I THE DAY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
The eleventh of September 2001 dawned a bright late-summer day on the US east coast, with blue skies and light glinting off its tall buildings in the cities dotted about the plains. At airports it was the cusp of the day, when night shifts left for home, and those who had arrived for work were organising their papers and thinking about their first cup of Starbucks. Earlier that morning, nineteen men, including fifteen Saudis, rose in nondescript hotels to board four transcontinental flights at Boston, Newark and Washington Dulles airports. They briefly flit across grainy videos recording their pestilence-like passage through terminals.
They had evaded every security system designed to prevent potential weapons coming on board, every method of screening used to identify suspected terrorists. Since a belt clasp or metallic watch routinely triggers detector alarms, readers who find all airports an ordeal like running the gauntlet may find this difficult to fathom. The hijackers were like the bomb-laden terrorist professor in Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent who ‘passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men’, the word ‘pest’ being used in the original sense of a plague, the ‘street’ in September 2001 being the polished floors of terminals. Each team included a man who had learned to steady a large commercial jet in the air and to alter its course, although landing the plane was not deemed a priority when they had their lessons earlier in the year. The muscular bulk of each of the four teams was needed to intimidate and kill crew and passengers. Who were these people? We can start with their leader.1
Born in 1968 in Egypt, Mohammed Atta had a degree in architectural engineering and had worked as a town planner in Cairo. His technical background may or may not be significant, in terms of inculcating a cold, problem-solving mentality, although it could just as well be seen as an inevitably utilitarian attitude towards knowledge common to developing societies where the arts are a luxury. In 1992 Atta moved to Germany, where he studied urban planning at the Technical University in Hamburg, an ugly city ravaged by British bombers and post-war planners. His thesis was on architectural restoration in Aleppo, which may or may not afford insight into his hatred of the anomie and arrogance of New York, the metropolis of the Western world.2 In 1995 he returned briefly to Cairo, where plans were afoot to prettify part of the old city and to fill it with actors in traditional costume to entertain Western tourists. The rage mounted. Back in Hamburg, his religious opinions became more pronounced, evidenced by a decision to grow a beard, and to communicate with his tight group of friends only in Arabic rather than his excellent German. The university, typical in its mindless multiculturalism, thoughtfully provided a hut for them to reinforce their hatreds of the Western world. Apparently they all stopped laughing in public so as to symbolise their newfound earnestness. Like others in his circle, Atta was pathologically antisemitic, regarding New York as the epicentre of Jewish world power, hatred of the coldly teeming cosmopolitan metropolis being one of many pathologies these men owed to a thoroughly European anti-modernism that would have been modish in France or Germany eighty years earlier. Atta’s immediate circle in Hamburg included Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni he had met in a radical mosque, and who moved into an apartment with him, along with another student, Marwan al-Shehi from the United Arab Emirates. A fourth member of the group was the Lebanese Ziad Jarrah, whose relationship with a Turkish girl complicated his dealings with the other three. Extraneous ideological influences included the London-based fanatic Abu Qatada, whose smiling rants were available on video or through the internet as well as through clandestine visits that went unremarked by British security agencies who in the eyes of their European equivalents seemed to be presiding over ‘Londonistan’.
No movements or relationships have been better studied, after the fact, than those of the 9/11 suicide-murderers. In 1999 all four members of the Hamburg cell slipped away from Germany to visit Afghanistan; various Moroccan members of their circle ensured, by paying outstanding bills for them, that nobody noticed their absence. While in Afghanistan, they met Osama bin Laden and those who initiated the coming ‘spectacular’ attacks against America. They returned to Hamburg in early 2000, shaving off their beards, and appearing to relax back into Western life. They acquired new passports, thereby erasing the visas for their trip to Afghanistan via Pakistan, and began making inquiries about US flight-training schools. Only the Yemeni Binalshibh was refused a US visa, since Yemenis were known to outstay their welcome, although he would be hyperactive as their link with the terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who may have presented the ‘planes plan’ to bin Laden.
Shortly after arriving in the US, the three men enrolled at two different flight-training schools near Venice, Florida, spending the summer acquiring pilots’ licences. While a frustrated Binalshibh wired funds to the three who had successfully entered the US, in Afghanistan bin Laden’s attention was drawn to Hani Hanjour, a Saudi jihadist and trained pilot, who was soon despatched to join the others in America. After completing their courses, the four pilots graduated from light aircraft to using simulators to learn to fly large commercial jets, although none of them showed any proficiency in doing so.
Meanwhile, others had recruited thirteen fit men in their twenties, mainly unemployed Saudis, who had been sent to Afghanistan by radical clerics in their native country. During their military training they were personally selected for the 9/11 mission by bin Laden, who prided himself on being able to identify a fellow fanatic in ten minutes. After securing US entry visas in their new clean passports, from April 2001 pairs of these men began arriving in America. By 4 July all nineteen hijackers were in place, using safe houses in Florida and New Jersey. While the muscle men visited gyms, the pilots began making long surveillance flights—usually travelling business or first class—on the types of aircraft they would hijack, scouting out their targets and establishing how easy it was to bring box-cutters on to a plane. In July, Atta flew to Madrid to confer with Binalshibh, who relayed bin Laden’s final instructions. In mid-August there was one close call when a replacement hijacker, the Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested for immigration violations after making a spectacle of himself at another flight school. By the third week of August all nineteen hijackers were booked on four transcontinental flights on 11 September, flights which require immense quantities of aviation fuel. The rate of intercepted terrorist telephone traffic intensified. On 9 September, in faraway Afghanistan, two Al Qaeda operatives, one posing as a television cameramen, blew up the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, an act designed to propitiate their Taliban hosts, and to allay their fears about probable repercussions after what was about to happen in the US.
On American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles, four squat Saudi heavies used knives and disabling sprays to terrorise the cabin crew and passengers, who were forced to the rear of the plane. New hands and eyes pondered the banks of illuminated instruments, the screens and dials and the flap and thruster levers that fill a pilot’s cabin. Mohammed Atta, who was now flying the aircraft, altered course and then flew southwards in ‘an erratic fashion’ towards New York. He may have said into the radio, ‘We have some planes,’ though it took many minutes for anyone to realise these words’ full import. Simultaneously, United Airlines Flight 175 left Boston’s Logan Airport for Los Angeles. As it climbed to its cruising altitude, the pilot and first officer reported disturbing radio transmissions from Flight 11. Hijackers struck soon afterwards on this aircraft, using sudden violence to commandeer the plane. Both pilots were probably killed. As desperate passengers and personnel used their mobile phones to alert family and friends to their plight, Flight 175 changed course for New York. To the south, at Dulles Airport, American Airlines Flight 77 left at 8.20 bound for Los Angeles. Thirty minutes later hijackers armed with box-cutters took over the aircraft. The plane altered course, as passengers, including Barbara Olson, the wife of the solicitor-general, made desperate calls to relatives. By 9.30 Flight 77 had descended to a much lower altitude and was heading towards the White House. The plane then abruptly banked to alter course for the Pentagon, the world’s largest building, housing a department with a budget larger than Russia’s GDP.
With the hijackers jabbering prayers in Arabic to stifle their own last-minute panic, for they used religious incantations as a combined stimulant and sedative, American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York at 8.46, killing all on board and an unknown number within the building. United Flight 175 sliced into the South Tower fifteen minutes later, the aircraft almost emerging from the opposite side of the building, and its exploding fuel tanks sending out clouds of smoke from the point of impact. Half an hour later, Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon at the full-throttle speed of 580 miles per hour, killing all 64 people on board and 125 Defense Department personnel. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld felt the shockwave of the impact in his office.
These three attacks, which collapsed the twin towers, resulted in the deaths of three and a half thousand people, although initially it was thought the casualties were double that number. These assaults appalled the world, although there was jubilation in some Palestinian refugee camps and in the Moroccan quarter of Rotterdam.3
By this time early-morning America, and then the world in its sequential time zones, was transfixed by what unfolded on television. I remember watching TV from early afternoon, when my sister-in-law called from Yorkshire to alert us to what was happening, and not switching off until thirty-six hours later. Ten days after that I was writing lengthy articles about it. Other horrors unfolded that day in one’s peripheral vision, the main event being the heroism of New York’s police and fire departments as they struggled to evacuate the World Trade Center before the towers collapsed.
The last aircraft, United Airlines 93 left Newark in New Jersey late, at 8.42, bound for San Francisco. An alert flight controller warned the sixteen flights on his watch, including Flight 93, two minutes before the plane was hijacked. At that moment the plane dropped 700 feet, and the captain began transmitting mayday distress signals. Four hijackers wearing red bandannas, rather than the five deployed elsewhere, overpowered the crew, leaving the passengers free to make mobile phone calls in which some learned of the fate of the other hijacked aircraft. Some of the thirty-seven passengers decided to regain control of the plane, although they knew less than the hijackers about how to fly it. They tried to break through the cockpit door. The hijacker–pilot rolled the plane sideways, and then raised and dipped the nose, to throw the insurgent passengers off balance. Recorders in the cockpit picked up the cries of the passengers outside the door and shouts of ‘Allah is the greatest!’ from the terrorists. Just after ten o’clock Flight 93 hit a field in Pennsylvania at 580 miles per hour, leaving no survivors as it ploughed its way to a dead end.
