The E-Bomb

June 28^th was not remembered anywhere in the Muslim world as the beginning of its unmaking. No one recalled that two hundred and six years ago, a 28 year man had arrived off the coast of Alexandria with a fleet of 400 ships carrying 36,000 men to begin the process that would eventually colonize the entire Muslim world. No one paid attention to the close resemblance of the proclamations of that maverick French General, Napoleon Bonaparte, who occupied the Muslim heartland for almost three years and the numerous subsequent viceroys, pro-consuls and other representatives of the British, French and American occupation armies. No one deemed it fit to recall that Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt and the massacres that followed began the long holocaust that continues to this day.

Since that fateful day of June 1798, the entire Muslim world has been under attack at various levels. This multidimensional aggression not only consists of military adventures, occupations and exploitation of natural resources, but it also aims at dismembering the entire spectrum of identities which makes an individual and a society Muslim: From Jihad to Hijab and from Islam’s wonderful system of charities to its integrated lifestyle, the whole range of spiritual, social, economic, and political aspects of a civilization have sustained a systematic assault. Napoleon himself was the pioneer of this onslaught. He had arrived in Egypt with a team of scientists and scholars who would give birth to the discipline of Egyptology and later to Oriental studies.

The records of Napoleon’s expedition survive in numerous French documents, the most complete being the massive Description de l’Egypte published between 1809 and 1829. Everyone knows about this standard text that portrays Napoleon as the liberator of Egyptians; Victor Hugo was so inspired by this official account that he wrote his famous poem “Lui” to capture the glory of Napoleon: By the Nile, I find him once again/ Egypt shines with the fires of his dawn;/his imperial orb rises in the Orient.” But, fortunately, the devastations of this fatal event have also survived in three works by Abdul Rahman al-Jabarti, the best Muslim historian of the nineteenth century who wrote in the grand tradition of al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir. Alas, no one consulted his three books describing the atrocities of the French on June 28, 2004; no one drew parallels between the French bombardment of Cairo after an heroic effort to drive them away and the bombing of Falluja on that day.

This is perhaps a fitting sign of the state of Muslims today; they have not just become insolent toward their present, they have also forgotten their past. Perhaps one cannot blame them; after two hundred and six years of aggression, hardly anything survives in the Muslim societies which can keep the inner flame of this civilization and produce men and women who can reclaim it. If this were only true of the masses who cannot be expected to do otherwise, it would have been possible to entertain hope, but it is equally true of the so-called leaders who come from the same breed as those who dined with Napoleon when the corpses of their brethren in faith were lying in the streets of Cairo.

Of course, these leaders of the Muslim world know that they are betraying their land and tradition, but they do so in the name of pragmatism. They consider themselves realists, who have to deal with ground realities. They consider the present world order unjust, but they abide by it because they see no way out of it. Seen from within the Islamic tradition, this mental subjugation is, of course, self-deception, but one cannot argue with this leadership by faith; they only understand the language of cold reason, devoid of that transforming flame that transcends reason.

But, even at that level, their stand is flawed because it is based on the acceptance of the material superiority of the West, especially that of its military strength. They argue that no army can fight and win a war from the American army because of the technological advantage Americans have. It is true that the American army has the most advanced technology working for it. Its range of lethal weapons, its communication system, its power of mobility and its ability to penetrate caves, deserts and oceans is, indeed, unprecedented. But it is equally true that this whole edifice of power is ultimately based on the movement of a small particle called the electron. Not only that. Computerization of banking, communication, transport, indeed of all economic activity, has also made the entire Western civilization hostage to the behaviour of small particles which move between circuits to produce reliable algorithmic functions. Thus, whether it is the pilot of a B-52 bomber or a banker in New York, or a salesman in WalMart, all rely on computer chips, which in turn rely on the movement of electron in their circuit.

Those who consider American material might unconquerable forget that this apparent strength is rather deceptive. They may not wish to consider the example of the power of Pharaoh as compared to that of Moses, but they would hopefully ask one of their science advisors to tell them something about the properties of electrons. These advisors will then tell them that a small change in the electromagnetic field can destabilize the behaviour of the entire computer system, leading to massive chaos and destruction. They would also know that this small change can be produced by a slight shift in the orbit of the earth, or by a minute differential change in the atmospheric electric field or by an E-bomb which emits electromagnetic radiations. All of these are real possibilities, not poetic flights of imagination.

Reduced to their ultimate building blocks, all civilizations rest on some foundational elements. The Western civilization has chosen to rest its foundation on material, rather than spiritual building blocks and increasingly, the material upon which the West’s material strength is built, has shrunk in size—from steam engines of the eighteenth century to the high speed trains of the twenty-first century, running on electromagnetic tracks. These developments should open a window of true freedom in minds which are not totally enslaved. Just as it is self-evident that non-Western civilizations do not need to go through all the stages of material development which the West has gone through, it is also apparent to any thinking mind that no civilization built upon the electromagnetically weak behaviour of electrons can hope to survive for long.

Seen through this perspective, the American military strength is merely a deceptive might; it is only real in so far as it functions within a stable electromagnetic field. But there is no guarantee that the earth’s electromagnetic field is going to remain what it is; it is highly likely that a Divine and human interference may slightly alter this field, resulting in the total collapse of the military and economic basis of this might. This will also produce a social upheaval of unprecedented nature. One can only imagine the new world order that would emerge from such a scenario.