5
The New World Disorder
JIHADISM IS NOT SIMPLE TERRORISM, nor is it insurgency. It is, first, a new warfare, and second, a political agenda for fighting a nonstate war described by Sayyid Qutb as an “Islamic world revolution.” The idea of remaking the world through militancy provides the overarching context of Islamism and violence.1 The founder of Islamism, Hasan al-Banna, argued that jihad is the means by which Islamism would establish an Islamic order for the world. In so doing, al-Banna transformed the traditional Islamic notion of jihad into something new. Put differently, just as political Islam grows out of Islam but is a significantly different phenomenon, modern jihadism grows out of classical jihad.2
Understanding Jihad and Jihadism
In 2005 I published an article in the International Herald Tribune headlined “Jihadism’s Roots in Political Islam” and was amazed to find that some people were unaware of these shared roots. The militants and the so-called moderates are two branches of the same tree, two sides of the same coin. This insight was not welcomed, especially by those who look to the institutional Islamists to bring democracy to the Middle East. As we saw in the last chapter, that is unlikely to happen. In this chapter I deal with the other side of the coin, the Islamists who reinvent jihad and turn it into jihadism.3 (We can add to this book’s list of important distinctions the one between classical jihad and contemporary jihadism.) Given that jihadism is an important direction in Islamism, one needs to look at it seriously, not merely in terms of radicalism or terrorism. Despite its significance, however, jihadism is not the mainstream of Islamism. Violence is not inherent in Islamism, since the core concern is the order of the state and of the world. Islamists resort to violence only in pursuit of their goal of a shari’a state. The American debate on Islamism almost always misses this point.
In classical and traditional Islam, jihad can mean either self-exertion (jihad al-nafs) or physical fighting (qital). The two definitions are, however, inseparable.4 Muslims fought the jihad wars of the futuhat from the seventh through the seventeenth centuries in order to extend dar al-Islam (the world of Islam) throughout their known world. These wars were in line with the Qu’ranic concept of jihad as war, not terror. Long before Carl Clausewitz formulated his theory of war, Muslims abided by rules and a code of conduct that limited targets in line with humanitarian standards. Although these rules fell far short of the practices prescribed by the Geneva Conventions, they still constituted a regulated system by which jihad would be conducted by regular armies. The practices of modern jihadism as a pattern of an irregular war waged by nonstate actors clearly do not conform to these standards.
The question is how well Western scholars and policymakers5 understand the difference between classical jihad and modern jihadism.6 In June 2010, while I was in Washington, D.C., in the final stages of revising this manuscript, I encountered the thinking of John Brennan, the top counterterrorism adviser to President Obama, who gave a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The speech was covered by the Associated Press and is also accessible on the internet, from which I quote this passage:
As the President’s principal advisor on homeland security and counterterrorism, I want to address how this national security strategy is guiding our efforts to secure our homeland.… Our enemy is not “terrorism” because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not “terror” because terror is a state of mind.… Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.… Describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie—propagated by al Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism—that the United States is somehow at war against Islam.… Our enemy is al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates.… We will take the fight to al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates.7
Brennan, speaking for the Obama administration, abandons altogether the terms “Islamism” and “jihadism” and reduces “al-Qaeda and its affiliates” to violent extremists who have nothing to do with Islam and Islamism. This is an improvement over the previous administration’s “war on terror,” but in reacting to that doctrine Brennan rejects too much.
This issue resembles in a way the distinction between Judeophobia and antisemitism that I discussed in Chapter 3. I began that chapter by asking whether Islamist Jew hatred might not be, rather than antisemitism, a “frustrated expression of justifiable political grievances”—that is, something completely unrelated to Islam and Islamism. In the analysis I showed that this is not the case. Similarly, we may ask here what jihadist terrorism is and how to fight it in a way that does not alienate the West from ordinary Muslims. Brennan believes that “addressing the political, economic, and social forces that can make some people fall victim to the cancer of violent extremism” would help, and he adds, “We seek to show that legitimate grievances can be resolved peacefully through democratic institutions and dialogue.” In line with my reasoning in Chapter 3, I consider jihadist Islamism not merely a tactic chosen to effect the redress of particular grievances, which can be abandoned once the jihadists become convinced that equally effective but less costly tactics are available. Instead, it is an interpretation of Islam in which Islamic tradition undergoes an invention that results in the religious legitimation of violence.
