And five years later…

September 2006, Al-Qalam

It was a tragic day, five years ago. And it heralded the beginning of a new period in the history of our world. The date I’m referring to, of course, is the 14^th October 2001, when the US attack on Afghanistan began. Five years later, the world’s superpower has managed only to secure the better part of the Afghani capital, Kabul, leaving the rest of the country to the mercies of warlords, tribal leaders and the Taliban – who were supposed to have been crushed within weeks.

Five years later, it is clear that Afghanistan was the beginning of a global war against Muslims and against all those who stand in the way of the expansion of the American empire. Whatever the pretext that was used to justify the war to the world, there was no justification for the bombing of an entire country into the Stone Age, for the murder of civilians that accompanied that bombing and for the illegal detentions and torture that formed part of that war.

But Afghanistan was not the only target of the Washington warlords; it was just the beginning – and the world will never be the same again. Not long after, Iraq was invaded and occupied too – this time on the basis of absolute lies. And most other countries of the world were browbeaten into accepting US president George Bush’s war of terror as their own. Many, like South Africa, enacted odious and draconian legislation in order better to deal with the – in many cases non-existent – ‘terrorist threat’.

The ‘War on Terror’ has now also become a franchise. Whether it is Israel wanting to justify its atrocities against the Palestinians and Lebanese or India wanting to make excuses for its clampdown on Muslim activists, all their domestic agendas can be easily tailored to fit into their explanation of the ‘War on Terror’. This gives them carte blanche to use whatever methods they think might be necessary and it allows them to become a US ally. The war against the Palestinian people very quickly became part of the ‘war on terror’. So did the war on Hizbullah, and the war against the Kashmiri people, and the war against the Chechen people, and the war against the Iranian people, and the war against activist Muslims living in the West…

In Gaza, Israel’s war of terror has reduced large numbers of Palestinians to scrounging in bins for food, to mothers suffering that their breasts are not able to produce milk because of their malnutrition and then having to give their babies formula milk. But, not having money, they mix much less of the formula than is required. The result: a generation of malnourished babies. It is a sobering and disturbing thought in the month of Ramadan!

But Bush and Blair’s military war of terror is just one dimension of the overall strategy. And becoming obsessed with that dimension – as critical as it is – is to forget other more insidious dimensions, something we cannot afford to do. One of those more insidious dimensions is the recent repeated rhetorical attack against ‘Islamic fascists’ or ‘Islamo-fascists’ (both Bush and Blair have used these terms recently) and the attempt to cultivate ‘moderate Muslims’. Sadly, a number of Muslims in the West have fallen into the trap, falling – in the process – over themselves to be seen as the ‘moderate’ Muslim voices.

This is not to deny that there do exist ‘fascists’ within our community (just as there do exist ‘terrorists’ within our community). But we certainly have no need of people of the likes of Bush telling us what Islam is and who is a good or a bad Muslim.

The past five years has guaranteed that we can never go back and undo what has happened. It is also a wake-up call for Muslims, a jolting reminder that we need to take responsibility for our community and the actions of its members, that if we are willing to tolerate unIslamic behaviour from within it, then we will be faced with consequences when others are affected by that behaviour, that if we are willing to simply overlook the actions of those Muslims who want to project Islam as a hate-filled, violent, misogynistic religion, then our passivity in the face of this distortion of Islam will result in our being constantly under attack and under the microscope by those looking for the vaguest excuse to get at Muslims.

As the world becomes an increasingly difficult place within which to be a Muslim, as Muslims languish in Guantanamo Bay and numerous other secret and not-so-secret prisons scattered across the globe, this Ramadan must force us to reach new realisations about who we are and how we are to live in this world. It should force us, too, to make renewed commitments about how we relate with the people we live with – in this country and beyond.

One of those realisations needs to be the understanding that, as we do not live alone, so too can we not fight our battles alone. While many of the governments of the world might be pursuing an imperialist agenda that is drafted in Washington, the peoples of the world do not necessarily accept such agendas. It is these people – Muslim and, especially, non-Muslim – that are our allies. Those Muslims that think that they can (or would like to) continue living in little ethnic cocoons will find – if they haven’t already – that such spaces are more dangerous than being comfort zones. And those that have not yet discovered this truth will one day find out – with a rude shock. And, then, it might just be too late.