The Beslan Silver Lining

At Beslan an arcade of shattered lives competes for media attention. Here, the freelance Ronins of the Arab world teamed with the reigning Chechen guerilla Samil Basayev and spilled some many thousand litres of blood. In inexplicable times, where the moral high ground is determined by the age of the newly dead, Beslan is right up there on the chart. A place where a Chechen clone of the Al Qaeda debated briefly the pros and cons of shooting children and decided that killing children was an Islam endorsed pursuit. Half of the 326 hostages killed in Beslan were children.

Fuelled by their demented vision of Islam, the goons, even in their most heinous discharge of fanaticism, perhaps, did us one favour in an unintended, oblique way. They provided space for muslim moderates to speak out. In an environment where Arab leaders criticising terrorism often delegitimise themselves the outpouring over Beslan was perhaps unique—almost like the initiation of electricity into the gears and levers of machinery.

A few samples:

Strident criticism came from Abdel Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, former editor of the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, and general manager of Al-Arabiya satellite television network, wrote: "Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of the students in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese workers and cooks are also Muslims. Those who rape and murder in Darfour are Muslims, and their victims are Muslims as well. Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Houthi [the head of a terrorist group in Yemen] is a Muslim.

“The majority of those who carried out suicide operations against buses, schools, houses, and buildings around the world in the last ten years are also Muslims. What a terrible record. Does this not say something about us, about our society and our culture? If we put all of these pictures together in one day, we will see that these pictures are difficult, embarrassing, and humiliating for us. However, instead of avoiding them and justifying them it is incumbent upon us first of all to recognize their authenticity rather than to compose eloquent articles and speeches proclaiming our innocence...

Palestinian columnist Hasan Al-Batal wrote in the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Ayyam: "The day of horror in the school in Beslan, September 1, should be designated an international day for the condemnation of terror, as has been done with other international events...

Even in faraway Australia, in Sydney, at the height of the Beslan crisis, a group of Muslim students and teachers from Strathfield’s Muslim Noor Al Houda Islamic College visited the Russian consulate in Woollahra. They passed over letters of sympathy, condemned the terrorists.

A Saudi columnist, Suleiman Al-Hatlan, wrote in the Saudi government daily Al-Watan: "If the ’heroes’ of the Muslim violence and terrorism do not represent true Islam, then who does represent it? The painful truth is that the acts of violence and barbarism occurring at present are nothing but the natural consequence of generations of Muslims having been misled and force-fed speeches [filled with] hostility and hatred for others over the course of decades, which deepened the backwardness and the ignorance in the Islamic world. …In our Islamic world the voices of ignorance continue in their plans to develop the ignorance and backwardness so that backwardness, degeneracy, and lack of direction will reign even more [than they do now]."

This and other critiques were fundamentally different from the 9/11 outpourings where there was a said as well as unsaid element of “the Americans had it coming”. Nobody’s saying that the children of Beslan had it coming. For this reason it could prove to be a turning point in the fight against an enemy that’s proving its manhood by giving the world a compressed course in beheadings and explosions.

For a long time in the muslim world the different groupings have blamed outside forces for their state of being. The Turks blamed their lethargy on the Arab dead weight. The Arabs pointed their fingers at the Turks who ruled them for hundreds of years. Of course, before all this the Mongols were convenient scapegoats. The Persians, of course, blamed all three impartially. The recepients of blame changed with the arrival of the imperialistic powers—the English and the French. Now the US and Israel provide strong placebos.

What people fail to realise is that the influence of these western powers was an after affect and not the reason for the dismaying statistics and the weakness of middle east states. In the process of always blaming somebody else the danger becomes that you start putting forward a different and exaggerated take on the events and, in due course, start believing your exaggerations.

As contempt for governments is growing in the muslim world the mantle for violent change is falling on individuals and non-state groupings---viz Muktada al Sadr, the Hezbollah, Osama Bin Laden, Zarchawi and others. These freelance bismarks of the Arab world hate the west more than their wish for survival.

It’s also perhaps time to rethink the view that Al Qaeda and its clones are reincarnations of some medieval djin. They are not. Contemporary radical islam is a globally transportable ideology stemming primarily from the belief that a new world order can be crafted by a theatrical display of force. The idea that it can so be possible is an influence of radical european belief and not Islamic thought. It’s a byproduct of globalisation.

Says John Gray in Al Qaeda and What it Means To Be Modern, “Anyone who doubts that revolutionary terror is a modern invention has contrived to forget modern history. The Soviet Union was an attempt to embody the world without power or conflict. In pursuit of this ideal it killed and enslaved tens of millions of human beings. Nazi Germany committed the worst acts of genocide in history. It did so with the aim of breeding a new type of human being. No previous age harboured such projects. The gas chambers and the gulag are modern.”

And so are the beheadings set to Koranic chants. Right now, the only weapon of choice we seem to have against the terror that radical islam wields, is military power. But if our battle against terrorism has to be more sophisticated we have to realise sooner than later that the greatest tool at our disposal is the piety, decency, and courage of the world’s vast majority of muslims. Beslan might be a catalyst for that introspection—on both sides.