8
In his 2006 Regensburg address, Pope Benedict XVI in rather brusque and undiplomatic fashion raised the question of the concept and value of violence in Islam.[1] Conjuring up the distant past, he referred to the Byzantine Empire collapsing under the onslaught of the Ottoman Turks. Then going further, he placed violence near the core of Islam, insinuating that it was an integral element of this belief system. Needless to say, he meant to “re-litigate” the concept of jihad and its connection to terrorism in a sensible and considered way, but instead managed to cause considerable insult. Some centuries earlier the same comment may have been taken as a compliment. Perpetrating violence as a means of expansion of faith would have been taken as a sign of commendable vigor, proof of the vitality of belief, and if accompanied by success also as vindication of dogmatic correctness and testament to the veracity of the founding revelation.[2] No moral wrong would have been seen in spreading faith by the sword. Today such measures are frowned upon as an unacceptable method of proselytization. The value of coercion and armed conflict for purely religious purposes has fallen victim to a global hegemony that attributes legitimacy to the use of organized violence for quite different purposes. (The state has assumed the right to violence and exercises it for economic interests, self-protection, and more recently for the protection of human rights.) Religious conversion, as much as the preservation of faith, is supposed to happen by means of peaceful persuasion rather than the use of force. Duress of any kind in religious matters is utterly tabooed. Official Islam concurs and insists that dawa (proselytization) be carried out with “sweet words” and inducements, but eschewing strong-arm tactics by any means. The doctrinal basis is provided by the Quran verse (2/256) “there is no compulsion in religion,” and (16/125) “invite people to the way of your Lord (i.e., Islam) with wisdom and fair preaching.” The worldwide Tablighi organization, for instance, concentrates on inner missionization to strengthen the faith among Muslims through mass rallies and public preaching in a peaceful way, while a wide range of other initiatives concentrates on external dawa. Saudi Arabia spends petrodollars lavishly around the world to spread its brand of Wahhabism, through financing educational programs, sponsoring imams and university chairs, and building mosques. While sometimes this leads to suspicions that this brand of enthusiastic Wahhabism does not necessarily have peaceful intentions, officially it disavows any connection to sinister, violent motives. Several Muslim countries pursue similar strategies of peaceful inner and external missionization, although not being able to draw on an equally rich funding base. Fanatical acts aimed at persuasion by force are left to violent fringe phenomena within Muslimhood, excepting, of course, that state law in some Muslim-majority countries circumscribes religious freedom openly or clandestinely. It may take a dim view on individual cases of apostasy or apply “lawful” pressure on religious minorities. Be it through the law or individual initiatives belligerent friction for religious reasons seems to be never far from the surface—despite official proclamations of peaceful intents.
It does not require a strong magnifying lens to perceive violence as tightly woven not only into Islam, but present in most religions. Religion totally devoid of even the smallest aspect of violence, I would maintain, is unthinkable. It may not manifest itself through openly aggressive, belligerent behavior, and instead could lurk on a more cryptic level of religious practice and belief. Violence is multifaceted, ubiquitous, and multidirectional in religion. It can be expressed in doctrinal, mythical, historical, and current sociopolitical forms; and it may be physical or symbolic. Here I will attempt to give a brief overview before looking in greater detail at the concept of jihad as the major doctrinal manifestation of violence in Islam.
As has been discussed already in the previous chapter, one does not have to dredge history very hard to find that atrocity, violent military conquest and forceful proselytization do not seem to be strangers to each other. The lust for power and religious conviction sometimes make dangerous bedfellows as is easily gleaned not only from Islamic history. Quite obviously, it is not always the necessities of physical survival and material existence, nor even the greed for wealth and resources, or the vision of a better and easier life, that drives people to wage war. Sometimes it is but the spurious belief in a religiously mandated imperative that causes people to clash violently. Matters of religious faith may drive people to confront, suppress, and exterminate others with stunning ruthlessness; and, alternatively, it may be the unshakeable firmness of their belief that drives them to stubbornly resist forcible conversion to the point of their own destruction.
Historically, religion-sponsored violence and faith-induced brutality is nothing new to humanity. Many religions at times seem to have employed violence for the purpose of defending or spreading their message.[3] Sometimes acts of violence are cynically rationalized as beneficial and “ennobled” by giving them a false ethical gloss. It may be a sacred duty to wipe out unbelief or to strike at heathens, and it may be considered an act of beneficence to coerce people to assume the “true faith.” Unashamed sophistry may be employed to explain why force may ultimately be of benefit to the victim. Forcing unbelievers at the tip of a sword into the arms of the “correct” belief may be done for their own good, so as to preserve their souls for eternity, or because a violent punitive death could be construed that it expunges sin and cleanses the victim. Sacrilegious insult offered to the divine by the sheer existence of “infidels” or by their actions is another “good” reason for retributive violence. Another rationale may be that the spiritual purity of nation, ethnicity, or culture may be at stake. Many such “ethical” reasons exist, which can motivate and excuse the killing of not only whole groups and populations, but also individuals like apostates, heretics, witches, communities of religionists of other faiths, and the like, under all kinds of excuses exonerating the perpetrator and glorifying sadism at the same time.
Some of the motives for religious conflict hark back to the connection, discussed earlier, between knowledge and power; the idea that knowing something—believing in a religious sense being tantamount to knowing[4] —confers power on the believer. It is a valuable resource that needs to be protected and defended, perhaps tested in real life—or shared with others even if they are unwilling. In a fashion, this was expressed already by Sir Francis Bacon’s remark[5] that possessing scientific knowledge equals power, which became a generalized aphorism that sums up this idea succinctly. Making this connection can result in various social phenomena: for instance, elevating religious secrecy to great importance. As knowledge confers power, one is loath to share it. Protecting it, and preserving the religious monopoly, may justify the use of violence. But the belief of possessing something of great value can also lead to the mercurial endeavor to spread a belief system as widely as possible, be it to enhance one’s own power over like-minded individuals or to convince others, who may at first be unwilling to believe, of this value. In any case, the dispensation of knowledge, or alternatively withholding the blessing, relates to power—a power so precious that it warrants the use of violence. Tribal religiosity tends to be adverse to organized proselytization, a mercurial, missionary endeavor, which may at times be enthusiastically extended into the area of open and violent coercion. Instead it tends to rely on exclusivity and restrictions on admission. Yet, in one form or another all types of religiosity embrace the use of violent coercion for the sake of exercising control over the dissemination of its knowledge substance. Esoteric religious information is maintained by secrecy and protected by violence; forceful means are used in recruiting adepts and violence then accompanies religious revelation. Tribal initiation into esoteric, religious knowledge for the youth is neither voluntary nor based on informed consent. Induction ceremonies, in “grabbing” young boys and girls, are sometimes deliberately brutal. Ritualized initiation itself, the organized revelation of esoteric matter, is usually based on aspects of extreme violence. (Circumcision, for instance, lends itself to being interpreted as an act of assault.) In tribal societies, the reluctant initiand, unwilling to submit to the impending cruelty, lacking perhaps in the requisite courage—in the rare cases that this happens—becomes an outcast, subject to taunts and sanctions or may even be executed. Without going into ethnographic detail, it is important to realize that religion, its dogma as much as its practice through ritual and in the way it is applied in social life, usually is intimately interwoven with aspects of power and violence in one form or another.
The threshold of religious violence in Muslim society generally is lowered on account of the fact that religious belief is still attributed with major social significance and that correct social conduct has religious significance. Thus issues concerning the propriety of social conduct, its correctness in terms of, and compliance with, doctrinal commands with some inevitability tend to touch on religious sensitivities and are likely to trigger strong measures. In a more secularized society, which has abandoned the religious value of social behavior—or never had the intimate connectedness between doctrine and particular forms of social conduct—flashpoints that provoke violence would be situated differently and be less likely found in the minutiae of social behavior.
From a Marxist point of view religious motivation may only be an outer expression veiling underlying causes of a material order, but it certainly does not appear so to religious fanaticism that is ready to inflict violence solely in the imaginary defense or advancement of a subtle point of doctrine. Not much has changed in the modern world. In January 2010, churches were petrol-bombed in Malaysia—presumably by Muslim extremists—over no more than the use by Christians of the word Allah to refer to “their” God. Muslims were incensed that a local Christian journal had adopted the Arabic word (which simply means “God”) to refer to the Christian God. To make matters worse the Christians had been supported in this “sacrilegious act” by the Malaysian high court, which issued a verdict that this was not illegal and did not constitute blasphemy. Obviously some Muslims found themselves in violent disagreement with this ruling and considered the word a “brand” that belongs only to Islam. The Islamic world in general takes a dim view on cases when there is suspicion that its spiritual territory is being infringed on by another religion and reacts violently when non-Islamic organizations or individuals attempt to convert Muslims or by their mere existence in the midst of Muslims offer an insult to the true faith. Similar incidents are not rare. The constant violent bickering on some Indonesian islands where Muslims and Christians live in close proximity to each other comes to mind and the persecution the Christian and Ahmadi minorities suffer in Pakistan and Middle Eastern societies. Reminiscent of the Malaysian fight over words, in July 2011 riots broke out in Bangladesh in protest against a recent amendment to the constitution which dropped the words “absolute faith and trust in Allah.”
The globalized world is resonating with violence in many forms. Much of it is widely accepted with resignation or even with a sense of necessity. However, violence directly in the service of religion has become a phenomenon of salutary rarity within the West.[6] There has been a faint afterglow of religious violence though in very recent times in highly secularized Europe. The sectarian warfare in Northern Ireland and the infamous “ethnic cleansing” on the Balkans have conjured up shades of religious conflict. In both cases ethnic and political motivations were the real causes but had been augmented by religious differences. Religion contributed to the horrid melee by throwing the ethnic differences and the political crisis they provoked into sharper relief. To the surprise of many, religion turned out still to be a major ingredient in identity formation, even in the highly secularized conditions of Europe. However, it was not for religious reasons that conflict arose in the first place.
The Islamic world is incomparably more convulsed by sectarian altercations. In the Middle East the ten-year war between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Iran—in addition to the traditional Arab—non-Arab divide and the long standing territorial dispute between the two countries—contained undertones of a sectarian clash between Sunni, and Shi’ites. The several wars and skirmishes India and Pakistan have fought since independence also have a religious background, and so has the unrest in Kashmir. Islam is involved in secessionist movements in the southern Philippines, mainland Southeast and Central Asia, and in China. Lebanon is rent into three main religious camps hostile to each other: Christians (of various denominations), Sunni, and Shi’ites; as well as some subgroups such as Druze, and Palestinian refugees without hope of ever being integrated. The religiously and ethnically complex pastiche of the Middle East also contains Syriaks, Kurds, Alevis, and Alawites, to name only some, who as minorities among engulfing majorities traditionally have always been in a difficult position. Not only in recent years have Christians (in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Egypt) repeatedly become a target for Muslim fanatics. In Africa hotspots of religiously inspired tension are festering in Sudan, Somalia, and Nigeria. In many cases, as was recently the case in Europe, religious tension is exacerbated by underlying ethnic differences. However, in India, apart from the crisis in Kashmir and the chronic standoff with Pakistan, Hindu nationalists, Christians, and Muslims seem to be continuously at each others’ throats despite being of one cultural and ethnic stock. Many more examples could be cited as evidence for the contention that religion is still responsible for many conflicts in the modern world and especially so in the Islamic world.
As has been outlined before, Islam’s history is rich in violence almost from the moment of its inception. The narrative of the original, growing community of Muslims is punctuated by important battles, such as that of Badr, Uhud, and the “battle of the camel.” Not only defense against hostile outsiders and battles for survival, also differences internal to Islam, rivaling religious exegeses, schismatic rifts provoking mutual recriminations of heresy, have repeatedly stirred this faith into bloody confrontations. The painful separation of Sunnism and Shi’a Islam, and continuous frictions between them ever since, the persecution of the Karejites and more recently the Baha’i in Iran and the Ahmadis in Pakistan and (to a minor extent in) Indonesia, sometimes bloody suppression of Sufism, Alawites, and Alevis represent the more prominent chapters of Islam’s history. Sectarianism provides still important markers of Muslim identity of an intensity that collectively spills over into violence more easily than is the case in other religious identity formations. This fact that violence is often directed against other Muslims whose creed is scarcely distinguishable, adds to Islam’s appearance as anachronistic in today’s world. If it were quantifiable, the violence perpetrated within Islam internally for sectarian reasons would be many times that directed towards the West. The sectarian dimension of conflict though may not always stand by itself, but may augment socioeconomic and political reasons. The Sunni-Shi’a antagonism is mainly sectarian in character, but in some cases is linked with political and economic deprivation. (This is the case in Saudi Arabia and some Gulf states where Shi’ites feel disadvantaged by the ruling Sunni elite.) Sometimes sectarian differences may have a separatist dimension. The bombing of Shi’a mosques (in July 2010) in Zahedan, Iran, by Sunnis, for instance, is part of the political fight of Sunni Baluchis for independence. Kurdish independence from Turkey and the dream of a Kurdish national state comprising not only parts of Turkey, but also of Iraq, Syria, and Iran has pitted Kurds against fellow Muslims for many years. In a wider sense then this meandering and braided stream of bloody violence, seems deeply inscribed in the life world of Islam.
Seen globally, in the ever-shrinking category of religiously inspired violence, it is Islam’s unfortunate position to stick out by the magnitude and frequency in which this religion is somehow connected with acts of violent conflict. It is equally striking that not unusually theological arguments are made to justify this connection. While religious reasoning in promoting and justifying violence has virtually disappeared from the arsenal of the West’s political tactics, this proposition enjoys a dubious revitalization in radical forms of Islam. It may episodically be openly expressed, while subliminally sectarian differences are simmering below the surface of politics all the time. It is even more remarkable that religion is not only used as a rationale for its own use of violence but, somewhat absurdly, is also used as an explanation of the motives of the West. The impact of the West’s episodic military incursions and robust interventions in the Islamic world are not necessarily seen as an accidental by-product of its exercise of global domination, or in terms of economic and strategic interests, but as a ploy of Christianity to diminish a religious rival and thus facilitate its own expansion. In this implausible and rather contradictory explanation, Western interventionism, its lust to interfere aggressively, is not only promoting secularism, but is deeply rooted in Christian expansionism.[7] When radical Islam speaks of a Western “crusade” (salibiyah), not unusually, this is understood in terms of this dual—and to the analytical mind contradictory—function.
