Fawaz Turrki, disinherited@yahoo.com

Terrorism has had a bad press recently. That is, literally.

One’s concern here is to explain that no discerning analysis of the origins, complexity and nature of terrorist acts in our time, perpetrated by individual Arabs, has yet surfaced in the public debate; and how marginal the “essentialism” of Islam should be in that debate. Arab terrorists may consider their pursuit of terror a career of high note, but do they, and we, know how mockingly remote their acts are from Islam, how uniquely rooted instead these acts are in the pathology of the terrorists’ political experience?

You have to be an outright optimist to believe that all has been well with the Arab world, and gifted with self-deception to have ignored its unraveling at the seams in recent decades. Modern-day Arabs have suffered repeated military defeats, watched helplessly as their polities have become progressively sapped of élan — their innovative intellectuals silenced or hounded to destruction or into exile — and have come to see themselves as mendicants in a world beyond their control. And now outsiders are in that world intent on reordering it for them, armed with master plans to introduce it to “democratic reform” and “free markets,” presumably because Arabs have failed by themselves to meet the challenges of modernity.

If we look nearer at the crisis of the Arab sensibility, we see the rent body of a whole generation that had grown up on the ethic of fear and defeat — and harrowing shame.

And herein, I say, lies the answer.

Different cultures conceive of and deal with shame differently. In ours it is associated with humiliation and disgrace, sentiments almost obsessive in their intensity. When your nation bows its head and casts down its eyes before constant defeat, you feel the shame of it, which you then either run away from or deny, in order to avoid moral judgment and the pangs of conscience. Denial and flight, however, are feelings that will continue to torment you with their psychic pain — till you liberate yourself from them by lashing out. And it takes a man of conscience to be put to shame.

In his introduction to Franz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” about the psychology of the colonized individual, shamed into humiliation by the treatment meted out to him by his colonizer, Jean Paul Sartre tells us about how violence — random violence, terrorist violence, revolutionary violence, violence enacted to gain national independence — brings with it the “cleansing” impulse of freeing the colonized subject from his feelings of inferiority, impotence and helplessness, themselves ancillary sentiments of shame.

And Michel Foucault, another French philosopher (the French, not unlike their British colonial counterparts in the past — and their Israeli copycats today — knew how to shame their “subjugated peoples,” and thus have over the years created an extensive body of literature on the subject) speaks of how the “cultivation of the self” by a shamed community creates and helps “the internal spaces of the soul.” There guilt with the self and rage at the other would trigger not only unrestrained violence, but the conjuring up by its members of a detailed melodrama of persecution and inadequacy, of conspiracy and betrayal.

All of which is by way of saying that terrorism directed at targets in and outside the Arab world, by Arab terrorists, is rooted in social, emotional and, yes, pathological — not religious — sources.

They “hate America”? Heck, these folks hate everybody.

The theme is universal: Terrorism is the product of despair, humiliation and disgrace, shame at one’s inability to be a determining force in one’s destiny, and at the involuntary forfeiture of one’s powers of self-determination. The antithesis of that condition is democracy.

If we ourselves have failed, and miserably so, to enact that in our political lives over the last half century, then where’s the harm in considering the US proposal for a Greater Middle East Initiative?

You call that a pact with the devil? I call it a pact with historical necessity, for as democrats we shall have our day, and terrorists — posturing behind our appropriated faith — shall have their eclipse.

To let this historical opportunity slip will be a crying shame.

— 18 March 2004