Suspicion

There has been, and still is, so much talk and literature on the 9/11 WTC incident from the American perspective that one often forgets how that incident has affected others around the world.

To start with, there is a continuing American suspicion of Arabs and virtually anybody with a Muslim name or anyone who may look like an Arab – including, foolishly, Hindus and Sikhs from India – and the fear it generates both in the West and in Muslims. Then, there is America’s ‘War on Terror’ – an idea which is equally abstract and absurd, shifting strategies from Afghanistan to Iraq and back to Afghanistan, with no specific result in sight.

On the other hand, there is Islamic fundamentalism – a metaphor, at least according to the West, for old-world regressive thinking and practice, made acutely prominent by the deeds of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Mutawas in Saudi Arabia. To these and many other Muslims around the world, there is a suspicion that America and the white Europeans are really the oppressors, while they are the persecuted lot.

This point and counterpoint of suspicion plays in the hearts of people from both sides of the ‘war’: the aggressors and the victims. Each living in their ‘reality’ of what the ‘truth’ is… while terrorism continues to take centre-stage.