Screening Islam: terrorism, American jihad and the new Islamists.

ONLY THE HEADLINES AND DETAILS varied in the coverage of 11 September and the subsequent suicide bombings in Israel. The underlying story in the mainstream Western media remained the same. Arab-Muslim terrorists were precipitating a civilizational conflict on a global scale. Thomas Friedman, from his watchtower in the New York Times, sounded the alarm: "A terrible disaster is in the making in the Middle East. What Osama bin Laden failed to achieve on 11 September is now being unleashed by the Israeli-Palestinian war in the West Bank: a clash of civilizations." Lest there be any confusion about who fired first, Friedman hastened to explain that "in the wake of repeated suicide bombings, it is no surprise that the Israeli Army has gone on the offensive in the West Bank. Any other nation would have done the same." (1)

The West, wounded first in New York and then in Israel, cast itself as the avenging victim, struggling to understand and respond to the Islam that launched these unprovoked terrorist attacks. The American reaction to 11 September defined the rules of engagement by launching an unconstrained "war on terrorism." President George W. Bush set an emphatically American agenda, defined by U.S. interests, projected by the Western media, and enforced by American power. The same American security apparatus that had not had sufficient evidence to prevent the attack unhesitatingly pronounced Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network of Islamist terrorists guilty of the horrific assault on the Twin Towers. The President spoke in terms shorn of the usual diplomacy. He announced that the perpetrators of 11 September and those like the Taliban who shielded them were "wanted dead or alive." The war on terrorism in Islam's name was to be an American jihad and the world was asked to believe and to join the "crusade." If you are not with us, you are against us, intoned the American President. He vowed to "smoke out" the terrorists wherever they sought refuge and to punish those who harbored them. Osama bin Laden became the evil outlaw with a price on his head and the forces of good in hot pursuit.

The U.S. government would not hear arguments that the undoubted "crime against humanity" of 11 September should be denounced as such and responded to by international law. The voices that asked what would come next in Afghanistan, once the Taliban had been deposed by the military assault, were reduced to an ineffectual whisper. The public announcement of a U.S. right to topple regimes and wage war on any continent at any time would represent the only change in American policies. The United States had been attacked for its goodness, its freedoms, and its prosperity, the President explained. No changes in its fundamental foreign policies, including those in the Middle East, were warranted.

Was the United States really surprised when the Israelis, along with the Russians and the Indians, moved to appropriate this stance for their own ends? In the wake of a wave of suicide bombings that targeted civilians in the heart of Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pronounced Arafat the "arch terrorist" in the bin Laden mold. On 29 March 2002 Israel launched its own war against terrorism, devastating West Bank cities in its own effort to "root out the terrorist infrastructure." Terrorists had attacked Israelis, like Americans, for who they were and not what they did. The thirty-five year old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the extensive colonization effort it enabled had no relevance. The Israeli government directed the focus elsewhere. In a frenzy of hatred with its roots in Islam, the irrational and homicidal bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, alongside the al-Aqsa Brigades, aimed to destroy the Jewish state that served as an outpost of Western civilization in the Arab Islamic world.

Islam suddenly became news and today, more than ever, news matters. The media constitutes what Manuel Castells has called "the privileged space of politics," as true in the global as In the national arena. (2) In an emerging network society, horizontal and endlessly expandable networks have replaced hierarchies in the economy, society and culture of the new capitalism of the Information Age. Prototypic institutions are complex, adaptive systems and the most promising Interpretive strategies to understand their rules and logic are coming from information and complexity theory) In the new conditions power has, of course, not disappeared. It continues to shape and discipline lives. However, power now flows through dispersed and flexible networks rather than inhabiting rigid structures. The coordination of economic, political and social action in these conditions of dispersal depends more than ever on the control of information and the maintenance of information flows. Hence, the critical importance of the media. Dominant elites, Including those charged with foreign policy, rely on a responsive corporate media to announce policies, coordinate action, and enact the politics of symbolic representation that best serves their interests. Moreover, the global reach of the American conglomerates means that the global media, for all intents and purposes, is American.

Evidence is clear that the United States and Israel grasp these new media realities of the Information Age. In the U.S., planning first began in the late seventies for conducting war in the emerging conditions of "information politics." (4) The media sphere takes priority. Assessing the American travail in Vietnam and the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, U.S. strategists concluded that war-making could only achieve success by relying on a professional rather than conscripted military, keeping the conflict short enough to preclude sustained public debate of its merits, and concealing its consequences as much as possible from public view. The latter demand, in particular, made the media as critical a battle site as any in the field, warranting the tightest controls. The Gulf War provided the affirming test case with the media given only "supervised" access to cover the fighting. American restrictions on the press in Afghanistan were stricter still.

Only when the attacks of the suicide bombers on civilians had enraged and frightened the Israeli populace could Prime Minister Sharon emulate the American example. Israel had the disadvantage of a military force that relied on reservists. By targeting civilians, the Islamist extremists effectively neutralized that liability. The promising movement of Israeli "refusniks" lost momentum. At home, the assertive Hebrew press was cowed as rarely before. Even more important, however, was the Israeli lobby's prowess in dominating the critical media battleground in the United States. (5) Israeli actions in the West Bank signaled an impressive understanding of the new media rules for war-making in the Information Age. "No access, no pictures, no story" became the mantra of the Israeli defense forces in dealing with journalists. The Israelis acted as quickly as possible to accomplish their goals and defied the force of world opinion by refusing to allow any authoritative and timely international investigation of their military actions.

The initial American and Israeli successes in the Afghan and West Bank theaters of the war on terrorism depended on the power to project a hostile and threatening Islam. An element of unreality hung over the celebrations of the world's only superpower of its victory over the Taliban's Afghanistan, a poor and devastated third world nation. It also required major suspension of disbelief to accept representations of the fighting on the West Bank as a "war" when the essentially defenseless Palestinian people had neither a state nor an army to protect them against a world-class military power. Global media projections of Islam as violence were indispensable.

MEDIA PROJECTIONS: ISLAM AS VIOLENCE

Representations of the global Islamic threat fell into comfortable, well-established grooves. The luxuriant legacy of European derogation of Islam, the adaptations of the Orientalist discourse to serve American interests in a bipolar world, and the refurbishment of the Islamic threat for the post-Cold War era all served to create an abundant reservoir of hostility to Islam. (6) In Israel a deep-seated racial contempt of Arabs and Muslims, reinforced by the habits of calculated humiliation and denigration built into the Israeli occupation, fed the same stream. (7) These Israeli realities, after all, represented an important part of the facts on the ground that the democratic Israelis not only tolerated, but enthusiastically created and overwhelmingly endorsed. They had an inevitably corrosive effect. In the United States, it was still essential to blunt criticism of an attack on one of the world's great religious traditions by conjuring up an innocuous and fatuous "good Islam," without historical or lived reality, to be contrasted to the "evil Islam" that threatened the West. In the Afghan theater, this distinction made it possible to drop yellow anti-personnel bombs for the "evil Islamist terrorists," while reaping the presumed propaganda benefits of yellow food packets for "the good Afghan Muslims" whom the Americans aimed to rescue. In this spirit, the U.S. State Department launched a long term project to combine a heightened public relations campaign with backroom leverage over dependent Arab regimes with the aim of making the Islam of American imagining a fully compliant Islam. Though the details are murky, it appears that the ill-conceived U.S. effort seeks to influence directly the way Islam is taught in schools and projected in local and global media in a number of Islamic countries, with the aim of expunging any bases in Islam for resistance to American policies.

