Listen to the damned

It is not Islam or poverty that succours terrorism, but the failure to be heard

Orhan Pamuk

Saturday September 29, 2001

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan

As I walked the streets of Istanbul after watching the unbelievable images of the twin towers in New York blazing and collapsing, I met one of my neighbours. "Sir, have you seen, they have bombed America," he said, and added fiercely, "They did the right thing."

This angry old man, who is not religious, who struggles to make a living by doing minor repair jobs and gardening, who drinks in the evening and argues with his wife, had not yet seen the appalling scenes on television, but had heard only that some people had done something dreadful to America. I listened to many other people express anger similar to his initial reaction, which he was subsequently to regret.

At the first moment in Turkey, everyone spoke of how despicable and horrifying the attack was. However, they followed up their denunciation of the slaughter of innocent people with a "but", introducing restrained or resentful criticism of America's political and economic role in the world. Debating America's world role in the shadow of a terrorism that is based on hatred of the "west", endeavours to create artificial enmity between Islam and Christianity and brutally kills innocent people is extremely difficult and, perhaps, morally questionable. But since in the heat of righteous anger at this vicious act of terror, and in nationalistic rage, it is so easy to speak words that can lead to the slaughter of other innocent people, one wishes to say something.

If the American military bombs innocent people in Afghanistan, or any other part of the world, to satisfy its own people, it will exacerbate the artificial tension that some quarters are endeavouring to generate between "east" and "west" and bolster the terrorism that it sets out to punish. We must make it our duty to understand why the poor nations of the world, the millions of people belonging to countries that have been pushed to one side and deprived of the right even to decide their own histories, feel such anger at America. We are not obliged, however, always to countenance this anger.

In many third world and Islamic countries, anti-American feeling is not so much righteous anger, as a tool employed to conceal the lack of democracy and reinforce the power of local dictators. The forging of close relations with America by insular societies like Saudi Arabia that behave as if they had sworn to prove that Islam and democracy are mutually irreconcilable is no encouragement to those working to establish secular democracies in Islamic countries. Similarly, a superficial hostility to America, as in Turkey's case, allows administrators to squander the money they receive from international financial institutions and to conceal the gap between rich and poor, which has reached intolerable dimensions.

Those who give unconditional backing to military attacks to demonstrate America's military strength and teach terrorists "a lesson", who cheerfully discuss on television where American planes will bomb as if playing a video game, should know that impulsive decisions to engage in war will aggravate the hostility towards the west felt by millions in Islamic countries and poverty-stricken regions. This gives rise to feelings of humiliation and inferiority. It is neither Islam nor even poverty itself directly that succours terrorists whose ferocity and creativity are unprecedented in human history, but the crushing humiliation that has infected third world countries like cancer.

Never has the gulf between rich and poor been so wide. It might be argued that the wealth of rich countries is their own achievement and does not concern the poor of the world, but never have the lives of the rich been so forcibly brought to the attention of the poor through television and Hollywood films.

Today, an ordinary citizen of a poor Muslim country without democracy, or a civil servant in a third world country or a former socialist republic struggling to make ends meet, is aware of how insubstantial an amount of the world's wealth falls to his share and that his living conditions, so much harsher than those of a westerner, condemn him to a much shorter life. At the same time, a corner of his mind senses that his poverty is the fault of his own folly, or that of his father and grandfather.

The western world is scarcely aware of this overwhelming humiliation experienced by most of the world's population, which they have to overcome without losing their common sense and without being seduced by terrorists, extreme nationalists or fundamentalists. Neither the magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm, nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manage to fathom this cursed private sphere. The great majority of the world population - which is passed over with a light depreciating smile and feelings of pity and compassion - is afflicted by spiritual misery.

The problem facing the west today is not only to discover which terrorist is preparing a bomb in which tent, which cave, or which street of which remote city, but to understand the poor, scorned majority that does not belong to the western world.

War cries, nationalistic speeches and impetuous military operations take quite the opposite course. The new visa restrictions for the Schengen countries; law-enforcement measures aimed at impeding the movement in western countries of Muslims and people from poor nations; suspicion of Islam and everything non-western and crude and aggressive language that identifies the entire Islamic civilisation with terror and fanaticism are rapidly carrying the world further from peace.

What prompts an impoverished old man in Istanbul to condone the terror in New York in a moment of anger, or a Palestinian youth fed up with Israeli oppression to admire the Taliban who throw nitric acid in women's faces, is not Islam, nor the idiocy described as the clash between east and west, nor poverty itself, but the feeling of impotence deriving from degradation and the failure to be heard and understood.

The wealthy, pro-modernist class who founded the Turkish republic reacted to resistance from the poor and backward sectors of society not by attempting to understand them, but by law- enforcement measures, interdictions, and the army. In the end, the modernisation effort remained half-finished, and Turkey became a limited democracy in which intolerance prevailed.

Now, as cries for an east-west war echo throughout the world, I am afraid of the world turning into a place like Turkey, governed almost permanently by martial law. I am afraid that self-satisfied and self-righteous western nationalism will drive the rest of the world into defiantly contending that two plus two equals five, like Dostoevsky's underground man. Nothing can fuel support for "Islamists" who throw nitric acid at women because they reveal their faces as much as the west's failure to understand the damned of the world.

Orhan Pamuk's latest novel is My Name is Red, published by Faber