Suhail Arrives in the West

Scenario : The West In The 22nd Century

(The ideas in this story are merely fictions of the future. They are not meant to cause offence to anyone, whether Jewish, Muslim, 'western', 'eastern', religious etc. Read with an open mind.

I posted Chapter 5 of this story on Literotica in 2007 under the title of 'Discovery Of The Real America', in which the lead character was named Saurus. I have since decided to make his name more Arabic by calling him Suhail so anyone who reads this to chapter 5 should be aware of this.

Chapter 1 contains a lot of imagined history, but further chapters are less historical or political and include more sexual themes. This story is from the same scenario as my 'Watching The Zabernians' mini series in which the character Jasper from Chapter 5 / Discovery Of The Real America is the lead character. My story '22nd Century West: Apple and Citrus' (Group Sex) is also from the same world/period scenario.)

Part 1

Suhail had come to the West as a representative of the Federated East, but also as a kind of spy. He was here in Central City, USA, to observe the place, its people, and to determine what possibilities there might be for the East to bring back the lost and depraved to the ways of true civilisation and of God or Allah, as he was variously known by the people of some of the major faiths. The East today was most of the middle east, and northern Africa, India, Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesia, China and North Korea.

A hundred years before the West had sought to defend Tunisia, Egypt and the last 'colonial' settlement of Israel from the Islamic Resurgence of the East, during the wars between two of the major civilisations of the world. The leaders of the Islamic East had in those days been embarked on a policy of jihad against the heathen, flushed by the success of the new agreements with India and other pro- religious states of the far east. Arabia, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and all of North Africa had become unified into a common Islamic Federation which had an alliance with India and Indonesia, and the neutrality of China and others. Soon after the conquest of Israel and the ousting of the European influence in Egypt and Tunisia, the Muslim Federation had made new federation treaties with India, largely muslim Indonesia, and with the governments of Myanmar, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia, pledging to respect each other's religions, in the common knowledge that all promoted the varied teachings and paths of what was really the same God.

The other major power in the world, aside from West and loosely federated East was China, which had economically, like the East, borrowed from, and become more like the West, but had refused to surrender its power and aspects of its more authoritarian culture. In the modern world today China was a natural ally of the Eastern Federation, and it was currently conducting negotiations whereby it might join the Eastern Federation, with much of its independent power intact.

The West remained the greatest power on Earth, incorporating as it did the Unification of the greater number of the nations of the world. Europe and America, South America, Russia, most of Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the eastern fringe nations such as Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan and Japan had joined.

'The West' wasn't really West; it was worldwide, far east as much as West, but the peoples of the two Eastern powers, the Eastern Federation of the East and China, called it 'The West', and so did many of its own citizens. Officially the West called itself 'The United Federation of Earth. The East had accepted for many decades, since the last war that they could never fragment the West, or defeat it. It was too big, too powerful. Even the eventual persuasion of China, to support the Eastern Federation had not been able to defeat or outflank the West, or to give the East sufficient bargaining power to make progress towards the eventual goal of civilising the world.

But there was hope for the East. The West was decadent and spoiled. Its people had forgotten how to work hard. They did not know what discipline was, or anything but selfish interests. Modern westerners did not know what poverty was. Well, even Easterners, although perhaps not all Chinese, no longer knew poverty, but they remembered it in their prayers. Their leaders would never allow them to forget poverty, as the western leaders had allowed their people. Eastern people remembered poverty, but they had higher goals; the improvement of the spirit, the doing of good works for their fellow man, the raising of a responsible next generation, and moral preservation.

Many Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, a religion also respected in the Eastern Federation, believed that a good life in this world would lead to a better one in the next. This was a concept which still motivated millions. Christians in the West had once believed it, before the gradual decay of their religion. As far as Suhail knew no religion survived in the West now, although he hoped to find some vestiges of faith and decency in America to join into alliance with the East. Even in Japan, which was politically a part of the West, their ancient religious practices were now only continued as quaint traditions; no one believed in them any more. Suhail, like many of the East, did not believe there was a next life for his own soul, but he believed in God and in the moral life.

The East had been collecting information about the West for many years, but now it had begun to make more of an effort. The West could not be defeated by war, but by influencing their social practices it was felt by Eastern leaders that they might be brought back onto a path of sober development and saved from their moral vacuum. Policies were being formulated to send 'missionaries' into the West to form groups, to influence the media, to make the shameless feel shame; to change the West, making it more like the East.

