Fathom: Do you think Al Qaeda has a particular ideology about and relationship to the modern world and modernity? Chris Brown: The ideology of Al Qaeda isn't very clear, but it does seem to involve both traditional and modern components. Their idea of a primitive version of Islam actually goes very deep in Islamic thought. The notion of pitting the purity of the desert, represented by Al Qaeda, against the corruption of the city is very traditional. Alongside that there are some very modern themes. The Al Qaeda leadership use modern technology and they are all modern people. Osama bin Laden may come across as a son of the desert, photographed on a horse carrying a rifle, but he is actually the son of a building contractor. All the pilots of September 11 were from middle-class families of one kind or another. They use the techniques of the information age.
One interesting anecdote is that a lot of the Al Qaeda volunteers were very disappointed with Afghanistan when they turned up. They regarded it as very primitive. This is a very interesting reaction because at one level they are supposed to be primitive themselves. Al Qaeda are supposed to represent the true purified faith. In fact, they found the Taliban very restrictive, because the Taliban are far more genuinely traditional. You can see this in the comparison between Mullah Omar and bin Laden. Bin Laden's face is everywhere: his image is printed on T-shirts throughout the Arab world. Mullah Omar has never been officially photographed. There is only one photograph of him, taken surreptitiously while he was addressing the troops. He is a genuine figure from an established Islamic tradition, whereas bin Laden and Al Qaeda work the traditional and the modern together in a very different way.
US Department of Defence | Since September 11, Osama Bin Laden's face has become one of the most well-known faces in the world. It appears on T-shirts in the Arab world as well as on Wanted posters in the Western world, such as this one issued by the US government. Bin Laden manages his image extremely carefully using a very conscious combination of primitive ideals with sophisticated technology. |
Fathom: Would you say this is a very conscious creation of an image? Brown: I believe so, and it has lots of parallels in the history of the last 150 years. In this time, we have moved into a dramatically new kind of society, which is based on technology to a much higher level. We are far less close to our origins than we used to be. Very few people work in agriculture, and most of us work in cities and industry. Reactions to this massive shift have varied all over the world. One very strong reaction has always been an authoritarian modernism, sometimes taking Fascist or Nazi form, in which the modern world is used to great effect but specifically related to the past. There are quite a few parallels between Al Qaeda and the Nazis, who exhibited this tension exactly. On the one hand the Nazis embraced state-of-the-art technology and all that was modern. For example, they were tremendously in favour of aircraft, and Hitler was the first world leader to fly around his country regularly by plane. On the other hand, the SS were busy re-creating German medieval traditions and runic writings.
The same process occurred with Mussolini in Italy. He famously made the trains run on time and was very concerned with technology. Yet he also emphasised Roman notions and was concerned to depict Italy as the new Rome. The fasces themselves were the bundle of sticks that were carried in front of the consuls of the old Rome. The notion of drawing on the past to underlie and underwrite an authoritarian approach to modernity is quite a common one.
Fathom: Can you explain your concept of 'irony' and how it relates to the current conflict?
Brown: This relates to the notion of reactions to modernity. One of the reactions to modernity I was describing earlier was the authoritarian reaction where one is selective about what parts of the modern world to embrace. Somebody like Hitler, for example, liked fast cars, aircraft, autobahns and modern weapons. He didn't want freedom of thought, speech or religion. He wanted to choose a particular authoritarian version of modernity. The version of modernity that is dominant within Western Europe and North America today doesn't pick and choose in that way. It acknowledges that one of the major features of the modern world is that traditional thought-patterns and beliefs have been weakened dramatically. Instead of rejecting that and trying to produce an alternative vision of modernity that rejects that weakening, it accepts and lives with it. When I refer to irony I mean that most of us, in holding certain values, are very aware that they are values. We are very aware that there are choices. We know that there are other things we could believe. It doesn't necessarily change what we believe, but the very fact that we are conscious of making a choice means that we have slightly distanced ourselves from it. We have a slightly ironic approach to it.
