When I began thinking about this book, Yasser Arafat was still alive, and Saddam Hussein was president of Iraq. No Islamic terrorist attacks had taken place in Britain, and the Middle East and its concerns were still very far from the thoughts of most people in the West. There was hope that moderates would continue to rule Iran, and sorrow that Lebanon would still be suffering under Syrian tutelage.
As it is being finished, Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister, is now off the political scene following a massive stroke. He founded a new political party, Kadima, which, under the leadership of Ehud Olmert, is now the largest party in the Knesset following an election in which their old party, Likud, trailed in fourth place. Olmert is now prime minister in a coalition that includes the Labour Party.
One of the difficulties about taking history into the present is that events can change so rapidly and unpredictably. The atrocities of 9/11 took place in the middle of my writing a textbook on terrorism, so much had to be altered, and quickly. Likewise, the death of Arafat has, some people now feel, improved the prospects of a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, even though old tensions between the Fatah base of the PLO and the overtly Islamist Hamas are continuing. But the election of Hamas as the biggest single party in the Palestinian elections of 2006 could change the situation yet again, with PLO and Hamas gangs shooting at each other in Gaza and the instant-comment pundits on television predicting a Palestinian civil war.
Similarly, in 2005, Lebanon became freer with the Syrian stranglehold diminished, although hopes for a reformist president in Iran were dashed in the elections that year. (Just to show the dangers of making predictions, the otherwise excellent US News and World Report special edition on Islam entitled ‘Secrets of Islam’ (no date) predicted confidently that former President Rafsanjani would win, only for him unexpectedly to lose almost immediately the edition was published.) And while the carnage in London of 7 July 2005 did not change British policy, it nonetheless drew the attention of British people to terrorism and issues in the Middle East in a way that might not have been the case hitherto.
Therefore, this chapter will be concerned with themes and broad ideas, in order to avoid the dangers of dating too quickly. While the individuals involved will probably change, the underlying issues are certain to be with us for some while into the future. As American specialist Ellis Billups Jr has remarked, the current conflict between Islamic terror and the West is likely to be around for many years. Similarly former CIA Director James Woolsey has referred to it as the Fourth World War and also expects it to last a very long time – presumably inferring that the Cold War figures as the third world war.
The key theme of this chapter will therefore be the rise of specifically Islamic terror, and the conflict within Islam to which many in Britain woke up on 7 July 2005. I was in the USA on 9/11, when America received a massive alarm call that should have woken the entire West. Therefore the events of 7 July nearly four years later should have come as no surprise, especially in the light of the Madrid train bombings not so long before.
Thankfully, and as all moderates of goodwill predicted, British Muslim leaders denounced the bombings that four of their fellow Muslims had carried out that day in London. For one of the key events of recent years is the impact that the Middle East and its internal conflicts is now having on the wider world, from Bali to Madrid and from London to New York.
Had this book been written not just a few years ago but some decades back, Nasser would have been the obvious choice for one of the most important Arabs of the post-war period, and certainly the most eminent Egyptian. However, there is now a good case for saying that that accolade should go to someone who, at that time, was almost entirely unknown.
In the light of the increase in religious terror since the 1990s, it is clear that by far one of the most influential and important Egyptian thinkers would now be the former school-teacher, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was executed on Nasser’s orders in 1966. The writer Peter Bergen has rightly described him as ‘the leading ideologue of the jihadist movement’. His thinking, and in particular his book Signposts Along the Road (sometimes translated as Milestones) has been crucial in the inspiration of the Islamic terror the world has witnessed since 1998, and in particular including and since September 2001.
At the heart of Qutb’s teaching was his confirmation that it was legitimate to attack apostate Muslims as well as complete outsiders. Therefore someone like Nasser, who was theoretically a Muslim, was evil, because his real ideology was not so much Islam as Arab socialism and nationalism. Qutb gained this idea from Ibn Taymiyya, who, as we saw, regarded it as lawful to attack the Mongol Khans in Iran, even though they were, nominally at least, converts to Islam.
(The academic Michael Scott Doran has suggested that bin Laden sees the current world threatened by the West in the same way that the Mongols threatened and then destroyed the great Abbasid empire in 1258 – a possible interpretation of bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa.)