Thus, despite the highly publicized gestures of conciliation by officials from the American President down, it is clear that Islam has survived as the Western enemy of choice into the global age. The most recent literature on globalization, for example, takes Islam as the emblem of the dangerous resurgent nationalisms and fundamentalisms that have emerged in the backlash to globalization. Western accounts of global trends, from the most sophisticated to the most accessible, from Manuel Castells and Mark C. Taylor to Benjamin Barber and Thomas Friedman, set Islam and the olive tree against the Lexus and the unstoppable forces of the worldwide market and the information technologies that enable it. (8) Long before Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban or Hamas and Islamic Jihad became household figures around the world, the central drama of our era was cast as "Jihad versus McWorld." In his influential book Benjamin Barber allows that "although it is clear that Islam is a complex religion that by no means is synonymous with Jihad, it is relatively inhospitable to democracy and that inhospitality in turn nurtures conditions favorable to parochialism, anti-modernism, exclusiveness, and hostility to 'others,' the characteristics that constitute what I have called Jihad." (9) The mainstream media projects precisely this Islam, without any of the qualifications with which a liberal scholar like Barber tempered his negative characterization. After the unthinkable slaughter of 11 September and the murderous attacks on civilians in Israel is any other view of Islam possible or even desirable?

This question cannot be answered by mindless and ahistorical apologetics on Islam's behalf. Rather, it should be recognized that the Islam screened in the mainstream has its truth, although it is not the only truth. The story of retrograde violence in Islam's name is compelling and important. It requires stunning inattention to the obvious to deny the Islamic rationalization of the murderous logic that brought the twin towers down. V.S. Naipaul is wrong to claim that "Muslim fundamentalism has no intellectual substance to it therefore it must collapse." Criminal political acts against unarmed civilians were first thought out in an Islamic vocabulary of jihad (struggle for the faith) and jahilliyya (un-Islamic, atheist or pagan), traceable to extremist Islamist thinkers Maulana Abul Ala Maududi and, even more emphatically, to Sayyid Qutb. They established the premise that the existing order was not only un-Islamic but actively anti-Islamic and therefore open to attack. Truth is not served by denying the connection between the extremist ijtihad (an effort of interpretation of the sacred texts) of these Islamic thinkers and the violent acts of the movements to which their thinking gave rise. The violent Palestinian militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad draw on the same sources. Clearly, the extremists for their part quite purposefully engineered Islam's complicity in violence. (10)

This tradition of interpretation of Islam does point to death and destruction. Its reasoning speaks in compelling ways to the desperate inhabitants of the margins, repressed and excluded and given no stake in society nor hope for a better future in the emerging global order. Driven to despair by their conditions, they seek not a return to tradition but rather, as Castells puts it, "the formation of a new godly, communal world, where deprived masses and disaffected intellectuals may reconstruct meaning in a global alternative to the exclusionary global order." There is an undeniable affinity to deadly violence in the path they take and the identity they assume. As Farhad Khosrokbavar explains:

   When the project of constituting individuals fully participating
   in modernity reveals its absurdity in the actual experience of
   everyday life, violence becomes the only form of self-affirmation
   of the new subject.... The neo-community
   becomes then a necro-community. The exclusion from
   modernity takes a religious meaning: thus, self-immolation
   becomes the way to fight against exclusion. (11)

The most sophisticated of the global theorists, like Castells, recognize that the projects of the violent extremists emerge in complex and diverse ways through political processes, shaped by the dynamics of residual state power and the global linkages of the economy. There can be no direct readings from sacred texts to holy war. However, in their struggles against exclusion by the state and the new global order, the militants do draw power from the distorted and dangerous Islamic identity they forge in building their "communal heaven for the true believers." (12)

Yet, the recognition of the reality of extremism in Islam's name does not excuse the failure of the theorists of globalism, like those of modernization and development before them, to recognize the terrible lie represented by allowing extremists alone to stand for Islam. It is critical to recognize and acknowledge the quite distinctive and minority character of these extremist readings and their related assessments of the appropriate strategies for Islamist movements. The new literature on globalization is discredited by the failure to do so. Islam as interpreted by the extremists proves too useful as a counterpoint to globalization. Benjamin Barber, for example, allows publication of his book, provocatively entitled Jihad vs McWorld with an offensive picture of a face-veiled woman holding a can of Coca Cola. In his afterword, Barber asks readers "to find their way past the book's cover to the substantive reasoning that makes clear how little my argument has to do with Islam as a religion or with resistance to McWorld as a singular property of radical Muslims." (13) The real problem, however, is not just the insensitive cover. What makes Barber's work an emblem for the misuse of Islam by globalization theorists is the absence in his argument of the sense that the violent militants have any competition. For global theorists, all too often the extremists alone speak for Islam. The news media, it goes without saying, refuses even more emphatically to complicate the useful images of militant Islam in conflict with the global era. For ill-equipped journalists to do so would take them into unsettling domains that would disturb the mainstream interpretive frames on which they rely.

Deprived of any sense of the interpretive struggles within the Islamic world over the meaning of texts and realities, it becomes extremely difficult to appreciate just how exceptional the extremist readings are. These distorted interpretations originated from the prison "think tanks" of repressive and often violent authoritarian regimes. Extremist strategists refined and adapted them in the caldron of a brutal and at times murderous foreign occupation on the West Bank and Gaza. They wrote them in the blood drawn by torturers.

A classic in this anti-terrorism screening of Islam is the Israeli "Inside the Mind of the Suicide Bombers," trucked out for American television during the Sharon-led assault on the West Bank. The film exemplifies the mainstream screening of Islam as violence. Called a documentary, it features interviews of jailed Islamic militants by their Israeli interrogators, ostensibly providing a vehicle for them to articulate their views and reveal the character of their thinking. One prisoner explains, for example, that there is nothing in the Quran that prevents the killing of civilians, including women and children. The film's montage alternates such chilling and uncomprehending words none too subtly with shots of ordinary Muslims at prayer. The sights and sounds of mainstream Islam are thus implicated in the crimes of the violent extremists. No opportunity for mainstream Islamists to challenge extremist views is given. No mention of the depredations of occupation that damage spirits and diminish lives. No hint that torture is standard practice in such Israeli jails. Violence, viewers are led to conclude, originates in the irrational psyches of the militants, warped by the tenets and practices of Islam.

