I, Tiresias

Three dates, three cities: 9/11, 26/11, 13/11; New York, Mumbai and now Paris. Three iconic cities brought to their knees. When President Francois Hollande tells his citizens “We are at war” it reminds us how the world has changed. This is not how wars were fought. Or perhaps so we believed. We think of armies, generals, planes, ships and tanks; we think of Churchill planning the future in some underground bunker. Instead, a man registered as a petty criminal with the local police masterminds attacks on the heart of Paris—on Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite—words with which a revolution was born. The target of 13/11 is a value system—democracy, freedom and secularism—not limited to Paris, but anchored to its history.

Paris 13/11 holds a dark mirror to our realities. Those who inflicted violence on the streets of Paris are part of a movement that sees Islam and the West locked in inevitable combat. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations is now seemingly coming alive before us, 23 years after the American political scientist first unveiled his apocalyptic vision. There is a French phrase un malheur ne vient jamais seul or ‘misfortune never arrives alone.’ This is not misfortune but horror of the worst kind and it has not come alone. This time it has brought the barbarity and religious fanaticism of an invisible state to all our doorsteps. ISIS is now in our neighbourhood. Unwanted but frightening in its appeal, its ambition, and its execution. Lenin once famously said that “the purpose of terrorism is to terrorise”. ISIS has adopted that as its bloody calling card. The real weapon of terrorists isn’t their bombs and guns­­—it is the reactions they provoke. The harsher those reactions are­—the more successful the terrorist campaign becomes. To believe that France would declare an Emergency, suspending civil rights, was unthinkable till 13/11. But these are the times we live in and thus the world.

One of the hardest lessons of 9/11 was that populist rhetoric and official overreaction could lead to a thousand unintended consequences. When states become the mirror of the forces they are fighting, the terrorists have won. They have exposed the myth of moral superiority. There’s another myth exposed by the tragedy in Paris. Al Qaeda operated from caves in the Afghan mountains and its leader Osama bin Laden ended his life in a rented house in Abbottabad. Those who attacked Mumbai were confined to Pakistan, under state protection. ISIS affiliate Boko Haram has so far restricted its gruesomeness to one region in Africa. The ISIS, however,  changed the rules of the terror game. We now face a transnational threat. Terrorists can move with ease from one country to another. They have cells and supporters in the cities being targeted. They have mastered digital weapons, which respect no borders. They create both formal and informal networks that may span countries, continents, or beyond. Warplanes may bomb their bases in Raqqa and other cities in Syria but their killers are everywhere, with passports that show them as citizens of Europe, America, Australia or the UK. That is the extent of the threat that 13/11 has exposed. That is also the danger that attacks on one community or its places of worship can bring.        

India has been there. In November 2008, the Pakistan-sponsored terrorists of Lashkar did exactly what we saw in Paris; groups of heavily armed men attacking innocent civilians in hotels, cafes and the city’s busiest railway station. The pressure to visit retribution on Pakistan was visceral but the Indian State took a deep breath and didn’t. Controlling visceral urges is what responsible nations do. America didn’t and let the genie out of the bottle. Paris represents a tipping point. It speaks of a clear and present danger: that of right-wing extremism and political legitimacy to right-wing parties like Marine le Pen’s National Front.  In Europe, even before the Paris attacks, the migrant crisis had helped to fuel the rise of anti-Muslim parties and social movements. As Germany has opened its doors to refugees from the Middle East, violent attacks on migrant hostels have risen. Anti-Muslim rhetoric has become commonplace among Republican candidates for the presidential nomination. Ben Carson, who leads in Republican polls, has said that no Muslim should be allowed to become US president; his closest rival Donald Trump has said that he would deport any Syrian refugees admitted to the US. In India too, ever since the BJP-led NDA came to power, Islamophobic rhetoric has been on the rise, ignorant of the more dangerous consequences. This is what ISIS feeds on. This is what it wants. 

Huntington’s clash of civilisations spectre, rejected by many when it was first aired, seems frighteningly real. Across the world, the loud restatement of liberal values is necessary and required but it should not hide a sober acknowledgment of global trends. Hardline Islamism is on the rise—even in countries like Turkey, Malaysia and Bangladesh—previously regarded as models of moderate Muslim societies. Such developments narrow the space for those who want to push back against the scare of the ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative. Huntington’s theory was that cultural and religious identities would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. It was written in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama’s  book, The End of History. Fukuyama’s book posited that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and the dispersal of its lifestyle may end humanity’s socio-cultural evolution and become the final form of human government and human existence. Huntington argued that the concept of ‘civilisations’ as the highest rank of cultural identity would become the potential for conflict. He wrote: “The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.” He termed Russia and India as ‘swing civilisations’ which may favour either side.

Today economic modernisation and social change have separated people from traditional, local identities. Instead, religion provides a basis for identity, especially for Muslims, and as we are seeing in India in recent months, for Hindus. The confluence of these developments in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia is fuelling afresh the idea of a clash of civilisations. Huntington may be fashionable, but not quite as a visionary prophet; rather as a teller of cautionary tales. Yet there are enough reasons to challenge his catastrophic view of the world. There is no insulation between Islamic and secular modes of being. Multiculturalism is not a naive aspiration—it is the reality of our world. Since 13/11, Muslims of all backgrounds, ages and nationalities have come forward to express sympathy with France and opposition to what ISIS represents. It is a daily refutation of the idea that different faiths and cultures cannot live and work together. That alternative will only add to the violence. The world is not fighting terrorists. It’s battling an ideology that has been twisted to suit bad politics, one that is not targeting countries, but a way of life. No one can picture Paris without its bars and cafes, its parks and restaurants and its men and women laughing, loving and mingling—the Fraternite that makes this City of Lights so appealing, so romantic and so unique. The French way of life is to live and let live, liberal in every sense of the word. It is a concept and a city, worth defending against this monster made by violence.