It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Thus, Charles Dickens famously opened his literary biography of revolutionary Europe. A Tale of Two Cities is a fabulous yarn about London and Paris. At that point in time, the two European cities were the twin-summit of western civilisation in all its glory and glittering contradictions. Yet Dickens, the supreme poet of urban squalor and muse of radical discontents, might as well have been writing about our own age, except that New York and London appear to have replaced London and Paris as the focal flashpoints.
The world has entered a phase of radical dis-ease, of revolutionary and disconcerting paradoxes reminiscent of the approaching end of a historic era. We are far from the end of history, but not nearly as far from some history-defining endgame. Startling technological advancements cohabit with—and aids—political barbarity. The most advanced and refined of human societies also harbour the most extreme cases of regression into animal savagery.
Pre-historic deprivation and destitution sit side by side with post-human paradise and sated, saturated bliss. While there are veneers of the First World in the old Third World, huge slabs of the Fourth World have invaded the First World, making nonsense of the old binary geopolitical polarities. Niger and Darfur jostle for attention with Tavistock Square and Aldgate.
May you live in interesting times, prayed the wise and eternally inscrutable Chinese. No prayer could have been better answered, and in full measure, too. We surely live in interesting times. A new type of conflict, the first truly global war—for want of a better term—is beginning to envelope the entire universe.
Unlike the old-type of warfare, this one is a war without defined battlefields or recognised combatants. The whole world is one vast battlefield and everyone a potential casualty. Mufti is often the uniform and there are no bugles heralding different armies or flags announcing national divisions.
In such circumstances, the Geneva Convention about warfare seems tired and outworn. “Citizens” wage war against their own country in a startling redefinition of the whole notion of treason and patriotism; volunteers die in strange lands in a chilling re-enactment of the medieval struggle between Christianity and Islam. The enemy combatant may well be your neighbour, your friend, your colleague at work , a former schoolmate or even your own blood relation. Goodbye to 1984 and the world of big brothers. Welcome to the twenty first century, and to the brave new world of puppy tyrants.
Whether this is a clash of civilizations, of cultures, of values, of barbarities, and even of fanaticisms and fundamentalisms is now beside the point. What is obvious is that international interaction is yielding to a new order. Buying into the advances of globalization, an anti-national, anti-modern and anti-consumerist species of Islam has been able to impose its own notions of warfare on the combined forces of western civilization.
Knowing that it lacked the technological superiority to prevail on the strict and rigidly delimited battle-field, it has literally taken the war to the streets. Knowing that the crudest bomb can become a weapon of mass destruction in the crowded megalopolis of the west, it has struck terror into the hearts of millions by bringing the war “home”. And since it doesn’t have to clean up even in its own occupied territory, it has forced America into the quagmire of nation-building, a task for which it is particularly ill-suited by reasons of culture and political temperament.
Like the proverbial fallen, hegemonic Islamism, down and out, flat on its back after centuries of repeated military and political humiliations from the combined forces of western ascendancy, has nothing to fear or lose. He that is down needs fear no further fall. But he that is down can bring others down, too. This variety of Islam may yet become the nemesis of a Christianity-based civilization.
By slowly draining the west of its prosperity in a permanent conflict with horrendous casualties, by making nonsense of its technological supremacy through sheer attrition, by striking mortal fear into its dazed citizenry , and, above all, by forcing it to compromise on the virtues of political plurality and tolerance that is at the root of its prosperity and civilization, militant Islam may end up up-ending the western giant.
We are back at the Dickensian paradox, and the brilliant English novelist’s tale of revolutionary Europe. The moment of consecration of empire is also the moment of its demystification. The lesson of history is that the precise point a society gets fully into its stride, the moment it reaches the summit of its particular civilization is also the moment it begins its irreversible slide into decay and irrelevance.
Britain was at the height of its imperial glory during the time of Dickens. The gifted novelist might have glimpsed the internal contradictions. But the profound irony was that at that point in time, his beloved country had also technically ceased to be a leading military power. It might have been the master of the seas, but even in Europe, the Crimean war had already showcased the future might of the Russian and Prussian (German) armies.
Every Rome, then, has its own barbarians and whether the Islamic multitude will do for America and the west remains a matter for heated speculation. It might suffice to add that ancient Rome did not die as a result of a single mortal wound but of a thousand cuts. A nation’s torment is often etched on the face of its leading city. Like the great European cities of the late nineteenth century, New York and London have become the metropolitan show-cases of contemporary discontents.
Four days apart at the end of July, yours sincerely found himself tramping through the sweltering heat of New York at the height of summer only to be confronted by an early autumnal breeze in London. Originating from the mesmerizing chaos of Nigeria and post-colonial Africa, one has spent the better part of two decades living and working in several western countries and in the process earning the honorific title of a citizen of the western world. But a slow and steady transformation is beginning to take hold and to change the colour and complexion of life in the west, particularly after the tragedy of September 11, 2001.
