What does Christopher Hitchens mean to me?

Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011) popped up on my horizon of intellectual heroes in the aftermath of 9/11, when I happened to stumble upon Noam Chomsky’s take on the events of that black Tuesday. Chomsky was one of my intellectual icons then and I thought he could help me understand the implications of the diabolic attacks that changed the world and – at a personal level – my life. A political animal myself at that time who liked to be identified with the Left and entertained strong opinions on matters that I thought (in those Leftish days) warranted my views, I saw myself seeking political explanations that would form a backdrop for me to analyse the real meaning or otherwise of the that perfectly co-ordinated attacks on the United Sates by a bunch of perfectly tuned and calibrated deadly jihadists.

An ardent admirer of Noam Chomsky and his brilliant linguistic theory of Transformational-Generative Grammar, I thought he could offer a clear assessment of what happened that day. But I found Chomsky utterly boring as he blamed the United States for the wickedness of the 9/11 attacks and Hitchens immensely interesting for his outright and honest analysis of the dangers of Islamic Jihadism. The latter’s rebuttal of the former in The Nation and the subsequent debate that followed were an eye-opener to the real dangers of what Hitchens rightly called Islamofascism. I still admire Chomsky the linguist, but his analysis of the 9/11 attacks and the threat of Islamism I thought has echoed the views of an intelligent Islamist apologist who would not hesitate to blame outsiders – the West, the Crusaders – for everything that went wrong in what they think is the perfect religion.

That debate was held in the backdrop of a growing sense of a civilizational clash between forces that represented freedoms, democracy and open-mindedness and their adversaries who thought that their holy book contained all the answers for guiding people for all times to come. Personally, the Chomsky-Hitchens encounter marked my departure from the ideological to the real. I loved Hitchens in that debate because he called a spade a spade. All the liberal values I have inculcated in me in the course of my formal and informal education have equipped me to visualise the real dangers of totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and communism. The excesses committed by these ideologies in the 20 th century were too real to be just wished away or presented as just a footnote to the history of the modern world. It was Hitchens who showed the world the fascist underbelly of Islam as a totalitarian belief system, not as a faith practised by millions of Muslims around the globe.

For me, it was a short distance from that realization to taking a fresh, critical look at the religion in which I was born. Having traversed that distance, I have come out of the old boxes which I thought I perfectly fit in. The result: I found myself emboldened to speak my mind, in my small circles of friends and family, on matters religious, especially Islam. It was not just to win debates but to demonstrate the process of my coming-out.

The Islam I was familiar with till 9/11 was built on a narrative that, in fact, erased all the bad stuff and is full of good stuff such as charity and brotherhood (no sisterhood). Even some bad stuff that was too obvious to be just swept under the carpet had been given honeyed explanations and interpretations. Any talk in family circles that remotely touched, say, the topic of polygamy in those days would be full of caveats by the elders in my family, the purpose of which was to tell us that men in the early days of Islam married many wives because of the large number of widows of Muslim men who had died in battles. It took me my post-9/11 interest in Islam, thanks to Hitchens as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji, to name a few, to realize that this narrative was a smokescreen and also to identify the blind spots that it was replete with. Hitchens in his international bestseller book, The God Is Not Great (2007), lays bare the mask or one of the masks thus:

“Not only did Islam begin by condemning all doubters to eternal fire, but it still claims the rights to do so in almost all of its dominions, and still preaches that these same dominions can and must be extended by war. There has never been an attempt in any age to challenge or even investigate the claims of Islam that has not been met with extremely harsh and swift repression. Previously, then, one is entitled to conclude that the apparent unity and confidence of the faith is a mask for a very deep and probably justifiable insecurity. That there are and always have been sanguinary feuds between different schools of Islam, resulting in strictly inter-Muslim accusations of heresy and profanity and in terrible acts of violence, naturally goes without saying.” (pp. 125-126)

I was born in a Muslim neighbourhood where this mask of ‘unity and confidence of the faith’ was uncovered more often than not with each person or family representing one school of Islam or the other claiming the heart and soul of what they all viewed as the perfect religion. The small sect of Islam I was born in and which entertained (and still entertains) the claim that it was (and is) the true recipient of the legacy of True Islam was at the receiving end of the 'accusations of heresy and profanity' by mainstream Muslims in my neighbourhood. In fact, I grew up with an awareness of factional fault lines getting sharper and wider. But, as Hitchens rightly notes in the book, what unites these warring sects of Islam is its claim that it is 'unimprovable and final’.

That sense of finality has certainly caused a cognitive dissonance in the Muslim psyche: how can a perfect and final religion be in a position where it has absolutely no leadership role in the affairs of the contemporary world? The only way to reduce the dissonance is to see the community as a victim of others - the West, the Crusaders. This denialism, an offshoot of the victimhood syndrome, has shaped the collective conscience of each of these sects and the characteristic feature of that conscience is hostility to the West. There may be differences in the degrees in which that hostility is manifest in different sects. But the overarching idea of an absolutely perfect Islamic alternative that these diverse sects seek to embed in the Muslim psyche is what the ideological Islamism pursues to cement the apparent differences with.

Another post-9/11 narrative that is still in the making is that Islam is a religion that appreciates individual liberty. That kind of personal Islam has to be appreciated and encouraged because it can be a better alternative to the violent jihadist strain in Islam whose victims are mainly Muslims. Perhaps, such initiatives may yield positive results in future. Their problem, however, is their vulnerability to confirmation bias. One already thinks that one’s religion is a beautiful religion and finds things to prove that it is and stays happy with that brilliant finding. But a religion that treats itself as perfect and final and its scripture as valid for all times to come cannot be easily made amenable to the fancies of a few reform-minded individuals unless they are prepared to disabuse themselves and their co-religionists of the perceived supremacy of their religion. My children would be living in a better world if such reform-oriented efforts succeed.

Islam is not the only target of Hitchens’ attack as he spares no religion from his sharp criticism and ridicule. The attack on the Twin Towers of New York just helped him focus on the jihadist ideology which he rightly branded Islamofascism. I salute him for his oratorical and literary skills to debunk dogmas and ideologies that stifle free speech. One of the world’s most influential public intellectuals, he will survive his death by continuing to inspire people like me who wish to live by Enlightenment values based on rational inquiry, freethinking, freedom of conscience, gender equality, basic human rights and dignity which we can find only in a true democracy. No revealed religion and no dogma can be an alternative to democracy. Let me toast a drink to the courage and intellectual honesty of Hitchens who refused to succumb to any notion of political correctness.