RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM
Any discussion of the current problems concerning terrorism, sooner or later, comes up against two crucial issues: How important is terrorism, and how is it going to end? We shall deal with the former issue later. As far as the end of terrorism is concerned, present writings have been mainly concerned with traditional terrorist movements but not the present contenders. However, the end of Baader-Meinhof, the Italian Red Brigades, or even the IRA and the Basques terrorists are of little help for the present threat, which is based on a wave of religious extremism. Such cases have been infrequent in recent history outside Islam.
All comments in this respect are bound to be speculative. I could imagine, to take an optimistic view, a letter written in forty years’ time by Ibrahim al-Bakr in Raqqa, who fought in Syria in his younger years and later became a deputy governor of Raqqa district, to his friend, Mahmoud Ghazal, a businessman in Port Said, Egypt, who also fought in the ranks of IS at the time:
Ya achi fi ma’aarkat [My brother in battle],
In my sleepless nights, I often think back to the great days of our youth. Those were the days that were long gone when we were fighting for a great cause. We often sinned and failed. I frequently ask myself, why did we fail?… What are the reasons for our setback, why did we not succeed to a greater extent? It now seems to be clear to me that the main mistake was the idea “Al-Islam howa el haal” [Islam is the answer]. I believe now that the Prophet of blessed memory would never have agreed to a slogan like this, nor would have al-Boukhari or any of those close to the Prophet. It was a catchy slogan, presented by a group of elderly leaders of the Brotherhood, but they were altogether out of touch with the modern world. How could “Islam is the answer” be of relevance in a digital world. How could it be an answer to problems of modern medicine and technology affecting society to mention just a few of the problems involved?
We should have been far more modest and restricted ourselves to religious issues, to the strict observation of what our holy book says. We should not have tried to encompass everything everywhere. What was the result of our enthusiasm and overeagerness? We attracted a few intellectuals, such as Qutb and some of the middle class, but mainly the poor and the down-and-out, who were the great majority in our demonstrations. Our fighters were from many countries. We did not find a common language. Look at the people who came from far away to help us. We attracted the young, who became militants and like both of us, hurried to the battlefield of their times. Those fighters were products of the West. But our appeal remained very limited because it soon appeared that we did not have the answer to all issues. The great majority of our brothers and sisters all over the globe did not join us. Some of them may have had certain sympathies, but by and large, they were either involved in internal rivalries and struggles or preferred a quiet life and making a living for their families.
The cardinal mistake was that we forgot that our communities were divided on many issues. And so were the fighters that came to join us.
The idea to establish a new caliphate was a harebrained scheme. There had been no caliphate since the 1920s, and what existed at the time was no more than a shadowy institution of no great importance. True, the states that emerged in the Arab world were largely artificial; it is now a hundred years since Sykes-Picot. But once separate and autonomous states emerged, there also emerged vested interests who wanted these new countries to continue to exist. I do not think that there was any way to overcome this development and to establish again one unified Muslim state any time after the downfall of the Ottoman Empire.
Our faith, the faith of Islam, is spread all over the world. What we should not nurture are illusions. What do Muslims in Indonesia have in common with those in Nigeria, for example? Time has taken its toll. By now even Muslims in India have little in common with those in Pakistan, even though India and Pakistan once were one country until the partition in 1947.
Look back and remember the young people who came from the West to join us in our holy struggle. They were full of enthusiasm in the beginning, but how much of it lasted? These young people resented certain features of life in their homelands. But they are products of Western civilization. They wanted adventure, and they got some of it, but after that, their enthusiasm and militancy declined, and they either returned home or became a major problem for us. And yet I am not pessimistic. We have a good chance of success, not because of our bombs and weapons but because of our women—the future. We will be the majority in many countries around the world. The ways of providence are unforeseeable.
I do not know, my brother and comrade, whether you fully agree with my ideas, but in any case, I wish you well in your enterprises even though the oil business is not what it used to be, what with all these recent inventions. You see, times change, and we, whether we want it or not, have to change with them. I hope your family is well, and I am sure your children will be successful in whatever they are doing.
This kind of scenario presents the optimistic view—namely, the decline of the influence of IS and al-Qaeda. However, it is also true that religiously inspired fighting and terrorism have lasted much longer than groups like the European terrorists of the 1980s, which were based on strange and usually half-crazy secular political ideas. How long have fighting groups lasted based on deep religious belief and religious fanaticism? To find some guidance in this respect, one needs to go back into history. It is difficult to imagine a military victory of IS or al-Qaeda, but they may succeed in deepening internal divisions in Western countries in which Muslims constitute a significant minority. This has happened to a certain extent in France, and it may happen in other European countries; it is less likely in the United States, a country constituted of a variety of minorities.
