To The Best Of Our Knowledge; The Other Islam

From PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. There's another contagion and that's sort of weakening of reason that begins to occur when we lump everybody together on the basis largely of what they were on their heads. Osama bin Laden has declared a holy war against America but it may be worth asking if the catchphrase Islamic fundamentalist means anything in today's world, given the vast range of Islamic practices. This hour we'll explore some Muslim traditions we don't often hear about in the West. Also, Israel's rabbis for human rights and why Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet, matters more than ever. He said, if you think there's an important difference between Muslim and Christian and Jews, then you're making another division between your heart, what you love with, and how you act in the world. It wasn't your normal summer vacation for a 19 -year -old English kid. When Jason Elliott hungered for adventure, he went to Afghanistan. It was the mid -80s when

Afghan rebels fought the occupying Soviet army. Somehow, Elliott managed to hook up with Amushadeem. Traveling through the mountains was grueling at times terrifying, but he fell in love with Afghanistan. And he's been back several times since then. By the mid -90s the Russians had left but the country was mired in civil war. When Elliott returned to Kabul, he dodged the rockets exploding around him. He also ventured into parts of the country where the Taliban had seized control. His book about these experiences and unexpected light has been called a classic of travel writing. These days Jason Elliott is bracing for a new war in Afghanistan. He told Steve Paulson that most Afghans resent Osama bin Laden for bringing them so much trouble. And though the Taliban controls 90 % of the country, Elliott says popular support for them is sparse. He worries that the West has condemned everyone who lives in Afghanistan. I

think we have to make a very clear distinction between Afghanistan as a nation, that is to say, the people that comprise the vast majority of its population, the regime under which they live, and those foreign elements that have taken refuge on Afghan soil, they're three very, very different things. And seductive as it is, we must be wary of lumping them all together. So even to use a word like Islamic fundamentalism and just to equate that with fanatics, with terrorists, that's a big mistake. Well it doesn't mean anything at all. And if you can find somebody to actually satisfactorily define the word Islamic fundamentalism, I take my hat off to. It's not a term which helps us. It's much more useful to deal with a country in terms of specific factors which you would anywhere else. I mean, you know, we know some of these terrorists associated with the tragedy in the United States lived in England, or nobody would dream of equating the English

population with terrorists or terrorism. We make a separation there. Why don't we make a separation when it applies to Afghanistan? Let me take this to a more personal level because you have traveled to Afghanistan several times and what comes through your book is a real love of the country, of the place and of the people. And I'm wondering why this country is so special to you? Afghanistan is a country which you tend to love or hate. I don't know anyone who's felt indifferent to it. I came to love it because I had never before or since I have to say encountered more hospitable or generous people who were courteous to a fault, to a foreigner who was really offering them very little in return. I think at one point you describe many of the people you met as having infectious good will. Absolutely, yes. And it's something I find impossible to recognize in the descriptions I'm hearing about

Afghanistan now. People are being lumped together under this very dangerous reductionism I would call it. That equates terror and bin Laden and Afghanistan all somehow, all somehow together. But I had nothing but courtesy and consideration from ordinary Afghans. I have to emphasize that. When you talk about the courtesy that you receive, the hospitality, can you give me some sense of that? What do people do when they meet a foreigner, when they meet a stranger? The first thing they do is say come home and meet my family and come and stay at my place. And you're a bit suspicious of this at first, but when you've got to the end of the street and a dozen different people you've met, I've made you the same offer and you realize they're not actually wanting anything in return, but merely glad to see you. You begin to soften a little and sure enough, you begin to take it for granted. And as a result, when you get home, that seems like the strange and inhospitable place. But it's not an aspect you hear and

