Two months ago, as I was about to board a Eurostar train to Paris from Waterloo Station, London, I was stopped, taken to a room with dark windows, and questioned by a man in plain clothes who said he was from the anti-terrorist squad of the Metropolitan Police. He was courteous – at least until, leafing through my passport, he discovered visas for Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was an odd excitement in his eyes and voice when he looked up and began an increasingly aggressive interrogation. I told him that I was a writer and had gone to these countries for an American paper, the New York Review of Books. It seemed hard for him to believe me. He kept asking whether I had met anyone close to Osama Bin Laden, whether I knew any Islamic extremists, and my truthful answers seemed only to work him up into a kind of frenzy.
Minutes passed. I told him that I had a train to catch. I felt the contempt in his voice when he said that he had to check me against certain profiles of potential terrorists, and that he had the authority to detain people for up to nine hours.
I resented his tone, but at the same time, like many people not used to being questioned by the police, I felt nervous and almost guilty of some unremembered misdemeanour. Luckily, I had the idea of asking him to check my name on the websites of certain English and American newspapers. I don’t know whether he did or not when he disappeared briefly into an inner office. But he looked subdued, if still unapologetic, when he returned.
With only a few seconds remaining, I ran to my coach. I sat down and then discovered that my hands were shaking. I looked around. The other passengers – returning to France, I later learnt, after protesting against the decision by Marks & Spencer to close its outlets in Paris – seemed to be staring at me. I turned towards the window and saw a dark-skinned man with a quasi-Muslim beard. I looked away. The white people were still staring. I opened the Guardian and saw strings of meaningless words. The train started; houses, offices slid off; my mind remained paralysed.
In just a few minutes, something had profoundly distorted my relationship with the world. It was no longer the solid place I had been moving through serenely, confident of my own place in it, as a writer for major western publications. Waterloo Station with its high overarching iron girders, and even the grimy backs of factories and warehouses in Clapham, appeared threatening, became emblems of the omnipotent power of the west that regulated the world’s unjust hierarchies and told everyone where they belonged – the power that was now challenged by a handful of men who happened to look like me.
The moment passed. In the merciful light of Paris, the world became neutral and manageable again. And it was interesting to think that, just a few weeks earlier, I had been seen as a representative of the powerful west by Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It barely mattered to them that I was, in one sense, the worst kind of infidel: a Hindu Brahmin by birth and Indian by nationality. The important thing for them was that I had travelled from England, and I was writ-ing for an American newspaper. And so the phone calls I made were swiftly returned. Doors that were normally shut to local journalists opened easily; people were courteous and frank.
In squalid madrasas (religious schools) where the Taliban had been given the most rudimentary Islamic education, and where another generation prepared themselves for jihad, men spoke calmly of how the oppressed Muslims of the world had come together to destroy one superpower – the Soviet Union – and would, by the grace of god, also take care of America and Israel if those countries did not relent in their persecution of Muslims. This was the message they expected me to take back to the west.
I went to an international conference of radical Islamists near the border with Afghanistan, where 200,000 men – many of them from North Africa, the Middle East and central Asia – listened to speeches on similar themes. The atmosphere was of a medieval desert fair: thousands of men walked urgently around the sprawling township of tents under a vast cloud of dust, past the stalls selling beautifully illustrated copies of the Koran in Urdu and Arabic, along with posters of Osama Bin Laden, who was clearly the star of the event. On the first day, a ferocious dust storm blew off some of the tents. The long white shirts of the men flapped and rippled in the wind as they ran out from under the swaying tents; the new Afghan rugs lost their bright colour and blended into the dust-white ground. But the speeches remained fierce: speaker after speaker urged Muslims to join the jihad against the United States and its allies.
It took me some time to sort out my own responses. I knew about the corruptions of jihad, of the leaders grown fat on generous donations from foreign and local patrons, sending young men to poorly paid shahadat (martyrdom) in Kashmir and Afghanistan. But I had not been prepared to be moved by the sight in one madrasa of six young men sleeping on tattered sheets. I hadn’t thought I would be pained to think of the human waste they represented – the young men, whose ancestors had once built one of the world’s greatest civilisations, and who now lived in dysfunctional societies under governments beholden to, or in fear of, America, and who themselves had little to look forward to, except possibly the short career of a suicide bomber, in a hopeless-seeming mutiny against the most powerful imperial civilisation in history.