As John Esposito, the American academic, has explained, in The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?:
For Qutb, Islamic movements existed in a world of repressive anti-Islamic governments and societies. Society was divided up into two camps, the party of God and the party of Satan, those committed to the rule of God and those opposed. There was no middle ground … The Islamic movement (haraka) was a righteous minority adrift in a sea of ignorance, and unbelief (jahiliyya). He dismissed Muslim governments and societies as un-Islamic (jahili), being in effect atheist or pagan.
As we saw much earlier, early Islam referred to pre-Islamic society as jahiliyya or a state of ignorance. To Qutb, Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s was no different – the same now applied to the modern Middle East. As Esposito continues:
For Qutb, the cause was the displacement of Islam’s God-centered universe by a human-centered world … [To Qutb] the West is the historical and persuasive enemy of Islam and Muslim societies, both as a political and as a religiocultural threat. Its clear and present danger comes not only from its political, military and economic power, but also from its hold on Muslim elites who govern and guide by alien standards, which threaten the identity and soul of their societies.
Nationalism and socialism are Western inventions. While Arabs like Nasser believed in them, such world views could not claim to be Islamic. Thus the new Islamic threat is against both local tyrants and innocent Westerners alike.
Palestinian terrorism, as we saw, was specifically directed against Israeli targets, including those overseas, such as the Israeli athletes killed at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Both the PLO, as a straightforward nationalist group, and Hamas, as a Muslim nationalist body, do not target anyone other than Israel.
However, what we have now is transnational terrorism, aimed both at regimes deemed un-Islamic, even if they are Muslim, and those countries deemed to be allied to such governments, and likely to corrupt ordinary Muslims by undermining their Islamic faith and practice. This latter threat has been called ‘westoxification’, a term popularized in Iran in the circles around Ayatollah Khomeini. The West is a double source of corruption – both at elite level, persuading rulers to reject Islamic government in favour of democracy or dictatorship, and at a street level, by seducing ordinary Muslims from leading pious lives.
This remains a controversial issue, in both the West and in the Islamic world. On the one hand there are writers such as the former CIA analyst, and now media commentator, Michael Scheuer, the author of books such as Through Our Enemies’ Eyes and Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. Scheuer says that it is what the West does, in terms of foreign policy and the like, that matters. On the other hand, those such as the conservative British critic and philosopher, Roger Scruton, who wrote The West vs. the Rest, claim it is because of who we are that extremists in the Islamic world dislike us.
A middle way between these views is possible – like that held by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. He has popularized the idea of a Jordanian journalist, Rami Khouri, who distinguishes between the Arab Street and the Arab Basement. (Since the Islamic world, thanks to television and radio, is now globally attuned to events in the Middle East, it might be better to refer to the Islamic Street and Islamic Basement.)
Khouri and Friedman argue that Islamic terrorists live in the Basement, but recruit from the Street. I would go on to say that the Basement hates the West and its Middle Eastern allies for who they are, and the Street dislikes them for what they do. Both theories are therefore correct and mutually compatible. The terrorists want a return to a pure Islamic state, a Caliphate, and the Street might, for example, like Coca-Cola and rock music but loathe the way they perceive the West as supporting Israel over Palestine, or the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
This means that, while the West may not wish to change its nature and thereby lessen the hatred felt for it by the Basement, it can, by judicious policy, prevent recruitment from the Street into the Basement. Much therefore depends on whether or not the West realizes that there is a conflict within the Arab world for the soul of Islam, and that when it does, it proceeds to act accordingly.
(The desire of the West to hold on to its own values – such as freedom of speech – was seen dramatically in the riots by angry Muslims worldwide in early 2006 against unpleasant caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper in late 2005.)
For after 9/11, the instinctive reaction of many in the West was to blame themselves. This was particularly true, for example, in many publications in Britain and the USA, and at the teach-ins held on American campuses to try to explain to perplexed students not just what had happened but why. But this, one can argue, was a completely Western-centred way of looking at the world, always making the West responsible for everything that goes right or wrong and refusing to attribute independent agency to anyone living outside the West’s borders.
