What would Mahatma Gandhi say to Osama bin Laden? And how would the world’s most famous terrorist defend his actions? Two very different opponents of Western imperialism exchange words about violence, nonviolence, and the future.
Like millions around the world, I found the atrocities of 9/11 abhorrent and utterly condemn such acts of terror. What drives the bombers? How do they live with their deeds? Is there no alternative to the continuing cycle of violence? No one is better qualified to advise on this than Mahatma Gandhi, the great apostle of non-violence.My imaginary exchange between him and Bin Laden tries to do two things: to comprehend at least part of the twisted worldview that inspires Bin Laden, for we cannot defeat it without understanding it; and second, to explore a neglected alternative. My Bin Laden is an intellectual construct, a metaphor, referring not so much to the real man as to a more generic pro-terror radical Islamist. – Bhikhu Parekh
Dear Mahatma Gandhi
2nd October 2003
Ever since my followers attacked the American embassy in Kenya, the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C., they and I have been declared enemies of the civilised world who can be hunted, tortured and killed like wild animals. I was not surprised by the American reaction, but I was dismayed by the hostile reactions of some of my fellow Muslims. I owe it to them to explain why we did what we did, and why we might do it again. Since every political act is unintelligible outside its historical context, I must begin with some history.
Islam is a great religion, continuous with and completing the other two Abrahamic religions. It accepts them as genuine and true religions, reveres their prophets and has always been tolerant and respectful of them. Thanks to the moral and spiritual force of its profound truths, Islam, a late historical arrival, was quickly able to win over the willing allegiance of millions of people in different parts of the world.
Christians, who have long been jealous of its appeal and resentful of its power, tried to discredit and undermine it by mocking its beliefs, vilifying its prophet and mounting crusades against it. Islam survived all these and built up large empires, the great Ottoman empire being the last.
With the rise of the modern world, Britain, France and other European countries began to industrialise. Driven by the lust for power and profit on which capitalism and imperialism is based, they conquered large parts of the world and set about reshaping their colonies in their image. The British and French overwhelmed the Ottoman empire, broke it up into artificial political units, set up corrupt rulers, kept them weak and divided, and used them to perpetuate European colonial power. After the 1939-1945 war, they deprived the Palestinians of their homeland, handed over a large part to the Jews, and created a festering source of injustice in the shape of Israel. Muslim societies have always included large Jewish communities and have been more protective of them than European societies. But giving the Jews their own state, at Palestinian expense, and in the heart of the Arab world, was unjust.
As the U.S. replaced the weakened Europeans in the 1950’s, it continued this project and designed a more subtle empire of its own. In the name of defending the west against the Soviet threat, it set-up and supported puppet regimes in many parts of the world, especially the Muslim societies of the middle east upon whose oil it had come to depend for its prosperity. It was even more partial to Israel than the Europeans were, devoting much of its foreign aid budget to it, arming it, and encouraging its expansionist ambitions.
The collapse of the Soviet Union gave the U.S. an illusion of omnipotence and removed all restraints on its hubris. The U.S. today is determined to Americanise the world and restructure every society along secular, capitalist, liberal and consumerist lines. Its troops are stationed in 120 countries, and pressure their governments to do its bidding.
Although the American empire must be fought in every part of the world, I am mainly concerned to liberate Muslim societies, not only because I belong to them but also because they constitute the weakest link in the imperial chain and my success there will set an example and inspire others. My goal is fourfold: (1) to get the Americans out of Muslim societies, (2) to destroy Israel as a separate Jewish state and create a free Palestine in which Jews can live as a protected minority, (3) to remove corrupt American stooges in Muslim societies and restructure the latter along truly Islamic principles and (4) finally to restore the earlier glory of Islam by ensuring Muslim rule in such erstwhile Muslim countries as Palestine, Bukhara, Lebanon, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, South Yemen, Tashkent and Andalucia.
Violence is the only way to achieve these goals because this is the only language the U.S. understands. Our violence has to be based on terror because ill-equipped Muslims can never match American might in open combat. Although our terrorist violence is primarily directed against the ‘icons of U.S. military and economic power’, one cannot be so fastidious as to exclude civilians. The U.S. itself has never spared civilians in its wars on us: nearly 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of U.S.-inspired sanctions.
