Essay: The Holy War of Words

Fairy tales in the West begin, "Once upon a time." In the Arab world they start, "Kan ya makan." The words mean "There was, there was not." That is, maybe it happened. On the other hand, maybe it didn't happen. Now you see it, now you don't.

Kan ya makan: the Arabic language is capable of magical effects. On a squalid Cairo street early on a cold, foul day, people greet each other with small bouquets of words: "Morning of blessings! Morning of light!" They have conjured a moment, and smiled, and passed, and then, poof! they are back on a miserable street among the pariah dogs. If people are poor and live in the desert, language may be their richest possession: Why not? It opens miraculously onto other worlds. The Koran, with its bursts of sonority and light, describes a paradise that has everything the desert does not: the sweetest water, cool shade, silken couches, wines that one can endlessly drink without getting drunk.

Kan ya makan is intoxication enough. It was out of the desert that humans conjured monotheism -- absolute God to suffuse utter emptiness. When kan ya makan enters politics, its genius makes language a reality superior to the deed -- even renders the facts of the objective world unnecessary and graceless. The vivid hallucination becomes the act: the prophecy is more satisfying than its literal fulfillment. If the demagogue-bard says the infidel will swim in his own blood, then words have pre-empted the work of armies. Ambiguity has an ancient history in the West, but the Middle East has its special genius for mirage. There, the dreariest, basest impulses go dressed up in poetry. Aggressive greed may swagger around as jihad. "Arab dignity and honor" shine in the mind with a radiant life of their own, forever beleaguered and violated and crying for revenge -- visions really, not things to be struggled toward, to be earned.

Westerners, who have wandered through centuries of darkness and enlightenment and rationalism and scientific method and then the various neo- darknesses of the 20th century (Auschwitz, Hiroshima and so on), have some difficulty with these dreamy effects in which reality and illusion float back and forth interchangeably. Americans have a special longing of their own. They need to know they are working in a scheme of virtue. Americans feel a moral unease when they sense that their power is banging around loose in the world without being, in a sort of theological sense, justified. The antiwar slogan "No Blood for Oil" proclaimed that unease, as if oil were Miller High Life and not the stuff that powers most of the world's economies. Americans felt the chill of that wrongness when Iraqi women and children were carried, charred by American bombs, out of a Baghdad bunker.