A particularly compelling concept of violence perpetrated in the service of religion is that of crusade, the holy war waged against people of another faith. Spiritual necessity to the believer at times does appear to demand the employment of forceful means on a large scale. In a truly Machiavellian sense, the noble goal of preserving the faith may justify the vilest cruelties. Violence and fanaticism can powerfully grow when belief and political ambition or economic interest are fused in an explosive combination. Both the Islamic expansion—despite the doctrinal maxim of “there is no compulsion in religion”—and “Christian” aspects of colonialism provide good examples. The violent mass conversion of Meso- and South American Indians by Catholic Spain and its emissaries, the conquistadores, and Europe’s medieval crusades against the “Mohammedan heathens” weave an especially bloody tapestry of history. Sectarian wars in Europe and religious purges acted out interchangeably between Catholics and Protestants, witch hunts, bloody personal religious feuds among clerics, prophets, and reformers, are all part of the nature of holy war.
The thrust of the Ottoman Empire into the Balkans and into central Europe to the doors of Vienna (first in 1524 and then again in 1683) could be seen as just another war, a strategy for “conflict resolution through its exacerbation,” which to Europe then was not unfamiliar. But it held another dimension of even greater fear to Europeans: that of the religious and cultural Otherness pressing forward, advancing on the back of hostile hordes of loathsome “Moors” and “saracens,” to subjugate the Occident to an alien, “aberrant” faith. It was that aspect that struck terror into the hearts of the European defenders. The ultimate prospect of succumbing in military defeat to a detested religion inspired a fear that was equal to the fear of death. (It is moot to speculate whether the victorious Turks would have been content with recognizing the vanquished people as dhimmi and leaving them their faith or would have forced them to convert on pain of death.) A person’s horror of becoming a victim of massacre in these times seemed equal to the prospect of losing the traditional identity as Christian Occidental and becoming submersed into the vast ungodly cauldron of Turkicized Muslims. In both alternatives it meant to be destined for damnation. It would have seemed like Hobson’s choice to die for one’s Christian faith and redeem one’s soul or convert and surely go to hell. Historical evidence suggests that this was a vital incentive in stiffening the stubborn resistance, more so than mere patriotism or “defending one’s patch” against an invader would have done.
Violence may be said to be integral to most—if not all—religions, either by the way they have been practiced or because it is doctrinally intimated. Despite protestations to the contrary, the monotheistic religions of the Middle East are no exception. One does not have to search among exotic religions such as Thugism (the worship of the Hindu goddess Kali) and the thirst for innocent victims this cult generated, or the Aztec worship of Quetzalcoatl and its demand for human hearts, or Aum Shinri Kyo’s dry-run demonstration of the apocalypse in Tokyo’s subway.[8] Violence often is multidirectional. Some Christianity-derived cults, when challenged, used violence not only to ward off an external enemy, but also towards their own membership.[9] The acceptance of violence as being somehow part of God’s scheme is also a familiar feature. Self-destructive violence pervades the history of all three major monotheistic religions and is given by all of them a high moral value. Jewish zealots, early Christians and later reformers, Karejites and Shi’a martyrs bear historical testimony not only to their self-denying and willing demise but also to the iconic value placed on accepting violence as God’s will. In Middle Eastern monotheism fundamental doctrinal issues, which provide subliminal corner stones of belief, are grounded in expressions of mythical violence. In many cases the value is not placed on inflicting violence—although this occurs too—but on submitting to it and accepting violent death as one’s sacrifice to a higher purpose. From Abraham’s readiness to commit the intended human sacrifice as an act of devotion, to the Christian crucifixion as the foundation act of a faith, Old and New Testament are riddled with celebrations of violence in the form of events of salvific or soteriological importance. Ritual reenactments and commemorations indirectly celebrate ancient forms of violence and keep the iconic notion alive. Divine vengeance of the Biblical flood, the horrific punishment inflicted on Egypt and the pharaoh, the unequal fight between David and Goliath leading to one of the combatant’s demise, the persecution of early Christians under Emperor Nero, to the bloody history of Christian saints, religious themes celebrate violence in various forms. Historical and mythical cases of violence are commemorated in ritualized form through passion plays, the Shi’a festivity of Ashura, and reenacted through the sacrifice brought at eid-al-adha—all of which ultimately are celebrations of violence. The sublimation of violence through ritualization and symbolization does not diminish the cryptic message, eternally intertwining the sacred with violence, that acts of violence may be good in serving a divine purpose. Mythical events, acted out in ritual, elevate the theme of suffering, as a consequence of violence, to soteriological and iconic significance. (It is not too far-fetched to see ritual self-harm, rifat, practiced in some Sufi sects as an extension of this trope.) More will be said later about the embracement of violence in creating the sacred role of the martyr.
Sacred violence is not always inter-sectarian or inter-religious and may have connotations other than sacrificial. Violence may be directed as a form of straightforward punishment to those co-religionists considered nonconformists, heretics, apostates, and blasphemers and those who are considered to be breaking divine laws. Conservative versions of Islamic law condone and even demand violence as legal punishment, which they see as prescribed by God’s ordinance. The penal code of the sharia fundamentally deems all crimes to be of a nature that defies religion—offenses against divine command—and therefore punishable with utter severity, but reserves the harshest punishment for insults directly offered to God, that is, heresy (altering or falsifying the word of God), apostasy (rejecting God’s message), and blasphemy (insulting the sacredness). The severity of these offenses justifies the gravest response. But not only the death penalty, demanded by strict sharia rules for such crimes, is a form of violence; much of the Islamic penal armory such as amputations, application of reciprocal retribution qisas (based on the Biblical maxim “an eye for an eye”), and flogging are violations of the bodily integrity of a person and represent legitimized, exemplary demonstrations of violence.
Having reviewed past and present with a not-too-fine-grained global perspective (fleetingly pointing to historical narratives and ritualized representations of violence), it seems fair to say that much of the religiously inspired violence in the present-day world seems to emanate primarily from Islam. The previous antagonistic tension between the two superpowers, the United States and Soviet Russia, representing a global ideological dichotomy, by and large had diverted attention from what seemed to be crises of smaller magnitude. With the disappearance of this tension, the full glare of the West’s attention falls on upheavals in the Islamic world (including now also the diasporic situation of Muslims living in and closely interacting with the West). The arising unflattering attention is giving the issue an almost evolutionary gloss. A distorted essentialization of Islam not only caricatures this religion’s image, but also gives Islam the appearance of being mired in an era of religious violence, which Western society has left behind. Secularization and modernization that have affected Christianity so profoundly, making it peaceful as well as emasculating it socially, seem to have bypassed Islam, or rather have not reached it yet. The idea of waging a crusade on religious, Christian grounds—to physically defend the faith or annihilate a religious dissenter—seems utterly ridiculous if not futile and is certainly illegal. While at least the mainstream of Christianity has lost its gusto for violent confrontation for doctrinal reasons, Islam does not appear to have undergone the same kind of transformation. Christianity has moved on to embracing an ideology in which aggressive acts even remotely reminiscent of violence—like burning copies of the Quran—have become relegated to the social and lunatic fringes. Characteristically, most of today’s proselytization work is not only peaceful, but combined with welfare and healthcare work, exemplary deeds of active caring. (In the eyes of fanatical Muslims this makes Christian missionarydom even more insidious. Charity and active compassion is seen to be bribery to bring people under the West’s domination in yet another cunning way.)
The brand name of Islamic violence is supplied by al-Qaeda. Most probably it is wrong to think of al-Qaeda as an organization in the traditional meaning of the term. Although it emerged from the international army of mujahidin fighting in Afghanistan and in the process adopting the most brutal, merciless methodology conceivable, over the years it metamorphosed into a new form. It may be more apt to think of it as an ideological locus[10] that through a worldwide connectivity subcontracts the execution of terrorist acts to only loosely affiliated groups and cells which have little awareness of each others’ existence. “The camp” refers to an ideological position, a standpoint in relation to the world and its political and ideological conditions. Whatever al-Qaeda as organization may be—cohesive, structured organization or loose-knit circle of ideologically like-minded individuals operating in autonomous cells with only some core ideas held in common and financially fed from one central source—it represents now the foremost physical manifestation of religious violence and consummate aggressive fanaticism. The name al-Qaeda has become virtually synonymous with a posture of murderous religious fanaticism, and so has the name of its (former) main ideologue, Osama bin Laden, presumed founder and self-styled theological expert until his death in 2011. The so-called “bin Laden factor” has done much damage to the reputation of Islam as a whole and has significantly lessened its acceptance in the West as just another religion of the same respectability as Christianity or Buddhism.
In a broader sense, harnessing theology for fanatical ends is not just the preserve of al-Qaeda. Thus it is not justified to blame it for all violence perpetrated in the name of Islam. The Islamic ordinariate of brutality is much wider and terrorist methods are not the monopoly of al-Qaeda proper. Countless other Islamic organizations and movements fit into this mold. There are extremist movements fighting for political causes such as independence (the North Caucasus Islamists, or organizations in the southern Philippines, for example), or to establish locally an extreme fundamentalist regime (the Pakistani and Afghani Taleban, northern Nigerian [the Buku Haram movement] and Somali groups [the al-Shabaab and Islamic Court movements], Saudi Arabian and Yemeni extremists, the Indonesian Jemaa Islamiyah), which look up to al-Qaeda as their teacher but probably have only intermittent and opportunistic contacts with it. These groups may draw at times on al-Qaeda’s assistance, receive finance, intelligence, and inspiration, and perhaps maintain some loose connections with it but operate independently of any central command structure. Some groups may have global or international ambitions, and others may pursue a local or regional agenda. What they have in common is the use of violence under the pretense of having a mandate from Islam and conducting a holy war in its name.
In terms of actions and philosophies, this extremist category is very wide. Depending on definition, it is not just comprising such organizations, which now are subject to anti-terrorist legislation in many countries. Khomeini’s revolutionary theology implemented in 1990 to create the God-state of present-day Iran also displayed similarly violent features, but meanwhile has become legitimized by being foundational to the modern theocratic state of Iran. Outside organized extremism, among Muslims there is a wide spectrum of conservative attitudes, which have considerable sympathy for aggressive action be it against the West or other Muslims, and thus provide an almost inexhaustible potential resource for extremism. (Thus effectively fighting extremism cannot be based on killing and interning as many extremists as possible, but on altering the balance of ideology.)
It is the seemingly all-pervading linkage between Islam and various forms of violence, historic and current, defensive and aggressive, which blights the reputation of this religion as a whole. Because of the absence of a more subtle and informed awareness of Islam’s nuances and historical changes, it fails to be considered as harmless and benevolent a religion as Christianity, whose basic kindliness is only matched by its social irrelevance. This perception is of vital importance in a situation of globalized interlocking of vital geopolitical and economic interests and even more drastically in situations in which Muslims are no longer geographically separated from the West, but as sizable diasporic minorities have become part of it. Suspicion and distrust in matters of national security, rejection of Muslims as fellow-citizens, and Islamophobic emotions are the result.
There is another important aspect to religious violence—violence that is not used for aggressive purposes but used purely for defense. This gives violence morally a more readily defensible position. The violation of secrecy—a core value in most tribal religions which needs to be vigorously defended—usually is punished very harshly and without mercy. Even defending precious belief against insult and denigration can have its ethical defense. The use of force to protect the integrity of a faith, even from a modern perspective, carries some considerable moral legitimacy. This is certainly a prominent feature in present-day Islam and the standard rationale used by jihadis. Most leading Muslim theologians will concur on the point that if Islam is threatened in any way the use of force is justified. Defending the faith by any means in principle is a doctrinal requirement of high priority, deeply anchored in the scriptures. Disagreement, however, lies in what constitutes a threat that makes defensive action mandatory and what degree or means of force are permissible. (In the highly secularized circumstances in which Christianity seeks to survive, this rationale is not officially recognized by mainstream churches.) The scriptures, and in particular the Quran, do not clearly separate the two motives—aggressive and defensive intentions—perhaps in recognition of the principle that attack is the best defense. (Certainly, this was a truism at the time Islam emerged and attempted to consolidate itself.) The concept of jihad potentially encompasses both and is quite ambiguous about the two motives. Mainstream interpretation today though gives in-principle primacy to the defensive kind. Doing so, however, is a matter of exegesis. Arranging attitudes toward the uses of violence on a spectrum, it becomes clear that peaceful interpretations (especially some Sufi versions) on one extreme disregard altogether the belligerent aspects contained in the scriptures, while radical Islam, on the opposite end, dwells heavily on them and seeks them out to justify violent action.
Today’s extremist Salafis (relying on the example of the very first generations of Muslims), in pursuing an aggressive jihadist agenda, find ample justification for their actions in the sacred scriptures.[11] The military exploits under the Prophet’s command were mainly for defensive reasons to ward off attack or buy some time to allow the fledgling Muslim community to consolidate. In some cases, however, military action went considerably beyond securing survival and pursued expansionist or other tactical aims.[12] Both Quran and Sunna provide justification and precedent for strong-arm tactics to secure the faith and preserve the community of believers, and in doing so go well beyond defense in the very narrow sense of warding off aggression of an external enemy. Beyond physical defense, when the lives of the believers are threatened, the imperative of providing protection for the faith supplies a rich matrix from which all kinds of justification may be deduced. Although theoretically one may make a distinction between preserving the substance of religion and protecting those practicing it, radical Islam blurs the two sides and often proceeds from the assumption that because Muslims are physically and spiritually in peril—for a variety of reasons—Islam per se requires to be protected, if necessary, by a violent jihad. Usually, when radical Muslims refer to the purity of Islam (which is in danger somehow) they have in mind a particular version of it and implicitly define “true” faith, purity of dogma, and correct worship in a narrow, highly idiosyncratic manner. The danger may be believed to emanate from external, impersonal forces of change, cultural influences imposed by outsiders, or possibly may stem from illicit conditions within Muslimhood itself. It does not require a physical threat. What may be labeled heresy, for instance, can be perceived to pose such a threat to Islam itself, or an un-Islamic regime, as much as, in a concrete sense, corrupting the Muslim youth with Western popular culture and the false allure of materialism or even a liberal interpretation of Islamic doctrine.
Today’s legitimacy of a global jihad, from a radical Muslim point of view, firmly rests on the perception that Islam is under attack—an attack emanating mainly from the West as well as corrupt regimes in the West’s pay. Bad governance by pseudo-Muslim administrations is considered as anti-Islamic and as much of an attack on true Islam as the subversive cultural impulses arising from the West, the humiliating defeats it inflicts time after time on the Islamic world and the corrosive secularization it promotes. One requires as strong a rebuttal as the other. Extreme views condemn as similarly pernicious and dangerous attempts within Muslimhood to enter into a dialogue with modernity, rationalism and globalizm to reform and modernise Islamic tenet. Labeling such initiatives blasphemy and heresy (kufr and bida) ultraconservatives respond with violent rejection. When they find the state unresponsive to this “crime,” vigilante action appears entirely justified. To stifle individual initiatives of “subverting” the true faith, even assassination is considered a legitimate strategy. Such subversion from within may be judged to be even worse than the decadence insinuated by Western popular culture or the uncouth proximity of members of another sect. The range of possibilities by which something may be construed as a spiritual attack on Islam is sheer unlimited. And in a physical sense, when looked at from this perspective, there are many examples where Muslims, as groups, nations, and collectively, have been humiliated, routed and subjugated in every conceivable way by the powers of the West. All this provides rich nourishment to the belief that Islam is under attack and in dire need of vigorous defense.
