The timing could hardly have been worse to try to launch a critical dialogue
on the Koran, Islam and unbelievers. The plan had been that, following
my Tribune column of a couple of weeks ago, I would co-author a piece
on the subject with two friends: one, a gay Arab asylum-seeker, currently
resident in London; the other, a one-time Zanzibari Muslim activist, now
close to apostasy, living in Dar-es-Salaam. We had intended to publish
simultaneously in Britain, Tanzania, several Arab countries and via the
internet.
Last week, both of my co-authors and the principal Arab publisher pulled out of the project, at least for the time being. Their explanations varied, but stemmed from the same cause: the evidence of US, and to a different extent, British abuse of Muslim prisoners in Iraq.
Husam, my gay Arab friend, told me he was simply too scared to go public with anything that was critical of Islam in the current international climate. His homosexuality alone had already made him a target for the murderous Islamists in his country of origin; hence his (as yet unprocessed) asylum application in this country. Putting his name to a critique of Koranic illiberalism now would be like issuing his own death warrant, he said.
Ayuba, my Zanzibari friend, approached the subject from a different direction when we spoke. "I am still part of the umma [the Muslim community] even if I am no longer an active Muslim," he told me. "If I attacked Islam now it would feel like a betrayal. That is how people would see it, even those who agree with some of what we are saying."
Our Arab publisher was both fearful and angry. "You can't write about these things. Not now. It would not be tolerated by Muslims. What the Americans have done here is disgusting."
It is difficult to underestimate the effect of the Abu Gharaib prison revelations on Muslim sensibilities. It is not the fact that prisoners were mistreated; not the fact even that some have been beaten and killed. Heaven knows, enough innocent Iraqis have been beaten, blasted, shot or blown to bits in the course of their "liberation" from Saddam.
It is the humiliation that really bites. And it is the sexual element of that humiliation that cuts to the core of Muslim values, faith and pride. Torture would have been cause for condemnation, for anger and outrage. But this goes deeper: it invites disgust, and confirms, for those seeking guidance from such a source, every Koranic imperative about the perversities of the unbelievers. "To us," as our Arab publisher said, "this is worse than torture."
Husam had wanted us to write about sexual intolerance in the Koran; about the legitimation of murder of homosexuals and other sexual deviants; about the treatment of women; about the fear and oppression of human sexuality; about the fact that Muslim men could have as many "slave girls" as they liked but that the punishment laid down for adultery by a Muslim woman is stoning to death. He had even talked about whether it might be possible, in an Arab publication, to raise the issue of the Prophet having married a girl aged six and consummated that marriage when she was nine.
And then came the pictures of naked Iraqi men being piled up in obscene human pyramids, forced to masturbate or simulate sex for the camera. There was the smiling Lyndie England, cigarette in hand, pointing at a man's genitals as he was made to touch himself. And, worst of all, the image that will now surely come to characterise George Bush's Iraqi adventure like no other: the naked Iraqi on a leash.
How do you initiate a serious dialogue about sexuality, freedom and Islam in the face of this sort of behaviour and this sort of imagery? At worst, the sexual humiliation of Muslim prisoners is an act of deliberate policy that comes from the top of the US command. At best, it reflects a debasement of human values among ordinary GIs, who can then try to justify themselves, as one did, by saying, "We just thought they looked funny."
Perhaps it's no wonder that the Boston Globe couldn't tell the difference between real pictures of US troops raping Iraqi women and the ones they published last week, which came from a Hungarian porn site. Perhaps America can't tell the difference.
Perhaps, in the blur of sexual sadism and the smog of this most ill-planned war, it has lost all sight of what liberty is really supposed to be about. It is certainly doing a better job of setting set back the cause of liberty than even the most optimistic Al Qaeda strategists could have dreamt of when they set out to provoke the Great Satan on 11 September 2001 and got it to respond every bit as stupidly as they might have hoped for.