I should make two additional points. First, our terror is reactive. We are only responding to the terrorist violence of the U.S. Americans rob us of our wealth and oil, attack our religion, trample upon our dignity and treat us as pawns in their global chess game.
Second, my followers neither kill like cowards nor make personal gains from their actions. They give up the ordinary pleasures—careers, families, even their lives—and show by their self-sacrifice that they are guided by the highest of motives. Our terrorism is moral and religious, not criminal in nature as our western critics claim. Our consciences are clear, and I say to my fellow Muslims that to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim.
Yours
Osama
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Dear Osama
1st November 2003
Listening to you, my brother Osama, I was strongly reminded of my dialogue with terrorists in my own country. As in their case, so in yours, I find your reasoning perverse and your glorification of violence utterly abhorrent.
Whether you realise it or not, you think and talk like an imperialist. You present a sanitised picture of Islamic history. All conquests and empires involve bloodshed, oppression and injustice, and yours was no different. Muslim rulers in India destroyed Hindu temples, looted Hindu property. They also destroyed traditional African cultures and sought to obliterate memories of their pre-Islamic past. And although they treated Christians and Jews better, they never granted them equal citizenship. You attack European imperialism because it ended yours, and you attack Americans because they are preventing you from reviving it. An imperialist yourself, you have no moral-right to attack the imperialist designs of others.
You keep talking about the truly Islamic society whose glory you want to revive. I do not find it at all appealing, and nor do most of your fellow Muslims. You want to combine a centralised state, an industrialised economy and nuclear weapons with a set of Islamic values and practices. This is an incoherent enterprise. Once you opt for the economic, political and other institutions of modernity, you cannot escape their logic. You would become more and more like a western society and get sucked into a process of globalization. But if you are really serious about creating a good society, you should stop measuring yourself against the West. You should start instead with the great values of Islam, relate them to the circumstances and aspirations of your people and assimilate those western values and institutions that will enrich your societies.
I have myself been a grateful student of the West, learning much from its liberal, Christian and socialist traditions and suitably integrating it into Indian ways of life and thought. You say that the West is spiritually empty and call its citizens infidels. Although the West is consumerist and militarist, many of its citizens have a strong social conscience. The concern for the poor, the welfare state, the movements for global justice and humanitarian intervention are all examples of this.
You are wrong to think that Muslims have a monopoly on spirituality. Spirituality is not about how often you pray, fast and visit the mosque, but about serving your fellow humans and living by the great virtues of humility, benevolence, tolerance and universal love. I see little evidence of this in you.
You seem to believe that Islam is perfect. But all religions contain truths and errors. Moreover, you, Osama, claim to know the true principles of Islam better than anyone else, and brook no dissent. You rule out the creative adaptation of these principles to a world vastly different to the one in which they were first articulated. And by asking the Islamic state to impose them on its subjects, you deny the latter their basic religious freedom. This is the surest way to corrupt both your religion and the state and to arrest the moral and spiritual growth of your people. A religiously based state is a sacrilege, an insult to God and to the human soul.
You blame the Europeans or Americans and never Islam for your sad predicament. Stop blaming others, and concentrate your energies on rebuilding and revitalising your societies by educating and organising the masses. You, Osama, have no patience, no plan of social regeneration, no desire to deal with the deeper causes of social decay.
While repeatedly attacking the Americans, you also keep attacking the Jews and have often expressed not only anti-Zionist but offensive anti-Semitic sentiments. I could not disagree more. Unlike you, I have lived and worked with Jews. Some Jews became my closest friends in South Africa, and one of them bought a farm where we set up an experiment in communal living.
I well know that the victims of yesterday can easily become the oppressors of tomorrow, and use their past suffering to excuse and even legitimize their brutal treatment of others. Israel has in recent years behaved in an unjust manner with the support of the U.S. Its misdeeds must be challenged, but you must not be insensitive to the effect of their past suffering on the Jews.
Finally I must turn to your terrorist methods. I find them unacceptable on pragmatic and moral grounds. They will not help you achieve your goals. There is not a single example in history of terrorists creating a humane and healthy society. Today, Osama, you use terrorism against the Americans and Muslim rulers; tomorrow your own people will use it against you and claim the same justification for it. When will this vicious circle end?
I also have moral objections to your method. Human life is sacred, and taking it is inherently evil. Besides, however fallen a human being might be, he is never so degenerate that he cannot be won over by organised moral pressure. Human beings do evil deeds because they are in the grip of evil ideas, or are driven by hatred, or because of the compulsions of their wider society which disposes them to do things they might personally disapprove of. Violence does not address any of these circumstances.