Perhaps the loss of western virginity has been long in coming. You cannot lay claim to being the arrow head of civilization and still maintain a political chastity. European imperialism and the triumph of western civilisation over native American culture did not flow from chastity but from intimidation and cruel pre-emption. If the events beginning with the spectacular siege of the New York twin-tower led to a heightened awareness, a sense of insecurity and vulnerability in western societies, they have now culminated in a radical loss of innocence.
Having reconciled itself to the fact that the struggle against Osama Bin Laden and his followers is not going to be a quick fix, New York wears its state of emergency very well. The entire country appears to have been placed on a permanent war footing with periodic bulletins and adjustment of alerts. Yet everything appears calm and unruffled on the surface, until you begin to probe the inner recesses of the society.
The security presence at the airport remains discreet and unobtrusive, but the customized screening, if your number comes up, is often comically invasive. Nevertheless, an ill-judged joke could induce an attack of nerves and send you in the wrong direction. If you are asked whether you carry any sharp object on your person, better not indulge in any metaphorical flight by pointing at your head as this could mean pushing you headlong into the screener.
The journey from Newark’s Liberty airport to New York city proper via Kennedy airport remains pleasant and mind-soothing, until heat and traffic snarl take over. From Kennedy airport, you slip into Queens through Jamaica and then on to the subway from Brooklyn. Despite the surrounding filth and the shabby, claustrophobic milieu, the trains are still spotlessly clean and well-kept. The subway tramps are still there, so is the teeming multitude of the multi-racial underclass, a rainbow coalition of assorted crooks and con-men.
Yet humanity still trumps villainy. You ask for a location and you are immediately surrounded by earnest guides and professional pathfinders. United by destitution and deprivation, the beatitude has no time or leisure to sort itself into primordial identities of race and religion. Overhead in the well-appointed suburbs and what is known as middle America, a bible-thumping fundamentalism, a homogenizing leviathan rules the roost.
If you survive the sweltering heat and manage to turn into the right corner in Brooklyn, you may yet find a Nigerian restaurant serving steaming pounded yam dish. This is not mainstream eating culture, but a kind of counter-cultural alternative life style moodily and testily tolerated. Unlike the cosmopolitan and adventurous European taste, the American palate is more conservative and this gastronomic regression is viewed as a quaint anomaly, a lapse of refinement.
The covenanted messianism which sees America as the future of humanity often leads to a stifling cultural conformism and a unique closure of the American mind, but it also coalesces into a granite uniformity of purpose once America is under threat.
As it reacts with panic and fright to the eruption of Islamic militancy and mayhem on its shores, the British political establishment may rue the absence of the uniformity of purpose and the manufactured consensus that appear to serve America so well in moments of crisis. But this will be to compound an original error of judgement with an obtuseness of purpose. Britain is not America.
Over the centuries, and through much strife and stress, Britain has developed a culture of political plurality based on tolerance, compromise and fair-mindedness. In the process, it has evolved perhaps the first genuinely multi-cultural society that the world has seen. Extremists of all hues may from time to time tug at the fabric, the compromises may often seem like shabby collusion and complicity with evil but it works most of the time. By going to war with Iraq without the support of crucial pillars of the nation and with a manufactured consensus, Tony Blair substituted American culture for British norm.
The dire consequences of that spectacular miscognition have arrived, with fear and unease enveloping Britain after the tragedy of July 7, with the militarization of a gentle society and the growing voice of right wing fanatics braying for blood and calling for a final solution to the immigrant menace. It is tempting to conclude that after running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, Britain has been hoisted by its own imperialist petard.
But that will be a disservice to the society of good manners, of gentlemanly restraint and wise discretion. It is these golden virtues that produced the little Lagos of Peckham and what is known a tad derisively as Londonistan. Whatever its colonial past and current imperfections, Britain is shinning example of multiculturalism.
That tradition now seems to be under grave threat. The kind of troop and security deployments that have been seen on the streets of England, particularly in London, in the wake of the recent tragedy must not be allowed to remain for long. A city with heroic antecedents, London, over the centuries, has seen many troops. But they were of a different hue: Magna Carta partisans, defenders of liberty and freedom, militant mobs, revolutionary crowds, chartists, Cromwellian stalwarts, Hyde Park tormentors of absolutism, freedom fighters fleeing from tyranny, exiled heroes of democracy and barons of sundry barricades.
It is from this illustrious and noble tradition that Britain must now draw profound resources and reserves of strength and resilience in the confrontation with an Islamism mired in the grand dream of a past Al- Andalus rather than the great vision of a future El Dorado . In doing this, Britain must revert to its traditional role of a wiser elder sibling to an America of rampart militarism and bare knuckle reflex.
While military might is often decisive in war, it is intellectual and moral might that often carries the day in a confrontation of cultures. As the Iraqi debacle has shown, when Britain apes American militarism, the world is a less safe and healthy place, and the whole of western civilization is endangered. If the initial misjudgement is allowed to be compounded by further errors of perception, if a species of Islam finally drives the west to become its mirror image, then we might as well bid goodbye to Western civilization as we know it.
•First published in Africa Today, August 2005.
