5 June 2017 - It is Monday, the day after the day after. I am alone in a gallery in the British Museum with the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. It is late afternoon and rain is battering the glass panels in the ceiling. The fine weather of the past week is already a distant memory, but that’s how summer works in England. The cuneiform inscription around the king reads, among other things “I am important; I am magnificent” before describing how brutally he used to kill his enemies. He has the best brutality, everybody says so.
Before coming to the museum, I had spent the day up the road at the British Library reading eighteenth-century manuscripts. On Saturday night, three terrorists had driven a van into pedestrians at London Bridge and attacked people with knives at the nearby Borough Market. As I went about my day, reading in the library and meeting with colleagues also going about their day, I followed the thread updating on The Guardian’s website, learning more details as the authorities released them. Mostly though I was concerned with honing an argument about whether comical poetry written in Delhi three hundred years ago was a social critique or just harmless fun. Armed police had shot the terrorists dead in eight minutes. I am not a callow, out of touch academic. I am fighting back.
For a few months, I lived two roads down from Borough Market. I walked through the market often, even though soon after we moved in my partner forbade me from shopping there. It was a punnet of organic raspberries or cherries that did it, I don’t remember which. “You paid how much for those?!” I live an hour away in Cambridge now but I am still within London’s gravitational pull. The places we’ve lived tend to draw us back but London has an exceptionally tight grasp on people in the UK because capital, talent and so much else pour into it, deadening the rest of the country more than people like to admit.
London is not a friendly place—it proverbial that a Londoner’s greatest fear is the thought of making accidental eye-contact on the tube or being greeted by a stranger on the bus—but like gas molecules bouncing around, proximity means interaction. And we do interact. Even today, on the day after the day after. It’s a fine thing if people around the world want to stand with us but most of us here are unafraid of everything except making conversation. By contrast, whenever I checked the US media, I discovered that in Britain we were “under siege” or “reeling” or something. People elsewhere want to use our experience to channel their own fear, which is understandable but not helpful. It’s not for us that they’re standing with us. The reality was that it was normal Monday here. A man who had been at a restaurant near Borough Market when the attack happened went back today to pay his bill and tip the staff. Beggars begged and workers worked. Yesterday I watched a BBC programme on Crossrail, a new east-west link under Central London. Ten thousand people are involved in building a tunnel for a rail service called the Elizabeth Line that is so badly needed that it is expected to have full-capacity ridership as soon as it opens next year. If we can build that then surely three men with knives can’t bring us down.
Today the only reason anyone remembers Ashnursirpal II is because they encountered him, twice life-size and carved in gypsum, on the way to the toilets in the British Museum. Anyone who reads the label to the stela knows, even at the remove of three millennia, that the king thought a bit too highly of himself. When I left him and made my way in the indifferent rain to King’s Cross to catch my train home, I listened to an interview with people connected with the space shuttle Challenger. I intensely felt that moment they recounted of the buzz of “they’re going to space” turning into a “they’re all dead” numbness. And then it happened again with the Columbia disaster seventeen years later. Our time on this earth is fleeting. We can all agree on that, whether we believe that after death comes oblivion, a trip to heaven or hell, or a stop-off in the bardo awaiting the next life. “Only connect.” Or “eat drink and be merry”. Or some other aphorism that has become cliché. That is our responsibility when faced with our mortality.
I was also thinking about takfir. Takfir, or declaring someone not a Muslim, is usually the refuge of scoundrels. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, for example, justify killing Muslims by claiming that the Muslims they kill do X or don’t do Y and are ipso facto not Muslims. I am not personally qualified to pronounce someone not a Muslim. But it felt right that so many British imams made a public declaration that they would not perform the Islamic funeral ritual for the terrorists. That was, essentially, an act of takfir. The Muslim Council of Britain and other groups released statements condemning the attacks in the strongest possible terms. They must have these things drafted and ready to send with just place names and details as blanks to fill in. It’s not that they don’t believe the words but if these organisations don’t manage to have a message out within minutes then Muslims are collectively blamed. There is a politics to this, a churn that proves that as a society we are racists and Islamophobes at the worst of times as we are at the best of times.