Like the scholar Daniel Varisco, Brennan not only misses the distinction between Islam and Islamism, he also accepts a definition of Islamism as inherently violent. These two confusions lead him to assume that to say that one is fighting Islamism is tantamount to declaring all of Islam a violent enemy. Like Varisco, he would abolish all of these terms and insist that the enemy is specifically, and only, al-Qaeda, which is artificially disconnected from Islam, Islamism, and jihadism. This is far too reductive. There are other ways to exonerate Islam from violence—and to protect Muslims from prejudice—than by denying the obvious. We can understand these phenomena only when we dissociate not just Islam but also the contemporary phenomenon of Islamism from violence.
Of course, this hardly means that all Islamist movements are nonviolent. One faction within Islamism is committed to violence, and this branch is identified in this chapter as jihadist Islamism. To be sure, jihadism does not stand outside Islam: it bases all of its actions on religionized politics. Islamists who are prone to violence also engage in shari’a reasoning. There is in Islam a tradition that revolves around the legitimization of just war, as shown by John Kelsay in Arguing the Just War in Islam.8 But for Islamists, these arguments take place within a wholly novel interpretation of jihad.9 One cannot repeat enough that Islamist violence is not mere terror. It is, to paraphrase Clausewitz, a pursuit of politics by other means.
How Not to Win Friends
Some in the West have an image of Islam as a “religion of the sword.”10 This distorted view—supported by such examples as the Saudi Arabian flag and the name of Muammar Qadhafi’s son, Saif-ul-Islam, which means “Sword of Islam”—represents a misperception of Islam that affects any inquiry into jihadism. The idea that religiously inspired violence is historically central to Islam encourages the conflation of modern jihadism with traditional jihad. Not even the pope seems quite sure of the difference. In a September 2006 lecture at Regensburg University entitled “Religion, Reason, and the University—Memories and Reflections,”11 Pope Benedict attempted to raise the theme of violence as a subject for discussion between Islam and the West by quoting the Byzantine emperor Manuel II, Paleologus, a Christian, who in 1392 criticized Islam’s tolerance of violence for the spread of religion. Unlike professional politicians, Benedict refuses to employ a speechwriter. He writes his speeches alone, as if he were a scholar who seeks no advice, and this habit sometimes gets him into trouble. In his lecture the pope quoted the following line from Manuel’s Dialogue Held with a Certain Persian: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” This is undeniably a clumsy way to raise any issue with followers of the Prophet, especially when one represents the church that brought us the Crusades and the Inquisition. Still, the underlying message was entirely reasonable: the pope wished to engage the Islamic world in a discussion of whether it is ever legitimate to use violence to spread faith. It is not the request that was wrong but the way he made it. The response, largely orchestrated by Islamists, was worldwide Muslim outrage.
I have no doubt that the pope’s intentions were benign. I do not buy into the suspicion that he was driven by Islamophobia and instead believe that he intended to involve Muslims in an honest dialogue between civilizations in which violence is supposed to be outlawed. Why is the request to dissociate religion from violent proselytization a problem? Why the outrage and the accusations of Islamophobia? Was it the single reference that struck a raw nerve, or the larger issue of religious violence? Deplorably, not only Islamists but also ordinary Muslim opinion leaders seemed to seize on the excuse of outrage to distance themselves from this proposed dialogue. Most Muslims believe that the expansion of Islam was well served by jihad, which they see as a peaceful pursuit that has nothing to do with war. The historical facts do not support this contention.
