In the full glare of the media

In terms of sheer killing, the Mumbai attacks, we know by now, are not India's 9/11. Unfortunately, India has seen worse - several times over the last 15 years. What made last week's attacks different was that they lasted for three days, in the full glare of the international media.

It was the terrorists' strategy to attract such long-lasting, intense attention. The prolonged final siege was intensified by the TV networks' use of private, mobile phone video recordings of the scenes of horror.

If only media organisations were as sophisticated in understanding the means of communication as they are in using them.

Many of them are finally coming round to the bankruptcy of the neo-conservative narrative of the "war on terror". As a story, it is exhausted. It just does not make sense of the intricate facts on the ground that journalists, diplomats, scholars and not least the US army are familiar with.

But the exhaustion of Al Qaeda's call to would-be martyrs, the fragmentation within even the small world of violent Islamists, has yet to be adequately noticed and reported.

Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, occupy prime time whenever they issue a message. They fill our screens and invoke a faceless mass following in the Muslim world, and we believe it may be there, listening. After all, why else would Al Jazeera give Bin Laden such importance?

Yet, on "jihadist" websites Bin Laden is contested. Would-be terrorists lament the disaster that followed 9/11 - the loss of the bases in Afghanistan, the brotherhood's dispersal, the increasing difficulty of major operations. Where Zawahiri may see victory on the horizon, others wonder if they will see it in their lifetime.

If such radical division does not make the news it is partly because the critics, like Abu Masab al-Suri, have no access to the news studios. (In late 2005, Suri was captured by US forces.) However, in a book called Beyond Terror And Martyrdom, to be published this weekend by Harvard University Press, French Middle East expert Gilles Kepel gives a detailed sketch of a fragmented jihadist world waging war on itself in the blogosphere and elsewhere.

Although he does not put it this way, for Prof. Kepel the key to understanding the relations between the West and Islam is to analyse the dynamics of the media and human relations of communication.

It made a difference, for the better, that the early Islamists were theorising their vague blueprints during an Arab cultural renaissance; for the worse, that late Islamists like Suri theorised their violence during the cultural nadir of the present day.

And in a detailed analysis of European multiculturalism and events that attracted much media attention - 7/7 and "the doctors' plot" in the UK, the murder of Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands, the 2005 riots in France, the cartoons controversy in Denmark - Prof. Kepel shows that the means of routine communication that governments have with their Muslim populations have a determining influence on the success or failure of multiculturalism.

In several cases, it is government policy that renders communities vulnerable to being taken over and dominated by extremists. Prof. Kepel is hard on some of the champions of multiculturalism...

...As he is on those that mock it. Because, he argues, the big news of our time is being missed. Follow the lines of actual cultural ferment and exchange and you will see a new cultural space being created that encompasses Europe, the Mediterranean and the Gulf.

Young entrepreneurs from Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Europe (often having a North African immigrant background) are investing their knowledge in the Gulf, becoming businessmen, traders, bankers or cultural and political advisors. Investment is also travelling from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, of which the SmartCity project, lauded in Malta as extraordinary (for us, yes), is only one example.

With adequate cultural and economic policies, Prof. Kepel argues, this embryonic space can flourish to create a truly imaginative, constructive dialogue between Europe and Islam. His blueprint calls for attention, even from a narrowly Maltese perspective.

For one, it makes the cultural initiatives taken by and within Malta in this European Year of Intercultural Dialogue seem truly meagre.

For another, it helps us see SmartCity as less of a job-creation project than one of human-capital creation. The fact that some jobs will be taken up by non-Maltese is a plus not a shame. It will fatten up the address books of tomorrow's enterprising Maltese elites. It will help them steer their way in a world where the management of knowledge embraces hybrid cultural relations as well as expertise.

Above all, it helps us see that the import of a project like SmartCity is not just for the ICT Faculty of the University of Malta but for the entire institution, not least the arts.

ranierfsadni@europe.com