History Repeats

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Peter Lamborn Wilson, "Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes" (Autonomedia, 208 pages, $13.95)
Donald Barr Chidsey, "The Wars in Barbary: Arab Piracy and the Birth of the United States Navy" (Crown Publishers, 165 pages, $4.50)
John Lukacs, "Five Days in London May 1940" (Yale University Press, 236 pages, $11.95)
"There was in those days an ominous and threatening unreality, a feeling that one was living in a bad dream, and that one was on the point of waking up from this horrible unreality into a still more horrible reality." The feelings described in those words might seem awfully familiar to residents of New York City in the wake of September 11th and the subsequent anthrax -by-mail scare. But they were actually written in a diary by Leonard Woolf, husband of the novelist Virginia Woolf, when he was detailing the mood in London and the surrounding environs in the opening days of World War II (they are quoted in Lukacs' book "Five Days in London May 1940").

Home: The People of the Book Part 1: Bin Laden: The Man Who Wasn't There "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America" by Yossef Bodansky "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden" by Peter L. Bergen Part 2: The Rise and Fall of the Taliban Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia" by Ahmed Rashid "Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan" by Michael Griffin "The Taliban: War, Religion and the New Order in Afghanistan" by Peter Marsden Part 3: Worlds Apart Karen Armstrong, "Islam: A Short History" Armstrong, "Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet" Bernard Lewis, "The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years" Geneive Abdo, "No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam" Part 4: History Repeats Peter Lamborn Wilson, "Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes" Donald Barr Chidsey, "The Wars in Barbary: Arab Piracy and the Birth of the United States Navy" John Lukacs, "Five Days in London May 1940

History has its consolations, and it may be somewhat comforting to realize that the hard experiences of today have precedent. Then again, it may be also be somewhat discomforting to discover that history often slips into the same old dangerous patterns. In the current crisis, America is wrestling with finding a balance between freedom and security; laws have been changed to make it easier to crack down on would-be terrorists even as voices on the right and the left fret about the loss of individual rights. Some of those same questions, as it turns out, were explored in Britain during its war with the Axis powers. Writes Lukacs: "In those last days of May 1940 Britain harbored more than 100,000 refugees, while more of them were still arriving from France. We have seen that there was considerable popular distrust of aliens. This, together with the prevalent anxiety about possible spies and so-called fifth columnists, contributed to the government's decision to corral refugees who had come from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, interning them on the Isle of Man."

Farther back in history, there are other echoes. In his excellent and insightful book "Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes," Peter Lamborn Wilson takes readers back to the period between the 16th and 19th centuries, when Muslim corsairs — in their way, some of the first terrorists — set sail from the Barbary Coast and ravaged European shipping, enslaving thousands of their defeated foes.

Some of that history is well known — but what is less well known is that thousands of Europeans, faced with the prospect of enslavement, chose to convert to Islam and join the Corsairs — "Turning Turk" it was called. Writes Wilson: "From about the late 1500's to the 18th century, many thousands of European men — and women — converted to Islam. Most of them lived and worked in Algiers, Tunisia, Tripoli and the Rabat-Sale area of Morocco — the so-called Barbary Coast states."

"Turning Turk" was viewed in the West at the time as the consequence of an impossible choice. But, in actuality, many of the European "Renegadoes" as they were called, enjoyed their new lives and the freedom and anarchy to be found on the high seas. After his fighting prime was over, 17th century Englishman turned renegadoe John Ward looked back fondly on his pirate days, and the times, as he said, "when we might sing, drab [i.e. f---], swear and kill men as freely as your cakemakers do flies; when the whole sea was our empire where we robbed at will, and the world was our garden where we walked for sport."

Corsair ships, during the 16th to 19th centuries, were often more egalitarian than European vessels sailing under state flags; Corsair ships were often fairer in their distribution of spoils (with every man getting a more or less equal share). The pirate "republics" along the Barbary Coast were often run with a somewhat democratic spirit, with many voices having their say. Wilson speculates that some of these pirate states: "can be seen as precursor to the republican governments of America and France, which came into being only centuries later...A strange thought: does European democracy actually owe a direct debt to the Corsairs?"

A stranger thought: Muslim warriors may have been an indirect influence on both the terrorists America is fighting against and the democratic values Americans are fighting for. In many ways, some of the same conflicts and cultural themes that played out hundreds of years ago on the high seas are repeating themselves in Afghanistan. Writes Wilson: "In our modern consensus view, the moral right of killing and stealing (war and taxes) belongs only to the State; even more specifically, to the rational, secular, corporate State. Those who are irrational enough to believe in religion (or revolution) as a reason for action in the world are ‘dangerous fanatics.' Clearly not much has changed since the 1600's. On the one hand, we have society; on the other hand, resistance."

