Letter To A Young Muslim

Dear friend

Remember when you approached me after the big antiwar meeting in November 2001 (I think it was Glasgow) andasked whether I was a believer? I have not forgotten the shock you registered when I replied "no",or the comment of your friend ("our parents warned us against you"), or the angry questions whichthe pair of you then began to hurl at me like darts. All of that made me think, and this is my reply for youand all the others like you who asked similar questions elsewhere in Europe and North America.

When we spoke, I told you that my criticism of religion and those who use it for political ends was not acase of being diplomatic in public. Exploiters and manipulators have always used religion self-righteously tofurther their own selfish ends. It's true that this is not the whole story. There are, of course, deeplysincere people of religion in different parts of the world who genuinely fight on the side of the poor, butthey are usually in conflict with organised religion themselves.

The Catholic Church victimised worker or peasant priests who organised against oppression. The Iranianayatollahs dealt severely with Muslims who preached in favour of a social radicalism. If I genuinely believedthat this radical Islam was the way forward for humanity, I would not hesitate to say so in public, whateverthe consequences. I know that many of your friends love chanting the name "Osama" and I know thatthey cheered on September 11, 2001. They were not alone. It happened all over the world, but had nothing to dowith religion. I know of Argentine students who walked out when a teacher criticised Osama. I know a Russianteenager who emailed a one-word message - "Congratulations" - to his Russian friends whose parentshad settled outside New York, and they replied: "Thanks. It was great." We talked, I remember, ofthe Greek crowds at football matches who refused to mourn for the two minutes the government had imposed andinstead broke the silence with anti-American chants.

But none of this justifies what took place. What lies behind the vicarious pleasure is not a feeling ofstrength, but a terrible weakness. The people of Indo-China suffered more than any Muslim country at the handsof the US government. They were bombed for 15 whole years and lost millions of their people. Did they eventhink of bombing America? Nor did the Cubans or the Chileans or the Brazilians. The last two fought againstthe US-imposed military regimes at home and finally triumphed.

Today, people feel powerless. And so when America is hit they celebrate. They don't ask what such an actwill achieve, what its consequences will be and who will benefit. Their response, like the event itself, ispurely symbolic.

I think that Osama and his group have reached a political dead-end. It was a grand spectacle, but nothingmore. The US, in responding with a war, has enhanced the importance of the action, but I doubt if even thatwill rescue it from obscurity in the future. It will be a footnote in the history of this century. Inpolitical, economic or military terms it was barely a pinprick.

What do the Islamists offer? A route to a past which, mercifully for the people of the seventh century,never existed. If the "Emirate of Afghanistan" is the model for what they want to impose on theworld then the bulk of Muslims would rise up in arms against them. Don't imagine that either Osama or MullahOmar represent the future of Islam. It would be a major disaster for the culture we both share if that turnedout to be the case. Would you want to live under those conditions? Would you tolerate your sister, your motheror the woman you love being hidden from public view and only allowed out shrouded like a corpse?

I want to be honest with you. I opposed this latest Afghan war. I do not accept the right of big powers tochange governments as and when it affects their interests. But I did not shed any tears for the Taliban asthey shaved their beards and ran back home. This does not mean that those who have been captured should betreated like animals or denied their elementary rights according to the Geneva convention, but as I've arguedelsewhere, the fundamentalism of the American Empire has no equal today. They can disregard all conventionsand laws at will. The reason they are openly mistreating prisoners they captured after waging an illegal warin Afghanistan is to assert their power before the world - hence they humiliate Cuba by doing their dirty workon its soil - and warn others who attempt to twist the lion's tail that the punishment will be severe.

I remember how, during the cold war, the CIA and its indigenous recruits tortured political prisoners andraped them in many parts of Latin America. During the Vietnam war the US violated most of the Genevaconventions. They tortured and executed prisoners, raped women, threw prisoners out of helicopters to die onthe ground or drown in the sea, and all this, of course, in the name of freedom.

Because many people in the west believe the nonsense about "humanitarian interventions", they areshocked by these acts, but this is relatively mild compared with the crimes committed in the last century bythe Empire. I've met many of our people in different parts of the world since September 11. One question isalways repeated: "Do you think we Muslims are clever enough to have done this?" I always answer"Yes". Then I ask who they think is responsible, and the answer is invariably "Israel".Why? "To discredit us and make the Americans attack our countries." I gently expose their wishfulillusions, but the conversation saddens me. Why are so many Muslims sunk in this torpor? Why do they wallow inso much self-pity? Why is their sky always overcast? Why is it always someone else who is to blame?