This is far from arguing that the West bears no responsibility, since Scheuer does have a point. But to say that the West bears sole responsibility is surely not true, and is also insulting to the people living in the Middle East. Unthinking knee-jerk support either for Israel (as in some circles in the USA), or for Palestine (as on much of the political left in Europe) does not help either side in the Israeli–Palestinian struggle, just one example of where Western attitudes have made an impact in the region.
Likewise, while support for war against Iraq has surely helped recruit some to the terrorist cause, for other like-minded individuals a hatred for everything for which the West stands long predates 2003. Therefore the picture is chequered or of uneven shades of grey rather than straight black or white, even though protagonists on the various sides would not see it that way.
In fact it is better to say that the main struggle is often an internal one, with the West often the scapegoat. This one can argue was the case in 2006, when the Syrian and Iranian governments used the Danish cartoon affair to stir up anti-Western hatred, conveniently, especially in the Syrian case, diverting local anger from an oppressive internal regime. To persuade the people to hate a foreign enemy is a good way of preventing them from realizing how freedom is crushed at home.
Again, while some people from the Muslim world were talking peace, others were plotting violence. For example in the 1990s when Palestinians were engaged in peace negotiations with the West, including with Israel under US auspices, Al Qaeda was plotting the attacks on the USS Cole and on American embassies in Africa.
All in all, while some people have a conceptual preference for black and white, I think the Friedman/Khouri paradigm of the Street and the Basement works better than any other interpretation. For the Basement, it is a religious struggle – or cosmic, as Mark Juergensmeyer helpfully puts it – and an internal conflict for the soul of Islam. Much of the Street, however, is affected considerably by how the West behaves, or how ordinary people perceive what is happening in Palestine when they watch Al Jazeera. To attribute blanket motives to everyone is to make matters much too simple, and if we are to understand the situation properly we need to be able to see it from several angles at once.
Analyses of the rise of Islam often begin with the tumultuous revolution in Iran in 1979, and the overthrow of the Shah not by pro-Western modernizers, but by religious zealots determined to create a regime radically different from what had gone before. There is much to support such a view, since 1979 was the first time that Islamic radicals had managed actually to take control of a country, and in Iran’s case one of the most prosperous, oil-producing and populous nations in the region.
But two cautions need to be made.
First, Iran is a Shia country, and therefore in Islamic terms atypical of most of the Middle East, which has remained Sunni. Only in Iraq and Lebanon, which have large Shia populations, has Shiite Islam and its perspectives made a difference.
Second, and related to this, Sunni Islamic radicalism has been around for a long time, going back to the Muslim Brotherhood and similar organizations. So although Ayatollah Khomeini remains a figure of real consequence, and events in Iran have greatly encouraged Islamic militants around the world by demonstrating that Islamic regimes can come into being and radical Shia organizations, such as Hizbollah, are involved in the active struggle against Israel, it is Sunni Islam from which Al Qaeda and its many imitator groups come, and Sunni militants who have launched holy war against the West.
One of the key – and most controversial – theories of recent years in international relations has been that of a Harvard academic, Samuel Huntington. First put forward in the influential American journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, and then published in book form in 1996 under the title The Clash of Civilizations, this was a theory that came back into the news, inaccurately I believe, in 2006 over the issue of Islamic rage against the Danish cartoons.
In essence, Huntington’s message was that since the end of the Cold War the old bipolar world – the free West (the USA and its allies) vs. the Communist East (the USSR and its satellites) – had come to an end. Optimistic commentators, like Francis Fukuyama in his idealistic The End of History, had suggested that this excluded future conflict. Far from it – there was a new kind around the corner.
The bipolar Cold War would be replaced by what Huntington called a ‘clash of civilizations’. This was based not so much on secular ideology but culture, at whose heart was religion. He divided most of the world into the following groups (surprisingly leaving out Israel, the only Jewish state): the West (as a merger of Christian Catholic and Christian Protestant), the Orthodox, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Confucian and the Shinto.
Most controversial of all, he stated that the civilization of Islam had ‘bloody borders’, and that many of the world’s forthcoming conflicts would include Islam as a protagonist. So when 9/11 happened, many Americans, in newspaper comment and on television, felt that Huntington had been vindicated. So too did Huntington. But there are good reasons to suggest that such a theory is fatally flawed.
