ESSAY

By LANCE MORROW

Fairy tales in the West begin, "Once upon a time." In the Arab world they start, "Kan ya makan." The words mean "There was, there was not." That is, maybe it happened. On the other hand, maybe it didn't happen. Now you see it, now you don't.

Kan ya makan: the Arabic language is capable of magical effects. On a squalid Cairo street early on a cold, foul day, people greet each other with small bouquets of words: "Morning of blessings! Morning of light!" They have conjured a moment, and smiled, and passed, and then, poof! they are back on a miserable street among the pariah dogs. If people are poor and live in the desert, language may be their richest possession: Why not? It opens miraculously onto other worlds. The Koran, with its bursts of sonority and light, describes a paradise that has everything the desert does not: the sweetest water, cool shade, silken couches, wines that one can endlessly drink without getting drunk.

Kan ya makan is intoxication enough. It was out of the desert that humans conjured monotheism -- absolute God to suffuse utter emptiness. When kan ya makan enters politics, its genius makes language a reality superior to the deed -- even renders the facts of the objective world unnecessary and graceless. The vivid hallucination becomes the act: the prophecy is more satisfying than its literal fulfillment. If the demagogue-bard says the infidel will swim in his own blood, then words have pre-empted the work of armies. Ambiguity has an ancient history in the West, but the Middle East has its special genius for mirage. There, the dreariest, basest impulses go dressed up in poetry. Aggressive greed may swagger around as jihad. "Arab dignity and honor" shine in the mind with a radiant life of their own, forever beleaguered and violated and crying for revenge -- visions really, not things to be struggled toward, to be earned.

Westerners, who have wandered through centuries of darkness and enlightenment and rationalism and scientific method and then the various neo- darknesses of the 20th century (Auschwitz, Hiroshima and so on), have some difficulty with these dreamy effects in which reality and illusion float back and forth interchangeably. Americans have a special longing of their own. They need to know they are working in a scheme of virtue. Americans feel a moral unease when they sense that their power is banging around loose in the world without being, in a sort of theological sense, justified. The antiwar slogan "No Blood for Oil" proclaimed that unease, as if oil were Miller High Life and not the stuff that powers most of the world's economies. Americans felt the chill of that wrongness when Iraqi women and children were carried, charred by American bombs, out of a Baghdad bunker.

But Americans understand even less the cultural-moral scheme in which Saddam Hussein, career murderer and impresario of atrocity, gets somehow transformed into an Arab hero. Or in which Iraqi horrors committed in Kuwait become invisible to the Arab eye and so vanish from its calculus of right and wrong. It seems to Westerners that some amorality is at work in the way Arabs judge atrocities and measure the worth of human lives -- or at least that a connection is broken in the apparatus of cause and effect. Sympathizers trying to explain an enthusiasm for Saddam Hussein sometimes remark that few Arabs like the Kuwaitis anyway. In Europe during the '30s, no one cared about the % Jews all that much either -- what the hell. During Black September in 1970, King Hussein of Jordan had his soldiers kill Palestinians wholesale. When Syria's Hafez Assad wanted to silence the Muslim fundamentalists in Hama in 1982, his army slaughtered more than 10,000. Ever since 1948, the Arabs have shed bitter, angry tears over the Palestinians, yet one of the secrets of the Middle East is that Arabs routinely treat Palestinians worse than Israelis do. Other Arabs do not trust Palestinians, think they are troublemakers -- overly pushy, political. Shhh.

Most Arab countries are essentially police states imposed upon peasants. On the level of everyday reality, fear -- of the government and its secret police, the mukhabarat -- is the beginning and end of citizenship. The real law in people's minds is not government at all but an organism growing from the social traditions and precepts of Islam, which as a social system for the poor has an admirable kindness and simplicity. As for national boundaries, those were drawn generations ago by colonialists, aliens from some other part of the universe.

But above the level of the Arab everyday, there floats a dimension of grand design, the high plane on which jihad and other transactions with the miraculous occur in the Islamic world. It is there amid the language with its efflorescent or bloody metaphors that Arabs, unexpectedly enough, resemble Americans. It is there they share the affliction of the immature, an obsession to think of themselves as righteous in the exertion of their power.

An Arab may behold the unsavory mess of the West -- drugs, AIDS, serial murders, shattered families and lives -- and think of Satan. He may be repelled and tempted simultaneously, just as Westerners can be charmed and appalled by the Arab world and what passes for reality there. But war is not symbolic. It is a savage lesson in the limits of gaudy rhetoric, of fairy tales. It would be pretty to think that the war that has now ended, after being played so fiercely before a global audience, might at last break the cycle. Germany and Japan ended in ashes after World War II, but in the apocalypse they expunged the worst of themselves -- their fascists and militarists, their evil dreamers -- and were reborn as new societies. Perhaps, perhaps. More hallucination will yield only more terrible slaughter.