The only person whose words personally hurt me today was the President of the United States. He deliberately misinterpreted a statement by the Mayor of London so that he could settle a score. Interpretation of words is fundamental to being human—it’s how we empathise, how we remember, and how we show respect to one another. That’s why my professional life in part involves looking at crumbly old manuscripts. Trump lacks the decency, or maybe the capacity, to use words in the ways I’ve mentioned. For him, what someone says is just leverage, a cache of material that can be used to make his enemies into losers. I thought of the invocation of “American carnage” in his inaugural address and it is clear that he wants us to be afraid. Fear is not the right emotion under such circumstances because all it does is crowd out the will to live. To put this into context, more people died from mass shootings in the US in the same period that we suffered our most recent three terrorist attacks. Last week a gunman killed eight people in Mississippi. Just seven people were thought to have died in the London Bridge attack (an eighth body was later found). Comparing body counts is unfair but what other tools do we have to remind ourselves that we collectively choose how to frame the moments when horror tears through the fabric of normality?
I am often asked what the solution to terrorism might be. (Having to field this question is an occupational hazard for someone like me who teaches Middle Eastern Studies.) A lot of things could be said about how international affairs could be conducted differently. But I often focus on the domestic because we have more influence on that front, even as relatively apolitical citizens: Terrorism isn’t black magic. It’s a criminal conspiracy. We psychoanalyse terrorists in a way that we do not other criminals, and that is a mistake. To point this out is not political correctness gone awry or excusing terrorism, but simply putting things in their proper perspective. The police response to this particular attack was exemplary but they should have been able to stop it. One of the attackers had literally been on television, featured in a Channel 4 show called “The Jihadis Next Door”. He had also been kicked out of two mosques for causing a ruckus and telling people that it was unislamic to vote. Both of the other attackers were also known to police. Rather than asking ourselves “why do the terrorists hate our freedom?” our questions should be more along the lines of “why did the police not notice the warning signs?” The policing problem was made worse by cuts supported by the current Prime Minister when she was Home Secretary. I am not a British citizen so I can’t vote in the election in three days. I think they’ll choose poorly and return this government, with its damaging policies, to power. [In fact, the Conservatives did win the June 2017 election but humiliatingly lost their overall majority in Parliament, requiring them to make a dirty deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a band of Northern Irish kooks.]
Terrorism, broadly defined as it is, cannot be eliminated any more than murder or tax evasion can. We need instead to keep it in perspective, and to live our lives to the fullest extent. We can only hope that when we are dead, our monument will not be put next to the toilets. Poor Ashurnasirpal II.
Before coming to the museum, I had spent the day up the road at the British Library reading eighteenth-century manuscripts. On Saturday night, three terrorists had driven a van into pedestrians at London Bridge and attacked people with knives at the nearby Borough Market. As I went about my day, reading in the library and meeting with colleagues also going about their day, I followed the thread updating on The Guardian’s website, learning more details as the authorities released them. Mostly though I was concerned with honing an argument about whether comical poetry written in Delhi three hundred years ago was a social critique or just harmless fun. Armed police had shot the terrorists dead in eight minutes. I am not a callow, out of touch academic. I am fighting back.
London is not a friendly place—it proverbial that a Londoner’s greatest fear is the thought of making accidental eye-contact on the tube or being greeted by a stranger on the bus—but like gas molecules bouncing around, proximity means interaction. And we do interact. Even today, on the day after the day after. It’s a fine thing if people around the world want to stand with us but most of us here are unafraid of everything except making conversation. By contrast, whenever I checked the US media, I discovered that in Britain we were “under siege” or “reeling” or something. People elsewhere want to use our experience to channel their own fear, which is understandable but not helpful. It’s not for us that they’re standing with us. The reality was that it was normal Monday here. A man who had been at a restaurant near Borough Market when the attack happened went back today to pay his bill and tip the staff. Beggars begged and workers worked. Yesterday I watched a BBC programme on Crossrail, a new east-west link under Central London. Ten thousand people are involved in building a tunnel for a rail service called the Elizabeth Line that is so badly needed that it is expected to have full-capacity ridership as soon as it opens next year. If we can build that then surely three men with knives can’t bring us down.
