Several questions have arisen following Newsweek’s allegation and retraction regarding willful desecration of the Quran by American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. Did this happen? Was it reported earlier? Was action taken to stop it? Why were such interrogation tactics used? Why aren’t Westerners aware of Muslim sensitivities? Why is the Muslim world up in arms against it now? Why didn’t it protest as vehemently earlier?
In March 2003, The Washington Post noted allegations of Guantanamo detainees that “American soldiers insulted Islam by sitting on the Quran or dumping their sacred text into a toilet to taunt them”. There was no protest in the Muslim world. In 2004, a Newsmax report quoted a former Delta camp prisoner as saying that “late at night, drunken female soldiers used to come and trample on the Quran”. There was no Muslim protest. In March 2004, the UK’s Daily Mirror recounted how over 400 Camp X-Ray detainees went on hunger strike protesting about “a guard who kicked a copy of the Quran”. There was no Muslim protest. In August 2004, The Independent, London, quoted ex-Guantanamo Bay detainees as saying that “guards threw prisoners’ Qurans in toilets”. The same month, the Daily News, New York, repeated the charges. There was no Muslim protest. On June 28, 2004, the Financial Times, London, quoted a prisoner’s mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay: “They tore the Quran into pieces, then threw it into the toilet”. There was no Muslim protest. In January 2005, Associated Press reported lawyers for a Muslim detainee as saying “they made him watch as a Quran was flushed down the toilet”. There was no Muslim protest. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also highlighted similar situations but there has been no Muslim protest until now. Equally, since ex-Guantanamo prisoners started returning to Pakistan two years ago, the Urdu media has known of the willful desecration of the Quran during interrogation. But it didn’t provoke any public outrage. Why not?
One reason may have to do with the Muslim world’s “defensive” or “guilty” mindset following the vicious attacks of 9/11 which killed thousands of innocent people and provoked an angry Western backlash against the extremist preachers and practitioners of Islam. Indeed, governments in Muslim countries, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan, were so anxious to distance themselves from “Islamic terrorism” that they swooped down on suspected Islamic militants and handed them over to the Americans without regard to due process of law in their own countries, the legality of the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay and its interrogation methods being the least of their immediate concerns.
But in due course, this Muslim mindset was transformed into an aggressive and defiant psyche. This resulted from the indiscriminate American bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq, sweeping occupation, and thousands of dead civilians in “collateral damage”. The scandal of Abu Ghraib rubbed salt into Muslim wounds. When Americans started buying up copies of the Quran making it a bestseller, their intent seemed geared to one question only: why did Quran sanction violent “jihad and terrorism”? (After all, Muslims over the world didn’t pour over copies of the Bible or Torah when the Christian or Jewish colonists invaded and occupied their lands.) Here was further proof that for Muslims, America’s declaration of “war against terror” was just another way of sanctioning and unleashing a “war against Islam” and confirming Samuel Huntingdon’s dreaded “clash-of-civilizations” thesis. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, this general resentment was fueled by the MMA and the Taliban respectively – the former has become increasingly hostile towards General Musharraf while the latter is making a last ditch effort to destabilize Hamid Karzai.
It is true that Westerners are not terribly sensitive to Islamic culture in which both the letter and body of the Quran is revered. The reason for this is the secularization of culture and lost sensitivity to the sacred following two centuries of rapid democratic-materialist expansion in the First World. That is why, for example, when the Quran is desecrated in the midst of Third World Muslims, it provokes violent passions. As a corollary, the same incident is inclined to evoke images of “medievalism” in the modern Western mind whose historical memory is cluttered with Witch Hunts and Inquisitions.
But this explanation cannot condone the Guantanamo Bay interrogators. On the contrary, it explains the facility with which they consciously desecrated the Quran as a cold-blooded tactic to break the spirit of the detainees. Far from being ignorant or unaware, the interrogators were acutely seized of the religious sensitivities of their prisoners and they sought to exploit these for mundane reasons. That is why their premeditated crimes are all the more unforgivable.
Newsweek’s “retraction” proves that the American media is vulnerable to state pressure, not that the allegations were misplaced. President Bush should stop being in denial. Guantanamo Bay should be closed down, due process of law must apply to all prisoners and the offenders must be punished. An urgent cleansing program for many officers of the US government is needed. And public diplomacy should be used to channel the truth, not block it.