MEDIA CONCEALMENTS: ISLAM AND THE POWER OF IDENTITY

Screening Islam as violence appears settled and successful in mainstream Western and global media. That appearance is deceptive. Screening in the media age, even when supported by overwhelming power and enforced by long established domination, cannot be relied on. The word "screen" itself suggests why. Screen, as Mark C. Taylor explains through the prism of information and complexity theory, is "a strange word in which multiple meanings pass through each other without losing definition." More pointedly, screening implies not only projection but its very opposite, concealing. Even apparently successful screening is haunted by the question: What does the screening screen? (14) A powerful specter haunts the dominant screening of Islam and Muslims. Hidden from view is centrist Islam, a complex adaptive cultural tradition, known in Arabic as the Wassattiyya, that has in the past mounted a powerful yet pacific challenge to the West. It promises to do so again.

The concealment enacted by screening Islam as violence directly serves obvious political ends. It focuses attention on violent minorities that can be suppressed by superior Western power. It hides the vast Islamic mainstream that represents the real cultural and political challenge, far more difficult to contain and far more unsettling. The projection of Islam as violence hides from view Islam as the uplifting faith and valued cultural tradition of millions of ordinary people. More pointedly, it conceals centrist Islam's impressive claim to the power of identity, both adaptable and inclusive, that has emerged as a critical political resource in our global age.

This Islam, screened from view, has taken shape "at the edge of chaos." It is delicately poised between the fixitity of extremist Islam of all types, on the one hand, and the chaos that results, on the other hand, when Muslims go so far in imitating Western models that they loose connection with indigenous cultural roots and undermine distinctive identities. This centrist Islam emerges from the broad Islamic mainstream, rather than either its extremist tributaries or the Islamist apologetics they have engendered.

This article takes the work of a group of Egyptian Islamist intellectuals who call themselves New Islamists us a particularly significant representative of this Islamic centrism hidden from view by projections of Islam as violence. This New Islamist School of scholars and public figures has produced an impressive, lived interpretation of Islam for our global age. Their centrist stance has a broad transnational appeal and importance. When brought into view, their work suggests the outlines of one of the most promising centrist Islamist projects of Islamist identity taking shape in the contemporary Islamic world. It is particularly well suited to the new social and cultural conditions of our global age.

There is no room in the usual mapping of Islam for the "creative between" from which such a centrist Islam emerges. Openness to their environment is what makes it possible for centrists like the New Islamists to take advantage of feedback and feed forward loops. They reach back to draw on the Islam of higher purposes and values rather than specific institutions or behaviors. At the same time, the school extends forward into the new realities of the Information Age. Yet, their creativity cannot be read mechanically either from the heritage nor the environment. The feedback and feed forward loops that their openness makes possible accelerate until things reach the "tipping point" where more becomes different. This is when "emergence" occurs and new and unpredictable forms take shape. The Islam of the center is neither a replay of the past nor a scripted imitation of the Western experience. This centrist way of seeing things and engaging the world involves both determination and chance. In this sense, the istiqlaf (the role of humankind to serve as God's vice-regent on Earth) of the New Islamists relies on flexible interpretations of the sacred texts and contemporary realities. These interpretations provide foundations that move. They are moving in that believers feel and respond to Islam's timeless values. They are also moving in the quite different sense that the Islamic moorings are sufficiently flexible and adaptable to allow the Wassattiyya as a complex adaptive system to enter into what Gell-Mann calls "the huge space of possibilities" of the global age. (15)

Projections of Islam as violence screen not only the New Islamists but all other such Islamist centrists from view. Hostility to Islam is served by instead accepting the claims by criminal minorities to speak in its name. This misrepresentation justifies assault on the Islamic mainstream. In the authoritarian political realm of Arab politics Islam everywhere inspires the forces of opposition. It is feared by undemocratic governments. On the global level, it is centrist Islam that offers a plausible, alternative civilizational path to the future. Precisely for this reason it is the indirect target of the over-reaching West. Islam of the mainstream and the power of Islamic identity which it carries represents the real challenge to an arrogant West and the repressive regimes it sustains. It does so by its capacity to promote distinctive civilizational projects of its own. These projects are not tied to the West either by reaction or imitation. They are threatening but only in the sense that they hold out to the peoples of the Islamic world the promise of a future of their own making.

In a regional and global climate marked by violent confrontations of all kinds, explanations for the murderous attacks of the militants offers neither the only nor the most difficult challenge to understanding. In a context marked by so much violence the resort to terror and its intellectual roots in distortions of Islam can be established easily enough. The real intellectual puzzle, it is argued here, is how Islam, in the face of all this violence, has nevertheless served to inspire humane responses, pacific though not pacifist to the new global conditions. Such positions distinguish between criminal violence and the universally recognized right of resistance to the white terror of repressive regimes or foreign occupation. These Islamist projects rely on reason and welcome science and progress. They embrace the market and democratic politics. At the same time, they reject the notion that the interested Western incarnations of these values represent their only possible forms. They generate creative Islamist alternatives. Despite its incessant screening in the Western media, the distorted and criminalized Islam of the networks of violent groups, with its deadly appeal to criminal minorities around the world, is not the only Islam. Nor is it the Islam most important nor most worthy of sustained attention by scholars. What does demand analysis is Islam's capacity to inspire hope for peaceful social transformation and rightful resistance in the face of all this violence.

There are, of course "many Islams," or to be more precise, many interpretations of Islam. Remarkably, alongside the denizens of caves, the Islamic world has produced "radicals of the center" who renounce violence and look to peaceful transformation. Islam is implicated in their dreams, too. They move comfortably through the new public spheres of our electronic age, to join other prophets of reconstruction and reconciliation around the globe. Everywhere the centrists of the Islamic wave challenge the claim of the criminal minority to speak for Islam. The Islamic mainstream, or Wassattiyya, contests the interpretations of the violent extremists and formulates political strategies that challenge their indiscriminate violence. Yet, the centrists, or so it seems, never make "news that's fit to print." The coverage of reactions in the Islamic world to 11 September was no exception.

The militants and their sympathizers, celebrating the murderous attack on U.S. civilians, dominated the front pages of the Western media. The same clip of Palestinians, especially children, who cheered in the streets at news that America had been struck was repeatedly shown. Where are those in the Islamic world, the experts intoned, with the sense of morality and the courage to condemn the crime against humanity committed in New York? Finally, on 17 October after more than a month of this endless propagandizing against Islam, the words of Islam's moderate and generous heart reached readers of the New York Times. However, the Time's foreign reporters were apparently engaged elsewhere. The Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty brought the news of the response of Islam's centrists to the attention of readers. In a full-page advertisement, the fund reminded readers that many Muslims were among the "innocent victims of the terrorist attacks." In their memory, the fund presented seven quotations from the world's most prominent Muslim leaders, all condemning the attacks, though apparently in ways unworthy of normal news coverage.

