Jihadists' incentives to fight

Sir, – It is to be hoped that Thomas Hegghammer’s open-minded overview of “Jihadi studies” (Commentary, April 4) will now start a wider discussion that will further illuminate the subject. It is certainly important to determine who the Jihadis really are, or rather what categories of Jihadis can be usefully defined. And it is certainly true that the so-called global war on terror has been hugely wasteful. As many have pointed out, it is not “global” but rather confined to the realm of Islam, its diasporic colonies, and lands claimed by Muslims, notably southern Thailand, Mindanao, Israel, Daghestan, etc; it is not a “war” because very sporadic attacks in very scattered locations by very different protagonists do not amount to a threat that can be fought purposefully; and the enemy cannot be the tactic of “terror” used by all in some form or another, let alone the technique of suicide bombing.

More questionable is the dismissal of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s theory that Islamic orthodoxy blocks development, inducing violent expressions of frustration and humiliation because Islam simultaneously promises superiority in all things to its adherents – a frustration especially acute for the Arabs, whom the Koran itself names as the world’s best people. Enzensberger’s theory can certainly be criticized (e.g. the violence started before any frustration – Muhammad himself was as much raider as preacher) but not, as it happens, with the argument advanced by Hegghammer: “If the Muslim world has been retarded for a thousand years, why does the violent reaction come now?”. That is unhistorical twice over: first, the Muslim world was doing very nicely c1008; second, when relative decline did become manifest centuries later, the seething resentment of almost all Muslim populations, which made it easy for truculent clerics to infuriate mobs into violence, became the salient hazard of travel in Muslim lands long before al-Qaeda. So it is not “now”.

Hegghammer does note his serious reservations about Robert Pape’s theory that suicide attacks have nothing to do with Islam as such but are merely responses to occupation, and mostly by non-Muslims. Pape’s numbers are fatally flawed by the inclusion of the Liberation Tigers of Sri Lanka, a sui generis case, and by the odd classification of Hezbollah and Hamas as territorialists rather than Islamists. But then Hegghammer fails to point out the central error of Pape’s reductionism, shared by many others: the minimization of the specifically Islamic incentive to fight and if necessary die (not suicidal attacks per se), which happens to resonate especially with young men trapped in forced celibacy: a promised paradise of orgiastic sex with both women and boys. Muslim preachers in conflicted lands are much less bashful than Western commentators in specifying what Allah himself will provide to dead Jihadists: Koran 51–55, “ . . . We shall wed them to dark-eyed houris”. Koran 55:56–57, “ . . . bashful virgins neither man nor Jinn will have touched before. Then which of the favours of your Lord will you deny?”. Koran 55:57–58, “Virgins as fair as corals and rubies . . .” . Koran 55:70–77, “ . . . Dark eyed virgins sheltered in their tents . . . ”. Koran 78:31, “. . . gardens and vineyards, and high-bosomed virgins for companions . . . ”. Later jurists universally condemned homosexuality, and no preacher would now proffer it, but the text is explicit: Koran 52:24, “Round about them will serve . . . boys handsome as pearls well-guarded”. Koran 76:19, “ . . . boys of perpetual freshness: if thou seest them, thou wouldst think them scattered pearls”.

I for one genuinely do not understand why the centrality of the sexual promises to Jihadist mobilization is so persistently ignored, or even explicitly denied, by most Western analysts, hardliners very much included. There is no such hesitation among the protagonists themselves: outwardly at any rate, death in fighting the infidel is not mourned by their families and friends but celebrated as a zawaj, a wedding.

EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
4510 Drummond Avenue,
Chevy Chase, Maryland 20815.

Shah Jehan

Sir, – It is a pity that Salman Rushdie (Letters, April 11) descends to ad feminam attacks on his reviewer rather than responding to the characterization of his book, and its place within his oeuvre, offered in the review. Readers will be able to judge for themselves whether my review exhibits the “ignorance”, “prejudice” and “clumsiness” which Sir Salman alleges, but let me draw attention to the more specific misrepresentations contained in his letter.

I nowhere suggest that he “invented” the historical facts which he works into his narratives. I explicitly say that the novel “exploits many sources” in “Florentine and Mughal history”, and indeed I draw attention to the appended bibliography by him and by Vanessa Manko. The point is the use to which such details are put in the novel and the way in which, in relation to several themes, they sustain a “familiar pattern” in his recent work. This applies, among other examples, to the marriage of Marietta and Niccolò Machiavelli. I nowhere claim that Rushdie “falsified” the character of this marriage, as a more careful reading of my review will demonstrate to him.

Sir Salman’s response to the identification of such patterns in his work is to dismiss it as “a primitive feminist attack”. I fear that, far from discrediting the reviewer, his use of this ill-tempered and inexact phrase will be more likely to persuade most readers that his writing does indeed embody assumptions which require careful critical scrutiny.

