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Iraq: Analysis of unjust war based upon lies: 10 years later



George W. Bush. Tony Blair. Dick Cheney. Paul Wolfowitz. Donald Rumsfeld. Karl Rove. Richard Perle. Irving Kristol. Richard Pipes. Colin Powell. Condoleezza Rice. Ahmed Chalabi. Kanan Makiya. Where are these architects of the Iraq war today, over ten years after the invasion was launched? Most of them are in either comfortable retirement, or in well-paid jobs with right-wing think-tanks, or the academia. Some have written best-selling memoirs. Chalabi is a major Iraqi power-broker, having made millions by cashing in on his contacts in Baghdad. Almost all of them are frequent guests on Fox TV chat shows. And certainly, not a single one has been indicted or jailed for launching a war based on lies. Despite the death of over 4,000 Americans and at least 100,000 Iraqis, nobody has been called to account.

  1. Inside Story - Iraq: Ten years after the invasion

    Was the Iraq war a success? What has changed since Saddam Hussein? Are Iraq and the countries involved in the conflict still ...
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    Inside Story Americas - Have lessons been learnt from the Iraq war?

    In March 2003, the United States launched an invasion of Iraq. It was a warpredicated on the false claim that Saddam Hussein's ...
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    Inside Story Americas - Are there any winners of the Iraq war?

    As the US prepares to pull out the last of its troops from Iraq, we ask what is its legacy after nine years of warInside Story ...
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Wars leave a legacy that goes beyond casualty figures. In Iraq, the impact of the invasion has been deadly, with daily explosions adding to the misery of a deeply divided nation. Although this vicious underground war no longer gets the international media coverage it did after the US pullout, it continues to exact a terrible toll.

The fault lines in Iraq are manifold: old sectarian tensions between Shias and Sunnis; ethnic strife between Kurds and Arabs; regional and economic strains between the oil-rich Kurdish north and resource-poor centre; and above all, the historical reality in which three provinces (Mosul, Baghdad and Basra) of the old Ottoman Empire were merged into the modern state of Iraq by a victorious Britain after the Ottomans were defeated in World War I.

In his definitive recent book A Line in the Sand on the re-drawing of frontiers following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, James Barr writes:

“When, however, Feisal was declared king [of Iraq] at an early morning ceremony in the centre of Baghdad eight days later, there could be no doubt that it was the British, not the Iraqis, who were the king-makers.”

Before the first Gulf war in 1990, Iraq was among the most socially advanced countries in the Middle East. It had a first-class health system, and its schools and universities were considered among the best in the region. This was reflected in the health and social indicators. After the war, a decade of crippling sanctions brought this welfare system to its knees. Hospitals ran out of medicines and hundreds of thousands of children died because they couldn’t get treatment for entirely curable diseases.

The physical infrastructure was devastated as well, first by the bombardment during both conflicts, and then by the sanctions. Powerhouses are still struggling to cope, and millions of Iraqis suffer through hours of blackouts. So while Saddam Hussein might have been toppled and executed, few Iraqis have cause to celebrate his departure apart from those, like Ahmed Chalabi, who have profited by the US-led invasion.

The problems Iraq is struggling to overcome a decade after the US-led invasion have been widely documented. But what has not been as closely examined is the impact the war has had on its perpetrators. While the direct cost to the US thus far is estimated to be $3 trillion, a further recurring cost of several billions per year lies ahead on account of disability payments to wounded veterans. When the US went to war a decade ago, Americans were told that the cost would not exceed $100 billion, and most of this would be recovered from Iraq’s oil industry. Dream on, Cheney…

How much this huge drain on the US economy has contributed to its ongoing decline is a matter of some debate among economists. But the role of the war in causing the enormous debt mountain facing the US treasury is hard to ignore. And this deficit has forced the government into cutting the budget at a time when the economy is crying out for a large cash injection. So at least part of the unemployment haunting the US can be traced to the expenditure incurred in Iraq over the last decade.