Of the statements that had somehow eluded the New York Time's foreign reporters and editorial writers, the statement by leading New Islamists of Egypt stands out. Key figures in this intellectual school of Islamist centrists denounced unequivocally the attacks on the Twin Towers. On 27 September, Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawy, Tareq al-Bishry, Muhammad Selim al-'Awa and Fahmy Huwaidy issued afatwa (religious ruling) that declared "the terrorist acts ... considered by Islamic law ... [constitute] the crime of 'hirahah' (waging war against society)." All three authors belong to the New Islamist circle of centrist thinkers who have been active in very public ways in Egypt during the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. Against the odds, in authoritarian landscapes disfigured by systematic violations of basic human rights and the threats of extremists, these thinkers and public figures of the New Islamist School have left an impressive public record of speaking and acting on behalf of reason and science, democracy and human rights, and economic development strategies that aim to close the gap between "provocative wealth" and the poor. They aim for radical but peaceful social transformation from below. By any reasonable calculus, these "radicals of the center" have demonstrated that Islam provides the cultural and moral resources to meet the challenges of the global age. (16) They have elaborated a collective interpretation of Islam that manifests itself in ways subject to verification "in human acts that take place in human history and society." (17) Islam, understood in this way, makes no claim to be the only "genuine" form in some abstract and unverifiable sense. Rather, this fully human ijtihad of Islam leaves a clear record that can be dispassionately reviewed and assessed. Yet, the actions of this New Islamist School for the most part remain unseen and their words fall on deaf ears in the West. Their record is screened from view in ways that are hard to consider disinterested. As a result of this and other such concealments, Islamic canasta has left little trace on Western understandings of Islam.

This willed, Western ignorance of the pursuit of peaceful remaking and repair in Islam's name requires explanation. The centrists of the Islamic wave have a fatal flaw from the dominant Western perspective. They vigorously advocate the maximum autonomy possible from the domination of the West for the peoples' of the Islamic world. Moreover, their condemnation of the crimes of the Islamic extremists does not translate into forgiveness for the violence of the West, particularly the United States. Repeatedly, their works raise awkward questions. Is the American bombing of the only pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan that provided medicine for more than half the country on the charge that it was making chemical weapons, later proven false, any less a "war on society" than the destruction of the World Trade Center? By what logic should the world grieve less for the children of Iraq who are dying by the hundreds of thousands as a result of the Western blockade than they mourn for the innocents slaughtered in New York? Is not colonization i.e., the appropriation of land and water and the displacement of an indigenous people, an act of violence that should be resisted? Is that crime less egregious because those who perpetrate it have themselves been victimized in even more inhuman ways by Europeans? By what authority is "moderation" declared to mean acquiescence in the relentless Israeli settlement of the Occupied Territories under the cover of a "peace process"? For opposing all forms of illegal and criminal violence, whether by the powerful or the weak, the New Islamists earn the active and dangerous enmity of the violent criminal groups in the Islamic world who cloak themselves in Islam. For that same offense, compounded by their critical independence and advocacy of autonomous development, they are actively undermined or willfully ignored by the West.

The New Islamists do not return the compliment. They pay close and respectful attention to developments in the West, although they persist in understanding them according to their own lights. Nothing demonstrates the independence of mind of these radicals of the Center more clearly than their response to 11 September. Their remarkable statements on those events bears close scrutiny. (18) "Our hearts bleed for the attacks that have targeted the World Trade Center, as well as other institutions in the United States," declared Yusuf al-Qaradawy in his first response to the terror that struck New York. Qaradawy based his condemnation of the murders on the Quranic verse that says "that if anyone slew a person--unless for murder or for spreading mischief in the land--it would be as if he slew the whole people; and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he save the life of the whole people." (19) Even in times of war, Muslims are allowed to kill only those with whom they are fighting, sparing women, children, and the aged. To reinforce that point, Qaradawy cited the Prophet Muhammad's judgment that for torturing a cat to death, a woman merited condemnation to Hell. If Islam thus called for the protection of animals, how much more deserving were the lives of human beings who are "God's vice-regent on earth." (20)

In his statement, Qaradawy explicitly noted that this condemnation of the murder of American civilians came "despite our strong oppositions to the biased American policy towards Israel on the military, political and economic fronts." Qaradawy pointed to the suffering of the Palestinians under occupation, bereft of a state or an army to protect them and enduring death and the destruction of their homes and property, leaving "innocent orphans wailing behind." Still, Qaradawy insisted that not even active American complicity in this record of Israeli oppression could justify the murders of civilians in New York.

The nuanced character of the New Islamist response to 11 September was ignored in a West far more interested in the extremist opinions of the violent militants. The balance and moral clarity of the New Islamist response emerged even more clearly in the lengthy fatwa issued on 27 September. (21) This ruling responded to a very specific inquiry by the most senior Muslim chaplain in the United States Armed Forces. The chaplain asked whether it was permissible for Muslim Americans to participate in the military campaign in response to the attacks on New York. The ruling declared unequivocally that American Muslims should serve in the armed forces of their country, even during a U.S. war with a Muslim country. The influential fatwa surprised and angered many in the Arab Islamic world, familiar with Qaradawy's record of outspoken criticism of the misuses of American power. (22) In this controversial and courageous ruling, Qaradawy was joined by Fabmy Huwaidy, Tareq al-Bishry, and Muhammad Selim al-'Awa, all part of the New Islamist School, along with two other Islamic scholars.

"All Muslims," the fatwa declared unequivocally, "ought to be united against all those who terrorize the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason." From the perspective of Shari'a and fiqh, the scholars indicated that guilty of the assault on New York should be judged and punished like those who "wage war on God and His Messenger and do mischief on earth...." (23) The scholars then apprised Muslims serving in the American armed forces and affected by the ruling of their responsibility "to make this stand and its religious reasoning well known to all their superiors, as well as to their peers...." It was important that they do so in order to convey "the true nature of the Islamic teachings that have often been distorted or smeared by the media." Given this judgment in the light of Shari'a and fiqh, the scholars concluded that it was imperative to "apprehend the true perpetrators of these crimes, as well as those who aid and abet them through incitement, financing or other support." Muslims are called "to participate in this effort with all possible means, in accord with God's (Most High) saying: "Help ye one another in righteousness and piety, but help ye not one another in sin and rancor." (24) By this reasoning, Muslim Americans were enjoined to serve in the armed forces of their country, even if that should mean fighting against their fellow Muslims.

This forthright condemnation of the terrorists did not, however, mean support for the American military response to 11 September. Rather, the fatwa called for the criminals to be brought to "justice in an impartial court of law and to be punished to deter them and others like them who easily slay the lives of innocents, destroy properties and terrorize people." The New Islamists consistently insisted that the proper course of action should be in line with the rule of law rather than the vigilante justice, even though they recognized that, like critics of American policy around the world, they had no power to enforce this preferred alternative. Moreover, the New Islamist scholars did not gloss over the anguish their ruling might cause to American Muslim serving in the military, especially given the ambiguities of a war where it would very likely be impossible to differentiate between "the real perpetrators who are being pursued and the innocents who have committed no crime at all." Despite their strong reservations about the way the United States had chosen to react, the New Islamists nevertheless explained that the American Muslim has no choice but to follow orders, otherwise his allegiance and loyalty to his country could be in doubt. The American Muslim, the fatwa stated simply, "could not enjoy the privileges of citizenship, without performing its obligations."

