Conjuring with Islam, II

Bruce B. Lawrence

I recall Tuesday September 11, 2001, as "black Tuesday," the day when commercial airplanes were turned into weapons of mass destruction as suicidal bombers destroyed two major monuments of United States commercial prowess in New York City, damaged a wing of the United States central military command in Washington, D.C., and took their own lives as well as those of nearly three thousand persons, many, but not all, of them American citizens. Black Tuesday was the worst terrorist attack on American soil. Its agents were identified as nineteen Arab men, all Muslim and all linked to a global terrorist network, Al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan but directed by a Saudi dissident in exile, Osama bin Laden.	1
Since black Tuesday Islam has been invoked, written about, challenged, and defended in a variety of forums. It is almost as if a new religious tradition had come onto the everyday screen of middle-of-the-road Americans. On Friday September 14, with the ravages of Tuesday still fresh in mind, I got a phone call from my former college roommate, a retired businessman. He was aghast at the carnage, but he was also eager to get behind the episode and to grapple with its causes. "Look," he reasoned, "I am Joe Six-Pack. I'm your average work-hard, play-hard American. I want to know about Islam. I want to learn the ABCs of the Arab world, I want to understand why they hate us so much."	2
Though the question seemed new to Joe Six-Pack, it is in fact a very old question, one confronting Americans at least since the Iranian revolution of 1979–1980. The return of an aging cleric from Paris to Tehran, the toppling of a supposedly invincible American ally, the eighteen-month Iranian hostage crisis—all brought Islam onto the television screens and into the headlines, into the awareness and imagination of average Americans over two decades ago.	3
What is interesting now, six months after September 11, is the pervasive amnesia about that earlier crisis. Most Americans, including most American scholars and certainly nearly all journalists, do not link the two periods. I think the linkage between the periods is one of the instructive lessons of history, and I will focus on it in the pages that follow.	4
In the confusion and perplexity that marked first the Iranian revolution, then the Iranian hostage crisis, Clifford Geertz, the distinguished anthropologist from Princeton University, wrote about the variant perspectives that those events evoked from commentators. Although there was a recurrent focus on jihad, then as now the interpretation of its significance depended on the location, the background, and the training of the interpreter. Journalists, scholars, politicians, and apologists do not have similar agendas, and their contrasting views have to be sorted out by the unsuspecting reader, that is, by middle-class, middle-of-the-road Americans such as Joe Six-Pack. The interpreters, noted Geertz,	. . .