A Soldier Once Spoke

An image. A thousand words worth. Take a moment to see the image before you. First you may notice I am Middle-Eastern by appearance; then you may notice I am military by dress. As an image I at once fit the profile of a terrorist and an anti-terrorist. A vivid oxymoron in green and brown, juxtaposed against a glorious red and white. As an image it says a lot about the central values of Canada: a nation that allows opposites to live in harmony, perhaps even to complement each other. A nation that brings out a distinctive tinge and hue in all that make it up in the creation of a vast mosaic that stretches far and wide. Yet a mosaic that itself portrays no image and remains a growing abstraction of coloured tiles. I am, like our country, a fragmented picture of something…something with multi-colours.

I believe that as a nation we must take a moment to close our eyes to such distracting obscurities, and realistically think about what we are and what we seek to be. We must divorce ourselves from any delusions of grandeur, or privileged access to nobleness by virtue of our immaculate track record of peace, order, and good government. Canada is not a peace-loving state; peace is a Canada-loving state. Fortune has thus far smiled very kindly upon our nation: surrounding us with three oceans and a friendly border, and filling us with ample natural resources and a comely population.

Canada! Fortune is fast proving to be a fickle friend. Our beloved oceans are no longer the vacant buffers they used to be. With rapid climate change and improvements in shipping technologies, our access to a probable "North West Passage" in the near future may become hotly contested, and our placid Hudson's Bay may become the scene of, as one author put it, the "Great Game in a cold climate." And finally, we merely have to realize the significance of the announcement by CSIS director, Jim Judd, that Canadians, fellow mosaic tiles, have joined the insurgents in Iraq in order for us to eradicate any misconception about the unshakeable virtue our citizenry.

I speak to you as a man born in Iran. My mother tongue is Farsi. When I see Afghanis interviewed on TV, I understand what they say. In fact it often reminds me of my childhood growing up around that language. When I hear a song in Farsi, a different segment of my soul turns on. Something very deep and profound is excited in my heart. A yearning the far-distant utopia of childhood overcomes me. And this from hearing a man in a turban yelling into the camera about how he can't feed his family anymore because his poppy field has been burnt. The impersonality of translation does not make me see him as a turbaned bundle of noise and banter. I hear every word for its meaning, and associate every raise of the eyebrow or tone with the appropriate emphasis. To me he is animated beyond "just another guy in a turban, yelling something I can't understand." I don't ask myself "why is he yelling?" after listening to the cool voice of the interpreter translating and summarizing the bombardment of harsh sounds coming out of the screen. I don't think, "if I were that guy, I would deport myself with a little more aplomb." But I should say, that sometimes I do think that when I am listening to a similar looking Arab guy whose language I can't understand (Farsi and Arab are only as similar and different as English and French). Language alone can divide us, and close the door the warm and friendly relations. A man whose language you don't speak is only a caricature of that same man if you could only understand.

What most of us think of the Middle East is a mere caricature of what it actually is. And in order to effectively engage that part of the world in open level discourse, we must be genuine in our desire to move beyond stock characters and fixed perceptions. I think that the best way to open that door to understanding is to translate a line of Arabic, which is the most common phrase of the Koran: "Be ismi Allahe Rahmane Raheem." This is commonly translated: "In the name of God the Almighty the Merciful." Yet even this fair translation leaves out a certain nuance in the language. "Be ismi" means in the name of. "Ism" means name, and "Be," in this context, means "In the." So "Be [In the] ism [name]." The "of" of "In the name of God the Almighty the Merciful" is actually in the "i" at the end of "ism." So, "Be [In the] ism [name] I [of]." So far we have: "Be ismi," "In the name of." Next we have "God," which in Arabic is "Allah." So from the top: "Be ismi [In the name of] Allah [God]." "Be ismi Allah," "In the name of God." But the Koran does not hesitate to describe God as "the Almighty the Merciful." The Arabic once again is: "Be ismi Allahe Rahmane Raheem." "The Almighty the Merciful" is the translation of "Rahmane Raheem." The literal translation for "Rahmane Raheem" is actually "the merciful, the most-merciful." You see, "Rahmane" and "Raheem" are two forms of the same word, mercy. In Arabic, most words are formed with only three consonant sounds. So if you want to look up the definition of a word in the dictionary, you have to look up its three-letter root, in this case "Ra-Ha-Ma," and you will find its many different forms. Like "Rahman," "the merciful," and "Raheem," "the most merciful." It is not redundant to say these two words in succession. In fact, "Rahmane Raheem," while maintaining distinct meaning, has a great sound to it. "Rahmane Raheem." It is very powerful at the end of "Be ismi Allahe Rahmane Raheem." "In the name of God the Almighty, the merciful." Now when you hear, "Be ismi Allahe Rahmane Raheem," your mind can remember how "ism" means name, and "Allah" can be "Rahman and Raheem," which makes him merciful and the most-merciful. Words fulfill functions in any language.

