Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit Read Free Book Online

peasant. Like his followers, in their black turbans and flip-flops, he had never been to Kabul. But he had cloaked himself in the mantle of the prophet—quite literally; a garment deemed to have been Muhammad’s was removed from an Afghan shrine and shown off by Mullah Omar on his rare public appearances. The first act of symbolic—and horribly real—violence after the fall of Kabul was the torture of former leftist president Najibullah. The Taliban cut off his testicles and dragged his battered body behind a Jeep. Then they shot him and hanged his corpse from a street lamp. As a sign of his citified debauchery and corruption, the ex-president’s pockets were stuffed with money, and cigarettes were pressed between his broken fingers.
    The aim of the Taliban’s assault on Kabul was to turn it into a City of God. All signs of Westernization, such as “British and American hairstyles,” had to be erased. Women were banned from work and hidden from public view. The religious police decreed that “women going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes to show themselves . . . will be cursed by the Islamic Sharia and should never expect to go to Heaven.” 17 Music was banned, and so were television, kite flying, chess, and soccer. Adultery would be punished by stoning, and drinking alcohol by whipping. The only law was Sharia, or religious law. And Kabul would be governed by a six-man Shura, not one of whom was from Kabul. Not one of them had ever even lived in a city before.
    Such cases of extreme revolts by rural people against the modern city are, in fact, quite rare. Most revolutions, religious, political, or combinations of both, are born in cities, as the brainchildren of disaffected city dwellers. Nikola Koljevic, to mention but one typical case, was a Shakespeare scholar from Sarajevo. He spent time in London and the United States. His English was fluent. He was a citizen of the most cosmopolitan place in the Balkans, a secular city of Bosnians, Serbs, Jews, and Croats, a city famous for its libraries, universities, and cafés, a city of learning and trade. Yet there he was, in the mid-1990s, watching his city burn from the surrounding hills. The orders to shell Sarajevo, in the name of ethnic purity and the “resurrection of Serbdom,” had been signed by Nikola Koljevic, Shakespeare scholar.
     
     
     
    SHELLING IS OF COURSE A CRUDE FORM OF DESTRUCTION. There are many other ways of attacking our modern Babylons that are just as deadly. Such attacks can take the form, for example, of building new cities, even bigger and grander than the old ones, cities that celebrate power instead of freedom, the power of tyrants, or gods. The city under attack, after all, is not just an urban cluster of buildings, but an idea of the city as a cosmopolitan metropolis.
    Hitler hated Berlin, but instead of abandoning or sacking his capital, he made plans to transform it. Speed, industry, and technology would be the hallmarks of Nazi achievement. Everything had to be bigger and faster, but also totally controlled by the Nazi state. The unruly crowds would be regimented as one single mass of worshipers. And the city itself would become a giant metropolis, to be called Germania, whose domes would reach such heights that clouds would float inside them. Large areas, where people lived and worked, would be demolished to make way for huge avenues, suitable only for military parades and mass rallies. The idea was to build a cult city to rival the City of God. Germania would be a morbid simulacrum of a great capital, populated by a pure race, a city with all spontaneous life sucked out of it, a Babylon of death. Thus, all the attributes of the liberal West—civil liberties, free-market economics, democracy, artistic freedom, individualism—would be “overcome,” to make way for something utterly outlandish. Berlin, Hitler boasted, “as a world capital, can make one think only of ancient Egypt, it can be compared