Imagining a terrorist's mind.

In a culture of intellectual quiescence, the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem stands out for his courage, his willingness to break with the crowd. Born in 1936, in the time of the monarchy, he made his own way through life, and educated himself in the classics. Some years ago he provoked a storm by openly journeying to Israel and writing about his experience in that country. This led to virtual ostracism by his peers. But he stood his ground, and in the crucial years since September 11 he has written scathingly and satirically of the pathologies of the Arab world--the anti-Americanism, the animus toward modernism, the refusal of the Arab intellectual elites to face the burden of Arab history. Salem is fierce in his denunciation of radical Islamism, and of the evasions and denials that sustain it in mainstream Arab life. What follows is a piece occasioned by the terrorist attacks on the hotels in Amman that took place last November 9. It appeared in Al Hayat, the London-based pan-Arab daily, from which I have translated it.--Fouad Ajami The battlefield commander Abu Fulan narrated to us what follows: "In the war of the hotels--and it was the most arduous of wars--we pulled off three raids, two of them in southern Sinai, the third in Amman. We exacted a toll of tens of souls, we made orphans of hundreds of children, we turned scores of wives into widows, we brought grief to countless mothers. We were able, with Allah's blessing, to inflict injuries on hundreds of people, some of whom lost an arm or a leg, some of whom were disfigured, and some left paralyzed for life. In the first two raids in Egypt, we used two cars loaded with explosives. But in the raid against the Amman hotels it was decided that the mission would be executed by fierce heroes, from among ourselves, who had dedicated themselves to the war against the hotels and the wicked ones who frequent them. Three men and a woman were selected for that mission when we made sure, after all the necessary experiments and investigations, that they were people who hated festive occasions and weddings and those who partook of them. Read the pages of our history, consult the histories of our ancestors: did any one of them celebrate a wedding in a hotel? In the days of old, caravanserais were places where the merchants and the travelers and their pack animals slept. We never heard of weddings in those caravanserais of old. Luckily for us, our enemies are fools. We strike them time after time and they never know why; we kill them and they wonder by what right we do so. We see our enemies on the satellite channels, we hear them react with puzzlement on the airwaves, we hear them asking, `What is the meaning of this particular attack? Is it aimed at the Jordanian government or the Jordanian people? Is Jordan being told to refrain from a particular policy or to adopt a position on an issue of importance: what is the message?' As you can see, our enemies are given to ignorance. They refuse to admit that joy, and all that springs or derives from it, represents the greatest danger to our people. You who can comprehend things should know that joy is a contagious disease. What will happen to the sons of this Islamic community if they all catch the fever of joy? This bridegroom in Amman whose wedding we destroyed, and his family: did they not stop for a moment to ask how we could give ourselves to joy when Palestine is occupied and Jerusalem is not yet liberated? How can we listen to music while our people in Baquba and the Anbar province are exposed to the noise and the attacks of the Apache helicopters? How can we rejoice while the Egyptian government manipulates elections? How can we celebrate a wedding in a hotel when the rights of Arabs are violated everywhere, when France prevents Muslim girls from donning the veil and the headscarf? How can a believer treat himself to a wedding, and to the pleasures of the wedding night, in the shadow of the desperate conditions that prevail in our Arab nation? We cannot permit ourselves to tire or to give up before this nation recognizes that joy is our enemy, that explosives are our constitution, that Zarqawi is our leader, that grief is our goal, and that destroying all manifestations of pleasure is our mission. Call up the image of the raid on the Amman hotels: contented people, happily smiling at each other. They are happy to the extent that they forget their wretched brothers. All these happy people have jobs, and government positions; they are possessed of wealth to spare and can travel to a distant country for a joyful celebration. Tell me, in the name of God, how else can we remind them of the suffering of our people if we do not strike them with explosives and turn them into corpses, into an example for those who should heed examples? Yes, I know that among the fatalities are innocent workers and waiters obliged by the nature of their work to be there. But we should not grieve for these innocents, or fear what will happen to them, for on Judgment Day everyone will be treated according to their deeds and their intentions. We are at war, and victory in this war requires clarity and candor. It is impossible to change and to reform this region unless we destroy much of what stands today. We cannot permit the existence of a state in Palestine, or a state in Iraq. We shall strive to destroy the state in all the lands of the Arabs and the Muslims. For the state, with its modern features, with its laws and its constitution, its parliament and its human rights, and its separation of powers and its devotion to development, could lead to human fulfillment, and such an outcome we shall not allow. Our foolish rivals among the intellectuals speak of moderates and extremists in our camp. I say to them, `You fools, have you seen among our ranks anyone who believes in the legitimacy of the modern state?' You believe in scientific research and think tanks. Take everything these so-called moderates say by way of speeches and sermons and pamphleteering, and you will easily discover that no one among them believes in the modern state. They, like us, want to destroy the present order of things and to arrive at a new reality that makes no room for joy or for hotel weddings. We each have our code, each sheik or preacher has his own way and method. The proof is that when the extremists among us kill sixty people, they, the moderate Islamists, step to the microphone to announce that they condemn this criminal act--but just as the listener is about to be reassured, they pronounce that we should not be talking about sixty people while forgetting the thousands killed by the Americans in Iraq, that we should not forget those killed by Ariel Sharon every day. Nor should we forget the victims killed by Hulagu, the Mongol invader. Then our moderates end with the all-time favorite song among the Arabs, the one that goes: `All those bloody events will come to an end with the destruction of Israel.'"

By Ali Salem