Carnage, manipulation, Saladin.
I sat transfixed, staring at the front page of the Friday morning’s Times and its picture of the exploded Madrid trains.
My immediate reaction was to cry quietly; people around me were busy going about their day, safe in their microcosm, safe in London, it must be safe, since the press mentions no special security measures, makes hardly any link with what is inevitably going to happen here, sooner or later. There is very little thinking going on in the news; emotion has taken over. It has taken over so much that I find myself shying away from the deliberate show of the carnage; just like on 9/11 I was disgusted at being manipulated into being moved. Moved I would have been anyway, who wouldn’t at the thought of people losing their loved ones in such horror; only, I do not need to have images of blood-streaked faces and bodies blown to bits to be convinced and moved. I do not want to read articles beginning with ‘And this morning when Maria kissed her husband Ramon good bye, little did she know that she would never see him again’. The British press, and this includes the ‘serious’ papers, are at it again. Make the masses shed tears and their job will be done; then maybe we won’t notice that they’ve forgotten to reflect on the meaning of it. Empathy is all very well, and I do believe that any human being will feel the horror and disgust and incomprehension in their bones, deep into their soul; I just don’t want to be told what to feel. What I want to know is this: why was the Spanish government to hasty to condemn the ETA as responsible for the bombing of the Madrid trains? Why did Aznar encourage his ministers to defend that theory, when all the evidence suggests otherwise, when the ETA have denied any implication? Is it so much more difficult to accept the notion that al-Qaeda wants to strike the countries that supported Bush and his warmongers? On top of it all, just a little perspective will tell us that Osama and his gang have more than one reason for wanting to settle old accounts with the kingdom of Spain; the little Spanish history I know tells me that, from a Muslim point of view, the conflict between Islam and the West goes back at least half a millennium, to the south of Spain and its bloody religious past. When I came home last night, I reached from a book I have on Andalusia to try refresh my memory, so forgive me if I’m about to be all pedantic. To cut short 800 years of history, Islam extended its kingdom to the south of Spain, the place that the Moors called al-Andalus – Andalucia, then lost it when King Ferdinand conquered Granada and kicked out the Moors, back to where they’d come from. The loss of the kingdom is, obviously, emotively engraved in the collective memory of Islam. Bin Laden’s immediate foe is America, the despised modern crusader, but the search for historical revenge in the blinkered mind of al-Qaeda leads much further back. With our foreshortened historical memories in the West, we see the War on Terror through a prism of recent events: Afghanistan, the Gulf War, the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia. But maybe Islamic memory stretches to a more distant horizon: to the Christian flag unfurling over the Alhambra, the refurbishing of the beautiful Mosque of Cordoba into a Catholic church, and the Crusades that preceded it.
The end of Andalusia as a Muslim kingdom was, indeed, a tragedy, but not for the simple, self-serving reasons espoused by bin Laden and his like. It was more than the humiliation of Muslims, the forced conversions, the victimisation. It was also the end of an era of progress and art and peaceful cohabitation. For centuries Islamic Spain had been a beacon of tolerance, commerce and learning, in which Muslims, Christians and Jews had lived, if not always in harmony, then certainly with mutual dependence and extraordinary patience. It is hard to imagine a society further removed from the brutal, repressive fundamentalism of al-Qaeda. Muslim al-Andalus was, in many ways, the polar opposite to the arid, anti-curious intolerance of, say, the Taleban regime in Afghanistan. Here was a society rooted in ethnic pluralism and religious tolerance, which was eventually destroyed by fundamentalisms, Christian and Muslim, but the rich history of al-Andalus remains as proof that Islam is not some fundamentalist behemoth bent on repression and intolerance, whatever its more extreme manifestations may be today.
I guess that judging Islam by bin Laden is as idiotic as judging Christianity by the murderous standards of the Crusaders. The problem is that bin Laden thinks he is the modern day Saladin, the martyr, enlightened, mythical man of the Muslim kingdom, and don’t we know what crazy people who think themselves reincarnations of myths are able to do.
A little perspective helps think more clearly. But now I still want to catch the news on BBC2. I don’t always know how to handle the image-consumer within me. Maybe it helps me feel a part of something. I don't know.