It is essential for a consideration of conservative Islam to take a critical look at the defense mechanism couched in the doctrine of jihad. As a term jihad has become a byword of terrorism in today’s world. The concept of jihad, paradigmatic for Islamic violence, has been made familiar in the West at first by bin Laden’s declaration of a “Jihad against Crusaders and Jews” in 1998. The term has entered now the Western standard vocabulary as a word of loathing. In translation the semantic combination of holy and war seems oddly incongruous in a secularized West. In response it has produced the eponymous expression “unholy war” referring to its odious reputation of an indiscriminately murderous, unjust campaign.[13]
Jihad is often called the sixth pillar of Islam in recognition of its doctrinal importance. Jihadis have elevated it above the other five pillars (shahada—profession of faith; salat—prayer; alms—zakat; fasting—sawm; and pilgrimage—haj) giving it focal importance as a sacred duty, a fardh. The sacred scriptures contain many ambiguities, not least in relation to jihad, which allows various and quite contradictory interpretations. By a small twist of exegesis, the concept ostensibly gives support to aggressive ideas that Islam or Muslims are somehow under threat and in need of being defended at all cost. The call to an all out “cosmic war” can be deduced from the Quran just as easily as a quietist, resigned attitude that shuns aggression.[14]
The call to fight in order to defend the faith is doctrinally underpinned by Islam’s inherent conviction of its spiritual and moral superiority. In other words, its belligerent side can only be fully understood by recognizing some specific doctrinal issues to do with its sense of having a mission in the world and occupying a superior position among humanity. While this in itself is not a call to arms, one can imagine that it generates a readiness to defend this central value and prove its truth by engaging in action—in other words, it implies an imperative of assertive self-preservation. Central in insinuating an inclination towards activism driven by a sense of superiority is the declaration of the Quranic verse 3/110, which says, “You are the best community created for mankind, enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong.” A sense of superiority is further reinforced in verse 3/104: “Let there arise out of you a group of people inviting to all that is good [Islam], enjoining Al-Ma’ruf [i.e., Islamic monotheism and all that Islam orders one to do] and forbidding Al-Munkar [polytheism and disbelief and all that Islam has forbidden]. And it is they who are successful.”
Among others, Bassam Tibi, himself a Muslim, draws specific attention to the “superiority complex” instilled by conservative Islamic teaching. He himself in his early years has had the “benefit” of this teaching, he explains.[15] The message of collective superiority of Muslims and Islam is most impressively summed up in the Qur’anic verse (3/110) where Muslims are reminded that they are the cream of humanity and are of exemplary significance to the world.[16] It is easy on this basis to understand why many Muslims see a discrepancy between this proclamation and the actual reality in the modern world. This then can readily be construed not only as a deficiency that has to be regretted but also as entailing a divinely demanded duty to rectify the situation. Self-righteous condescension towards “infidels” needs to be nourished by empirical facts.
In this vein, Quran verse 9/123 admonishes Muslims: “O believers, fight the unbelievers who are near to you, and let them find in you a harshness; and know that God is with the God-fearing.” Such doctrines do not encourage a sense of humility to emerge; they make it incumbent for the believer to assume a dominant position. There is no suggestion in these and other verses of yielding gracefully or being content with a condition of equality with others. Turning an advantage into an offer of peace is rejected in verse 47/35: “so be not weak and ask for peace while you are having the upper hand. Allah is with you.” Ayat 3/21 chooses similar tones: “Verily! Those who disbelief in the Ayat of Allah and kill the Prophets without right, and kill those men who order just dealings, . . . then announce to them a painful torment.” And 32/18 says, “Is he who is a believer like him who is an evil-liver? They are not alike.”
Such exhortations clearly promote a message of supremacy and a quest for domination, if necessary by force. It is obvious that such doctrinal points and what ambiguities they may generate can be relatively easily molded into an aggressive posture. One only needs to detach these verses from the historical context and ignores a reasoned asbab-an-nusul. A possible ambiguity if such exhortations really do apply to the present world can also be “clarified” by the appropriate mind-set.
Muslim minds, offended by the current global situation, find encouragement and incitement in such decontextualized statements contained in the Islamic scriptures—in fact they do not see ambiguity, but clarity. In particular some passages can be interpreted to contain the demand to take up arms in the defense of the faith. When the Quran (9/38) proclaims, “O you who believe! What is the matter with you, that when you are asked to march forth in the cause of Allah [i.e., Jihad] you cling heavily to the earth? Are you pleased with the life of this world rather than the Hereafter? But little is the enjoyment of the life of this world as compared to the Hereafter,” it is a clarion call to fight in the “just” cause, and not to spare one’s own life. Self-preservation has to be set aside. As Quran verse 4/95 specifically reminds the believer, “Do not sit at home [unless disabled], God prefers the one who fights with his wealth and with his life—his is the paradise.” The hadith commands, “He who does not care about the state of the Muslim umma, is not part of the Muslims.” Therefore to the attackers on Muslims “ announce . . . a painful torment” (Quran 3/21); and the Muslims are further reminded of their duty: “Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of a believing people” (9/14). And as verse 3/104 promises to those people who do good and prevent evil, it is “they who are successful.” Victory is theirs.
If one searches, one can find in the Quran even harsher imperatives, such as “kill the mushrikun [unbelievers, idolaters] wherever you find them, and capture and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush” (Quran 9/5); “Fight against the mushrikun . . . collectively as they fight against you collectively” (9/36); “Fight the unbelievers until there is no longer any fitnah [sedition, disbelief, polytheism] and religion is all for God” (2/193; 8/39); and “Cast [the disbelievers] into hell[fire]” (8/37). All this, when isolated from the historical context in which Muslims were called to the defense of Islam in times of dire need, as existed at the Prophet’s time, may seem to convey an eternally valid message of aggression and implacable hostility. By a stretch of the imagination, such a situation of Islam’s need might be perceived to exist as the West militarily, economically, and ideologically appears to oppress Muslims. In this perceived crisis, the call for restraint, which clearly is also contained in the Quran, is easily ignored: for instance, when it says “Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you, but transgress not the limits. Truly, Allah does not like the transgressors” (2/190).[17]
As argued before, Islam is emphatically this-worldly in its intent, yet it also has an inherent tendency, as most religions do, to transcendentalize the meaning of human existence. By proposing a kind of other-worldliness that gives meaning to human life, it relativizes and diminishes the importance of individual existence in comparison with God’s grandiose design plan. Religious devotion of some intensity tends to magnify the transcendence of the meaning of human existence and concomitantly to downplay the here-and-now as just a transitory phase to be replaced with something of far greater durability and significance. “Untempered by secularism, the brevity and ephemerality of this life is ranged in unequal contest against the prospect of divine judgment, and subsequent eternal paradisical reward or hellish damnation.”[18] Everlasting bliss can be earned by performing one’s duty. This creates a mentality that makes it easy for the fervent believer to depart from this world for the sake of attaining eternal bliss. At the same time it gives ethical license to coerce others, whose life’s meaning is equally supposed to be located in the afterlife, to do the same so as to hasten them towards God’s final judgment. The practical result means blurring the distinction between martyrdom and homicide. The anthropocentric world view of the West, which has long left behind such medievalist religious fervor and rejected the view that this life is just a test with an ulterior purpose, fails to empathize with this position not only in its own name, but condemns its inherent incompatibility with an ethically and ideologically globalizing world. The values globalizm, grounded in this-worldliness and empiricism, tries to espouse are in stark contradiction to the fanatical Muslim philosophical position.
Jihad is usually translated as holy war—or by Christianizing the concept, crusade. It actually means struggle of an unspecific kind and refers to a morally justified act. The word war, harb, is associated rather with unjust fighting as it characterizes the pointlessly violent activities of the “unbelievers.” Hence their abode is that of Dar-al-Harb. Although jihad is also translated as “fighting” (or “fighting in the cause of Allah”) and “striving with your life,” it does not necessarily refer to armed or violent struggle. It is a hallmark of radicalism that this aspect has been put into the foreground of present-day teaching.
Tradition and scriptures distinguish between lesser and greater struggle, the latter by definition being the more demanding and the more meritorious. This kind of struggle—a fight with one’s inner enemies as it were—refers to personal growth and the endeavor to become a better Muslim through self-discipline, and a faithful and painstakingly correct adherence to Islamic articles of faith and to prescribed behavior. In this sense it refers to the duty of every Muslim without gender distinction to strive towards personal perfection. The foremost duty, one may infer, is to rise to moral excellence and virtue in practical life. What the Prophet had apparently considered to be the more exacting and morally higher form of a Muslim’s duty has retreated into the background in the course of Islam’s recent radicalization. Extremist interpretations of jihad, inspired by the view that Islam is in peril or that Muslims are suffering oppression, have led to the lesser aspect of the concept gaining pre-eminence. Thus the role of mujahidin (the people carrying out jihad) is predominantly understood now in terms of waging armed struggle, and, in garnering world attention, it has led to the neologism of jihadist, a word synonymous with terrorist. This Islam-specific morality not only demands moral rectitude, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice from the jihadi, but even excuses homicide, whether in the course of war or terrorism, as a legitimate commitment to jihad.
Even among apologists of violence, the more temperate view on this theological point holds that jihad is not necessarily intended to be of the Machiavellian kind that holds that the end justifies the means and thus every kind of violence is permitted. The Quran (2/190–93, 9/36) takes care to spell out rules of engagement. For instance, non-combatants—women, children, and the elderly—held to be innocent of armed aggression are to be spared; the opponent’s means of sustenance are not to be destroyed, and if the enemy surrenders, to make peace. Mindful of such edicts, some Muslim scholarly authorities reject the legitimacy of unconditional, indiscriminate jihadism. However, the extremist view perceives justification in the belief that there are no innocents among its enemies; all share in the collective culpability of being hostile to the true faith. Even Muslims who do not follow the call to engage in jihad or do not share in the particular radicalised version of Islam may be seen to have joined the ranks of the enemy and become legitimate targets.
Dehumanizing the enemy is the usual device of war propaganda, and particularly vicious forms demonize the enemy by ascribing to them the attributes of evil, which is supposed to inspire even greater efforts to vanquish them. Conceiving a conflict in Manichaean terms of good fighting against evil is an old propaganda trick (still employed in the wars of the twentieth century) that stiffens one’s resolve. The Iranian rhetoric of America being the Great Satan—ridiculously hackneyed as this may sound in the secularized West—is not just a figure of speech but falls into this rubric of war propaganda couched in extreme religious jargon.
Depending on the meaning attributed by believers to the concept of jihad, a more peaceful or alternatively a more radical, belligerent form of Islam emerges. Neither will seriously contradict the core elements of belief. Moderate Islam understands jihad as an inner fortitude that rejects being translated into physical violence. From another point of view belief without action is meaningless. As the ahadith admonish, seeing injustice perpetrated on fellow Muslims and not intervening is tantamount to reneging on one’s own Muslimness. Neutrality is as impossible an option as siding with the enemy. What we can observe in this context of Islam doctrinally activating violence is more than just using it as a functional tool to achieve a tactical end. It represents the ritualization of violence; in other words, the elevation of violence to the status of a sacred instrument. The violence into which the energies of the religious adepts are to be channelled is given a special liturgical meaning. Struggling in the cause of God lends itself readily to the instrumentalization of violence as a companion of sacrality. Such an interpretation of jihad, although this is by no means self-evident or cogent, fits seamlessly into a broader understanding of Islam and shapes it decisively.
The important point to make is that for radical Islam the violence that is associated with its understanding of the essential meaning of jihad, holy war, is enriched with a distinctly sacred, liturgical meaning. It possesses a redemptive quality as well as containing aspects of sacrifice. Rene Girard[19] has examined the close connection between violence and the sacred and the manifestation of this in the religious triumvirate of violence, sacrality, and sacrifice. Not all violence perpetrated by Muslims, though, is sacrificial in intent and carries some symbolic connotations. It may be purely pragmatic, unsublimated, and opportunistic, and by heaping chaos upon chaos, may simply be a social release valve to respond to an unjust, bewildering, or oppressive situation. In this sense of expressing inner rage, it may manifest undirected social pathology, no more than pent-up aggression suddenly unleashed. But crusades or holy wars are essentially of a different kind: in obeying a sacred duty, meting out suffering and death means offering a sacrifice. In a gruesome manner this universal trope of human sacrifice can be seen manifest in the slaughter of captives by cutting their throats. Some such acts perpetrated by Muslim extremists have been videotaped and broadcast on the internet (mainly in the aftermath of the Iraq war and the ensuing brutal anomie). Through their resemblance to the ritual halal slaughter of animals, such acts can be recognized as being more than just sadistic executions, but as ritualized murder containing distinct undertones of sacrifice.
For the jihadist suffering literally is a self-sacrifice offered for a higher glory. Suffering death is the “ultimate” sacrifice, and like all sacrifice brought in the name of a sacred cause, some reward is expected. Sacrifice plays on the universal theme of reciprocity; it is a transaction in which both sides, sacrificer and supernatural agency, enter into a relationship of obligation and mutuality. This expectation may be divine intervention in assisting the sacred cause or more concretely a reward may be expected to fall personally to the sacrificer. Martyrdom clearly is the most meritorious form of self-sacrifice, promising the highest rewards; it is of a kind that ennobles even the suicide bomber, the human bomb, and lifts them above the contemptible act of suicide. In this religious lexicon killing oneself and others is a sacrificial act that is beatified by the highest ethical reason and bathed in a mellow moral glow under an approving divine canopy.
The martyr is promised immediate salvation and eternal reward in paradise. Martyrs do not die, their earthly demise merges seamlessly with an afterlife of bliss and affluence. Believers are urged not to weep for them, for “they have not died.” For the more simple-minded and materially orientated ones among the martyrs, the favors of hordes of huri, flawless virgins with “swelling bosoms,” beckon—although for female martyrs no equivalent, opposite-gendered reward is promised. Their torn and tortured bodies—unwashed as it is prescribed for martyrs—miraculously resurrected and unblemished immediately enter paradise where in youthful form the martyrs at once partake of wonderful provisions. For the more educated, these rather earthly delights are metaphors for unimaginable spiritual wonders awaiting the select few. In this intoxicating perspective, moral shadings vanish. Even naked, unspeakable brutality becomes excusable, canonized by the purity of its intent and diminished by the magnitude of reward. More will be said later of the mysterious mind-set of the suicide bomber.
