Tuesday September 11th, Wednesday September 12th for many living to the
East of Greenwich, will be a day that most people will remember - the shock
of seeing planes full of fuel being deliberately flown into tall buildings in
an act designed to maximise the loss of life. In the first few hours after
the acts few people were making suggestions as to who might be responsible.
Perhaps they recalled the Oklahoma bombing where foreign terrorists were
suspected but the culprit was eventually found to be a US citizen. Speaking
on an Access radio programme in those first hours after the terrorist acts,
before any suggestions of responsibility had been made, I offered the opinion
that religion was involved. I quoted the Dalai Lama who in Wellington a few
years previously had said, "If your beliefs drive you to take the life of
another human, then it is better to give up your beliefs". In a subsequent
email message I recalled another quotation attributed to the Voltaire Atheist
Centre, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India; "Those who believe in absurdities
also commit atrocities". It seemed clear that those who had hijacked the
planes believed that their deaths would give them direct entry to Paradise
and rewards that were beyond any that they would experience on Earth.
Over the past weeks I have received emails, letters, and articles from
various people - some claiming that their religion had predicted the events
(retrospectively of course) and others from people attempting to explain the
events in terms of their particular philosophies. But these attempts to
explain the acts often told more of the writers own religion, philosophies,
or beliefs, than they gave a true insight into the thinking of the
perpetrators.
Soon after the events I recalled a story that Marco Polo heard, about
1273, as he passed through Mulehet in North Eastern Persia into what is now
modern Afghanistan. He was told the legend of the Old Man of the Mountain. A
very wealthy old man called Alaodin, who was considered to be a prophet by
the simple mountain people of the area, lived in a strong castle. In a near
by valley between two mountains he had constructed the most beautiful garden
imaginable with many fruit trees and palaces decorated with gold. He would
select boys aged between 12 and 20 who showed an aptitude for battle and
after putting them to sleep with drugs would take them to the valley. Here
they would be tended by the loveliest girls versed in the arts of caressing
and flattering men, playing every musical instrument and dancing and singing
better than any other women - and they could take their pleasure at will.
They were convinced that this was Paradise.
When he wanted somebody killed he would drug some of the boys and have
them taken to his castle where they would wake displeased with their removal
from Paradise and ask how they could return. He would tell them that the way
to return to Paradise was to carry out his missions and if they died in the
attempt they would go straight there. They would do whatever he asked,
unafraid of death. Many local Kings and Barons paid tribute to the Old Man
and cultivated his friendship for fear of being murdered. The Old Man had
also set up two other Old Men who followed his practices, one near Damascus
and the other in Kurdistan.
In 1262, Hulagu, the lord of the Levantine Tartars, disgusted at the Old
Man's terrible ways, decided to destroy him. He sent several of his barons
with a large army to attack the Old Man's castle. It was heavily fortified so
they laid siege to it for three years until hunger overcame the defenders.
The Old Man and all his men were put to death and the castle and the garden
of Paradise were demolished.
1n 1979, following in the route of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo I
entered Iran, then in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution and before a
real government had been established. I passed through Tehran [At the time I
was not aware that some American diplomatic staff were hiding in the New
Zealand embassy in Teheran], some hours after students had stormed the
American embassy taking some of the staff hostage, and stopped in the
relative calm of Esfahan. Here I sat in a café and discussed the world with
university students. When Ayatollah Khomeini, came on the radio and announced
that an American warship was entering the Persian Gulf through the Straits of
Hormuz they told me of their plans to collect a few rifles and drive to the
coast in their Hillman Hunter cars to fight the Americans on the beaches.
America, he told them, was the great Satan, a land of unbelievers that must
be destroyed. Unconcerned that the Americans might be much better armed than
they were - they were not concerned about the possibility of death - and
feeding on anti-Americanism generated in Western countries they assured me
that "if the Vietnamese can beat the Americans then so can we"! But they were
unaware of armies assembling to the South West where Saddam Hussein, a self
styled modern Nebuchadnezzar who had begun to restore Babylon, was about to
invade to recapture former territory of ancient Babylon that just happened to
be where modern oil fields existed, and they were unaware of the Russian army
about to push south into Afghanistan.
The Ayatollah, they assured me, was a great leader because he was very
old, 79, and knowledgeable (of the Koran presumably) and was standing up to
the Americans. Khomeini was exiled by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi because of
his habit of issuing fatwas and arranging for people, including clerics with
more liberal opinions, to be murdered, for his opposition to much needed land
reform (much of the land in Iran was owned by the mosques), and for his
opposition to modernisation. In exile the BBC boosted his stature when it
employed him to send religious broadcasts to Iran! But in the bazaar, older
people would tell tourists, when they thought nobody else could hear, that
the country was going backward and they would happily welcome the Shah's
return. But the Shah was to die first and Khomeini, supported by his youthful
Paradise seeking followers, was to turn Iran into a backward theocracy that
began to export its fundamentalist ideas to neighbouring countries. Women
were induced to wear Islamic dress and the Hizballah (party of god) movement
in South Lebanon was funded - an organisation that combined charity with
terrorism. Despite the differences between Shi'ite and Sunni branches of
Islam, Moslem women from Britain through the Middle East to New Zealand began
to wear headscarves and more traditional dress and Moslem clerics began to
talk of a return to theocratic government and sharia law. Seeking to bolster
resistance to the Russian presence in Afghanistan, neighbouring Pakistan
introduced sharia law and established seminaries to train more clerics and
helped produce the Taliban from the children of Afghani refugees. One of
Khomeini's last acts before his death in 1989 was to issue a fatwa calling
for the death of the author Salman Rushdie.
Now we have another Old Man of the Mountain. In the early 80's, Osama bin
Laden, a staunch young puritanical Wahhabiyah Moslem was asked by Saudi
Intelligence to represent Saudi Arabia in the jihad against the Russians in
Afghanistan. He gained a taste for the jihad and now seeks to extend it
against all Western countries. On the run in late 1996 he bought his way back
into Afghanistan with the purchase of equipment for the Taliban and then
befriended Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader. Bin Laden upholds the Taliban
as the example of the most desirable form of government. In Afghanistan he
quickly set up training camps for young, mostly Arab, Paradise seekers. It is
estimated that these camps may have trained between five and twenty thousand
people and that many have gone on to fight on various fronts like Kashmir,
Chechnya, and Algeria, while others, perhaps as many as three thousand, have
been infiltrated into Western countries - the Al Quaeda networks objectives,
to bring about a revolution in the house of Sa'ud, to spread Islam by
destabilising and if possible collapsing the West, to convert the world to
Islam, and to completely eliminate non-believers, particularly atheists and
agnostics.
Now the West is faced with a dilemma. A monster has arisen that will not be appeased. Followers are taught that American reticence to act is evidence of cowardice and fear of death because they do not submit to God and that they must be provoked until they attack Afghanistan. This he hopes will either bring about the fall of America, just as he believes it broke up the Soviet Union, or trigger a major war where a thousand million Moslems will triumph over the West. Action against bin Laden and his network is likely to kill innocent people and induce others to join his jihad but failure to act will allow the training of more Paradise seekers, escalating acts of destructive terrorism and the deaths of thousands more. The future is difficult to predict but we do need to avoid absolute positions.
valid html5