The three best-known examples of religious groups using terrorism and being defeated are the Jewish zealots in the Roman province of Judea, the Shiite Assassins cult, which formed in Persia around the time of the First Crusade, and the Thuggee cult in India. The first was crushed by the Romans during the destruction of Jerusalem, but managed to inflict terror through the province for nearly seventy years, as they opposed Roman rule. The Assassins, for their part, lasted some three hundred years and managed to kill numerous heads of state, as they opposed the Seljuk Empire and created their own state. Only a Mongolian invasion managed to subdue this religiously inspired group of killers, but its legacy continues. Similarly, the Thuggee cult formed at some period before 1350 and lasted until the nineteenth century, when the British destroyed the cult. According to sources, these individuals worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali and killed in a ritualistic fashion to honor her. The extent to which this is true is debatable, given the prevalence of Muslims in their ranks, but nonetheless, they were known for having a strict of set of rules governing whom and how they could kill. The duration of their existence has led estimates of those they killed to range from half a million people to as many as two million. The records for these groups are sparse, but at least they give a mental map of how long religiously inspired violence can last. The reason for their collapse seems to have been the overwhelming power of better organized fighting forces, which could also impose the rule of law.
To find examples of fighting groups, after the age of crusades inspired by militant religions, one still has to go back at least a few centuries. One example would be Oliver Cromwell, a member of Parliament and a military commander who eventually emerged as the leader of the party called the Roundheads. He was a chief commander of the New Model Army, which in its fighting, particularly in Ireland, used fairly brutal methods. He became a hero to some and an abomination to others. He is well remembered, even today; Vladimir Putin on a recent occasion compared himself and the actions of contemporary Russia to Cromwell and his campaigns.
Another more fitting example are the Hussite Wars, occurring about two centuries before (1419–1434). Jan Hus, not well known in the Anglo-speaking world, was a forerunner of Protestantism. He was a Bohemian priest and head of Prague’s Charles University, one of the earliest in Europe, existing to this day. Hus did not accept the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, and his followers were fighting the Catholics mainly in Bohemia. It was essentially a war between priests and their followers. The issues at stake are no longer of great interest; they concern, for instance, the question of whether the obligation of the faithful was to receive communion in both kinds—bread and wine—the doctrine of Utraquism, and so on. The Hussite camp was divided into several factions, but it was fighting with great fervor, and as a result, what was later to become Czechoslovakia became predominantly Protestant territory. Hus was burned at the stake as a dangerous heretic. Yet another interesting case that deserves to be studied concerns the rebellion of the Anabaptists led by John of Leiden in the city of Münster, Germany. These events took place in 1534 and lasted altogether one year. In the instances of Cromwell and his following in Britain and Jan Hus, the military operations ended with the death of the leader. However, the consequences were far-reaching.
For a closer phenomenon that could teach us about the duration of violent religious explosions, one has to go back to the Muslims and the appearance of a variety of Mahdis, beginning in the eighth century with King Ṣāliḥ ibn Ṭarīf of the Berghouata in modern-day Morocco. The term Mahdi does not appear in the Qur’an but emerged soon after. It means “one called to provide guidance to the pious,” but Mahdism as remembered today concerns mainly colonial wars against the British in the nineteenth century. The best recalled today is the Mahdist War (1881–1899) in the Sudan, which included the assassination of General Charles Gordon. This has been the subject of books and movies, but how much light this sheds on current events remains doubtful. There certainly was a great deal of religious fanaticism involved but not much terrorism as we understand it today. It lasted a long time, but eventually the enthusiasm ran out. Some of the followers returned to private life, while others went into politics. This has frequently been the course of events both in the Muslim world and elsewhere: realizing that the armed struggle and terrorism led them nowhere, the militants chose politics. This was the case in Europe in recent decades, but will it also take place in Asia and Africa?
But do events that took place in the nineteenth century help us to understand the current situation? The imperialist West that once acted with determination and without scruples has disappeared, and the aim now is to hit extremists in their homelands. But even more important is the aim to gain predominance in the countries under Muslim rule or in which Muslims are well represented. This makes the Middle East and various Asian and African countries major battlefields with occasional attacks in Europe and America. Such operations by individuals or little groups have become particularly likely with the return of jihadists from the battlefield in which they are fighting.