Purity of intent and motive to perform a sacred duty, and violence may combine in bizarre, unspeakable combinations. Violence thus performed is instrumental in achieving a desirable, perhaps divinely commanded, goal whereby the cruelty of methods may befit the magnitude of the purpose, yet make it completely ethical through its ritualistic execution. In serial Aztec human sacrifice as much as in the horrors of the Holocaust, these elements are inseparably intertwined. The destruction of countless lives becomes rationalizable as indeed necessary, a duty to be performed, for the survival of society, or the nation as well as for the greater glory of serving a higher authority (be they gods or destiny). Nourishing the gods with the hearts and blood of victims was considered necessary to retain divine help and thus keep the Aztec nation strong—as well as eliminating scores of enemies. Eliminating the enemies of the Nazi state, who in Nazism’s murderous eugenics were obstacles to the attainment of the perfect, cleansed nation, eliminated a corrosive and dangerous threat to its health and strength. Deranged visions of the sacred importance of global jihad, in my view, show some uncanny similarity by being based on conceptions of sacrifice, ethically pure violence, and sacrality of objective.
Sadistic violence of this kind raises anxious questions. Whether it is sublimated to a higher purpose or appears to be simply unrefined, atavistic destructiveness, it raises a nagging question: is it innately present in the human condition—and, therefore, will inevitably show up in some form or other—or is it coming from a “capital of violence” that is built up by uncongenial social conditions? It could be generated by particular social agencies, institutions, and constellations[20] or, always slumbering in the deeper reaches of human nature, could be called forth by conflict situations. Is violence inevitably inherent in every society or can a society without violence be designed? There are many questions, none having been answered with finality. Some critics of Islam tend towards the view that violence may be brought to fomentation by doctrinal flash points contained in this religion, such as the ones I have highlighted before. Islam seems to serve somehow as a catalyst. The ex-Christian West entertains the expectation that religion be restraining, an institution that dissipates or suppresses violent energies and helps in subduing what may be seen as a naturally occurring “volcanic” quality of human nature. This makes Islam suspect, as it appears to cause the opposite effect. However, one should not overlook that the moral imperatives of peace, tolerance, understanding, and humility have risen to doctrinal prominence in the (mainstream) Christian churches not so long ago and that opposite impulses do still exist. Some “fire and brimstone” preachers exemplify the persistence of liturgical belligerence at least in word, if not in action. The assumption that religion intrinsically is pacifying and has a socializing mission—in which destructive violence is kept at bay—is wrong. Most religions openly or cryptically “preach” violence—which is to say, contain belief elements that ritualize, iconisize, or allude to violence, or doctrinally conjure up images of violence and its results. These belief elements can be instrumentalized to activate and justify violent behavior in any form. The fallacious expectation that religion is a medium that encourages a harmonious sociability can be found in both Emile Durkheim’s and Karl Marx’s thinking about religion. In this respect they meet in unison, even though one thought religion was objectively necessary and beneficial for society and the other that its tranquilizing, “opium-like” effect was pernicious. Both may have been wrong in presuming that religion’s intrinsic purpose is the pacification of human nature.
The questions, whether Islam is prone to generating violence and whether its edicts are inciting aggression loom large. The concept of jihad is often identified as the source of violence. Clearly, radicals see it as an open invitation, religiously sanctioned and of supreme ethical value, to be violent. Because of scriptural ambiguity gaining clarity depends on interpretation and often this is achieved by removing the reference from its wider, historical context. Extremists ignore the so-called Greater jihad, a concept derived from the ahadith in which the Prophet is described having said, after a successful military campaign, that the greater and more difficult task is still ahead: the believers’ personal struggle to moralize their existence. At the same time it may be argued that the infusion of Islamic morality into human existence creates a duty to take up arms to defend this morality when it is threatened by jahiliya (immorality, decadence, ignorance) and heresy. Crisis may create a confluence of both forms of jihad: to be moral may require taking up arms. The duty to struggle in the name of Islam is supplemented and underpinned by a scriptural claim to supremacy. A heightened sense of its own superiority intricately woven into the fabric of Islamic doctrine adds both pungency and urgency to the imperative of jihad in the present global circumstances.
In this sense, undeniably, the sacred texts contain doctrinal impulses towards the employment of violent means. They could be overcome or set aside, but some interpretations choose not to do that. Such impulses are contained especially in three concepts: the moral duty of jihad, the exaltedness of the virtue of martyrdom, and the certain expectation of paradise through acts of violence. It would require a determined counter-exegesis to weaken and deactivate the divine imperatives, which jump out at the believer who experiences alienation and wishes to embrace Islam wholeheartedly as a panacea.
One suspects that for many, but in particular for radical Islamists, Quranic phraseology is not empty rhetoric, grandiloquence without meaning. It represents a hard-edged imperative: submission under God’s will, not in the form of resignation (a kismat), but as a clarion call to live up to one’s duty for action. In this it is important to realize that the Salafist leanings of today’s radicals usually do not seem to concern themselves with the rich philosophical and contemplative literature that Islam has accumulated over centuries. It is primarily the Quran and the Sunna (the collection of ahadith) that form the basis of the Salafis’ collective belief and from which they seem mainly to draw inspiration. In addition, the writings of Qutb, al-Banna, and Mawdudi may be consulted, to strengthen their belief that the West has to be resisted, but some extreme Salafism even rejects these sources as illicit innovations. The more nuanced and liberal nature of the works from the classical and the Spanish period eludes this search for the fundamentals of the faith.
The doctrinal exhortation to assume an activist stance is further corroborated by the sacred scriptures giving specific instructions about how to deal with infidels in the defense of religion and Muslim co-religionists. Constant vigilance is advised, both defensively and offensively, for instance, in Quran verse 3/200: “Guard your territory by stationing army units permanently at the places from where the enemy can attack you, and fear Allah, so that you may be successful.” Such verses may be of dubious tactical value in today’s world, but they seem to issue eternally valid commands never to let one’s guard down in relation to “infidels.” Instructions are seemingly always given from a position of strength, never considering compromise, seeking mutual rapport based on tolerant understanding. Instead a tone of belligerence is paramount, so impressively articulated in verse 9/123: “O believers, fight the unbelievers who are near to you, and let them find in you a harshness; and know that God is with the god-fearing.”
Even more openly aggressive imperatives are not hard to find, such as “Kill the mushrikun [unbelievers, idolaters] wherever you find them, and capture and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush” (Qur’an 5/9); and “fight against the mushrikun . . . collectively as they fight against you collectively” (Qur’an 9/36), which, when isolated from their historical context, may seem to convey a message of implacable hostility and command belligerence towards people of other faiths. It is not difficult to understand how fanatical aggressiveness can grow from a certain understanding of Quranic passages. Thus justification of forceful defensive action for the fanatic turns into a duty of unmitigated, proactive aggression. On this basis a sense of victorious supremacy turns from a hoped-for prospect, a longing for a divine promise yet to be met, to an unshakeable, preordained certainty.
Passages surrounding articles of faith like these taken from the Quran—but elaborated and exemplified in the exegetical Islamic literature—provide doctrinal foundations that lend themselves to being exploited by ideologues to shape a jihadi’s frame of mind. Flexibility of interpretation hardens into the shapes of eternal truths. Especially if the historical contextualization of divine revelation is denied, as fundamentalism is inclined to do, it lacks the awareness that the scriptures may relate to the original precariousness of the Muslim community. Instead it creates the belief that eternal truths have been formulated, which apply in unchanged form to contemporary situations and convey an urgency to validate them. Rejecting contextualization means accepting the unconditionally exemplary value of historical events and giving them the status of sacred precedence to be emulated faithfully. Indeed, this is the perspective one finds time and time again in the utterances of extremists.
The scriptures also supply rules of engagement, a fact which can be misconstrued as underpinning the necessity to engage in warfare. Such rules may seem to preach fairness, such as to spare noncombatants, women and children, the elderly, not to destroy the enemy’s means of livelihood, and the like. But these rules of fairness lend themselves to be interpreted in various ways. They can easily be understood to further corroborate the divinely intended need towards violent conduct. By recommending aggression to be carried out in an orderly and prescribed manner, it moralizes this violence, and legitimizes it with the divine seal. For the jihadist it strengthens a sense of “doing the right thing.” And in another sense, these rules can entirely and legitimately be suspended, for instance, if the adversary is considered to fight without rules or constraints, or commands overwhelming power. An additional rationale—providing a telling background to bin Laden’s fatawa—is to ascribe to the West, and especially America, a collective culpability without exceptions. People have the government they elect or deserve, and thus there are no innocents that should not be harmed. Through this convenient rationale not only is democracy condemned, but also terrorism justified in striking indiscriminately. Targets like airplanes, marketplaces, and underground trains become legitimate venues for attacks.
The point to be made here is that Islam is what people make of it. To blame Islam per se as a religion for the violence is alluring but overly simplistic. There is no simple causal connection between Islamic doctrine and violent acts of extremism and terrorism. Doctrine, appropriately interpreted, provides a comfortable justification for any action. Add to this a perception of duty to address injustice or suffering, a sense of powerlessness in using ordinary channels of protest, a sense of being a victim of hegemonic oppression, deprivation, and aggression. Certainly, the perception is widespread of the hegemonic oppression of the Islamic world by the West and that the Christian-secularized West is waging a religious war against Islam. This provides both incentive and broad license for harsh measures and retribution. The Quran (5/33) seems to condone this where it says, “The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides, or be exiled from the land.” This, for some, is justification for the fiercest response imaginable, leaving little excuse for leniency, concession or compromise, while from another angle of interpretation this may have no gravity, failing to relate to present conditions.
Doctrine may provide a justification and perhaps even a methodology, but not a cause. As with any ideology, the time has to be rife for doctrine to become influential. In the confluence of Max Weber’s[21] elective affinity (of the congruency of ideas and material circumstances creating an interestedness[22] ) and Antonio Gramsci’s[23] idea of how dominance of an ideology (i.e., hegemony) is achieved (namely by consensus and persuasion—not enforcement—through which a client culture or group or society accepts the domination by another),[24] lies the explanation for the rise of Islamic militancy. The belief in osmotic empowerment does not hinge on the octruization of ideology. Ideas of the need of Islam to defend itself with all means possible against infidel incursion and the injustices of the modern world can only take hold if there is some basis in empirical reality, if there are conditions that lend themselves to this interpretation and make these ideas seem reasonable and full of explanatory cogency. In such circumstances it does not need blunt coercion to rally people; instead seductive reasoning, the intellectual allure of seemingly sound explanations and promised solution provide the pull of the ideological force field. Thus even the sweet dawa recommended in the Islamic methodology suffices.
Islamic extremism occupies a broad front against the West’s political and cultural dominance. Bin Laden’s fatwa addressing the West as crusaders uses the reference to a historical situation to point to a contemporary danger posed by the West. As the crusades once threatened to re-Christianize the “Holy Land” and the Levant, the West’s current engagement in the Islamic world needs to be repulsed now to prevent the destruction of Islam. Pushing America and its allies out of the Islamic realm is even more important in a very specific sense. Infidel troops are already dangerously close to Hijas, the holy inner precinct of the Islamic world that includes Macca and Madina. The presence of nonbelievers is not tolerated there. Establishing infidel dominance over Islam’s core area from where it spread would pollute its purity and make muhajirun (refugees from infidel rule) of all devout Muslims. No other world religion is less inviting to its inner sanctum, although some secretive cults also like to surround themselves with extreme exclusiveness. For conservative Muslims the intrusion of infidels into the heartland from where Islam sallied forth to conquer wide swathes of geography, is unthinkable.
The scriptural example and the law schools suggest that Muslims should not live under infidel rule. They should rather follow the Prophet’s example of hijra (his emigration from Macca to Madina), which occurred in the year 622 AD and signifies the year zero in the Islamic calendar. The issue of good Muslims having to live under non-Muslim governance has remained a thorny issue.[25] It is not difficult to understand that on this basis a readiness for assimilation under minority conditions cannot easily grow despite the doctrine of darura (necessity),[26] clever interpretations of maslaha (the common good), and the scriptural concession that there should be no hardship in religion. While this is plainly obvious when Muslims form a diaspora in the West, some extend this notion, and its ethical problems, to the globalized future: what to do when the whole world is under Western domination?
From the defensive thinking of conservative Islam also grows the ambitious vision of a reestablishment of a global khilafa, a caliphate that encompasses large parts of the world, thus spreading a political umbrella over all Muslims. It bans the specter of devout Muslims having to live under non-Islamic rule. In this realm Islamic governance should replace infidel governance. Reclaiming Palestine, Chechnya, and Dagestan, separating the Muslim southern islands from Catholic Philippines, freeing southern Muslim Thais from Buddhist rule, liberating Xinjiang’s Uighurs from Han-dominated communist China would make sure that no Muslims would have to live under infidel rule.
From a partisan viewpoint it seems painfully obvious that many Muslims are victimized and persecuted by the West. As I could observe firsthand by attending a mujahidin conference in Indonesia,[27] it is only a small step, aided by a convoluted logic, to the assumption that the West’s aggressive stance in the world at large is directed against Islam as a religion and a way of life.[28] Some Muslims sincerely believe the time is upon them to defend both.
Objective facts suggest that it is a tiny minority, perhaps as little as a few thousand, among the 1.3 or 1.4 (according to some estimates 1.6) billion Muslims, who have fully and fanatically embraced the violent extremist creed to make them into active terrorists. There is a much larger resource of sympathizers who embrace this point of view and who form a shadowy reserve army from which active extremists might be drawn. Perhaps there are also some thousands who driven by a misguided sense of patriotism and perhaps by poverty can be bought to do the Taleban’s bidding in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not all extremists and militants are fighting the West in some form. There are more Muslims who direct their aggression towards other Muslims. But it remains a statistical fact that the vast majority of Muslims must be peaceful or at least are not actively involved in violent action. However, this seems to do little to rectify the West’s widely held view of Islam as a violent religion that seduces people to commit terrible crimes. Perhaps it is true that many Muslims have in recent years been polticized and radicalized in their perception of the world, stirring mightily anti-Western, and especially anti-American, sentiments; that they have become entranced by radical doctrines and form now a reservoir of potential recruits for extremism. Yet, it is still unjustified to allot blame solely to Islam as a system of belief that incites violence.[29] The relation between Islamic faith and violence may be traceable to the scriptural doctrines but is not compelling enough to blame Islam per se. Like other religions, the Islamic faith may contain stimuli towards violence, which, however, are not potent enough inevitably to lead to violence on a grand scale. As in other religious doctrines and traditions, there are doctrinal ambiguities that can be exploited by radical ideologues to form a dogmatic imperative for extremism, but by the same token the inherent plasticity of religious doctrine does also allow it to be shaped into a foil for moderation. As the “counter-reformer” Abdullahi an-Na’im,[30] offering an alternative view, states, “the notion of aggressive jihad has become morally untenable as a means of conducting international relations.”