How much sense did it make to talk of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West, when Muslims by the thousands served in the American military while seeking moral guidance from the leading scholars of the global Islamic community? In their own far more nuanced thinking about the new complexities that the global age imposed, the New Islamists called for "positive cooperation for the common good, the cultivation of mutual interests and joint action to find new formulas by which nations could relate to each other." (25) [Emphasis added] For inspiration to this required new thinking and new international behavior, they turned to that evocative Quranic verse where God speaks to all mankind, not just to Muslims: "Oh Mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that you may despise each other)." (26)

All too familiar with the disappointing history of Muslims and human beings everywhere in responding to that message, the New Islamists recognize that ours remains a violent and unjust world, marked by terrible conflicts and an unacceptable gap between the poor and the rich, the powerful and the weak where we can scarcely hope to know each other. In the face of these realities and as Islamist intellectuals, they call for a "new ijtihad, liberated from the remnants of history and from the imprints of these remnants on our heritage of fiqh." (27) The New Islamist response to the events of 11 September displayed just how bold and nuanced that ijtihad would have to be in order to honor the inclusive spirit of the Quran as they read it and the realities of the global age as they understood them.

The Islam of the virulent, extremist minority mirrors the worst of dominant structures. It is vigorously opposed by the inclusive and forward-looking Islam of the radical center. Groups like the New Islamists who are an outgrowth of the Wassatiyya tradition take their guidance from the core values and higher purposes of civilizational Islam. Moreover, they do so with a flexibility that makes them uniquely attuned to the new conditions of the global age. It is perhaps hard to recognize them as a force for progressive change because, as Castells suggests, "our historical vision has become so used to orderly battalions, colorful banners, and scripted proclamations of social change." (28) In place of the old ideological certainties, the New Islamists for their part offer a tentative and flexible interpretive project, inclusive and open to the world. In place of the elitist vanguard that worked from the top down with a fixed scenario of progress, they appear as cultural figures who look instead to broad social transformation from below, centered in the educational and symbolic spheres.

Though largely unnoticed in the West, for decades Islam's centrists have been lending their voices to the condemnation of criminal political violence. Inspired by istiqlaf, God's charge to humankind to "build the world" through the message of Islam, such groups have not hesitated to reject the world view of the Islamic militants who set "dar al Islam" violently against "dar al harb." They champion a model of gradual social transformation. They seek development with a strategy that begins with educational reform, based on reason and science. They speak out against the resort to violence in their own societies, countering the distorted views that prompt militant attacks on the arts, non-Muslims and women. The work of this vanguard of the Wassattiyya is so powerful because they have understood the essential reality of our time: the unprecedented speed of change that is transforming all aspects of our lives. (29) They have correctly identified taqlid (imitation) and the rigidity of ideas and institutions it causes as the most destructive demon of the age of speed. They have understood that there is little to distinguish the imitation of others, notably Westerners, from the rigid repetition of historic formulas. Neither engenders the creative thought and action that the new age requires. Finally, they have pioneered in the development of alternative social arrangements created out of complex and adaptive networks. In fact, their record of public activities provides important lessons that can contribute to our efforts to "provide an account of the distinctive operational rules and principles of networks." (30) I judge understanding of these new cultural codes as they are being developed around the globe the most pressing political, intellectual, and moral challenge of the global age. In teaching these lessons, Islamist centrists help explain the mystery of centrist Islam's stunning adaptive capacities. Does it make any sense to simply hide these Islamist achievements from view with the incessant projections of Islam as violence? Is such screening of centrist Islam and the power of identity it engenders even possible?

THE DUPLICITY OF SCREENS: ISLAM AND THE MEDIA IN NETWORK SOCIETY

The screening of Islam as violence illuminates the duplicity of media screening. It both projects and conceals at the same time. Moreover, the duplicity of screens emerges as a far more complex phenomenon than the discussion so far might suggest. The contrasting images of the Islam of violence and the Islam of the radical center do not stand apart from one another and in sharp opposition, as the analysis thus far might misleadingly suggest. It is not a simply question of alternating, contrasting visualizations. In fact, projecting is actually implicated in concealing, just as concealing always unavoidably involves projecting. This complexity of screening in the media age makes the propagandistic use of screening far more treacherous than standard interpretations by media analysts most often suggest. More generally, it appears that the interpretive strategies that dominated the last three decades of the twentieth century, including the social constructionism of Foucault and the deconstruction of Derrida, introduced into Middle East studies by Edward Said, have remained tied to a textual notion interpretation that can go only so far in understanding how meaning is conveyed through the new electronic networks. In parallel fashion, the older political economy approaches to the media have not always kept pace with revolutionary transformations of the world economy. In the seventies a new form of capitalism began to take shape in the United States, variously labeled post-industrial, late modern, or globalist. Manuel Castells has argued persuasively that this new political economy formation, germinated in the Silicon Valley, has in turn created a new form of society, the network society of the Information Age. While there are important debates about the new form of society, there is near unanimity about the primacy the media enjoys in this emerging social formation. What must now be interpreted is a turbulent and ever more complex media field where image, sound, and fragments of texts intermingle in chaotic ways to create meaning. The challenge, as Taylor puts it, is not simply to describe empirically the new networks in which we are enmeshed but rather to understand their distinctive logic and cultural codes, expressed above all in the media. That task has only just begun with promising initiatives in information and complexity theory. Enough has been achieved to allow a preliminary exploration of the implication of these new theoretical insights for screening Islam in the global age.

Inevitably, the starting point must be the transformation of the media itself. Though global in its reach, the new media is concentrated in a handful of conglomerates as never before. Finally, despite its apparent diversity, the global media is in fact almost as completely dominated by the sole American superpower as the closely related field of military technology. The new realities of concentrated ownership and U.S. control make the idea of a mainstream that dominates the news all the more compelling. Americans themselves get their news overwhelmingly from CNN, the major television networks and the news services, alongside the leading morning newspapers. To a surprising degree, so does the rest of the world. Mainstream news in the U.S. respond across the board to the market dictates of "bottom line journalism" which, among other things, has reduced foreign coverage, emphasized opinion over factual reporting, and made the news less critical than ever before of the government and major corporations. The news now provides less reporting and more shouting of opinions by talking heads that generally represent the very limited range of the officially constructed right and left. Incessantly cited opinion polls, scientific and otherwise, simply provide instantaneous measures of popular prejudices that is then recycled as news. A proliferation of news programs, in much the same spirit, has adopted the format of professional wrestling, with stylized confrontations that entertain rather than inform. Personalities inevitably come center stage, rather than complex historical or political conditions. The message is kept astonishingly simple. George Bush's clumsy demonizations of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and crude characterizations of the war on terrorism as a conflict of good and evil precisely reflects the new style. The issue is Arafat's personal qualities of leadership rather than the impossible circumstances of a Palestinian people under occupation by one of the world's leading military powers, backed by the sole superpower. Essentially, the worst of American parochialism and the American style of personality politics is now beamed worldwide and projected as "globalism."

The Islam screened in this mainstream media is the object of scarcely concealed contempt and thinly veiled hostility. Denied access to the military theaters in Afghanistan and the West Bank, reporters all the more easily fell back on mainstream wisdom about the Islamic world. Editorial opinion, the barometer of the thinking behind the news, overwhelmingly offers one-sided support for right-wing Israeli policies. The Israeli triumph appears overwhelming. Language is steadily adjusted to the Israeli line. Any mention of "occupation" disappears. The West Bank and (Gaza emerge as "contested" rather than "occupied." "Israelis consistently retaliate and respond," while Palestinians "attack." Illegal colonial settlements become "Jewish neighborhoods." The drums for Israel beat incessantly that the issue is terror and suicide bombers in Islam's name rather than occupation and aggressive colonization.