Of that civilisation, the young Islamists knew little, apart from the misdeeds of America’s representatives and clients in Muslim countries. I did not think that they would be converted if they knew more – not everyone in the world wants to be an American – but I remember thinking, with what in retrospect looks like shallow pity and regret, how they would never experience the humane and generous side of the culture they saw as an oppressive presence in their lives.
My own feeling for America had developed over many visits. It was separate from the fact that I wrote for American papers, that the country’s marginal but robust intellectual life – given so little due in the denunciations of American culture – had made it possible for me to sustain a career as a writer; and that it gave people like me, who had started out with very little in their own societies, another chance. No: it was something else. I felt it as a ridiculous pang in my heart as the plane banked for final approach at JFK and the towers of the city at the edge of the vast, entranced continent rose serenely into view. I felt it again, as nostalgia, after I was thousands of miles away from America. I began to put complex contradictory words to it only after I read John Updike, longing, while he was lonely in London in 1969, for America, and wondering about the extraordinary civilisation that the “last new race” in the world had created, about “the breezy big kitchens, and the lawns burnt brown by August, and the twirling sprinklers and fainting skies, and the cracked tender terrible confident emptiness of it all”.
It was easy to denounce that vision of endless space and well-being and leisure as a deception; to speak of the dirty work of empire-building and empire-maintenance, the ruthless suppression of remote and near enemies, that went on behind it. But it remained seductive, particularly to those of us from struggling, tormented societies, even when you had, like me, no plans to live in the US. Here was a country whose nation-building traumas seemed to lie in the remote past, where a widely shared affluence seemed to have taken care of the social and economic disparities that complicated our lives elsewhere.
And it was this frail, private fantasy of America as an untainted, almost Arcadian realm that I selfishly mourned when I heard the news in the Himalayan village that has been a part-time home to me for many years. I had no TV or radio near, and horrible images arose in my mind, images that seemed to have accumulated over the past twenty years, during the militant uprisings in India, which involved tens of thousands of murders and hundreds of suicide attacks on individuals and institutions. But such was the imaginative dissonance between Manhattan and the Kashmir valley that they obscured at first what I struggled to articulate to myself: that the brutality of the world where I had grown up had come to America, and had irrevocably and drastically altered the hierarchies of the world.
On the last pages of V S Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, the Indian narrator, who has been untouched so far by the violence of his African country, is told to get out fast by an African official: “One day they will rough you up and then they will discover that you are like everybody else and then very bad things will happen to you.” Whatever else happened now, I felt, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had made America appear – and appearances are all – mortal and vulnerable; had destroyed its formidable aura of a superpower, which America could not ever regain, no matter how many fighter jets were scrambled, or naval fleets positioned in the Gulf, or ominous plans drawn up for “ending” hostile states.
It was terrifyingly easy to guess the responses of the young jihadis I had met. How fast they would have moved from their sense of besiegement and impotence – of which I had an intimation at Waterloo Station, when a resentment against the west and its harsh arrangements had stirred even within my privileged being – to exultation at the sight of fewer than two dozen motivated and patient Muslims bringing a rich and proud superpower to its knees. How drunk they, and all other enemies of America, would be on their new sense of power.
Something terrible lay in this discovery of America’s vulnerability. But equally appalling revelations awaited me in the next few days as I received anguished e-mails and phone calls from friends in America – people anguished and distressed not only by the destruction of innocent lives, but also by the vicious revenge that was now being sought. From what they told me, retaliation, swift and cruel, was already in the air. The dogs of nationalism and war had begun to bark all across America. The brutally ignorant commentators on the American networks were howling for blood, for an earth-shaking demonstration of America’s might, and ordinary American citizens phoned radio and TV stations to demand an immediate and comprehensive nuclear attack on Bin Laden, the Arabs, Muslims, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, anywhere, everywhere – all this punctuated with dark insinuations about the envy the rest of the world feels towards America because of its prosperity, but with no discussion, not even a casual one, as to what America had done to incite such awful acts of hatred.
