My father was buried on the same day as the Ayatollah Khomeini, who died the day after him. Cut off from the news media, I knew nothing of this until I caught sight of a television in a pub after we had finished our business in the graveyard.
Some years later, reading Don De Lillos's novel Mao II, I came upon the following description of that June day in 1989, from the viewpoint of a character called Karen: "The living forced their way into the burial site, bloodying their hands and tearing at their hair, choking in the thick dust, and the body of Khomeini rested in a flimsy box, a kind of litter with low sides, and Karen found she could go into the slums of south Tehran, backwards into people's lives, and hear them saying, We have lost our father. All the dispossessed waking to the morning call. Sorrow, sorrow is this day."
Terror, terror is this day. I could see in the faces of those hundreds of thousands of people who sought that day to prevent the body of their father going into the ground that what consumed them was not sorrow but fear. They did not want, any more than I did, their father to leave them, for how could they face the terrors of the world without him? De Lillo wrote: "The living touched the body, they pressed the imam's flesh to keep him warm."
I remember as a teenager that a great-aunt who lived on Long Island, New York, took for a while to sending us postcards of the newly-constructed World Trade Centre. We had not been to New York, but those postcards told us our aunt was more proud that she lived within sight of those towers than of anything else.
"Look," she said, "I am at the heart of the world, our world, your world".
Fear begets fear. Vertigo, the fear of heights, might now be redefined as a fear of getting above oneself. Until last week, I had imagined that my fear of heights was irrational to the point of superstition. The trepidation I felt on the upper storeys of tall buildings was a measure of a fear, I was persuaded, that defied logic. Now I know all it defied was experience, a different thing. We have been shown that our deepest fears have a sound basis in reality.
Looking at my great-aunt's postcards, I used to puzzle: "Why, if this was the centre of our world, was it necessary to build these towers up into the sky, when the whole of Connacht was crying out for people? Why, if this was the same world as ours, was my great-aunt living thousands of miles away from where she longed to be?" The magnetism of capital had sucked her in to live beside this human geyser, shooting its human contents up into the clouds. We imagined we had mastered the earth, but in truth we had ourselves been mastered.
The battle between Islam and the West is the world's last battle between tradition and modernity. Faith, devotion and authority of the old kind confront science, reason and materialism and the winner must take all.
Last Tuesday was a meeting of the unstoppable force and the immovable object. Strangely, the inertia of tradition was represented by a moving aeroplane, while the driving whirlwind of progress was depicted in the seemingly indestructible twin towers. We saw what happened. We are left with our fears.
For several decades now, Islam has been under bombardment from the Western media, from Hollywood, CNN, and the liberal voices of post-modern cynicism. Besieged by values which not merely seek to contradict its faith and unsettle its austerity, but to undermine the very essence of its devotion and mysticism, Islam has retreated into a cocoon of paranoia, yes, but also self-sufficiency.
Other traditions have crumbled, but Islam has not. It has been observed that the West does not have an answer to suicide bombers, to the characteristic of indifference to personal welfare upon which its enemy is able to call. It has not been widely observed that those who destroyed the WTC were also using as a weapon the very instrument of media power which had been used for so long against them. Without television, this act would have been meaningless, and therefore unthinkable. Its awesome evil resided not simply in the ingeniousness of its turning of the crudest of technologies against the heart of modernity, but in its calculated strike against the Western imagination using the very instruments which had seemed to make the West omnipotent.
There are only two known antidotes to fear: action and prayer. Each on its own is useless. In its hour of grief, America fell back upon values which the logic of consumerism has done so much to erode: faith in God and belief in authority of the old kind. The most impressive people of the past week have been George Bush and Billy Graham. Just as its enemy, driven by fears of engulfment, surrendered a little to the anti-values which threatened it, so the West, in its terror, rushed backwards to embrace the values it had all but abandoned. Western liberalism lies buried in the rubble of the twin towers, and at the pulpit are the figures of men who walk in the old way, uttering words of war in the pauses between prayers.
Our fathers are risen and walk among us.
jwaters@irish-times.ie