Ben-Gurion International Airport is a brash, beautiful, strikingly confident construction that, like much of Tel Aviv, looks as though it might have sprouted fully formed from the desert sands of the old Arab port city of Jaffa. Named after the surly general and chief architect of the state, the airport is a testament to Israel’s self-ascribed position as a bastion of social and technological advancement amid a sea of inchoate enemies. In fact, Ben-Gurion’s primary function seems to be to filter out those very enemies by tightly controlling access to the state. This is true of all international airports, I suppose, as anyone who has undergone the humiliation of being scanned, fingerprinted, and photographed to be allowed entry into the United States post-9/11 can attest. In the modern world, airports have become a kind of identity directory: the place where we are most determinately defined, registered, and catalogued before being apportioned into separate queues, each according to nationality.
Still, Israel has, for obvious reasons, taken this process to new and unprecedented heights. I am not two steps off the plane when I am immediately tagged and separated from the rush of passengers by a pimpled immigration officer in a knitted yarmulke.
“Passport, please,” he barks. “Why are you here?”
I cannot tell him the truth: I want to sneak into Gaza, which has been sealed off for months. In 2006, when Palestinians were offered their first taste of a free and fair election, they voted overwhelmingly for the religious nationalists of Hamas over the more secular yet seemingly inept politicians of Fatah, the party founded by Yasir Arafat in 1958. Despite having promised to allow the Palestinians self-determination, Israel, the United States, and the European powers quickly decided that Hamas, whose founding charter refuses to recognize the state of Israel and whose militant wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has been responsible for countless Israeli military and civilian deaths, would not be allowed to govern. Gaza, the sliver of fallow land that has become Hamas’s de facto stronghold, was cut off from the outside world. International aid dried up and a plan was put in place to, as The New York Times put it, “starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections” to the point where new elections would have to be held. This resulted in a violent rift between Hamas and Fatah that split the Occupied Territories in two: the West Bank, governed by Fatah with the aid of Israel and the international community, and Gaza, ruled by Hamas and isolated from the rest of the world, a prison with one and a half million hungry, fuming inmates.
I wanted to visit the ruined village of Um al-Nasr, in northern Gaza, some miles away from lush Tel Aviv. A few months earlier, a number of villagers, including two toddlers, had drowned in what the press was calling a “sewage tsunami.” The deluge had been triggered by the collapse of a treatment facility just above the village that had been slowly and steadily leaking sewage. For months the villagers of Um al-Nasr had pleaded with Israeli authorities to allow the importation of the pumps, pipes, and filters necessary to stem the flow. But Israel, rattled by a ceaseless barrage of crudely constructed rockets launched daily from Gaza, some of which were—in the sort of grim irony that can exist only in such a place—constructed from old sewage pipes, refused. The villagers built an earthen embankment around what was fast becoming a giant lake of human waste. But the embankment would not hold. On the morning of March 27, 2007, while most of the villagers of Um al-Nasr slept, the embankment gave way. The village was inundated.
This is what we talk about when we talk about Gaza: that human beings—men, women, children—could literally drown in shit.
“Why are you here?”
“To visit the sites,” I say.
It is not a satisfactory answer, and I am taken into a windowless room, where the question is repeated, this time by a slightly older officer. An hour passes, and a third officer walks in with the same question. “Why are you here?”
Thereafter, the question is repeated—in the sterile immigration office; in a smaller, even more sterile office inside the first office; in an even smaller office inside that office; and later, at the immigration queue, at the baggage claim, at customs—until I come to think of “Why are you here?” as a form of greeting.
All of this is understandable. I resent none of it. Though I am a citizen of the United States, I was born in Iran and have spent a great deal of time in countries that do not even recognize Israel’s right to exist—countries that, were I to have an Israeli stamp on my passport, would not allow me to enter their borders, would maybe even cart me off to jail. Israel has every reason to be cautious, considering the battering it has received at the hands of people who look just like me.
