December 19, 2003

SARTRE AND ISLAMIC TERRORISM

by Srdja Trifkovic

It is not often that a line in a newspaper makes me jump and pace the room. It happened this morning as I belatedly came across an article in the Guardian (November 26) about two young Turkish Kurds, Azad Ekinci and Feridan Ugurlu, who blew themselves up in two separate attacks on the British consulate and HSBC bank in Istanbul five days earlier.

The London daily's correspondent reported from their native town in eastern Turkey that "Ekinci was kept indoors by an overly protective mother-until he met Mesut, who had a taste for Jean-Paul Sartre and connections with the Islamist guerrilla group Hizbullah." The pair soon became inseparable: "They were so tight, one couldn't go without the other to the toilet," said Adul Ali Benghizou, a middle-aged man who knew the two well. "Ekinci was a bit isolated, but when he met Mesut he changed. Mesut was obsessed with existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre." The pair soon went to the battlefields of Bosnia and Chechnya as volunteers for jihad.

For once it all came together: Sartre as inspiration for suicidal terrorism, young existentialists volunteering to fight for Izetbegovic's Islamistan in Bosnia, the unexplored link between Jihad and homo-eroticism.

The road from Sartre to terrorist violence is pretty straightforward. The effect of existentialism on a young, impressionable person can be compelling. It is appealing to an adolescent to be told that he is whomever he chooses to be, a lawmaker unto himself, that the only authority is his freedom. That realization soon turns to anguish, however, when our thinking teenager realizes that the price of freedom is meaningless existence, that life is "useless passion." In Sartre's own words, it is "very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him." The inevitable result is despair, the realization that we cannot ultimately rely on anyone else for anything, "given that man is free and that there is no human nature for me to depend on." We are all alone in our "unhappy consciousness," in a world not of our making and not of our choosing.

This is powerful stuff, and there are only two ways out of it: suicide, or self-immersion in an ideological opiate. Sartre opted for the latter, by accepting the Marxist conceptions of history, economics, and politics. (In addition he made a lot of money from peddling ideas such as these, spent days smoking Gauloises in CafÙ de Flore, and employed his live-in mistress as procuress of much younger women for an endless string of one-night stands.) Even after he was expelled from the Communist Party Sartre remained a typical fellow-traveler and an advocate of leftist and Third World revolutionaries. In the final years of his life, however, he replaced both existential dread and Marxism with Jewish messianic utopianism. In an interview with his friend and associate Bernard-Henry LÙvy (formerly Pierre Victor), published shortly before his death, Sartre dwells on his discovery that "the messianic idea is the base of the revolutionary idea."

To a young Kurd, however, Islam offers the natural alternative to existential Angst, with its mix of the messianic base and revolutionary superstructure. It is a totalitarian political ideology (like communism) with 72 dark-eyed houris and 28 "scented boys" hereafter. Had Sartre lived longer-he died in 1980 at the age of 75-he could have ended his spiritual quest by kissing the carpet in the direction of Mecca. The notion is far from preposterous: after all that was the final destination for another ex-Communist philosophe, Roger Garaudy, who converted to Islam in 1982 at the age of 68.

Sartre's sidekick, Bernard-Henri LÙvy (or BHL as he is known in Parisian gossip columns) is already halfway there. This media personality and the author, most recently, of an adoring Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, was one of the most outspoken Western advocates of the Muslim side in the Bosnian war, so much so that he had the gall to declare that the policy of Alija Izetbegovic "has been demonstrably against the establishment of an Islamic state." In his lunatic account of world affairs the Muslims are always sufferers at the hands of the Orthodox Christians and always innocent of any wrongdoing, in Chechnya and Kosovo no less than in Bosnia. Sartre's most prominent disciple professes disdain for jihadist fundamentalism but advocates an invented "moderate Islam" in its stead, with the recently deceased author of the Islamic Declaration as the role model. The "siege" of Sarajevo became a stage for his non-stop self-serving media appearances.

Thanks to Bernard-Henri LÙvy more than any other man, the capital of France-and until not so long ago the intellectual capital of the world-has succumbed to the culture of victimology and anti-Western self-hate. His most tangible contribution to his countrymen and the rest of us has been to promote and encourage the Muslim sense of victimhood. Together with the likes of George Soros, Susan Sontag, and countless others like them, he has fed the minds of potential suicide bombers with a political pap that nourishes and legitimizes their rage.

