In 1970, famed poet and author James Dickey published his magnum opus, Deliverance. He later adapted it himself for the big screen two years later, searing banjo music and homosexual rape into the popular consciousness.
In my opinion, Deliverance isn’t just the single greatest prose piece of James Dickey, but of Southern Gothic literature, ever. The protagonists are businessmen from Atlanta, the beating heart of the South. They’re drawn to the Appalachian wilderness up north to conquer a white river before its dammed in the name of economic development. This is where they’re ironically thrust into conflict; they encounter hostile natives. Not in some remote part of the American West, or in some far-flung colony, but in what they thought was their own backyard. The source of the conflict? A psychologically wounded population still reeling from theological and cultural dissonance.
Before we continue, let’s do a quick refresher on Southern Gothic as a literary genre. It deals with themes like isolation, decay of old power, and the past digging itself out of its own grave to confront the present. In the Old South, plantation owners and other social bosses weren’t just powerful but exalted.
The wealth of the region was perceived as the product of a chemical reaction between the righteous Christian white person and the primitive savage. In the antebellum rationale, the arrangement wasn’t simply strange but virtuous- this new civilization equaled out to being something greater than the sum of its parts. Existing harshness or inequality was understood through the lens of opportunity cost; the free savage would be rebuilding only his own backwardness. The enslaved savage, in contrast, was building progress with the white person’s invitation (of sorts). It wasn’t only practical; it was framed as moral and necessary.
The American Civil War was caused by cessation of the South, the cessation was caused by a political stalemate: more productive economic systems rendered old, extractionary ones obsolete. The people whose wealth and power were hopelessly entangled with the old were at an impasse; they could not rejoin the world and keep their privilege. And it wasn’t only about physical but psychological comfort; if your system must evolve to stay relevant then it no longer can be exalted or divine. In the economics of extraction, the goodness of a system is recognized as such by the powerful elite. What becomes bad for them becomes bad for all of us.
The defeat of the Confederacy and emancipation of the enslaved created a moral and psychological crisis that was resolved through withdrawal and insulation. Not because it needed to be. Allowing for a contemporary re-evaluation of their values cost so much in the present that it became too painful to see the longer-term cost. If you had once been exalted and now were fallen, what was even the point of going on? The wretched didn’t just deserve to be oppressed, they needed it for their own good.
Islam is not just a world religion; it was a civilization. A civilization that grew as much from trade and moral persuasion as it did from invasion and conquest. This happened because the early Muslim conquerors tried something unique, conquest as a long-tailed investment rather a zero-sum transaction. Where before inequality or hardship resulted either in plunder or enslavement, Islamic civilization tried harmony.
That’s why to medieval peoples their yoke wasn’t as heavy as the usual conqueror’s justice; so long as you kept busy and quiet your Islamic overlords were hired administrators who gave themselves the job. That they were good at administration made it that much more bearable. To these overlords, their new civilization was greater than the sum of its parts. Their supremacy made it all possible. They were exalted.
The European miracle and the Great Divide between West and East are less than four centuries old. The Great Divide between the West and the Global South is even younger. Colonialism, western imperialism and Zionism were loud, waking nightmares that psychologically disturbed a sleeping civilization. These weren’t just difficult challenges but an existential crisis that could not be reconciled. Islam conferred righteous on Earth as it did in Heaven.
Christianity was able to become contemporary because the stalemate had been broken, and progress was victorious. The theological battle could be diffused with Christian metaphor, made possible by the philosophical focus on delayed gratification. Heaven was aspirational, as was worldly progress. How could Islamic civilization mirror that on someone else’s terms?
Muslims believed they were exalted, their power systems timeless and complete. And for harmonizing such a complex human system over such a diverse territory, the Muslims themselves were the righteous. Not because they deserved it, because they’d needed to be. Islam could never take a vacation or a demotion like Christianity because that created a paradox; if group membership did not confer exalted status, then something else did. All the old power systems would be exposed and discredited. With the social power being theocratic in both culture and politics, the same people who controlled the narrative were also the gatekeepers for narrative changes. The people could not keep up because the leadership could not.
Let’s return to Deliverance. The metaphor is almost permeable. Modernity (the dam) is literally killing a town (old civilization) and graves are being (literally!) dug up as a result. The mountain men don’t rape the city slickers as a crime of opportunity. Cruelty is the last tool in an irrelevant system’s tool chest. In isolation Southern decadence became corrupted and grotesque, like an Appalachian family inbreeding in its own isolation. Those rape happy mountain men were a metaphor for rootsy families using terror as a weapon against contemporary southerners who wanted to let go and move on. And Deliverance ends with a tense ambiguity over whether the dead will stay buried this time.
In the 1990’s, the Cold War robbed the Islamic world of its second point of reference. It could cope with being a third wheel in world affairs, it could not cope with being irrelevant. The winner of the Cold War flaunted its worldly success in both commercial and military dominance. Mass media and inexpensive travel made the West impossible to ignore. Their civilization collapsed under the weight of hubris and complacency, its replacement a physical caricature of Islam’s antithesis. Worldliness above family and clan. Independent problem solving, outside of Islamic reasoning and thought. The West’s rise wasn’t just a cultural humiliation but a theological earthquake. How could Islam be exalted and complete if the ignorant could outpace the wise and knowing?
Terrorism isn’t warfare over land or resources. It’s a decaying civilization trapped in stasis; the most constructive solution is the most painful and threatening. Islam needed to conquer the world to bring order. If the established order is no longer Islamic, then what is Islam?
Osama bin Laden’s finger wagging lectures to the West conceal a deeper truth, in the Muslim world he rarely talked about the foreign policy of the West. He offered soothing comfort and reassurance to a civilization in a crisis over too many contradictions between the physical and the meta-physical worlds. Flying planes into towers was non-consensual sodomy, violent intimidation to set the record straight. Think about ME hurting you the next time you want to change things without asking US first.
Let us hope that the Middle East can achieve chrysalis and new life like the Old South did. For the sake of all our asses.