Terrorism has sometimes been called the power of the powerless. This certainly contains a valid assessment. In a contest one of the opponents, unable to match power and to injure and weaken the enemy in open combat, seeks strategic advantage or recompense by devious tactics. If successful they may sap the enemy’s strength and even if they are failing, they may still undermine his resolve. One of terrorism’s prominent functions is to serve a psychological purpose: through its ubiquitousness and unpredictability terrorist violence can be unsettling and even cause fear far beyond its physical impact. In their physical effectiveness individual attacks may amount to no more than pinpricks, yet that can be demoralizing—just as ants or mosquitoes can drive you from the lovely picnic spot you have discovered. Comparing this nuisance with terrorism may amount to terminological hyperbole, but in a methodological respect it goes to the heart of the matter. The psychological effect in sum total exceeds the damage: the terror that grips a nation is bigger than the bomb’s impact. And at the risk of sounding heartless, it may be said that worldwide many more people die in road accidents or from a smoker’s lung than by the terrorists’ bombs. Yet the fear generated by terrorism is greater and so is its social impact. (Actual loss of life through attacks on airplanes, for instance, though relatively small, has led to a complete revolution in airport security systems at enormous expense, while tobacco smoking has not been banned as a dangerous drug.)
The psychological impact is exactly the reason why terrorism is condemned by international conventions and laws. It does not come as a surprise that terrorists, well aware of the usefulness of this method, disregard the ban. Some Islamic authorities explicitly condone this tactic and even encourage it because of its psychological effectiveness. One of the foremost Sunni spiritual authorities, the mufti Yusuf al Qaradawi, has not only welcomed the conquest of Europe and America through peaceful dawa, but specifically and in several versions theologically welcomed suicide operations as heroic martyrdom and declared the spreading of terror an acceptable method to unsettle and discourage the enemy. Terrorism in this view is a legitimate war tactic to even the chances. Given the sheer impossibility of swaying the hegemonic juggernaut of the West by conventional means, Muslim terrorism with somewhat greater plausibility has been called the language of despair.
In addition to its rational function of spreading fear, terrorist action contains a symbolic aspect and acts as a device of communication. In a seemingly unequal contest between opponents of quite different strength the weaker side may try to match the more powerful on a level of symbolic action. Blowing up airplanes, trains, and offices does not militarily weaken the West (or shake an unloved pseudo-Muslim satrap regime to the core) and as such has little effect on the hegemonic imbalance, but it has a theatrical effect that exceeds the sum total of people killed and maimed, or the material damage inflicted. Car bombs and suicide vests by themselves do not unseat an unwanted government, but they do send a powerful symbolic message of the resolve and punch of its opponents. Destroying tall buildings with flying incendiary devices full of people is priceless in terms of creating a brutal iconography. Its semiotic multivocality is of powerful expressiveness on several levels: from the theatrical performance value of spectacularly crumbling skyscrapers and the sacrificial immolation of thousands, to the encrypted message about the destruction of the seat of financial power from which economic world domination is exercised. (The attack on the military seat of power, the Pentagon, did not quite succeed; nor, as far as one can surmise, did the attack intended to strike at the center of political power, the White House.) No less spectacular is the demonstration of the ability to geographically match the enemy’s reach and penetration, thrusting a dagger into his very heart. Yet, most effective was the creation of graphic images of destruction. They have been used to great propagandist effect in the cyberspace communications following the 9/11 attacks. Even if jihad cannot muster the same military might as the West, it has shown itself capable of creating a lasting symbol of its effectiveness.
The Islamic world itself came perilously close to suffering a demonstration of such symbolic magnitude. This happened when the Masjid al Haram, the Grand Mosque of Macca containing the innermost sanctum, the Ka’aba, was temporarily seized by terrorists in 1979. A belief in the return of the Mahdi had led a group of fanatical devotees to act on an apocalyptic vision and to seize the mosque in a surprise attack. What better way to symbolize the dawn of a new era than by occupying the supreme icon of Islam and dedicating it to the Mahdi? Police and military units, over several days, laid siege to the armed Muslim terrorists holed up inside. In the ensuing battle the sacred precinct was heavily damaged. It caused many casualties and severely desacralized the holiest of holy shrines. Ultimately, the terrorists were vanquished; some were killed during the fighting and others taken prisoner (the presumed Mahdi among them) and later executed by beheading. The attack may not have been successful, but it managed to leave an indelible impression, even though few Muslims like to be reminded of it.
As two antagonists grapple with each other, the language of power becomes a shared factor in the competitive relationship. This language does not just draw on physical violence, but uses tactics of symbolic value such as seizing or destroying an iconic item. The symbolic meaning of such an act is understood across cultural differences. Yet, a combative discourse and measuring power by symbolic means can only really take place when the two opponents use the same “language”; that is to say, use commonly understood symbols as a means of communication. Constructing a common “language” to enter into a discourse together may depend on the weaker group accepting paradigms and symbols of the dominant group.[31] When cultures are too different, the actions they inspire may remain chronically misunderstood—devoid of the symbolic significance intended—by the opposing side, or even worse, may be ignored. A good example taken from Europe’s colonial history is the summary landgrab by which the Australian continent was expropriated from the indigenous people.[32] Starting with a total incomprehension on the part of the colonizing power of the Aborigines’ modus operandi of distributing, owning, and using land, their language of resistance was totally brushed aside as inconsequential, irrelevant, indeed was not understood as a legitimate means of either patriotism or defense of their ownership right. Partly because of its ritualistic nature and partly because of its, in a practical military sense, pitiful ineffectiveness, resistive action taken by the Aborigines was not even understood as guerrilla warfare let alone as a legitimate attempt to protect their “natural” rights of ownership.[33] Aborigines in turn failed to comprehend the meaning of being dispossessed in a colonialist enterprise. Bereft of opportunities—even of the few reluctantly tendered by the dominant society—to help and express themselves in terms comprehensible to the dominant group, Aborigines slowly and painfully had to learn to speak the symbolic language of the conqueror so as to be able to convey their objection to their being dispossessed. It took over a hundred years. The tragic lesson to be learned is that it behoves the weaker opponent to find means and ways to communicate with the more powerful and to do so by assimilating some of the symbolic vocabulary of the language of hegemony.[34]
This language used in the current struggle between the West and Islam (or rather, some extremist Muslims) for ideological supremacy draws on grandiose symbols and rituals of power, imageries of war, ostentatious displays of destruction, visions of doomsday and Armageddon in the form of arrays of bombs and missiles, magnificent explosions, and fields of ruins. All this is delivered through theatrical performances of war, designed to impress and demoralize the opponent, and smash their resolve into early submission. (At times this tactic was given verbal dignity with the epithet “shock and awe.”) Muslims responded with a similar display of airplanes crashing in a fireball and of burning and crumbling buildings. The attack on New York’s twin towers revealed something of the self-aggrandizing character of Islamic extremism trying to match the West’s array of symbols. It was an event—at the risk of sounding frivolous, a happening—that was meant to rival in magnitude aggressive manifestations staged by the West. Perhaps by hyperbolizing Kant’s concept of moral reciprocity and symmetry it may be said there is a competition of terror between America and radical Islam. The attack’s dimension succeeded in indelibly inscribing it in history as a Muslim ritual of power. In terms of display of destructive potency it certainly exceeded the impact of individual airoplane crashes (even of the Lockerby kind), carbombs, and exploding suicide vests; it was even larger a prize than the iconoclastic destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, which clearly was intended as a signal of victory over unbelief.[35] Not surprisingly, America, raising the stakes, responded to the destruction of its modernist icon and the failed attack on its heart of military might, the Pentagon, with an even bigger display of power: by bringing down a whole country (Afghanistan) and in quick succession repeating the lesson in even greater magnitude by destroying another (Iraq). The orgiastic display of firepower, charred ruins, tens of thousands of casualties, and thoroughly destroyed despotic governance produced a symbol difficult to match in its magnificence.
Some Muslims, approving the destruction of the twin towers, offered another path to intellectualize these events and lift them above the motivation of sheer brutality and senseless display of force. They pointed out that this was payback for the violence and injustice inflicted on the Islamic world by the West and in particular the United States.[36] Payback should always be proportional to the injustice perpetrated. While physical proportionality can hardly be achieved in the struggle between Muslims and the West, some symbolic balance can be aimed for. Befitting the fundamentally different ethos of the contesting cultures, while Islam is suffering spiritually at the hands of the West, the damage inflicted on the West is to its pride and haughtiness. Not only has the myth of its invulnerability been disproved, at least symbolically its hold on financial world domination has also been dented. The universal significance of proportional payback has been discussed before. Measured in these terms, the reciprocal attack was extremely modest, even restrained; and in order to address the injustice properly and to restore balance, in this view, more attacks of a similar magnitude should follow. Rationalizing this atrocity, intellectualizing its ferocity, and thus to provide some moral justification, seems to be of some concern to thinking Muslims. One argument questioning the morality of this action has been that if Muslims are concerned with justice, where is the justice in killing thousands of innocents, people who have done no harm to Muslims? The Islamic response counters by portraying the towers as places of evil; places where the sin of riba (banking with interests) was cultivated. The towers represented the financial wheeling and dealing of the West, where IMF and World Bank operated, carrying out their sinful business of world strangulation by which the Muslims were shackled in poverty. Such highly immoral financial machinations being carried out in this place would have kept pious Muslims at bay, hence no pious Muslims could have suffered in this inferno. (In this dimly thought-out scenario the oil wealth accumulated by the Arab elites assumes the same moral sinfulness but is considered of lesser global harm.) Both global financial institutions are held culpable in enslaving the Islamic world financially and making it subservient to the rapacious capitalism of the West. Thus there are no innocent victims in this tragedy.
According to Islamic rules of fairness in conducting jihad, noncombatants should be spared, as should women and children, the elderly, the frail and the sick. No such rules apply in bomb warfare. In this sense blowing up tall buildings, the Dresden fire bombing, and dropping the “fat boy” on Hiroshima belong in the same category. One might reject the close kinship between them and yet there is some similarity that unites them. In bomb warfare as much as in suicide bombing, targets may be chosen arbitrarily and opportunistically, but they are important for their psychological and symbolic effect. The attacks are meant to send a powerful message, their enormous destructiveness being a symbolic, exemplary measure of the sender’s power. All three bomb attacks were planned and carried out for the same reason: a ritual act of power to reveal the potential destructive might in an impressive, irresistible demonstration.
The symbolic act happens to be indiscriminately lethal, but that hardly matters. (Even drones are not exactly high precision instruments, just as the expression “surgical strike” metaphorically suggestive of precisely targeted medical intervention, is misleading.) From the sweeping perspective of the modern jihadi moralizing his deed, murderous acts may appear to be targeted. Shi’a processions, or Sunni mosques, chosen as targets have a good chance of inflicting damage to the sectarian adversary. In the struggle between Islam and the West there are no innocents on the side of the West—hence there is no moral dilemma. To some extent, paradoxically, democracy is to blame. Democratic systems, giving rights to vote and thus determining governance, spread responsibility and guilt over the whole society. Radical Muslims rationalize the absence of precise targeting by assuming that in democracies people are collectively responsible for the government—they possess the governance they deserve. Thus no one is innocent. Their guilt is either of the collective kind or by association and both spread culpability to all Westerners. (A Norwegian imam’s ruling that extremists should not target the respective Western country that gives them shelter, sounds rather quaint and apparently is unheeded if one looks at Muslim attacks in the West.) However, seen in this light, the ethical ground which might justify the frequent car bombs exploding in the Islamic world, in highly frequented places like busy streets and marketplaces, and which usually kill large numbers of Muslims without sectarian or ethnic distinction, still remains a mystery. So-called “collateral damage” may justify methods of modern warfare, but to my knowledge it is not an Islamic concept.
Several scriptural references refer to a physical and moral elevation of those who give their lives for the cause of Islam. A great reward awaits them. “They are not dead” the Quran promises; “do not weep for them.”[37] Self-sacrifice “in the way of Allah” is considered a high virtue. The martyrdom of the shahid, dying in pursuit of “the just cause,” awaits much prestige and above all transcendental reward, according to the Quran (22/58–59; 2/154; 3/157–58, 169–71). The mustashhidin (martyrs) are assured instantly to become the beneficiaries of divine largesse. (With some recalibration this issue may well apply not only to the martyrs among Muslim extremists, but also to the demonstrators and fighters in the Arab Spring uprisings whose bravado suggests a comparison with the death-defying ethos of suicide bombers. These people share the willingness to die a martyr’s death regardless of the political motivations.) Looking beyond the doctrinal gloss, on closer inspection, martyrdom harbors a moral dilemma.
As present-day terrorist methods often do not spare the attacker’s life—and are not designed to do so—the theological problem arises: is this condemnable suicide and should be forbidden, or is it virtuous self-sacrifice to be recommended? Can the human bomb be a killer, a committer of suicide, a saint, a martyr, a sinner and a legitimate warrior all at the same time—and emerge spiritually unscathed to reap eternal rewards?
In this respect Islam manifestly posits a contradiction inherent in its tenet: it condemns suicide (intihar) as a sinful act—as it says in a hadith, “Your body has rights over you,” and in the Quran (2/195), “Do not bring about your own destruction.” Yet, a person’s death in the course of a jihad, fighting for Allah, is praised as a highly valued form of martyrdom (shahada). The willing death of the mustashhidin (the self-sacrificers), engaged in a suicidal mission, then—amounting to voluntary self-destruction—is an obvious moral conundrum. Does the suicide vest represent a tool of self-destruction or a weapon to harm an enemy in pursuance of a just cause?
The desired resolution rests on a “mysterious” transformation. Though in both its design and execution tantamount to suicide, and, therefore, to be condemned, the act performed for the higher purpose of defending Islam embodies the virtue of ultimate self-sacrifice (istishhad), the highest ethical act of the jihad. The defining difference is the intent and its ethical gravity. Thus it offers to resolve the nagging problem: if martyrdom plainly is achievable only by planned suicide, which in itself undoubtedly is a sinful act rejected in the scriptures, how to value a voluntary certain death in the pursuit of “the just cause.” The terrorist’s suicide mission containing a grave moral contradiction, bears the stigma of self-harm—as integral to the heroic act is the certainty of death, not just an exponential increase of risk through the nature of the operation—but at the same time wears the halo of supreme morality in the form of self-sacrifice (istishhad). How can that act elevate him or her to the status of mustashhidin for whom paradise awaits? For some this tactic of modern warfare has opened up an acute ethical problem that has occasioned some learned debate—publicly accessible in the various websites of Islamic authorities. Overwhelmingly those who deal with this issue agree: if the religious warrior is certain of his own demise, it is the nature of the cause for which he or she surrenders their life that determines the ethical value. For other scholarly minds the fine dividing line between the death-wish and the urge to defend the faith as the guiding principle—a subtle distinction between the behavior’s Thanatos and religious ecstasy—is blurred for the sake of the practical need for a relentless, no-holds-barred jihad. The extraordinariness of the fight and the magnitude of danger to true faith requires special dispensations. It seems in the face of this awareness the question of theological correctness pales somewhat into insignificance. Whatever scholarly opinion may be, an amazing number of people, in taking the ultimate step, seem to have found a clear answer. Some Muslim scholars, however, remain unconvinced of the deed’s ethical merit.