A non-quantifiable element is the lack of accountability at the highest level of government: countries are taken to war on the flimsiest of pretexts; tens of thousands are killed; countries are destroyed; and yet nobody is held to account. People like Tony Blair and Dick Cheney write memoirs justifying their actions, and yet nobody is in the dock for lying to the public and shattering untold numbers of lives. Speaking at the House of Commons on March 18, two days before the firestorm broke over Iraq, Tony Blair said:

“We are now asked to seriously accept that in the last few years — contrary to all intelligence — Saddam Hussein decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons [of mass destruction]. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.”

And yet, despite later evidence that Saddam Hussein had indeed destroyed the weapons, Blair continued to repeat his excuse for going to war in his autobiography A Journey. As an interesting aside, when this book was first distributed, copies would be removed from the biography section by Blair-haters and moved to the crime shelves.

In July 2002, Ron Suskind of the New York Times wrote a column based on a conversation with an unnamed senior US official. He quoted the person — widely believed to be Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s influential deputy chief of staff — as saying:

“That’s not the way the world works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This is the hubris that prompted Bush to ignore international law and vast sections of public opinion while launching his misadventure. And to his everlasting shame, Blair brazenly lied to the British people to drag them into an illegal, unpopular and pointless war despite the stiff opposition he faced. The bulk of the support he received came not from his own Labour Party, but from the Conservatives.

Another lesson from the misadventure lies in the fact that when a government creates a climate of fear, the public and the media are easy to manipulate. Journalists, much as everybody else, are swept up in the frenzy of patriotism. Even a fiercely independent newspaper such as The New York Times fell victim to the steady release of misinformation. Instead of retaining an attitude of healthy scepticism — the default position of a free press — The Times succumbed to the stories created by Bush’s spin-doctors.

The reality is that wars push up ratings and circulation. Indeed, CNN took off during the first Gulf war in 1990 when it was the only 24/7 news channel available. In the second assault on Iraq, a wide range of broadcasters were positioned to cash in. ‘Shock and awe’ was great theatre for millions in the West who, while being spared the sights of blood and suffering on the ground, were treated to televised images of precision bombing and the retreat of Saddam’s ground forces.

Very few journalists asked any tough questions about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. For instance, how could the alleged programme have been put in place under the constant aerial surveillance by US and British aircraft that had been flying over the country since the end of the first Gulf war? Secondly, given the sharp drop in oil revenue caused by the harsh UN sanctions, how could Saddam have paid for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as for their delivery systems?

Actually, far from being tough, these are elementary questions that even uninformed laymen could have posed. Instead, a respected figure like Colin Powell gave the Bush-Blair lies credibility by standing before the UN Security Council and making a presentation about the danger these non-existent weapons represented for the whole world.

Dick Cheney, in his autobiography In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, writes:

“After Christmas, the president asked [secretary of state] Colin Powell to make the public case against Saddam at the United Nations. The work Scooter [Libby] and Steve [Hadley] had done, coordinating with a CIA officer … was forwarded to Powell for him to use as he prepared his remarks…

“A few days later, Powell sat in the US chair at the Security Council, with [CIA director] George Tenet behind him, and presented the case against Iraq. ‘My colleagues’, he said. ‘Every statement I make today is backed by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.’”

When these ‘facts’ turned out to be a tissue of lies, Powell’s promising political career lay in tatters. It is the business of governments and politicians to lie, but it is for the opposition and the media to expose them. In this case, both failed miserably in their primary function. Eager to get tit-bits of manufactured intelligence, journalists fell for the official line hook, line and sinker. Newspaper editors and TV producers, not wishing to place their organisations outside the carefully crafted consensus, fell into line. The few that opposed the war saw their patriotism being questioned.

In the US, in particular, mindless jingoism took hold as the entire spectrum of the media began beating the war-drums. Opinion polls indicated overwhelming support for military action. As we have come to learn, even at this late stage, Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi deputy prime minister, sent secret messages to American policy makers, inviting any degree of inspection to assure themselves that Iraq had destroyed its WMDs years ago. But with Bush and his neo-con cabal determined to go to war, there was no stopping the US-led juggernaut.

In his magisterial book The Great War for Civilisation, Robert Fisk, that tireless crusader against the Bush-led campaign, quotes from a column he wrote at the time: [Reading Tony Blair’s infamous ‘dodgy dossier’] “can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof — if the contents are true — that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq. For if the details of Saddam’s building weapons of mass destruction are correct … it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us — for nothing.”

