The stillborn dogmatism of I am right, you are wrong has circled back since the contest of ideologies and once again attained its apotheosis of I am right; you are dead. The monologue of unilateralism constantly aspires to the mantle of the Chosen and, of course, further dichotomizes the world, inviting us, on pain of consequences, to choose between “them” and “us.” We must, in other words, reject the conditions George Bush delivered so explicitly in that ultimatum You are either with us and against the terrorists, or you are on the side of the terrorists, and in We do not require the world’s approval since we are divinely guided, just as strongly as we repudiate Osama bin Laden’s The world is now clearly divided into two — the world of the followers of Islam against that of infidels and unbelievers. What does this mean for those billions of the world who are determinedly unbelievers? What does it mean for the world of Hindus, Buddhists, the Zoroastrians, the followers of Orisa, and a hundred other faiths that are routinely marginalized in the division of the world between two blood-stained behemoths of faith — the Islamic and the Judeo-Christian?
We, on the African continent, whose people were decimated, in a time of our own troubled peace, in Kenya and Tanzania, our soil violated by one of the earliest acts of aerial sabotage that scattered human limbs over the earth of Niger, have a special stake in this. The black freedom fighters of southern Sudan, locked in a brutal war of over three decades against an Islamic regime — a genocidal war that has claimed at least a hundred thousand times more lives and overseen a thousand times greater destruction of a people, an environment, and a culture than the conflicts in the Middle East — have not resorted to accusing the Islamic or Arab world of a conspiracy against the black race. They are focused on their quest for liberation from a specified, localized, theocratic, and often racist order, against which they have raised charges of an ongoing “ethnic cleansing” that remains largely ignored by the Western world. It has only belatedly, in very recent times, been acknowledged by the United Nations, through a warning from its secretary-general, as yet another Rwanda scenario in the making.We do not hear from the leaders of that struggle any proposition of the division of the world into the African world against All Others. The combatants have not moved to set the bazaars and monuments of Medina on fire or burn Japanese infants in their cribs. Not even the historic — still ongoing in places — denigration of African religions and cultures, or indeed the memory of both European and Arab enslavement of the African peoples, has elicited this inflammatory agenda.
Have we any lessons to offer the world from that same continent of a history of near-universal disdain? I can think of one. I dispense it at every opportunity. African religions do not proselytize, but let me break with that tradition yet again in the worthy cause of a global quest for harmonized coexistence, and offer the world a lesson from African spirituality, taken specifically from the religion of the Orisa, the pantheon of faith of the Yoruba people. This religion, one that is still pursued in Brazil and other parts of South America and the Caribbean, has never engaged in any equivalent of the crusade or the jihad in its own cause. The words infidel, unbeliever, kafiri are anathema to its scriptures; thus it does not recognize a spiritual division of the world. Despite its reticence, however, it has penetrated the globe and survived in the confident retention by the displaced and dispossessed slaves, its infectious hold extending even to their European violators. Its watchword is tolerance, a belief that there are many paths to truth and godhead, and that the world should not be set on fire to prove the supremacy of a belief or the righteousness of a cause.
What we have witnessed in the tearing out of the heart, liver, and tongue of the United States, the hideous conversion of captive human beings into battering rams for the destruction of other innocents, is an image of such diabolical horror that the imagination instinctively recoils from its full grasp, even after subsequent, seemingly competitive horrors. It will remain so for years. To accept it as a valid and appropriate response to injustices perpetrated by American governments against other people is to abdicate all capacity for moral revulsion. Those very voices that were raised in condemnation of the violation of a mosque in Jerusalem by an Israeli reservist who massacred dozens of worshippers in cold blood — those are the same voices that are now raised, among others, against the violation of humanity on September 11, 2001. And the passion of those voices must not be belittled, cowed, or isolated. And yes, even as the murder of Muslims in East Jerusalem, though it took place in a specific milieu, was a crime against our humane universe, even so must the outrage that was committed on American soil on September 11 be recognized and addressed for what it was — a crime against all of humanity, and one that deserves the sternest collective response of that same Community.
Could the United States have responded differently immediately after September 11? Perhaps not. Hindsight is a most unreliable judge of such decisions, and those circumstances were clearly unprecedented. Did that nation, however, have to continue along an avoidable path that led remorselessly into Iraq? More specifically, and with no complication of hindsight: why were the weapons inspectors of the United Nations ordered out of Iraq in submission to the will of one nation, most especially at a moment when Saddam Hussein had openly submitted himself to the authority of that very institution?
Let us turn to our present dateline. It is still the second millennium, the era of the so-called global village. Concretely, it is the era in which the world has attempted to put in place, after many blunders and derelictions of responsibilities, international courts and tribunals for crimes against humanity. It is an era in which former heads of state are being hauled in for crimes against their own peoples and against others — from Chile to Rwanda. It is the era of the strategy of near-globally upheld sanctions, not always successful, we know, and sometimes excruciatingly slow in their ability to produce the desired results. It is nevertheless the era of newly reinvigorated possibilities, a new global relevance for the organ called the United Nations. Indeed, perhaps it was stemming from this same consciousness, an attempt to impress upon the world the critical necessity of such an organ in the new millennium, that the Nobel establishment, in its centenary year, chose to honor that organization, and its secretary-general, with the Peace Prize.We cannot deny or gloss over some of its failures to live up to the world’s expectations, to its founding ideas, and to the needs of humanity. We are only too keenly aware of the costly consequences — in global trust, and in human lives — of some of these failures. Nevertheless, we are doomed to despair if we fail also to acknowledge its many achievements, and to accept the fact that it is the only organ in the world that has the authority of legitimate intervention in troubled spots.
Unilateral action, or the appropriation of a global duty of response, by any one nation serves only to diminish the United Nations. That the greatest culprit in this respect should be one of such powerful achievements as the United States, one that is also host to that organization, physically, on its own soil, only denotes an enervation of the global vision. That the United States has the capacity for technological, military, and economic leadership is not in dispute; what the United States lacks is philosophical leadership, despite its formidable reserves of original thinkers. Adopting a global view of a criminality on its soil, and primarily against its people, the U.S. had the option of placing its formidable capabilities under the moral authority of the United Nations, instilling in her own people the imperatives of a global approach to justice.