Palestinians, in contrast, have been hindered in this arena as in others by their impossible condition as a dispersed and occupied people, compounded by the limitations of PLO leadership. Astute Palestinian intellectuals leaders, such as Hanan Ashrawi and Edward Said, frankly acknowledge this much. Yet, these media analyses that focus on shortcomings and limitations, measured by the American and Israeli standard, whether by specialists or engaged parties, do not give us the last word on this "privileged space of politics" in the emerging global network society.

The most recent interpretive work, part of globalization theory and focused on electronic rather than print media, leans against these unduly pessimistic findings. The electronic media, it turns out, cannot impose political choices in quite the way that studies based primarily on content analysis that measures intent and the political economy of ownership would lead us to believe. The electronic media are now far too varied and elusive to play quite so docile a role. Moreover, a stronger sense is emerging of "the independence and commonsense of collective public opinion in most circumstances." As Castells argues, the linkages to political positions and ideologies are highly complex and indirect. Moreover, the assumed passivity of audiences is giving way to a more subtle understanding that envisions a "two-way process of interaction between the media and their audience concerning the actual impact of messages, which are twisted, appropriated, and occasionally subverted by the audience." (31)

In his path breaking analysis of network culture, Mark C. Taylor emphasizes the logic of these "undecidables" of the ubiquitous screens of our media age. Taylor writes: "A screen, then, is more like a permeable membrane than an impenetrable wall; it does not simply divide but also joins by simultaneously keeping out and letting through. As such, a screen is something like a mesh or net forming the site of passage through which elusive differences slip and slide by crossing and crisscrossing. But a screen is also a surface on which images, words, and things can be displayed. Every surface is actually a screen that hides while showing and shows while hiding." (32)

The subversive potential of screening Islam as violence found classic expression in a striking incident from the Egyptian regime's own war against terrorism. (33) In an effort to confirm the official view that the violence of the militants had its roots in deranged psyches and common criminality, rather than any shortcomings of government policies, the regime arranged in 1994 an interview with a so-called "repentant terrorist." The exhibition backfired when the exhibited terrorist managed to do more than confirm the official version of the origins of terror. On the surface, the government effort went well. Extremism was given a face and the young man a carefully controlled opportunity to tell "his story" in ways that verified official views of the nature of terrorism and justified its ruthless suppression. Quite unexpectedly, however, the television medium carried an excess of meaning that created an opportunity, for the attentive public at least, to see more in that face than what was intended and to hear more in that voice than could be spoken.

The engaging public performance fixed attention just long enough for second thoughts to take shape about where criminal responsibility actually lay. Speaking a polished yet unpretentious Arabic, drawing without strain on the classical language of the Quran, the "terrorist" quickly established himself as an excellent speaker of obvious intelligence, personal dignity, and even charisma. However dissolute his final destination, 'Abdul Baqi established that his journey began as the genuine religious quest of a deeply devout seventeen year old. A young boy of obvious talent found all avenues for advancement closed in a deteriorating school system in the neglected province of Fayyum. He found intellectual stimulation instead in the study circles around a mosque where the writings of such extremist thinkers as the Pakistani Abul A'la al-Maududi and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb circulated. Qutb's influence in particular marked a pathway to extremism that led the young man into the underground. He spent more than a decade and a half engaged in criminal and terrorist attacks on society. The way back was opened up for 'Abdul Baqi reading Shaikh Muhammad al-Ghazzaly, a leading New Islamist, whose work opened his eyes to the distortions of extremist thinking. The regime had hoped to use the testimony of the repentant terrorist to legitimize a generalized assault on the lslamist wave, including its moderate center. Instead, the interview with 'Abdul Baqi, in spite of its official scripting, registered the contrary position that the only real antidote to terrorism was serious reform that improved conditions, along with education in Islam rightly understood.

Israel's war on terrorism, waged as much in the media as by incursions against the defenseless Palestinians, registered equally unexpected instances of the duplicity of screening. Israel had great success in framing the news to advance its cause and in using terrible power to impose its will. Still, powerful images and sounds, carried by the very media that adopt pro-Israeli position, signal defiance and refusal. Veteran Israeli leftist Uri Avnery provides two compelling examples in Arafat's humiliation and the Jenin resistance. With rhetorical flourish, Avnery nevertheless suggests how the images, sounds, and smells that found their way out of the West Bank through the new information networks undercut Sharon's purposes. The Israeli Defense Forces intended to annihilate the Palestinian nation under the cover of destroying the terrorist infrastructure. Instead, Avnery avers, "they have created the foundations of the Palestinian nation and the Palestinian state." Avnery explains:

   The people saw their fighters in Jenin and believe that they are
   far greater heroes than the Israeli soldiers, protected as they
   are inside their heavy tanks. They saw their leader in the
   historic TV sequence, his face lighted by a single candle in his
   dark, surrounded office, ready for death at any moment, and
   compares him with the Israeli ministers, sitting in their offices
   far from the battle-front, surrounded by hordes of bodyguards.

Thus national pride is engendered. Avnery also recounts what he found in Jenin:

   105 years ago, the day after the First Zionist
   Congress in Basel, Theodor Herzl, wrote in his diary: "In
   Basel 1 founded the State of the Jews." This week, Ariel
   Sharon should note in his diary: "In Jenin 1 founded the State
   of the Palestinians."

   Of course, he did not mean to. Quite the contrary, his
   intention was to destroy the Palestinian nation, its institutions
   and leadership, once and for all, leaving only bits and pieces,
   human wreckage that could be disposed of anywhere.

   In practice, something quite different happened.
   Faced with the onslaught of the biggest military machine in
   the region and the most modern arms in the world, submerged
   in a sea of suffering, surrounded by bodies, the Palestinian
   nation straightened its back as never before.

   In the small refugee camp near Jenin a group of
   Palestinian fighters from all the organizations gathered for a
   battle of defense that will be enshrined forever in the hearts of
   all Arabs. This is "the Palestinian Massada" as an Israeli
   officer called it, alluding to the legendary stand of the
   remnants of the great Jewish rebellion against Rome in the
   year 71 AD.

   When the international media cannot be kept out
   anymore and the pictures of horror will be published, two
   possible versions may emerge: Jenin as a story of massacre, a
   second Sabra and Shattila, and Jenin, the Palestinian
   Stalingrad, a story of immortal heroism. The second will
   surely prevail. (34)

Such unintended subversions in the Israeli and Western coverage of Palestinian resistance illustrate the kinds of insights about screening that the new interpretive strategies provide. By drawing on information theory and focusing on the vastly expanded electronic media, rather than texts, they provide a new and more complex way of understanding how meaning emerges from electronic screens. What is screened is always both "information" with an intended message and background "noise" whose disturbing presence can never be quite eliminated. The information and noise are implicated in each other. (35) The intended humiliation of the Palestinian leadership and the crushing of the armed resistance could not be projected without at the same time providing resources to subvert those very intentions.