The problem is not with Israel. The problem is with me, with the sum of my identities. My citizenship is American; my nationality, Iranian; my ethnicity, Persian; my culture, Middle Eastern; my religion, Muslim; my gender, male. All the multiple signifiers of my identity—the things that make me who I am—are in one way or another viewed as a threat to the endless procession of perfectly pleasant, perfectly reasonable immigration officers whose task it is to maintain a safe distance between people like them and people like me.
Even so, throughout the entire exercise, I could not help but think of the famed French theorist Ernest Renan, who years ago defined the nation as “a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.” Nowhere is that sentiment borne out more fully or with more force than among the relatively new nations scattered along the broad horizon of the Middle East. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the region in which nationalism arose so late, and so often through the will of others, is the region in which it is now being most unmistakably subsumed by the rising tide of globalization.
Globalization means many things to many people. Though the term itself is new, having entered our vocabulary only in the 1980s, the systemic social, economic, and cultural changes that the word conjures have been taking place for centuries. There is a compelling case to be made for considering the process of globalization to have begun when the first humans footslogged out of Africa in search of game and refuge and more temperate climates. The age of empires was in some ways the height of globalization; the Romans, Byzantines, Persians, and Mongols were able to cross-pollinate their trade, communication, and cultures across vast distances with fluidity and ease. The same could be said of the age of colonialism, in which the old imperial model of commercial relations among neighboring kingdoms was transformed into the more manageable, if less ethical, model of total economic domination of indigenous populations. And certainly no single force can be said to have had a greater impact on propelling globalization forward than religion, which has always sought to spread its message across the boundaries of borders, clans, and ethnicities. Simply put, globalization is not a new phenomenon.
In its contemporary usage, however, the term “globalization” refers to modern trends such as the expansion of international financial systems, the interconnectedness of national interests, the rise of global media and communication technologies like the Internet, and the mass migration of peoples—all taking place across the boundaries of sovereign nation-states. The simplest and most elegant definition of modern globalization belongs to the Danish political philosophers Hans-Henrik Holm and Georg Sorensen: “The intensification of economic, political, social and cultural relations across borders.” But I prefer the sociologist Roland Robertson’s view of globalization as “a concept that refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (italics mine).
Globalization is not just about technological advancement and transnational relations. It is about one’s sense of self in a world that is increasingly being viewed as a single space. The world has not changed as much as we have. Our idea of the self has expanded. How we identify ourselves as part of a social collective, how we conceive of our public spaces, how we interact with like-minded individuals, how we determine our religious and political leaders, how we think even about categories of religion and politics—everything about how we define ourselves both as individuals and as members of a larger society is transformed in a globalized world because our sense of self is not constrained by territorial boundaries. And since the self is composed of multiple markers of identity—nationality, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and so on—if one of those starts to give way (say, nationality), it is only natural that another (religion, ethnicity) would come to fill the vacuum.
For most of the last century, secular nationalism—the political philosophy that places the nation-state at the center of collective identity—has been the dominant marker of identity in much of the world, even in the developing world, whose leaders tend to view the creation of a sturdy national identity as the first step in a country’s economic and political advancement. Nationalism begins, of course, with the idea of the nation, but the nation is not always so easy to define.
A nation is “a community of common descent,” writes Anthony Smith, the foremost theorist on the subject, bound together by a set of shared values and traditions, myths and historical memories, and often linked to some ancestral homeland: “the place where ‘our’ sages, saints, and heroes lived, worked, prayed, and fought.” A state is the bureaucratic mechanism (i.e., government) necessary to organize and control a nation within territorial boundaries. A state has borders; it can be geographically defined. A nation is borderless; it is an “imagined community,” to borrow a much-borrowed phrase from Benedict Anderson. The only borders a nation has are those of inclusion and exclusion: who belongs and who does not.
In a state, membership is defined through citizenship. But membership in a nation requires some other measure of unity: the members must share the same traditions, speak the same language, worship the same god, or practice the same rituals. The modern state can be traced back only to the eighteenth century. But the nation has existed from the moment human populations began to organize themselves as families, clans, tribes, peoples. The Celts, the Aztecs, the Persians, the Jews, the Arabs—all laid claim to a degree of “nationhood,” all possessed a sense of community, and all maintained links to an ancestral homeland long before they were absorbed into various states.