This tacit acceptance of lawless actions by citizens, elected officials and the media has eroded the checks that have traditionally restrained generals and soldiers. When Blackwater contract mercenaries can get away with shooting unarmed Iraqis on mere suspicion, and Wikileaks can show the crew of an army helicopter gunning down several civilians — and then chuckling about it — then the USA has no moral ground to lecture others about human rights.

And this is another long-term impact of the Iraq war: both the US and Britain have lost the right to criticise other countries about torture and other human rights violations. When they can kidnap suspects in one country and fly them to ‘interrogation centres’ in other locations, they can hardly accuse the torturers they have sub-contracted their dirty work to.

Another deadly legacy of the invasion of Iraq is the strength gained by violent Islamic groups in Iraq. Al Qaeda has been the biggest beneficiary of Saddam Hussein’s removal. Under him, extremism was crushed with an iron fist, and Al Qaeda failed to gain a toehold. In the power vacuum created by his fall and the dismantling of his intelligence services soon after the invasion, a large number of jihadis from other Muslim countries poured into Iraq to fight the coalition forces. Many of them were under the Al Qaeda banner. From the beginning, they killed indiscriminately, targeting Shias as well as Christians.

Iran, too, benefited from the US-led invasion of Iraq. The rise of Shias to political power in Iraq gave Iran an important ally. Iranian arms flowed to Hezbollah through Iraqi and Syrian territory, making an arc of Shia power from Iran through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to emerge from the Iraq war is that if a government creates a climate of fear, the majority of the opposition, the public and the media will fall into line. Goebbels, the Nazi information minister, used this technique to good effect before and during the World War II. By demonising a foe, and ascribing non-existent powers to him, it is possible to make people believe the most outlandish lie.

When Tony Blair stood up in parliament and stated that according to information provided by the British secret service, Saddam Hussein had the capability of firing a nuclear-armed missile at Britain in 45 minutes, he was preparing the public for war. Later, the famous ‘dodgy dossier’, containing doctored intelligence, was released to the media. Although this contained dubious material, most people did not think their government would deliberately lie to them.

Another useful lesson to emerge from this tissue of official lies is that the public has a short memory. Despite our experience with the Bush-Blair propaganda a decade ago, and the misuse of doctored intelligence, we now hear war drums beating, urging the Pentagon to carry out a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear installations. Again, secret sources are being cited to make a case for war. Surveys show considerable support in the US for this action.

Out of all the institutions that failed to do their job in the run-up to the Iraq war, perhaps the biggest failure was that of the media. Since time immemorial, we have seen that in war, truth is the first casualty. Noam Chomsky, in his groundbreaking book Manufacturing Consent, pointed to the nexus between the executive, academia and the media. Although written in the 1980’s, the insights in this seminal work showed us how even superficially independent news organisations tend to fall into line in times of manufactured crises.

Chomsky also showed us how university professors almost invariably support the government of the day in times of war, thus giving it a spurious legitimacy. And while we all expect politicians to lie to suit their own purpose, we look to academia and the media for some objectivity and independence. Chomsky effectively demolishes these myths.

Thus, although the lessons from the Iraq war have been endlessly discussed and documented, the sad fact is that given the vast power of patronage and propaganda at the disposal of modern governments, we are doomed to repeat the follies of that murderous and totally unnecessary conflict.



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Obama`s drone speech misses the mark


US President Barack Obama`s speech on drones and counterterrorism at the National Defence University in Washington on Thursday falls far short of my expectations. To be blunt, his arguments were deeply flawed and full of contradictions.
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Barack Obama: 'drone strikes have saved lives' - video | World news | guardian.co.uk - The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk › World news › Drones
The US president defends his country's use of unmanned drones as part of their continued counter-terror policy.
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In what has been described as his new policy to restrict the scope of these counterterrorism operations, Obama continued to justify the drone strikes, or target killing, as `effective` and `legal` although that kind of legality is widely challenged both in the United States and abroad, and that kind of `effectiveness` is contradicted by his own admission that drones have come at a severe cost to the US relationship with Pakistan, citing the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their territory.

