After much pouting on the subject of what wasn’t available for me to download to my iPod for audiobook “reading” pleasure, it came to me that now would be a good time to explore some history, religion, or philosophy I’m not too familiar with.
I’ve been wanting to read one of the books on suicide bombers. I just don’t understand the mental belief structure that brings a person to that place in their life where he or she is willing to purposefully sacrifice him- or herself in order to kill many other people for his or her faith or cause. So I started there, but what I found was several books about the events that led to 9/11 and that intrigued me. I really don’t know anything about why there’s fighting in the Middle East and why they hate the West so much. My opinion on the matter has been that they don’t want us there and we’re making it worse by being there, but I don’t really understand the roots of it all, the catalysts. I find it odd that my world history class in high school focused more on European history with a little bit on ancient Egypt. Certainly there was no coverage of the modern Middle East.
So, I’ve downloaded The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road To 9-11. It seems to cover quite a lot of information from the beginnings of Islamic fundamentalism in the late 1940’s in Egypt by Sayyid Qutb to Ayman al-Zawahiri’s work with the Red Crescent and his leadership in a radical underground Islamic movement against the government of Egypt to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan against the Russians to F.B.I. agent John O’Neil in the mid-90’s trying to get someone to take the threat of bin Laden seriously only to die himself in the World Trade Center to the lack of cooperation of U.S. government agencies.
The first chapter has been enlightening and educational. I can see how Qutb came to some of his conclusions, even if I don’t agree with them. In the year or so that he resided in America, he seemed to come to the conclusion that Americans had lost their faith in God and started to worship Capitalism and Materialism; the Americans he observed, even the ones in the churches, seemed to be most interested in the experience of intimacy and pleasure. The very Moderness of America had somehow deprived Americans of their Divinity.
Qutb also had a certain bias against the Western and European cultures. He believed that the “white” cultures favored the Israelis. This would be reinforced throughout his lifetime. From WWII on, whenever Israel would have a conflict with Arabs, it would appear that the U.S. and other Western countries would take Israel’s side rather than the Arabs’ side.
O.K. So, the Israel/Palestine/WWII thing has always confused me. As I said, it wasn’t really covered in my high school class and I didn’t take modern history in college. I could never figure out how the Allies could just get together at the end of the war and give the Jews some land in the Middle East. My thought process was that that land had to have belonged to someone already and I could imagine those people would be upset that the U.S. and the other Allies just divied up their land like that. So, as always happens when I’m reading nonfiction, I had to go look up some facts last night before I could continue so I could straighten all this out in my head.
Now, I think I get what the whole upset is about, but I think rather than fighting with each other, I think Israel and the Arabs in Palestine should kick some British ass. I mean, it’s their fault, isn’t it? The whole thing really goes back to WWI when the British, the French and the Russians were fighting the Ottman Empire (the Turks) who actually controlled the Middle East and back then there was no Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Iran, etc. It was all just part of the Empire. The Brits, the French and the Russians were going to split the area up, but they were going to leave the area know as Palestine to “international administration”. Then apparently the British made two secret deals, one with the Arabs and one with the Jews, basically promising each of them their own countries if they helped fight off the Turks, which they did, but the Brits had promised pretty much the same land to both of them.
The British didn’t seem likely to keep their promise to the Jews, but after WWII and the holocaust, the U.S. aided Jewish survivors in immigrating to the promised land, so to speak, and Israel was taken and claimed by force.
Qutb suggested that this was the first sign that God had turned his back on the Muslim people, by humiliating the Muslim warriors at the hands of the Jews and the Western oppressors. He suggested that Muslims were submitting to the modernness of the Western World and that was separating them from their Divinity. In order to return to victory, they would have to return to pure Islam. His movement toward more intense fundamentalism was decades long and was part of his political battle with President Nasser of Egypt. His years spent in prison witnessing the abuses against the Muslim Brothers organization allowed by President Nasser influenced him to believe that a true government run by Islam law would prevent such abuses and he wrote a manifesto of political Islam called Milestones, which was immediately banned. It is this work which has inspired much of Radical Islam today, supposedly even Al-Qaeda.
I had to stop the book in a number of places, back up, and re-listen to really absorb all of the information. There is a lot of information.
I’ve just begun listening to Ayman al-Zawahiri’s early life and such. I didn’t realize he is a doctor and that he worked in the Red Crescent during the Afghanistan/Russian War. He was already a radical Islamist by then and believe that the Americans helping the Afghanis were just as evil as the Russians, but his main interest was establishing an Islamic government in Egypt.
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