Think of the nation as a grand historical narrative—both mythical and real—written in the memories of generation after generation of a people. The state is the cover and binding that harnesses that narrative, creating a readable book. Thus, when we speak of the nation-state, we refer to the relatively new idea that a nation—a community of common descent—can be contained within the territorial or bureaucratic boundaries of a state. And when we speak of secular nationalism, we mean the even newer idea that the members of a nation-state should be bound together not by religious or ethnic affiliation but through a social contract among free and equal citizens.
When the nation-state was an autonomous, territorially bounded entity governing a community of people who shared some measure of cultural homogeneity—as was the case throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—secular nationalism thrived. But globalization has changed everything. The rise of cosmopolitan cities such as New York, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Hong Kong; the surge in mass migration, dual nationalities, and hyphenated identities; the ceaseless flow of peoples across state borders; all of these have made achieving anything like cultural homogeneity within territorial boundaries almost impossible. The more the world becomes deterritorialized, the more nationalism loses its place as the primary marker of collective identity. Just as a narrative cannot be truly contained within the bindings of a book, so has globalization put the lie to the idea that a nation can be truly bound by the geography of a state.
The truth is that secular nationalism was a shaky idea from the start, one born in post-Reformation Europe, cultivated during the European Enlightenment, then systematically imposed upon the rest of the globe through conquest and colonialism. In large parts of the developing world, the nation-state is a foreign concept. The map of the Middle East is a palimpsest, with arbitrary borders, made-up names, and fabricated nationalities often aggressively imposed by colonizers. In this region, nationalism has never been the primary marker of collective identity. Most Sudanese do not refer to themselves as “Sudanese.” Rwandan identity is based chiefly on the clan, not the state. Whatever their citizenship, a great many Sikhs will always view their national home to be Khalistan. The Kurds have never been a territorially bounded population, and Iraq is a fictive state built upon the myths and memories of peoples with whom modern-day Iraqis have little in common. In these countries, among these “nations,” citizenship is just a piece of paper. And, as Edmund Burke noted a century ago, “men are not tied to one another by papers and seals [but] by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.”
Even in Europe and the developed world, the idea of secular nationalism was problematic. That is because membership, or rather citizenship, in the nation-state requires submission to the state’s sovereignty over all aspects of life. Max Weber’s famed axiom that the state is the entity that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force has proven a woefully inadequate description of the nearly absolute powers claimed by even the freest and most liberal nation-state. The modern state holds a monopoly not only on force but also on identity. It assumes meticulous control over every level of social life, both private and public. It is the primary repressive force for controlling human impulses. It declares what is and what is not proper religious or political expression. It demands consent over all activity—social, sexual, and spiritual. Above all, it decides who can and who cannot share in the collective identity it has itself demarcated. The state’s sovereignty over life and death is absolute and unavoidable.
As one can imagine, not all members of a nation have been willing to allow the state to draw boundaries around them, call them a people, a religion, a culture, and thus enforce upon them a categorical sameness to the exclusion of others who may share many aspects of their identity but who happen not to be bounded by the same geography. In all parts of the world, loyalties to family, clan, ethnicity, and religion tend to trump loyalty to the state. Now that globalization has, at the very least, begun to loosen the grip of secular nationalism on our identities, people are beginning to reassemble around older, more primal forms of identity such as religion and ethnicity, neither of which can be easily controlled by the state apparatus.
Witness the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia. The forced disaggregation of a people once united by a civic identity into tiny, ethnically homogeneous states, each in conflict with the others, is perhaps the clearest example of what happens when transnational identities—in this case ethnicity—clash with national loyalties. Similar tensions led to the partitioning of Urdu-speaking West Pakistan and Bengali-speaking East Pakistan into the homogenized states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. But when it comes to the power of transnational identities to challenge nationalist ones, no force exerts a greater pull than religion.