We know every detail of how the highest levels of US government reacted to these events. President George W. Bush was in a classroom at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida when a senior aide informed him that a small plane had hit the World Trade Center. Bush—like anyone watching this on TV—thought it must have been an accident. Maybe the pilot had suffered a heart attack. Just after 9 a.m. another aide whispered to Bush, ‘A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.’ Maintaining his outward composure, Bush remained listening to children read for a few minutes, seated before a blackboard that proclaimed, ‘Reading makes a country great,’ one of the domestic projects that he and his wife Laura hoped would define his narrowly won presidency. Much has been written about how Bush reacted to events that were designed to defy the imagination. The enormity of the attacks was reflected in his face, which does not conceal intense emotion well, and in the buzzing pagers and mobile phones of the journalists accompanying him. By 9.30, just as he boarded a plane for Washington, he learned of the attack on the Twin Towers. He concluded a call with vice-president Cheney with the words: ‘We’re at war…somebody’s going to pay.’ Since American Airways Flight 77 was at that point heading towards the White House, where Dick and Lynne Cheney were soon manhandled into a bunker guarded by agents with machine guns, the president’s security staff ordered Air Force One to take off without a fixed destination. Laura Bush (or FLOTUS) and daughters, code-named ‘Turquoise’ and ‘Twinkle’, were secreted in secure locations in Washington, New Haven and Dallas. Practised emergency managers and counter-terrorism experts switched to their pared-down, time-saving use of language, interspersed with an occasional ‘fuck’ this or that. Because it seemed like an ongoing attempt to decapitate the US government, Air Force One was diverted to an airbase in Louisiana, where the folksy and far from articulate leader of the free world made a brief televised address, before the Secret Service whisked him off to a base in Nebraska equipped with better communications connecting him to the crisis teams assembling in the capital. Anyone with emotional intelligence, or taste, and whose mind was not corrupted by anti-Americanism, could see the enormity of the burden placed upon Bush, who in that hour had the sympathy of the world.
At his own insistence, by 6.30 that evening Bush was back in the Oval Office, having spent the day making such surreal decisions as authorising US combat jets to shoot down unexplained passenger aircraft. Rounds of meetings ensued as Bush and his team sought to shape a strategy that initially focused on Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan. It was going to be bloody. The CIA’s counter-terrorism chief, Cofer Black, warned Bush that American agents and servicemen were going to die, a reminder of the nation’s traumas about death in foreign parts, from Vietnam to Somalia. Black chilled the cabinet when he added: ‘When we’re through with them, they’ll have flies walking across their eyeballs.’ Thereafter he was known as the ‘flies-on-the-eyeballs guy’, the man to summon when the mood was vengeful. This was war all right, but against whom? Who were ‘they’?4
II ’THE KNIGHTS OF DEATH ARE HARD ON YOUR HEELS’
The 11 September attacks were not the first, or the last, terrorist assault nominally directed against Western interests and values, for the victims were not solely diplomats, spies or soldiers, nor always ‘Western’, but people engaged in such threatening activities as dancing in a tropical discotheque or shopping in Nairobi, Madrilenas reading on a train entering Atocha station, or writers and film-makers. Although the latter are single individuals, the ways in which religious fanaticism reached across legal systems to kill them is indicative of a broader trend as well as of the paramountcy of religion over localised jurisdictions. This is worrying as it also demonstrates that these ulterior loyalties are evident among second-and third-generation immigrants, suggesting a conspicuous failure to integrate them into the host societies. When young Muslims speak of their brothers and fellow countrymen, they sometimes mean not their neighbours in Barcelona or Bradford, but people in Chechnya, Iraq or Palestine. Bizarrely, many of them have managed to combine radical Islam with a street culture that owes more to Los Angeles than to Islamabad, with their booming stereos, hoods, sweatshirts and trainers.
Following a precedent set in 1989, when the Iranian regime issued a religious edict inciting the murder of the British writer Salman Rushdie, the forty-seven-year-old Dutch newspaper columnist and film-maker Theo van Gogh was killed on 2 November 2004 as he bicycled to work along the Linnaeusstraat in a mixed-nationality quarter of Amsterdam. It is a busy street lined with budget stores and with an average quotient of the city’s pervasive squalor. Van Gogh was like a cross between the bumptious US film director Michael Moore and the more tough-minded British columnists Rod Liddle or Richard Littlejohn. He was a typical Dutch anticlerical, who had attacked Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam. His murderer, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch-born Moroccan, Mohammad Bouyeri, was a student drop-out who had drifted into minor criminality before joining a terrorist group called the Hofstad Network which planned to blow up Schiphol airport and to kill such figures as the conservative Dutch MP Geert Wilders.
A close friend of the victim talked me through Theo van Gogh’s fate at the crime scene. He brought along van Gogh’s wicker basket from his bicycle. Bouyeri ambushed the film-maker as he stopped at a zebra crossing in the cycle lane, shooting him once in the side. Van Gogh fell from his bike, but then raised himself from the ground and stumbled across the road. Bouyeri trailed him to a waste bin to which van Gogh clung, where he shot him twice more. He pulled out a butchers’ knife to cut off van Gogh’s head, settling for plunging a smaller weapon with a letter affixed into his victim’s chest. This contained death threats against the Somali-born Dutch liberal MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Amsterdam’s socialist Jewish mayor Job Cohen. Van Gogh’s offence had been to help Ayaan Hirsi Ali make a film exposing Muslim mistreatment of women, an act that, of course, is not an offence in any Western society, although radical Islamists had murdered prominent writers in Egypt in the early 1990s. Bouyeri fled along the Linnaeusstraat to a park where he opened fire on a Dutch policeman and bystander who were both critically injured. Another policeman shot the perpetrator (whose flight was impeded by his traditional dress) in the leg and apprehended him. On Bouyeri’s person they found a poem, ‘Baptized in Blood’:
I also have a word to the enemy…
You will certainly come off badly…
Even if you go all over the world on Tour…
Death will be on the look-out…
The Knights of Death are hard on your heels…
Who will colour the streets Red…
To the hypocrites, I say in conclusion…
Wish for death or else keep your mouth shut and…sit
It should be emphasised that until Khomeini announced open season on Salman Rushdie, no religious edict had ever been issued regarding a Muslim living in a non-Muslim country. No religious edict decided the fate of the non-Muslim van Gogh. Bouyeri has said nothing about his murderous actions.5
Van Gogh’s murder, which has caused a sea change in Holland, up to and including the firebombing of the occasional mosque, was one event in a depressingly lengthy catalogue of atrocities occurring around the world. 9/11 was preceded by the 1993 ambush of US forces in Mogadishu (where imported terrorists brought down special-forces helicopters) and the truck bomb that exploded into the World Trade Center; the 1995–6 attacks on US and Pakistani personnel in Riyadh and Dharhan in Saudi Arabia; the 1998 bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed hundreds and wounded five thousand Africans; the 2000 holing of the USS Cole; and unsuccessful conspiracies to kill former President George H. Bush and simultaneously to destroy airliners over the Pacific. 9/11 was followed by an attack on (mainly) Australian tourists in a nightclub in Bali; the killing of two hundred commuters in Madrid’s morning rush hour at Atocha station; and two suicide attacks, one horribly effective, the other a failure, on the transport system in London that killed fifty-two people, and then in October 2005 a further attack in Bali that claimed the lives of twenty-five people and further bombings of a Hindu festival in India. November 2005 saw bombs explode in three hotels in Amman, one of which wiped out a Muslim wedding reception. Realistically, in the six to nine months between this book being finished and its publication there will be more.
Over the same period, Israel has been subjected to a murderous campaign of suicide bombings by the Palestinian terrorist organisation Hamas, in which bus drivers have emerged as unexpected heroes of a society under siege. British-born suicide bombers were responsible for one such attack, on Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv, while another Briton—product of a minor private school in Essex and the LSE—killed the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl for being a Jew. The Iranian-sponsored terrorist organisation Hizbollah regularly fires rockets into Israel too. Every day, Allied coalition forces, and vaster numbers of Iraqis, come under murderous assault from remnants of the Saddam regime and from foreign Islamist fighters drawn to Iraq by anarchy and bloodshed. The bombs get bigger as the addicts of orange light require ever greater explosions. At the time of writing, sixty Iraqis are being killed each day.