As befits a purveyor of victimology, the one thing to which Levy seriously objects to in the Muslim world is the legal ban on homosexual intercourse. In July 2002 he signed a petition, addressed to Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, protesting the trial of a group of young men accused of homosexual practices. In Pakistan they'd be lashed, in Saudi Arabia executed. And yet-to come back to Azad Ekinci and Feridan Ugurlu-all over the Islamic world suppression and unavailability of liaison between males and females outside the prearranged wedlock has produced latent sexual tension that has sought and found release in homosexual liaisons through the centuries. When the two suicide bombers' neighbor remarked to the Guardian's correspondent that "[t]hey were so tight, one couldn't go without the other to the toilet," the allusion to the nature of their friendship was unmistakeable. Those denied access to licit sexuality have sought and obtained outlets that produced chronic contradictions between normative morality and social realities.

Historically, this state of affairs was not concealed from Western observers who were fascinated, shocked, and often attracted by the outward appearances of rampant, barely concealed pederasty. By 1800, a European traveler to Egypt wrote that "the inconceivable inclination which has dishonored the Greeks and Persians of antiquity constitutes the delight, or, more properly speaking the infamy of the Egyptians" and that "it has seized the poor as well as the rich." The "contagion" in question was spelled out more bluntly by an earlier writer, Thomas Sherley, describing the Turks: "For their Sodommerye they use it soe publiquely and impudentlye as an honest Christian woulde shame to companye his wyffe as they do with their buggeringe boys."

A 17th century French visitor to the Middle East went so far as to claim that Moslems were bisexual by nature, and many male authors gave descriptions of "licentiousness" (lesbianism) among women in harems and bath houses. Homosexuality became known to the English as the "Persian" or "Turkish" vice.

This peculiar aspect of the Muslim world has never disappeared. The sight of men, even soldiers in uniform, strolling along a street hand in hand, strikes first-time visitors as extraordinary even today. The fascination of Western authors like Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, or Andre Gide, with this aspect of the Islamic world continues in the "gay culture" of our own time. One of its Kulturtraegers finds "something extremely sensual and potent about the image of the Islamic male." "You only have to compare the stiff, asexual frigidity of Bush and his bookmarmish wife," says he, "with the moist-eyed, sensitive and soft-spoken quality of the bearded Bin Laden, feminine yet virile, with his multiple wives and vast progeny, to grasp the difference."

The author has intuited something important, and dangerous. The Guardian told us that "Ekinci was kept indoors by an overly protective mother," and mothers fixated on their sons create preconditions for what is known in clinical psychology as the "lost object homosexuality." The cry for the missing father, that emanates across the Moslem world into the endless void from a hundred thousand minarets five times each day, can never be answered. The hatred that motivates Bin Laden and his "feminine yet virile" followers such as Azad Ekinci and Feridan Ugurlu is not the normal aggressiveness of the child for the father at the Oedipal stage but hard-core psychotic homosexuality of the son abandoned by his father, a condition that can lead to homicidal, delusional paranoia. In Istanbul on November 15, mixed with Sartre, it killed 25 people including the British consul-general.

The two youngsters would have been wiser to follow the example of Saddam Hussein in their choice of books. According to a Knight Ridder report (December 16), in the hut where he was hiding among a dozen books piled on top of a chest near a bed "[t]here was a book on interpreting dreams, volumes of classical Arabic poetry titled Discipline and Sin, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment."

This is excellent news. Saddam is most unlikely to get out of his present predicament alive but, judging by his bedside reading, his soul is on the way to recovery. Not only is he grappling with the important issues of "discipline" and "sin," he is also following Raskolnikov's path from murderous madness to his Lazarus-like rebirth and, finally, an eminently Christian acceptance of guilt, repentance, and quest for atonement. The outcome of Saddam's trial is immaterial here; his spiritual recovery won't help him in the eyes of the law but will in the eye of God. If Saddam accepts Fyodor Mihailovich's message he has an opportunity to begin his life anew. He is guilty of many horrible crimes but his guilt will lose its demonic hold and in the remaining few months of his life, in his prison cell, he may even experience "a presentiment of future resurrection and a new life."

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