What's more, the corsairs of the 19th century were also part of the reason why America has a strong, vital navy today. In his book "The Wars in Barbary: Arab Piracy and the Birth of the United States Navy" (originally published in 1971), Donald Barr Chidsey tells the rousing tale of how Arab piracy in the 19th century prompted America to strengthen its naval forces. Chidsey writes that "when the American Revolution was ended, the new republic of the United States found itself with an army of some 700 men and no navy at all. There were many who would have eliminated even those 700 soldiers." America, of course, was a new nation, made up of states which were wary of strong federal control. As it turns out though, pirates from Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were in the habit at the time of capturing ships and holding the passengers for huge ransoms. European countries struck up treaties with the pirates and paid tributes to ensure the safe passage of their ships.

At the time of George Washington's inauguration, 21 Americans were being held for ransom in Morocco. The U.S. prepared to pay $41,00 for the prisoners, $25,000 for a treaty with Morocco, and $25,000 a year indefinitely, in the form of naval supplies, to get out of the hostage jam. Soon afterwards, Algerian pirates seized eleven American vessels and the U.S., a young cash-poor nation, faced the prospect of paying out millions more in ransom. A bill was quickly introduced in Congress appropriating funds for the building of four frigates of forty-four guns each and two frigates of thirty-six guns each; the measure also called for the hiring of crews for the new vessels. The bill squeaked through the Senate and passed in the House on March 27, 1794; President Washington signed it the next day. Writes Chidsey: "This was the birth of the United States Navy."

So from the very beginnings of America, American presidents have shown little interest in giving in to terrorism. Unfortunately, the world's troublemakers don't always learn from history, or they learn the wrong lessons. Lukacs writes that Hitler's assessment of the character and strength of the British people proved to be dead wrong. Writes Lukacs: "[Hitler] knew something, but not much, about their history. He did not really understand the common people of Britain or elements of their character....He and his National Socialists were bound to win the struggle [Hitler thought], even though they had started out as a minority, because they and their ideas were more determined and stronger than those of their opponents."

Like Hitler, Osama bin Laden drew certain conclusions from the experiences of the U.S. military in Vietnam and Somalia. He concluded that America's fighting resolve was weak and wouldn't last after it began to take casualties. Writes Bergen in "Holy War, Inc.": "Bin Laden told CNN in 1997 that one of his proudest achievements while he was based in Sudan was the role of his Afghan Arabs in the 1993 killings of more than a dozen Americans soldiers stationed in Somalia." Bodansky quotes Bin Laden as once saying "Our mujahideen who fought here in Afghanistan also participated in operations against the Americans in Somalia — and they were surprised at the collapse of American morale. This convinced us the Americans are a paper tiger." Like Hitler, Bin Laden miscalculated. Somalia was a peacekeeping mission for the U.S., and most Americans had little emotional connection to the country beyond the sympathy they felt for the starving Somalians they saw on television. Now, of course, Americans have reason to fight that may be closer to their hearts: the thousands who were killed in the September 11th attack.

In her biography "Muhammad," Armstrong tells the story of the original Satanic Verses. Of course, most people know the story of Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses": in 1989, after Rushdie wrote a provocative novel by that name, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah against him for what he saw as a blasphemous portrayal of the prophet Muhammad. The original tale of the Satanic Verses, which Rushdie drew on for his novel, takes place in the time of the Prophet. The story, which many Muslim scholars say isn't true but that nonetheless appears in several histories released in the years after Muhammad's death, says that on one occasion Satan interfered with Muhammad's reception of the divine word and that Muhammad uttered two verses that declared that the pagan goddesses al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat could be revered as intermediaries between God and man. He later rescinded the verses and replaced them with passages that dismissed the goddess as human fabrications.

The Quran, in Sura 22:51, acknowledges the difficulties involved when human prophets channel the word of God:

"Never did We send
An apostle or a prophet
Before thee, but, when he
Framed a desire, Satan
Threw some (vanity)
Into his desire: but God
Will cancel anything (vain)
That Satan throws in,
And God will confirm
(And establish) His Signs:
For God is full of knowledge
And wisdom"

The course of a war is difficult to predict, but, at the time of this writing, bin Laden seems to be losing. Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are on the run, and their strongholds seem to be slipping from their fingers one by one. Bin Laden, according to his biographers, sees his struggle in religious terms. Writes Bergen: "The journey to Afghanistan had a profound spiritual importance for bin Laden: it recalled for him the Prophet Muhammad's emigration, or hijra, from Mecca to Medina in the seventh century." One wonders if Bin Laden and his followers, in light of their losses, haven't begun to question their particular brand of militancy; do they wonder now, as they gallop on horseback from hideout to hideout, if they haven't, all along, been following some 21st century version of the Satanic Verses and strayed from the true path of Islam?

Perhaps, in all the books one might read, some of the most relevant and telling words that speak to the current crisis are found in the holy book of the Muslims. As the holy Quran reads in Sura 2: 11-12:

"When it is said to them:
‘Make not mischief on the earth,'
They say: ‘Why we only
Want to make peace!'

Of a surety, they are the ones
Who make mischief,
But they realize (it) not."