As I have shown by example, organised non-violent resistance is the only moral and effective way to fight evil. It appeals to the opponent’s sense of shared humanity, awakens his conscience, reassures him that he need fear no harm, and mobilises the power of public opinion. It also allows time for tempers to cool and reason to work, lifts both parties to a higher level of relationship, teases out what they share in common, avoids false polarisation, and leaves behind no lasting legacy of mutual hatred.
Don’t play your opponent’s game and remain trapped in the chain of action and reaction. Take upon yourself the burden of his evil, become his conscience. Take the case of the Palestinians. They have used violence. Israel has countered it with greater violence. The result is an increasing brutalisation of the two societies. Now consider what would happen if the Palestinians were to follow my advice. They would eschew all threats to Israeli citizens, acknowledge them as their brothers, appeal to their sense of justice and long history of humiliation, and get them to appreciate both the suffering they are causing to the Palestinians and the considerable damage they are doing to their own psyche and society. If necessary, they would mount well organised acts of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience to highlight their injustices.
I cannot imagine that any Israeli government, not even that of Ariel Sharon, would kill unarmed and peaceful protesters with the world watching. If it did, it would not only incur universal condemnation, including that of diaspora Jews, but also divide its own people. I am convinced too that some Israeli soldiers would disobey government orders, as some are already doing.
You might say, as some of your associates have done, that non-violence comes easily to us Hindus and is alien to the Islamic tradition. This is not true. Hindus have a long tradition of violence. It was only after a long campaign and examples of successful non-violence that I was able to bring them round to accepting it. As for Muslims, you should know that they too have a long tradition of non-violent resistance. The ferocious Pathans of the northwest frontier provinces of what is now Pakistan embraced it with great success under the guidance of my friend Abdul Gaffar Khan.
With blessings and love
MK Gandhi
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Dear Mahatma Gandhi
1st January 2004
I must confess that I had never before had a reason to read your writings or follow your life. You are not as well known in Muslim countries as you are in the West, and all I had heard was that you were a Hindu leader of India who could not command the loyalty of the Muslims and fought against the British by a passive and rather feminine method. But I was sufficiently interested by some of the things you said to go and read and reflect on your life and work. While I now see the situation a little differently, I remain unpersuaded.
You misrepresent your Indian experience and, like all moralists, extend it to societies where it does not apply. The British people were ambivalent about the empire, and some were opposed to it. By the time you came to dominate the Indian political scene, the British were exhausted, initially by the 1914-1918 war and then by the Great Depression. The events leading up to the 1939-1945 war and that war itself debilitated them further. You were therefore in the fortunate position of confronting a weak opponent who had neither the will nor the means to continue to rule over your country.
The historical context in which I have to operate could not be more different. It is dominated by a single power with a global reach, which feels triumphant after its victory in the Cold War, and thinks that it can now do what it likes. Its economy is driven by an enormous appetite for profits and the consequent desire to turn the whole world into a safe market for American goods. Its political system is dominated by money and selfish pressure groups, yet insists without the slightest embarrassment that it has a right and a duty to export it to other countries. This formidable combination of self-righteousness, missionary spirit, national self-interest, moral myopia and overwhelming power in a single country has radically transformed the world. Your ideas, Mr Gandhi, belong to a world that is dead.
It is vital that Muslim countries should unite, acquire nuclear weapons, take control of their oil wealth and lead the world in a better direction. You call this imperialism. I understand your fears and assure you that we do not seek to impose our views on others, let alone run their societies. We want to restore Islamic civilisation in the erstwhile Muslim countries, and are confident that its moral and spiritual vision will win over the allegiance of the rest of the world in time. The future belongs to us.
You reject modernity, I don’t. The modern world is here to stay, has much to be said for it, and anyone opting out of it is doomed to impotence. I do not want an alternative to modernity as you do, but an alternative modernity, a society that draws on modern technology and places it in the service of Islam. I want nuclear weapons, the modern state, industrialisation and so on, without which my people would remain at the mercy of the West. I do not want the modern secular, egalitarian and liberal culture with all its attendant evils of atheism, confused gender roles, promiscuity, homosexuality, selfishness, consumerism and so on.