Suhail was to travel to the West to observe, to help to collect ideas for the detailed formulation of this policy. He was also going to work with the existing 'missionaries' to put the new policy into practice.

A hundred years ago, when the West had fought its last major wars it had been relatively strong and disciplined. Until then economic competition and national rivalries within itself had kept its workers and people relatively hardworking. Life had been centred around business and progress, and, until only a few decades before, the eradication of poverty, in what had once been called the 'Third World'. Supranational rivalries with the Federation of the East and with China had kept the West in fighting shape economically, spiritually and militarily. Now, decades later, the East believed that the West no longer had the focus of leadership, and its people did not have the self discipline and self denial to fight effectively in any potential war.

In the wars of the early twenty first century the West proved itself, at that time, to be generally superior in power to the East despite the growing ambitions of the newly formed, and at that time muslim, Eastern Federation. They had easily enough resisted the efforts of the East to conquer and convert areas of Africa and Central Asia. But there had been one significant success for the East, which made a final negotiated peace possible.

100 years before in the war between West and East, both sides eventually drew up a peace agreement, but not before the Muslim Eastern Federation and its allies finally conquered Israel. The West, in particular the Americans had acted to protect Israel from the justice of the east over many years. For a long time the Israelis with superior firepower had won every war they fought and gradually colonised large areas of the west bank, in particular, which had long been promised by UN declarations to be returned to the Palestinians' control.

The Israelis haughtily dismissed the opinions of the rest of the world, and their own neighbours, and because they felt confident of their own power and the guarantee of support, their insurance policy from the Americans. They managed to believe they had justice on their side, and fooled themselves into believing they would last forever as a state. When they responded heavily to the attacks of the warlike Hezbollah of Lebanon they attacked that recently peaceful state without sufficient regard for the civilians of the country. This was one of the main causes of the all out war between East and West which followed.

The West took the blame for Israel's intransigence although most western nations had long since bitterly criticised Israel for the problems it suffered, which were mostly of its own making. Nonetheless the US took the position that Israel had to be defended from the more effective than expected attacks it began to suffer from all of the Eastern Federation states acting together. Finally Israel's reliance upon divide and rule, and the disagreements between muslim states, were no longer sufficient to save it from its embittered neighbours. There was full scale war between the world's nations. Nonetheless the US could not save Israel this time and 60 or 70 years of history was overturned in just a few dark days for the overconfident people of Israel. An almost biblical disaster occurred to them, reminiscent, but far worse, than the disasters they had at times inflicted upon Lebanon. The war dragged on. Israel was long destroyed, becoming again a wandering nation, or living in the countries its settlers had come from in the years of Israel's growth.

The Kashmir question was solved between Pakistan and India before the world war began, enabling India to be a neutral supporter of the Muslim Federation, and some years later to build supranational links with the Eastern Federation and to join it. After the world war muslims relaxed and became less extreme in their views, having no burning colonial, anti Israel, or pro muslim Kashmir sentiments to inflame them. They refused however to follow the decadent ways of the West, with its spiralling sexual revolution and the economic relaxation it brought.

Victory over the East had given the West confidence in their unassailable primacy and allowed them to concentrate on what they termed as improvements in the 'quality of life' instead of more basic economic and military considerations. The West had always been decadent and morally impure, from the days of the bisexual Greeks and the greedy and corrupt Romans, to the slave traders and exploiters of the colonial period, to the wasteful culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, and the sexual excesses of more recent times. Westerners knew how to enjoy themselves, or thought they knew, but in fact they were bored and directionless, with little purpose in life. Of course many of them still raised families, but population decline was rife in many parts of the Western world; one factor which gave the East and China hope for their own rising prospects. They had become selfish, and lacking in responsibility and sense of duty. The East had continued to know poverty in some places for longer, despite having the teachings of Mohammed, or of the Hindus and Buddhists, for those peoples who chose those ways. Sense of community and family, of sharing, were reputed to be stronger in the East.

After the wars with the West the East no longer believed they could ever defeat the West militarily, despite the changes in the West, but other means would be pursued and the West would continue to crumble by degrees, just like the power of the ancient Romans, who stopped bearing children and became too complacent.