Obama needs to be reminded that he was the one who ordered to dramatically increase the drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries from the days of his predecessor, George W. Bush. And if that escalation was a mistake, he owes an apology, at least to the Pakistani people, especially those whose loved ones died as so-called collateral damages.

Obama did not mention whether the US will compensate the familiesof those civilians killed by drone strikes, including of course, the innocent 16-year-old son of radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, both American citizens and both killed during a US drone strike.

Obama also failed to mention the prolonged terror caused by drones on local populations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Let me be clear, please do not call all these premeditated attacks as `target killings` again. Give them the real and more easily understood label of assassination, and please also do not gloss over torture as `enhanced interrogation.

In acknowledging civilian casualties in the drone attacks, Obama said,`Those deaths will haunt us as long as we live,` but he did not say whether he has been haunted in the past four-plus years as president when thousands of civilians, according to various NGOs, were decimated in drone strikes.

Obama has also changed the concept of war when he believes that the US can use drone strikes wherever alleged terrorists are. I wonder if he dares to order drone strikes if a terrorist leader happens to be in Mexico, Canada, Russia, Britain or China.Throughout his speech, Obama did not admit anything wrong on his part, not on drones and not on the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

So many years have passed andObama clearly has not tried hard enough to close Gitmo. I don`t even remember when he last tried or tried hard enough to close Gitmo. Instead, he laid all the blame on Thursday at Congress for restricting its closure and transfer of prisoners out of the facility. Obama admitted that Gitmo, where detainees were held without charges, has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law.

In his speech, Obama said: `Imagine a future 10 years from now, or 20 years from now when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not part of our country.

Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?` These may be the few sensible words in Obama`s muchbelated speech, and he should ask the same questions regarding drones.

Overall he has not correctly addressed the public concerns over the years and he has left many questions unanswered. All these mean that more mistakes will be made in this war on terror.
           
By Chen Weihua, by arrangement with the China Daily/ANN 


Islamophobia & Anti-Semitism on the rise: US State Department report

Ultra-orthodox Jews pray during Passover in Jerusalem on March 25, 2013 while a woman in Egypt used an Egyptian flag as a tradition Muslim face covering at a demonstration for International Women's Day in Cairo's Tahiri Square on March 8, 2013. A new report from the US State Department claims that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are on the rise world wide.Photo by: UPI and Reuters
Anti-Semitism is on the rise in many parts of the Middle East and in pockets of South America while corresponding Anti-Muslim sentiments are increasing in Europe an Asia, according to an annual US State Department report.
The 2012 report on religious freedom said expressions of anti-Semitism by government officials and religious leaders were of great concern, particularly in Venezuela, Egypt and Iran. At times, such statements led to desecration and violence, the report said.
While anti-Semitism is on the rise in some corners of the globe, Islamophobia has gained a foothold in Europe and Asia. For example, head scarves have been restricted in India and Belgium, while specific groups of Muslims are severely restricted in Pakistan.
In France, state employees are barred from wearing prominent religious symbols such as Muslim head scarves or Jewish skullcaps.
"When political leaders condoned anti-Semitism, it set the tone for its persistence and growth in countries around the world," the report said.
In Venezuela, government-controlled media published numerous anti-Semitic statements, particularly in regard to opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, a Catholic with Jewish ancestors, the report said.
In Egypt, anti-Semitic sentiment in the media was widespread and sometimes included Holocaust denial or glorification, the report said. The report cited an Oct. 19 incident in which Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi said "Amen" after a religious leader stated, "Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters."
The Iranian government regularly vilified Judaism, and vandals in Ukraine desecrated several Holocaust memorials, the report said. Vandals in Russia painted a swastika on a fence at a St. Petersburg synagogue and on a synagogue wall in Irkutsk.
"Even well into the 21st century, traditional forms of anti-Semitism, such as conspiracy theories, use of the discredited myth of "blood libel" and cartoons demonizing Jews continued to flourish," the report said.
Secretary of State John Kerry called the report a "clear-eyed, objective look at the state of religious freedom around the world," and said that in some cases, the report "does directly call out some of our close friends, as well as some countries with whom we seek stronger ties."
Kerry called the report an attempt to make progress around the world, "even though we know that it may cause some discomfort."
When countries undermine or attack religious freedom, "they not only unjustly threaten those whom they target, they also threaten their countries' own stability," Kerry said at a news conference, calling religious freedom a basic human right. Kerry urged countries identified in the report to take action to safeguard religious freedoms.
Besides anti-Semitism, the report also notes frequent government restrictions on religion and policies that make it hard for citizens to choose or practice their faith.
"Governments that repress freedom of religion and freedom of expression typically create a climate of intolerance and impunity that emboldens those who foment hatred and violence within society," the report said, singling out China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Cuba, among other countries, for criticism.
The report also cites the use of blasphemy laws to harass, detain and abuse government critics, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. In Saudi Arabia, the report cited incidents in which activists were arrested and charged with apostasy and blasphemy, offenses that carry potential death penalties.
Kerry, who took office earlier this year after incidents highlighted in the report took place, thanked a "broad spectrum" of faith leaders, religious organizations and journalists who participated in the report, many at great personal risk.
"Governments around the globe continue to detain, imprison, torture and even kill people for their religious beliefs," Kerry said. "In too many places, governments are also failing to protect minorities from social discrimination and violence" against religious groups including Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Christians, Muslims and Sikhs.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the appointment of Forman as anti-Semitism envoy showed that U.S. resolve to fight anti-Semitism is serious and ongoing. The ADL is confident Forman "will play an important role in ensuring that the significant political will and diplomatic resources of the U.S. are brought to bear to urge foreign governments to take action" against anti-Semitism, Foxman said.
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Islam is monolith or not? An other perspective