n of this would be to look at Christian belief in the West. Very few modern Christians, although they are perfectly sincere Christians, hold to the same kind of creed that people did 300 years ago. Three hundred years ago, Christianity wasn't a life-style choice, but something you lived and breathed. It wasn't really possible to conceptualise an alternative to it. Now we know there are alternatives. So, even if we are practising Christians, we are conscious that we are living in a world in which many people aren't. There are alternative value-systems available and even religious leaders rarely claim that their religion is the only way to God. What they will characteristically say is that they like their religion but they respect everybody else's. That is a very modern approach and in a way it is a very ironic approach to religious belief. On the other side, the authoritarian modernists don't have that sense at all. As far as they are concerned they know the truth, they have it and they are acting upon it. There is no distancing from it. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are of this ilk.
Fathom: Do you think there is a divide among Western critical commentators and academics about the response to Al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks of September 11?
Brown: I think there has been a divide. It is very difficult to think of any respectable or responsible person who felt anything but revulsion for the actual attacks. Very few people actually endorse what was done. The questions come when interpreting the motives of the people who did it. There is a three-way divide. Some figures on the non-progressive end of the spectrum basically don't care why Al Qaeda did it. They view them as enemies and are out to get them. On the most liberal/progressive end of the spectrum there has been a divide between those who take the ideology of Al Qaeda seriously and those who regard it as a place-holder for something else, which is a much more traditional left-wing agenda about poverty and dispossession generally. There are two elements of this. The element I agree and identify myself with is also represented by Christopher Hitchens, who has written very extensively on the subject. He has argued that what we are dealing with here is Islamo-fascism. Al Qaeda's motivation has been to establish a theocracy in the Middle East and this isn't something progressive left-wingers ought to be involved with. There is another body of thought, however, that regards the overt theology of Al Qaeda as a symptom of something else. It argues that this would not be happening if it weren't for all the bad things the West has done in the world, in particular the way the US has supported corrupt regimes and Israel against the Arabs. I think this second approach is basically misconceived, but it is quite strongly held.
Let me give you one illustration that isn't about Al Qaeda but is quite a good example because it relates back to notions of modernity. A few weeks ago Cherie Booth, the British prime minister's wife, announced that she had a certain amount of understanding and sympathy for the suicide bombers in Israel. She was immediately misinterpreted as having supported them, whereas what she was trying to say was that they wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for the poverty and oppression they were suffering. I find this a very interesting response, because it basically involves denying the suicide bombers' own account of what they are doing. They believe that what they are doing is martyrdom. They believe that they are going straight to heaven and that their victims are doomed to hell. There have been quite a few reports of people who have seen the expression on the faces of suicide bombers just when they are pressing the button. They have looked uplifted and as if they expect to be transfigured.
In a sense, Cherie Booth's reaction was a classic Western reaction. We really cannot imagine religion being something that motivates us to kill ourselves anymore. We have to interpret that kind of behaviour in terms of socio-economic deprivation because that is the kind of society that we live in. However, it is not the kind of society that they live in and I think that is the basic misunderstanding here. One of the reasons why a lot of left-wing progressives have shown more tolerance and sympathy for Al Qaeda than they ought to is because they have interpreted what Al Qaeda have done in Western terms rather than in the terms Al Qaeda use to frame it for themselves.
Fathom: Was there a transatlantic division in the academic response to September 11? How would you characterise it?
Brown: I think that is an extremely interesting question. If asked whether there was a non-academic difference, one might say 'Yes'. In the academic world, I think, differences were much less. A lot of American academics have been very resistant to the more unthoughtful responses to September 11, and they have had real trouble within the US about this. I think that in the wider American society, tolerance of disagreement and dissent is less than it was before. In a sense, this is understandable after a terrorist outrage of that nature, and one shouldn't underestimate the scale of it. It is worth recalling that more people died in two hours than died in the entire Northern Ireland campaign over the last 30 years. This was a major event and has had a big impact. This has been an impact on wider society rather than the academy as such.