To begin with, it embodies Edward Said’s hypothesis that the West looks at the Middle East and nearby regions en masse through a distorting lens. While by no means always agreeing with Said – his criticisms of academics such as Bernard Lewis are often unfair – on this issue, he has a strong case. In reality the Middle East is far from homogenous culturally, economically, and even spiritually. There are secular republics and an Islamic state, moderate countries and totalitarian regimes. A number of countries, such as Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, have old Christian communities. In some, women are well-educated; in others conditions are similar to the Middle Ages. Some are Sunni, others Shia or with large Shiite minorities. Iran is Persian speaking, reserving Arabic for religious use. In Iraq, from 2003 onwards, many Shiite Iraqis were murdered by Sunni extremists – Muslims killing Muslims.
Outside Islam’s historic heartland, Muslim communities from West Africa to Indonesia vary even more widely – to say that Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, for example, are the same would be to stretch a point too far. In Pakistan as in Iraq, Shiite Muslims have been the victims of attacks by Sunni terrorists, pitching Muslim against Muslim once again.
In another of my books, Why the Nations Rage, I have quoted from the now former president of Iran, Khatami, a moderate who, when in power, was keen to develop what he describes as the ‘dialogue of civilizations’, a theme enthusiastically supported by the United Nations. Similar calls have been made by other Muslim peacemakers, notably the Pakistani scholar, Akbar Ahmed. In short, one could use the phrase of another Harvard academic, David Little, who refers both to the ‘confusion of civilizations’ and the fact that the Huntington thesis is over-simplistic.
Not only that, but the decision of many moderate Muslims to march against the extremists in early 2006 also proves that Islam is far from monolithic, and that many in the Islamic world deeply resent the claim of the hard-liners to be the sole spokespeople for the Muslim religion.
But while the clash of civilizations theory may be flawed, and fails to recognize the rich diversity of life in the Middle East, it does, like all Orientalist theories, inform much Western perception of the region, although in this particular case distorting outside views of the area to the detriment of those living there.
Perhaps a more impressive theory is that of a Muslim academic living in Germany, Bassam Tibi. This theory, which, alas, has had far less attention, is the ‘clash of universalisms’ in his book The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder.
Tibi’s argument is that Islam and Christianity are innately different from other religions, in that they claim universal validity. Both of them are active missionary faiths, seeking to win converts from all ethnic groups and peoples across the world. While other religions might evangelize on a limited basis, only these two state that they alone are universally true.
Take the helpful recent books Mark Juergensmeyer has written, such as Terror in the Mind of God, together with Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God and my own works. Juergensmeyer and Stern aim to show that while most religions have extremist, terrorist wings, the consequences of this are normally manifested within the religion rather than outside it. Hindu extremists from the RSS, the group that killed Gandhi, will commit atrocities against Muslims and Christians within India, but do not take the struggle outside. The same applies, as Juergensmeyer demonstrates, with Sikh terrorist groups. This is because, although there are plenty of Hindus and Sikhs living outside of India, the real struggle is for the soul of India itself and not one for worldwide domination. Hindus and Sikhs do not want to have global jurisdiction, nor do they go out of their way to win converts from among peoples of non-South Asian origin. (There are exceptions to this, but not many.)
With Islam and Christianity it is entirely different. There is a growing number of converts to Islam in the West, and in places such as Nigeria and Indonesia Christians and Muslims are in a race for converts. This has created violent clashes among those whose idea of spreading the faith is more violent than those of the more peaceful majorities within those religions. (It should be remembered that in south-east Asia, Islam was brought peacefully, and spread through traders and merchants, rather than by the sword.) The central belts of Nigeria and areas such as Aceh in Indonesia have seen bloody fights between the two groups, with people being killed on both sides. In India, since the riots in Ayodhya in 1992, Muslims have usually been the victims of angry extremist Hindu mobs, rather than the perpetrators. (Similarly, Christians have also been victims, with both local believers and missionaries being killed.)
Some of the borders of Islam, therefore, are bloody, but it is not possible to blame the Muslim faith tout court as a result. It is the global nature of Islam coming up against an equally international faith, Christianity, with both claiming universal jurisdiction, which truly makes the clash happen. Thus radical Hindus do not kill people outside India, but extremist Muslims slaughter people from New York to London via Bali and Madrid.