The image Muslims have of themselves as people of a peaceful religion must be contrasted with the undisputed historical fact that the pursuit of da’wa (proselytization) was combined with jihad wars. Nonetheless, it is taboo for Muslims to associate da’wa with violence, because they contend that jihad is peaceful. The literal meaning of jihad is self-exertion. Muslims may use violence in the expansion of their religion, but only in self-defense, when “unbelievers” prevent them from spreading Islam. This contention notwithstanding, it is a fact that the Byzantine Empire was brought down in 1453 by Islamic conquest, which was by no means an act of self-defense but rather one of military aggression preceded by years of jihad wars. Constantinople was conquered by force and the son of Manuel II was killed. The city, transformed into Islamic Istanbul, became the capital of the last imperial order of Islam. The earlier conquest of Spain was a similar action of violence, not peaceful proselytization, and not in any way “self-defense.” Jihad means self-exertion, but it also means qital, or war. Still, classical jihad was warfare, never terrorism.
The pope’s intention in his Regensburg lecture, as he reiterated in his subsequent public apology to Muslims, was to argue that “the genuine dialogue of cultures and religions is … urgently needed today.”12 To this legitimate point I would add that the dialogue needs also to be honest. Both sides must candidly address the relationship of violence and religion. The terror attacks in the United States in 2001 and in Europe between 2004 and 2006 were committed in the name of Islam and had no other legitimation than jihad. These assaults continue to give rise to problems that cannot be ignored. The rising Muslim immigration in Europe is an issue as well. The lack of integration of this diaspora contributes to the narrative of “Islam under siege” and legitimates recruitment for jihadism.
Thus we have within Islam an impasse characterized by self-deception on both sides. Ordinary Muslims wish to ignore the violent jihad of the past, while jihadists wish to pretend that their very different form of violence continues an ancient and honored tradition. The true relation of jihadism to jihad is more nuanced than either side acknowledges. Traditional jihad includes violence, but it is regular warfare, not terror. Jihadism is a contemporary phenomenon rooted in political Islam. The purpose of this chapter is to relate violence in Islam to the contemporary context of jihadism pursued by Islamists. I do this not merely to make subtle academic points but because a proper understanding of this relationship has implications for national and international policies. To understand how jihad has been reinvented by Islamism into an instrument of terror, one first needs some basic knowledge about the doctrine of jihad and its history.13
Classical Jihad
The history of jihad begins not in Mecca, with the commencement of Islamic revelation in 610, but rather with the establishment of the new Islamic polity in Medina in 622—the polity that modern Islamists, in an invention of tradition, have upgraded to an “Islamic state.” In the Islamic calendar following the hijra, the migration of the Prophet, this is the Year One. After 622, and in particular after 632—in the aftermath of the death of the Prophet—the new religion was spread by a combination of peaceful proselytization, trade, and jihad wars. Various Islamic empires based in the Middle East gained control over North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Balkans.14 Muslims grew convinced of their superiority over their infidel enemies, who were to be subdued by jihad. This imperial expansion took place from the seventh century to the seventeenth, in the context of jihad wars.
Medieval faqihs, Islamic jurists, dealt with non-Muslims only when the cultural other was seen as a threat, defined in terms of “the house of war,” or in a context of submission through conversion and acceptance of dhimmi (protected minority) status.15 These fiqh jurists were powerful opinion leaders in Islam because they acted at the same time as ulema (men of knowledge) equipped with the religious authority to determine what is right and what is wrong. Authoritative faqihs conceded a temporary cessation of hostilities only in the emergency case of Islamic weakness. In general, Islam is viewed by its believers as a religious mission designed for all humanity. Muslims are religiously obliged to disseminate the Islamic faith throughout the world. The Qur’an says in sure 34, verse 28: “We have sent you forth to all mankind.” Muslims believe that spreading the Islamic faith is not an act of aggression but rather a fulfillment of that Qur’anic commandment. They resort to violence only to subdue those who resist this mission of da’wa, and they see this not as aggression but as a defensive act against the enemies of Islam. If non-Muslims refuse the option of peaceful submission, then Muslims are obliged to wage war against the unbelievers. They argue that if non-Muslims were to submit to the call of da’wa through either conversion or subjugation, there would be no violence, which is thus the fault of the infidels. Peace requires that non-Muslims accept the status of dhimmi and pay a jizya (tax). World peace, the final stage of da’wa, can be reached only when all of humankind has converted or submitted to Islam. Thus the literal translation of da’wa as “invitation” is not quite correct. One can turn down this invitation, but only at the price of being subject to violent jihad.