Fatah learned this truth the hard way. The party of Yasir Arafat began its political career as merely the most formidable of a number of Palestinian underground guerrilla groups active in Egypt and Jordan, but it quickly rose to dominate the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO, the sole legitimate body representing the interests of the Palestinian nation. Fatah’s initial success was a result of its ability to unite all the disparate and often feuding Palestinian political groups under a single, secular national identity.
However, the same force that propelled Fatah to the top of Palestinian politics in the 1960s and 1970s—secular nationalism—is the force that has led to its slow demise (though it must be said that the unbridled corruption of many Fatah leaders certainly played a part). In 1988, when, after two decades of crushing occupation the Palestinian population suddenly rose up in open revolt, a new organization, the Islamic Resistance Movement—popularly known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas—burst onto the political scene. In direct opposition to the secular nationalism offered by Fatah, Hamas framed its political platform in exclusively religious terms. It relied on the widely recognized symbols and terminology of Islam to create a new collective identity, one that could cut across all boundaries of culture and class and unite the Palestinian people in resistance to Israel.
In the Muslim world, the fusing of religion and nationalism is called “Islamism.” Developed primarily in postcolonial Egypt and India, Islamism is a political philosophy that seeks to establish an Islamic state—either through grassroots social and political activism or through violent revolution—built upon a distinctly Islamic moral framework. Some Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), and Algeria’s Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), are committed to civic, even democratic, participation in society. Others, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, Islamic Jihad in Egypt, and the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), wish to overturn their governments through armed revolt.
Religious nationalism is by no means a uniquely Islamic phenomenon. As we shall see the civil war between Fatah and Hamas (between secular and religious nationalism) is a battle that is taking place all over the globe and in nearly every major religion. This is due partly to the fact that secular nationalism, in demanding that the nation-state be placed at the center of collective identity, was consciously conceived of as an alternative to religion. A great deal of nationalism’s success in the first half of the twentieth century came from its ability to co-opt the vocabulary, authority, and resources of religious institutions for its own ends. It was perhaps inevitable that, as secular nationalism began to give way, religion would once again become the principal marker of collective identity—and with a vengeance.
The problem with religious nationalism is not its aspirations, which in most cases involve little more than injecting (or perhaps imposing) a particular set of values and customs into society. The problem is that religious identities cannot be tethered to the nation-state. That is why the greatest threat to global security comes not so much from the rise of religious nationalism, which, at least in a democracy, may be unavoidable and which, given space and time, may evolve into mature and responsible governance, as has been the case with Turkey’s AKP or, for that matter, many of Europe’s Christian Nationalist parties—the real threat to global peace and security comes from the rise of religious transnationalist movements that cannot be contained within any territorial boundaries. And the most dangerous by far of these new transnational movements is the broad-based, global ideology of militant Islamic puritanism, of which al-Qa’ida is merely the most notorious and violent manifestation: Jihadism (Global Jihadism, to be precise).
There has been much confusion over the meaning and application of the word “Jihadism” (jahadiyyah in Arabic), especially because it is so often misappropriated either by opportunistic politicians who place all of America’s adversaries into a single category or by careless media that too often pander to the fears of an unknowledgeable public. Muslims in particular are annoyed by the term, arguing (correctly) that the concept of jihad, as utilized by al-Qa’ida and like-minded militants, is a base and corrupt rendering of a centuries-old doctrine that, in any case, was never one of Islam’s principal tenets. In Arabic, jihad literally means “struggle” (from the verb jahada, meaning “to strive for something”) and is almost always followed in the Qur’an by the phrase “in the way of God.” Jihad implies a struggle against the self, against one’s passions and instincts and the temptations that oppress the soul. Yet in a religion obsessed with social justice, the idea of jihad as an internal struggle quickly expanded to include the physical struggle against oppression, against chaos and civil strife, against the internal and external enemies of Islam, even against unbelief.