CONCLUSION: ISLAM, THE MEDIA AND THE PROCESS OF INFORMATIONAL POWER

The media sphere, as the privileged space of politics, is one of turbulence, chance, and emergence. These uncertainties and the creative possibilities they harbor can be constrained. They cannot be eliminated nor even effectively disciplined. Not even the deep-seated cultural hostilities to Islam nor the impressive resources of the Israeli propaganda machine can tame the turbulence, stimulated by the extraordinary expansion of travel and communication networks. The mainstream media can be dominated and manipulated, as the derogations of Islam and the dehumanizations of the Palestinians attest. More can and must be done, in the interest of truth and justice, to challenge these manipulations. At the same time, the limits of even the most successful news management should also be recognized and more fully exploited. What are the implications of these unintended, aleatory elements carried by the same media networks that support domination?

As more and more people are drawn into alternative media channels, unprecedented opportunities open up. As Taylor points out, "the mix of worlds, words, sounds, images, and ideas become much more dense and diverse. When this media-mix approaches the boiling point, multiple cognitive and cultural changes become inevitable." But they remain unpredictable. Not all energies should go into reactive attempts to match and counter each distortion of Islam or denigration of Palestinian resistance. A decentered, variegated media strategy that aims simply to establish presence should be the aim. The appearance in the media of Islam as identity and Palestinian civil society as a living reality, no matter what form it takes, will itself be a victory. Such changes in representation are possible, though not predictable. Acts of symbolic contestation can and should be mounted from whatever sites emerge, especially those far from the seats of power and therefore less subject to domination. Given the new multiform and interconnected media, the circulation of alternative symbolic meanings registered on the margins in alternative electronic networks and grassroots communities around the globe will be impossible to control. There is promise in their unsettling effects.

Shifts in the chaotic media sphere are precipitated in two specific ways. Frequently, it is simply a matter of too many discrepancies between simple media framings and the rich and varied data from diverse sources and experiences that demand new ideas and concepts. In such cases the shifts in interpretive schemata can be dramatic and total if a new and more adequate flaming of experience presents itself. At other times, the reverse occurs. The networks of travel and communication expose viewers who are screening the news to an unruly proliferation of interpretive frameworks that give rise to nagging doubts about even the most insistently presented, single perspective. Moreover, the inherent duplicity of all screenings as noise and information, as projections and concealments becomes itself a vehicle for expanding creative possibilities to break the stranglehold of the manipulated mainstream. Understanding of the new logic and cultural codes of network society, and particularly of the crucial media space of politics, can help cultivate and facilitate the conditions for emergence of suppressed alternatives and unforeseen possibilities.

These insights should not be read as a call to abandon struggles for a purposive media strategy to combat the denigration of Islam and the demonization of Palestinians. Rather, they suggest the need simply to recognize that purpose will always be shadowed by chance in network culture. As Taylor puts it, "at the cusp of purpose and chance, words, images, and symbols are thrown together to create new meanings that are as unpredictable as they are uncontrollable." Some of the most important successes in these related projects will come by surprise. By this understanding, events are not read as meaningful by pre-existing scripts. The process by which new meanings emerge is far more chaotic. "Meanings," as Taylor notes, "are interactive events." Unpredictable combinations and juxtapositions occur that create, on the screen, new meanings that more often than not take shape in multiple media. "Rather than viewing events as meaningful," Taylor concludes, "meaning must be understood as an event." (36)

Israel's war on terrorism is as much a 21st century media event as a 19th century colonial incursion. In the mainstream media, the dominance of the Israeli view of events has been near total, giving rise in the Arab world to all the usual and always damaging conspiracy theories. In fact, however, there have been some significant changes in the media coverage, not all to Israel's advantage. Alexander Cockburn brings "this huge difference" to the fore by contrasting Sharon's wars, the first in Lebanon in 1982 and the second today on the West Bank. Cockburn recalls that "twenty years ago, at least for people living here in the United States, it was harder, though far from impossible, to get first-hand accounts of what was going on. You had to run out to find foreign newspapers, or have them laboriously faxed from London, or Paris. Reporting in the mainstream corporate press here was horrifyingly tilted into putting the best face on Israeli deeds." On coverage today, he notes mostly, it still is. "But the attempted news blackout by the Sharon government and the Israeli military simply isn't working." Accounts poured out of Jenin and the other Palestinian camps and cities on a daily basis though such Internet sources as the Electronic Intifada.

The proliferation of such media channels, especially in alternative forms, has made all the difference. A few, such as the new Arab satellite channels like Al-Jazeera have rightly received great attention. The catalogue of these contributing factors, however, is much longer and would have to include access through the Internet to the European and Israeli press, alternative Internet media channels, the periodic reports of progressive media watchdogs, the linked political networks of activists of all kinds, and the impressive transnational human rights community, among many others.

The Israelis have long understood full well that, in some very real way, the real battle for Palestine is fought in the virtual space of the media. While the Israelis have poured all their efforts into an incredible effort to dominate information and communication, the Palestinian leadership has as yet failed to act effectively on this compelling reality of the Information Age. Yet, despite Israel's dominance of the mainstream American media, the story of Israel's terrible assault on the Palestinian people in West Bank towns and refugee camps is becoming available. "information and images," Edward Said reports, "have nevertheless seeped through. The Internet has provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial eyewitness reports, as has Arab and European TV coverage, most of it unavailable or blocked or spun out of existence from the mainstream US media." To magnify that effect, Said argues that Palestine must be understood "as one of the great moral causes of our time" rather than simply "a matter of trade, or bartering negotiations, or making a career." Second, the struggle to organize opinion, waged through the media, is central and the battleground that matters most is America. Third, understanding America, including a mastery of its language, is absolutely central not only to counter the Israeli adversary, but to recognize friends, including Americans as well as Israelis. Finally, Said argues that Palestinians should recognize that their greatest victory will come "simply" from surviving as a people and a culture in the face of the Sharon led and American supported campaign to wipe them out. (37)

The focus on the media struggle in America must not be so focused on the terrible difficulties of that terrain that the opportunities it also offers are neglected. Through the prism of an understanding of network culture certain refinements in the definition of tasks ahead become clear. Vulnerabilities, especially with a perspective as unitary and insistent as the Zionist one, lie along the lines where disparities open up between the dominant explanation and the facts on the grounds. They can best be exploited by a simple and direct messages, conveyed by a story, images, and sounds that capture, for example, the realities of a 35 year occupation, the myth of Barak's generous offer, the systematic violations of Palestinian human rights, and the planned destruction of Palestinian national identity. Media Alert reports, for example, "more than 90% of network TV reporting on the occupied territories fails to report that the territories are occupied." (38) Precise measurements of this kind point not simply to an Israeli success. They also pinpoint vulnerabilities.