As Juergensmeyer also shows – including in his book The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State – many of these struggles are intra-religious. Al Qaeda is against the West, but also the Saudi regime. The extremists in Israel who murdered Rabin are as much against their own government and the peace process as they are against the Arabs.
This we see, in Islam, above all in the career of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian thinker who is now being written about in depth in such publications as The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, and in Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman.
Benjamin and Simon rightly place Qutb, a twentieth-century thinker, in their chapter on Ibn Taymiyya, the medieval thinker we have already considered, and after their assessment of the eighteenth-century leader al-Wahhab.
What is especially interesting about Qutb is that he spent time in the USA. He was shocked by an innocent church dance in Greeley, Colorado, considering it hopelessly decadent, as he did the uniformity and neatness of the suburban lawns. But as Berman points out, what really horrified Qutb was not so much the sex or the identical appearance of the houses but the ‘place accorded to religion in liberal society’, and in particular the ‘split between the sacred and the secular in modern liberalism’.
This confirms what was seen earlier in the Friedman/ Khouri idea of the Basement and the Street. What Berman is showing is that it is not so much what the West does in the Middle East or elsewhere that matters to the Basement, but the very self-identity of the West itself.
Qutb was dismayed that much of his own part of the world was following in the footsteps of the West. He encapsulated his views in his book Islam: Religion of the Future. There, he wrote, the danger to the Islamic world from the West was the latter’s attempt to confine Islam to the sphere of emotion and ritual, bar it from participating in the activity of life and check its complete predominance over every secular human activity, a pre-eminence it earns by virtue of its nature and function. In other words, only Islamic theocracy is legitimate, which is what Qutb and his sympathizers have wanted to restore ever since.
This is why Qutb judged Nasser’s Arab socialism to be so wicked. While in prison, Qutb also wrote a massive thirty-volume commentary on the Quran. When it came to people like Nasser, he commented, there were those ‘who claim to be Muslims, but perpetrate corruption’, false co-religionists who ‘oppose the implementation of God’s law’, evil rulers who ‘are seriously lacking in faith and loyalty to God and Islam’.
Emmanuel Sivan, in Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, quotes Qutb as saying about tyrants such as Nasser that in such regimes, ‘man is under the domination of man rather than of Allah’. As we saw, to Qutb, ‘everything around is jahiliyya [ignorant of Islam] … including a good part of what we consider Islamic culture’.
Thus Qutb rejected not just Arab socialism but Arab nationalism as well – including Nasser’s brief attempt to unify with Syria in a United Arab Republic. As Qutb put it bluntly to his secret police interrogators, the ‘sole collective identity Islam offers is that of the faith’. The founder of the Ba’ath Party in Syria, Michel Aflaq, was a Christian, as were numerous other Arabs around the Middle East. Unity on the basis of Arab ethnicity would include them, but that was unacceptable to a pious Muslim like Qutb.
Qutb thus rejected geographical nationalism in favour of the religious kind. As he put it:
The homeland a Muslim should cherish and defend is not a mere piece of land; the collective identity he is known by is not that of a regime … His jihad is solely geared to protect the religion of Allah and his Sharia and to save the abode of Islam and no other territory.
This is also the view of bin Laden and Al Qaeda. To extremist Muslims, there is only the Dar al-Islam (Realm of Islam) and the Dar al-Harb (Realm of War), and no other state has true legitimacy in the eyes of God. The world according to this view only has two halves – that under direct Islamic rule and the rest that is both outside it and thus in conflict with it.
(Moderate Muslims, by contrast, are active in working out how the millions of the faithful now living in the West can do so, and in a way that enables them to be both pious believers and good citizens at the same time. This is the exciting new possibility of a Realm of Peace, or Dar al-Salaam.)
Qutb therefore told his interrogators that ‘Patriotism should consist in bonds to the faith, not to a piece of land.’