For the Jihadist, however, the doctrine of jihad transcends these traditional definitions, becoming instead a means of devotion. The Jihadist movement, in bin Laden’s words, “wants to keep jihad alive and active and make it part of the daily life of Muslims. It wants to give it the status of worship.” For Maulana Masood Azhar, the head of the Kashmiri Jihadist organization Jaish-e Muhammad, jihad is not only “the most virtuous deed,” it is, in fact, “the protector of all other deeds.” The pillars of faith and practice upon which Islam is founded—prayer, alms, fasting, pilgrimage, and the confession of faith—are, in Jihadism, supplanted by the one and only means of salvation: jihad. “Everyone not performing jihad today is forsaking a duty,” wrote the father of modern Jihadism, Abdullah Azzam, “just like the one who eats during the days of Ramadan without excuse, or the rich person who withholds the zakah [alms] from his wealth. Nay, the state of the person who abandons jihad is more severe.” It is not scripture, nor theology, nor prayer, nor good works, nor the law, nor any spiritual endeavor that defines a Muslim but, as Azzam declared, “jihad and the rifle alone.”
Despite its fixation on jihad, Global Jihadism is less a religious movement than it is a social movement, one that employs religious symbols to forge a collective identity across borders and boundaries (more on this later). Jihadism traces its historical roots not to the Prophet Muhammad but to the Arab anticolonialists of the twentieth century, men like Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. It looks not to the Qur’an for its doctrinal basis but to the writings of the thirteenth-century legal scholar Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah. It has more in common with the Bolsheviks and the French revolutionaries than it does with militant Muslim nationalist groups such as Hamas and Hizballah. To talk about Jihadism as Islamofascism is to misunderstand both Jihadism and fascism. Fascism is an ideology of ultranationalism; Jihadism rejects the very concept of the nation-state as anathema to Islam. In that regard, Jihadism is the opposite of Islamism.
It is ironic that Jihadism is so often viewed as antimodern. Jihadism does not reject modernity; it is a product of modernity. It does, however, reject Westernism, and because “modernity” and “the West” have become inextricably linked (mostly in the West), anyone who rejects one is automatically assumed to reject the other. Jihadism may present itself as an alternative to the modern world, but the ideas upon which it draws are quintessentially modern. To paraphrase the British political philosopher John Gray, Jihadism is “a symptom of the disease of which it pretends to be the cure.”
Neither is Jihadism traditionalist. Jihadist ideologues go to great lengths to distance themselves from the traditional doctrines of Islam. There is in this movement a complete rejection of Islamic authority and an almost total disregard for Islamic law. In the United States and Europe it is common to point the finger of blame for the radicalization of Muslim youth at mosques and madrassas (Islamic schools). But that assumption ignores the seismic societal shifts that globalization has wrought upon the Arab and Muslim worlds over the last century, as widespread increases in literacy and education, not to mention the birth of new technologies such as satellite TV and the Internet, have allowed Jihadist leaders to sidestep Islam’s traditional clerical authorities and deliver their individualistic, anti-institutional message directly to Muslims all over the globe.
Nowhere is Jihadism’s lack of regard for Islamic tradition more obvious than in its fundamental reimagining of the doctrine of jihad. What was for centuries considered a collective duty waged predominantly within the confines of an empire or state and solely in defense of life, faith, and property (“Fight in the way of God those who fight you,” the Qu’ran warns, “but do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor;” 2:190), has, in Jihadism, become a radically individualistic obligation utterly divorced from any institutional power (the Yemeni Sheikh Rabi al-Madkhali defines a Jihadist as “anyone who believes that Jihad is purely an individual duty to fight”). Indeed, the fundamental aim of Jihadism is to separate the doctrine of jihad from all political or religious institutions, so as to make it strictly an ethical obligation. This is not jihad in its classical Qur’anic sense as a struggle against oppression (“permission to fight is given only to those who have been oppressed;” 22:39). This is something else entirely. This is jihad as a form of identity—a mere metaphysical struggle stripped of all political considerations.
This is jihad as cosmic war.
