Tunisian taxi talk

In Tunisia, as elsewhere, taxi drivers have lots to say. As elsewhere in the Arab world, they and their fellow citizens are often afraid to say it. Political freedom is variously stifled from Mauritania to Iraq. This repression corresponds to one of Islam’s few glaring failings as a comprehensive human structure. After accomplishing and organizing so much else, Prophet Mohammed died without stipulating leadership succession. Ever since then Muslim politics has been a brawl. Every regime starts from scratch in terms of legitimacy. Every regime, accordingly, puts its own survival first. Result: little or no tolerance for – let alone celebration of – political freedom.

Tunisia, however, is not Iraq, and Tunisians are not systematically terrorized by their own government. Since independence from France in 1956, power has effectively resided in the hands of only two men, both benevolent despots. The sole transition, after three decades of rule by founding father Habib Bourguiba, was prompted more by the Great Man’s increasing senility rather than policy arguments or naked personal ambition. Tunisia’s state security apparatus, while presumably ubiquitous, hasn’t had much to do, except protect the borders from what goes on next door. Compared to the erratic course of Libya’s Col. Qaddafi (to the east) and Algeria’s past decade of free-for-all bloodbath (west), Tunisia is positively docile.

As such, Tunisians feel freer to talk than most Arabs, and what better venue than the anonymous privacy of a taxi cab? I hired several for vacation excursions late month. What follows is a summary translation from fractured French. (It was a compound fracture with language breakage on all sides. On mine because I’d last studied French the same year France left Tunisia. On the drivers’ part because, during the same interim, Arabic has gradually replaced French in Tunisian schools. For me, laziness and lack of practice. For Tunisia’s pair of wise presidents, a sop to religious traditionalists.)

One more item of conversational context. Many Tunisian taxi drivers are owner-operators and, as such, members of the country’s substantial middle class. Their talk has the tone of middle classes everywhere: bland, cautious, respectable, and certainly not looking for arguments. It’s also civil and unfailingly polite. Many statements of political opinion elsewhere in the are prefaced by soft phrases like “in my opinion” or “as far as I know.” (Note that Crown Prince Abdullah, de-facto leader of Saudi Arabia, has used such modest qualifications in recent interviews. Abdullah has proposed – or, more accurately, re-proposed – the only formula which can end the hideous Palestine/Israel conflict: land for peace. Can you imagine a humble “as far as I know” said unsarcastically by Ariel Sharon? Or on the tongue of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney who, by not cutting all aid immediately, continue to enable Sharon’s current attempt to eliminate Palestine?)

My taxi talk would begin with the word “Afghanistan” – unmistakable no matter how badly pronounced. My open question to the taxi drivers: “What do you think of the situation in Afghanistan?”

First the good part. None of my drivers championed the Taliban or al-Qaida. None shared my curiosity regarding the fate of Osama bin Laden. One driver began by denouncing the 9/11 attacks on America as profoundly un-Islamic and, as Muslims often do, cited two stories from the Prophet’s life to illustrate his point. (Such stories, called hadith, are second only to the Holy Qoran in terms of guidance for Muslim behavior. There are thousands of them, each recalling some specific action or statement by Mohammed – and each meticulously graded by degree of verifiability.)

I was told how the Prophet disabled a would-be assassin, by mystical incantation, and then forgave him. And again how Mohammed, while traveling incognito, chanced upon a poor, old woman carrying firewood and shouldered the load – despite her stated inability to pay. Fuel delivered, the old woman said, “Since I have no money to pay you, kind man, let me share a warning: Stay away from this new and false prophet named Mohammed.” Kindly, Mohammed revealed his identity.

Both stories end the same way. The failed killer and the amazed crone both convert to Islam on the spot. “The point?” as I had to remind my driver/raconteur who’d been swept away by his own holy narration: Both stories speak to Islam’s emphasis on kindness and compassion, rather than on 9/11 style violence and terrorism. “No true Muslim,” this driver concluded, “could have done such awful things.”

Now the bad part. Two drivers also voiced suspicion that America had pre-9/11 motives for going into Afghanistan. “We heard,” one said, “that the Pakistan ambassador to France said that a plan was already in place to attack Afghanistan and gain the natural resources hidden in its mountains.” The other driver named the resource: “Oil.”

The point here is not whether these notions are true – “as far as I know” they’re not, despite talk of trans-Afghanistan pipelines. The point is that they exist at all…and that they conform to a pattern of suspicion, much of it wild, which stretches across the Muslim world. Misimpression is less important than the reasons for misimpression.

Among the wildest misimpressions in my notebook: That the 1988 mid-air explosion which killed (pro-US) Pakistan president Zia ul-Haq and US ambassador Arnold Raphel was a CIA plot. Also, even more outlandish: That 9/11 was some sort of Israel-U.S. conspiracy calculated to unleashed American fury and thus finish with Palestine once and for all. Ridiculous nonsense – but rather than simply ridiculing it, we should ask ourselves what prompts such bizarre speculation.

Ask Tunisian taxi drivers. “Afghanistan” was good as an opening gambit, but my interlocutors quickly shifted to Palestine. Listening to them and remembering similar conversations in Muslim countries over the past three decades, I understood, yet again, how wild ideas such as those listed above get started. They come from the perception – both furious and mystified – that the United States of America is the world capital of Zionist extremism. The fury is there because that Zionism exists at the direct expense of Arab Muslims. They are asked to pay, in effect, for the Europe’s Nazi Holocaust.

The mystery is there because Muslims still can’t fathom why the United States – a country otherwise widely admired – is so self-destructive in its half century of one-sided support for Israel and now for its ongoing enabling of Ariel Sharon. You hear the figure “2.1 billion” a lot. That’s the number of U.S. tax dollars slated, this year alone, to subsidize Sharon. Muslims are keenly aware of this statistic. And of the fact that $2.1 billion represents the largest U.S. aid package, by far, to any country anywhere.

“Sharon,” one driver said, “is worse than Milosovich. Why is Milosovich on trial and not Sharon?”

Said another, “How can we talk of Osama bin Laden as a terrorist and not mention Ariel Sharon? Is terrorism any less terrible when practiced by a state?”

“Sharon,” said a third, “has invaded Palestine as Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq … and killed far more people and caused far more destruction. Why is there no Operation Desert Storm against Sharon? Why are there no U.N. sanctions against Israel?”

“What about Sabra and Shatila?” said a fourth in reference to Sharon’s role in two 1982 Palestinian refugee camp massacres. At the time a morally grounded Israel disgraced and dismissed Sharon for his role. Now a Belgian procedure has been seeking to indict Sharon as a war criminal. (The chief prosecution witness – a Lebanese militia leader who reportedly did the killing while under Sharon’s direction and now wanted to tell the whole truth – was mysterious murdered earlier this year. Want to know who was behind that murder? Ask any Muslim…and don’t assume that the response constitutes misimpression.)

All this taxi talk occurred in mild-mannered Tunisia. All came from people with established lives and moderate sensibilities. And all was voiced back in late March when Sharon’s effort to finish Palestine had not yet gone into high gear. This mobile gabfest leaves us with two questions:

What are less placid Muslims in less tame places saying in early April with Palestine devastated by Sharon’s terrorism and the United States wringing its hands?

What price, ultimately and undeniably, will our country have to pay for its enablement of state-terrorism at Islam’s expense?

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