Apart from the imaginative forms of violence this phenomenon of self-sacrifice generates, of particular interest is the formation of this mind-set and its causes. The religiously motivated act that leads to the voluntary, fully envisaged and intended destruction of the perpetrator in its personal motives remains mysterious, especially to the secularized Western mind. How does the (extremely) devout progress from refusing suicide as sinful to embracing it for the sake of a higher priority? How does an educated suburban dweller, a student, a housewife slide into the role of suicide bomber?
How to understand the willingness of men and women to become the human bomb? In the name of Islam, fanatics have driven explosives-laden trucks and cars, hiding explosives in vests and belts, in turbans, under burqas, in shoes and underpants, even in body cavities, thus making certain of their own horrible if instant demise. (This may seem slightly preferable to self-cremation, as some contemporaneous protesters have chosen—among them the young Tunisian man whose sacrifice sparked off the so-called Arab Spring. In historical times this was the preserve of Christian reformers and their suicidal insistence on being burned at the stake for refusing to recant. Of one such hapless martyr, Johann Hus, it was said that he suffered for the duration of the Lord’s Prayer.)
This stubborn insistence on setting aside the basic instinct of self-preservation is not only a manly thing. Although men clearly are the main candidates, women also choose this path of personal redemption. In Russia they are notoriously known as the “black widows,” so called for the color of their dress.[38] The Moscow underground bombing of March 2010, apparently, was carried out by two black widows with suicide vests. But they represent a new development. The Quran cites women as noncombatants who are to be spared. And while Khomeini in the Iran-Iraq war escalated the suicide mission of young men to epic proportions (they were given cardboard keys to paradise, to hang around their necks when they marched through minefields), women were excluded. Their self-sacrifice was considered un-Islamic. Since about the year 2000 Hamas, the Palestinian and Chechen jihad, and al-Qaeda—apparently in contravention of the basic sacred scriptures—recruit women for this purpose.[39]
A rational explanation of this phenomenon—which defies natural instinct of self-preservation as well as fundamental Islamic doctrine—is difficult and elusive. In modern times it is particularly hard to understand. As the absolute certainty of eternal life in a splendid beyond-world and wonderful heavenly rewards, titillating with their delights, has diminished in an increasingly secularized world, where does this courage, this sangfroid to stare death in the face come from? It may have been easier in the past when the firmness of religious belief and the attractiveness of paradise were hardening the resolve. But when this kind of religious fanaticism has obviously lost some of its soteriological currency in the world, the flowering of this phenomenon in Islam seems hard to grasp. Under the relentless onslaught of hegemonic rationalism, this extreme sense of commitment in the West is confined to religious pathology and insanity. Yet there seems to be an endless supply of people who are inspired by the conviction that this action is religiously and ethically supremely justified and that it is of extreme merit to spill their own and others’ blood.
In today’s hegemonic discourse acts of martyrdom may, for some causes, inspire fleeting admiration because of their apparent idealism, but tend quickly to become consigned to the category of insanity. Hedonism and preoccupation with physical well-being are of supreme value. On the collective political and military planning level, loss-and-gain calculations do not count on self-sacrificial martyrdom in the achievement of a goal. (The world was astounded about the idealism of the first wave of workers, immediately after the Chernobyl disaster, trying to contain the fallout. They seem to have been well aware that they would be doomed.) State violence is pursued usually only after a risk assessment in relation to factors of survivability, and avoids to ask for self-sacrificial acts of heroism. (Such acts, by and large, have become the stuff of Hollywood films, but not of real life.) The hegemonically desired benefit of risky operations is based, in Max Weber’s terms, on Zweckrationalitaet (instrumental rationality, which is the pursuit of rational gains in the empirical world to be achieved with rational means), and not Wertrationalitaet (value rationality in which a higher transcendental value is pursued regardless of material, empirically verifiable gains in real life). Pursuit of virtue through self-harm in a religious context is considered the last convulsion of a vanishing world.
What seems so incomprehensible, perhaps even repulsive, to the modern rationalist discourse, is that the believing mind puts a different value on the concept of suffering and self-sacrifice for the attainment of a transcendental goal. Empathetic understanding for such motives has drastically diminished in modernity. The suffering of the martyr is an offering made to a higher power inviting reciprocity in the form of blessing or more tangible rewards. It would go too far exploring the whole complexity of self-harm in a universal cultural context. It touches on issues of universal human psychology—or to put not too fine a point on it, masochism and sadomasochism. It also summons up universal tropes of suffering and its redemptive value and of extreme asceticism and its connection with the wish for spiritual and cognitive enlightenment. A short sketch has to suffice to demonstrate the universality of this cultural phenomenon—which has suffered a drastic decline in the West.
The hope for higher insights—or rewards of some kind—through suffering is universally expressed in various ways. It is quintessentially practiced in the Shamanic and Fakir traditions. The Shamanic vision quest in addition to hallucinogenic drugs may be aided by suffering some deliberately inflicted agonizing pain. In the Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions, the range of calculated discomfort endured by Fakirs for the sake of enlightenment is considerable: from inflicting wounds on one’s body, skewering one’s flesh, lying on a bed of nails, to pulling a car with one’s penis—the range of possibilities is only limited by one’s imagination. Beyond that, most traditional cultures show features where some form of extreme bodily discomfort or even torture, deliberately and ritually inflicted, delivers revelatory experiences, or special wisdom, or a promise of divine reward. Mythology of various cultures celebrates this theme (for instance, Odin’s suffering hanging from the world tree Yggdrasil for the sake of gaining wisdom). A well-known paradigmatic example is the sun-dance ritual of the Mandan Indians in which the devotees are skewered through the skin on their backs and suspended from above. (This technique has been revived by a small group of Western devotees.) Pain inflicted in this and countless other rituals of calculated suffering may be expected to create altered states of consciousness and ecstasy that have soteriological as well as enlightening purposes. In the Catholic tradition there are many customs that celebrate the redemptive trope of suffering and self-denial: from relatively harmless features of asceticism (fasting, vows of silence, celibacy, arduous pilgrimages, wearing hair shirts and sack cloth, fetters, etc.) to practices of self-torture, so-called corporal mortification (for instance, through flagellation).[40] Pilgrimages covering long distances on one’s knees are practiced in Catholicism and Buddhism.[41] Acts of extreme and violent self-denial, regardless of whether they are done as an intellectualized painful penance to atone of concupiscence or simply to satisfy neurotic urges, can range from wearing the crown of thorns, using a metal cilice, the realiztic reenactment of Christ’s passion carrying a heavy cross, and even actual crucifixion (which sometimes goes beyond symbolized staging; it may be performed even with real nails). In some rare instances, instead of gaining prestige in the respective religious community, this has led to the death of the victim. In a few cases it raised the suspicion that death was not accidental, but had been intended by the victim: in other words, religious ecstasy was planned to culminate in suicide. Needless to say, the official church frowns on such displays of extreme devotion. Wider secularized society shows even less respect for such ecstatic behavior.
Islam also has features of ritual castigation (apart from Sufi rituals which practice self-harm). Shi’ism celebrates Ashura on the tenth day of Muharam with mass demonstrations of self-flagellation in various forms. Even the fasting, sawm, at Ramadan is amenable to the interpretation that it is an act of self-chastisement, making a sacrifice of one’s bodily comfort, for spiritual gain. Devout religious conduct in many cultures is full of symbolic and real acts of self-denial and asceticism to the point of self-harm. Religiously induced ecstasy is a fascinating psychological phenomenon, which can be channelled by culture into various activities and expressions. Considered in this light, the human bomb cannot be taken as a new phenomenon of moral depravity.
On the theme of religiously blessed suffering, one may wonder about the torture of waterboarding and other methods of inflicting suffering on Muslim prisoners (suspected of terrorism) in order to extract information. Do they perceive this treatment in religious terms as being of redemptive quality? Do they see their fate as that of a martyr? It would be conceivable, even though I have not found any corroborating information.[42]
The shahid enjoys high esteem and a prestige that is hard to fathom in a more secularized society such as the West. And, of course, there is the promise and expectation of paradise, graphically imagined by many to be full of earthly—and even sexual—delights, which must be an allurement for the aspirants to martyrdom. The videotapes and letters left behind by suicide bombers (successful ones and thwarted ones) speak a clear language of religiously induced ecstasy and the expectation of a metaphysical reward. In the farewell videotapes of intending martyrs, there are few hints of sadness and depressive foreboding—only joyful anticipation and acceptance of a religious duty. Training tapes and propaganda videos issued by the ideologues of terror, as a rule, emphatically play on religious doctrines and beliefs that support martyrdom and expectations of reward in order to create the necessary fervor and consummate obedience to divine command.
The renowned scholar Bernard Lewis[43] put forward the opinion that at the root of suicide bombing is sexual frustration. For the time being at least, this must remain a very speculative, if not facile, hypothesis. Expectations of a carnally wonderful afterlife, he proposed, would provide the major incentive for young Muslim men to lay down their lives. Because there is no casual sex in the Arab-Muslim world, young men are left with either marriage or visits to a brothel. Both options may be financially unaffordable leaving only the alluring and compensatory mirage of sexual fulfilment in a martyr’s paradise. A large number of virgins with “swelling breasts” and “wide, lovely eyes,”[44] as promised in the scriptures, may indeed feature in the sexual fantasies of contenders to martyrdom, but whether this is the main motif in choosing this career is far from certain. Lewis’ overly Freudian explanation, placing libido near the wellspring of religious violence, may be tempting by its simplicity, but ultimately falls down for exactly that reason. Human beings are not so uncomplicated that one deep psychological cause can mechanistically account for such motivations as suicide-murder. With equal justification one may point to the absence of alcohol as an ameliorating social lubricant that if more freely available may take the edge off people’s irascibility.
Osama bin Laden recorded a feeling of calm and serenity when during the mujahidin’s campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a grenade landed next to him. In the event it did not explode and bin Laden lived to pursue his fighting career. As the explosive lay next to him, he registered a sense of tranquillity and an elevated being of otherness going beyond a mere sense of detachment or extra-body experience. In Arabic this describes the sensation of sakina,[45] not only feeling disconnected from the physical world, but in a state of utter calmness and serenity. The concept of sakina referring in this way to a feeling of detached exhilaration is clearly related to the notion of religious enrapture. Some people, experiencing the numinous vividly, are capable of feeling they are in the presence of divinity. In Quran (48/4 and 48/26) it says, “He it is Who sent down al-sakinah into the hearts of the believers” and it endowed “the Messenger” and the believers with a quality which elevated them above the pride and haughtiness of disbelievers. Al-sakinah as an intoxicating and fortifying, yet calming, quality is accessible only to believers. It can be imagined that suicide bombers in their mental preparation strive towards this desirable sensation that steels them for the task, makes them indifferent to the result, and assures them of possessing divine grace. Having not experienced this, what seems to be, a trancelike condition, or religious rapture or any form of extraordinary exultation, I cannot say whether at least terminologically it may be called intoxication with the sacred.
Historically, today’s suicide bombing is not a recent Islamic invention. As far as the use of explosives in this enterprise is concerned, the dubious honor belongs to Sri Lankan Tamil Elam fanatics. Theirs may in fact have been a reinvention as in wider history the idea of deliberate, violent self-sacrifice in the pursuit of a sacred goal seems to reach back to a Muslim sect of several centuries ago. Members of the Hashhashin sect were sent on assassination missions from which it was impossible to return. In the twelfth and thirteenth century this Nizari sub-sect of Shi’ism in northern Persia pursued strategies of daring assassination that made it virtually impossible for the perpetrator to survive. In recent times this tactic was used in the Middle East by Fedayin militias in Palestine and with devastating effect by the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon. They developed the first truck bombs that led to the hasty retreat of the American and French marines in 1983. Perhaps the best-known suicide warriors of recent history—who went far beyond the ordinary bravery of soldiers in the line of duty and patriotism—were Japan’s Kamikaze pilots in World War II. Islamic suicide bombers may be said to be the Kamikaze of the postmodern era. Kamikaze died for nationalism and patriotic glory, not religion, but seen in a different way, there is an ingredient they share with Muslim suicide bombers: Kamikaze were idealists of the highest order, acting in defense of what they were taught to be of supreme value. Giving their lives and making a principled stand elevated them as individuals beyond what they could achieve, or ever hope to be, as ordinary soldiers. As martyrs their personal glory would remain unsurpassed.
Jihadis, similarly, see themselves as legitimate warriors in a legitimate war, not as terrorists. In their understanding their acts are liturgical, sanctifying even murder-suicide, and of symbolic value, beyond merely inflicting damage to the enemy. Even from a point of view of pragmatics, this tactic may have a place: with a display of extreme violence that includes self-destruction a demonstration is given of the unrelenting, unshakable commitment of the warriors, which may shock and intimidate. Whether this works is debatable. The Western hegemonic perspective tends to see present-day suicide bombers as contemptible criminals of low moral status. (The comparison with individuals committing mass murder and then shooting themselves, as seems to happen with disturbing frequency, is not only tempting but leads to a perspective that sees this kind of action as a form of psychological aberration.) Their bravado lacks the admirable gloss of heroism in the eyes of non-Muslims. This perception logically arises from a socially determined partisan standpoint. Ideology—to which ethics and values belong as integral parts—tends to arise from—or at least is intimately connected with—a socioeconomic position. One does not have to cling “religiously” to a Marxist position, to assume that the Western socioeconomic “infrastructure” supports an ideological proclivity in which the glorification of individual enterprise for material gain produces little sympathy for human self-destruction for a spurious “spiritual” cause. Individualism, materialism, capitalism, and secularization together produce an ideological “climate” in which religiously motivated suicide bombing would struggle to ascend to a supreme value of idealistic heroism. Obviously, the globalized world, despite efforts to entrench a certain hegemonic worldview, has not yet managed to eradicate rival values and ideals. In fact, their persistence could be seen as becoming iconic in anti-globalizing and anti-hegemonic endeavors. In the sense that jihad becomes a major ideological ingredient in the resistance to globalization, it can be expected that this dynamic develops features of a “counterculture” in which some aspects purposefully imitate the rejected hegemon, and others deliberately contrast with it.
