Here’s a piece of brave and eloquent introspection from M.A. Muqtedar Khan in tomorrow’s Orlando Sentinel. Yet another indicator that these awful events might lead to a brighter future – not least for America’s many Muslim citizens, and their fellow-believers around the world.
“AS IF I HAD NEVER READ A BOOK”: Leon Wieseltier and I have had our deep differences, but his diarist in this week’s New Republic (it is not, alas, online) is the finest response I have yet read to the physical remains of the crime of September 11. He manages to be both surpassingly eloquent and yet also deeply right. Here’s the final paragraph: “I cannot locate the balm in culture. It is just not my piety. I discovered this when I wasnt into ground zero, in a red hard hat. I was not prepared for what I saw. I do not know how to express the quality of my shock, except to say that it banished culture completely from my mind. I fell dumb and stood there as if I had never read a book. My observations erased my memories. I was without allusion and without metaphors. Can a mind be naked? Then I was naked, without coverings. All I could do was look and pray to see. The metal was the color of an infernal tarnish. I learned that yellow smoke is released when iron is cut. The hole in the sky was more striking than the hole in the ground. I watched the cranes scoop up soil from the pit, and then I grasped that it was not soil. There was no soil in this place. What they were moving was the substance that was formed out of the dissolution of everything and everybody that had been crushed and incinerated: a deathloam. There were spots of it on my boots. I shivered and moved away. And when I left it was not culture that was restored immediately to my consciousness. It was politics; policy; American action.”
The Dish 