Jarret Brachman, the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, traces Jihadism’s current incarnation as a global force to about 2003, though its roots go back to an early-twentieth-century Islamic revivalist movement known as Salafism (the term salaf refers to the original Companions of the Prophet Muhammad). Salafism began as a progressive movement in colonial Egypt and India whose adherents advocated reform and liberalization of traditional Islamic doctrine. The movement was founded upon the writings of two of the century’s most renowned Muslim intellectuals, the Iranian scholar/activist Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (who began his career in India) and the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abdu. Al-Afghani and Abdu believed that the only way for the Muslim world to throw off the yoke of colonialism and push back against Western cultural hegemony was through a revival of Islam. These “modernists,” as they were called, blamed the clerical establishment—the ’ulama—for the sorry state of Muslim society. They sought to challenge the clergy’s self-proclaimed role as the sole legitimate interpreters of Islam by advocating an individualized, unmediated, and highly personal reading of the Qur’an and the Hadith (the collected sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad).
By far the most successful Salafist organization of the time was the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in the 1920s by the Egyptian schoolteacher turned activist Hasan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood began as a grassroots social movement dedicated to the gradual Islamization of society through religious welfare and education programs. Al-Banna believed that the only way to create a truly Islamic state was through preaching and good works, not, as some of his fellow Islamists argued, through violence and armed revolt. Although far more conservative in his interpretation of Islam than either al-Afghani or Muhammad Abdu, al-Banna nevertheless agreed that the main obstacle facing an Islamic revival was the ’ulama, or, more specifically, the senior clergy of Egypt’s famed al-Azhar University, whose international prestige and longevity (it was established a thousand years ago) have made it the closest thing the Muslim world has to a Vatican. In fact, al-Banna explicitly established the Muslim Brotherhood as an alternative source for Muslim spirituality, one whose reformist outlook and social activism created a stark contrast to the somewhat stilted theology offered by the clergy of al-Azhar.
By the time Hasan al-Banna died in 1949, the Muslim Brotherhood was the most dominant social movement in Egypt. Indeed, after the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924—the symbol of the global Muslim community, or ummah—the Muslim Brotherhood was the only truly transnational Islamic movement in the world, with offshoots in Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon. When, in 1952, a group of Egyptian military officers led by Colonel Gamal Abd al-Nasser launched a coup against Egypt’s British-backed monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood helped rally the country under the new regime. At first Nasser welcomed the Brotherhood into his administration, placing its members in a number of senior government posts. But after a failed attempt on his life, allegedly by a member of the Brotherhood, Nasser outlawed the organization altogether and threw its leaders into jail.
In prison, the Brotherhood fractured into competing groups. A new breed of activists, led by the charismatic Egyptian academic Sayyid Qutb, transformed al-Banna’s social movement into a revolutionary force dedicated to “setting up the kingdom of God on earth and eliminating the kingdom of man.” Qutb argued that Nasser—and in fact every other Arab leader—could not be considered a true Muslim unless he was willing to strictly apply and abide by Islamic law (known as Shariah). And since he was unwilling to do so, he was an apostate, a kafir; his punishment was death. Qutb went so far as to state that anyone who accepted Nasser’s leadership was also a kafir. “Those who consider themselves Muslim, but do not struggle against different kinds of oppression, or defend the rights of the oppressed, or cry out in the face of a dictator, are either wrong, or hypocritical, or ignorant of the precepts of Islam,” Qutb declared.
Nasser executed Qutb in 1966, but by then Qutb’s influence had spread through the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood, radicalizing the Salafist movement. Fearing for their lives, the Qutb-inspired Salafists and radical members of the Muslim Brotherhood (Qutbists, they are sometimes called) fled their home countries in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine for the only place that would give them refuge, Saudi Arabia. There they encountered an even more conservative strain of Islam commonly called Wahhabism.
Born in the vast desert wastelands of eastern Arabia, a region known as the Najd, Wahhabism (its adherents prefer the term “Muwahiddun,” meaning “Unitarians”) is a militantly puritanical movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the middle of the eighteenth century. Claiming that the purity of Islam had been defiled by “un-Islamic” beliefs and practices such as praying to saints and visiting their tombs, Abd al-Wahhab sought to strip Islam of what he considered to be its cultural, ethnic, and religious “innovations” (bida’), so as to restore the faith to its original, unadulterated, and distinctly Arab origins.