you only hear the bad news from this place. Tell me what it was like when you arrived in Kabul because I would imagine there was a fair amount of gunfire and even shelling from rockets going on. Yes, but those are normal in warfare and they form the backdrop of your experience. They don't necessarily preoccupy with the whole time. The most disturbing thing to my mind was not actually the rockets themselves, but not revealing my fear of them to Afghans. Now, you may have gathered Afghans are a proud people in the most positive sense. And when we would hear rockets about to be fired into the city from their initial detonation in the surrounding hills, you knew that you had about seven seconds left to hopefully get into a more safe place. But when you looked around in the street among the Afghans around you, you'd see that despite having heard the same sounds

as you had, they hadn't so much altered their tone of voice. And out of shame alone, it became impossible not to also as it were hold your own ground. You couldn't possibly run behind a building while all these people around you were carrying on as if nothing had happened. One day when a shell landed close to the house I was staying and killed a number of people in the process, I visited the site in order to write an article about it. And walking home I found myself cowering somewhat in the shadow of a wall. Up ahead a young Afghan was waving to me frantically and I couldn't quite understand what he was trying to say. And it dawned on me eventually that he was urging me to not walk in the shadows, but to walk in the sunshine in the middle of the street and straighten my back and walk like a man. Because this was the most unAfghan kind of behavior to walk cowering in the shadow of a wall. And this was kind of a daily

occurrence. You know this reminder that despite the hazards around you, one simply mustn't lose one's own self pride. What was the state of the country after the Soviets left? After they'd been there fighting the Afghans for a decade, was the country in ruins? Well don't forget there's a widespread sentiment in Afghanistan that for ten years the Afghans themselves were fighting at the sharp end of what was the Cold War. Supported generously by American funds. And when that fight was over and the Soviets returned to a now fracturing Soviet Union, the Americans who had so generously supported them rolled up their maps and went home. And many Afghans were left with a sense of profound disappointment by what they perceived as their abandonment

by America, who naively or not they had imagined would help rebuild their country after the war. So the Afghans felt they had been on the front lines of the fight against communism. They had lost thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in that war. Well nearly nearly two million is a phenomenal number of people. Nearly two million people probably have died. A million and a half we reckon probably in that in the ten year period that they were fighting the Soviets. And then once the Soviets left, the United States didn't care about Afghanistan anymore. Well I heard that one of the sayings among the CIA at the time was that they would fight the Russians to the last Afghan. And this was virtually the case. It was the Afghans who did the fighting and it was the Afghans who got left behind and stranded in a shattered country after the Soviets had retreated. And probably as many

sustained as many casualties as Americans had in Vietnam. Do you want to go back there? I'd love to go back. I doesn't seem like now is the best time. And my heart goes out to those Afghans who are leaving their homes as if these poor people have not had to suffer enough. Now it seems likely that they'll have to face another round of hostility from outside the outside world. The world is an interconnected place. And dropping bombs on people has an effect. And I think we ignore those possible consequences at our peril. You're saying this will turn a lot of Afghans against the United States, people who might be neutral at the moment. Well, you know, the Afghans are not, they just want to get on with their lives like most people. I don't think they have too much time for the ideology. They've got children to send to school and households to run.

This is a people who suffered unimaginably over the past 25 years. The majority of Afghans are offended by the presence of foreigners on their soil who brought Afghanistan's name into such distribute. They don't want to be involved in any international conflict. They had enough. In my view, they deserve better treatment than they're getting from the outside world. Jason Elliott, talking with Steve Paulson from the BBC in London. Elliott is the author of an unexpected light. Travels in Afghanistan. Like everyone else, we've been searching for some solace in the wake of the terrorist attacks. And strange champs found a bit of comfort in an unlikely place, the poetry of a 13th century Sufi mystic. In recent years, Rumi has become

one of the best -selling poets in America. Thanks largely to the translations of Coleman Barks. Today, Rumi's own history seems especially pertinent. A Muslim, born in Afghanistan, he celebrated the underlying unity of all religions. He also had a gift for writing about great sorrow, as Coleman Barks shows with this poem. Stay together, friends. Don't scatter and sleep. Our friendship is made of being awake. The water wheel accepts water and turns and gives it away, weeping. That way it stays in the garden, whereas another roundness rolls through a dry riverbed looking for what it thinks it wants. Stay here, quivering with each moment, like a drop of mercury. That's very beautiful. Well, he does attend to the health of the communal soul.