But apart from the now vanished Taliban Afghanistan, and revolutionary Iran, there has not been a fully fledged Islamic state to keep the extremist Muslims happy. If even Saudi Arabia is insufficient, then no one is truly up to the mark. What extremists want thus falls into the category of a country that once existed in a Golden Age. While Christianity and Islam are unique in their combination of universal claims and their monotheism, radical Islam is very similar to many other faiths when it comes to internal motivations for religious terrorism. This has been pointed out very clearly by the LSE professor, Anthony Smith, in his seminal Chosen Peoples as well as in several of his other works. What all of these faiths look to is a heroic mythical Golden Age, when everything was as it should be, the godly members of the chosen race ruled justly and everyone followed the dictates of the faith as laid down.
In the case of Hinduism, it is nostalgia for an era before the Mughal invasions, when India was, for all intents and purposes, an overwhelmingly Hindu state. In Judaism, the extremist Zionists who wish to create a Greater Israeli state with much larger boundaries than those of the present nation, a Sanhedrin, Temple worship and besides, live in hope that this will speed the appearance of the long-awaited Messiah. Sikhs want an independent Kalistan, a country of their own as it existed before the conquests of the British.
Islamic extremists want nothing less than a full restoration of the great Caliphates. This, by definition, is considerably more than the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, because it would include restoring Islamic rule to all the former domains, Spain included, as people in Madrid found out in 2004.
(Moderate Muslims, such as Akbar Ahmed, also share a regret for the departed glories of Umayyad rule in Al-Andalus, calling it ‘Andalus nostalgia’. But they accept that times have changed and that the expulsion of the Moors from Granada in 1492 became irreversible long ago.)
All this is not to deny that there are other issues involved. Many attribute much Muslim rage against Britain in 2005 to the British decision in 2003 to join America in conquering Iraq. But such things seem to be Arab Street issues – talking about Islamic terror means going to the Basement.
It is not just the Caliphates that these groups want restored. They also want a pure Islamic government, especially of the kind seen in the seventh century before the split of 680, their Golden Age of Islam when Muhammad was alive and when the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs ruled what they consider was a united all-powerful Islamic empire.
As we saw, the description given to seventh-century Muslims is al-Salaf al-Salih, the venerable ancestors. Followers of the return to an idyllic Golden Age are therefore called salafiyya or salafi, the disciples of the ancestors. While most salafiyya are far from being extremists, all terrorists would be very much in the salafiyya camp, as a Guardian interview with young Muslims shortly after 9/11 demonstrated. As the reporters discovered, ordinary Muslim youths despaired at the extremism of some of the radicals who had tried to turn everyone at local mosques into salafists.
Michael Scott Doran, of Princeton, has written in Foreign Affairs and in How Did This Happen? that Al Qaeda ‘grew out of … [this] religious movement … [and that such extremists] regard the Islam that most Muslims practice today as polluted by idolatry; they seek to reform the religion by emulating the first generation of Muslims, whose pristine society they consider to have best reflected God’s wishes for humans’.
Doran reminds us that by no means are all salafiyya Muslims violent. Nor, as he points out, do all such extremists wish to globalize their struggle: Hamas, as already noted, restricts its use of suicide bombing and mass killing to the Palestinian struggle for independence.
Sayyid Qutb, he opines, is the ideologue of the salafiyya movement, ‘the most important Salafi thinker of the last half-century, and a popular author in the Muslim world today, nearly forty years after his death’, which was in 1966. What he accomplished, mainly in jail, was an update on Ibn Taymiyya that enabled extremist Muslims to think that they could kill apostate Muslims, especially rulers whose Islam they considered to be compromised, or only skin deep. His disciple Osama bin Laden has also issued many fatwas, or religious pronouncements, either in his name or in that of whatever front organization he was using at the time. The classic example was the one published in early 1998, and whose significance many did not fully grasp until over three years later, in September 2001.
Bernard Lewis gave an excellent treatment of it in Foreign Affairs, ‘License to Kill’, Nov./Dec. 1998. However he does not quote from it in full, and to understand properly what is going on with religious, salafiyya extremism in the early twenty-first century, we need to have all of it. (The translation is that given in Walter Laquer’s Voices of Terror, Source Books, 2004.)
Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in his Book, ‘But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war.’ Peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-’Abdullah, who said, ‘I have sent the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.’
The Arabian peninsula has never – since Allah made it flat, created its desert and encircled it with seas – been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches, and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food. In the light of grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged to discuss current events, and we should all agree on how to settle the matter.
No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone. We will list them in order to remind everyone.