The young Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi eclipsed the elusive Osama bin Laden in terms of his violence and public notoriety, which began when he personally cut off the head of Nicholas Berg for the benefit of a video camera. Al-Zarqawi formed his organisational network in Iran, whose evil regime seems to be inciting events in Iraq (by the delivery of shaped explosives to the insurgents) so as to deflect any attack on their illicit quest for a nuclear capability. No word of condemnation comes from any Arab regime regarding the murder of innocent Iraqis on a daily basis, although Ayman al-Zawahiri bizarrely condemned these attacks from his cave residence in Afghanistan. One suspects resentment that al-Zarqawi was hogging the limelight, for competitive egos were at work as they are among professional gangsters. So-called Muslim community leaders (so-called because they merely represent other groups) in countries like Britain have also failed to condemn these killings of fellow Muslims, while finding every ‘contextual’ excuse for global Islamic violence.6
Leaders of Muslim countries trying to hold the ring against radical Islamism face regular assassination bids, the fate of Anwar Sadat hanging over Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, who (whatever one thinks of their regimes), are personally very courageous. In Algeria, an estimated 150,000 people have been killed in the dirty war that ensued when the army decided to ignore the Islamic Salvation Front victory in the 1997 parliamentary elections. Radical Islamist violence spread to Bosnia, Chechnya, the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and the Xinjiang province of China. We should not follow these countries’ autocratic rulers in eagerly conflating each local terrorist threat with the network responsible for the anti-Western atrocities, to gain either Western assistance in crushing them or some form of aid that has hitherto been outstanding. Other claims should not be taken uncritically either. The terrorists’, and their wider penumbra of passive supporters’, rhetorical claims that they are moved to kill by the plight of their co-religionists in Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq or Palestine should be queried more than is the case. There is little to stop, for example, a British-born Muslim from working in a Palestinian hospital or orphanage rather than blowing up a Tel Aviv pub or an underground train in London.7
Islamic terrorist atrocities are a fact, and not a figment infiltrated into our anxious imaginations by our rulers, a favourite trope of the superficially clever who regarded the Cold War in similarly domestic instrumental terms. Van Gogh was cut to pieces not by a phantom, but by a real man, who is currently sitting in a Dutch prison. Al-Zarqawi was not some Arab Robin Hood but a psychopathic murderer. These atrocities reflect an incapacity on the part of the perpetrators and their sympathisers to understand us—the Western ‘Other’—who are reduced to a few crudely paranoid stereotypes that the otherwise outward ‘gazing’ postmodern ‘Left university’ in the West religiously ignores. Our murderers are inspired by hatreds of the occident that owe as much to the history of Western self-repudiation as to resentment or puritanical and politically radicalised versions of Islam.8
The inspiration (and the finance) for many of the terrorist atrocities catalogued above came from Osama bin Laden (1957-?), the tall and ascetic seventeenth child of a pious Saudi construction magnate who had a total of fifty-seven children. His father, Muhammed bin Laden, was a penniless immigrant from South Yemen who built up his Bin Laden Group on the back of lucrative construction projects connected with Saudi Arabia’s holiest places Mecca and Medina, as well as with remote US bases built to defend the desert kingdom against Saddam. He died in a helicopter crash, the craft that had enabled him to pray at all three Saudi holy places in a single day. Osama bin Laden studied civil engineering and management, clearly to some effect, at the universities of Medina and Jeddah, although both his pious family background and events in the world around him ensured that religion and politics became his overriding obsessions. By all accounts he was an effective project manager, a skill that stood him in good stead in his chosen path. He had the money to indulge his beliefs because between 1970 and 1994 he received US$1 million a year as a legacy from his father. Several factors contributed to his worldview. Some were long range, others proximate. Like many indulged rich kids, bin Laden was susceptible to older gurus, a tendency still reflected in the Egyptian surgeon and Islamic Jihad leader Ayman al-Zawahari, who presumably still hovers behind his shoulder in whatever caves they inhabit if bin Laden is still alive. Who were these influences on the young Saudi?
At Jeddah university, bin Laden was taught by one of the Palestinian co-founders of Hamas, Dr Abdullah Azzam, subsequently blown up in Pakistan, and by the Egyptian Dr Muhammad Qutb, a brother of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist ideologue who had been hanged in 1966. Azzam advocated implacable confrontation—‘Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogue’—in order to restore the Caliphate as far as Spain’s Andalucía. Azzam would play an important part in luring bin Laden to Afghanistan, where the former established an organisation to funnel through Arab fighters as a sort of Islamic international brigade. Bin Laden is presumed to have killed him subsequently.
Sayyid Qutb was a source of the moralising convolutions that appeal to impressionable minds such as bin Laden’s. Qutb had grown up in a middle-class family in a poverty-stricken village in Upper Egypt, about which he wrote a book. Having memorised the Koran by the age of ten, he developed an aversion to Westernised women he had encountered as a student at a secular teacher-training college. His political involvements, while employed as a teacher and civil servant, led the Egyptian government to allow him to leave on an extended pedagogical fact-finding trip to the USA in 1949. An encounter with a drunken woman on board ship clouded his vision of that society even before he arrived there. In a Washington DC hospital the forty-three-year-old virgin, who was ill, was assailed by a lecherous nurse, whose ‘thirsty lips…bulging breasts…smooth legs…and provocative laugh’ simultaneously attracted and revolted him. In Greeley, originally a utopian settlement in eastern Colorado, Qutb hated the manicured lawns as symptomatic of Western individualism and materialism. He could not find anyone to cut his hair properly, although having a bad-hair day is surely a poor excuse for such fanatical hatreds. Worse, in the church halls and crypts he was horrified to discover Christian clergy aiding and abetting youngsters clasped to each other in the darkness of a sock hop as ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ played on the gramophone. Clearly, Qutb had a problem with Western women, a theme common to many Islamic militants and puritans everywhere. In the big cities even the pigeons seemed to live joyless lives amid the promiscuous tumult. When he returned to Egypt in 1951, he saw signs of the same decadence and soullessness all around him, the result of Nasser’s attempt to build Egypt on the Western creeds of nationalism and socialism, which had led the country into military defeat and systemic poverty. As with so many Islamist militants, the failure of these imported Western creeds prompted Qutb to intensify his religious convictions. As a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was arrested in 1954, tortured, tried and sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour. In 1958 he witnessed a massacre of mutinying fellow prisoners. A year after his release in 1964, he was rearrested for further plots, and then hanged.
During his imprisonment Qutb wrote two works which were to become highly influential, despite his having no recognised authority as a religious teacher. One of them, Milestones, has the status of the Communist Manifesto in such circles. Faith was the guarantor of the innermost being of the true believer in a world of inauthentic otherness. The word jahiliyya, used by the Prophet to describe pre-Islamic pagan Arabia, and then in the thirteenth century applied to Mongols who adopted Islam but not the sharia law, was revived to describe the benighted chaos of modern unbelievers and those in the Islamic world who were contaminated by them. If the word originally signified naive idolators who worshipped several false gods as well as Allah, it came to mean those who consciously sought to replace Allah with the worship of things.9 It was the duty of an enlightened and pious vanguard to reverse this, by reviving a lost purity that had existed until the eclipse of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs who followed the Prophet in AD 650. This was essentially an Islamist version of the Marxist–Leninist idea of the revolutionary vanguard whose role was to raise the consciousness of their more benighted potential followers.10 This was a recipe for a war against virtually anyone who did not meet school inspector Qutb’s exacting moral standards. Qutb’s harrowing fate, mostly brought down on his own head, provided a stirring story of martyrdom for a noble cause in an Islamic world otherwise dominated by repulsive dynasts, madmen and military dictators whose wealth stemmed from selling oil and the return on their investments in the West.11
The tribal rulers of bin Laden’s native Saudi Arabia derived their legitimacy from a puritanical Wahhabi strain of Islam, named after the eighteenth-century revivalist figure Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The Kingdom’s public face is that of a puritanical insistence on Islamic law, including absolute intolerance of other religious traditions, it being impossible to open churches or to practise other religions. Petrodollars have enabled the ruling elite to live a lavish lifestyle, largely thanks to hired Western technicians and armies of Third World helots who are miserably treated by masters with Latin American-style manners.12 The contrast between public puritanism—with its strict code of sharia—and the hedonistic lifestyle of the Saudi ruling elite in the fleshpots of Addis Ababa, Mayfair or Monaco led to the incident in 1979 when four hundred Islamist militants stormed the Grand Mosque at Mecca and called for the overthrow of the ruling dynasty. French commandos had to be given a dispensation to help ten thousand Saudi troops eject them. Many of bin Laden’s messages are exposures of the endemic corruption of the Saudi ruling dynasty, a view few would gainsay.
