July 28, 2002

In the seventies Oriana Fallaci was known as a firebrand reporter who bearded many a lion in his den — Castro, Qadhafi, Kissinger, Golda Meir, Zulfikar Bhutto — and was blunt and forthright in interviewing them. She was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Lebanon. She wrote a number of books including a semi-biographical novel entitled The man that was badly received by critics. Then she went into hibernation and for the last ten years has lived in New York — in exile as she calls it — and in silence.

It was the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, not far from her Manhattan apartment — and of which she claims to have had a premonition — that shook her out of her slumber and has shattered her silence in an explosion of rage and pride. La Rage et L’Orgueil (Anger and pride) is the title of the French edition of her latest work (La rabbia e Forgoglio in the original Italian) — an English translation is not yet available. It is less a book than, in the publisher’s words, a ‘concise and virulent pamphlet’. What Fallaci has to say in it, and she says it over and over, may be summed up, in her own words, as follows:

You (Western nations) do not understand, you do not wish to understand, that a crusade in reverse is on the march. A war of religion that they call jihad, holy war. You do not understand, you do not wish to understand that for them (i.e. Muslims) the West is a world to be conquered, punished, subjugated.

But just a fanatical minority? “No, my friend, no. They are millions upon millions upon millions, the extremists, the fanatics....” The “multitudes who flood the streets of Islamabad, the squares of Nairobi, the mosques of Tehran.... with their fierce countenances and fists clenched in threat” are seeking nothing less than “the conquest of our souls”. She provides a long list of monuments and art objects, from the Jefferson monument through the Eiffel Tower to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that they plan to destroy.

Moreover, they would turn church bells into the muezzin’s call, replace miniskirts with burkas and substitute camel’s milk for cognac; in short, the end of civilization as Oriana Fallaci knows it.

But Fallaci is ready and prepared. “Is it war that you want!” she challenges the “followers of Allah”, “So be it! As far as I am concerned, let there be war. To the last breath!.” She does have lucid moments: the conflict “is cultural, intellectual, religious, moral, political” and not military; the West’s military victory would only make things worse. But such thoughts are fleeting.

In her view Muslims are just a bad lot, illiterate and uncivilized, they oppress women, they have given nothing to civilization, there isn’t one democracy among the whole lot. Oscillating between obscurantism and puritanism, Islamic society keeps its doors closed against liberty and justice and progress. (Pakistan is mentioned only in passing as a friend of the Taliban and blamed, in a reversal of the truth, for aiding them to destroy the Bamian statues).

Ms Fallaci’s last word concerning Muslims: To negotiate with them is impossible, to reason with them unthinkable, to treat them with tolerance or hope, suicidal.

She is enraged at Westerners who out of pusillanimity or concern for political correctness, or sheer blindness, refuse to recognize the danger, fail to see that the Muslim hordes coming to the West are not immigrants but the advance guard of an organized and well-planned invasion. The list of these errant Westerners is long — liberals, the Pope (for apologizing for the crusades); French President Chirac, the ‘clownish and stupid’ European Union. Also in for it is the ‘inanity and perfidy’ of literary critics (most of whom had panned her novel).

She is particularly hard on her own countrymen, starting with Prime Minister Berlusconi, who having preceded her in stating the truth — Christianity is superior to Islam — let himself be brow-beaten by his ‘hypocritica’ European colleagues and went back on the statement (“My father would have broken his nose, my mother torn out his eyes”). For Italians she reserves her choicest epithets: factious, vain, vulgar, bilious, petty-minded, cowardly, opportunist; the Italians of today don’t even know the rules of grammar and commit ‘monstrous errors’ of syntax.

“Donkeys! Animals!” she yells at their perpetrators. It has come down to this in the Italy of today, she laments, that there are people in high positions who would not know the difference between caviar and porridge. Among such there were some who on September 11 had the effrontery to say “Good for America, America had it coming”: “I spit in their faces.”

Of America and Americans, she has the highest opinion, as she does of a small handful of others: New York’s ex-Mayor Giuliani, the late King Hussain (“How could such a man have been born and bred under the shadow of minarets!”) the Dalai Lama. Also of herself and her writing. She claims to be a perfectionist: “I am a slow writer, a circumspect writer, not easily pleased with my own work . . . not at all like those writers who are always so delighted with their production . . and rejoice at it as if they had urinated eau de cologne” — not quite an example of circumspection!

Reaction to the book in the West has been mixed. In France two anti-racist organizations have filed complaints in court against Fallaci for incitement to racial hatred. She calls this “intellectual terrorism” and in a disingenuous disclaimer says that she is talking not of war between races but between religions.

Press reviews have been critical in general. A French critic called the book “an unremitting succession of confused and peevish phrases” written, moreover, with “a cruel lack of talent”; he reminds the author that emotion and fervour cannot justify anything and everything.

The Economist of London thinks that the author has a case up to a point but presented without perspective and historical context, the book is just a “fluent diatribe which panders to a succession of prejudices and convictions” against Islam.

Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis dress it up in scholarly robes. But the horror of the September 11 attack seems to have removed the inhibitions that kept the sentiment in check. Undoubtedly to some extent the campaign is orchestrated in order to divert attention from the Palestine issue and other specific causes of Islamist belligerence. But at all levels now it is open season on Islam, from Berlusconi and US Attorney General Ashcroft to the local grocer and his wife.

Much of this, one hopes, will blow over in time, for the real conflict is not between Islam and the West but within Islam. Possibly by her “paranoid and apocalyptic vision”, as another critic puts it, Oriana Fallaci may have served, contrary to her intention, to incite a less prejudiced appraisal of Islam and Islamic society.

In the long run more important than the West’s appraisal of Islam is what Muslims themselves think and want to make, of their society. The Taliban/Ayatollah models have probably run their course but in the apoplectic rantings of Fallaci there is a kernel of bitter truth about the deficiencies of Islamic society — the absence of democracy, treatment of women, low educational and cultural levels, obscurantism, resistance to change. Unless these are redressed, more is at stake than the good opinion of the West.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)