GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 4 ● Number 2 ● Spring 2002—The Impact of 11 September

Book Review

Understanding 11 September

SALIM YAQUB

Salim Yaqub is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago.

Two Hours That Shook the World

September 11, 2001: Causes and Consequences

by fred halliday

London, Saqi Books, 2001. 256 pages

Paperback: £12.95

here has been a proliferation of books assessing the background and meaning of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, many of them featuring shallow, sensational or predictable analysis. Fred Halliday’s essay collection, Two Hours That Shook the World, is of a different order. Because most of its chapters were published well before 11 September, and because the author is a seasoned analyst of Middle Eastern and international politics, Two Hours treats the issues underlying 11 September with unusual discernment, seriousness and depth. Halliday challenges the facile and tendentious categories pervading much of the discourse surrounding the interactions of Islamic societies with the world—crusades and jihads, terrorists and freedom fighters, the timeless essences of “Islam” and the “West”—and seeks to replace them with a more nuanced, judicious and demanding analysis, informed by universal values and common standards of evaluation. “The issues raised by 11 September,” Halliday writes, “confront everyone on this earth” (p. 29). They must therefore be addressed in the broadest human terms. Mere anarchy has again been loosed upon the world, and this time “[t]he centre has to hold” (p. 216).

Since only the introduction, conclusion, and first and last chapters were written after 11 September, they alone can directly address the “causes and consequences” of the tragedy. Halliday begins the search for causes by considering some of the more prevalent explanations for the attacks. He sensibly rejects the notion that 11 September was a long-delayed payback for the Crusades, noting that “the image of the Crusades means little to those outside the Mediterranean Arab world” (p. 34); Osama bin Laden and most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. The legacy of colonialism and the inequities of globalisation have, Halliday acknowledges, generated deep resentment towards the West within the Muslim world, but these issues seem to be unimportant to the apparent sponsor of the attacks, bin Laden, whose real enemies are Shi’ites, women and allegedly hypocritical Arab rulers (pp. 34–5, 214–5). Of course, the ills of colonialism and globalisation may resonate more deeply with some of bin Laden’s supporters than with bin Laden himself, a distinction Halliday does not adequately explore.

For more genuine causes of 11 September, Halliday looks to the manner in which the Cold War was waged in the 1980s, especially in Afghanistan. Here, he does see “a striking Western responsibility”, not so much in alienating Muslim opinion as in “stoking up Islamist movements in the cold war period and in helping to promote the kinds of autonomous terrorism that culminated in the Taliban and in al-Qa‘ida” (p. 37). Halliday finds another cluster of causes in what he calls the “new integrated West Asian crisis”, whereby hitherto discrete conflicts in Palestine, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf region, Afghanistan and Pakistan have, over the last decade, become increasingly linked to one another. This integration has occurred both on the rhetorical level, as the protagonists of one West Asian conflict claim common cause with the protagonists of others, and on the operational level, as free-floating guerrillas move from one trouble spot to the next. Compounding the West Asian crisis are two additional phenomena: “the emergence of a new, transnational and fundamentalist Islamism” and the proliferation of weakened states, which either fail to prevent terrorist organisations from operating on their soil or, like the Taliban, willingly forge alliances with their militant guests (pp. 38–41).

Turning to the consequences of 11 September, Halliday sees the reinforcement of some trends that preceded the attacks and the emergence of new ones. The former include a “worldwide recession, growing hostility to immigrants and refugees in developed countries and an assertion by the USA of military hegemony” (p. 33). Among the new developments are an enormous rise in security consciousness within developed countries, a shift away from “the certainties of neo-liberal market policies”, and, of course, a US-dominated war on terrorism with all of its attendant uncertainties (pp. 32–3). Whatever lies ahead, Halliday writes, the Western states are sure to survive. “Less certain,” however,

is the outcome in a number of Arab and Muslim states involved in the crisis: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen may all be affected by upheaval from within, if not immediately, then over months and years ... 11 September was an earthquake, which weakened the structure of many states: they may not fall immediately or at all, but their propensity to be overthrown is that much greater. (Pp. 42–3)

It is an elegant metaphor, pointing to a real and worrisome danger.

The remainder of Halliday’s book consists of essays published before 11 September. In these, he is primarily concerned with challenging what he sees as wrongheaded approaches to understanding international politics, especially interactions between Islamic and Western societies. Halliday has little use for Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis, seeing it as an “utterly irresponsible” attempt to essentialise the Islamic world and portray it as an aggressive monolith (pp. 121, 194). Huntington’s infamous remark that Islam has “bloody borders” unfairly implies, Halliday writes, that Muslims alone are to blame for the conflicts that pit them against non-Muslims (p. 79). Even more misleadingly, Huntington’s model obscures the clash between secularism and fundamentalism now taking place within Islamic societies, a conflict Halliday describes as “the most important cause of the events of 11 September” (p. 46).