Sometimes when we talk I get the impression that there is not a single Muslim country of which they canfeel really proud. Those who have migrated from South Asia are much better treated in Britain than in SaudiArabia or the Gulf States. It is here that something has to happen. The Arab world is desperate for a change.Over the years, in every discussion with Iraqis, Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians and Palestinians, thesame questions are raised, the same problems recur. We are suffocating. Why can't we breathe? Everything seemsstatic: our economy, our politics, our intellectuals and, most of all, our religion.

Palestine suffers every day. The west does nothing. Our governments are dead. Our politicians are corrupt.Our people are ignored. Is it surprising that some are responsive to the Islamists? Who else offers anythingthese days? The US? It doesn't even want democracy, not even in little Qatar, and for a very simple reason. Ifwe elected our own governments they might demand that the US close down its bases. Would it? They alreadyresent al-Jazeera television because it has different priorities from them. It was fine when al-Jazeeraattacked corruption within the Arab elite. Thomas Friedman even devoted a whole column to praise of al-Jazeerain the New York Times. He saw it as a sign of democracy coming to the Arab world. No longer. Because democracymeans the right to think differently, and al-Jazeera showed pictures of the Afghan war that were not shown onthe US networks, so Bush and Blair put pressure on Qatar to stop unfriendly broadcasts.

For the west, democracy means believing in exactly the same things that they believe. Is that reallydemocracy? If we elected our own government, in one or two countries people might elect Islamists. Would thewest leave us alone? Did the French government leave the Algerian military alone? No. They insisted that theelections of 1990 and 1991 be declared null and void. French intellectuals described the Front Islamique duSalut (FIS) as "Islamo-fascists", ignoring the fact that they had won an election. Had they beenallowed to become the government, divisions already present within them would have come to the surface. Thearmy could have warned that any attempt to tamper with the rights guaranteed to citizens under theconstitution would not be tolerated. It was only when the original leaders of the FIS had been eliminated thatthe more lumpen elements came to the fore and created mayhem. Should we blame them for the civil war, or thosein Algiers and Paris who robbed them of their victory? The massacres in Algeria are horrendous. Is it only theIslamists who are responsible? What happened in Bentalha, 10 miles south of Algiers, on the night of September22, 1997? Who slaughtered the 500 men, women and children of that township? Who? The Frenchman who knowseverything, Bernard-Henri Levy, is sure it was the Islamists who perpetrated this dreadful deed. Then why didthe army deny the local population arms to defend itself? Why did it tell the local militia to go away thatnight? Why did the security forces not intervene when they could see what was going on? Why does M Levybelieve that the Maghreb has to be subordinated to the needs of the French republic, and why does nobodyattack this sort of fundamentalism?

We know what we have to do, say the Arabs, but every time the west intervenes it sets our cause back manyyears. So if they want to help, they should stay out. That's what my Arab friends say, and I agree with thisapproach. Look at Iran. The western gaze turned benevolent during the assault on Afghanistan. Iran was neededfor the war, but let the west watch from afar. The imperial fundamentalists are talking about the "axisof evil", which includes Iran. An intervention there would be fatal. A new generation has experiencedclerical oppression. It has known nothing else. Stories about the shah are part of its prehistory. These youngmen and women are sure about one thing if nothing else. They don't want the ayatollahs to rule them any more.Even though Iran, in recent years, has not been as bad as Saudi Arabia or the late "Emirate ofAfghanistan", it has not been good for the people.

Let me tell you a story. A couple of years ago I met a young Iranian film-maker in Los Angeles. His namewas Moslem Mansouri. He had managed to escape with several hours of filmed interviews for a documentary he wasmaking. He had won the confidence of three Tehran prostitutes and filmed them for more than two years. Heshowed me some of the footage. They talked to him quite openly. They described how the best pick-ups were atreligious festivals. I got a flavour of the film from the transcripts he sent me. One of the women tells him:"Today everyone is forced to sell their bodies! Women like us have to tolerate a man for 10,000 toomans. Young people need to be in a bed together, even for 10 minutes . . . It is a primary need . . . it calms themdown.

"When the government does not allow it, then prostitution grows. We don't even need to talk aboutprostitution, the government has taken away the right to speak with the opposite sex freely in public . . . Inthe parks, in the cinemas, or in the streets, you can't talk to the person sitting next to you. On thestreets, if you talk to a man, the 'Islamic guard' interrogates you endlessly. Today in our country, nobody issatisfied! Nobody has security. I went to a company to get a job. The manager of the company, a bearded guy,looked at my face and said, 'I will hire you and I'll give you 10,000 toomans more than the pay rate.' I said,'You can at least test my computer skills to see if I'm proficient or not . . .' He said, 'I hire you for yourlooks!' I knew that if I had to work there, I had to have sex with him at least once a day.