Confirmation of sorts of the value of suicide bombing as a powerful symbolic act came to radical Muslims from an unexpected quarter. The world news media, early in 2010, reported a spectacular homicide-suicide attack on a taxation office in Austin (Texas, USA) in which a man crashed his light airplane into the office building killing some people and himself. Allegedly, he believed the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), the federal agency of taxation, had gratuitously ruined him. Shortly afterwards, New Zealand’s electronic Dawa eNewsletter[46] commented on this event with a newsflash.
It portrayed the event as a legitimate act of majoritarian discontent in America. The article cited a “Rasmussen Poll [that] indicates that the vast majority of Americans are convinced that "their" government is totally unresponsive to them, their concerns, and their needs.” It went on to say that “only 21 percent of the American population agree that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed, and that 21 percent is comprised of the political class itself and liberals [sic]. Rasmussen concludes that the gap between the American population and the politicians who rule them “may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the eighteenth century.” This is not only a rather idiosyncratic reading of internal American politics, but interestingly, it contradicts the notion, mentioned earlier, that in a democracy all are collectively responsible for the form of governance they have.
Citing the incident with tacit but readily apparent approval, the article voiced the view that only extreme violence will get the attention of the Western world. The important ingredient is the theatrical effect, the artfulness of execution, the shock waves—while the number of people killed is supplementary to this purpose.
“Indications are that Joseph Stack [the suicide pilot] was sane,” the article says. “Like Palestinians faced with Israeli jet fighters, helicopter gunships, tanks, missiles and poison gas, Stack realized that he was powerless. A suicide attack was the only weapon left to him.” The article argued that the suicide note explaining his motivation segregated him from the deranged people who randomly commit mass murder. It intimated that in this case violence has become an act of sanity, even rationality.
“The [U.S.] government and its propaganda ministry [sic] do not want to call Stack a terrorist,” the article maintained.
Terrorist is a term the government reserves for Muslims who do not like what Israel does to Palestinians and the U.S. government does to Muslim countries. . . . But Stack experienced the same frustrations and emotions as Muslims who can’t take it any longer and strap on a suicide vest. “Violence,” Stack wrote, “not only is the answer, it is the only answer.” Stack concluded that nothing short of violence will get the attention of a government that has turned its back on the American people.
Clearly, this interpretation is not totally devoid of some logic, yet it puts a gloss on the incident, which is unlikely to be shared by the predominant Western view—for several reasons. Not least among them is the reluctance, discussed before, of attributing commendable value to acts of murderous self-destruction, although it may agree that there may be some theatrical effect in its execution. There might be more agreement in the assumption that grandiose acts of violence garner attention.
Clearly, this incident was modeled on the events of 9/11. It also makes transparent another aspect of extremism. It draws attention to the fact that violence is a language, a form of communication when other forms of communication fail. Conflict resolution, therefore, first and foremost has to find a common language, agreed-on common symbols. When Theo van Gogh was shot in the streets of Amsterdam by a Muslim extremist, who had taken exception to a film the Dutch filmmaker had made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (the Dutch-Somali apostate), in his dying moments he famously asked his assailant, “Can’t we talk about this?” He did not realize killing him was the language of the enraged and aroused fanatic. Murder is not necessarily always a negotiable phenomenon of greed, instinctive rage, opportunism—but may be a cerebral communicative device that employs a universally understandable symbol; it is speaking for the powerless or those mute with rage who are incapable of other forms of articulation. Lacking in legitimate power and lost for words, there seems to be only one language left that can be understood by the powerful adversary.
In this section I wish to consider two particular social aspects, which seem to be eminently characteristic for the militant organizations and functions of Islamic extremism. In various combinations these aspects can be detected in various other social phenomena.
The average age of suicide bombers is said to be around twenty-five, and for the majority it is less than thirty. Even though I cannot vouch for the absolute accuracy of these statistics (and I doubt that anyone else can), the youthfulness of the human bomb, ensuring their death as martyrs in various lethal ways, must be an object of reflection.
There are several more or less clandestine Islamist organizations that use suicide bombing and other extremist tactics. Some are notorious throughout the world. Others have a more localised relevance and may not be so well known to the outside world. The overwhelming majority of them operate deep in the shadows of secrecy, barely known by a few snippets of inside information about their clandestine nature and goals. Their individual members leave the shadows of anonymity only to execute acts of terror and destruction, and when they are caught as a result, or their torn and mangled remains are identified.
Al-Qaeda is probably somewhat atypical in that it probably is no coherent organization, but rather a loose network of autonomous cells that receive orders and finances from a more or less centralized “brain.” It approves and contracts out “projects” making it difficult to trace the initiative back to the blessing it received from the al-Qaeda hierarchy and the funds it may have attracted from its paymasters. (This seems to have been the situation of bin Laden’s modus operandi as observed shortly before his demise at the hands of the American military death squad.) Thus under the label al-Qaeda there is a whole host of only loosely affiliated groups of varying size—from large paramilitary organizations in places like Yemen and Somalia to secret cells of three or four individuals in Western cities—and with different degrees of militancy. Al-Qaeda is probably best known for using suicide bombers. The Middle Eastern conflict zones of Iraq, Palestine-Israel, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are well acquainted with this tactic. India is also familiar with this phenomenon. Farther East, Jemmaa Islamiyah[47] has become infamously known for the so-called Bali bombings as well as other atrocities in Southeast Asia some of which involved suicide missions. It has a program of re-Islamization (mainly of Malay society) and establishing a Southeast Asian khilafa.
The Taleban fighters[48] in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a very different type of organization. This is a relatively openly military organization with wide grassroot support from mainly within the tribal society of the Pashtun (in both Afghanistan and Pakistan). Ideologically, it represents not only a very conservative, Wahabbism-influenced version of Islam, but also incorporates many cultural idiosyncrasies of tribal pashtunwala. Death-defying prowess and extreme courage have always been admired character traits, which are put to good use now in the internecine warfare. (In its form today it revives the previous Pashtun—Tajik division. Having been pushed into the underground through the military successes of their Western and Tajik opponents, more recently they are reemerging with increasing vigor and extending their field of operation and strategic interests deep into Pakistan.) In Afghanistan—conjuring up shades of the mujahidin resistance to the Soviet invasion—Taleban political philosophy is strengthened by claims to a patriotic duty to defend the country against the occupation force of Western infidels.
There are many more or less well-organized groups with varying degrees of inner cohesion and fanatical dedication. Internally motivated by a joint sense of purpose, their objectives may differ in focus and ultimate intent. Broadly, they have in common the character of secret or semi-secret societies inspired by fanatical religious belief, and a commitment to violence as a legitimate tactical means. Other features that are present to varying degrees of intensity and spectacularity are a sociocritical or rebellious agenda, and the use of violent theatrics to broadcast their intentions.
The shadowy army of Muslim militants, and in particular the terrorist cell, embody two significant social phenomena—or perhaps better referred to as sociological tropes: the youth gang, which apart from youthful age brings a destructive and rebellious potential into the frame, and the secret society, which has discipline, order, and structure and is gathered around a central mission or agenda that motivates its existence. This is not to say that gangs are totally unstructured. But the destructive force of its rebellious spirit discharges in a more or less aimless, untargeted manner. In modern society this phenomenon can be found in the formation of youth street gangs and the (semi-) delinquent subculture it engenders.[49]
In a wider perspective it becomes readily obvious that in hybrid form and in various combinations these phenomena are widespread. By placing less emphasis on the specific religious background of Muslim extremism and lifting its seemingly rebellious, violent agenda and clandestine mode of operation into the focus, one finds that history and the contemporary world abound with kindred phenomena. In a phenomenological sense, these phenomena are not precisely identical by sharing all of the ideological and sociological features, which would make them immediately subsumable under one category, but rather are joined by a family resemblance. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, the IRA (Irish Republican Army), and ETA (the Basque separatist organization) come readily to mind as paradigmatic for violent, shadowy organizations with a rebellious political agenda. Similarly, in Europe and the United States, urban guerrilla groups of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s pursued revolutionary sociopolitical goals, in their philosophy and sociocritical agenda operating under cover of secrecy on the extreme left of the political and ideological spectrum. In South America this tradition continues. These shadowy organizations demonstrate the thin line between what may be considered a cause of social justice and the tactics that clearly stem from a terrorist textbook.
Another shadowy organization showing some of the common features with strong religious undertones was Aum Shinri Kyo (Supreme Truth) in Japan. Although clearly a millenarian religious sect under charismatic leadership, it bluntly manifested its terrorist agenda through its doomsday-inspired attack in Tokyo’s subways in 1995.[50] Subsequent investigations revealed an enormous secret organization with a large following, secret laboratories, and production facilities no one outside the cult seems to have known about. The way this organization functioned provides a useful link to appreciate similarities in other respects between secretive cults and radical Islamism: they share certain recruitment techniques. The attraction to the semi-secret nature of radical and extremist organizations is not solely based on its mystique or the lure of adventure, and it does not arise only from a rational embracement of its mission in protest against the political and social status quo. As has often been observed with NRMs (or so-called cults), successful recruitment to a large extent is based on the tactical use of certain psychological techniques to persuade prospective adepts. The indoctrination process can be facilitated by various artificially provided circumstances. Among them, the physical separation from society and community is important in order to control the learning input effectively and provide an environment that not only shuts out contravening influences but also produces the appropriate stimuli. (Youth initiation practiced in tribal society employs similar principles.) Fundamental to the learning experience of this kind is gathering the novices in camps where they can be isolated from the influences of the wider community and new patterns of understanding can be implanted in them while at the same time keeping disturbing influences at bay—at least for some time, perhaps long enough for the new ideas to be bedded down.[51] Physical detachment and distance from the outside world is an effective means of influencing minds. The stereotypical cults seeking to indoctrinate receptive young minds in isolated camps, force them to cut off ties with family and friends. This practice is used also in the education scenario of radical Islam. Closed learning institutions, such as madrassas (religious boarding schools) or paramilitary training camps, which provide the ideal physical and intellectual confinement, provide the ideal environment to implant the appropriate worldview and value system. Evening sessions in mosques and weekend training courses are only imperfect imitations, but can achieve similar results in generating total commitment to a worldview that is more or less askew to the “mainstream.”
Scanning history, social phenomena of rebellious youth groups with violent agendas can be found at various points in the past and pursuing various social and political agendas. In the aftermath of World War I, out of the chaos of defeat, formations of extremist political organizations can be found in Germany and Austria—some of them illegal and pseudo-secret. As long ago as in the Middle Class revolution of 1848 in several German cities, we find similar motives of violent rebellion against an established order nurtured by semi-secret cells. (The young and idealistic Karl Marx was prominently involved in the failed uprising and had to flee to England where freedom of thought enjoyed greater respect.) These groups exemplify an important point: the desire to become instrumental in the elimination of politically or ethically unwanted conditions does not necessarily always attract primarily the economically most deprived and undereducated groups—in Marx’s terminology, the Lumpenproletariat. Deprivation features may play a role in recruiting “foot soldiers.” Material deprivation is present, for instance, in the life story of the surviving Bombay attacker who came from humble Pakistani circumstances and was attracted by monetary reward as much as by the promised adventure that allowed him to break out of his miserable, humdrum existence. It is also a factor in the recruitment of Taleban fighters among the poor peasantry who are lured by regular pay and other pecuniary inducements. Material poverty certainly helps in recruiting drives, but that should not deceive that the leadership, as well as many of the followers, are relatively well educated and usually do not come from a socioeconomically deprived background. Looking at the life stories of terrorists, and those aspiring to it, who have come to the notice of the West, makes it clear that they had a good, and in some cases above-average, education. Obviously, it is not necessarily the search for financial and economic gain that drives people into the arms of radical organizations. Not infrequently it is a mixture of fanatical ethics, rage about injustice, and youthful impetuosity that moves people to rebel against society and the dominant world order, and to fall in with the pursuit of utopian visions of a better, more just, more ethical world.[52]
This phenomenon of violent rebellion against the sociopolitical status quo by secret groups of relatively well-educated young people has a long history, although it may lack the radical and organized socio-critical agenda. The existence of rebellious and violent youth gangs, often students (organized in so-called semi-secret student societies, called Burschenschaften in German language areas) in several European countries, spreading at times terror among the sedate burghers, can be traced back into postmedieval times. Although these groups of educated youths did not act on a clear ideological plan of radical social reform, they did manifest rebellion against the prevailing social order. Social phenomena of extreme violence, often directed against their own community, perpetrated by youth gangs can even be found in premedieval times in Europe. Ancient precursors may be seen in the so-called berserkers in Scandinavian society[53] around the ninth and tenth century and, according to Tacitus’s description of Teutonic tribal society, such an element was present already in Roman times. These were cadres of young men spreading fear among opponents in battle through their crazed and frenzied behavior. Half-naked and gnashing their teeth in rage, often foaming at the mouth (possibly from drug taking)[54] they believed themselves to be invulnerable as well as invincible. They were feared as much by their own community as by the enemy in battle.[55] Other similar phenomena crop up episodically in Europe’s later history. Culture historians[56] see this tradition perpetuated, for instance, in the Bavarian Black Riders, a secretive group riding on black horses with a skull on top of their helmets, in the Thirty Years War.[57] The destructive potential of such groups could be directed inwardly against their own society as much as outwardly.
Clandestine, violent organizations can crop up in the most unexpected places. Underground resistance movements in cases of war are a well-known phenomenon, as is the general trope of the “Fifth Column.” In rare cases the state makes use of this “rebellious” potential for defensive purposes. It is little known that in 1940 a special branch of the British Home Guard—or Dad’s Army, as it was also known (it did not only recruit old men into its ranks, but also those with vital functions who could not be spared to serve at the front)—was created to fight a guerrilla war. Under Churchill’s direct command, this clandestine organization was known, if at all, as the Scallywags. Its members, respectable and professional citizens for the most part, were trained in sabotage, assassination, and spying with a view to resisting an impending German occupation in every possible way. Highly secret and befittingly financed by MI5, it comprised about six thousand members whose identities were generally not known to the wider society, nor very much to each other. They were organized in small cells with as few members as possible knowing of each other so that betrayal would not endanger the whole organization. It was in effect a terrorist suicide squad, as it was expected that hardly anyone would survive their personal mission, once the organization began doing its job.
What these rabble-rousing groups, secret societies, and clandestine organizations have in common is the ritualization of violence, opposition to an existing social condition or social order, and harnessing a degree of idealism and moralistic fervor for destructive purposes. In some cases one has to dig deep to discern features of idealism under the thick surface of gratuitous violence. The destructive zeal and the lust for power through terror may often come to overshadow any other more laudable features.
