Brian Keenan

Typically, with a japanese speech to prepare for the chairman of the foundation of our program, an exam and an essay to write concerning "My Idea for the Best Vending Machine in the World" all due tomorrow I felt like now was the perfect time to research into some of those who were taken hostage in Lebanon along with Terry Waite. Brian Keenan, a university professor who while working in Beirut was kidnapped and held for four years is another whose great compassion and deep understanding strike deeply,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/special/islam/3080590.stm

BRAIN KEENAN: "April is the cruellest month. That line of TS Elliot's has a special significance for me.

On 11 April, 1986, it was a bright sunlit morning as I locked the gates to the Turkish villa I rented in Rue D'Americque, Beirut and began the 10 minute walk to the university campus where I taught in the English department.

There were several butterflies drifting daintily across the bougainvillea - the last butterflies and sunlight I was to see for four-and-a-half years.

Within minutes I was bundled into the back of an old Mercedes by four armed gunmen. I was driven into captivity and the terrifying squalor of the secret underground prisons of Lebanon's Islamic militants.

Darkness and despair

For several months, I was held in isolation and complete darkness in a cockroach and rat infested cell. All my clothes and personal belongings were taken from me and I was made to wear a blindfold and a pair of shorts.

One meal a day of rice, vegetables and bread was shoved under the cell door.


The chains remained on our wrists and feet for the duration of our confinement

I was permitted only 10 minutes each morning to wash, use a stinking toilet and fill a bottle of drinking water. Another bottle was given to me to urinate into. The rest was unremitting darkness and despair.

For the first two years I was given no books or papers or allowed any access to radio or TV. Nor was I told who was holding me or why. My jailors spoke little English and pidgin French, so we conversed little.

My first interrogators spoke both languages and seemed to have some grasp however naively of international politics. They were primarily interested in the names of British teachers and the CIA operatives working in the American University of Beirut, company I was not in the habit of keeping or knowing.

After this initial period I was moved and held with John McCarthy, a British journalist captured a week after me. During our captivity, we were moved to several locations throughout Lebanon. One was in or near the Israeli occupied zone.

With the moves came the chains, which remained on our wrists and feet for the duration of our confinement.

My captivity revealed something about the psychology of these zealots that is rarely factored into any understanding of their cause
These men were in their early 20s with little education and a life experience that probably never extended to more than a few miles from their home.

As the years passed, we learned to communicate more. We were after all in each other's company 24 hours a day.

But a hostage existence is lived in a kaleidoscopic decompression chamber. Reality is a minimal but very heightened one. The mercurial temperament and psychotic personality of some of our captors occasioned erratic but constant abuse and violence.


Like fundamentalists anywhere they had a naïve, myopic and absolutist view of the world. Everything was black and white. The West and particularly America was the great Satan and we, by association, were his acolytes.

Their rantings about American imperialism, Zionism and the Thatcherite and Reagan regimes were the second-hand rhetoric that they had been force fed and regurgitated.


Militant Islamic groups began taking hostages to highlight their cause
If these men talked about the dispossessed and the poor of the world and the spectre of American and international capitalism, then that is because that was their very real experience of the world.

They wanted sovereignty over their own lives and affairs. The individual Jew was not abhorrent to them, but Zionism and the state of Israel has no legitimacy for them.

Jihad: Inner conflict and moral self-refinement

My residence in Lebanon before my capture had clearly pointed up the intense historical and political complexity of the Middle East.

My captivity revealed something about the psychology of these zealots that is rarely factored into any understanding of their cause.


Fundamentalism in any guise is the expression of a terminal sickness
These are people who want to be heard, who feel in their skin, the exclusion of the world and so turn against it. Flight or fight is a human response and these people were human even if their abuse of us was gratuitous and bestial at times.

However, what happened to me has not influenced my opinion of extremist Islam. Fundamentalism in any guise is the expression of a terminal sickness.

Messianic pronouncements and spectacular feats of martyrdom and carnage convince me of nothing. The call to holy war is a corruption of the meaning of the Koran. Jihad is about inner conflict and moral self-refinement as man approaches his God.

Obsession and psychosis

In comparison to today's extremists, my captors were markedly different. Their cause and the reason for our captivity were specific not global.


Keenan was released in 1990 after four-and-a-half years in captivity
They were a much smaller organisation operating only in Lebanon and organised and funded out of Iran. Our captivity was a reaction to British, American and Israeli support of Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war.

It was also about the prolonged economic sanctions in Europe against Iran and also it was a means of leverage to obtain the release of 14 Muslim freedom fighters held in prison in Kuwait.

Today's extremist belongs to a more sophisticated and extensive covert network. Its operatives are organised, well funded, educated with a focus and commitment, which crosses the divide between obsession and psychosis.

Who is the prisoner here?

As an ideology it is neither theologically liberating nor politically revolutionary. Rather it is personally repressive, politically reactionary, and theologically prohibitive. It is the expression of a mind-set trapped in the middle ages, in collision with modernism.

It is a problem that will not go away. Least of all because another fundamentalist in the White House makes pronouncements about the axis of evil and promises to rid the world of this contagion.

This will only serve to rally young impressionable minds to the cause. But are they terrorists? Terrorism, like the word Jihad, is a term bandied about for the gullible by the myopic. It serves to legitimise aggression as a form of righteous crusade.

Just as I was chained in darkness for almost five years, my captors were chained to their guns in a profound darkness that I could see into. Tell me now, who is the prisoner here? "