September 11, 2002, 8:00 a.m.

By David Pryce-Jones

The events of September 11, you'll remember, came out of a perfect cloudless sky, as if out of the blue, out of nowhere. The unexpectedness of this mass murdering then seemed some new kind of doom. In fact a long historical process is at work, involving the relationship of the West and the world of Islam. For centuries now, the West and its social order has challenged other civilizations. In the face of that challenge, China, Japan, India, adopted the science and the arts, even the music, which were both the cause and the effect of Western creativity. Leaders and thinkers in Muslim countries also tried to match the West. With the possible exception of Turkey, they proved unable to do so. The reasons for this are unclear. Nobody and nothing effectively stands in the way of education, reform, experiment in building a modern social order with its own special characteristics like other peoples. Islam, it is true, offers the vision of a society based upon the Prophet Mohammed's long ago divine revelation of the will of God. This is a sort of utopia. But other utopias and other revelations, from Christianity to Communism, have come to terms with the contradictions and conflicts inherent in reality.

In the Sixties I first began to travel in Arab countries. There was still a certain courtliness of manner, a social architecture, something of a settled life. This has all since vanished in what V. S. Naipaul calls "the steady grinding down of the old world." Arab countries are centralized and militarized secret police states inhabited by subjects of a ruler and not by citizens. Injustice is everywhere. The big cities deteriorate into slums, and the countryside into ruin. The bonus of oil wealth ebbs away in corruption and inequality. Between them, dictators like Gamal Abdul Nasser, Saddam Hussein, and so many more, have put an end to settled life. The cruelty and waste are impossibly sad.

Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the hijackers have a mindset conditioned by this general failure, and they speak for millions of Muslims from Algeria to Pakistan and beyond. The only solution they envisage to the despair and envy from which they are suffering is at last to build the model of the Islamic society laid down long ago. Like all utopian hopes, this is irrational, and cannot be programmed. Incapable of realization, the proposed solution is only an aggravation of the condition.

That would be bad enough in itself, though still open to analysis. But the bin Ladens and other Islamists shut off debate through the conviction that their utopia could indeed by realized if the West did not stand in the way. Unable to explain why the West would want to do anything so stupid and pointless, they go on to maintain that the West consists of Christians or Jews who have a plot to destroy Islam and occupy its lands and generally behave like a Great Satan. However contorted or far-fetched, this alibi serves the purpose of allowing Muslims to blame the West for their own failures, and to present themselves as innocent and powerless victims.

What do you do to people who victimize you from a position of unmerited strength? Of course you kill them. I have no doubt that the September 11 terrorists went to their deaths without fear and in the certainty that they were somehow leveling a long score. Their hatred fed on the sense of inferiority. They couldn't acquire the technological skills to make the planes, but they could at least have revenge by learning to fly them. I have no doubt that the Palestinian suicide bombers also believe fearlessly, even joyfully, that they have hit upon the right way to settle a long score with Israelis.

Terror of the kind carries the illusion of strength, while actually expressing weakness. Years will have to pass before Muslims are able to climb out of the political and social quagmire which they have made for themselves. In that time, there are likely to be attempts at other mass attacks like September 11. But the fact of Western success does not bring with it any responsibility for Muslim failure. They have to sort that out, and they will too, because it's a truth as old as mankind that hate ends up destroying the hater.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2002