In 1932, just as the discovery of oil began to reshape both the physical and the social landscape of the Arabian Peninsula, Wahhabism became the official religion of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. By the 1960s, the kingdom had become one of the richest countries in the world. Massive skyscrapers towered over traditional city centers, as in Mecca. The city of Jeddah, in western Saudi Arabia, had transformed itself into an international hub for business and finance. To keep opposition (particularly religious opposition) in check, the Saudi regime co-opted the Wahhabi clergy to give the royals religious sanction for whatever they wished to do. This had the result of pushing young Saudis—many of whom had been born into an internationally isolated and ultraconservative society but who were suddenly finding themselves trying to cope with an increasingly opulent, cosmopolitan country awash in “Western cash” and swayed by “Western values”—away from the traditional religious authorities and into the hands of the Qutbists and radical Salafists who quickly dominated the intellectual circles of Saudi Arabia. It was the hybridization of Salafism and Wahhabism—of Islamic political activism and Saudi puritanism—that would give birth to a new, ultraconservative, ultraviolent social movement of young Muslims properly termed Jihadism.
At first, Jihadism began as just another Islamist movement focused on establishing an Islamic state. As Fawaz Gerges, America’s premier scholar of Jihadism, has shown, the early Jihadists were “religious nationalists whose fundamental goal was to effect revolutionary change in their own society.” Their primary focus was on what they termed the “Near Enemy”—Arab regimes, “hypocrite” imams, apostate Muslims—as opposed to the “Far Enemy”—Israel, Europe, and the United States. “The road to Jerusalem goes through Cairo,” Ayman Zawahiri wrote in 1995, before he had joined al-Qa’ida, when he was still a fervent Islamist and the head of a religious nationalist organization known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ).
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, however, Zawahiri and a great many of his fellow Jihadists began gradually to shift their focus from the Near Enemy to the Far Enemy—from localism to globalism. This was partly a result of the failure of Islamism to bring about the revolution it had promised for so long. The violent suppression of religious nationalism throughout the Arab world had effectively broken the back of the Islamist movement. In Algeria, parliamentary elections were canceled by the military when it appeared that the Islamists of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) might win a majority of the seats. The FIS, which had caused a stir in Islamist circles by participating in democratic elections, was swiftly outlawed and its leaders were imprisoned. The result was a devastating civil war that cost the lives of nearly 200,000 people, convincing Algeria’s more radical Islamist groups, such as the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, that political participation was a waste of time. Around the same time, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood called the Combatant Vanguard launched a rebellion in the Syrian city of Hama. In response, Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, unleashed the full force of his army upon the town, killing tens of thousands of Muslim Brothers and virtually razing Hama. Abu Musab al-Suri, the al-Qa’ida ideologue who was a member of the Combatant Vanguard but who was not one of the rebels, wrote in his memoirs that the massacre at Hama, more than anything else, made him realize that Islamism was doomed to fail. Meanwhile, the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood had abandoned its military activities and, under severe pressure from the government, reformulated itself as a political party ready to engage the establishment rather than to fight it. The Salafist groups that remained uninfluenced by Saudi Wahhabism soon began to follow the lead of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, publicly renouncing violence and returning to their roots of preaching and social welfare (though, unlike the Brotherhood, the Salafists refused to enter the political arena). By the end of the 1990s, scholars such as Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel were confidently pronouncing the death of Islamism as a viable political ideology.
