Apartheid in the mind

It seemed inconceivable three weeks ago, but today, one can actually applaud the restraint Washington has demonstrated in the aftermath of September 11. What seemed impossible on September 12 and 13 has been achieved. One false move now would undo the foundations that have been laid in these traumatic three weeks of what could be an enduring structure.

What is it that has been achieved? Take Bangladesh, for instance. Election campaign in the country was at its peak when the attacks in New York and Washington occurred. The principal challenge to the incumbent Sheikh Hasina was from Begum Khalida Zia supported by the Jammat-e-Islami, a militant Islamic party which would not have found the ways of the Taliban unacceptable. Had the Americans embarked on a knee-jerk, retaliatory strike, opinion globally would have been polarised between Islam and the west. In this framework, popular opinion in the world’s third largest Muslim nation would have rallied around Jammat-e-Islami. The principal political leaders would have had to condemn American action.

But look at the effect American patience has had — both Sheikh Hasina and Begum Zia endorsing the growing coalition against terrorism. The American tragedy began to be seen as a universal danger. Result: the Jamaat-e-Islami is isolated, even though Khalida Zia has won. Leaders like Amini of the Islamic Front who talked of Talibanising Bangladesh are on the margins.

Where do we go from here? I believe in a crisis such as this, the media and the establishment are generally batting on the same side. And here is something the media can do. Bring home to the American people how the patience of their leaders who have diligently striven to separate Islam from terrorism, has had such a salutary effect in a far-flung country which has the world’s third largest Muslim population. The important thing is not the election results but the marginalisation of core Islamist groups with a high tolerance level for Talibanisation. It is important that the American people, indeed the world, understand how this came about.

I shall not tire of repeating the cardinal truth: the world changed on September 11. One of the consequences of the tragedy must be to bring an end to a glaring paradox in the global system: galloping globalisation matched by systems of intellectual apartheid. The multinationals will know the minutest detail of the Indian system but candidate Bush will not know the name of the Indian prime minister.

In a global village when one segment of humanity lives and evolves without any knowledge, any experience of other segments living elsewhere, what we have in essence is a system of separate development, uninstitutionalised apartheid.

Ignorance accords ready hospitality to prejudice which, when manipulated by the electronic media, can be easily worked up to a point of hysteria. American people roused in this fashion then exert inexorable pressure on the government of the world’s only superpower. Just imagine how an enlightened American public opinion would play on that country’s foreign affairs.

Again, a great deal of the responsibility rests on the media. Faulty choreography can instantly create the impression that the Taliban are some sort of a representative group of Muslims. Introduce the American people to the women of Tunisia, Morocco, and Turkey. Did they know that Tunisian women, under their personal law, have more rights than their counterparts across the Mediterranean in Europe? Are they aware that Mustefa Kemal Pasha Ataturk replaced the Shariah law by Swiss law because he believed that those are the sorts of reforms Islam had to introduce to keep pace with modern times? Would they be surprised that the principal adviser in the royal palace in Rabat happens to be Andre Azoulay, a Jew. It is almost mandatory for Moroccan Jews in Israel to hang King Hasan’s photograph on the wall.

Americans would be astonished that the much maligned Muammar Qadafi was the first Arab leader to have set up a military academy for women, that no Imam but the most educated in the community leads the Friday prayers. What Americans would not believe is another unpopular truth: the Iraqis under the Baath party were the most moderate (in many cases agnostic) Muslims in the Arab world.

If some of these basic, even superficial, facts are brought before the American public by their media we shall have moved a safe distance away from the civilisational clash some lobbies have been baying for.

Then must follow the real work, enlarging the community of democracies, true democracies, not just the ones described moderate because they acquiesce in the American tilt on the Palestinian issue.

If Human intelligence and not mere electronic surveillance is required to defeat terrorism, all the more reason that the system of separate intellectual development be banished, and parochial, inward looking societies be dazzled with more images of people they do not know.

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