Two further events in 1979 were of profound significance. The Iranian Revolution that overthrew Shah Reza Pahlavi proved the viability of an Islamic government, which sponsored terrorism in the Lebanon and made martyrdom a central concept, notably in the case of the child soldiers mown down in Iraqi minefields during the long and bloody Iran–Iraq war. The ayatollah Khomeini was vociferous in his hatred of a West that had sheltered him from persecution, a syndrome shared by many lesser mortals who have passed westwards since then to enjoy hospitality, tolerance and welfare payments. As Shia Iran became the focus of political Islam, the Sunni Saudis sought to boost their rival Islamist credentials, albeit while maintaining their traditional grasp on power. The war that followed the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan at Christmas 1979 must have seemed heaven-sent in the eyes of the Saudis, who, with US encouragement and support, were able to despatch militants to fight the atheist Marxist enemy.
Between 1979 and 1982, bin Laden was responsible for raising money and providing weapons for the Afghan mujaheddin, before venturing there himself in 1982 to team up with his former university teacher Azzam. He graduated from helping with strategic construction projects to hosting Arab fighters, and then commanding them in military operations, although his talents were as an organiser rather than combatant. He consolidated his local presence through acts of generosity to all and sundry, a ‘Robin Hood’ tactic he shared with, for example, the cocaine barons of Colombia who effectively provided an alternative welfare state in that similarly benighted country. He organised a global funding network called the Golden Chain to funnel cash and arms to the ‘holy warriors’ who were recruited through a related Bureau of Services. They were initially trained under the auspices of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which was heavy with Islamic militant sympathisers. Bin Laden and his associates founded Al Qaeda—meaning ‘the base’ of activists in the vanguard of the struggle—in 1988 to maintain networks established to wage ‘jihad’, a word signifying not only self-overcoming, but also wars of defence and offence depending on how theologians and others choose to interpret it. Gradually a hard core emerged, numbering in the low hundreds, many of them relatively well-educated Egyptians like Ayman al-Zawahiri, although that brought the complication of wanting to concentrate terrorist attacks on Egypt or Israel, the line subsequently argued by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a former Jordanian petty criminal turned terrorist, who until killed by a US-led task force, had emerged as bin Laden’s main competitor for the title of super-terrorist.
Relationships were developed through volunteers, with any number of groups engaged in militant struggles. Experts claim that the appropriate analogy for Al Qaeda is of commercial ‘franchises’ and ‘venture capital groups’ rather than anything resembling the rigidly hierarchical and villainous SPECTRE organisation in Bond movies. Again, the debt to the West is striking, the combination of borrowings from defunct Marxist–Leninism and ultra-capitalist modernity being extraordinary.
In 1989, following the withdrawal of Soviet forces, bin Laden returned to Saudi where he was invited to redeploy his Afghan veterans in resisting the Marxist regime in South Yemen. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden offered the Saudi monarchy help should Saddam decide to go for broke by attacking Saudi Arabia. This offer was declined and the king turned to the US for more substantial military assistance. In bin Laden’s eyes the presence of such US forces, however discretely corralled, represented the pollution of the most sacred sites in Islam, especially since America’s new model army is blind to gender as well as race, a further offence among racist and sexist Arabs, aspects of the culture that we know about but rarely mention. He wrote an open letter chiding the elderly Saudi mufti bin Baz for sanctioning the stationing of such troops, and for welcoming the 1993 Oslo peace accords.13 Bin Laden had a high regard for the (drug-and drink-sodden) Soviet troops he fought in Afghanistan, in contrast to his low opinion of the fighting capabilities of the clean-living Americans. If God had enabled the faithful to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, and to win the Cold War, for which bin Laden took sole credit, why shouldn’t Allah direct his wrath towards the godless United States of America and its lesser confederates?
Sensing that his days in Saudi were numbered, bin Laden moved to Sudan, where, since 1990 the religious ideologue Hassan al-Turabi had encouraged him to settle to develop roads and to fight Sudanese Christians in the south. Bin Laden’s wealth also enabled the regime to import wheat to feed its starving people. He developed a network of business enterprises based on selling Sudanese commodities to the European Union via Cyprus, and using the profits to sponsor Islamic mercenaries despatched to Bosnia or Chechnya, two conflicts that have been gradually ‘Islamised’. It cost about US$1,500 (or £750) to put one such combatant in the field. In 1991 he became stateless when the Saudis removed his passport, although in that sinister world of dark mirrors few of their responses to bin Laden were so unambiguous. The radicalism of bin Laden’s vision—and his focus on the US ‘Crusader–Zionists’ as the ultimate source of Islam’s problems—meant that he became a magnet for the deracinated flotsam and jetsam that began to float free of specific conflicts and whose primary loyalty was to the ‘emir’ or ‘sheikh’, as he dubbed himself from 1996 onwards. His education, wealth and conspicuous height (six foot five) and white garb contributed to his charisma among simple souls, the most committed handful of whom took Fascist-style ‘blood oaths’ to obey his orders.14 On countless videos we can see the sheikh delivering his words of death with a simpering smile in an Arabic monotone, the outward calmness belied by a revealing incident involving the BBC foreign editor John Simpson. In 1989 Simpson was filming a mujaheddin group in Afghanistan. A figure dressed in white appeared, with a Kalashnikov and expensive calfskin boots. He told the mujaheddin to shoot Simpson. One group of fighters regarded this as a dishonourable request and won a straw poll on the issue. Not giving up so easily, Osama bin Laden offered the driver of an ammunition truck US$500 to run Simpson over instead. The driver laughed and drove away. Simpson’s crew came upon the Arab in white, lying on a camp bed and crying while he beat the pillow with his fists in infantile frustration.15
Al Qaeda was the first truly global terrorist organisation, consisting of alienated and displaced persons whose loyalties were to the organisation and who could emerge anywhere with new identities provided by the Sudanese authorities, who issued them with false passports. Al Qaeda also seemed to transcend the historic division between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Its operatives learned about bomb-making from Hezbollah in the Lebanon, and had extensive contacts with Iranian secret agents. They also had more fitful contacts with the intelligence services of Saddam Hussein, whose relationship with Islamic militants was characteristically opportunistic as this national socialist evolved into a would-be Saladin.
One or two words of caution are necessary to avoid giving Al Qaeda more importance or coherence than it possesses. Like the Securities and Exchange personnel who shaped war-crimes charges before Nuremberg in 1945–6, intelligence services and policemen who are engaged in hunting Al Qaeda operatives are primarily interested in organisational relationships to help prove the charge of conspiracy underlying assassinations and mass murder, not to speak of more shadowy linkages with rogue regimes which provide a more calculable target for the West’s enormous military capabilities. Several informed journalistic investigators of Al Qaeda are sceptical whether the organisation is as effective as this suggests, pointing out its habit of claiming responsibility for atrocities with which it has no real connection as a means of magnifying its own global scope and magnitude.
Most of Al Qaeda’s estimated US$30 million annual operating budget came from donations to dubious Islamic charities from oil profits and investments in the West racked up by rich Saudis. However, terrorist operations around the Middle East (in particular an attempt in 1995 to kill Hosni Mubarak) led to pressure from Egypt and Saudi Arabia on Sudan to expel bin Laden, although apparently the Saudis also tried to assassinate him. Fearing that the Sudanese might betray him to the highest bidder, in 1996 he returned to Afghanistan, or more specifically to the Pakistani-sponsored religious movement called the Taliban (students) who were fighting for control of that country. They routinely increased their limited local support by paying extremely poor peasants US$300 to join them in further wrecking that war-ravaged country. Wherever they imposed their rule, ‘idols’ were destroyed—notably the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001—and those guilty of such crimes as adultery were shot dead in the middle of Kabul’s only football pitch with a bang and a collapsing burqa. Despite their ostentatious puritanism, the Taliban had amicable relations with the disintegrated nation’s opium growers and drug traffickers. Any faint reservations their leaders may have had about the tall Arab were allayed by annual payments of up to US$20 million for their hospitality. The Saudis may have restricted bin Laden’s access to his family’s wealth, while the Sudanese looted his modest local assets, but the Golden Chain ensured that Saudi money soon flowed to him as he oscillated between Pakistan and Afghanistan. There he organised a network of training camps for international terrorists, including the Jordanian al-Zarqawi, who would carry out attacks either of his devising or proffered to him by other Islamic radicals who lacked means of their own. The camps grew more sophisticated in scale, including huge tunnels cut into mountains like the complex at Tora Bora.
The devastating bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 were the first obvious fruits of bin Laden’s strategy of internationalising Islamist terrorism. Although US president Bill Clinton was acutely aware of the threat from this remote quarter, legal restrictions and a collective post-Vietnam fear of ground operations going wrong in inhospitable places meant that the US response was confined to firing (quite modestly laden) million-dollar Cruise missiles at camps and houses the terrorists had long vacated. No technology could bridge the time that elapsed between intelligence, which had to be evaluated, and firing a submarine-based missile over airspace that was nervy because of tensions between India and Pakistan. Each possible response was also ‘lawyered to death’ by those anxious about collateral casualties. Advance warnings to Pakistani intelligence inevitably became warnings to bin Laden to move on in his little convoy of SUVs.