Unlike you I don’t consider violence inherently evil. I judge it on the basis of its goals and its ability to realise them. Your non-violent struggle was constantly shadowed by terrorist activities, which frightened and weakened the British and must be given as much credit for achieving Indian independence as your non-violence.
You, Mr Gandhi, had no answer when Martin Buber asked what advice you would give to the Jewish victims of Hitler’s camps.
Unlike Hinduism, Islam takes a more charitable view of violence and sanctions and even enjoins it under certain circumstances. The prophet himself used violence, and so did his followers and other great Muslim religious and political leaders. Even if I were to plead for non-violence, it would not be accepted by my fellow Muslims. The Pathan followers of Abdul Gaffar Khan used it only for a while, and then abandoned it in favour of violence. I see no other way to shake the might of the Americans.
Violence is how we got rid of the Soviets in Afghanistan. America understood this and gave us all the help we needed. And it is because of this that they are now scared of the same methods being used against them. As I have said on several occasions, the struggle against the Soviets was a profound ‘spiritual experience’ for me and my fellow-fighters, and represented a decisive turning point in our way of thinking. I would rather stick to the method I and my followers have found successful than try yours. If others hit me, I hit back. I am a follower of Prophet Muhammad, not Jesus Christ.
Yours
Osama
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Dear Osama
30th January 2004
You advance the following propositions. First, Americans are embarked on an imperialist project to dominate the world. Second, Muslim societies should be reconstructed on the basis of the true principles of Islam. Third, this cannot be done without getting the Americans out of your societies and overthrowing their native collaborators. Fourth, only terrorist violence can achieve these goals.
As for the first argument, you are wrong to generalise about Americans. Some groups there fit your description, others don’t. Many Americans are deeply troubled by and critical of what their government is doing in their name, and have protested against the recent war in Iraq. Some of those who support the present administration do so because they are fearful after the events of 9/11. Their belief that their country was invulnerable to foreign attack has been shattered, and they live in fear of future attacks. Bush reassures them that his global war on terrorism will give them the security they crave, so they go along with him. As long as you keep talking the way you do, you reinforce their paranoia and support for Bush’s policy.
As for your second argument, I could not disagree more. All past and present experience confirms my view that identifying religion with the state corrupts both. Have you learned nothing from the disastrous experiences of Iran and your own ‘land of the two holy mosques,’ as you call Saudi Arabia, both of which are beginning to appreciate the need to separate religion and state?
Your third proposition is only partially true. Following our earlier discussion, I looked more closely at the history of U.S. interference in the affairs of Muslim societies. I appreciate better your view that you can’t achieve significant changes in your society without ending U.S. influence. However, removing them physically does not mean that you will be able to banish American values and views of life if your people remain enamoured of them. You can only fight ideas with ideas. You need to build a cadre of reformers and activists, work among the masses, and create a broad-based movement with the power to reconstitute your society. Once your society develops a collective sense of identity and a strong spirit of independence, America would not be able to dominate it.
Finally, you make a serious mistake in rejecting non-violence. Braving the brutality of America’s southern states, Martin Luther King used non-violence to achieve civil rights for black Americans and gave them a sense of pride and self-confidence. You say that my own countrymen used violence and that I sanctioned it. Some of my countrymen did resort to violence when provoked beyond endurance. Although I said that it was understandable, I continued to condemn it, fasted in a spirit of atonement and even apologised to the colonial rulers for it. To condone isolated acts of violence by desperate individuals is one thing; to make violence the central principle of struggle is totally different.
Even if you do not believe in non-violence, you should know by now that your methods have done an incalculable harm to your people: you have discredited a great religion. Millions now instinctively associate Islam with violence and destruction. You have given the Bush administration an excuse to unleash extensive violence and pursue a project of global assertiveness. It is time you grew out of your infantile obsession with death and destruction, abandoned your messianic zeal, and showed a bit of humility and good sense. But my religion forbids me to give up on any human being, not even on you.
Yours
MK Gandhi
This dialogue is based on a lecture first delivered at Boston University. A longer version will appear later this year in ‘The Stranger’s Religion: Fascination and Fear’ edited by Anna Lannstrom (University of Notre Dame Press).
Bhikhu Parekh is a professor of economics and political philosophy at the London School of Economics. The author of three books on Gandhi, he was appointed to the British House of Lords by the Labour Party.