A common feature of such social elements is that it involves a certain age bracket (as well as predominantly the male gender). Perhaps for obvious reasons, mainly young men are attracted to such groups and organization. This is another sociological aspect of interest in this context. If one casts the net even wider, one may include here football hooliganism and skinhead groups both of which display prominently features of (often “mindless” and untargeted) violence. The underlying philosophy of skinheadism in fact is vaguely connected with a rebellious, if at times only vaguely formulated political program. The opposition to the sociopolitical status quo may be in terms of anti-immigration, white supremacy, racism, anti-multiculturalism, extreme nationalism, and the like. Often, acts of violence seem to be untargeted and random and hardly in support of any articulated political cause. Young men are attracted for various reasons ranging from socioeconomic deprivation (although this is usually more of a subjective state of mind) to the desire to pursue what they may see as ultimate social justice with a Machiavellian moral elasticity. In any case, a personal sense of disenfranchisement from society at large—often for imaginary, or fictitious reasons—lies at the root.
In modern Western society the potential of youthful enthusiasm can grow into violent fanaticism when goaded along by unscrupulous leadership. However, the formation of (semi-) secret societies associated with extreme violence forming an important part of their agenda, points to a sociological syndrome that is more widespread and has deeper roots in human nature than would appear on first sight. (Whether one wants to attach a Freudian significance to it, as Bernard Lewis has tried to do, is another matter.) Alienation of male youth ventilating itself in aggression is probably a universal phenomenon, although maintaining this means moving onto anthropologically tricky ground. It invokes the old nature-versus-nurture debate and conjures up visions of a “classical” anthropological debate two decades ago. The notion of a harsh and bitter human nature stood against the description of the harmonious, lovely Samoan society, which had made the American anthropologist Margaret Mead famous.[58] In her narrative Samoans of her time were living in an easy-going, carefree society without violence and social stresses—which came to be bitterly disputed by others who claimed she had been deceived. It is not improbable, however, that in culturally, socially, and economically very homogenous societies the alienation, which seems to act as a catalyst for violent rebellion in the young generation, is minimized to the point of appearing to be absent. On the other hand, some societies and historical contexts may have offered an instituted possibility to harness the destructive potential and ritualize the violence of male youth groups by channelling it into socially more useful enterprises. This may have been defensive endeavors from which the whole society or group may have benefited, or aggressive, offensive adventures—such as youth initiation groups of the Massai being traditionally occupied with killing lions and stealing cattle from outsiders. The wandering years of trade apprentices, the journeyman’s perambulations, obligatory in European societies in previous decades, may be a more peaceful version of the same initiative. In some Australian Aboriginal societies young men in the course of youth initiation were expected, for the duration of several years, to live in groups alone, segregated from family and community, and to fend for themselves. In chance encounters with others, they were expected to keep their distance, observe avoidance rules, and in communicating with others use changed (falsetto) voices to disguise their identities. In other words, the meaning of such institutionalized customs of temporary expulsion may be found to lie in deflecting potentially destructive energies, dissipating them, or directing them towards external conflicts. As gang studies have shown such groups are not amorphous, but have a firm internal structure, a set value system, common symbols, and hierarchies of respect. Access to success, status, and in-group respect is of a kind different from the analogous concepts in mainstream society and more often than not is based on aggressive bravado. Exactly this ethos can be expected to be present in modern extremist groups.
In an unspecific, amorphous sense there is a youthful reservoir of aggression and excitability that can be tapped for generating a more organized and focused form of violence, which may be harnessed for various purposes and commissioned to pursue any goal. Mobilization of the aggressive potential young men offer can happen through evocation of idealism (in support of causes believed to be worthwhile) and by glorifying destructive acts. (As far as one can tell, the twin tower attack with its strong visual imagery has become emblematic in the world of terrorism.) Islam’s often violent history can supply the sacred precedents. Together with the plasticity of Islamic doctrine that allows interpretations that elevate aggressive tendencies to highest ethical and sanctified prominence, goals can be articulated by the appropriate ideologues, to try and change the world by any means.
1. See Erich Kolig, New Zealand’s Muslims and Multiculturalism. Leiden: Brill, 2010; p. 174–177.
2. This is not to overlook that many religions have always shunned not only forcible conversion, but any kind of organized missionization. Hinduism, Judaism, and many tribal religions, on the contrary, cultivate(d) a sense of exclusivity, which makes admission not easy.
3. See Mark Juergensmeyer. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
4. The contradiction involved in knowing and believing in this context is only semantic. Their distinction, however, is integral to modern epistemology, while in traditional versions it is irrelevant. In a traditional, theocentered epistemology, the cognitive act of believing in something (of an intangible, nonempirical kind) is identical with knowing something (in an empirical, verifyable sense). The modern religious believer is also disinclined to make a profound distinction, thus giving belief the status of firm knowledge.
5. (1561–1626). To be precise, he was referring to scientific knowledge, which gives power over nature. Much of Michel Foucault’s argument, in particular, draws on this notion of a power-knowledge connection, though in a much wider, sociological sense.
6. Catholic-Protestant wars fought over purely religious differences have ceased centuries ago and pogroms against Jews on purely religious grounds have become unthinkable. Unfortunately, visceral xenophobism can adopt quite different rationales. (See Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.) The Northern Irish conflict and the Balkan wars of the 1990s largely had political reasons, with religion providing the outer varnish as it were.
7. As I found in my own research, both sides of this argument may be held simultaneously by a person. As so often, cognitive dissonance may not result in discarding one side or stimulate urgent attempts to somehow harmonize both and to resolve a logical contradiction.
8. In the attack in 1995, twelve persons died and allegedly five thousand were injured by the release of Sarin gas.
9. An outstanding example is the People’s Temple, which in 1978 in Guyana, after having killed a U.S. congressman (suspected of spying), committed collective suicide (though as it turned out afterwards not always entirely voluntarily) of 918 members. Similarly, the destruction of the Branch Davidian community in Waco, Texas, caused about one hundred persons’ death, in 1993. There are many more examples of Christian, inspired cults committing not only assault in the name of upholding a self-styled law, but also lethal violence internally against the membership. There is a huge literature on NRMs (New Religious Movements). See for example, Christopher Evans, Cults of Unreason. London: Harrap, 1974; Rodney Stark (ed.), Religious Movements. New York: Paragon, 1985; Bryan Wilson and Jamie Cresswell (eds.), New Religious Movements. London, New York: Routledge, 1999.
10. Rohan Gunaratna, Inside al Qaeda. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia. Boulder, London: Riemer, 2003.
11. Asma Afsaruddin (“Demarcating Fault-lines within Islam: Muslim Modernists and Hardline Islamists Engage the Shari’a.” In Shari’a as Discourse, J. Nielsen and L. Christoffersen (eds.). Farnham: Ashgate, 2010; p.35) mentions that radical Islamists emphasize violent jihad and despise as impotent those who prefer a more peaceful interpretation.
12. There was also an ingredient of revenge, for instance when two Jewish tribes were put to the sword for perceived wrongs they did to the Muslim community.
13. John Esposito’s, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002) presents a comprehensive view on the subject.
14. The terms “cosmic war” stems from Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War. New York: Random, 2009. Aslan argues that jihadism is not based on the Quran, but rather the writing of Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Ahmed ibn Taymiyyah (p. xviii). However, on pp. 3–4 he reproduces the letter the 9/11 bombers received from their “handler.” In it they are instructed to remember the Quran and its commandments. Some Salafis who emphatically wish to return to the doctrinal basics of the Quran and embrace the notion of a violent jihad, do reject Qutb’s work.
15. See, for instance, Bassam Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe. London, New York: Routledge, 2008; p. 37–38, where he draws specific attention to this.
16. John Esposito, Islam the Straight Path. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991; p. 30 has a more elegant translation.
17. Aslan, How to Win . . . (p. xix) renders this ayat as “Fight in the way of God those who fight you, but do not begin hostilities. God does not like the aggressor.”
18. Erich Kolig, New Zealand’s Muslims . . . ; p. 247. This section repeats the threads of thought on jihad laid out in this book.
19. Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press (orig. 1972), 1977.
20. As, for instance, Erich Fromm causally connected extreme human destructiveness with certain societal forms (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. London: Cape, 1974).
21. The concept of “Wahlverwandtschaft” is used by Weber in a rather vague sense, but most conspicuously in his explanation of the rise of the capitalist ethos. For a summary see, e.g., Herbert Howe, Max Weber’s “Elective Affinities: Sociology within the Bounds of Pure Reason.” Americam Journal of Sociology 84/2 (1978): 366–385.
22. L. Mannheim (ed. by Paul Kecskemeti), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1952; p. 183 on the concept of “interestedness.”
23. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
24. Rarely is it conversion by force, though hegemony may also be “armored with coercion” (P. Anderson, “The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100 (1976-1977): 5–78; p.13). But ultimately consent and collaboration by the subordinate class are indispensable in the exercise of hegemony (Joseph Femia, “Hegemony and Consciousness in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci.” Political Studies 23 (1975): 29–48).
25. See Bernard Lewis, “Legal and Historical Reflections on the Position of Muslim Populations under Non-Muslim Rule.” In Muslims in Europe, B. Lewis and D. Schnapper (eds.). London, New York: Pinter, 1994. See Tariq Ramadan’s (Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; p. 65–73. justifications for allowing Muslims to live in the West, and the recourse to traditional concepts such as Dar-al-Ahd, Amn etc.
26. The concept of necessity in times of need allows for a reasonable reduction in the total adherence to Islamic prescriptions.
27. Organised by Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia, a radical Islamic organization founded by Abu Bakar Ba’asyir (accused to be the instigator of the first Bali bombing). This party was teetering on the brink of political legality. See Erich Kolig, “Radical Islam, Islamic Fervour, and Political Sentiments in Central Java, Indonesia.” European Journal of East Asian Studies 4/1 (2005): 55–86.
28. The whole tenor, for example, of Iftikhar Malik’s book (Islam and Modernit . . .) is of this kind: it claims that from the beginning the West has been hostile towards Islam.
29. Opinions are strongly divided on this question. It is hardly surprising that one view holds Islam and its doctrines responsible for the violence perpetrated in its name. See Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “The Terror of Belief and the Belief in Terror: On Violently Serving God and Nation.” In Dying for Faith, Madani Al-Rasheed and Marat Shterin (eds.). London, New York: Tauris 2009.
30. an-Na’im, The Islamic Counter-Reformation. New Perspectives Quarterly 19/1 (2002): 29–43; p. 33
31. David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1988. Anthropological essays analyzing the acceptance by a subaltern group of paradigms and symbolic language of the dominant group are, for instance, Roger Keesing, “Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific.” The Contemporary Pacific 1/1 (1989):19–42; and Allan Hanson, “The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic.” American Anthropologist 91/4 (1989): 890–902 to name only two.
32. Very briefly put, this was the “terra nullius” declaration by the British Crown in 1788, which pronounced the continent a colony. In subsequent years and by further declarations the Crown extended its assumption of sovereignty from the original eastern parts of the continent incrementally further West. By this act the Aborigines were regarded as only occupiers of the land without property rights and without claim to sovereignty. The symbolism of this act—with far reaching consequences—was totally incomprehensible to the indigenous people.
33. See Erich Kolig, Dreamtime Politics: Religion, World View and Utopian Thought in Australian Aboriginal Society. Berlin: Reimer, 1989.
34. Ghandi’s passive resistance was a symbolic language of power that was understood by the British hegemon. Perhaps its paradigm of peaceful objection struck a responsive chord in the Christian background of the colonial power.
35. Unbelief here not only in the sense of Buddhism or the forbidden representation of the human form, but also victory over the Shi’ite Hazara who in their “seditious unbelief” had tolerated the figures to remain for so long.
36. Equally popular was the hypothesis that the destruction was staged and self-inflicted by the United States so as to have an excuse to attack the Islamic world or to divert attention from the actions of Israel.
37. Quran 22/58–59; 2/154; 3/156–58, 169–71.
38. These are women fighters, often the widows of jihadis, from the North Caucasus area of Dagestan and Chechnya fighting for an Islamic state independent from Russia—or in some cases possibly as an act of personalized vengeance.
39. See Margaret Gonzalez-Perez, “The False Islamization of Female Suicide Bombers.” Gender Issues 28 (2011): 50–65. The argument that women with psychological problems, immature young girls, and economically unsupported women become primary targets of recruitment would need more empirical corroboration.
40. Church authorities (such as the Vatican) do at times speak out against extreme practices.
41. A particularly arduous form of pilgrimage in Tibetan Buddhism is to move along a sacred path by continuous prostrations.
42. I deliberately abstain here to discuss the legality of this controversial action, legalized by the George W. Bush administration in the course of the “War on Terror” policy. It has been condemned as a human rights violation and at the same time defended—in Machiavellian terms; for instance, by a Harvard law scholar, Alan Dershowitz (Why Terrorism Works. Melbourne: Scribe, 2003).
43. Interview in the Jerusalem Post, February 25, 2011, www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnist/Article.aspx?id=209770.
44. Hadith and Quran 44/54, 52/20.
45. This seems to be related to the Hebrew Shekhina which refers to God’s presence in the world. It also relates to the name Sakaina, one of the daughters of imam Hussein. See for example Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom. London: Random Arrow Books, 2009; p. 118.
46. Of March 1, 2010. This normally is a moderate medium of distributing Islamic news.
47. Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia. . . .
48. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of Afghan Warlords. London: Tauris, 2000. In the meantime more relevant literature has accumulated.
49. See William Foote Whyte, The Street Corner Society. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1943; Fredric Thrasher, The Gang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927; Robert Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie.” American Sociological Review 3 (1938): 672–682.
50. Sect members released lethal sarin gas in underground trains in March 1995 on the order of the charismatic leader and prophet Shoko Asahara, causing seven deaths, seriously sickening 144, and reportedly injuring a further 5000. See, e.g., Ian Reader, Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan. Richmond: Curzon, 1999.
51. This holds true regardless of whether one agrees to call the attendant learning process learning in the ordinary semantic meaning, indoctrination, or brain washing.
52. The mix of youthful rebellion, search for belonging, and idealism striving towards a just society is clearly noticeable in Ed Husain’s story of becoming an “Islamist.” (Ed Husain, The Islamist. London: Penguin, 2007.)
53. Berserksgangr in Norse.
54. Other explanations are that this was a pathological syndrome associated with epilepsy.
55. This social phenomenon is mentioned in the Egils and Ynglynga Sagas as well as other sources. They were possibly associated with Odin (or Woden) worship and showed interesting ritual features such as the wearing of bear or wolfskins (which merges into the werewolf myth), and engaged in symbolic violence such as drinking blood and eating raw meat.
56. Such as Hans Peter Duerr. Ueber die Grenze zwischen Wildnis und Zivilization. Fankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985; p. 103.
57. One might see a faint echo in the Nazi SS troops and their emblematic black uniform and skull and crossbone symbol.
58. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: William Morrow, 1928. Later, her thesis of freewheeling sexuality preventing adolescence crises was attacked by Derek Freeman (Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.) Their difference of ethnographic interpretation became a celebrated controversy between Mead and Freeman and their admirers.