And by community, he means the whole planet. He doesn't divide us up into nations and churches. He said this in the 13th century. It's astonishing, really, with the crusades going back and forth across his country and with the Mongol armies coming through. And he said, if you think there's an important difference between Muslim and Christian and Jew and Hindu and Shamanist and Buddhist, if you think those are important divisions, then you're making another division between your heart, what you love with and how you act in the world. That is such a radical thing to say. Now, but seven centuries ago, he said it with such authority and with such gentleness. How was it received seven centuries ago? What did the religious leaders of his time think of him? They did not kill him, and that's

saying something, I guess. All religions, members of every religion, came to his funeral. You know, there's a story, it may be legend, but it's a persistent legend, that when Ginghis Khan and his armies came down and got almost to Konya, Turkey, where Rumi lived, he walked out alone to meet the armies, and he talked to the generals, and they said, we must spare this town, Konya, because there might be other people in it, like this one. He was such a loving person, and his depth was such that they couldn't imagine killing him. His Rumi stayed popular through the centuries and well known through the centuries. In the Middle East, he has been, but not until 20 years ago, that he began to become popular in the Western world. I've read that he is the best -selling poet in America today, which I

find... I'm not sure if that's true or not, it seems like it might be, to translations that I've worked on, have sold half a million copies, which is astonishing in the world of poetry. How do you explain that? What is it about Rumi that obviously speaks so powerfully to Americans in particular today? There's a theory that Christianity expunged the ecstatic material in the third century, in the Council of Nassio, from the canon, from the New Testament. And it may be that Rumi is filling that need of the West for ecstatic vision, and he seems to say it with some authenticity. And maybe because he seems so inclusive, I mean, you mentioned that he does. Well, he refers to Jesus and to old Testament prophets, and the major figures of every major religion of his time, they're all in his poetry. The ones he knew, yes, he celebrates the impulse to praise

the mystery that we live within, and it is within us. And he doesn't worry about calling it names. He speaks to it directly, but he just uses the pronoun, you. Tell us something about Rumi, who was he, where did he come from? Well, he came from Afghanistan. He lived on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire. It was born September 30th, 1207 in a town named Bulk, B -A -L -K -H in Afghanistan. And when he was a young boy, the Mongol armies were coming through, and his family fled to Damascus, and later to Conia, Turkey, where he became, as his father was, the head of a dervish learning community. The purpose of that community was to, with whatever means that they found, to open the heart and to explore the mystery of what they called

union. But the main galvanizing event in his life was when he met his teacher, and his friend, Shams of Tabouris, in an October afternoon of 1244. There are many stories of that meeting. Tell me. Well, Rumi was talking evidently with a group of students, and he was reading from his father's spiritual diary, the Mahareef. And Shams came along and pushed his books into the fountain. And Shams says, now you must live what you've been reading about. And Rumi says, but those books, they're so bad. He says, we can get them out, and drive them off, and you can go on reading them. And he pulled one out, and it was dry. But, or he says, you can begin to really open your heart and live what your father has been talking about. And so he and Shams went into a kind of retreat together, into what they call so bad, or

mystical conversation, on mystical subjects. The poetry came out of that friendship. Through his love for his friend, he sort of fell into the divine, into a state that is nothing but love. Is there one you could read to give us a sense of how Rumi himself described this? Well, this is one of the ones that it's very difficult to understand, but I'm going to read it anyway. Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or Zen, not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West. Not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural, or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist. I am not an entity in this world or the next. Did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin's story, my place, is the placeless, a trace of the traceless, neither