Many American academics want to see a nuanced response to what has gone on over the last year. They support the War against Terrorism, as do the majority of European academics, but they are a bit more critical of the tactics than the rest of American society. I don't think there is a big divide academically, but there is a big divide about how acceptable these beliefs are. This does relate to the wider question of anti-Americanism, which exists on a global scale, including in Western Europe. It actually exists also in the United States. Some of the leaders of anti-Americanism are American. That in itself is an interesting comment on the nature of American society and the notion of irony when approaching one's values.
Fathom: Has this divergence between American academics and American society been visible?
Brown: I think in many places it has been. In some universities that are vulnerable to pressure from state legislatures there have been cases where academics who have expressed doubts about the War on Terrorism have received quite a lot of political pressure. I think there has been quite a genuine divide there, in the way that there simply hasn't been anywhere in Western Europe.
Fathom: Do you have any conception of how academics in the Muslim world received the crisis?
Brown: It does depend on which parts of the Muslim world you are talking about. I would suggest that the majority of the academics within most Muslim universities, including the theological colleges, would oppose what was done. They believe that this was an act of terrorism. In fact, the majority of orthodox Islamic theologians believe that suicide is a mortal sin and so they would oppose suicide bombing. Again you have to bring the reaction of the wider society into account, because academics aren't divorced from the rest of their societies. There was certainly no great support for Al Qaeda within the universities and the general reaction from the universities within the Islamic world has been much the same as the rest of the Islamic world.
![[image]](21701759_cave.jpg)
US Department of Defence | The bombing of a cave complex in Afghanistan. US-led military strikes sought to eradicate all military capability of Al Qaeda and the Taliban . The war in Afghanistan was criticised by some in Europe, although the majority of academics supported the action. |
Fathom: How would you link the response of 'liberal' Western intellectuals to the September 11 crisis to the concept of irony?
Brown: Western liberal intellectuals find it very difficult to take people's beliefs seriously, especially if they don't fit into the model Western liberal academics hold of what a belief ought to be. Effectively the kind of theological backing for Al Qaeda and for the suicide-bombing campaign Hamas has been running in Israel hasn't been taken seriously. There was an interesting example of this when the BBC correspondent Orla Guerin was interviewing the mother of a suicide bomber. This woman looked straight at the camera and said: 'I'm proud of my son. My son is in heaven. Your children will go to hell but my son is in heaven.' When this was watched on Western television people said: 'She's crazy. How can she possibly believe that?' I don't doubt that she does believe it. It seems to me that we ought to recognise that and one of the weaknesses of liberal progressive academics is that we don't recognise that our own sense of irony about the world isn't shared by everyone else. In fact the majority of the people in the world today have a decidedly un-ironic view of their own beliefs. They take their beliefs desperately seriously. They're willing to die for things that we wouldn't be, and we sometimes find that difficult to understand.
Fathom: Do you think this might be related to widespread secularisation and the Enlightenment in the West?
Brown: Very much so, although it is not just confined to secular people. Fundamentalist Christians may be much closer to Islam in this respect than they are to Western liberal intellectuals. It is very striking that American Baptists in the south may have the same mind-set as many people in Al Qaeda, although they are associated with different kinds of values. However, the orthodox and mainstream Christian religions--Catholicism, Anglicanism, Calvinism--have adapted to the modern world by accepting a degree of ironic distancing from their own beliefs. Within the Catholic or the Anglican church you will not find many people who literally believe that the world was created in seven days. You won't find intense arguments about such notions as the reality of the Virgin Birth or physical resurrection. These beliefs are seen as important, but not necessarily literally true. However, that is not an attitude that most people in the world today have about their religion, whatever that may be.
