Aftershocks: reflections on the implications of September 11.

• Author: Reisman, W. Michael

The Fundamentalist conservatizers in the Islamic world who support or passively sympathize with those who are attacking us perceive themselves as under a grave threat. To assess the accuracy of their perception, we must look at what they fear. Since 1945, the international legal system, at the initiative of leading Western modernizing states, has established a set of ground rules of political and other social organization based upon what it considers to be universally valid and self-evident principles. These ground rules are embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although the United Nations Charter purported to reserve the domestic jurisdiction of states from international concern, Western governments and the human rights lobby have vigorously diminished the scope of domestic jurisdiction so that it no longer buffers the internal legal arrangements of states from the application of international human rights law. The values we designate as "universal" are, indeed, "universalizable," in contrast with tribal or other ethnically or religiously restrictive values that limit their reach and confine their benefits to members of a particular group. But "universalizable" values are not necessarily universally held. Nor are they "natural."

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I.

During the Cold War, fictional accounts of invasion and occupation by the respective enemy became forms of entertainment as well as means of sustaining mass mobilization and willingness to sacrifice. To mention only one example of this genre, this audience will recall the motion picture "Red Dawn" which depicted a brutal Soviet occupation of large parts of North America--replete with commissars in each small town--and heroic guerrilla actions conducted by young Americans from retreats in the Rocky Mountains. (1)

The attack on the United States on September 11 has yet to produce a new wave of such films and novels. It's not merely that the entertainment industry has not had the chance to catch up. When it does, the plots will revolve about more sabotage and terrorism, but not about invasion. Even scare fiction requires enough vraisemblance to make itself credible--and vendible. We are angry and indignant at the massive violation of our homeland and the murder of fellow citizens and we have no choice but to view ourselves in a war with a formidable adversary who is able to conduct the war in our territory. We require a new infrastructure of defense. But no one, whether in the Defense Department, in Governor Ridge's Office of Homeland Security, in a Department of Homeland Security when it is finally operational or, indeed, in the entertainment industry, which is ever alert for new commercial opportunities, is developing worst-case contingency plans for an invasion by Islamic militants and a long-term occupation, replete with hooded and bearded mullahs conducting forced conversions throughout the population in deconsecrated churches and synagogues that have been converted into mosques. We have been attacked and wounded and anyone who has not retreated into private fantasies accepts--as a real possibility--that we may be attacked and wounded again. But we know we are not going to be invaded. That expectation alone tells us something about the distinctive meaning of this war. This is not a classic type of war whose objective is invasion, occupation and incorporation. Nor are our enemies "mad," a soft psychologistic term we frequently call up when we cannot understand why others are doing the things they do. Nor are they driven by nihilism.

This war departs from the classic model in yet another way. Though we have been attacked, we are not the prime object of this war. This is, in large part, a war between Moslems in the Islamic world about the future control and social structure of the Islamic world, stretching from the Maghreb of North Africa and the largely Islamicized areas of sub-Saharan Africa, through the Middle East and the Anatolian landmass, through Central Asia and the Islamic states of the sub-continent, through the Islamic areas of China, and through the archipelagos of South Asia. It is a war about who, among contending Islamic groups, will gain power and control the dar al Islam, the values that will govern it and how it will be organized.

On one side of that Islamic world stand modernizing elites and those strata of the Islamic world who wish to make their space part of the expanding global civilization based upon science and technology. These modernizing elites believe that without such engagement and incorporation, they will be unable to assure to themselves and their populations the material benefits and life-opportunities that are the products of a robust economy within a liberal system of public order. In many of their countries, some modernization has taken place. If its benefits are not widely distributed, images of life in the modern world are. Though many of these images, which are fabricated for advertising and promotional purposes, are extravagantly inaccurate, they are, nonetheless, the pictures others gain and operate with.

On the other side stand Fundamentalist conservatizing counter-elites--variously called "Islamists" or "Jihadists"--whose members' views cover a spectrum but at the core share the common belief that the civilization of science and technology is antithetical to the true values of their faith; that it will deprive them, individually and collectively, of power: that it will hollow out their religion; and that it will contaminate and corrupt their lives and the lives of their children.

Some of this reaction is familiar from many other situations of social change. Every innovation in social arrangements necessarily terminates existing ones, causing distress and deprivation to those who were secure in the older arrangements but who prove insufficiently adroit to adapt rapidly to new ones. Part of the support for the Fundamentalist conservatizers comes from these victims of rapid social change in the Islamic world. Part comes from people disenchanted with social change. The early phases of modernization are also attended by rampant and ostentatious corruption, which abounds before effective control mechanisms come into operation. Reactions to this unattractive feature of modernization account for some of the support for the Fundamentalist conservatizers, coming from those who are disgusted by the corruption and see it as an inherent--and permanent--part of the modern package. As with every social movement, some support the Fundamentalist conservatizers because they see them as a path to individual or group power. But, let us not delude ourselves: some support the conservatizers because they believe in an orthodox form of their religion and are convinced that it will be eroded and denatured by modernization.

In the long Spanish civil war, which was also a war about modernization, the lines were clearly drawn: you were either for the Roman Catholic Church or against it, for social revolution or against it, for modern values or against them. One of the things that is confusing about the struggle within the Islamic world, in contrast to the comparative clarity of the long and violent war in Spain, is that everyone, modernizers and Fundamentalist conservatizers, radicals and reactionaries, uses the language of Koranic piety. Everyone sounds like a Fundamentalist conservatizer. There are historical reasons for this anomaly. Almost all of the Islamic states were formed relatively recently, most often through the decisions of external imperial powers rather than as a result of authentic and widely supported nationalist uprisings. The peoples of these new states still lack strong national identification; loyalty systems continue to revolve around the extended family. The only vocabulary of loyalty capable of mobilizing masses of people is the language and symbols of the common religion. Hence every aspiring counter-elite in an Islamic country--whether modernizing or conservatizing--must present itself as more pious than the elite it is seeking to replace, while stigmatizing its competitors as apostates and adulterators of the faith. As for the incumbent elite--whether modernizing or conservatizing--it too has no choice but to present itself as ever more orthodox. Hence an idiosyncrasy of the modern Islamic world is a rather androgynous modernizing elite. It moves comfortably in the West, still seeks to adopt many modern programs, and often depends upon the West for its internal or external security. Yet it often cultivates a religious image in language and costume and, in particular, it indulges (and tries to control) religious institutions. For these elites, truly, the voice is the voice of Jacob, the hands are the hands of Esau.

If this is a war within the Islamic world for control of the Islamic world, why was the United States attacked--our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the USS Cole in the harbor of Aden, the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington? Why are we seen as the enemy? The answer to that question is complex but one distinct part is that we are seen as the indispensable supporter for the erstwhile modernizing elites. Many in the Islamic world believe that without our support, most of the modernizers would quickly flee, fall or molt into conservatizers. The United States was the Great Satan to the supporters of the Islamic Republic because it had reinstated the little Satan, the Shah, in 1954. U.S. support kept him in power until President Carter decided not to come to his assistance in 1979, whereupon he was, as the Iranians say, bar bahd rafdeh, gone with the wind. In fact, in the Islamic world, there are no explicitly modernizing leaders who have a solid democratic base of domestic support and, as a result, can survive without internal military suppression or, often, without external Western support. The modernizers know it--just ask Mr. Hamid Karzai who enjoys...