body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one, and that one, call to, and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath, breathing, human being. He sort of says two things. He says, we are not who we think we are. We are not this body, this life. Our real life is the life of the soul, the spirit, it's elsewhere, but he says, we are our breath, we are human. How can we be both? I don't know. Yes, he says many ambiguous mysteries, and he does love this world. That's what I love about Remy. He caresses it. He is very tender toward existence. He is not a renunciate in that way, and yet he says, this is not my hometown. I am from somewhere

else. Someone asked him once why he talked so much about silence, and he said the radiant one inside me has never said a word. So he was full of words and also silence. He talks a lot in his poetry about dying, about grief. There's a lot of language of annihilation. He uses images of flames, appear often. There's an entire poem about coming to the place of execution. What do you make of all of that? Well, the oldest image maybe is the moth and the candle. He says, judge a moth by the beauty of its candle. Otherwise what it dies into. He says there's a shredding that's really healing that makes you more alive. There's some kind of annihilation. He calls it funer. That is

the dying before you die. That all religions have some version of. In that sense he sort of welcomes grief. The other line of state with me this week is I think he says the cure for pain is in the pain. There's some great possibility. You've devoted years of your life to working with Rumi, translating. It's 25 years, yeah. In this new book I think you wrote, what I deeply want is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers. It sounds like you have a very strong drive to share Rumi, to bring Rumi, to bring us to his words. Today I'm wondering why? In 1977 I met a teacher on the same level of awareness that Rumi is on and he told me to do this work. It's kind of an act of service I guess. It's also just great fun to work with the master

like this and enlightened being who is also a great artist. Have you yourself ever had a kind of ecstatic mystical experience of the kind that Rumi writes about? I have. I tell this story in the book about my holy day. I made the second 1977 when I had a dream and I walk inside the dream. I was still asleep but it was a state of lucid awareness. I was sleeping out in the dream and on a sleeping bag and next to the Tennessee River where I grew up in Chattanooga and a ball of light in the dream came off of Williams Island and came over me. I thought in the dream that it was some kind of a UFO or something and it clarified from the inside out this ball of light. A man was sitting there with a white cloth over his head and he raised his head and he said I love you and I said I love you too.

The landscape then filled with moisture like dew and the moisture was love. That's all that happened in the dream and then a year or so later I met that man. That man you had seen in the dream? You can believe it or not. It did happen to me and say I met him. One of the first sentences he said to me was will you meet me on the inside or on the outside? And I said with my sort of English teacher subtle mind I said isn't it always both and he just looked at me. We went on talking of something else but will you meet me on the inside or on the outside? I'm still trying to wonder where it is we meet. Is there one more poem you would read for us one more that we can think about? Learn the alchemy true human beings

know. The moment you accept what troubles you've been given the door will open. Welcome difficulty as a familiar comrade joke with torment brought by the friend. Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover. Then are taken off that undressing and the naked body underneath is the sweetness that comes after grief. poet Coleman barks taught at the University of Georgia for many years his latest collection of Rumi's poetry is called The Soul of Rumi. He talked with an strange chance for another taste of Rumi's words here is Iran's Dastan ensemble. Coming up

Israel's rabbis for human rights and why many Muslims feel trapped in today's political world in Egypt for instance. Modernist intellectuals are in a bind on the one hand they hate fundamentalism on the other hand they're deeply hostile to their country being completely controlled by the United States so they play both cards. I'm Jim Fleming it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI public radio international. Some people use religion to justify terrible acts of

violence. But faith can also be used for peaceful ends consider Israel's rabbis for human rights which is working to protect the basic rights of both Israelis and Palestinians. It's the only group in Israel which includes orthodox reform conservative reconstructionist and renewal rabbis. Rabbi Arak Asherman the group's executive director jokes that it's the one organization in which all these people can get together without strangling each other. Our organization was founded in 1988 during the first intifada and of course we have to always add this to the English between the first and the second intifadas. But at the time when the orders went out to break people's bones to try to put down that intifada many people who weren't particularly political or left wing or activists felt that a red line had been crossed and that there needed to be a Jewish rabbinic response to what was going on. Our founder Rabbi David Foreman wrote an open letter saying why is it that the religious establishment in this country seems only concerned