Among this backdrop of battlefields, the other scenario one has to deal with is the possibility that an extremist Islamist group will be able to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Up until now, the past has served as a referential guide for explaining interesting features of the current terrorist threat. As discussed in other parts of this book, religious terrorists are the actors most likely to use nuclear weapons if they get access to them. This may be difficult today but will probably be much easier in the not-too-distant future. Until now, the threat of terrorism has seemed prolonged, unlikely to end, but unlikely to cause the collapse of the Western world. Nuclear weapons would change this calculus and add a hitherto unknown dimension to how terrorism ends. What if members of such a group explode a nuclear device in a Western city and threaten more such attacks? In this case, there will be overwhelming popular pressure in Western countries to use extreme measures. Muslim communities in the West may be outlawed or expelled unless they will exhibit a great readiness to capture the perpetrators and their supporters. Massive nuclear strikes against the countries in which weapons of mass destruction were produced by the terrorists are more than likely. Needless to say, in such a situation, traditional liberties will be severely curtailed or altogether abolished in the West.
This possibility cannot, unfortunately, be excluded. If terrorist groups will not engage in such actions, it is always possible that some ultraradicals (or madmen) will do so. With technological progress, a very few people can cause enormous havoc. It would be very difficult if not impossible to establish within a short time whether the perpetrators were indeed members of a terrorist group and acted on its behalf or whether these actions were carried out by lone madmen. There have been similar incidents by individuals in the recent past, though weapons of mass destruction were not involved. It is impossible to predict how Western governments would react in such situations.
Suicide terrorism has attracted enormous interest and has been given much publicity, but it has been frequently misinterpreted. Many historians of terrorism date its contemporary form back to 1983, but another date in the early 1980s could be chosen with equal justice. Suicide missions have become frequent in our age, but they go back far in history. It appears in the Bible with the story of Sampson bringing down the temple in Gaza. It was common practice in Sparta; in the words of a poet, “They give away their life as the law demanded.” It was practiced in ancient Rome and in the Middle Ages, and by the Shiite Assassins in the eleventh century, who attacked mainly Crusaders but also fellow Muslims who were considered enemies.
The early Christian martyrs were certainly not terrorists, but they knew that their mission was an extremely dangerous one and more likely than not that their mission would lead to their capture and death. Soldiers and civilians engaging in suicide missions can be found in the history of every nation. They were glorified in the works of leading writers of the time. An interesting example appears in Konrad Wallenrod (1828), a poem by the Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz. He wrote:
I deceived you, from Granada
I brought you the plague
“For my kiss breathed venom in ye.
And the plague shall lay you low.…”
Laughed, and died; his eyes yet open.
In this case, the hero is a Muslim from Granada by the name of Al-Mansur carrying the pestilence into the enemy Christian camp—perhaps the first known case of biological warfare in literature. Mickiewicz later regretted this poem, which had become very popular, but did not succeed in buying up all the circulating copies. However, in another poem—“Reduta Ordona,” he wrote:
God said “become,”—God “die” will also say.
When faith and freedom runs away from human,
When tyranny and pride embrace the earth
Like Moskals surrounded Ordon’s Reduta—
God will punish the tribe of crime-poisoned winners
And God will blow up this earth, like Ordon did with his Reduta.
Mickiewicz returned to the same theme, but this second time the hero was a Pole while the enemies were the Russians.
In the schools of pre–World War II Germany, one could sometimes find the following inscription by Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.) There is also, for instance, the story of Arnold Winkelried in Swiss history, who sacrificed himself to enable his comrades to make progress in battle. There are many other examples. The best known who are closer to our time are the Japanese kamikaze. More than 3,800 of them died in attacks mainly against American targets. Most of them were pilots, but kamikaze attacks were also carried out in the navy and in land warfare. The suicide concept goes far back into Japanese history; it was expected that the samurai would give their lives for the emperor. There are no reliable statistics as to the total number of kamikaze attacks committed by the various branches of the Japanese military; it could well amount to 10,000 or even more.
Contemporary acts of suicide terrorism are more spread out. For comparison’s sake, according to the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST), the number of suicide terrorist attacks is in the neighborhood of 5,430 just for the period from 1990 to 2015. Further obstructing the data, evidence shows suicide attacks before 1990 are rarer. Suicide missions in World War II, as in previous wars, were by no means committed only in Japan. The Soviets had their Alexander Matrosov, who had sacrificed himself in order to save his comrades in arms. They were frequent in the air forces of both sides of the Second World War, especially in the early years of the war, when the equipment on the planes was not yet very sophisticated and the range of the planes was limited. True, most of these missions were committed in a military framework, but the motivation was the same as that of individuals.
As pointed out earlier on, many, if not most, of the rebels and terrorists up to the nineteenth century were “suicidal.” Since the primitive weapons in their hands such as knives and pistols were so short-range, they knew that they were bound to be caught (and the punishment used to be certain death). In brief, suicide missions have been committed all throughout history, out of a variety of motives and in a variety of countries and cultures.
There has been some research by psychologists concerning the motivation of individuals who completed suicide missions. Some have drawn the conclusion that those who organized these missions chose emotionally unstable candidates with what psychologists defined as a weak ego. This may be true in some cases but not in others. Others have pointed to the attraction of the famous seventy virgins who would be at the disposal of “martyrs” in heaven. Since those who committed suicide missions can no longer be interviewed, the results of this kind of research has to be considered with measured caution.