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbours, and turning its bases in the peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighbouring Muslim peoples.
If some people in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans’ continued aggression against the Iraqi people using the peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader–Zionist alliance, and despite the huge numbers of those killed, which has exceeded one million, despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrible massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbours.
Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and to divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and the murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighbouring Arab state, and their endeavour to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the peninsula.
All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war upon Allah, his Messenger, and Muslims, and ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in ‘Al-Mughni’, Imam Al-Kisa’i in ‘Al-Bada’i’, Al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of Al-Islam in his books, where he said, ‘As for fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life.’
On that basis, and in compliance with Allah’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country where it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslims. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together’, and ‘fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah’.
This is in addition to the words of Almighty Allah: ‘And why should ye not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)? – women and children – whose cry is: “Our Lord, rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will help!”’
We – with Allah’s help – call upon every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call upon Muslim ulema, leaders, youths and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan’s US troops and the devil’s supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.
Almighty Allah said: ‘O, ye who believe, give your response to Allah and His Apostle, when He calleth you to that which will give you life. And know that Allah cometh between a man and his heart, and that it is He to whom ye shall all be gathered.’
Almighty Allah also says: ‘O, ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when you are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, he will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but him ye will not harm in the least. For Allah hath power over all things.’
Almighty Allah also says: ‘So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For you must gain mastery if ye are true in faith’.
Most people will not have seen a full version, so this long quotation should be helpful. For here is as good a description of salafiyya doctrine as one could hope to find anywhere – the many fatwas issued by bin Laden in October 2001 and afterwards really do no more than to add to what he states here. It also demonstrates, for instance, the way he uses both the Quran and the Hadith, the latter being the authenticated sayings of Muhammad not contained in the Quran itself.
Saudi Arabia is the holiest part of Islam, because of the presence of the two special cities, Mecca and Medina. Next in holiness is Jerusalem, and then Baghdad, for so long capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, Islam’s Golden Age. Note that it is the presence of Americans – infidels – on sacred Saudi soil and the need to get rid of them to restore Saudi ‘purity’ that so preoccupies bin Laden; pronouncements on the Palestinian issue would come later. This was underlined by the Islamic specialist Olivier Roy in the New York Times on 22 July 2005 – with bin Laden’s ultimate aim being not to help the Palestinians, but to build a theocratic Islamic Caliphate that will restore Muslim power.
Psychologically the wording is interestingly similar to much fascist literature of the 1930s, in which Jews were described as infections in pure Aryan (or Romanian, in the case of that country) soil. Roger Griffin, a British authority on fascism, describes this phenomenon as ‘palingenetics’, or myth-based ultra-nationalism. Griffin argues that fascism is an ‘of-this-world’, secular ideology, but that the Romanian version was strongly religious. I would argue that it is legitimate to apply the palingenetics paradigm to religious nationalism as well.
It is therefore possible to say that extremist salafiyya Islam wants to restore an Islamic mythical nation, religiously pure and unsullied, in the same way that Nazis and Iron Guard fascists wanted to restore a Jewish-free, racially pure German or Dacian country.
In his fatwas in October and November 2001 bin Laden referred to Islam as being a nation, and the struggle as being religious. So it is not pushing an analogy too far to say that bin Laden is advocating a new kind of religious nationalism. In his case it is the whole Dar al-Islam (Realm of Islam), the entire Muslim umma from Morocco to Indonesia, as opposed to the more geographically limited Third Reich or Greater Romania of the 1930s. The precise words may be different, but the phenomenon is the same.
But it is Islamic rather than local nationalism that is being advocated. Bin Laden protests at the way in which the West divided the Dar al-Islam, a division that began with the decline and then the fall of the Ottoman Empire. While the Western powers did not intend to commit a religious act – it was Ataturk and the Turkish Parliament that abolished the post of Caliph – this is, in the view of many commentators, not believed in the Muslim world.
The same, perhaps, is true of the creation of first the Jewish mandate and then Israel itself – it was a positive move in favour of Jews rather than an attempt to deprive good Muslims of land. (This, of course, is not how the Palestinian majority saw the arrival of Jewish settlers at the time, since they were in full occupation of the territory. Nor have they seen it that way since.)