with Sabbath observance and Kashruth the Jewish dietary law says important as those things are where are the Abraham Joshua Heschel's running around this country speaking to some of the moral issues of our society. Rabbi Heschel was a descendent of a long line of historic rabbis saved from the holocaust but most of his career in this country the Jewish theological seminary wrote wonderful books which everybody should read but he didn't just stay in the ivory tower he was involved in the issues of his time. What was the response of the religious community then to Rabbi Foreman's letter? Well many people answered that call and we quickly brought together this unheard of unprecedented group from different streams of Judaism today we are some 100 rabbis and rabbinical students this is wonderful on the other hand you don't represent the majority of Israeli religious people do you? Not yet but I do think that we have succeeded in introducing into people's intellectual universe that there is this other way one of the most dramatic

experiences that I've had working for rabbis for human rights was in December of 1995 this was just a month after its cockle ravines assassination and we went for a morning of study At Heschel called Burekat Yosef it's located in Maladimim a bedroom community of Jerusalem which is in and of itself though the largest settlement in the West Bank it's over the 67 borders. Headed by a rabbi named Nakum Rabinowicz rabbi Rabinowicz had been quoted on the radio is saying that bomb should be placed on the side of the road to prevent withdrawals from territory and he's one of the rabbis suspected and I really underline suspected because it was never proven and he denies it but one of the rabbis suspected of having given the halakhic the Jewish legal justification for the assassination and so after studying with the students for the morning we had a roundtable discussion with rabbi Rabinowicz and the students in ourselves the first thing he needed to say was that the first book of the Bible Genesis teaches us that all human beings are created but celimino him in God's image therefore Judaism cannot condone the mistreatment or

pressure or humiliation of any human being but then we started talking about specifics and we were talking about what's going on in Hebron at the time and he said but you've never seen it. We have second and third hand sources and then one of the students got up and said of a quota of but rabbi when I was doing my army service in Hebron I saw it with my own eyes and at that point you could have heard a pin drop. I can't say that everybody signed up that day to become members of rabis we mean rights but I do think that student came to see us again and I do think in some small way we introduced some new ideas into people's intellectual universe. It seems to me that the biggest problem in the Middle East at the moment in Israel at the moment is the question of where the news comes from. I have a close friend who is Jewish and who has lived in Israel and we argue about Israeli issues and because of that I look at the reports that are available online from Palestinian sources from Israeli

sources. Look at the Jerusalem post look at Israel line look at the Palestinian online presence. One of the things that is noticeable to me is that in the Israeli press that is available the only Palestinians who die are terrorists. In the Palestinian press that is available online the only Israelis who die are soldiers. In a world where the news is presented that way how can you address issues or am I simply not seeing it? Is the news in Israel broader than that more widely representative than that? I think you're making a very good point. I would perhaps add to your repertoire of Israeli media sources are its English edition which is perhaps the most balanced but even there somewhat limited. And if I were an average Israeli progressive today and all I knew about the current situation is what I learned from the Israeli media where we hear every hour on the hour about every act of Palestinian terror attacking Israelis and those are

terrible they should be condemned and we do. But if that's all I knew and I didn't know the rest of the picture I too would be saying the heck with those Palestinians they're shooting at us right and left and let's give ourselves a pat on the back for acting with restraint. I'm one of a handful of Israelis not in uniform or not a settler who's been in the territories since it's intensified to begin partly because people are scared but it means that I have a view from the ground of certain realities in the field which most Israelis don't have. I'll give you an example one of our major campaigns right now is an olive tree campaign. Some 25 ,000 olive trees have been uprooted since it's intensified although our Torah tells us the Bible tells us even in times of warfare don't uproot the fruit trees. That's just olive trees. Why would they be torn out? Well it depends who you ask. If you're sitting in Tel Aviv what you probably have heard is that this was a necessary security act people were shooting from behind these trees people were throwing stones from behind those trees. Now as I said from Tel Aviv that makes sense when you get to the

