Why us? Why them? (Part II)

Yankee poet Robert Frost wrote of ocean waves which “Thought of doing something to the shore/Which water had never done to land before.” Remind you of 9/11? And of those who perpetrated those unprecedented, formerly inconceivable attacks on the United States?

Frost ends his poem (“Once by the Pacific”) on an ominous tone: “And not only a night, an age./Someone had better be prepared for rage./There would be more than ocean water broken/Before God’s last ‘Put out the light was spoken.'”

Again the questions, “Why us? Whey them?” and a second explanation: Frost’s key word Rage. Debates within the Terrorist Studies community distinguish between rational motives (explored in Part I of this article) and sheer fury. Academics tend towards the former. Politicians and soldiers – officials concerned with winning, respectively, elections and wars – prefer the rage explanation because it demonizes the enemy and thus enhances support for strident policy. Hence former CIA director James Woolsey’s newly famous dictum: “Terrorists don’t want a seat at the table. They want to destroy the table and everyone sitting at it.”

According to such rage theorists, the feeling is primordial and beyond persuasion. Thus less U.S. effort should be spent on assessing the rational legitimacy of terrorist grievances … and more effort on simply eliminating terrorists.

My sense of terrorist rage is more psychologically complicated. Remember (Part I) the Iranian mullah in 1973 Isfahan? He showed me, calmly and cogently, how – according to his perceptions – Western culture was corrupting Islam. Had we talked politics, no doubt that he could also have given me chapter and verse of specific historical grievance…beginning with our CIA’s installation of the hated Shah two decades earlier. The point is that his genteel surface hid a furious interior, much in the manner of video Osama. There was, despite the mullah’s politeness, palpable fury that afternoon in Isfahan. One senses the same in Osama’s taped pronouncements: controlled rage channeled into (what for him) is rational critique.

Not everyone – of whatever culture – can simultaneously feel so deeply and think so clearly. Usually one mode diminishes the other. Palestinian street kids, for instance, seem all rage (and so, it must be said, do some of us from time to time). Their arguments aren’t rational and coherent. All they know is what they’ve experienced first-hand (brutal Israeli violence, oppression, and humiliation) and what they’ve been told by community elders (that this intolerable situation must be resisted with whatever available means). Top Islamist leaders, including the aged, blind Sheikh Yassin of Hamas, are different. They command both reason and rage … and are all the more dangerous for having both maintained their original fury and channeled it rationally.

There’s also Romance. Those young Palestinian stone-throwers are David to the Israeli Goliath. Young Afghans were that way in the anti-Soviet jihad. Young Muslims from many countries have been that way in leaving home, traveling far, and joining the Taliban. And I recall some Israeli young bloods from 1969 when I was privileged to work for the summer on a kibbutz near Jerusalem. Underage for the ’67 war, they compensated later by sneaking into then-enemy Jordan, at the dark of the moon, and taking each other’s pictures at sunrise in Petra.

Such activity is the quintessence of romantic daring-do. Reduced to less intense pursuits – in my case, at the moment, scribbling – we adults forget the sheer rush of being, say, 19 and immersed in some risky, physical, problematic enterprise. There’s nothing like it – even, perhaps especially, when the enterprise is warfare. Then romance can escalate to altered state. Military historian Martin van Crewald notes that war “by compelling the senses to focus themselves on the here and now, can cause a man to take his leave of them.”

All the more so if a cause is involved. Stronger still if that cause has divine sanction. Can we secular Westerners ever know the full experiential effect of participation in Holy War with its combination of adrenaline, youthful idealism, and scriptural support? I got just a hint of that power on the outskirts of Afghanistan’s Holy war: utterly overwhelming. Perhaps the closest young American males get to it is playing sports. I’ve done that too: Great stuff in Madison Square Garden, but weak tea compared with jihad.

The romance of sacred conflict is even greater still when your target, your Evil Enemy, is the world’s Goliath and only super-power. You’re dirt poor. You’re unemployed and utterly without prospects. You’re self-esteem stands at zero. You watch in frustrated, furious wonder as the media portrays infidel Goliath’s unbelievably good life. All you have is a slingshot – or a suicide bomb – and your own sad life to sacrifice.

The romance of possible martyrdom is phrased, like so much else in the Muslim world, within the Rhetoric of Religion. Words central to all cultures, but Islam reserves special status for language. Reason: All of the Holy Koran, unlike Jewish and Christian scriptures which contain human narrative as well as divine utterance, is believed to be the verbatim word of God – inscribed on a tablet in heaven and transmitted to the Prophet Mohammed by Archangel Gabriel. Every single Arabic syllable. Thus the basic notion of language, certainly in Arabic but also by extension in other tongues, is endowed with enormous power.

America has its quota of specialist wordsmiths, but few in my experience evoke the powerful audience response accomplished by ordinary Muslim clerics. That power is in the words themselves and in the honor given to them. Originating with the Koran, Islamic language tends in usage to acquire a momentum of its own, going beyond mere denotation and creating its own reality of involvement and commitment. (Former Afghan President Rabbani can push this button; thus far the more prosaic new Interim Chairman Karzai, for good or ill, has displayed no such aptitude.) Muslim rhetoric envelops and transforms the listener to a point equaled in our culture only by African-American preachers. (In this respect, white America is probably most familiar with the enormous oratorical skills of Jesse Jackson. For his Muslim counterpart, listen to the even more powerful – and far more disturbing – Louis Farrakhan.)

Swept away by their own religious rhetoric, Muslim orators sometimes stretch a point, sometimes flat-out lie. I recall one Friday mosque sermon in Pakistan during August 1988. That week both Pakistan President Zia ul-Haq and U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel had died in the same mid-air plane explosion, clearly caused by a bomb. Who planted it has never been resolved. Undeterred by lack of evidence and in full rhetorical stride, the imam (head cleric and preacher) of one Peshawar mosque labeled it immediately “a CIA plot.” Only the Americans, he said in a sort of backhanded compliment, would have the cleverness and the capacity for such an act. His parishioners, mostly sensible men when at home or work, were utterly swept away by religion-context rhetoric.

Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric, as witnessed in post-Oct. 7 videos, is calmer and more professorial. He makes his points and, from our perspective, he certainly stretches them. One example from the most recent tape: his claim that the West harbors “an unspeakable hatred for Islam.” That’s simply not true … as much as it was, say, 500 years ago.

Donald Rumsfeld, certainly the Administration’s star performer since early October, responded to Osama’s rhetoric with this Dec. 27 mockery: “He should not be regarded as the oracle of all wisdom.” Absolutely true. But then, “He has lied time and again.” Is this likewise true? However hostile in his opinions and wicked in other respects, when has Osama actually “lied”? Could it be that our supremely effective Secretary of Defense is himself susceptible to the tempting sweep of rhetoric? And are we, as our fellows in the world of Islam, sometimes liable to be swept away?

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.