Khalid, an Afghan immigrant now in his 50s — he said he did not know exactly how old he was — had arrived in the US just under two decades ago and opened a little printing shop off Dupont Circle in Washington.
Around that time, the Taliban had already come to control a large chunk of territory in northern and western Afghanistan, where they established the so-called Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and where systematic massacres, graphic brutality and rough justice became the norm.
They made it clear that women, denied access to education, will know their place in society. They blew up a sixth century Buddha carved in a mountain cliff in the Bamiyan Valley in 2001 (against near universal pleas by religious and political leaders in the Arab world and Islamic countries) and used terror to elicit obedience to their edicts — not altogether your garden variety type of government responsive to the challenges of modernity.
Also around that time — before the advent of hard drives and discs — I patronised Khalid’s shop to print various chapters of a book manuscript I was working on. I got to know Khalid well, as he got to trust me equally well.
I asked him if he thought the Taliban was bad news, medieval, barbaric and cruel. He agreed they were but, he added, he would remain an ardent supporter of the group regardless.
But why?
“The Taliban brought stability to the country”, he said simply, “and eliminated corruption.” He used the Arabic word “fassad”, which refers to the notion of unchecked corruption combined with brazen theft by bureaucrats unanswerable to no one. “The Taliban does not rob”, he said, as an afterthought. Effectively, Khalid was willing to barter his political freedom for social stability.
I thought of Khalid the other day as the America-led military campaign against Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) approaches its first anniversary on August 8 — a campaign that has managed neither to “degrade” nor to “destroy” it.
Endurance?
Why has Daesh endured? Why is it, one wonders, that this group, rummaging through the attic of our history, resurrected the putative ethics of the ‘Caliphate’ and yet was not laughed off the stage?
Earlier last week, the New York Times, in two long front-page articles published on two consecutive days, datelined Washington and Istanbul, addressed the phenomenon of Daesh’s implacable durability and seeming appeal. NYT can ruminate all it wants. So can we.
How do certain Arabs, including this columnist, see that phenomenon? Modesty aside, in simple terms.
Arabs in the Levant, where Daesh controls large swaths of territory inhabited by 11 million people (as many people as there are in the whole of Greece), have for generations been broken in back and spirit, unable to find a way out of, around or through their spiritual malaise, their defeatist frame of mind and their dependence on the West to solve their problems, especially in Palestine.
They gasped for air.
They had lived their lives in unstable states whose leaders relied on coercion, terror and violence to rule. They grew up socialised on an ethic of fear, inured to oppression.
Over the last four years alone, their leaders in Syria have killed well over 230,000 innocent civilians in cold blood. In Iraq, they had lived under the thuggish Baath regime and today live under the openly sectarian regime.
What do they have to lose living under, or joining, the rule of the Caliphniks of Daesh, who have established, as my Afghan friend Khalid would have put it when he spoke about the Taliban, a seemingly stable system of government free of corruption?
Vacuum
And like Khalid, you trade personal liberty for peace of mind. Daesh simply filled the vacuum created by all the injustices and humiliations that had been heaped on the people in that region.
The final point is the most difficult to make, for it may give rise to misunderstanding, however cautiously I put it. But it is this: Daesh is asking young, alienated Muslims, not just in the Levant but elsewhere as well, eager to recapture the assabiyah of the old Caliphate — that lost Eden of yore — if they are too selfish to die, too helpless to fight, too scared to utter their name.
Not since the 1936-1939 civil war in Spain has there been such a seductive clarion call to a trans-national, trans-cultural and trans-linguistic fraternity of arms.
In effect, Caliphniks are being asked to effect a dissociation from personal identity, to accept a diminished range of validity to the self and to entrust their centre of reality to the workings of their history.
That was a history to have gloried in, when Muslims did not have to go to a foreign capital, with hat in hand, to ask its leaders there to mediate their dispute, say, with the Crusader Kingdom in Jerusalem in 1188, but instead stormed the Holy City’s walls and dealt a knock-out punch to the occupiers there.
It is all there, Daesh claims, in the ‘Caliphate’, the ‘Caliphate’ they aim to resurrect. It is there where individual existence anchors its meaning.
This is what distinguishes Daesh autocracy from other species of theological totalitarianism.
It all seems unabashed, muscular: Reclaim your history, for only through it is one’s identity most truly challenged and guarded.
We can dismiss Daesh as a brutal group and move on, disregarding the fact that, like Dylan Thomas, it is calling on Muslims in the Levant and beyond to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
And no one can write (or drink) like Dylan Thomas. Let Arabs have their day again, with the lights turned back on — of justice, freedom and equity as Muslims had known them, yes, in the Caliphate — and Daesh will have its eclipse.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