field then you see here are all the trees that were uprooted far from any road. And here our trees were after one of our joint Jewish Palestinian acts in November where we helped harvest olive trees helping villagers who were under siege to get to their trees and harvest them. For the next two weeks every night settlers would act as vigilantes and 25 trees here 30 trees there night by night. Or let's take even an example where there was a real security issue which shouldn't be belittled. A few weeks ago near Diristia a woman was seriously injured by a stone that's not forget that. The response of the army though was to want to take out along the side of that road 1500 trees. A few activists stood in front of the bulldozers were arrested that that bought time and this issue went to Israel's high court. Thank God Israel is a democracy in a lively democracy and we do have a judicial system and freedom of expression. So when it went to high court all of a sudden the army changed their tune. They didn't need to take out 1500

trees. All they needed to do was take out 10 trees to create a little access road and put in a little observation post. One of your great success stories of the past year was the reestablishment of the caved wellers in the South Hebron Hills. Can you tell me first of all who these people are? Sure. South of Hebron in the South Hebron Hills there are a number of people who believe it or not in this day and age living caves. Some of them by economic necessities, some of them by preference. They are descendants of Bedouin although they vigorously point out that they are not Bedouin. They don't live a Bedouin lifestyle. They are sedentary and they have crops. They are farmers and not just sheep herders. They were expelled from those caves last year in the middle of winter over year ago now because it's hard to know just why. It's hard to know why in fact the Israeli government was so stubborn about this when it became a worldwide issue thanks to the work of rabbi, between the rights and other organizations coalition.

But it seems that the real issue was that they were the only Palestinian presence between Kirit Arba and some of the other Jewish settlements around Hebron and the 67 border. And so as they were looking at making border adjustments in negotiations they thought that this would be a way to bring this in as part of Israel. If they were not in those caves then it would be possible to extend the border around the Israeli settlements near Hebron. And in fact when later on maps were published some of the maps that the government was proposing we did see that there was a sliver of land. Not part of what they were asking to be permanently annexed into Israel but part of the land that they were asking for a long term lease on. In a major human rights victory which brought together public pressure bringing some of Israel's top poets and authors together to speak out about this and finally a high court appeal we brought those people home. In this country we see very little about Palestinian organizations that are

actively searching for peace we hear mostly about the act of terrorism. There are Palestinian groups with whom you work to try to address these issues. Absolutely. There are Palestinian human rights organizations and religious groups. How are they treated by the Palestinian Authority? Well let's divide. There are organizations whose primary purpose is to deal with Israeli human rights abuses and of course the Palestinian Authority has no problem with that. There are Palestinian organizations also dealing with Palestinian human rights abuses which is by some aid and his Palestinian human rights monitoring group and others who have a much tougher time of it than we do. I've been interrogated from time to time. I've been arrested from time to time but I have not been harassed in the way that some Palestinian human rights organizations happen. One of the rabbis in your organization wrote a piece suggesting

that what he called the darkness of disillusion was the biggest obstacle that you face. Almost all of Israelis today walk around in this big national depression because on both the left and on the right people's worldviews have been shattered. The right wing realizes that there is no military solution and the left has seen some of the problems with the peace process. I too, I'm usually the eternal optimist and I will admit that my pessimistic side creeps out a lot more than it used to be and there is part of me that says you could put the perfect peace proposed on the table tomorrow and because everyone's thinking at the emotional level and not from the rational level it would be rejected by both sides. We do have to hold on to hope because what is their life if we don't have something that we can believe in something we can hope for and so we try to do that. There are some people in Israel believe they're not on the right wing who are convinced that Israel will be destroyed. It's kind

of a macho thing though but we will hold out like real men as long as we can. I wouldn't want to live that way. Rabbi Arakashaman is the executive director of Israel's Rabbis for Human Rights. Coming up, the forgotten tradition of secular Islamic intellectuals. I'm Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International. With all the furor over Islamic fundamentalism, it's easy to forget

