Still missing the crux in erratic Islam-West relations

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): In the United States, controversy is building around the 20th Century Fox film The Siege, scheduled for release in November, in which a wave of bombing in New York by Islamic militants leads to the declaration of martial law, and the mass internment of American Moslems and Arab-Americans.

In Vatican City, the Pope and his theological advisers begin a week-long meeting on Monday to discuss the text of a final, definitive "sorry" for all the errors and brutalities the Church has committed over two millennia, from the Inquisition to the role of Catholics in the Holocaust. The act of repentance is to be delivered on March 8, 2000 by Karol Wojtyla himself -- and the odds are good that it will even include an apology for the Crusades.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook met to put an official end to ten years of Iranian threats against British novelist Salman Rushdie's life, and to re-establish normal relations between the two countries. As usual, the complex relationship between Islam and the West is generating a lot of traffic. And as usual, nothing is quite what it seems.

"It looks like it's over," said a surprised Salman Rushdie, rejoicing in the news that the Iranian government has promised to do nothing further to threaten his life, and dissociated itself from the offer of a US$2.5 million reward to anyone who kills him. "It means everything. It means freedom." But it means nothing of the sort: Rushdie will never be safe.

The reward was actually put up by the 15 Khordad Foundation, a militant Islamic organization that has never withdrawn it. And the original fatwa condemning Rushdie to death that Ayatollah Khomeini issued almost ten years ago, having been told that Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses contained blasphemous passages, will never be canceled. The late ayatollah has virtually the status of a saint in Shiite Islam, and cannot be second-guessed by a mere government.

The present government of Iran wasn't trying to kill Rushdie anyway. Previous governments may have sponsored some of the more than two dozen Iranian hit men that Rushdie says have been caught and expelled from Britain in the past decade, but certainly there have been none with official backing since President Mohammad Khatami was elected by a landslide vote last year.

Khatami's goal is to democratize Iran and normalize its relations with the rest of the world, but it's an uphill struggle.

The religious conservatives who want to maintain a clerical stranglehold on Iran's government are deeply entrenched, and they use their power to close down pro-Khatami newspapers and jail his allies on trumped-up corruption charges. At the moment, they are also working on a war with Afghanistan to bolster their position.

But this is where things get complicated. The Taliban militia that now control over 90 percent of Afghanistan are so radical in their conservatism -- they will not even let females go to school -- that they shock even the Iranian mullahs. Yet they have been secretly financed and armed by the United States and its Pakistani and Saudi allies. Why? Because if the Taliban can pacify Afghanistan, then American oil companies can build a pipeline across it -- instead of across Iran, the other obvious candidate.

So is it really about religion, or is it about money, or maybe about "geopolitics"? It's about them all -- but ordinary foreign policy takes on a special quality when the protagonists are Moslems and Christians, for the relationship is very old and very tangled.

Take, for example, the Crusades, launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, for which the Vatican is preparing an apology -- as if wicked Christians had made an unprovoked assault on innocent Moslems.

The contemporary West is so used to being powerful that it has forgotten the Crusades were a counter-offensive, meant to recover formerly Christian lands that had been conquered by Moslems only three centuries before. It was part of a thousand-year struggle between Islam and Christendom, twin heirs of the Jewish tradition -- in which the Christians were the underdogs most of the time.

The only right time for Christians to apologize for the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 would be at exactly the same time that Moslems apologized for the conquest of Jerusalem in 637. Moslems could apologize for the conquest of Christian Egypt in 672, and Christians could apologize for the conquest of Moslem Egypt in the 19th century. And Moslems and Christians could both apologize for conquering India.

Moslems, having donned the mantle of victims, never dream of apologizing for their history -- but a unilateral apology by the Pope is mere condescension masquerading as penitence. And exactly the same attitude infects the producers of the film The Siege.

Director Edward Zwick thinks that a movie about Moslem terrorists massacring Americans, and the U.S. responding by interning American Moslems, is just fine. The hero, after all, is an Arab-American FBI agent who is torn between his loyalty to the U.S. and his horror at "undue and overzealous targeting of a particular ethnic group". That should be enough balance for anyone.

"They thought they were being very sensitive; that's why they shared the script with us," said Hala Maksoud of American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League. "They thought we would approve." But to Zwick's surprise, the League did not approve of the third action movie in a row by 20th Century Fox (after Executive Decision and True Lies) in which the anti-American villains are Moslems or Arabs -- and it plans to picket theaters when the film opens.

Just another week along the Christian-Moslem fault line. In their various ways they are all trying to bridge the gap -- Cook and Kharrazi, Khatami and Rushdie, Wojtyla and Zwick and Maksoud -- but the past is so huge a burden that it's almost impossible to get it right. And most people, of course, don't even try.