In Islamic belief, the resort to force to disseminate Islam is not harb (war)—a word used only to describe the use of force by non-Muslims—but jihad. Islamic conquests are not hurub (the plural of harb) but futuhat (opening). They open the world to the entrance of Islam. Jihad is the instrument of futuhat expansion. Relations between dar al-Islam, the abode of peace, and dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers, thus remain, by both doctrine and history, in a state of war.
In short, jihad is understood by Muslims as a religious duty, a defensive war to break resistance to Islam’s mission of expansion. I know of no Muslim who has the courage to reform this unacceptable and illogical belief. Add to this the Islamic doctrine that admits no perpetual peace with non-Muslims. Only hudna, temporary peace, is allowed with unbelievers. This hudna, an intermediate state between war and peace, is a standard condition for relations between Muslims and non-Muslim: all treaties between Muslim and non-Muslim powers are considered temporary. Islamic jurists differ on what length of time counts as “temporary.” In the authoritative commentaries, the length of this hudna is, on average, ten years. Israeli students of Islam thus wonder when the peace of Camp David, accomplished with the mediation of President Carter in 1979, shall expire. If we could apply to Islamic tradition the European distinction between just and unjust wars (a concept that is foreign to the Islamic fiqh doctrine), we might say that when Muslims wage war for the dissemination of Islam, it is a just war (futuhat), and when non-Muslims attack Muslims or resist their jihad, it is an unjust war (’idwan). But the application of the just war concept to jihad would be a Western reading, not the way Muslims themselves view the issue.
From Traditional Jihad to Jihadism
Traditional jihad was a war carried out by the Islamic Empire and symbolically led by the ruling caliph in his capacity as imam of all Muslims. The caliph acted as head of state, and the jihad war he led was subject to rules regarding tactics and legitimate targets.16 Jihadism is a reinterpretation of jihad, much as Islamism is a political reinvention of Islam. It is not simply terror practiced by mavericks creating havoc but a variety of “irregular warfare.”17 This new jihadist pattern of warfare is waged by nonstate actors with no recognition of previously accepted rules or limits on targets. The schism within Islam between Sunna and Shi’a also matters to jihadism.18 My research on this new warfare aligns me with scholars like Martin van Creveld in his study of “low intensity war” and Kalevi Holsti in his description of “war of the third kind.” Jihadism is a religionized ideology that legitimates this form of irregular warfare by pairing it with harb al-afkar (war of ideas). Jihadist war is presented as a just war of the oppressed against their oppressors. Nazis and communists also joined violence with propaganda in a way that resembles the Islamists’ war of ideas.
The jihadist war articulates what the late Hedley Bull once described as “the revolt against the West.” This revolt contests the hegemony of the West, but it also assumes a cultural dimension: it is directed against “Western values as such,”19 including the secularism of the Westphalian synthesis on which the international system rests.20 The Peace of Westphalia, two treaties signed in 1648, not only recognized the sovereignty of states but established certain freedoms of (Christian) religion and prohibited nations from interfering with one another’s religious establishments. This is the secularism that Islamists reject. They would reinsert religion into world politics, not so much as a faith and a cultural system but as a politicized ideology.
The new revolt also legitimates the violence practiced by nonstate actors. Jihadist Islamists see themselves as warriors, not criminals. They view their resort to violence as “terror in the mind of God,”21 as Mark Juergensmeyer aptly titles his book on jihadism. Islamism is religionized politics and jihadism is religionized war. I mean this not in the traditional sense of a “religious war,” or a European-style war over religion, but in the sense of the return of the sacred: the articulation and legitimation of warfare in religious terms. Jihadism is a divine war, a “global jihad,” in which violence is only an element. Hezbollah, for instance, views the outcome of its war with Israel in July and August 2006 as a “divine victory.”22 Its jihadists employed violence not as “criminals,” as a prominent student of war put it at a major international security meeting, but as true believers fulfilling a farida ghaibah (neglected duty) by purifying the world of its sins and Western vices. The lack of respect for rules—Hezbollah, for instance, used the population of south Lebanon as a shield, leading to many civilian deaths—grows out of their war’s divine status. What do international conventions matter when the stakes are cosmic?