that many Muslims are not especially religious. In fact, there's a long tradition of atheist intellectuals in the Islamic world. Novelas Tarik Ali explores this history in a series of books called The Islam Quartet. His most recent novel, The Stone Woman, is set in Istanbul in 1899 when the Ottoman Empire was crumbling. From any centuries as Ali told Steve Paulson, Muslims ruled over much of the world. The Ottoman Empire extended to large parts of Europe. We see some of its remnants today in the Balkans, the current Yugoslavia, Croatia, Slovenia, large parts of Ukraine, the whole of what constitutes now the Middle East, the whole of Greece and the Greek islands. In those early centuries, it was a very confident empire. When the Jews were expelled by the Catholics from Spain, they were all given refuge in the Ottoman Empire. When Protestant

heretics were fleeing Catholic oppression, they were all given refuge in Istanbul. Istanbul was a very lively buzzing city. This was really the place for free thinkers, which you're suggesting. For free thinkers, for Jewish people fleeing, for Protestants, for other sorts of heretics fleeing, but Islamic free thinking and Islamic heresies were not permitted. They were very tough on that and came down very hard because they knew if they allowed those to get out of control, power might slip from the hands. So they were very nice to foreigners, but very harsh on dissidents within Islam itself. So many foreigners must have loved it. They could go there when no other place enough. They loved it and Jewish historians will tell you today, after the Morish Islamic Empire in Spain, where Jews were also not persecuted. The next period in their history where they suffered very little persecution was actually in the Ottoman Empire. And lots of the Spanish Jews

who escaped there spoke Ladino, their own language, right till the 20th century. I'm assuming that the great adversaries during most of this history of the Ottoman Empire were the powerful Christian states. Though on occasion, some of the Christian states did play games, try to get into alliance with the Ottomans against other states. But by and large, the big clash was between the Ottoman Empire and Christianity. Was this a clash of ideas of ideology? I didn't think so. It was a clash of empires. It just so happened that one of these empires was not a Christian Empire, but a Muslim Empire. And that gave it an edge because then religion could be utilized by both sides. Crush the infidel called the Ottoman Sultans and crush these sort of upstart heretics, said the Christians. You are in the midst of writing a series of novels which are calling the Islam

quartet, which is really about this conflict, this clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity. What has drawn you to this subject? Well, it started off, actually, when during the Gulf War, 10 years ago, when I was getting more and more angry as US and British bombers were bombing Baghdad. And then a British commentator appeared on television and just casually said the Arabs were people without a political culture. And that just enraged me, enraged me as if to justify all that was going on. And I began to ask myself the question, why is it that out of the three great universal religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Islam has been left behind? Why is it not at the center of the world as well? My own answer to that is that one reason why Western Europe took off and the rest didn't is that the particular form of feudalism which existed in Western Europe was

a form of parcelized sovereignty so that within the pause of this feudalism you saw the birth of capitalism and enterprise. And markets. And that gave it a certain dynamism which finally led to eruptions and inventions. Inside the Ottoman domains, this wasn't permitted. The state was everything. There was no feudalism proper in these domains. Everything was ruled from the top. That kind of entrepreneurial activity was not allowed. Well, it was allowed to a certain extent, but the state dominated it through taxation in such a big way that it could never develop further and increasingly. That was one sort of basic fact. The other facts were that as Europe was developing, the clergy in the Ottoman Empire said we cannot imitate the infidel. So for instance, the printing press was never allowed in when the sultans, the Ottoman sultans, the rulers

wanted the printing press in because they saw what Europe was doing. The clergy said, do you know how many copies of Martin Luther's attack on the church were printed on these printing presses and hundreds of thousands? And that's how they collapsed. Do you want it to happen here? So the clergy really stopped progress. Clocks weren't allowed in because they said so what time isn't linear, time in our world is circular. The moors in calling the faithful to prayer five times a day is enough of a clock for us. So constantly there was resistance to change and modernization. And this finally sunk them really. Now we've been talking about Western stereotypes about Islam and certainly one of the reigning stereotypes is that Muslims are zealots, they're religious fundamentalists, but the characters in your book are very worldly intellectuals, progressives for the most part. They argue about Dante and Hegel and Machiavelli, those figures.

