Islam, Terrorism, and the West

Personal

I was in Sendai, Japan, as a visiting professor at Tohoku University when the 11 September 2001 airborne assaults on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, occurred. I happened to be watching television when the stunning image of the first smoking tower flashed on the screen. As soon as I assured myself that this was neither the science fiction channel nor some Hollywood urban fear-and-panic movie and that what I saw was real, I could not help experiencing a strong emotion of schadenfreude that I tried to contain, control, and hide. This primitive emotion took hold of me despite the strong injunction in Arab-Islamic culture forbidding such a reaction (shamateh, in Arabic) when it comes to death, even if it happens to be the violent and deserved death of your mortal enemies. At that moment, I intuitively knew that millions of people experienced the same emotion throughout the Arab world and beyond. They would all spontaneously utter, both silently and aloud, the traditional formula: "Allahumma la shamata!" (Oh! Lord, not that this is out of schadenfreude!), to relieve themselves of the embarrassment of having been involuntarily overcome by that forbidden feeling.

As the macabre drama of the two towers unfolded and I regained my composure, two ideas and a question spontaneously flashed in my mind. The first idea was that Islamists did it, because they have a deep-seated vendetta against the World Trade Center after failing to blow it up in 1993. As is predictable with Arab and Middle Eastern vendettas, the aggrieved party revisited the site with a greater vengeance than ever, to settle accounts and even the score. Memories came back to me of how, when al-Qaeda failed in its 2000 attack on the American warship USS Sullivan near the port of Aden, Yemen, its operatives returned to Aden after about eight months to carry out their deadly attack on the American destroyer the USS Cole. In another instance, when al-Qaeda failed to assassinate a targeted American diplomat in Amman, Jordan, its hit men revisited the site and "evened the score" by killing another American diplomat, Lawrence Foley, at more or less the same spot. Because of these memories, I never had any doubts about who committed the heinous crime.

As an Arab, I know something about the power of the desire for vengeance in our culture and its ability at times to engulf all behavior and color all outlooks, to the detriment of all other considerations. To appreciate this matter, all one needs is a quick look at the endless deadly retaliations and counterretaliations unfolding in Palestine and Israel since the start of the second intifada. My second reaction was that the United States would be out in full force to crush the Islamist movement worldwide into oblivion.

The question I had was: Why the schadenfreude on my part? Why this unworthy and reprehensible delight—even if awkward, shy, and self-conscious—in reaction to a massacre of innocents? Various answers crowded in on me. The news from Palestine had been particularly bad for the last few days. Perhaps it was the sneaking satisfaction of seeing the arrogance of power abruptly humbled, even if temporarily. Perhaps it was the sight of the jihadi Frankensteins that the United States had so carefully reared, nourished, and used suddenly turning their deadly skills against their masters, handlers, and manipulators. Certainly, one legitimate occasion for such gloating in my Arab-Islamic culture is the moment when "the black magic finally turns against the magician," as we say in Arabic: the dramatic exposure of the cynicism and hypocrisy inherent in Ronald Reagan inviting the Taliban to the White House and hailing them as "the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers." I also felt the natural resentment of the weak and marginalized at the peripheries of empires...