Between crime and insanity

Military prosecutors earlier this week charged US Major Nidal Malek Hassan with 13 counts of premeditated murder, and one day soon, in a court of law, a jury of his peers will determine his fate. What is left for us is to ponder over what lessons can be drawn from the mayhem that this Army psychiatrist, an American native, born and raised in Virginia, and presumably a devout Muslim, had unleashed on his fellow soldiers on a US military installation in Texas two weeks ago.

By all accounts, Hassan, the son of Palestinian immigrants (his father had arrived in the US aged 16), was estranged from the traditions of his society, its values and its norms, and found a sheltering refuge from his alienation in religion. Friendless, he was a loner whose relations with other people were shallow and unfulfilling. In short, he did not fit, opting for a solitary life where he no doubt saw his as the tragic condition of a man of faith in an age of brute power — brute power directed at his fellow Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan by the very military establishment he had enlisted to serve in. He told his army superiors of his unease about being sent to those two countries where he, a Muslim, would find himself killing other Muslims, and asked for a pass. None was forthcoming.

So, like an enraged beast, he snapped, right? Not so fast, please, with such a facile answer.

That reason and common sense — both of which Hassan, a qualified doctor and a practising therapist, should have possessed in spades — is the line dividing men from animals. This, which defines these men's singular eminence above the grunt of the beast, is a given in the rational world we inhabit.

Though in it we are often confronted by existentially, even at times morally and philosophically confounding problems, we deliberate over our decisions and are held accountable for our acts. We do not break free from that reason and that common sense in order to go off on our own tangent, in this case slaughtering 13 people and wounding dozens more, unless we are insane.

No doubt, in time, when his case comes up for trial, the court will order a team of psychiatrists, as is customary, to determine whether Hassan, one of their own, was indeed insane. And that will explain a lot, for to the insane, or the insanely alienated, death is a refuge when the unbearable onslaught of ‘otherness' is near, when it seems impossible to proceed afresh that morning.

What else would Hassan have been but insane? For the mind dizzies at the amount of confusion it would have taken a sane man, a Muslim, to shout, as he went on his murderous rampage, Allahu Akbar (God is Great), thus debasing, cheapening and demeaning the place that this holy outcry holds in a Muslim's essential repertoire of religious consciousness. To Muslims, the words are sacred, but to Hassan they were profane.

Quite obviously the man believed in jargon mockingly remote from the precepts of Islam, a faith that enjoins its adherents against such acts of wanton violence.

All of which brings us to the sputtering platitudes of those nuts in the media, such as the neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer, who used the tragedy at Ford Hood as an excuse to explain how, see, told you so, the Muslim identity clashes, or is incompatible, with the values of a secular nation state (And you thought that neoconservatives have long since lifted anchor and put out to sea with George W. Bush).

Integration

Or such as the inane Evangelical preacher Pat Robertson who, speaking on his television programme The 700 Club, said last Monday: "Islam is a violent — I was going to say religion, but it's not a religion. It's a political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and on world domination. I think we should treat it as such and treat its adherents as such, as we would members of the Communist Party or members of some fascist group". Inane he is.

Happily, nonsensical pontificating of this kind has been rare in the mainstream media. It's obvious that most American commentators realise that the roughly 3 million Muslims in the US, a nation of immigrants whose capacity to absorb newcomers is legion — unlike European nations which have so far been unable, or unwilling, to integrate their immigrant communities after well over half a century — are comparable to the general population, a predominantly law-abiding middle class, concerned more with their career opportunities, their kids' college funds, their mortgage payments, their pension investments, and the rest of it, than they are with the phantom demons behind the putative "clash of cultures" between Islam and the West.

You would have had to struggle, since the news about the Fort Hood tragedy broke, to find intemperate statements by any of these commentators about Muslim Americans, who are at any rate a mix of people from all over the Islamic world, difficult if not impossible to stereotype.

In coming months, as more revelations begin to crowd upon us, we will get to know more about who this man called Nidal Malek Hassan is, and what in his dissociated mental condition he had concealed and internalised before his alleged crime.

One thing we know already though: His actions debase the universal parlance of the very faith that he professed to embrace so ardently and so piously.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.