Are you trying to resurrect a different tradition? Well, I think this different tradition existed within Islam. It still does, but it was very strong for hundreds of years. And the stereotype irritates me and the two people who promote the stereotype by the establishments in the West in whose interest it is. But on the other hand, Islamic fundamentalists, both of them like this stereotype, of the zealot, the fanatic. So I challenge it. And the other thing I challenge both in this novel and in Shadr's The Bomegranatory and The Book of Saladin. I challenge the view of women is submissive creatures of the Haram, which is a dominant view. Because this also is not the case. I mean, there were women, Muslim women in Spain in the 11th century writing erotic poetry, which would make you blush to this day. And likewise, in the Arab world, in the medieval period, this is a tradition which has also continued. And so these books are essentially, I mean, you know, you probably gathered. I'm not a believer

myself. I'm a materialist and always have been. But it's funny that only I feel it is only materialists who can understand religions and what motivates them. And the societies which exist underneath or under their shadows. What do you mean by that? Why only can a materialist understand religion? Well, I think you have to be at a distance from all religions to understand them. I really believe this very firmly that if you're involved in a particular religion, you can't be objective anymore. So it's sort of quite ironical that I've written these novels now which irritate lots of people. I can imagine. Well, you said earlier that the thing that got you started writing this series of novels was a comment that... During the Gulf War. During the Gulf War, there was no such thing as a history of Arab politics. Is that changing, that thinking? I hope it's changing.

I mean, one thing which enables people to believe that are all these protectrits which the United States has created in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia, these wretched Gulf states. Where there is no history and no politics, because if there were, these rulers wouldn't be in part. That's why you need American troops in Saudi Arabia, not to defend Saudi Arabia against Saddam Hussein, but to defend the Saudi monarchy against its own people. I mean, these are corrupt, craven, opportunists, regimes which would collapse if the United States were ensuring them up. And this has been one of the problems. And because countries like Egypt have fallen in with this, people feel now that the only way to oppose them is in the name of militant Islamism. And that's the danger which has been created by the politics of the last 20 years. What has created that is? It's the feeling that in Egypt, for instance, modernist intellectuals are in a bind. On the one hand, they hate fundamentalism. On the other hand, they are deeply

hostile to their country, being completely controlled by the United States. So they play both cards. And the fact is that in Egypt, in Algeria, in Pakistan, in Iran, the cause of fighting against Western domination was suddenly taken up by the Islamists. And at the same time, they promised a regime which would be incorruptible, which is, of course, not true. But these promises and the agitation worked for a certain extent, and they built up my support. I mean, when they come to power, of course, the support begins to crumble as we are seeing in Iran. But where they aren't allowed to come to power through bureaucratic means as in Algeria and in Egypt within our elections, then they say, look, they are frightened of us. Why are you frightened of us? Stooges of Satan, they ask their leaders. Why are you frightened of us? Because we speak for the people. The fact is, if they were in power

for a few years, they would stop speaking for the people because they would do very similar things. Tariq Ali is a historian, activist and writer. He talked with Steve Paulson about his novel, The Stone Woman. It's to the best of our knowledge, and Jim Fleming. You can buy a tape of this program by calling the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444. Ask for the other Islam, number 923 -A. If you have comments or questions about the show, we'd love to hear from you. You can send us email through our website at www .wpr .org -book or write to us at to the best of our knowledge, 821 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin, 537 -06. To the best of our

knowledge is produced by Steve Paulson, Mary Lou Finnegan, Veronica Rickert, and Strange Champs and Doug Gordon, with engineering help from Carill Wheeler and Marv Nunn.