We as Canadians living with the legacy of multiculturalism can appreciate that more than perhaps most other countries. We appreciate how much intelligence another person can have despite not being as eloquent as they would like to be in either English or French. Too Easy? Okay let's move on. I think it would be appropriate now, to talk about the point of this discussion. You are going to be in Afghanistan soon. You are going to be fighting in a war. It will be fought against people not only whose language you can't understand, but whose ways of life and points of views are equally alien to you. This speech is to emphasize that even the most blood-thirsty heretical malicious terrorist Taliban can never help but to be human. Sometimes some of these fanatics would wish they could carry out their vengeance with the power of Satan (or Shaytan, as they would call him), but they can't. They can only blow themselves up, and maybe a dozen others. For all their fanaticism and powerful talk, the average terrorist can't kill more people than he has fingers to point at virgins in heaven. If we consider the limits to his desire to inflict suffering, than it is easier to tear away at conception that he is other than human. If his physical might is not as strong as he might have hoped or expected, than we may assume that the might of his conviction is not as potent either. If he is only human in arm, it may be safe to say he is only human in mind. Perhaps even fanatics can be caught daydreaming. Or, from the perspective of the Taliban, I might say "Shayad fekrahe een adamha be fekreh fagad pooloh nafte neest." "Perhaps then money and oil are not the only things on these peoples' minds."

Your environment, the culture that you are brought up in, and the language that you speak play a major part, I think, in forming your values, morals, judgment calls. Essentially, that there is no objective absolute towards which humanity is (or aught to be) approaching. The following is a quote from an essay by famous Oxford scholar, Sir Isaiah Berlin:

This is a relativism which kills the notion of progress in the arts, whereby later cultures are necessarily improvements on, or retrogressions from, earlier ages, each measured by its distance from some fixed, immutable ideal, in terms of which all beauty, knowledge, virtue, must be judged. The famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns can have no sense…: every artistic tradition is intelligible only to those who grasp its own rules, the conventions are internal to it, an 'organic' part of its own changing pattern of the categories of thought and feeling…It is as if one were to suggest Shakespeare could have written his plays at the court of Genghis Khan, or Mozart composed in ancient Sparta…The idea of the cumulative growth of knowledge, a single corpus governed by single, universal criteria, so that what one generation of scientists has established, another generation need not repeat, does not fit this pattern at all.

I don't think that I would have the same thought that I do now if I were raised in the same place I was born. Who knows what thoughts my role models, my peers, my environment might have implanted me with. To say that we can form thought independent of our development as a person or as a community. But as the little-known Italian writer, Giambattista Vico, pointed out in the 18th century it is not beyond me to understand them through use of my imagination.

This was a,

…new view of men and society, which stressed vitality, movement, change, respects in which individuals or groups differed rather than resembled each other, the charm and value of diversity, uniqueness, individuality, a view which conceived of the world as a garden where each tree, each flower, grows in its own peculiar fashion and incorporates those aspirations which circumstances and its own individual nature have generated, and is not, therefore, to be judged by the patterns and goals of other organisms.