Just occasionally you see a Christian equivalent of a non-ironic approach. There was a case recently about, I think, an FBI agent who had been suspended from his job. He had been searching the rooms of an Islamic terrorist suspect and written graffiti on the walls saying 'Jesus Christ is Our Only Saviour' and other basic fundamentalist lines. This is the kind of behaviour that gets you instantly suspended from a federal government job because it is seen as inappropriate. Most people in the rest of the world would not see that as particularly inappropriate. That is the person acting on his beliefs and that is what Al Qaeda say they are doing. Secularisation is part of it, but we shouldn't exaggerate it. We now have secular religions in the West, as well as seculars who are anti-religious. Post-Enlightenment thought has affected the religions as much as everything else. You can see the influence of the Enlightenment within Protestant thinking very clearly in terms of historical research. In the nineteenth century there were a lot of historians of Christianity who subjected the Bible story to the new critical techniques of historical analysis developed to look at Roman or medieval British history. What they came up with is exactly what one would predict: a demythologising of Biblical narratives. Those demythologisations are now very widely accepted within the orthodox religions, though still anathema within fundamentalist Christian circles. That kind of re-writing of history hasn't really taken place in the world of Islam yet. There are scholars of Islam who study the history of Islam, but they do not publish their writings in the Islamic world. They mostly work in the West, though not all of them are Western, and they look at the circumstances of the writing of the Koran and the early history of Islam. However, their findings are dynamite and they are simply not published. They are not yet acceptable within the Islamic world.
Fathom: Do you think George Bush has come in for unfair criticism from Western liberal intellectuals?
Brown: I would put this into a wider context of Western anti-Americanism. I think among progressive and liberal thinkers, anti-Americanism has become very common, sometimes for quite good reasons. The United States has been the central power in the world power-structure for the last 40 or 50 years and has ended up doing a lot of very bad things in different parts of the world. It had to make all sorts of unsavoury compromises in the Cold War. It supported a lot of dictatorships throughout the world as whole and because of this--combined with a certain amount of European snobbery--the sense of the US being an awful place is quite strong. In a way, George W. Bush feeds into that, because he is someone who clearly is not one of the intellectual leaders of our time. He is a politician who obviously is very good at inter-personal relations but doesn't have the grasp of issues that would be expected with Western European politics. He feeds the anti-American prejudice very strongly. People see in George Bush everything that they don't like in America, forgetting that the majority of Americans didn't actually vote for Bush and that many Americans would share these critical views. If you look a the actual record of the Bush administration, I think it has been a very patchy one over the last year. In some respects it has been rather good. People assumed after September 11 that there would be a knee-jerk reaction, that there would be instant bombing and so forth. There wasn't, and in fact there was a measured and calculated campaign. Although there were civilian casualties as there are in every war, there were relatively few given the level of firepower used.
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| US Department of Defence |
| The action in Afghanistan led to the foundation of an Afghan army, that will in the future become self-sufficient. |
Other aspects of the Bush policy have not been very satisfactory. Virtually everybody this side of the Atlantic regards the 'axis of evil' as a rather silly idea and not the basis of a diplomatic strategy. People are very unhappy at the unilateralism that the US sometimes shows. I do, however, think there is a certain unfairness. One does need to remember that George Bush may not have been elected by the majority, but he is the constitutional ruler of an essentially democratic state that rests on the rule of law and, although we might not like his politics, I think he deserves a bit more respect than he is sometimes given. I believe it does relate to a wider issue of anti-Americanism, which is a very ambiguous notion in the modern world. Many people are anti-American, but many people love parts of what America is about. We wear American clothes, we listen to American music, we watch American television. Anti-Americanism is combined with pro-Americanism in a very particular way. A survey that was conducted in the Islamic world asking what country people most admired found that the US won in almost every country. People admire the wealth and the kind of society it is. At the same time, the same people hate it. There is a contradiction there, but a very common one.