Today the only reason anyone remembers Ashnursirpal II is because they encountered him, twice life-size and carved in gypsum, on the way to the toilets in the British Museum. Anyone who reads the label to the stela knows, even at the remove of three millennia, that the king thought a bit too highly of himself. When I left him and made my way in the indifferent rain to King’s Cross to catch my train home, I listened to an interview with people connected with the space shuttle Challenger. I intensely felt that moment they recounted of the buzz of “they’re going to space” turning into a “they’re all dead” numbness. And then it happened again with the Columbia disaster seventeen years later. Our time on this earth is fleeting. We can all agree on that, whether we believe that after death comes oblivion, a trip to heaven or hell, or a stop-off in the bardo awaiting the next life. “Only connect.” Or “eat drink and be merry”. Or some other aphorism that has become cliché. That is our responsibility when faced with our mortality.
I was also thinking about takfir. Takfir, or declaring someone not a Muslim, is usually the refuge of scoundrels. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, for example, justify killing Muslims by claiming that the Muslims they kill do X or don’t do Y and are ipso facto not Muslims. I am not personally qualified to pronounce someone not a Muslim. But it felt right that so many British imams made a public declaration that they would not perform the Islamic funeral ritual for the terrorists. That was, essentially, an act of takfir. The Muslim Council of Britain and other groups released statements condemning the attacks in the strongest possible terms. They must have these things drafted and ready to send with just place names and details as blanks to fill in. It’s not that they don’t believe the words but if these organisations don’t manage to have a message out within minutes then Muslims are collectively blamed. There is a politics to this, a churn that proves that as a society we are racists and Islamophobes at the worst of times as we are at the best of times.
The only person whose words personally hurt me today was the President of the United States. He deliberately misinterpreted a statement by the Mayor of London so that he could settle a score. Interpretation of words is fundamental to being human—it’s how we empathise, how we remember, and how we show respect to one another. That’s why my professional life in part involves looking at crumbly old manuscripts. Trump lacks the decency, or maybe the capacity, to use words in the ways I’ve mentioned. For him, what someone says is just leverage, a cache of material that can be used to make his enemies into losers. I thought of the invocation of “American carnage” in his inaugural address and it is clear that he wants us to be afraid. Fear is not the right emotion under such circumstances because all it does is crowd out the will to live. To put this into context, more people died from mass shootings in the US in the same period that we suffered our most recent three terrorist attacks. Last week a gunman killed eight people in Mississippi. Just seven people were thought to have died in the London Bridge attack (an eighth body was later found). Comparing body counts is unfair but what other tools do we have to remind ourselves that we collectively choose how to frame the moments when horror tears through the fabric of normality?
I am often asked what the solution to terrorism might be. (Having to field this question is an occupational hazard for someone like me who teaches Middle Eastern Studies.) A lot of things could be said about how international affairs could be conducted differently. But I often focus on the domestic because we have more influence on that front, even as relatively apolitical citizens: Terrorism isn’t black magic. It’s a criminal conspiracy. We psychoanalyse terrorists in a way that we do not other criminals, and that is a mistake. To point this out is not political correctness gone awry or excusing terrorism, but simply putting things in their proper perspective. The police response to this particular attack was exemplary but they should have been able to stop it. One of the attackers had literally been on television, featured in a Channel 4 show called “The Jihadis Next Door”. He had also been kicked out of two mosques for causing a ruckus and telling people that it was unislamic to vote. Both of the other attackers were also known to police. Rather than asking ourselves “why do the terrorists hate our freedom?” our questions should be more along the lines of “why did the police not notice the warning signs?” The policing problem was made worse by cuts supported by the current Prime Minister when she was Home Secretary. I am not a British citizen so I can’t vote in the election in three days. I think they’ll choose poorly and return this government, with its damaging policies, to power. [In fact, the Conservatives did win the June 2017 election but humiliatingly lost their overall majority in Parliament, requiring them to make a dirty deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a band of Northern Irish kooks.]
Terrorism, broadly defined as it is, cannot be eliminated any more than murder or tax evasion can. We need instead to keep it in perspective, and to live our lives to the fullest extent. We can only hope that when we are dead, our monument will not be put next to the toilets. Poor Ashurnasirpal II.
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