Yet, beyond the seeming failure of Islamism, there was a far more significant development in the globalization of the Jihadist movement. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 drew to the region a wave of Jihadists from every corner of the world, many of whom, like Zawahiri and al-Suri, felt increasingly abandoned by the collapse of the Islamist movements in their own countries. The presence on the battlefield of tens of thousands of Muslim fighters from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Algeria, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Pakistan, Jordan, Malaysia, Indonesia—all working together for a common cause—created a sense of global community among the Jihadists that they had never before experienced. In his memoirs, Nasir Ahmad al-Bahri, who would eventually become one of bin Laden’s chief bodyguards, described a similar feeling of communal identity among the Jihadists fighting in Bosnia: “We realized we were a nation [ummah] that had a distinguished place among nations. Otherwise what would make me leave Saudi Arabia—and I am of Yemeni origin—to go and fight in Bosnia? The issue of nationalism was put out of our minds, and we acquired a wider view than that, namely the issue of the ummah.”
After the war, when the fighters returned to their home countries, they discovered that they were no longer as animated by local concerns as before. To some, the idea of building an Islamic state seemed somehow antiquated. “The struggle to establish the Islamic state cannot just be fought on a regional level,” declared a suddenly globally minded Zawahiri in December 2001, after he had merged his nationalist group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida. In Afghanistan, but also in Bosnia and Chechnya, the Sudan and Somalia, the Jihadists had been given a glimpse of a borderless future where nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, and even language were no longer paramount, where the only identity that mattered was religious identity. Their sights were now set firmly on global transformation. Their guns had turned on the Far Enemy.
By the end of the millennium, Islamism and Jihadism, once cousins, had effectively split into two opposing, rival movements: “religious nationalism” versus “religious transnationalism.” Today, Islamism remains a nationalist ideology, whereas most Jihadists would like to erase all borders, to eradicate all nationalities, and to return to an idealized past of religious communalism. An Islamist group such as Hizballah has no global agenda. Its money may come from Iran, but its agenda stops at the borders of Lebanon. The same is true of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which diligently portrays itself as a nationalist movement with exclusively nationalist ideals. Jihadism, however, rejects the very concept of nationalism; it is as much an antinationalist movement as a transnationalist one.
The Islamists of Hamas draw their ranks from the fathers of the children who drowned in the village of Um al-Nasr: the marginalized and dispossessed of society, men and women for whom there seems no future. For members of such groups, social, political, or economic deprivation is often the chief motivation for action.
Not so with Jihadism, which finds its members among the educated, urbane, middle-class Muslim kids living in, say, East London who read about the deaths of the children of Um al-Nasr on the Internet.
These young Muslims tend to be socially integrated and politically active but find traditional expressions of Islam—that is, the Islam of their parents—inadequate for confronting the challenges of the modern world. They are bound together by a master narrative of oppression and injustice, convinced of their role in the cosmic war between good and evil.
Islamist groups can sometimes be fearful of globalization, viewing it as a “Western” assault on their religious identity. Jihadism, on the other hand, is the child of globalization; it relies for its very existence on a world without borders, a world in which no barrier exists between religion and politics, between the sacred and the secular. In its drive to reestablish a global Caliphate, Jihadism seeks a deterritorialized Islam—one unrestrained by the boundaries of ethnicity and culture.
Not all Jihadists are globalists, of course, nor do all Islamists confine themselves solely to nationalist concerns (as we shall see, the attacks of September 11, 2001, have led a great many Jihadist leaders to question the viability of focusing so narrowly on the Far Enemy). But for those who continue to count themselves among the growing ranks of the Global Jihadist movement, the strategy of “dragging the Far Enemy onto the battlefield,” of expanding the goals and aspirations of Jihadism beyond local grievances, beyond nationalist concerns, the shift in focus from the Near Enemy to the Far Enemy both “resolves the mental complex in the ummah with regard to defining the enemy,” to quote the Syrian al-Suri, and frames the Jihadist struggle not as a battle between rival political ideologies but as a cosmic contest between belief and unbelief—or, in Zawahiri’s words, “between Islam and the infidels.” In such a battle, no one can remain neutral. Every Muslim has a duty to respond to the call of jihad, to rally under the banner of Islam, to come to its defense, and to join in a cosmic war whose epicenter lies here, in Israel, at the nexus of nationalist and transnationalist identities, where secular and religious nationalisms collide, often with bloody consequences, where the very concept of cosmic war was born and where, according to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition, the war will come to a final and fiery end.