In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
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In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
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Ali Salem: An Apology from an Arab man of letters
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 prominently involved in that horrible disaster (Mohammed Atta) was Egyptian.
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 sacriligeous? 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 of Egypt, art, education, and the economy have all been leveled to a ground zero. I'm convinced, though, that the problem we face is 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 is really the selfish product of lunacy. In America, the most free and modern nation of out 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.
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He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
-Ali ibn-Abu-Talib |
We westerners are rightly proud of the material advances of the past several hundred years, coinciding with the rise of Europe and America from earlier rustic susbsistence and simplicity (and relative deprivation). The struggles of our ancestors were, at long length, rewarded. The prosperity of the contemporary West is more than a little due to the sacrifices of generations that went before. But there are other sources of influencewhich also deserve mention.
At a time when barbarian Europe languished in Dark Ages of poverty and illiteracy, backward and unwashed, the vast empire of Islam basked in the glories of a Golden Age of culture and advancement that eventually inspired Europe, too. The cities of Spain, under Muslim rule, glittered with a brilliance that lasted for centuries. Cordoba's teeming half million inhabitants enjoyed the comforts of public plumbing and illuminated streets. They had universities and libraries, culture and learning.
Muslim mysticism passed directly or indirectly into the very fibre of the Spanish Christian tradition. St. Teresa of Ávila or St. John of the Cross might never have written as they did had they not been exposed to such Sufi doctrines as the concept of God the Beloved and Friend, and the belief that God could only be known through renunciation of the world.