According to scripture and interpretations., the Muslims are one nation , though they belong to different ethnic groups,  tribes and races, but how its seen on ground Mohsin Hamid explains:

There are more than a billion Muslims in the world, each with an individual view of life. So why are they viewed as a unified group, asks Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Riz Ahmed as Changez with Kate Hudson as Erica in the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist
In 2007, six years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, I was travelling through Europe and North America. I had just published a novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and as I travelled I was struck by the large number of interviewers and of audience members at Q&As who spoke of Islam as a monolithic thing, as if Islam referred to a self-contained and clearly defined world, a sort of Microsoft Windows, obviously different from, and considerably incompatible with, the Apple OS X-like operating system of "the west".
I recall one reading in Germany in particular. Again and again, people posed queries relating to how "we Europeans" see things, in contrast to how "you Muslims" do. Eventually I was so exasperated that I pulled my British passport out of my jacket and started waving it around my head. "While it's true the UK hasn't yet joined the eurozone," I said, " I hope we can all agree the country is in fact in Europe."
Six years on, a film inspired by the novel is in the process of appearing on screens around the world, and I am pleased to report that those sorts of questions are a little rarer now than they were in 2007. This represents progress. But it is modest progress, for the sense of Islam as a monolith lingers, in places both expected and unexpected.
Recently I was told by a well-travelled acquaintance in London that while Muslims can be aggressive, they are united by a sense of deep hospitality. I replied that I remembered being in Riyadh airport, standing in line, when a Saudi immigration officer threw the passport of a Pakistani labourer right into his face. If that was hospitality, I wasn't sure we had the same definition.
Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics. Most Muslims do not "choose" Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion. They then evolve their own relationship with it, their own, individual, view of life, their own micro-religion, so to speak.
There are more than a billion variations of lived belief among people who define themselves as Muslim – one for each human being, just as there are among those who describe themselves as Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu. Islamophobia represents a refusal to acknowledge these variations, to acknowledge individual humanities, a desire to paint members of a perceived group with the same brush. In that sense, it is indeed like racism. It simultaneously credits Muslims with too much and too little agency: too much agency in choosing their religion, and too little in choosing what to make of it.
Islamophobia can be found proudly raising its head in militaristic American thinktanks, xenophobic European political parties, and even in atheistic discourse, where somehow "Islam" can be characterised as "more bad" than religion generally, in the way one might say that a mugger is bad, but a black mugger is worse, because black people are held to be more innately violent.
Islamophobia crops up repeatedly in public debate, such as over the proposed Islamic cultural centre in downtown Manhattan (the so-called "Ground Zero mosque") or the ban on minarets in Switzerland. And it crops up in private interactions as well.