Especially now, with images of wanton destruction circulating around the globe and the smell of unburied corpses in the air, it is critical to focus not simply on the unfolding tragedies but also the breakthroughs that will keep the struggle alive. It is worthy of note, for example, when an establishment figure with the profile of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security advisor, bluntly compares Israeli actions to those of the apartheid South African regime in the mainstream media. (39)

The promise of Palestinian survival is not only carried by a flawed leadership and a poorly armed militia confronting a world-class military machine. There is also Ayat Akhras who was only sixteen when she blew herself up outside a supermarket in Israel. (40) The Israeli propaganda machine explains, of course, how Islam inspires such violence and how the PLO shamelessly manipulates the young especially into committing such homicidal acts. As a weapon of resistance, suicide bombing that targets civilians is immoral and counterproductive. Suicide per se, however, is not the issue. Given the extreme imbalance of power, all resistance to the Israeli occupation, including legitimate attacks on military and paramilitary forces that sustain an illegal occupation, is "suicidal." Criticism of such acts should center instead on the choice of targets for a rightful resistance to occupation, as the New Islamists and other centrist Islamist figures have made clear.

Still, when confronted by that haunting picture of Ayat in Time, even the most pragmatic strategist of resistance or, as much to the point, even the most heavily influenced by Israeli propaganda, must wonder "why we blow ourselves up?" Fortunately, the official voices of the Palestinian Authority were not the only ones that could be heard in the fleeting silence opened up by the horrifying spectacle of a beautiful child who makes her own body a deadly weapon of resistance. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist and founder of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizen's Rights told Americans, was able to tell millions of Americans how "a few weeks ago, my sister, a professional and a mother of four, was visibly shaken as she watched, on television Israeli tanks torturing the streets of a refugee camp and soldiers raping its homes. She shocked us all when she declared that she would like to become a martyr." Yes, reports Serraj, there is the promise that Muslims who sacrifice themselves for the sake of Islam would have eternal life. But, more to the point, is the desperation born of humiliation, helplessness, and the unbearable sense of shame it fosters. "What is not always said and still more rarely reported," writes Serraj, "is that in every case of martyrdom, there is a personal story of tragedy and trauma." Serraj cites the case of another young Palestinian, also a suicide bomber, who "was burning with desire for revenge. He was a tearful witness, at the age of six, to his father's beating by Israeli soldiers. He would never forget seeing his father taken away, bleeding from the nose." What have Palestinian children seen in these last months and what has it done to them? (41)

Finally, let us recognize that sometimes the most powerful voices and moving images present themselves without drama and without calculation. (42) The nine year old boy appeared out of nowhere, reported the foreign journalist. His city was under curfew and the streets were deserted. And suddenly, there he was playing soccer, oblivious to the rules and to the dangers. My Mother's worried and mad at me, he explained matter-of-factly to the woman reporter who was puzzled to find him outside. She told me not to go out but I went anyway. I know the Israeli soldiers kill people. But I just can't stay inside any longer. "I want to play." The world needs to understand the power of Islam as identity. It needs to recognize the humanity of Palestinians, their national and human rights. R also needs to hear and see, just around the comer, that nine-year Muslim boy who wants to play.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Thomas Friedman, "The Hard Truth," New York Times, 3 April 2002. Footnotes from general press coverage will be provided only for distinctive viewpoints, important for the argument of this article.

(2.) Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume II. The Power of Identity (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997), p. 311.

(3.) The most insightful synthesis of these new theoretical horizons is Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

(4.) Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume I. The Rise of Network Society (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 1996), p. 486 for the discussion of "instant wars," and Castells, The Power of Identity, pp. 310-312; 333-342 for the explanation of the phrase "information politics."

(5.) For a concise discussion of the means used, see Paul Soloman, "Bias and Fear Tilting Coverage of Israel," Fair (www.fair.org/extra/writers/ solomon), 19 April 2001.

(6.) See Albert Hourani, "Islam and the Philosophers of History," in Europe and the Middle East (London: Macmillan & Co., 1980), pp. 19-73; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), and John Esposito, The Islamic Threat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

(7.) The most impressive resources to document the corrosive impact of racist attitudes come from the Israeli left, notably the late Simha Flaphan, the late Israel Shahaq, and Uri Avnery. American scholars who have dispassionately and accurately recorded the impact of the Israeli occupation include Sara Roy, Ann Lesch, and Ian Lustick, among others.

(8.) See Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society; Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000) and Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995).

(9.) Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, p. 204.

(10.) See the interview in Newsweek International, 18 August 1980.

(11.) Cited in Castells, The Power of Identity, p. 20.

(12.) See the discussion in Castells, The Power of Identity, p. 20.

(13.) For Barber's reasoning, see the "Afterword" in Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, passim.

(14.) For an incisive synthesis of these insights in information and complexity theory, see Moment of Complexity, especially pp. 195-231.

(15.) Cited in Taylor, Moment of Complexity, p. 207.

(16.) For a detailed treatment of this distinguished school of centrist Islamist thinkers, see my Islam Without Fear, forthcoming, Harvard University Press.

(17.) For a discussion of this guideline for a reasonable approach to an Islamic community of interpretation, see Edward Said, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon), p. 41.

(18.) The complete text, in Arabic and English, of Qaradawy's statement, from which all quotations are taken, was made available on Islam-online, 13 September 2001.

(19.) Sum 5: 32.

(20.) Sura 2: 30.

(21.) The compete text, in Arabic and English, of the fatwa, from which all quotations are taken, was made available on Islam-online, 27 September 2001. See one representative report on the controversy it generated in al-Qahira, 23 October 2001.

(22.) See a representative report on the controversy it generated in al-Qahira, 23 October 2001.

(23.) Sura 5: 33.

(24.) Sura 5: 2.

(25.) Kamal Abui Magd, A Contemporary Islamic Vision: Declaration of Principles (Cairo: Dar al Sharuq, 1991), p. 48.

(26.) Sura 49: 13.

(27.) Kamal Abul Magd, A Contemporary Islamic Vision: Declaration of Principles, p. 49.

(28.) Castells, The Power of Identity, p. 362.

(29.) See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Translated by Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986).

(30.) Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, footnote 2, Chapter 2, p. 273.

(31.) Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, p. 311.

(32.) Mark Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, pp. 200-201.

(33.) This account is based on the treatment by Fahmy Huwaidy, al-Abram, 13 January 1998.

(34.) See Uri Avnery, "What I Found in Jenin." Z-Net, 14 April 2002.

(35.) See Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, especially pp. 99-124.

(36.) Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, p. 214.

(37.) Edward Said, "Thinking Ahead: After Survival, What Happens?," Z-Net, 7 April 2002.

(38.) Seth Ackerman, Extra!, January-February 2001.

(39.) Brzezinski-Kissinger Discussion, PBS, 4 April 2002.

(40.) See the account in Time, 8 April 2002.

(41.) Dr. Eyad Sarraj is a psychiatrist and founder of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights, "Why We Blow Ourselves Up: A Palestinian doctor explains why so many of his people want to be martyrs," Time, 8 April 2002.

(42.) The Electronic Intifada, in particular, has provided a wealth of such images and sounds to record the human consequences of the Israeli military reoccupation of West Bank towns.

Raymond William Baker is Professor of International Politics at Trinity College, Haverford Connecticut and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the American University of Cairo.