TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031191/0311640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 76

The Holy War of Words


By Lance Morrow


    Fairy tales in the West begin, "Once upon a time." In the
Arab world they start, "Kan ya makan." The words mean "There
was, there was not." That is, maybe it happened. On the other
hand, maybe it didn't happen. Now you see it, now you don't.

    Kan ya makan: the Arabic language is capable of magical
effects. On a squalid Cairo street early on a cold, foul day,
people greet each other with small bouquets of words: "Morning
of blessings! Morning of light!" They have conjured a moment,
and smiled, and passed, and then, poof! they are back on a
miserable street among the pariah dogs. If people are poor and
live in the desert, language may be their richest possession:
Why not? It opens miraculously onto other worlds. The Koran,
with its bursts of sonority and light, describes a paradise
that has everything the desert does not: the sweetest water,
cool shade, silken couches, wines that one can endlessly drink
without getting drunk.

    Kan ya makan is intoxication enough. It was out of the
desert that humans conjured monotheism -- absolute God to
suffuse utter emptiness. When kan ya makan enters politics, its
genius makes language a reality superior to the deed -- even
renders the facts of the objective world unnecessary and
graceless. The vivid hallucination becomes the act: the
prophecy is more satisfying than its literal fulfillment. If
the demagogue-bard says the infidel will swim in his own blood,
then words have pre-empted the work of armies. Ambiguity has
an ancient history in the West, but the Middle East has its
special genius for mirage. There, the dreariest, basest
impulses go dressed up in poetry. Aggressive greed may swagger
around as jihad. "Arab dignity and honor" shine in the mind
with a radiant life of their own, forever beleaguered and
violated and crying for revenge -- visions really, not things
to be struggled toward, to be earned.

    Westerners, who have wandered through centuries of darkness
and enlightenment and rationalism and scientific method and
then the various neo-darknesses of the 20th century (Auschwitz,
Hiroshima and so on), have some difficulty with these dreamy
effects in which reality and illusion float back and forth
interchangeably. Americans have a special longing of their own.
They need to know they are working in a scheme of virtue.
Americans feel a moral unease when they sense that their power
is banging around loose in the world without being, in a sort
of theological sense, justified. The antiwar slogan "No Blood
for Oil" proclaimed that unease, as if oil were Miller High
Life and not the stuff that powers most of the world's
economies. Americans felt the chill of that wrongness when
Iraqi women and children were carried, charred by American
bombs, out of a Baghdad bunker.

    But Americans understand even less the cultural-moral scheme
in which Saddam Hussein, career murderer and impresario of
atrocity, gets somehow transformed into an Arab hero. Or in
which Iraqi horrors committed in Kuwait become invisible to the
Arab eye and so vanish from its calculus of right and wrong.
It seems to Westerners that some amorality is at work in the
way Arabs judge atrocities and measure the worth of human lives
-- or at least that a connection is broken in the apparatus of
cause and effect. Sympathizers trying to explain an enthusiasm
for Saddam Hussein sometimes remark that few Arabs like the
Kuwaitis anyway. In Europe during the '30s, no one cared about
the Jews all that much either -- what the hell. During Black
September in 1970, King Hussein of Jordan had his soldiers kill
Palestinians wholesale. When Syria's Hafez Assad wanted to
silence the Muslim fundamentalists in Hama in 1982, his army
slaughtered more than 10,000. Ever since 1948, the Arabs have
shed bitter, angry tears over the Palestinians, yet one of the
secrets of the Middle East is that Arabs routinely treat
Palestinians worse than Israelis do. Other Arabs do not trust
Palestinians, think they are troublemakers -- overly pushy,
political. Shhh.

    Most Arab countries are essentially police states imposed
upon peasants. On the level of everyday reality, fear -- of the
government and its secret police, the mukhabarat -- is the
beginning and end of citizenship. The real law in people's
minds is not government at all but an organism growing from the
social traditions and precepts of Islam, which as a social
system for the poor has an admirable kindness and simplicity.
As for national boundaries, those were drawn generations ago
by colonialists, aliens from some other part of the universe.

    But above the level of the Arab everyday, there floats a
dimension of grand design, the high plane on which jihad and
other transactions with the miraculous occur in the Islamic
world. It is there amid the language with its efflorescent or
bloody metaphors that Arabs, unexpectedly enough, resemble
Americans. It is there they share the affliction of the
immature, an obsession to think of themselves as righteous in
the exertion of their power.

    An Arab may behold the unsavory mess of the West -- drugs,
AIDS, serial murders, shattered families and lives -- and think
of Satan. He may be repelled and tempted simultaneously, just
as Westerners can be charmed and appalled by the Arab world and
what passes for reality there. But war is not symbolic. It is
a savage lesson in the limits of gaudy rhetoric, of fairy
tales. It would be pretty to think that the war that has now
ended, after being played so fiercely before a global audience,
might at last break the cycle. Germany and Japan ended in ashes
after World War II, but in the apocalypse they expunged the
worst of themselves -- their fascists and militarists, their
evil dreamers -- and were reborn as new societies. Perhaps,
perhaps. More hallucination will yield only more terrible
slaughter.