Beginning in late 1998 and extending into late 1999, bin Laden and his most senior associates turned their minds to what became known as the ‘planes operation’. This was payback time for the Christian Crusader footsoldiers of Zionism, for bin Laden detects the Jews behind everything. It involved co-ordinated ‘spectacular’ attacks in which hijacked commercial airliners would be crashed into symbolic targets. These were carefully chosen. The twin towers, and by extension the US itself, were described by bin Laden in October 2001 as ‘the Hubal of the age’, a reference to the large stone moon god, one of the 360 idols worshipped by the Arabs in the period between Abraham and the coming of the Prophet. The wily rulers of Mecca had refused to destroy the idol lest this diminish pilgrim traffic. Nor would the holy hypocrites of Medina help the Prophet destroy the idol. Despite them, the Prophet returned to Mecca, defeated the pagans and tore down Hubal. This was a case of propaganda by the deed, in which by one imagination-defying act they gave the world a graphic demonstration of their total faith in God, merely passing through glass, flames and steel to the musky scents of paradise while leaving the smell of death lingering behind them. As Mohammad Bouyeri’s poem had it: ‘Accept the deal…And Allah will not stand in your way…He will give you the Garden in place of the earthly ruin.’ In his various reflections on the event, bin Laden himself seems mesmerised by the financial loss 9/11 occasioned, totting up the cost of the ‘successful and blessed attacks’ in terms of lost business, employment and reconstruction to arrive at the figure of US$1 trillion, a big return on his US$500,000 investment. The loss of three thousand lives warranted no mention, for there was no defining line between taxpayer civilians and US soldiers.16
III US, THEM AND ’EURABIA’
Western culture is infinitely rich in resources for making sense of these murderous assaults on its values, although politicians, with horizons confined to the present, rarely avail themselves of them or shy away from giving offence. Orvieto cathedral in Umbria contains a masterly fresco cycle painted around 1500 by Luca Signorelli, an artist from nearby Cortona in Tuscany. One bay shows the Antichrist preaching with Satan whispering in his ear, a relatively rare theme in Western art. Although the allusion seems provocative in connection with contemporary Islamist terrorists, especially to anyone sceptical of George Bush’s use of the (Islamic) term ‘evil-doers’ to describe them, in fact the simulacrum-like face of the Antichrist is useful for our purposes, and not just because the simpering smile resembles that of bin Laden. Not only does it force us to think about evil as an endemic presence in human affairs, but in this case the not-quite-right features of the Antichrist remind us that Islamist terrorism is in some respects like a cover version of ideas and movements that have occurred in modern Western societies, as well as a radicalised caricature of what over a billion Muslims, who simply wish to live out their lives in their full human complexity, believe. That is why the more intelligent commentators on 9/11 consulted their Joseph Conrad and Fyodor Dostoevsky novels for people similarly intoxicated by orange explosions and livid bloodshed. There were no answers to be had in the Greenwich plastic dome or the gleaming Parisian Grande Arche de la Défense.
The ‘clash of civilisations’ inaugurated by Islamist terrorists (for bin Laden uses that concept) has provoked a Western crisis of identity although most ‘civilised’ people are as affronted when someone is blown up in Nairobi as they are when this occurs in Madrid or London. Although some would like to see Europe as a utopian oasis insulated from a US hypostatised as ‘Texas’, in fact this is impossible, as soaring petrol prices and the flow of manufactured goods from China or India readily indicate. Certain European governments, above all the Zapatero socialist regime in Spain, and the always disappointing left in Germany, are under the illusion that they can appease militant Islam through an ‘alliance of civilisations’, or by willing a fusion culture based on the Mediterranean that will distinguish them in the eyes of Islam from their Atlanticist fellows in northern Europe. Of course, if the Spanish people think they have more in common with Libya or Tunisia than with England, Holland or Germany that is entirely their own affair, but one doubts whether they or the Italians share this liberal elite view.17 Islamist terrorists are also linked to Western culture without evidently understanding it, beyond its technological marvels or what they (and many Western commentators) regard as liberal decadence. All of the terrorist atrocities chronicled above were entirely reliant on sophisticated Western technology as well as box-cutters. These included laptop computers, mobile encryption phones, global positioning equipment, car and truck hire, credit cards, fast-flow international bank transfers, an Islamist press, video cameras, DVDs and satellites to transmit ideas and images, aircraft and sophisticated bombs, to say nothing of the repeated attempts to acquire bacteriological, chemical or nuclear weapons to cause a major catastrophe. Even the wealth that enables terrorist attacks is based on revenue that Saudi Arabia acquires from selling oil at vast profit to the insatiable West and other major markets. Much of this revenue is in turn squandered, not simply in supporting the ruling elite’s extravagant lifestyle or buying weapons for armies whose record is dismal, but in converting the public face of the urban Arab world into a travesty of the travesties that already characterise Western modernism. Fake charities and phoney NGOs ensure that some of the surplus revenue flows not only to madrassas and mosques but to terrorist organisations.
The internet has become the broadband river whereby noxious ideologies (and the practicalities of terrorism) can be accessed in the privacy of bedroom or study in provincial towns and major cities of the West by young people, of whom significant numbers applaud the actions of Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorists. It is curious that while security services can monitor internet paedophiles, they seem to be unlucky with people planning bomb attacks. The effect of attacks like 9/11 was primarily evaluated by the chief perpetrator in terms of its impact on Wall Street’s financial markets, although as an engineer bin Laden also savoured the physical impact on the structures his planes collapsed. The fact that his outlay of US$500,000 caused what he estimated to be US$1 trillion worth of damage seems to have particularly excited his imagination.
Anyone who has visited a National Health hospital in Britain will have been struck by the dedication of the large number of migrants who work in them for a combination of long hours and low pay. The rapid ageing of Europe’s population and its looming pensions crisis seem to many observers to mean that it has few alternatives to welcoming a much younger, and largely male, migrant workforce, which has added twenty million legal Muslim entrants throughout the continent since 1970. The illegal numbers would push that much higher. They are the ghost army of night cleaners in urban offices, or of those who toil in the hothouses of Andalucía for minimal wages. No one should mistake the human suffering involved, as wars intensify poverty and a tide of desperate humanity heads Europe’s way. The distressing scenes at Sangat near the Calais channel-tunnel entrance, or amid the barbed-wire fences of Spain’s Moroccan enclaves at Ceuta and Melilla, or on the heavily patrolled borders of the Ukraine indicate the scale of this human tide surging up from Africa and Arabia for the privilege of living in some rat-infested and rackety slum in Paris or toiling in the 100-degree heat of an Andalucian hothouse. Conditions in the banlieus of Paris have reached boiling point. One unfortunate by-product of this may be to surrender supervision of these troubled housing estates to self-appointed ‘uncles’ and Islamic clergy, probably supported by a form of militia, who will further detach these areas from modern French life, in pursuit of Islam’s goal of creating extra-territorial moral and legal enclaves where the writ of the Western secular state no longer runs. Few intelligent observers were consoled when French imams decreed a ‘fatwa’ against young rioters, since it is not they who make laws in France.18 If the stimulus this disorder has occasionally given to far-right parties, and to mavericks such as the flamboyant entrepreneur homosexualist Pim Fortuyn in Holland, is one over-studied phenomenon, an equally disturbing trend is the way in which Muslims have influenced those who represent them in Europe’s parliaments. The real test of being British is not who one supports in cricket, but whether one accepts that Britain has autonomous national interests which are not subject to the veto of this or that minority. The price of domestic harmony, and of a seat representing part of Birmingham or Walsall, seems to be the sacrifice of Europe’s staunchest ally. Like Britain’s bumptious George Galloway, one can also get elected to parliament by playing to the Muslim gallery, punctuating one’s discourse with crazed anti-American slanders and the occasional ‘Shalom aleichem’.19
It would be wrong to imagine that the West solely imports, rather than exports, its present difficulties. It has been incautious about what face it blithely exports, and not only because its cultural diplomacy has collapsed since the days of Encounter during the Cold War.20 Mass tourism has become the means whereby affluent Westerners, who are ignorantly indifferent to local sensibilities, have established outposts of their way of life on the coastal fringes of more traditional cultures. Instead of getting blind drunk in Birmingham, Benidorm or Bremen they do it in Eilat, Marrakech or the Maldive Islands. Moderate Muslims say this is no bad thing and that the natives gradually get used to it, but then they are part of a privileged elite that does not have to encounter such horrors on a daily basis. Satellite television enables people in the remotest societies to access such ghastlinesses as MTV where even wild animals are not safe from being stuffed down teenage trousers, in the mindless antics of those American teenagers whom Michael “Halloween” Myers has not yet murdered. Joking apart, international corporations, whose lack of local legal anchorage and arrogance appals as many on the right as on the left, leave their sordid traces on virtually every society on the planet, notwithstanding their commercials extolling cultural sensitivity. There is something wrong about the Gadarene rush of US companies and armies of private security contractors into the Iraqi war zone where robotic-seeming US troops already look, and often sound, like something that has strayed from a Terminator movie.21
