1. Personal

I was in Sendai, Japan, as a visiting professor at Tohoku University when the September 11, 2001 airborne assaults on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon fortress in Washington, DC occurred. I happened to be watching television when the stunning image of the smoking first tower flashed on the screen. As soon as I assured myself that this was neither the science fiction channel nor some mega Hollywood urban fear and panic movie on display and that what I saw was for real this time, I could not help experiencing a strong emotion of Schadenfreude that I tried to contain, control and hide. This primitive emotion took hold of me in spite of the strong injunction in Arabo-Islamic culture forbidding Schadenfreude (shamaleh, in Arabic) when it comes to death, even if it happens to be the violent and deserved death of your mortal enemies. At that moment, I intuitively knew, as well, that millions and millions of people experienced the same emotion throughout the Arab World and beyond. As the macabre drama of the two towers unfolded and as I regained myself and my composure two ideas and a question spontaneously flashed in my mind.

The first said: our Islamists did it, because they have a deep-seated vendetta against the World Trade Centre, as they had tried to blow it up in 1993, but failed. And as is predictable with Arab and Middle Eastern vendettas, the aggrieved party revisited the site with a far huger vengeance than ever, to settle accounts and even the score.

From that moment on, I never had any doubts about who perpetrated that all-destroying act and who committed that heinous crime. For, as an Arab I knew something about the power of such motives in our culture and their ability at times to engulf all behaviour and colour all outlooks to the detriment of all other considerations. To appreciate this matter, all one needs is a quick look at the endless acts of deadly retaliations and counter-retaliations unfolding in Palestine and Israel since the start of the second Intifada.

The second idea said: the United States will be out in full force to crush the Islamist movement world-wide into oblivion; while the question asked: why the Schadenfreude on my part? Why this unworthy and reprehensible emotion of taking delight – even if awkwardly, shyly and self-consciously – in such a massacre of the innocents?