5
Islamic Ummah
and the war in Iraq
Jonathan Raban argues that, apart from the immediate cost in human life, military intervention in Iraq has also represented a disastrous failure of imagination and a fatal inability to understand the role of history - and religion - in the region
Saturday
April 19, 2003
The Guardian
Whatever its immediate apparent outcome, the war on Iraq represents a catastrophic breakdown of the British and American imagination. We've utterly failed to comprehend the character of the people whose lands we have invaded, and for that we're likely to find ourselves paying a price beside which the body-count on both sides in the Iraqi conflict will seem trifling.
Passionate ideologues are incurious by nature and have no time for obstructive details. It's impossible to think of Paul Wolfowitz curling up for the evening with Edward Said's Orientalism, or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, or Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or the letters of Gertrude Bell, or the recently published, knotty, often opaque, but useful book by Lawrence Rosen, The Culture of Islam, based on Rosen's anthropological fieldwork in Morocco, or Sayyid Qutb's Milestones. Yet these, and a dozen other titles, should have been required reading for anyone setting out on such an ambitious liberal-imperial project to inflict freedom and democracy by force on the Arab world. The single most important thing that Wolfowitz might have learned is that in Arabia, words like "self", "community," "brotherhood" and "nation" do not mean what he believes them to mean. When the deputy secretary of defence thinks of his own self, he - like me, and, probably, like you - envisages an interiorised, secret entity whose true workings are hidden from public view. Masks, roles, personae (like being deputy secretary for defence) mediate between this inner self and the other people with whom it comes into contact.The post- Enlightenment, post-Romantic self, with its autonomous subjective world, is a western construct, and quite different from the self as it is conceived in Islam. Muslims put an overwhelming stress on the idea of the individual as a social being. The self exists as the sum of its interactions with others. Rosen puts it like this: "The configuration of one's bonds of obligation define who a person is . . . the self is not an artefact of interior construction but an unavoidably public act."
Broadly speaking, who you are is: who you know, who depends on you, and to whom you owe allegiance - a visible web of relationships that can be mapped and enumerated. Just as the person is public, so is the public personal. We're dealing here with a world in which a commitment to, say, Palestine, or to the people of Iraq, can be a defining constituent of the self in a way that westerners don't easily understand. The recent demonstrations against the US and Britain on the streets of Cairo, Amman, Sanaa and Islamabad may look deceptively like their counterparts in Athens, Hamburg, London and New York, but their content is importantly different. What they register is not the vicarious outrage of the anti-war protests in the west but a sense of intense personal injury and affront, a violation of the self. Next time, look closely at the faces on the screen: if their expressions appear to be those of people seen in the act of being raped, or stabbed, that is perhaps closer than we can imagine to how they actually feel.
The idea of the body is central here. On the website of Khilafah.com, a London-based magazine, Yusuf Patel writes: "The Islamic Ummah is manifesting her deep feeling for a part of her body, which is in the process of being severed." It would be a great mistake to read this as mere metaphor or rhetorical flourish. Ummah is sometimes defined as the community, sometimes the nation, sometimes the body of Muslim believers around the globe, and it has a physical reality, without parallel in any other religion, that is nowhere better expressed than in the five daily times of prayer.
The observant believer turns to the Ka'aba in Mecca, which houses the great black meteorite said to be the remnant of the shrine given to Abraham by the angel Gabreel, and prostrates himself before Allah at Shorooq (sunrise), Zuhr (noon), Asr (mid- afternoon), Maghreb (sunset) and Isha (night). These times are calculated to the nearest minute, according to the believer's longitude and latitude, with the same astronomical precision required for sextant-navigation. (The crescent moon is the symbol of Islam for good reason: the Islamic calendar, with its dates for events like the Haj and Ramadan, is lunar, not solar.) Prayer times are published in local newspapers and can be found online, and for believers far from the nearest mosque, a $25 Azan clock can be programmed to do the job of the muezzin. So, as the world turns, the entire Ummah goes down on its knees in a never-ending wave of synchronised prayer, and the believers can be seen as the moving parts of a universal Islamic chronometer.
In prayer, the self and its appetites are surrendered to God, in imitation of the prophet Mohammed, the "slave of Allah". There are strict instructions as to what to do with the body on these occasions. Each prayer-time should be preceded by ritual ablutions. Then, for the act of prostration, and the declaration of "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), the knees must touch the ground before the hands, the fingers and toes must point toward Mecca, and the fingers must not be separated. Forehead, nose, both hands, both knees, and the underside of all the toes must be in contact with the ground. The body of the individual believer, identical in its posture to the bodies of all other believers, becomes one with the Ummah, the body of the Islamic community on earth. The abdication of self five times a day, in the company of the faithful millions, is a stern reminder that "self-sufficient" is one of the essential and exclusive attributes of Allah, mentioned many times in the Koran. Human beings exist only in their dependency on each other and on their god.
The physical character of this prayer is unique to Islam. Jewry and Christendom have nothing like it. The Ummah, a body literally made up of bodies, has a corporeal substance that is in dramatic contrast to the airy, arbitrary, dissolving and reconstituting nations of Arabia. To see the invasion of Iraq as a brutal assault on the Ummah, and therefore on one's own person, is not the far-fetched thought in the Islamic world that it would be in the west.
For
weeks the Jordan Times, like every other newspaper in the region,
carried front-page colour pictures of civilians killed or wounded in
Operation Iraqi Freedom. Government censorship being what it is, these
photographs could afford to be more eloquent and candid than the stories
printed beneath them. On April 2, the picture was of an Iraqi father in
a dusty grey jellaba, arms spread wide, screaming at the sky in grief,
while at his feet, in a single barewood open coffin, lay huddled the three
small, bloodied bodies of his children. His rage and despair can be seen
exactly mirrored in the faces of Egyptian demonstrators in Tahrir Square,
as the Ummah bewails the injuries inflicted on it by the western invaders.
Geographical distance from the site of the invasion hardly seems to dull
the impact of this bodily assault.