To accept that another's outlooks are completely different is one thing, to say that there is no way one could ever have adopted similar outlooks is, in the words of Burke, "the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy." While I now don't agree with what those Iranian youths are doing (or attempting to do), it nonetheless negatively disturbs me to imagine how "it could have been me."


Destination: Hezbollah, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda
The question is then, what are some of the factors that are convincing these young men and women to voluntarily leave their homes and home countries for a war-zone (not only that of Lebanon and Afghanistan, but of course this whole segment also applies in principal, if not in examples, to Iraq)? What are some reasons that are increasing Hezbollah's, the Taliban's, and Al-Qaeda's popularity?

The following Berlin quotation partially explains this occurrence:

[Y]ou must realize that if you use violent methods the result will almost invariably be totally different from what you intend. Why? Because too much is unknown – not because you are wrong. The abuses are abuses, the tyranny is a tyranny, it should be stopped, it can be stopped; but if the measures are too violent – that's to say, if you believe in the possibility of a total or even three-quarters transformation of society by organized means, if need be by violence – you will find that you've heaved up forces of whose existence you were probably not aware, which will in some way frustrate your designs and produce something maybe better than there was before, but not what you wanted.

This effectively encapsulates what is happening as a result of the large-scale violence the West has let loose on extremist groups in the Middle East. Such "blow-back" (a term commonly used for the US, and how its actions abroad have led to unexpected consequences) includes the alignment of Hezbollah, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda, with anti-imperialist, anti-aggression, anti-West sentiment in the region that is already strong due to it's long history of colonialism and conflict.

It is every person's right to believe that what they are doing is good; as it is every person's right to consider how much they have been wronged. "Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human" (Berlin) While the West may perceive the actions of Hezbollah, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other terrorists in the area to be misled, it is not in its interest to allow these ideas to be propagated and continue to be pervasive. A CNN journalist recently said there is a "War of Perceptions" going on (he also said that the West was losing at the moment); winning this war means rigorous fighting in "the battle of Ideas".

Brain Map for the Middle East
In the battle of ideas, I am Lincolnesk in thinking "a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall". But there is no shortage of gall. It's available in the US foreign policy elite; Daniel Pipes posts the articles of authors with the following views on his web-page:

It is insane that a billion people follow an insane man of the 7th century. It is insane that the rest of humanity go along with that. This insanity is bringing our world to the brink of destruction. Only when the belief in Islam is weakened, Muslims will turn towards moderation and modernization.

This is a classic example of delivering a sober message in language you would expect from the heretics, which is unfortunately increasingly common in public discourse. Saying the people of the region, the Muslims, could use to alter their outlook on the world is one thing, calling Mohammed insane betrays the author's ignorance about how to go about doing.

In his Mimesis, Eric Auerbach writes:

When people realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena…so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid…"

To sincerely empathize with the people of the region will allow us to better understand the forces that conduct their actions and their ways of thought, with which we can then discover the methods most effective in modifying those forces. Right now, the west is suffering the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome. (footnote: In fact, the very word "terrorist" has been used so indiscriminately to describe such a wide variety of persons and groups since 9-11 that it has, quite naturally, lost a lot of its former meaning.)

In the battle of ideas in the war of perceptions it would be prudent to avoid dehumanizing the opponent, for then we can no longer relate, will cease to comprehend, and will fail to convert.

Vico's most famous passage in his New Science can be of use in this discussion:

But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men made it, men could come to know.

Vico was the first to point out that human institutions, culture, and history are the only things that humans can understand because they are our own products, whereas any other object or phenomenon in nature is the creation of God and therefore beyond our scope of understanding. However alien the mores and polity of the Muslim world may seem to us, since they are the products of humans, they are not incomprehensible.

It is in this scope that weapons for ideological war must be forged. The very phrase "ideological war" is an oxymoron of sorts, because it is one whose victories and defeats can have similar ramifications for both sides. Entering this battlefield one must keep the following in mind:

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance – these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.