September 1, 2002 (Time Magazine)
An Apology From an Arab
An Arab intellectual apologizes, and explains
By ALI SALEM
As an Egyptian, I find myself compelled to apologize to the American people
for what happened to them on Sept. 11. I apologize because one of those involved
in that horrible disaster was Egyptian. As a man of letters, I declare myself
innocent of having any part in the creation of the culture that spawned these
individuals.
A long time before New York City's Twin Towers were destroyed, many towers
in my country were brought down by this same brand of perpetrators. They killed
President Anwar Sadat, who initiated peace with Israel and liberalism in Egypt;
they killed the Egyptian writer Farag Fouda, a defender of freedom and secularism;
they stabbed our Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz, when he was 82 years old, after
discovering that 30 years earlier he had written a novel they considered the work
of an infidel. They said they had not read the novel. Who told them it was sacrilegious?
Someone living in a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan, or sitting in a London
café or a mosque in New Jersey, told them so. In Egypt alone, these fundamentalists
have killed more than 1,000 policemen and ordinary citizens, Christian and Muslim
alike. In one of the most beautiful places on earth, the temple of Queen Hatshepsut
in Luxor, they slaughtered nearly 60 tourists in 1997. In Algeria their sickles
endlessly harvest the souls of the poor and helpless. They have committed all
these crimes with the purpose of establishing the kingdom of God on earth and
have succeeded only in turning our lives into hell.
In my country, art, education and the economy have all been leveled to a ground
zero. I'm convinced, though, that the problem we face is not religious but political.
And so it will never be solved with a religious summit. If you hold a meeting
of Muslim sheiks, Christian pastors and Jewish rabbis, they inevitably come out
with blissful smiles and report that they have found their values to be mostly
identical, and they are right.
Extremism may claim God as its redeemer, but it's really the selfish product
of lunacy. In America, the most free and modern nation of our time, you see it
too. You saw it with Jim Jones, who told his flock in Guyana to follow him into
death by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid, and you saw it when David Koresh created
his own small hell in Waco, Texas.
In my part of the world, the Arab Middle East, a great tragedy results from
our governments' well-intentioned attempts to cure society of extremism through
education. These leaders, however, don't teach what they should to produce the
values they want. They seek moderation and enforce piety. They seek citizens who
value life, yet their school curriculums exalt the value of science and ignore
philosophy and history and the liberal, humanistic values they embody. That is
why those who excel in such a system are no less immune to the call of extremism.
Our governments assume that people need to understand Islam in its purest form
to stay religiously moderate. The result is the mass production of true believers,
not good citizens. Because people initially welcome the imposed piety but then
gradually realize it doesn't equip them to meet the challenges of getting through
life, life becomes a morbid burden. To shake off this burden, some of them, usually
young men, can't wait for natural death and decide instead to take a short cut
to heaven.
Before ascending, they must have a cause that's canonized by their community-the
greatest cause on earth, capable of justifying their sacrifice in the eyes of
their kin. It's not enough to die fighting for their country; they must be fighting
for God. Once they have secured that cause, they search for a way to ennoble it
in the eyes of ordinary people who do not share their holy delusion but whose
admiration they crave. They know that most people respect logic and reason. So
they go looking for a nationalistic cause: this is what Osama bin Laden did when
he claimed the Palestinian cause as a justification for the destruction of Sept.
11.
But beneath their claims is a sadder truth: these extremists are pathologically
jealous. They feel like dwarfs, which is why they search for towers and all those
who tower mightily. We must admit that we failed to teach these people that life
is worth living. These extremists exist now, and will exist forever, so the question
before us must be, How can we defend both our lives and theirs? We in the Arab
world love freedom and want the chance at a decent life. We are not different
from you, as it sometimes seems. We may be just temporarily backward. Working
together, our governments must decide how, with what culture and by what actions,
they will combat the influence of those who hate life.
(Ali Salem is a playwright and the author of several books, including
"Journey into Israel." He lives in Cairo)
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