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COMMENTARY
September 18, 2001
Most valuable allies
On Saturday I took a stroll through Toronto's Yorkville in the cool of late summer under a cloudless sky. I wanted to look at all the "beautiful people" on the eve of war. ... Well I am a "beautiful person" myself I wanted to buy the new CD by Angela Hewitt our fine Canadian pianist playing a remarkable wildly various assortment of Bach arrangements. Heard a track on CBC-FM: she is divine uplifting. The street was just re-opening. Someone had put something resembling a bomb in front of a carpet shop belonging to two Afghan brothers with a flag on top so that it also resembled a little coffin and the street had been closed several hours. The police had detonated this box of rubbish with a loud bang. At the international newsstand I looked at empty racks. Not one newspaper or magazine from Europe published later than the previous Monday. Nor any American papers either: though a few of these had got through and been sold out. Looked for a while at those empty racks. So the Americans will go into Afghanistan and Iraq at the least. They must: a few Clintonian cruise missiles will only stir the existing rubble. In the words of a Taliban spokesman in Peshawer Pakistan expressing the truth that sometimes comes as a last resort: "There is nothing left in Afghanistan worth the price of one of your cruise missiles." (The transit through Pakistan will be the hardest part.) And we'll be there following right behind the Americans with perhaps a Canadian Forces tug or something at about the distance of the Red Sea. Thank God President Bush is surrounded by brilliant advisers for I'm at a loss what he should do. Or rather I know what the Americans and their allies have to do but I don't yet see how it can be done. International terrorism cannot function on an effective scale without the help of friendly regimes so the struggle begins with regime removal. Not one regime -- and the Taliban in Afghanistan may be the easiest to kick over -- but "as many as it takes". Curiously this is just what Osama bin Laden has been preaching all along -- the need for war the final war between the decadent West and an aroused Islam with a billion soldiers. His own face expresses this strange and monstrous serenity. It is said that the snake in the Garden of Eden was a beautiful beast. It might even be that a large proportion of the Islamic world exulted secretly if not openly on seeing the carnage in New York -- the destruction of this apt symbol of the Western Mammon these columns parted by the terrorist Samson. But not all. I know from raw first-hand experience how many Muslims long as we long to be delivered from their terrorists and tyrants. For long the masses throughout the Middle East have been free of the obligation to take sides. Except Israel there is not one democracy from Morocco to Pakistan not one country in which truly open discussion can take place. (Except briefly and many years ago it was possible in Beirut.) Now ready or not this immense and silenced majority is put on the line. There can no longer be a middle way between the liberty and modernity of "the Great Satan" and the backwardness and barbarity of Arab political regimes. To survive Islamic holiness must choose sides painfully must now and forever embrace that culture of liberty which began for us so many centuries ago. It is a project that must still run decades even centuries. You cannot change the fatalist outlook of a thousand years in a single historical instant no matter how traumatic. But in the war that is coming we must prevail: not only for our own survival but strange as this may sound for the sake of Islam. To prevail the faster we must somehow find in ourselves the means to spread this hope for a new Islamic order after the old is overthrown; an Islam again embracing trade and liberty and peace and free inquiry as it did in the height of its civilization. For without that hope without its contagion we have no allies and can do nothing but kill and kill and kill. "Sheep may safely graze." This was the Angela Hewitt track I had heard on the radio arranged by Mary Howe. The partnership begins with the people of Muslim communities that now live among us in the West almost all of whom have embraced this hope. They are our most valuable allies in the struggle ahead. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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