In my early 20s, I remember being seated next to a pretty Frenchwoman at a friend's birthday dinner in Manila. Shortly after we were introduced, and seemingly unconnected with any pre-existing strand of conversation, she proclaimed to the table: "I'd never marry a Muslim man." "It's a little soon for us to be discussing marriage," I joked. But I was annoyed. (Perhaps even disappointed, it occurs to me now, since I still recall the incident almost two decades later.) In the cosmopolitan bit of pre-9/11 America where I then lived, local norms of politeness meant that I'd never before heard such a remark, however widely held the woman's sentiments might have been.

Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.
We ought therefore to look more closely at the supposed monolith to which we apply the word Islam. It is said that Muslims believe in female genital mutilation, the surgical removal of all or part of a girl's clitoris. Yet I have never, in my 41 years, had a conversation with someone who described themselves as Muslim and believed this practice to be anything other than a despicably inhuman abomination. Until I first read about it in a newspaper, probably in my 20s, I would have thought it impossible that such a ritual could even exist.
Similarly, many millions of Muslims apparently believe that women should have no role in politics. But many millions more have had no qualms electing women prime ministers in Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. Indeed, this month's Pakistani elections witnessed a record 448 women running for seats in the national and provincial assemblies.
Two of my great-grandparents sent all of their daughters to university. One of them, my grandmother, was the chairperson of the All Pakistan Women's Association and dedicated her life to the advancement of women's rights in the country. But among those descended from the same line are women who do not work and who refuse to meet men who are not their blood relatives. I have female relatives my age who cover their heads, others who wear mini-skirts, some who are university professors or run businesses, others who choose rarely to leave their homes. I suspect if you were to ask them their religion, all would say "Islam". But if you were to use that term to define their politics, careers, or social values, you would struggle to come up with a coherent, unified view.
Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture. Many people have little or no knowledge of scripture at all. Many others who have more knowledge choose to interpret what they know in ways that are convenient, or that fit their own moral sense of what is good. Still others view their religion as a kind of self-accepted ethnicity, but live lives utterly divorced from any sense of faith.
When the Pakistani Taliban were filmed flogging a young woman in Swat as punishment for her allegedly "amoral" behaviour, there was such popular revulsion in Pakistan that the army launched a military campaign to retake the region. As my parents' driver told me, "They say they beat her because of Islam. This isn't Islam. Islam says to do good things. So how can this be Islam?" He offered no complex hermeneutics in support of his position. His Islamic moral compass was not textual; it was internal, his own notion of right and wrong.
I often hear it said, at readings or talks ranging from Lahore to Louisiana, that The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about a man who becomes an Islamic fundamentalist. I'm not sure what that term means, exactly, but I have a reasonable idea about the sentences and paragraphs that are actually present in the book. Changez, the main character, is a Pakistani student at Princeton. When he gets his dream job at a high-paying valuation firm in New York, he exclaims, "Thank you, God!"
That's it. Other than that exclamation (a common figure of speech), there's no real evidence that Changez is religious. He doesn't quote from scripture. He never asks himself about heaven or hell or the divine. He drinks. He has sex out of marriage. His beliefs could quite plausibly be those of a secular humanist. And yet he calls himself a Muslim, and is angry with US foreign policy, and grows a beard – and that seems to be enough. Changez may well be an agnostic, or even an atheist. Nonetheless he is somehow, and seemingly quite naturally, read by many people as a character who is an Islamic fundamentalist.
Why? The novel carefully separates the politics of self-identification from any underlying religious faith or spirituality. It sets out to show that the former can exist in the absence of the latter. Yet we tend to read the world otherwise, to imagine computer-software-like religious operating systems where perhaps none exist.
And in so doing, it is we who create the monolith. If we look at religion as practised in the world outside, we see multiplicity. It is from inside us that the urge to unify arises. A dozen years after 2001, we are perhaps getting better at resisting this impulse. But we still have a long, long way to go.