But Halliday is also sharply critical of those who exaggerate Western hostility to Islam. To insist that anti-Islamist prejudice is a fundamental and enduring feature of Western culture, he writes, is to ignore the numerous instances in which Westerners and Muslims have made common cause: “The history of European relations with the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century was one of both conflict and accommodation, the latter often involving alliances between various European powers and Istanbul against other ‘Christian’ powers” in Europe (pp. 107–8). In other cases—India in the 1850s, Malaya and Cyprus in the 1950s—Muslims “were to a greater or lesser extent allies of, or at least partial collaborators with, the British” (p. 107). And then, of course, there was the US support for the Afghan rebels in the 1980s (p. 108). The anti-Muslim sentiment now manifest in Europe and the United States, Halliday argues, has more to do with international and domestic events of the last two decades than with any deep-seated Western hostility to Islam (pp. 108, 111–13).

Halliday is likewise impatient with blanket denunciations of “Islamophobia” which seek to place all aspects of Islamic life beyond the reach of respectable criticism. He notes that the advocates of this position, be they indignant Muslims or guilt-ridden Westerners, mimic their adversaries in homogenising Islamic societies, this time with a positive valence. Instead of fearing and hating “Islam”, Western audiences are urged to appreciate and respect it. This stance precludes an honest airing of fundamental disagreements over the proper ordering of society, an issue that involves such questions as the role of women, the rights of dissenters, the position of religion in politics, and so on. These disagreements are as potent within Western and Islamic societies as they are between them, a fact ignored by Huntingtonians and Islamophiles alike (pp. 122–30). “The alternative to the clash of civilizations,” Halliday insists, “need not be the mutual indulgence of communities” (p. 131).

The alternative Halliday favours is a critique based on “reason and insistence on universal values and criteria of evaluation” (p. 216). He does not enumerate all of the “universal values” in one place, but they apparently include national self-determination, racial equality, transcultural dialogue, respect for basic human rights and the eschewing of violence against civilians (pp. 27, 48, 68). Halliday occasionally uses the adjective “Enlightenment” in place of “universal” (pp. 27, 67, 192), suggesting that he sees these values as essentially Western, but at other times he insists on their broader human resonance. Thus, on the question of violence against civilians, Halliday finds “no barrier between Western or international codes and those of the Muslim world. All religions contain passages that can be cited to justify terrorism and barbaric acts in war. But for those who want to use or find them, there are also principles of constraint” (p. 48). He notes that “[o]ne of the most striking and original assertions of ... universalism has come from the President of Iran, Mohammad Khatami”. Even Khatami’s reactionary rivals at home employ “a universal vocabulary” when they assert national sovereignty and assail foreign domination (p. 131). Halliday’s defence of universalism is not as coherent and systematic as it might have been, but the position itself is sensible and refreshing.

Because it is mainly a collection of previously published pieces, Halliday’s book inevitably contains some repetition. Readers may tire of the author’s often reiterated, though well-taken, assertion that Islamic fundamentalism is a thoroughly modern movement whose primary objective is temporal power (pp. 40, 47, 55, 201–2). Another consequence of the ensemble format is that Halliday’s position occasionally shifts from chapter to chapter. In one essay, he chides Americans for being “quick to scorn others for their obsession with the past” (p. 169); in another he writes that Israelis and Palestinians will achieve reconciliation not by “arbitrating their ancestral claims but rather [by] denying the relevance of history at all” (p. 136). Sometimes the shift occurs within a single entry. Thus, in chapter one, Halliday ridicules commentators who go “trawling around in holy texts for quotes for and against violence and resistance” (pp. 45–6), yet two pages later he does much the same thing, citing several passages from the Qu’ran and Islamic tradition that outlaw indiscriminate and aggressive warfare (p. 48).

Halliday also makes a number of questionable assertions. Americans will be startled to read that “Muslims are not a noticeable immigrant community” in the United States (p. 87). Pollsters will wonder at his finding that “99.9 percent of humanity” sees nationality as a timeless quality (p. 198). Supporters of Palestinian rights might bridle at the claim that “calls to return to the intifada ... are both illegitimate and impracticable” (p. 209). The wisdom of physically resisting Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip may indeed be debatable, but does Halliday really question the Palestinians’ right to resist?

A more fundamental objection is that Halliday does not, after all, provide a satisfactory explanation for the attacks of 11 September. In his first chapter he identifies “the most important cause” of those attacks as being the “violent clash within the Muslim world between those who want to reform and secularize and those whose power is threatened or who want to take power in the name of fundamentalism” (p. 46, author’s italics). In the conclusion he writes,

The root cause of this crisis is intellectual, the lack of realistic education and democratic culture in a range of countries, such that irrational hatred and conspiracy theory prevail over reasoned critique. (P. 216)

These two explanations are not incompatible with each other, but they are not quite the same, either. Presumably, Halliday sees some connection between irrationality and conspiracy-mongering on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other, but even he must agree that the former two phenomena not exclusive to fundamentalists: secularists, too, are capable of wild flights of paranoia. And how, exactly, does the “new integrated West Asian crisis” fit into all of this? Halliday has gathered the components of a convincing explanation but has not assembled them in a fully articulated and coherent model. This failure is all the more striking because it occurs in those portions of the book that are primarily concerned to provide such an explanation.

Yet these problems detract little from Halliday’s overall achievement. His handling of the issues underlying 11 September is at once intelligent, humane, hard-hitting and courageous, providing welcome relief from the tendentiousness and fatuity that too often prevail in discussions of this sort. One is inclined, therefore, to forgive his occasional lapses of rigour and consistency.