Islam’s Nowhere Men
In its beginnings, the
Pakistan of Faisal Shahzad’s parents was animated by the modern ideals of its
founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. In that vision, Pakistan was to be a state for the
Muslims of the subcontinent, but not an Islamic state in the way it ordered its
political and cultural life. The bureaucratic and military elites who dominated
the state, and defined its culture, were a worldly breed. The British Raj had
been their formative culture. But the world of Pakistan was recast in the 1980s
under a zealous and stern military leader, Zia ul-Haq. Zia offered Pakistan
Islamization and despotism. He had ridden the jihad in Afghanistan next door to
supreme power; he brought the mullahs into the political world, and they, in
turn, brought the militants with them.
This was the Pakistan in
which young Faisal Shahzad was formed; the world of his parents was
irretrievable. The maxim that Pakistan is governed by a trinity—Allah, Army,
America—gives away this confusion: The young man who would do his best to secure
an American education before succumbing to the call of the jihad is a man in the
grip of a deep schizophrenia. The overcrowded cities of Islam—from Karachi and
Casablanca to Cairo—and those cities in Europe and North America where the
Islamic diaspora is now present in force have untold multitudes of men like
Faisal Shahzad.
This is a long
twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can’t wish it away. No
strategy of winning “hearts and minds,” no great outreach, will bring this
struggle to an end. America can’t conciliate these furies. These men of
nowhere—Faisal Shahzad, Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric
Anwar Awlaki now holed up in Yemen and their likes—are a deadly breed of
combatants in this new kind of war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them.
America is at once the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they
project their deepest malignancies. -- Fouad Ajami
By Fouad
Ajami
'A Muslim has no nationality
except his belief," the intellectual godfather of the Islamists, Egyptian Sayyid
Qutb, wrote decades ago. Qutb's "children" are everywhere now; they carry the
nationalities of foreign lands and plot against them. The Pakistani born Faisal
Shahzad is a devotee of Sayyid Qutb's doctrine, and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the
Fort Hood shooter, was another.
Qutb was executed by the secular
dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966. But his thoughts and legacy endure.
Globalization, the shaking up of continents, the ease of travel, and the doors
for immigration flung wide open by Western liberal societies have given Qutb's
worldview greater power and relevance. What can we make of a young man like
Shahzad working for Elizabeth Arden, receiving that all-American degree, the
MBA, jogging in the evening in Bridgeport, then plotting mass mayhem in Times
Square?
The Islamists are now within the
gates. They fled the fires and the failures of the Islamic world but brought the
ruin with them. They mock national borders and identities. A parliamentary
report issued by Britain’s House of Commons on the London Underground bombings
of July 7, 2005 lays bare this menace and the challenge it poses to a system of
open borders and modern citizenship.
The four men who pulled off
those brutal attacks, the report noted, “were apparently well integrated into
British society.” Three of them were second generation Britons born in West
Yorkshire. The oldest, a 30-year-old father of a 14-month-old infant, “appeared
to others as a role model to young people.” One of the four, 22 years of age,
was a boy of some privilege; he owned a red Mercedes given to him by his father
and was given to fashionable hairstyles and designer clothing. This young man
played cricket on the eve of the bombings. The next day, the day of the terror,
a surveillance camera filmed him in a store. “He buys snacks, quibbles with the
cashier over his change, looks directly at the CCTV camera, and leaves.” Two of
the four, rather like Faisal Shahzad, had spent time in Pakistan before they
pulled off their deed.
In an earlier age—I speak here
autobiographically, and not of some vanished world long ago but of the 1960s
when I made my way to the United States—the world was altogether different. Mass
migration from the Islamic world had not begun. The immigrants who turned up in
Western lands were few, and they were keen to put the old lands, and their feuds
and attachments, behind them. Islam was then a religion of Afro-Asia; it had not
yet put down roots in Western Europe and the New World. Air travel was costly
and infrequent.
The new lands, too, made their
own claims, and the dominant ideology was one of assimilation. The national
borders were real, and reflected deep civilizational differences. It was easy to
tell where “the East” ended and Western lands began. Postmodernist ideas had not
made their appearance. Western guilt had not become an article of faith in the
West itself.
Nowadays the Islamic faith is
portable. It is carried by itinerant preachers and imams who transmit its
teachings to all corners of the world, and from the safety and plenty of the
West they often agitate against the very economic and moral order that sustains
them. Satellite television plays its part in this new agitation, and the Islam
of the tele-preachers is invariably one of damnation and fire. From tranquil,
banal places (Dubai and Qatar), satellite television offers an incendiary
version of the faith to younger immigrants unsettled by a modern civilization
they can neither master nor reject.
And home, the Old Country, is
never far. Pakistani authorities say Faisal Shahzad made 13 visits to Pakistan
in the last seven years. This would have been unthinkable three or four decades
earlier. Shahzad lived on the seam between the Old Country and the New. The path
of citizenship he took gave him the precious gift of an American passport but
made no demands on him.
From Pakistan comes a profile of
Shahzad’s father, a man of high military rank, and of property and standing: He
was “a man of modern thinking and of the modern age,” it was said of him in his
ancestral village of Mohib Banda in recent days. That arc from a secular father
to a radicalized son is, in many ways, the arc of Pakistan since its birth as a
nation-state six decades ago. The secular parents and the radicalized children
is also a tale of Islam, that broken pact with modernity, the mothers who fought
to shed the veil and the daughters who now wish to wear the burqa in Paris and
Milan.
In its beginnings, the Pakistan
of Faisal Shahzad’s parents was animated by the modern ideals of its founder,
Muhammad Ali Jinnah. In that vision, Pakistan was to be a state for the Muslims
of the subcontinent, but not an Islamic state in the way it ordered its
political and cultural life. The bureaucratic and military elites who dominated
the state, and defined its culture, were a worldly breed. The British Raj had
been their formative culture.
But the world of Pakistan was
recast in the 1980s under a zealous and stern military leader, Zia ul-Haq. Zia
offered Pakistan Islamization and despotism. He had ridden the jihad in
Afghanistan next door to supreme power; he brought the mullahs into the
political world, and they, in turn, brought the militants with
them.
This was the Pakistan in which
young Faisal Shahzad was formed; the world of his parents was irretrievable. The
maxim that Pakistan is governed by a trinity—Allah, Army, America—gives away
this confusion: The young man who would do his best to secure an American
education before succumbing to the call of the jihad is a man in the grip of a
deep schizophrenia. The overcrowded cities of Islam—from Karachi and Casablanca
to Cairo—and those cities in Europe and North America where the Islamic diaspora
is now present in force have untold multitudes of men like Faisal
Shahzad.
This is a long twilight war, the
struggle against radical Islamism. We can’t wish it away. No strategy of winning
“hearts and minds,” no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end.
America can’t conciliate these furies. These men of nowhere—Faisal Shahzad,
Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric Anwar Awlaki now holed up
in Yemen and their likes—are a deadly breed of combatants in this new kind of
war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them. America is at once the object
of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest
malignancies.
Source: The Wall Street
Journal
9:25 PM
Sultan Shahin
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