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Article Excerpt
Abstract
In the wake of the devastation of September 11, 2001, legendary Italian writer Oriana Fallaci published a mammoth article, then book, La rabbia e l'orgoglio [The Rage and the Pride], which attacked Islam as institutionalised barbarism intent on totalitarian domination of the entire planet. It's easy to dismiss Fallaci's furious outburst, but its implications need to be tackled forcefully and far-sightedly in the following respects: 1) considerable sections of public opinion in Europe share her extreme views; 2) several EU and other "western" governments, while disclaiming such views, in fact tacitly pursue immigration polices predicated on a civilisational chasm between the West and Islam; 3) there is a need for a discursive and societal space where western and Muslim version of universalism can coexist.
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The most vehement and sustained reaction in print to the destruction of the Twin Towers to appear in Italy--and perhaps anywhere in the world--was a 10,000-word article filling four full pages of the broadsheet Il Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's most venerable dailies, on 29 September, 2001. The article carried the title 'La rabbia e l'orgoglio' [The rage and the pride] and was couched in the form of a letter signed by Oriana Fallaci.
Both the content and the tone of her article, in keeping with the personality of its author, combined to raise a national uproar across Italy, but, as we shall see, its significance extends well beyond Italy's borders to involve the Western world as a whole. Before the uproar resulting from her article had fully died down, it was rekindled by the publication, on 12 December 2001, of the full version of her diatribe, under the same title, in book form. (2) This rated a scathing review by Marco Belpoliti in the May June issue of the US journal Foreign Policy, (3) but one index of the impact of the book in Italy is that it sold an unprecedented 700,000 copies in the first two weeks and that during April to June of 2002 it was back at or near the top of the Italian best-seller lists, nudging aside the Italian versions of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and Ken Follett's Thieving Magpies. (4) Sales had already topped one million, saturating the Italian readership market. La rabbia e l'orgoglio is also available as an audio CD, with Fallaci reading her own text, and was used as a discussion text in Italian schools. Fallaci's book thus represented a formidable societal force in Italy, but also beyond Italy, as translations quickly appeared in the major western languages. Fallaci was invoked in the Netherlands by Pim Fortuyn, the popular leader of a new party committed to stopping Muslim immigration into the Netherlands, before his assassination in April 2002. Whatever the intellectual failings of Fallaci's message, its popular impact cannot be ignored.
I will first, then, say something about Fallaci's message in The Rage and the Pride regarding September 11th, and then something about Fallaci herself, before attempting to consider the questions which she herself raises as well as the questions which are raised for us by her astonishing provocation: and by 'us' I mean us academics as a profession implicitly committed to civilised values of truth, knowledge, understanding and equity, with a loyalty to humanity as a whole rather than to any one of its subcategories. Is it possible for us to find a concretely universalist space for debate--in other words, one that subsumes positions that are in conflict with our own cultural traditions? My discussion will partly ride on the backs of the more serious responses to Fallaci's invective delivered by Italian intellectuals.
In discussing Fallaci's message, I will address first its content and then its tone, although of course the two are inseparable.
In substance, then, Fallaci proclaims, in the forty-page preface 'Ai lettori' [To the readers] that opens the volume, that she had broken the silence to which she had vowed herself for the past ten years because 'there are moments, in Life, in which to keep silent becomes blameworthy and to speak out becomes obligatory. (5) She then writes that Usama Bin Laden and the images of his supporters round the world have proved her right in asserting in the wake of September 11 that for decades an Islamic Jihad or Holy War has been conducted against the West and that 'the adherents of Islamic fundamentalism are proliferating like protozoa' (6). But, Fallaci asserts, there is more to it than that, for Bin Laden and his like are not the real protagonists of this war" they are just the visible tip of that immovable Mountain called Islam that has not budged for 1400 years and that is jealous of Western prosperity and blames the West for all the ills and disabilities which affect Islamic countries. The fundamentalists and the terrorists cannot be distinguished from the body of Islam as a whole. 'Nine out often Imams are spiritual leaders of terrorism' (7).
Thus, Fallaci's preface, which was written later than the main body of the volume containing the unabridged version of the article, goes further than what Fallaci had originally asserted on 29 September. There she had indicted the extremists of Islam, but had not explicitly accused Islam as a whole of being irrevocably hostile to the West. The difference, however, is not great, given that in the article she had already equated Islam with barbarism and denigrated virtually every manifestation of Islam and denied it the status of a civilisation.
The Rage and the Pride proper begins, after the prefatory forty pages, with Fallaci recalling the horror of the destruction of the World Trade Centre, almost within view of her Manhattan apartment, and denying the suicidal hijackers the title and dignity of martyrdom. The destruction of the Twin Towers with their occupants is her cue to pen a ringing affirmation of the United States as the nation unequivocally founded on libertarian and egalitarian principles, the open society par excellence, and, whatever its faults, the champion of principles of freedom, justice and humanity round the world, on whom the future prospects of a humane and rational international order depend. In its uninhibited eloquence and uncritical fervour, this part of Fallaci's message exactly expresses the ideal view that the United States would like to have of itself, and the view propounded by its present leaders.
Now follows the alarm call. Brushing aside the wonted and expected accusations of racism, she proclaims that for at least twenty years she has been warning that a war of religion is in progress, a world-wide offensive by Islam dedicated to ensuring 'the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization' (8). She wholeheartedly takes on board Samuel P. Huntington's hypothesis of The Clash of Civilizations, but neither naming Huntington nor, apparently, having read him, as she calls it 'the clash of the two civilizations,' whereas Huntington's thesis is marginally more subtle than that, and more general. (9) She outlines a thumbnail sketch of western civilisation that takes in classical Hellenism, Christ, the Renaissance and the achievements of modern science and contrasts this with Islamic civilisation which she regards as not being worthy of the title. She quotes Usama Bin Laden as saying that 'the whole of planet Earth must become Muslim' and asserts that 'there are tens of thousands of Usamas ... they are everywhere, and the most militant ones are those in the West' (10).
As her credentials, she presents horrific or otherwise astounding episodes of Islamic barbarism witnessed by her or involving her during her career as a prominent interview journalist and war correspondent who met the world's leaders and travelled widely in...
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