The Night the Dunes Fell Silent

Robin L. Fetherston

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The Night the Dunes Fell Silent

In: I Want to Do Bad Things: Modern Interpretations of Evil

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Robin L. Fetherston

Robin L. Fetherston
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 13–19

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848883307_003

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On top of a file cabinet in my office in Doha, Qatar, sits a cardboard box of trinkets and bookmaking supplies, and buried somewhere in it is a sliver of wood covered in transparent tape on both sides. I found the splinter embedded in the outer weave of my purse the morning after a suicide bomber destroyed the theatre in which eight colleagues and I were sitting as we watched a rendition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I keep it as a memento of escaping the danger of that night – for I pulled it out of my purse rather than what could have been my eye. But to focus only on the relief of escaping relatively unharmed on March 19, 2005, fails to do justice to the complexities of survivorship. My creative nonfiction essay describes the impact of a single act of terrorism on one group of expatriate academic colleagues and the varying and similar ways in which we responded. It observes that while people may survive a bombing, no one remains undamaged. It seeks to explain why in contrast to those farther away from the incident, these nine academics whose ideas and beliefs covered a wide spectrum of religion and non-religion intuitively refrained from using the word evil when discussing the Egyptian suicide bomber or his act – how the descriptors of language failed us. And it discusses how the bombing revealed to us our Edenic dreams of Doha as a safe haven in the Middle East, while simultaneously blasting them away, and what new perceptions emerged from that disillusioning.

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I Want to Do Bad Things: Modern Interpretations of Evil

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848883307

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 01 Jan 2014

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - Ethics & Moral Philosophy
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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The Night the Dunes Fell Silent

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I Want to Do Bad Things: Modern Interpretations of Evil

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