Another essential part of the agenda is the radicalization and indoctrination of young Muslims in order to recruit them as loyal and obedient soldiers of jihadist Islamism. This again is a common feature of totalitarian movements. The collective memories of imperial Islamic conquests as futuhat, and the traditional view of jihad as defensive, are revived by the Islamist movement in the notion of “Islam under siege.” This justifies jihadist irregular warfare anywhere in the world as a defensive action.
It has become risky to engage in the study of jihadism because such study is regarded even by some Western scholars as an indication of Islamophobia. The impulse is to minimize the jihadists’ importance and pretend to do so out of sensitivity to Muslim feelings. The result is to deny the connection between jihadism and terror as well as the phenomenon’s roots in political Islam. Too few Western scholars are willing to contest the jihadists’ claim to be the spokesmen of the umma and, as “true believers,” the legitimate representatives of Islam.
The warriors of the new irregular war represent a complex issue in international relations.23 Islamist jihadism is the ideology of many transnational movements, all legitimated by politicized religion and embedded in global networks. To understand this phenomenon one has to free oneself from the logic of interstate war. Traditional international relations scholars, though well aware of the decline of interstate war and the rise of nonstate actors, tend to overlook two basic aspects of the problem. First, the need to come to terms with changed patterns of violence and war is undermined by a lack of knowledge in strategic studies about culture, religion, and history. Without this, no grasp of jihadism is possible. Second, the terrorists act within networks of transnational religion. They are not criminals but warriors waging a new kind of cosmic war in the name of God. Their concept of jihadist violence is rooted in an ideology24 that religionizes existing conflicts.
The West and the New Proletariat
Any analysis of jihad and jihadism risks offending Muslims, especially when the issues are addressed frankly. Islamists take advantage of this sensitivity; they use the accusation of Islamophobia to mobilize their followers and silence their critics. They also seize any pretext to prevent vigorous and candid debate about jihadism and its roots in political Islam. This is what happened to the pope, and it will continue to happen. In short, complaints of Western Islamophobia have been a most useful instrument in the hands of the Islamists and a basic part of their war of ideas. Jihadists defame any linking of Islamism with terrorism as a “war on Islam.” It is unfortunate that there are serious Muslims—not only Islamists—who voice this perception.
The birth of jihadism coincides with the birth of Islamism. The founder of the Movement of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, set out all of jihadism’s essential features.25 The claim of a return of history, the religionization of politics and the politicization of religion, the use of collective memories of early Islamic conquests26 to revive the Islamic dream of a “remaking of the world”27 through jihad, and the claim that Islamist doctrine represents the authentic jihad can all be found in al-Banna’s writings. His decisive 1930 publication Risalat al-Djihad laid the foundations for the jihadist-Islamist ideology. Moreover, al-Banna practiced what he preached. Today, there is a part of the Muslim Brotherhood that pretends to have abandoned jihadist warfare and instead engages in the more promising war of ideas. This venture, which has proved more successful than the resort to violence, blurs the distinction between jihadism and institutional Islamism.
None of these issues are well understood in the West, which explains the lack of appropriate policies for dealing with Islamism. This will have to change. Recently, in a development most Europeans ignore or deny, Europe has also seen a religionization of social conflicts. Peter Neumann writes that the connection between jihad and jihadism matters to the rising and intensifying Muslim immigration to Europe.28 The Muslim Brothers have established a following among the European diaspora of Islam.
Western politicians need to avoid the mistakes of the second Bush administration and of American conservatives in the post-Bush era, and must beware of raising general suspicions against Muslims. Disregarding the difference between Islamism and Islam only validates the followers of the jihadist ideology in their allegation that Islam and its people are being targeted by the West. This is why a successful strategy against terrorism requires Muslim-Western cooperation.
