Islam's Gaze is Stuck on the Past

Carlos Alberto Montaner

A couple of decades ago, a Spanish socialist senator told me a peculiar
secret: Shortly before Franco's death, in 1975, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi delivered to the senator $50,000 to help him liberate the province of Andalusia from Madrid's tyrannical control. Gadhafi dreamed of restoring an Islamic state in southern Spain that would recreate the glory of Granada, the last Moorish redoubt in the Iberian peninsula, seized by the Catholic monarchs in 1492.

The senator - who at the time was a rebellious youth - pocketed the $50,000 and forgot the whole thing. But the reason this story is interesting is not the Spanish politician's roguish rip-off; it's Gadhafi's fevered memory. To the Libyan colonel, Granada was not a remote episode that occurred half a millennium earlier when Columbus discovered America, but a living and ongoing insult against Islam that deserved to be avenged by blood and fire.
No forgiveness

There is something terribly sick in a culture that neither forgives nor forgets, that looks permanently toward the past, convinced that all the truths have already been inscribed in a sacred book that determines who are the infidels who must be vanquished or exterminated.

Within that moral aberration lies the infinite capacity of Muslim Arabs to inflict harm to others and to themselves without the slightest vestige of remorse. That's something that has nothing to do with the existence of Israel or the position of the United States, as exemplified by the periodic massacres in Sudan, Algiers, Syria, Jordan or Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

This reflection comes to mind after hearing of Yasser Arafat's death. It is true that his disappearance opens a space to the hope that peace may come to the Middle East if Arafat's authority is inherited by Palestinians who are willing to coexist serenely with Israel. But to anyone who knows the despotic behavior of the Arab ruling classes, their manifest contempt for human life and their cult of violence should harbor no illusions.

On the other hand, it is hard to believe that the whole of Palestinian society truly sympathizes with the murderers in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad. The guilty party is the Palestinian elite, which establishes its hierarchy by means of force and the subjugation of the weak. Ordinary people undoubtedly shudder in horror at the sight of the suicidal assassins who strap bombs to their waists to blow up buses or supermarkets.

Peace is possible

These same people must be tired of living in poverty, terrorized by their own bullies in an atmosphere of bloodthirsty heroism fed by the victims those bullies can exact from their enemies - even if victims are innocent children - or by the ``martyrs'' they contribute, fanatical youths goaded to their deaths with the help of the darkest superstitions and the vilest promises.

The Palestinians are among the most educated Arabs. They know that if they could build a peaceful, democratic and honest state - not the corrupt and brutal satrapy that Arafat led until his death - a generous rain of U.S. and European aid would descend upon their country, in addition to the assistance that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Arab Emirates would likely contribute. In the course of a generation, the Palestinians could create a prosperous and developed nation.

But how do people shake off a ruling class? How do they bury a culture that is anchored in the past, a culture that is more interested in avenging old injuries, real or imagined, than in building a promising future? No one has an answer.

November 16, 2004

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