>From Volume 23 Number 19 | cover date 4 October 2001
11 September Some LRB writers reflect on the reasons and consequences
Terry Eagleton Dublin It's Islamic fundamentalism, not The Satanic Verses, that represents a blasphemous version of the Koran. Most ideology, however, works by a distinction between what one does and what one says one does, such that the one does not impinge too embarrassingly on the other. There is thus no conscious contradiction between faith in Allah, God of justice and mercy, and murdering innocent American citizens or dismissing a woman's testimony of rape as ipso facto invalid. Similarly, there is no conscious hypocrisy in believing yourself the great bastion of freedom while massacring Cambodians, financing terrorist thugs like the Contras, embargoing Iraqi children to death and being in effect a one-party state, since the belief and the deeds belong to incommensurable realms. Phrases like 'freedom-loving peoples' can't be invalidated by anything as ingloriously mundane as the facts. This is one reason why there is only a faint hope that the US, in the wake of the moral obscenity wreaked on it, will recognise that the question of who one is is always dialogical, and stop behaving like the man in Wittgenstein who, when asked how tall he was, responded by placing his hand on top of his head. In Planet of the Apes, the gung-ho American hero arrives at the inconceivably remote planet to find some of the younger apes playing basketball. It's a bit like those dwarfish American citizens with oddly triangular eyes who regularly step out of UFOs grounded in Nebraska. America's only hope is to see itself in the eyes of others, but globalisation, which means that one of the most fearfully parochial nations in the world now stretches to every corner of the earth, shatters the mirrors in which it might contemplate its own estranged visage. As the globe is flattened into a single space, it is by the same stroke carved rigorously down the middle. Civility now confronts barbarism - which is to say, among other things, that the fundamentalist fanatics of Montana are pitched against the wisdom of artists like Naguib Mahfouz or 'Abd al-Hakim Qasim. In the conflict between capitalism and the Koran, or a version of it, one transnational movement confronts another. For the moment, in its atrocious suffering, the US has the moral advantage over its equally frontierless foes. Shortly, no doubt, it will squander even that.
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