Hushed voice among Muslims

Ian Buruma, Guardian News Service, London

The former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was barking up the wrong tree when she chastised British Muslims for not sufficiently condemning the Sept. 11 atrocities. The response of British-Muslim worthies to the events in America was never the problem.

The people we should be worrying about are liberal intellectuals inside the Muslim world. They have been effectively silenced. Even in Indonesia, where moderate Muslims theoretically should now have the upper hand, their voices are muted by fear of an Islamist backlash. In other Muslim countries, assiduously courted as allies of the west, the position of skeptical, liberal-minded thinkers is even more impossible.

For they are squeezed between Islamists on one side, and more or less brutal, autocratic governments on the other. They cannot choose either side without betraying their principles. Yet any independent criticism could cost them their lives. Most, understandably, opt for silence.

Here in the west, at least, you can say what you want without being murdered. Which is why it was so depressing to read the long list of responses to recent events by intellectuals in the London Review of Books (LRB). Here they were, professors of this or that, raving on about "cowboy" President Bush, about the crassness of Hollywood movies, about the Vietnam war, about U.S.- sponsored globalization, about capitalism and, of course, about U.S. and Israeli atrocities against Iraqis and Palestinians.

It isn't that all these points are wrong. What is so nauseating is the smug way with which most of them squander their freedom by missing the point and yet write as though they are being tremendously brave in doing so, as though damning U.S. foreign policy or ridiculing George Bush's English is a sign of bold dissidence.

Why could none of them bring him or herself to say that the problem in Iraq is not Bush, but Saddam Hussein? Why did hardly anyone point out that the main problem in the Middle East is not Israel or globalization, but home-grown tyranny? In London or Cambridge one can say so. In Baghdad or Teheran one cannot.

And if our western thinkers cannot be critical of non-western dictators, why did the LRB not include one liberal Arab voice? Oh, yes, there was one: Edward Said. He can always be relied on to say the right thing. He is, to speak with Thatcher, one of us. True to form, he writes about a pogrom atmosphere against Arabs in America, U.S. violence against innocent Iraqis, and the Palestinian problem.

But Said has also been critical at times of the tendency among Arabs to blame everything on western imperialism. One of Said's fiercest critics, the Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya, has pointed out that liberal thought in the Middle East was dealt a huge blow by the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel.

More and more, he said, Arab intellectuals indulged in "sickly thought-killing resentment", blaming all their problems on the West. What was needed, he argued, was "a new self-critical discourse".

Since Said seems to agree, I was interested to read what he has been saying to an Arab audience. Al Ahram, a publication in Cairo, regularly takes his pieces. On this occasion it published a longer version of Said's LRB article. And true enough, right at the end of his piece, almost as an afterthought, Said does say that Arabs should be more "self-critical", more tolerant of others, and more supportive of secular politics. Oddly, this part of his discourse was cut by the LRB.

The bulk of the Al Ahram article, however, is a longer and more extreme litany against America's sins. There is a "palpable air of hatred" of Arabs in the U.S., and even talk of "nuking" the Muslims. Violent loathing of Arabs and Muslims is stoked by Hollywood movies, Jewish lobbies and pro-Israeli "dreadfully racist" magazines such as the New Republic, and "bloodthirsty" columnists in the New York Times. Although allies have "forced" Bush to tone down his ambitions, "a huge war seems to be in the making".

Let us hope the current war in Afghanistan does not spread across the entire Middle East, but if I were an Arab student reading all this in Cairo, I would surely be justified in thinking that tolerance and self-criticism may be very good things, but that my enemies are clearly in the West, and not at home.

If a world-famous Arab intellectual, living in New York, says it, well, then, it must be true. And the new, self-critical discourse would seem to be more remote than ever.