Part 2

Suhail came from the great Eastern metropolis of Baghdad, where the streets were busy with workers and shoppers, cars and trams. He flew into that other great ancient city, which many felt should have been a capital of the East, perhaps the capital of the East, as it had once been effectively in the days of the Ottoman Sultans. Istanbul had actually been a part of the West since before the earliest days of the Western Federation. Suhail knew that the city had been a capital of the ancient West, long before, the city founded by the barbaric and depraved Romans, into whose perverted image the modern West had partly returned. They had named their city Constantinople, and strangely its muslim conquerors had waited five hundred years to give it their own name. Suhail was struck by the realisation that even its Eastern overlords must have been conscious that their city was neither East nor West, but a marriage of the two. He looked forward to his work in the West and hoped that it would bring about a marriage between East and West which would redeem the West and be fruitful to all.

Unprepared because he had not travelled in the West before he marvelled at its beauty, the high rise architectural splendours and the ancient buildings restored and preserved. The city was not so dissimilar to Baghdad in technology and design; the East too was wealthy and boasted many splendours, and indeed in the last century, driven by economic growth the high rises were higher than in the West and the building mania far stronger.

He was shocked from the outset by the behaviour of the citizens, who appeared to have lost any sense of their ancient, largely muslim identity. There were supposed to be Jews and even some Christians in this place of unbroken heritage. Women walked around half naked in the streets, and completely naked on the beaches, and in the parks, which he visited. Some couples even copulated without any concern for privacy in these places, and he observed some cases where two men were engaged in penetration of each other, and women licked at each other's private parts; parts which would have been private in any decent country, but here they were on public view. Ancient barbaric Rome had indeed returned with a vengeance. Most people did not seem to go so far in public and walked by, unconcerned or ignoring of these exhibitors. He sensed the rumours he had heard were probably true. There were no real families here, no couples devoted to each other, no happy content people, secure in strong relationships. Here was insecurity and short-lived animalistic lusts. These people must be unhappy, how could they be happy in such uncertainty.

Suhail stayed in Istanbul for one night only, occupying himself by travelling around the centre of that massive city. Although Istanbul was not as big as his home city Baghdad, which spread for many miles across the plain, it was bounded by natural impediments, hills and seas. He visited the ancient mosques and shrines, and discovered, to his pleasure that they were properly preserved and treated partially as museums by the irreligious Westerners, with condescending respect for what they seemed to see as an ancient past. The past was revered in the West, perhaps more than in the East where people were often too busy getting on with their own lives to think much about the past. In the West people appeared to have too much time, therefore the past was deserving of interest, although he felt it insulting that the religious heritage appeared to have been demoted to a mere tramstop on a tourist trip, or an object of historical interest.

Suhail was therefore even more pleased when he found real worshippers in one mosque. They were a small group of perhaps 25 people, mainly old, the youngest of the adults being about 50; some looked to be well over 100. About five of them were young, grandchildren presumably. Where were their parents he wondered. At least their grandparents were attempting to shelter them from the depraved lifestyles of the people in this city. Women worshipped with the men here in a compromise, which probably seemed essential in this Western society. Suhail could accept the need for that given the circumstances they found themselves in. Even in the East there were many regions where some mosques encouraged the women to join the men.

Back in Baghdad many aspects of worship and life were what might be called 'modern', not 'ancient'. Islam had made cultural concessions to the West when it embraced western economics in previous centuries, and in terms of women's place in education and careers, and also when it came to terms with its traditional enemy in India and learned to accept the qualities which they shared in common. It was a marriage of convenience and compromise, but it had worked and lasted. There was more peace and real understanding between the two religious cultures than ever before in history. That tolerance and compromise between state and religion had in the past been a stronger western tradition than an Eastern one, although Islam and Hinduism did both have a longer, if intermittent tolerance in their cultures. In the face of western cultural attack everyone knew it was necessary and most now believed it to be desirable. Tolerance had been taken too far in the West and its people had lost their way completely. Religious tolerance had led to tolerance of anti religion, anti social lifestyles and of personal depravity. It had gone so far that now personal depravity seemed to dominate life in the west. The worship of Self and the Body had taken over everything. That would never happen in the East.