Islamic terrorism also draws on a tradition of ‘occidentalist’ hatreds that are partly reliant upon the West’s own tradition of repudiating modernism. The ideological indebtedness of Islamist terrorists to the West extends beyond the ‘vanguardism’ that links Al Qaeda and other groups to the Marxist–Leninist tradition of militant elites making up for persistent failures of popular consciousness. If some call these terrorists Islamo-Bolsheviks, in recognition of similarities not with only the Bolsheviks, but also with the Russian nihilist precursors who so appalled Dostoevsky, others have also semi-hit the mark by describing them as ‘Islamo-Fascists’, a term that resonates in the left-wing imagination and is employed by President Bush too. Now although almost nothing connects Al Qaeda with a movement like Nazism—apart from an antisemitic mania that sometimes draws upon such historical resources as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—militant Islam shares something of the cultural pessimism of nineteenth-century Western critics of mass urban industrial society. It is not difficult to alight upon any number of Western (as well as Chinese or Japanese) critics of the comfortable soullessness of major cities, where innocent country folk were thrown into a witches’ whirligig of deceit, deracination, vice and the richness of life reduced to sordid commerce. Everything and everyone had a price, in the great whore city filled with whores of both sexes. Only one type of being seemed entirely at ease in this environment: the Jews, who it was claimed, were at the cold dark heart of these unnatural arrangements, a theme that resonated in Europe’s most profoundly provincial nation, namely Germany, where being provincial is celebrated as a virtue, and managers of hedge funds are compared with ‘locusts’ by politicians who ought to know better. Bin Laden’s writings and messages are saturated with antisemitism, as well as with such bizarre claims as that AIDS originated in the US rather than sub-Saharan Africa, his claim that the US exports AIDS being undermined by the fact that only 0.3 to 0.6 per cent of the population there are carrying it.22
As in the case of earlier crises, whether the fin-de-siècle Dreyfus Affair which influenced Emil Durkheim to write about the socially constitutive role of religion, or the domestic repercussions of the Vietnam War which led the US sociologist Robert Bellah to write about civil religion, a clear and present external and internal threat has triggered waves of introspection on the subject of what we in the West stand for. Newspapers in Britain, to take one example, are filled with ‘the fundamentals of law in this country’ or ‘what it means to be British’, while traditional patriotic history books and a Little Book of Patriotism have become bestsellers.23 These debates, which are replicated elsewhere in Europe, have overlapped with parallel attempts to build a supranational European ‘moral’ identity in contrast to the allegedly ‘alien’ identity of the USA. Clever noise about Martians and Venusians has been two-way, and it is assuming dangerous proportions since several vested interests are keen to open rifts within what have been effective alliances.
One fantasy that tantalises some Europeans is that of a decent, humane polity whose ‘soft’ moral power would rival the ‘hard’ power deployed around the world by the faltering Colossus across the Atlantic. Europe would be based on the explicit rejection of such practices as the death penalty, on subscription to multilateral institutions like the UN, and on high-maintenance social policies that are partly possible due to the US taxpayers’ generous underwriting of Europe’s ultimate security through NATO.24
The role of religion is crucial to these widening divisions, although many commentators have remarked that, while Americans may exaggerate their religiosity when questioned by telephone pollsters, Europeans may correspondingly over-egg their secularity in similar surveys since they imagine this response is fashionable. Moreover, it worth stressing that in a global perspective it is northern and central Europe that is ‘exceptional’ in this regard rather than America.25 My own entirely subjective impressions of religion, gathered in a few years’ experience of varied regions of the US, is that it adds a surprise dimension to people that is increasingly not met with in western Europe, that it provides a warm hearth for people in a vast and highly mobile society that can be cold beneath the superficial amiability, and that devout ‘black-or yellow-necks’ are just as evident as the Bible-bashing ‘rednecks’ of European legend.
In contrast to the US where, despite a formal separation of Church and state designed to preclude ‘Establishment’, religion has a significant impact on politics, many Europeans are determined to write Christianity out of the picture. They include British leftists, despite Evangelical Christianity being integral to British socialism, and aggressive secularists, in Belgium, France or Spain, who patrol battle lines established a century earlier over such issues as education. Religion in these circles signifies the Basques, Belfast, Bosnia and Bush, at any rate something horrid, like the ‘national Catholicism’ of Franco. Actually, the Democrat presidents John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were not slow to invoke the Almighty, with genuine conviction in the case of Carter. The ultra-conservative and much maligned Ronald Reagan was not much of a churchgoer, even if rhetorically he appointed Him an honorary member of his cabinet.26 The US religious right did not emerge from nowhere, and nor did it do so without liberal provocation. It is important to recall that the politicisation of conservative American religion began with the 1963 Supreme Court ban on prayers in public schools, and gained momentum through Roe v. Wade a decade later, the Supreme Court decision which struck down state laws against abortion, and that conservatives are as widely represented among America’s largest denomination, Roman Catholics, as among the Evangelical Protestants who seem to attract the most media attention.
In similar fashion, the US right established an impressive array of think-tanks and autonomous centres, largely because they felt, with reason, that their views were excluded from the ‘Left university’ and much of the media, a process extended through maverick ‘bloggers’ seeking to balance liberal bias in America’s established networks and newspapers.27
There are other cultural differences. Although the European media chooses to ignore it, the US has an extraordinary range of religious public intellectuals, such as William Buckley Jnr, Stephen Carter, Richard Neuhaus and George Weigel. By contrast, although Europe has such outstanding figures as Leszek Kolakowski, Hans Maier and Josef Ratzinger, its public culture is dominated by sneering secularists, who set the tone for the rest of the population and can make light work of the average bishop rolled out to confound them, especially in the case of Anglican bishops who share so much liberal common ground. Much of the European liberal elite regard religious people as if they come from Mars, except when they operate within such licensed liberal parameters as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the struggle against apartheid or the US civil rights movement in which Christians, notably Dr Martin Luther King, played a distinguished role.28 ‘Britain’, we are loftily told, ‘has not, since the 16th century, been ruled by bishops or mullahs and has been the better for it.’ In fact, ‘mullahs’ have never ruled Britain except in that columnist’s imagination. The last truly politically significant English cleric was the seventeenth-century archbishop William Laud. This line neglects the contribution that clergy have made to the public affairs of Britain, and, more worryingly, the fact that it is not only ‘fundamentalist lobbies’ who ‘curse’ modern politics, but professional lobbies representing animal rights, gays or the planet (causes that inspire sectarian devotions to the fox or Gaia, so to speak) which could equally be deemed a mixed blessing were it not politically suicidal to say so. Idiot and ignorant actors and playwrights are integral to all these causes.29 Although many European politicians are highly religious, including the leaders of Britain’s major political parties, notably Tony Blair, and many parliamentarians, it was thought expedient to let it be known that Downing Street does ‘not do God’ lest secularists make hay with it as they did when Blair announced that he felt accountable to God.
One European politician who did not dissemble his conservative religious convictions, the distinguished Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione, was the subject of a gay cum secularist media witch-hunt which refused to acknowledge that as EU justice commissioner he would be as capable of separating his private beliefs from his official brief as he had been in every earlier appointment. That the political thugs and gangsters of ETA, IRA–Sinn Fein and various neo-Fascists are represented in the European parliament is apparently deemed less shocking than the appointment of a single Catholic professor, but then the media seems to be fascinated by its brushes with people who commit shocking violence while smirking at them.30
Instead of religion, the liberal elites prefer their monopolistic mantra of ‘diversity’, ‘human rights’ and ‘tolerance’ as if they invented them, unaware of the extent to which these are products of a deeper Christian culture based on ideas and structures that are so deeply entrenched that most of us are hardly aware of them. As the great contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet has written: ‘Modern society is not a society without religion, but one whose major articulations were formed by metabolising the religious function.’31
That truth was suppressed in the draft 2004 European Union Constitution, which Dutch and French voters have since pushed into limbo. This document grandly traced Europe’s ethos and telos from Thucydides to the Enlightenment. Vociferous objections from Italy, Poland, Spain and pope John Paul II forced the drafters to concede the scantest reference to the continent’s fifteen centuries of Christianity. Among the most vociferous was Aleksander Kwásniewski, the atheist president of Poland, who said: ‘There is no excuse for making references to ancient Greece and Rome, and to the Enlightenment, without making reference to the Christian values which are so important to the development of Europe.’32 Academic postmodernists would have had reasons to object too since they generally regard Enlightenment rationality as a mixed blessing. But then they really don’t add up to a hill of beans in the scheme of things.
