For whom the bomb ticks?

The difference between Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and Ahmed Muhammad has less to do with their surnames than the contexts in which their names came to be dragged into the morbid American fascination for terror with an Islam tag.

Ahmed Mulloy? Probably that name doesn’t ring a bell with you? Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t. Because he is only as real as the ‘clock-bomb’ that the real Ahmed Muhammad took to his school in Texas which his English teacher in her infinite wisdom, derived in part from those that created Ahmed Mulloy, thought could blow up the whole school, not excluding her own blessed self, into smithereens. Ahmed Mulloy and his creator? Here, they are: Mulloy is a character created by John Updike in his 2006 novel Terrorist.

As the protagonist of a post-9/11 fiction Updike has fashioned him as an eminently sellable proposition. A callow teenager, equally misinformed about both the world and Islam, prone to sexual delinquencies, and the heir of a broken family of mixed extraction, he proves an ideal platform for Updike to paint Islam in fantastically unflattering terms. His inspiration is a caricaturistically drawn clergy man named Sheikh Rashid who subscribes to a Taliban version of Islam. In short, Ahmed Mulloy is a progeny of the cross-pollination between Hollywood inspired macho culture and partly US patented version of Islam espoused by the Talibans. Under the promptings of the Sheikh, he joins a business group involved in underhand dealings and complicitous in terrorist plots. Eventually, the impressionable boy is lured into carrying out a mission to blow up some American landmarks. Before the awful thing happens, the readers are treated to a scene in which the wannabe suicide bomber has a sexual encounter with his estranged girlfriend. Which American imagination would satisfy itself with a mere bomb plot without the background tapestry of sex and women?

But we need only hold our breath. Updike’s imaginative orgy satisfies itself in exploding the sex bomb. Before Ahmed gets a chance to drive his explosive- laden truck (the author informs us that he entrusted his body to the truck as gingerly as the prophet entrusted his to Buraq, the heavenly horse) to its targeted destination, he is intercepted by his school counsellor at a traffic intersection, and dissuaded from carrying out his mission. Even otherwise his mission was doomed, the counsellor informs him. The FBI had infiltrated the organization, and had got timely warnings of the plot; in all likelihood the plot itself was part of FBI’s sting operation. They have even managed to defuse the bombs that Ahmed was carrying.

Probably, unwittingly here Updike throws light on the nexus between intelligence agencies and terrorism: they are strange bedfellows who cannot help each other’s company (The ex-RAW chief Amarjit Sing Dulat’s statement that the Wing has often in the past financed the journeys of Kashmiri separatist leaders isn’t something that should confuse or detain us here).

The counsellor gently persuades Ahmed to think of his future and prevails upon him to give up terrorism and opt for legal studies. What on earth could this holy counsellor be? The angelic man is doubtlessly a Jew. Who else in American iconography could be so warm, so sane, and so self-sacrificing?

But let us not grudge him. He is certainly a far cry from the teacher who raised an alarm when the real Ahmed Muhammed brought a deftly assembled clock to his class. For the Texan lady teacher, who must have read Updike, somebody with the name Ahmed plus Muhammad could be nothing but a terrorist plus a ‘terrorist.’ How could it be otherwise, she smartly reasoned and handed the boy to the police.

Imagining the trauma that Ahmed must have gone through, as he was subjected to marathon interrogations with his hands cuffed demands no great gifts like that of Updike. Even a Tasleema Nasreen’s third world imagination can fathom it, if rightly applied. A school is expected to be a nursery of talent and creativity under the tutelage of warm and protective teachers. It was there that Ahmed met with the most gruesome experience at the hands of the very people who were meant to be his mentors. Even Murdstone could not have been so cruel to David Copperfield.

However, thank God there is a silver-lining in the way the Ahmed story eventually unfolded. His agony had at least its partial reparation in the overwhelming sympathy and messages of solidarity all the way from the White House downwards. The White House response may certainly have to do more with real politics than with genuine sympathy. But it was not so with others. As it did on many other occasions, the virtual community was really earnest and sincere in its sympathy for Ahmed and angst against the authorities. Our hopes of a world where mutual love and respect thrives lie in our ability to harness and translate these sane voices in the virtual world to the real world.

Of course there were discordant voices, mostly from expected quarters. Richard Dawkins, the perpetual Islam baiter and radical rationalist- who à la Umberto Eco’s formulation has taken rationalism to its most irrational extremes-stated that the boy probably wanted himself to get arrested. Similarly, Taslima Nasrin was at her usual superfluous and supercilious best when she wisely chose to inform the world that Muslims do actually make bombs and faulted the internet public for its hastiness in condemning the teacher who caused all the mayhem. The world really owes Nasrin a huge gratitude for this piece of timely warning. She would however do well to go through the history of numerous school attacks in America that claimed many lives and verify for herself how many of them were orchestrated by Muslim students. If a religion that believes taking a single innocent life to be tantamount to killing the entire humanity and whose adherents for ages stayed away from using fire arms saying that Only God had the right to use fire for punishment now comes to be equated with bombs and arson- though their per capita possession of such weapons is the lowest in the world- contemporary history marked by colonial oppression and pillage has a lot to answer for it. These are things that Tasleema Nasreen’s school of thought can hardly comprehend.

(Dr. Umer O Thasneem teaches English at Calicut University. The views expressed here are personal. He may be contacted at uotasnm@yahoo.com)