It seems to me that the September 11th attacks on New York cannot be justified on the basis of The Koran. My copy of the document was published in the Penguin Classics. It was translated by N.J. Dawood (first published, 1956; revised, 1959, republished 1961; Penguin Books, Ltd., London and Tonbridge).
In Arabic, one hears very often the words Allah, el Bismillah, "God, the compassionate". Christians, Jews and Muslims are expected to take God as an example, and to try to be as He is. However, there was nothing compassionate in the use of human beings as projectiles on that fateful day.
In the late 1940s I lived in Tangier. Most of my neighbours were Muslims. I was employed by RCA Communications, Inc., an American firm. My fellow workers were Muslim, Hebrew and Christian. My closest friends were Muslim, the likes of Mohammed Boudra, the son of Ab del Krim, the leader of the revolt against colonial rule in the 20s, and a political refugee; Sidi Bourguiba of Tunisia, another political refugee; and Alal Fassi, leader of the Moroccan nationalists. They enabled me to keep in touch with the undercover politics of the region, about which I wrote for Irish and American papers.
The saint
When I heard that a number of small houses were being built in the city, I applied for one, got it, and moved out of the hotel. I was already married. My landlord was known widely in the city as El Wali (the saint), or Cherief Dar Kana.
In the Muslim world one does not have to die to be recognised as a saint: one earns the title by a blameless life. My landlord was the leader of a Muslim sect. Also, he happened to be an active politician, a rebel, a believer in action directe; in short, a very interesting person. In no time we were good friends, confiding in each other, exchanging opinions. I was probably the first Irishman he had met.
My Arabic, though slowly increasing, was inadequate for our conversations; and, as French was his second language, it was through that medium that we conversed, usually on the day I was paying the rent.
One such day he remarked that I looked worried. had I a problem? Surely it was the duty of friends to share problems? That gave me the opportunity to explain my gloomy aspect: my next door neighbour was a Spanish mechanic, a refugee from Franco's Spain, and he had just lost his job. His wife was expecting her first child, a fact that had become patently obvious. Yes, he had noticed.
"The man may have some difficulty in paying his rent," I said. "And Tangier is a hard station. I'm dreading the day when he will be thrown out in the street and left homeless. That's what's worrying me."
"Don't you know that the Koran orders that we must treat as we would our own people all those who believe in the one God? You have no need to worry. I will not have him thrown out on the street. He, his wife and the child will have my protection."
El Wali was as good as his word; and up to the time that I quit RCA, Tangier and North Africa to return to freelancing as a journalist in Ireland, towards the end of the forties, my neighbour, his wife and his child continued undisturbed in their little house.
Free food for poor
It is, of course, easy to proclaim a belief without honouring it in practice, as so many of us are wont to do. However, in the market place of Tangier, which I visited daily, for fruit and vegetables, the Wali's precept was being honoured daily. Pregnant women, too poor to pay for their requirements, wandered among the stalls, taking whatever they needed, without payment; and likewise the village fools, and very poor men. Before meeting El Wali I had noticed this practice and had inquired of one of the Berber women if they had noticed? And what was happening? They had referred me to the Koran, in much the same way as El Wali had done.
Before I left Tangier I was called to a meeting in the home of El Wali. There I met a number of men from what we used call the "Spanish Zone", that part of Morocco occupied by the Spaniards. They had been involved in an unsuccessful rising. Some of them claimed to have been tortured by members of the Spanish Foreign Legion.
I was asked by their leader to protest on their behalf in letters to world leaders, including Churchill and Stalin. This I was glad to do. Every journalist has the dream of writing what we call a scoop, an exclusive report of something sensational. I availed myself of the opportunity to write such a scoop and, for safety's sake, sent the article via the English PO, to avoid censorship.
On return to Ireland shortly afterwards I went to see the late Liam Mac Gabhann in the Irish Press office on Burgh Quay, Dublin, to ask why the newspaper had not published my scoop.
No corroboration
"We could find no corroboration of the story," explained Liam. "There was not even a line from Reuter or Associated Press"
To the best of my knowledge only one newspaper carried the story, though not as I had written it. That was the Gibraltar Chronical. The explanation for the silence of the news agencies was that their representatives in North Africa were Spanish journalists, high rankers in such organs as Espana, and the Spanish news agencies, all under the firm control of Franco's censorship,
The French at the time also operated a severe censorship in North Africa, where the colonial powers worked in close unison. Thus, no report appeared, as far as I know, in the French language press of Morocco, then occupied by the French.
Anyway, my experience of having lived in Tangier was to develop a respect and admiration for the Muslim people in the Mogreb (comprising the three nations of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), and their struggles for independence. They saw no other way of achieving independence than to use physical force in the same way as the French had done against the German occupation.
The people who were sacrificed as projectiles in America on September 11th may not all have been people who believed in this one God. But there is no doubt that those hundreds of massacred men, women and children, did contain believers in that same God. Hence my thesis, that the attackers operated outside the Koran.