Liberal and secular politicians, many with the lawyers’ limited historical consciousness, decided to omit a religion that made a major contribution to the dignity and sacred identity of autonomous individuals regardless of their ethnic origins, as the greatness of one God paradoxically lessened human dependence. Its transcendental focus has set bounds to what the powerful could not or, more importantly, should not do by providing moral exemplars of good kingship and evil tyranny. The eleventh-century investiture contest between emperor Henry IV and pope Gregory VII contributed to the evolution of a separate civil society beyond the ambit of the state. In the seventeenth century, Jesuit theologians developed theories of resistance to tyrants, up to and including justifications for tyrannicide in times when this was not academic. In the absence of other forms of welfare, Christianity has provided charity to the needy for several centuries, a constant from St Francis of Assisi to the Salvation Army and the Samaritans. As the British socialist politician, Roy Hattersley, pointedly asked, when have committed rationalists ever operated soup-kitchens, hotlines for the suicidal or hostels for crack addicts? Europe also consists of what one might call ‘cultural Christians’—a term more routinely used by ‘cultural Jews’ who have abandoned their religious faith. Entire swathes of European art, literature and music, including Raphael and Rubens, Bach and Handel, Messiaen and Roualt, are incomprehensible without knowledge of Christian sacred culture. Attempts to airbrush Christianity out of the historical record are as intellectually dishonest as Stalin’s photographic conversion of those he had murdered into a bush, lake or jacket.
The unwanted intrusion of Islamic terrorism into Europe’s major cities, already depressingly accustomed to the mindless murderousness of Basques and Irish, and the dawning realisation that among Islamic minorities there are those whose primary allegiance is to a foreign religion or, worse, to international terrorists, and who have conceived a murderous alienation from their parents’ or grandparents’ adoptive homeland, has had immediate consequences beyond elaborating more anti-terrorist legislation. The Germans have introduced citizenship tests whose questions—opponents argue—are tougher than those posed to contestants on the local equivalent of ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ In the Netherlands, where in the wake of the slaughtering of Theodor van Gogh the shock has been greatest, the immigration authorities have produced a video to convey to immigrants the quintessence of ‘Dutchness’. This consists of snippets from the life of William of Orange, tulips and windmills, naked sunbathers and a gay wedding. The Netherlands’ security minister, the former prison official Rita Verdonk, is currently trying to outlaw the wearing of the burqa, a ‘crime’ already subject to a £100 fine in parts of Belgium. The imagination reels as it tries to conjure up what an equivalent British video might offer: Elizabeth I, roses and castles, the generous frontage of the celebrity Jordan, and nightly scenes of drunken anarchy on the streets of Cardiff or Nottingham that would embarrass Bosch or Breughel.33
Inevitably, perhaps, the allegiance militant religious minorities display towards their religion has led to questioning of both liberalism and the theology of multiculturalism, public doctrines that have come into conflict with one another. Liberal notions of equal human rights have collided with the lesser rights that some minorities accord to women, not to speak of their absolute denial of rights to gay people. Liberals have failed to persuade vociferous religious minorities that their own culture of universal human rights is not a recipe for decadence, or something that these minorities take a cynically instrumental view of. Interestingly, the first words uttered by a man captured after an attempted suicide bombing in London, as he appeared naked with his hands up on the balcony of a block of flats, were ‘I know my rights,’ a thought eagerly greeted by armies of British human rights lawyers whose blinkered and self-righteous indifference to the primary right of people not to be blown up is truly a sign of decadence. Unfortunately, the lawyers over-generously represented in our legislatures simply parrot this way of thinking, a development that may contribute to mass alienation from our political system.
Nor did liberal multiculturalists, who imagined a Herderian riot of diverse flowers living gaily in a huge garden, take adequate notice of the fact that one aggressive minority would seek to create cultural no-go areas, in which mosques and madrassas in what amount to ghettos of the mind, would be followed by calls for a separate Islamic banking system, sharia law or, more outrageously, an Islamic parliament. The spectacle of Yorkshire as a northern outpost of ‘Eurabia’ is not confined to the imagination of Harvard and Stanford historian Niall Ferguson. Western societies have tolerated various devils and pests in their midst, providing them with ‘people carriers’ as part of their welfare package, despite their vocal calls for our destruction. Belatedly but rightly most European governments are throwing such individuals out, but they will have to be much more vigilant about whom they let in, ensuring, for example, that imams speak European languages, and are educated in Western values vis-à-vis homosexuals or women.
It might reasonably be objected that Western societies have long made accommodations with, for example, Orthodox Jews, who do not want to work on their sabbath, or Sikhs, who wish not to discommode their hair by wearing motorcycle crash helmets. London’s Soho Chinese community have their own street signs and telephone kiosks adorned with Mandarin, to the delight of those who visit there. But that is not part of a campaign of territorial exclusion or self-assertion. The demand for banks that refuse to charge interest represents an extreme version of Islam, which sits ill with Egyptian banks that routinely charge moderate rates of interest or indeed with learned theological opinion in that highly Islamic country. In other words, the call for sharia-conforming banks is part of a strategy for expanding Islam’s space within the host country in conscious rejection of any notion of accommodation, as is intimidation against churches marooned in Islamic-dominated areas.34 Similarly, the wearing of head-scarves in schools has become an act of provocation, exploited by the militants who encourage schoolgirls in this choice of fashion.
In addition to emphasising ‘rights’, multiculturalism asserts specific group grievances, whether they concern the Irish potato famine, colonialism, slavery or the Jewish Holocaust, to take the better-known examples. Few dare to highlight the fact that, for example, in the 1840s the British government maintained the navy, collected duties on barrels of brandy, but entirely lacked the administrative apparatus to do anything about a large-scale famine. What has a twenty-year-old Spanish person got to do with the deaths of native Amerindians in the sixteenth century for which his or her government has apologised? Why are countries that fought Nazism for five years being made to feel guilty about the fate of the Jews for which Germany and those who collaborated with it were solely responsible? Encouragingly, the Roman Catholic Church is beginning to baulk at demands for apologies for the Crusades—which were a Christian response to Islamic aggression.
In addition to being often unsympathetic to the victimhood of other victims (as the British Council of Muslims recently demonstrated in its churlish avoidance of Holocaust Day and which some US Jews displayed in their equally churlish response to gypsy victims of Nazi persecution who were excluded from the Holocaust Memorial), such aggrieved groups imagine that a self-identifying cause construed as moral entitlement trumps any collective obligations, largely because, in this case and others in the West, the dominant majority tends to have a history as victor rather than victim and hence cannot mount the same emotionally based assault on popular consciousness. The effect is rather like arguing the moral case of the war in Iraq with the mother of a deceased soldier, a lost cause since motherhood and victimhood combined are mythically powerful. While minorities send out a clear and indignant moral message, the majority is thoroughly confused by its residual Christianity, a liberalism that simultaneously transmits ‘tough’ as well as ‘soft’ signals, and a public culture where the ‘freedoms’ achieved in the 1960s have degenerated into addictions and obsessions suggestive of dependency, not least freakish obsessions with deviant sex, food, housing or life lived through material acquisition. It is a grim spectacle.35
Surveying the early-twentieth-century European cultural landscape, there are signs everywhere that the creeds that became hegemonic in the sixty years after the Second World War are in desuetude. The end of the Cold War and the emergence of an Islamist terrorist threat have opened up chasms within the Atlantic community that saw off Hitler and the successors of Josef Stalin. Support for the US-led coalition in Iraq can determine (as it has already done) the fate of European governments, as witnessed by the fall of Spanish president José María Aznar, a man of courage and dignity, and the longevity (until 2005) of chancellor Gerhard Schröder, as the Spanish and German left played their anti-American cards in a climate rendered almost insane by the re-election of George W. Bush. The complication that Israel seems to represent to harmonious relations between Islam and a Western world of which Israel seems an increasingly tenuous part has resulted in antisemitism—if that is what criticism of Israel is seen to be—becoming as characteristic of the European left as it once was of the right, although some would argue that that poison has lain within ‘anti-Zionism’ all along. Bitter quarrels have erupted among American Jewish intellectuals, because the allegedly antisemitic view that Israel is complicating US foreign policy is as rife among their gentile colleagues in the US as it is in a Europe which some American Jews hysterically claim is synonymous with that malady. But there are less parochial concerns than what animates New York intellectuals, whether academic or public, whose prodigious wordage in the New York Review of Books or New Republic passes most people by.
Terrorism has further major consequences. The shadow of Islam has made the expansion of Europe to include Turkey, a secular state with a Muslim majority, an urgent desideratum, further evidence that the tight Franco-German axis around which ‘Old Europe’ operated is in terminal decline. Turkey has been a reliable member of NATO for decades, and unlike Belgium or Holland is one of the few countries in modern Europe capable of fighting a war. Potential accession states will soon number Morocco, which is already in preliminary negotiations to accede, and in all likelihood Algeria, which from the 1840s was an integral part of France. But there are also important changes in the realm of public ideology that would have seemed unthinkable some years ago when the old anti-Fascist slur of ‘racism’ routinely silenced all debate.