"Wherever you go it's like this! I went to a special family court - for divorce - and begged thejudge, a clergyman, to give me my child's custody. I told him, 'Please . . . I beg you to give me the custodyof my child. I'll be your Kaniz . . . ["Kaniz" means servant. This is a Persian expression whichbasically means 'I beg you, I am very desperate'.] What do you think the guy said? He said, 'I don't need aservant! I need a woman!' What do you expect of others when the clergyman, the head of the court, says this? Iwent to the officer to get my divorce signed, instead he said I should not get divorced and instead getmarried again without divorce, illegally. Because he said without a husband it will be hard to find a job. Hewas right, but I didn't have money to pay him . . . These things make you age faster . . . you get depressed .. . you have a lot of stress and it damages you. Perhaps there is a means to get out of this . . . "

Moslem was distraught because none of the American networks wanted to buy the film. They didn't want todestabilise Khatami's regime! Moslem himself is a child of the Revolution. Without it he would never havebecome a film-maker. He comes from a very poor family. His father is a muezzin and his upbringing wasultra-religious. Now he hates religion. He refused to fight in the war against Iraq. He was arrested. Thisexperience transformed him. "The prison was a hard but good experience for me. It was in the prison thatI felt I am reaching a stage of intellectual maturity. I was resisting and I enjoyed my sense of strength. Ifelt that I saved my life from the corrupted world of clergies and this is a price I was paying for it. I wasproud of it. After one year in prison, they told me that I would be released on the condition that I signpapers stating that I will participate in Friday sermons and religious activities. I refused to sign. Theykept me in the prison for one more year."

Afterwards he took a job on a film magazine as a reporter. "I thought my work in the media would serveas a cover for my own projects, which were to document the hideous crimes of the political regime itself. Iknew that I would not be able to make the kind of films I really want to make due to the censorshipregulations. Any scenario that I would write would have never got the permission of the Islamic censorshipoffice. I knew that my time and energy would get wasted. So I decided to make eight documentaries secretly. Ismuggled the footage out of Iran. Due to financial problems I've only been able to finish editing two of myfilms. One is Close Up, Long Shot and the other is Shamloo, The Poet Of Liberty.

"The first film is about the life of Hossein Sabzian, who was the main character of Abbas Kiarostami'sdrama-documentary called Close Up. A few years after Kiarostami's film, I went to visit Sabzian. He lovescinema. His wife and children get frustrated with him and finally leave him. Today, he lives in a village onthe outskirts of Tehran and has come to the conclusion that his love for cinema has resulted in nothing butmisery. In my film he says, 'People like me get destroyed in societies like the one we live in. We can neverpresent ourselves. There are two types of dead: flat and walking. We are the walking dead!'"

We could find stories like this and worse in every Muslim country. There is a big difference between theMuslims of the diaspora - those whose parents migrated to the western lands - and those who still live in theHouse of Islam. The latter are far more critical because religion is not crucial to their identity. It's takenfor granted that they are Muslims. In Europe and North America things are different. Here an officialmulticulturalism has stressed difference at the expense of all else. Its rise correlates with a decline inradical politics as such.

"Culture" and "religion" are softer, euphemistic substitutes for socioeconomicinequality - as if diversity, rather than hierarchy, were the central issue in North American or Europeansociety today. I have spoken to Muslims from the Maghreb (France), from Anatolia (Germany); from Pakistan andBangladesh (Britain), from everywhere (United States) and a South Asian sprinkling in Scandinavia. Why is it,I often ask myself, that so many are like you? They have become much more orthodox and rigid than the robustand vigorous peasants of Kashmir and the Punjab, whom I used to know so well.

The British prime minister is a great believer in single-faith schools. The American president ends eachspeech with "God Save America". Osama starts and ends each TV interview by praising Allah. All threehave the right to do so, just as I have the right to remain committed to most of the values of theEnlightenment. The Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a setof ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers ofpersecution and intolerance. Why should we abandon either of these legacies today?

I don't want you to misunderstand me. My aversion to religion is by no means confined to Islam alone. Andnor do I ignore the role which religious ideologies have played in the past in order to move the worldforward. It was the ideological clashes between two rival interpretations of Christianity - the ProtestantReformation versus the Catholic Counter-Reformation - that led to volcanic explosions in Europe. Here was anexample of razor-sharp intellectual debates fuelled by theological passions, leading to a civil war, followedby a revolution.

The 16th-century Dutch revolt against Spanish occupation was triggered off by an assault on sacred imagesin the name of confessional correctness. The introduction of a new prayer book in Scotland was one of thecauses of the 17th-century Puritan Revolution in England, the refusal to tolerate Catholicism sparked off itssuccessor in 1688. The intellectual ferment did not cease and a century later the ideas of the Enlightenmentstoked the furnaces of revolutionary France. The Church of England and the Vatican now combined to contest thenew threat, but ideas of popular sovereignty and republics were too strong to be easily obliterated.