My reference to Jehangir rather than Shah Jehan as the builder of the Taj Mahal was a simple mistake, for which I apologize. Qara Köz is indeed Akbar’s great-aunt, though if exact familial terminology is at issue then she has to be described not as the “sister” but as the half-sister of Akbar’s grandfather.

However, such so-called schoolgirl howlers are, clearly, not the main point at issue. Far more important is the question of the response we might hope for from a major novelist to a measured assessment of his recent work which concludes that its most recent instalment is “a bravura performance, but one which is finally disappointing”.

RUTH MORSE
Université Paris Diderot, 10 rue Charles-V, 75004 Paris.

Humanizing worms

Sir, – Congratulations on your review headline “Worms who eat whales” (March 21, p11). In humanizing worms you have caught up with Erasmus Darwin who, in his poem propounding evolution, reminded us that “man”

Should eye with tenderness all living forms,
His brother-emmets, and his sister-worms.

This is from canto 4, lines 427–8, of the poem that he entitled “The Origin of Society”, published in 1803 with just the title page altered to the politically safer The Temple of Nature (though eighty-one running heads with the original title remained in view).

DESMOND KING-HELE
7 Hilltops Court, 65 North Lane, Buriton, Hampshire.

In defence of Elgar

Sir, – I greatly admired (and in the THES of May 20, 2005, favourably reviewed) Richard Taruskin’s achievement in The Oxford History of Western Music. The often remarked-on omission of Elgar’s name from it surely puts him in a rather invidious position now. What is really bugging him? Why does he resort once again to the sort of random, all-purpose, indiscriminate abuse with which colleagues who have displeased him in some way are already only too familiar?

I suspect that behind the chuckles and the fausse bonhomie lurks the fury of one who hears unwillingly a voice other than his own. Honestly, I never knew it was quite so easy to draw blood. I guess I’m kind of honoured to be his target this time, but wish I could rate the tirade as the measured judgement of a distinguished scholar rather than the self-indulgent reaction of someone suffering from an ill-digested lunch.

A few questions remain. Just what type of second-rateness in these books is he intent on protecting? Has he any interesting thoughts about Elgar? What did he have for lunch?

HUGH WOOD
32 Woodsome Road, London NW5.

Sir, – About reactions to Hugh Wood’s review of recent books on Elgar, a review I for one valued as (a) an example of real thinking for himself by (b) a hugely experienced musician: I searched the reactions in vain for useful points, found none, and wish only to underline how hostile the disagreements between rival systems of education (in this case music, or rather musicology) can be, especially when voiced in a west-to-east direction.

Perhaps what prompts such reactions is some atavistic fear that traditional British musicianship, though now seriously diluted by the west-to-east currents, not only regards itself as superior but actually is, or was. Accusing Wood of “stereotyped national vices” is very revealing and (I think I am right to say) would cause real offence in the opposite direction, east-to-west.

PETER WILLIAMS
Clifford Manor, Newent.

Phenomenal

Sir, – While enjoying Mark Vernon’s review of Simon Glendinning’s In the Name of Phenomenology (March 14), I couldn’t help but notice a remarkable visual pun. I applaud the layout folks who put Glendinning together with “Pierre, a ‘witch-child’”. It brought to my mind the wonderful Pierre Glendinning of Herman Melville’s Pierre, or The Ambiguities. Melville, in my mind, was postmodern before there was a postmodernism; deconstructing before the deconstructionists. It was delightful to see this visual play in a review of phenomenology.

GEOFF COHEN
3625 Oakwood Place, Riverside, California 92506.

Sir, – By a gremlin twist that is not at odds with the structure of the book under discussion (Le Fanu’s Ghost by Gavin Selerie, In Brief, April 11), extracts from two distinct poems have been combined with the reviewer’s naming of the second poem, “Terror Twilight”, to create an entirely new run of indented lines. Nevertheless, as publisher, I appreciate how other material in this issue intersects with the concerns of Selerie’s book, which deals inter alia with the locked room mystery (Poe, page 30), the Mist and Fog journals (p6), Swift’s relationships with women (same page as the Le Fanu’s Ghost review), Smock Alley Theatre and various female writers of Irish extraction or residence (p8). Whether accidental or planned, a pleasing editorial weave.

GLENN STORHAUG
Five Seasons Press, 41 Green Street, Hereford.

Sir, – In her review of Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Edgar Allan Poe (April 11), Patricia Craig notes Poe studied “at the University of Charlottesville in Virginia”. Wrong way round – it was the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

DAVID S. CUTLER
3001 Veazey Terrace NW, #1503, Washington, DC 20008.