We know now that one kind of suffering – that of Jews being persecuted in Europe – led in time to another kind, that of dispossessed Palestinians. Unfortunately, those who made Jewish settlement possible in the first place, such as Winston Churchill in 1921, did not foresee that the consequences of their actions would be with us still.
In any case, at that time there were more Palestinian Christians than there are now – in many ways they are the group that has suffered the most. As the Economist noted in late 2001, two-thirds or more of Arab-Americans, including those from Palestine, are of Christian not Muslim origin.
Gilles Kepel and Michael Scott Doran also make the significant point that in the Middle East, it is the local rulers who are the main enemy of the jihadists rather than the West. They point out that bin Laden in attacking the USA is trying to attack an enemy of Islam – he calls the USA Harbal, the name for a pre-Islamic idol and false god – but in so doing is thereby hoping to destroy the one superpower that keeps the corrupt and despotic House of Saud in being. But for America, the view goes, the Saudi regime would collapse and the peninsula could return to pure Islamic rule once again.
According to such extremists, America is the far enemy, the local regimes the near one. Destroy the ability or desire of the far enemy to support the near enemy and the local apostate regimes will crumble.
As many newspaper articles in July 2005 pointed out, the radicals will use ‘hot button’ issues to gain support. Palestine, Iraq after 2003, the crushing of dissent in Egypt and Algeria – all these are causes that can win over the Arab Street, and maybe recruit some to the Basement. But all these are means to an end, rather than the principal goal itself.
For as Michael Scott Doran reminds us, the attempts by the Islamic revolutionaries to succeed in taking over, other than in Iran, have all proved futile. Furthermore, despotic regimes are far more ruthless than any in the West at crushing dissent, as the deaths of over 100,000 people in Algeria bear witness. (Many of these were by government forces – but thousands of ordinary Algerians also died at the hands of the Islamists, who thereby proved themselves good pupils of ibn Taymiyya and Sayyid Qutb, in that the extremists were willing to shed the blood of their fellow Muslims, whom they regarded as inadequately Islamic or compromised by secular values.) One could argue therefore that it was because the attempt to overthrow the near enemy was failing – for example after the assassination of President Sadat of Egypt when the Egyptian people failed to rise in support of the supporters of jihad – that Islamic extremists such as bin Laden shifted their attention to the far enemy, the West.
Specialists differ on what this implies for the future of Islamic terror. Gilles Kepel, for example, the author of The War for Muslim Minds, feels that the supporters of jihad are on the decline, whereas Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God, thinks otherwise. The events in Britain in 2005 seem to suggest that the latter is right, since there is now a growing constituency among Muslims in Europe for extremist action. The majority of Muslims in the West are certainly against such atrocities, and have issued fatwas of their own to condemn them, but it only takes a very few recruits to cause completely disproportionate mayhem.
Iraq, the Palestine issue – often called the cancer at the heart of the Middle East – and the new danger of a nuclear Iran: all these add together to make the region as crucial as ever in the geopolitics of the early twenty-first century. Iran remains unpredictable. Few foresaw a moderate president being replaced by a hard-liner. Then, in Israel, the end of the Likud era, with a new, comparatively moderate party, Kadima, coming to power, was also unexpected. The same could be said for the Palestinian Authority area, when the inhabitants elected not the perennial PLO, but Hamas, a religious party, rejectionist in regard to Israel. Few brave pundits would have foretold in early 2005 what events would come later in the year, and in early 2006.
However, it is what happens in Iraq that will surely prove crucial so far as the Middle East is concerned. Much depends on whether Iraq can hold together, and on how Sunni Muslims and Kurds react to majority Shiite rule, even if there is some kind of coalition government. Certainly as the Egyptian, Jordanian and Algerian experience has shown, local governments can be far more ruthless in suppressing dissent than more liberally inclined Western regimes. An authentically Iraqi regime could thus be draconian with continued Sunni Al Qaeda-linked terrorism. But that in turn could also make the situation worse, rather than better, especially if it escalates into full-scale civil war.
We must hope for the best, for that is what the people of the Middle East so richly deserve after a century of foreign rule and internal conflict. But, as Zhou Enlai is famously supposed to have said about the long-term effects of the French Revolution, it is still too early to tell …