As I write, a week after the attacks, no evidence has emerged directly implicating Osama Bin Laden as either the sponsor or the mastermind of the attacks. What little detail is available links the hijackers most inconveniently to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates: three Middle-Eastern countries with repressive US-backed regimes and strong, if ruthlessly persecuted, Islamist movements. Nevertheless, President Bush now seems ready to put on – and, by the time you read this, may have already set off – a spectacular display of America’s war machinery against the lifeless background of Afghanistan, which might be bombed into the Stone Age, a condition that country has almost achieved, partly through a previous involvement with America in the cold war.
But then what? The possibilities are frightening: an Islamist backlash in Pakistan and the overthrow of the current moderate military leader; the brandishing and the likely use of nuclear weapons; a suitable response from Israel and India; the beginning of a nuclear war in Asia.
The Bush administration supposes its country will be safely out of this mess after having reached its aim, which, when you discount the moralising and geopolitical claptrap, is simply this: to make the world see that the American military will always have the upper hand over the likes of Bin Laden when it comes to violence and destruction. Or perhaps American troops are expected to be around for ever to deter future enemies, of whom the Chicago Tribune warns that “life is long, we are not finished, they must feel the terror”: the kind of rhetoric that has stultified even responsible sections of the American media. It is no more than banal machismo. People like Bin Laden feel no terror; and thousands wait to take their place – thousands who now have a clearer idea of the damage they can inflict by the simplest means.
It probably appears disingenuous now to be outraged by the moral nullity of America’s leaders and by the lynch-mob rage they currently stoke across the country. All of America’s wars in the past half-century have been conducted far from home, and, more recently, from 30,000 feet up in the air. A country so exceptionally well-shielded from the mass tragedy and trauma that almost all other nations have experienced could only have a complacent and largely unexamined collective life. And, after all, it was America’s lack of a rigorous self-awareness, its sensuous self-absorption, that had beguiled so many of us.
In a strange twist of irony, this is what now strikes hard at all of us who have been half in love with the country, and who, half turning away from, even while deploring, the always visible corruptions of empire, had secretly poured our shy, bumbling affection on its mass illusions: on an unselfconscious vitality that now reveals itself as ignorance, quickly combusted into a xenophobic fury, and on a dreamy innocence that was not of this world, could not live long, and, it seems increasingly, had no right to exist.
Meanwhile, the distance between America and the rest of the world grows even wider. I had a sense of this when I finally watched the images of the burning and collapsing towers on a small grainy black and white screen, in a daily-wage labourer’s tin shack deep in the Himalayan valley below my cottage. Around me swarmed a large family, busy cooking a meagre meal over a kerosene stove in one corner. They were not sure why I, the well-off-seeming man in the big cottage, was present in their cramped, dingy quarters, watching something they had seen and forgotten about. The labourer, a low-caste Hindu, stood behind me. He said, his quiet voice almost drowned out by the excited commentary, but chilling in its heart-felt intensity: “This is all God’s will.” For an extraordinarily lucid second, I saw what he meant on the screen, where the mighty towers erected in defiance of nature were being brought down to earth by a power which, though mortal itself and made devastating only by technology, suddenly appeared, in the scale of what it had achieved, to have been abetted by a malevolent divinity.
It was a profoundly disturbing moment, in all its reminders of our not-so-common humanity. I knew then that the more widespread and morally ambiguous response to the event could never be captured by TV cameras, could barely be expressed in words: that it probably lay buried in the hearts of millions of humiliated peoples around the world, and not just those who have felt the malign hand of American foreign and economic policy on their lives, but all those who have been excluded from the banquets of the “free world”, condemned to centuries of deprivation by the injustices of history, for whom the wealth, security and power represented by the World Trade Center have remained tormenting fantasies. These are people in whom the sight of the collapsing towers did not so much induce shock and horror, or a craving for bloody revenge, as a great awe, and a bitter, smug shrug at how the arbitrary cruelty and pain they have long lived with had caught up with the most privileged people, and the most magnificent city, in the world.
Only raw American nerves would mistake this for the crude gloating of a handful of Palestinian refugees shown on TV. The reactions outside America to the terrorist attacks are much more complex and ambivalent than Americans will let themselves believe. They reflect the real divisions of the world which at such moments – with the reports pouring in from the US and Europe of hate crimes against Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs – seem, in a sinister way, as much racial as economic. And the animosity and distrust that these divisions breed will continue to fester silently, even as the leaders of America bully all the good peoples of the world into joining a show of unity against the suitably “shadowy” evil lurking in the ravines of Afghanistan.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics (Picador, £6.99)
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