When Trevor Phillips, the black British and Labour-supporting chairman of the British Commission for Racial Equality pronounced that multiculturalism is inherently divisive, people became alert, even if others have been saying the same thing for several decades. Evidently, the messenger was more important than the message, even if the message has yet to percolate down to the politically correct denizens of local government, the lowest rung—in every sense—of modern government, who in Britain occupy their time (and spend other people’s money) with trying to convert Christmas into ‘winter lights’ or some other silliness that neither Hindus, Jews, Muslims nor Sikhs actually want.36 The chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, the most impressive religious leader in the Kingdom, has similarly argued that Britain needs to develop the ethos of a country house to replace the anomie of a commercial travellers’ cheap motel, a metaphor intended to stimulate greater awareness of what all citizens have in common. Elsewhere, changes in climate are coming thick and furious. A certain liberal-left desperation is evident when it is claimed that a suddenly deliberalised Holland was probably never very liberal at all, an assertion difficult to square with the hashish cafés and the canal-side window displays of prostitutes. The war and insurgency in Iraq (and the ‘war on terror’) have sent shockwaves through liberal ranks, causing bitter divisions between so-called ‘tough’ liberals like Michael Ignatieff and Christopher Hitchens and those apparently less concerned with whether Iraqis and Afghans should enjoy the same rights as themselves. The erstwhile left is bitterly divided over such issues as torture. News of this novel trend has yet to reach celebrity actors, film-makers and playwrights, who are stuck in the infantile Noam Chomsky cum Harold Pinter view of the world that, in the latter case, has been endorsed with the Nobel Prize. Nor has it penetrated the walls of the ‘Left university’, which will probably be the last redoubt of Western multiculturalism, just as it has long been the sunset home of Marxism and its derivatives.37 The voices of militant rationalism and scientistic stridency have become shriller, with Darwinism’s high prophet, the zoologist Richard Dawkins, behaving like the hotter sort of seventeenth-century English Protestant in his zeal to mock the faith of people who believe in miracles. In hospitals and research laboratories some scientists push hard against the boundaries of what many lay people regard as decent or seemly. Even in Britain—where the Churches are otherwise preternaturally obsessed with homosexual clergy—when both the Anglican and Roman Catholic archbishops expressed unease about the easy availability of abortion, people listened.38 Some still gleefully anticipate the onset of the totally secular society, a viewpoint I recently heard confidently expressed by the Spanish minister of religion, despite contrary evidence for the enormous vitality of religions in the US and around much of the rest of the world. Islam is resurgent, but so too is Hinduism in India, with even the Chinese Communist authorities forced to take religion seriously, which means persecuting the Catholic Church and adherents of Falang Gong. Thanks to the John Paul II generation, Christianity is vital in much of formerly Communist eastern Europe, including Russia, where Orthodoxy is experiencing a renaissance that has even spread to western Europe. The young Poles and Ukrainians who come to work in southern and western Europe are conspicuous by a dignified religious faith that makes it easy for them to integrate. So too are many migrants from Africa, whose vibrant Churches in poorer parts of big European cities are filled with ladies in vivid hats and men in suits and ties, not to speak of the flow of migrants into Spain from Central and Latin America. Although opinion surveys routinely announce the demise of Christianity, there seem to be plenty of Christians in the upper reaches of banks, broadcasting industry and newspapers, while Tony Blair’s cabinet includes at least one member of Opus Dei as well as several practising Anglicans.
The Christian Churches of Europe present a confused picture in the early twenty-first century. Some things are obvious enough, but they may require brief recapitulation. How long can they continue to regard Churches in the New World, let alone the Third World, as appendages to an old continent where Christianity appears to some to be in decline? It is striking, to say the least, how few European Christians are prepared to speak publicly about their co-religionists in the US, whom liberal opinion routinely caricatures and blames for America’s venturesome foreign policy. I have yet to hear a single European cleric ask whether in fact this is true. The Roman Catholic Church seems unsure whether to make a virtue of its authority and traditional structures—which may consolidate its core believers—or to make judicious compromises with a society that it finds alien, hostile and vapid. Under the present pontiff, Benedict XVI, the goal seems to be to fall back on the commitment of increasingly isolated groups. However, the Churches are not immune to demographic facts. In most European countries, an ageing ministry and a fall in the number of vocations disadvantage the priesthood, whose members are also underpaid and overworked in relation to the herculean kindnesses they perform. Importing young clergy from the Third World, as the Church does in France, will not correct this problem in the long term. On the other hand, courses in Christianity, such as Alpha and Faithworks, which are tailored to a modern pressurised lifestyle, are doing booming business—cynics say as dating agencies—as are the nation’s psychotherapists, the secularised alternative to the religion Sigmund Freud regarded as an illusion. But how many of these people are retained by a parish church? It may be a distortion of the media, but the Churches seem to put extraordinary passion into discussing sex, a subject that many lay people find less than compelling. If this is partly a reflection of the homosexualisation of the clergy, this will presumably have grave implications for heterosexuals wishing to pursue a vocation who may not feel comfortable in what are tantamount to gay covens, familiar enough from other walks of life.39 Perhaps they might like to address other themes once in a while to animate the interest of thinking people within the vast pool of cultural Christians?
For example, there is a palpable fatigue with the culture of living through shopping, or rather with unprecedented levels of credit-card debt, and some chains of superfluous shops face ruination. Perhaps the huge suburban shopping malls will join the cathedrals as part of the heritage industry. They might also wish to explore the reasons for the self-destruction of so many young people, whether those who kill themselves with drugs, or who just degrade themselves through other forms of nihilism. Surely this is to identify real phenomena that the Churches might wish to address, in connection with the wider existential boredom that bedevils modern Western mankind? They may also wish to tackle the disturbing social implications of the ‘multicultural society’, rather than passing over hard inter-cultural questions in the interests of inter-faith ‘dialogue’. In whose interest is it that certain vociferous minorities are protected from public criticism through special legislation, while various self-appointed cultural commissars seek to eradicate Europe’s historic religious traditions? This goes beyond the annual rote expressions of alarm about the commercialisation of Christmas, or attempts to supplant it with ‘the holidays’ or ‘winterval’. What is the position of the Churches on the prospect of legal dualism or federalism, in which religious minorities are allowed to practise an alternative law to that in the rest of the land concerned?
What do the Churches have to say about the worrying surrender of sovereignty, not to a federal Europe—although that is also a matter of deep concern—but to the self-appointed ‘moderate’ leaders of so-called communities, a deal brokered to contain violent people within these minorities? Talk of ‘Eurabia’ is alarmist, but the example of ‘community restorative justice’ in Northern Ireland indicates how entire communities can be delivered into the hands of extremely suspect so-called leaders, whose agenda is modest compared to those wishing to restore the medieval Caliphate to most of Spain. What will be the role of Christianity—Europe’s historic faith and the culture most people are born into—in relation to the civil religions which anxious governments are actively exploring in every state in Europe as a means of recreating social harmony now that the post-war welfare state consensus no longer seems sufficient to perform this unifying task? Why is the United States more successful in absorbing immigrants—including Muslim immigrants–than much of Europe? Is it a matter of greater space and social mobility? Does the absence of a welfare state diminish the opportunities for resentments about how the cake is shared out? Does the strict separation of Church and state mitigate the overwhelmingly and sometimes stridently Christian nature of the US?
Optimists, including all those who still subscribe to the multicultural ‘project’, will conclude this book with the thought that in the past Europe has successfully accommodated other minority faiths, and that judicious adjustments—the appointment of ‘head-scarf mediators’, the provision of Muslim cemeteries, and the licensing of humane forms of animal slaughtering, (all contentious in many parts of Europe) and even limited legal dualism or federalism, will allow us all to josh along in the fullness of time. Optimistic secularists may feel that the challenge represented by Europe’s fifteen million Muslims may give a final impetus to the separation of Church and state, winding up various anachronistic anomalies, from the Church of England to the Lutheran Establishments of Scandinavia.40 By contrast, pessimists may object that these measures represent the thin end of the wedge, to be followed by further demands, and that such innovations as separate legal systems are inherently divisive. Demographic factors alone will result in the grim prospect of ‘Eurabia’ if only to ensure a workforce to support the large over-hang of pensioners of my own generation and beyond. No measures will appease Europe’s Islamist radicals whose primary loyalties are to the free-floating mercenary army symbolised by Al-Qaeda, whose solidarities and values have been forged on battlefields stretching from the Balkans, via the Caucasus to Iraq and Afghanistan. On the whole, I conclude this book as an optimist, although certainly not of the Panglossian variety, since the increasingly sharp definition of what is at stake is itself surely part of the solution.