Since the 1970s, psychologists and psychiatrists have written extensively about terrorists and their motives. For instance, Luis de la Corte Ibáñez states in “The Social Psychology of Suicide Terrorism”:
According to several authors, social psychology is the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by other people (Aronson, 1999). The phenomenon of social influence is at the very heart of social psychology. Sometimes this influence happens in a non-deliberated or non-direct way. But other times individuals and groups deliberately try to change another person’s behavior. There are a variety of tactics that people apply to influence other people. Terrorism involves the use of force or violence in order to instill fear as a means of coercing individuals or groups to change their political or social positions which means that social influence is the ultimate goal of terrorism. Obviously we could say the same about suicide terrorism.
It should be recorded, however, that such comments by psychologists and psychiatrists all refer to the terrorism of the last century. The authors were not familiar with jihadist terrorism, which was to become the dominating form in the decades thereafter. In contrast, those that have studied the phenomenon up close in more recent decades have shown that jihadist suicide terrorists are not deranged, mentally challenged, or acting irrationally. This subject has been discussed before in a preceding chapter concerning economics and the study of terrorism. Needless to say, prejudging suicide terrorists as fanatics disregards what makes them lethal and underestimates their capacity to attack. This discussion must be placed within the context of singular events that have forced national reactions like Hezbollah’s suicide bombing attack against the Marine barracks in Beirut, which greatly altered America’s foreign policy toward Lebanon. This section, if anything, is to remind the general audience that throughout history, suicide attacks have been regarded as noble, rational, and worthy, even if the result was the same.
Of the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as other Muslim countries, the overwhelming majority have wanted nothing but a quiet and better life. IS and allied groups no doubt use the opportunity to infiltrate some of their militants, but these are a minority. However, to what extent have the Muslim communities helped the authorities in Europe and the United States, forewarning them of planned terrorist operations? There has been a recent such case in Germany, and in all probability, there have been more such cases of which we have not heard. But the evidence is not overwhelming. What of the younger generations? Like thousands of the young generations of Muslim communities in other American and European countries, Pakistanis in Britain, North Africans in France, and Turks in Germany, will the integration of the refugee communities be more successful than that of other Muslim communities in the past? It is possible that the refugees will provide a new stimulus (economic, social, and cultural) in their new countries, but this is not very likely in the short run. On the other hand, there is increasing hostility on the part of the local communities. In some places, there have been open attacks, as well as the ejection of the newcomers, who were considered a threat to the traditional character of these countries. Some of the influx has to be viewed against the background of British and French imperialism; having been the masters of colonial empires, the immigration of colonials may have been inevitable.
Elsewhere, the willingness to accept refugees was undoubtedly based on guilty memories and shame about their behavior and reluctance to accept refugees in past ages, especially before and during the Second World War. Be that as it may, the politicians willing to accept the stream of refugees disregarded two essential factors. First, according to the available evidence, nearly half were not political refugees but were “economic” refugees in search of better incomes and living conditions. Other parts of the globe such as the Americas or Australia have been traditionally welcoming of immigration, at least until fifty or a hundred years ago. But they were in fact depending on some measure of immigration. This, however, has not been the case of densely populated Europe, which furthermore has not yet overcome the repercussions of the economic crisis of 2008 (and which suffered from substantial unemployment). Second, the politicians willing to accept these refugees did not fully realize the political reaction that this was bound to generate. All over Europe, the right wing, and especially parties of the extreme right, have been greatly strengthened as a result of these political miscalculations, and democratic parties have declined. This has been particularly noticeable in France, but also to a considerable extent in Germany, Britain, Greece, the Balkans, and probably also in Italy and Scandinavia. It is difficult to understand even in hindsight how this reaction was not foreseen, and it is impossible to predict how far-reaching its effects are yet to go.
We witness, at present, strange developments in the United States, Britain, and many European countries. The Middle East seems to be afflicted by a permanent crisis, and the situation in Africa is unlikely to improve soon. Europe has been declining for a long time, and if this continues, it may become little more than a museum of an erstwhile great culture. However, the reputation of IS may also suffer for having given terrorism a bad name.
Terrorism will continue as long as there are territorial and separatist conflicts, as long as there are ideological or religious movements with aims spanning the whole globe. They will probably not continue with the same intensity, but there will always be a fanatical fringe believing that violence alone will help to attain their goal. There is an interesting historical parallel—the fate of the Roman Empire. The Romans had managed to absorb and acculturate various foreign nations, but failed at the time of the Hun invasion. Why this was the case is a matter of debate to this very day.