Unfortunately, one of the least helpful groups in this regard has been the political left. If jihadism is a revolutionary ideology of the religious right, why does the left support it? It is not possible to prove that the founders of Islamist ideology have ever read Marx or Lenin, but a close reading of the Islamists’ prose strongly suggests some level of familiarity. The Islamist use of Marxist-Leninist terms shows an acquaintance with the vocabulary of Marxist secular internationalism, even if Islamist internationalism is religious and emerges from a politicization of traditional Islamic universalism. One may read Sayyid Qutb as having adopted the Marxist-Leninist idea of world revolution and applied it to jihad. Qutb writes: “Islam pursues a complete and comprehensive thawrah (revolution).… Jihad is an obligation of Muslims to carry out this revolution to establish hakimiyyat Allah (God’s rule on the entire globe).… It follows that jihad is an idea of thawrah alamiyyah (world revolution).… In this understanding, Islam is a permanent jihad for a remaking of the world along the nizam salih (just system).29
In Marxist thought the vehicle of revolution is the proletariat. This revolution did not happen during Marx’s lifetime. Lenin replaced the proletariat with the party of revolutionary cadres. Al-Banna and Qutb also speak of a permanent revolution that will realize Islamist goals. Unlike the futuristic Marxist utopia of a classless free society, the Islamist utopia is backward-oriented: it first constructs an imaginary “Islamic state” and projects it, in a new reading of Islamic history, into the past. In this reading the first Islamic state was allegedly established in Medina 622. But the Prophet in his hadiths never used the term “dawla” (state). Second, the restoration of this “Islamic state” (despite some Western misconceptions, Islamists do not speak of a restoration of the caliphate) is to be accomplished by a revolution that restores Islam’s historic glory. This vision is constructed out of collective memories and identity politics. The Islamist internationalism it reflects could be a religious version of secular Marxist internationalism. Islamists argue that Muslims have fallen into jahilliyya, ignorance, and lack political consciousness and so need a surrogate to act on behalf of the besieged and oppressed umma: these are the jihadist revolutionaries. Their role is that of the Leninist party which speaks on behalf of the dormant proletariat. They act in the belief that they are “the true believers.”30
Pax Islamica
Despite the outpouring that has swamped the book market since 9/11, the place of jihadism31 in political Islam is not well analyzed in the Western literature on Islamic politics.32 Many of these books employ the old language of “holy terror.” Some equate the origins of jihadism with the rise of Osama bin Laden. I repeat that jihadism is historically rooted in the twentieth-century phenomenon of political Islam and predates bin Laden by many decades. Islamism is something other than what is described as “Islamic politics.”
Qutb’s concept of “jihad as a permanent Islamic world revolution” is an advance over the simple thinking of al-Banna, who lacked Qutb’s intelligence. The overarching goal of jihadism is to establish hakimiyyat Allah, God’s rule, as a political order, first in the world of Islam and then in the world at large. This new order would replace the Western secular Westphalian system with an Islamic one. This political goal is common to both jihadism and institutional Islamism.
The only difference is that jihadism33 adds a new concept of war. This is not well understood by such Western experts as Marc Sageman,34 who focuses on terror and overlooks the ideological dimensions of jihadism. To deal with jihadism as pure terror35 is to miss the point. A cultural and religious underpinning serves to legitimate global jihad and keep it rooted in political Islam. Terror is simply a means to achieve the vision of a pax Islamica, the world order that is to emerge after jihad has toppled the international Westphalian order of secular states and that is the endpoint of the Islamic world revolution. These are the ideological foundations of terrorism. We lack a strategy for dealing with them. It is most disturbing to see “scholarly” publications attacking analyses of these foundations and accusing their authors of Islamophobia.
Jihadist Islamists cultivate an Islamic nostalgia36 with their claims of a “return of history” and a return to the Islamic glory of the past. But their terrorism lacks authenticity: it is based on an invention of tradition. The Islamist visions are strictly modern, embedded not in the mythic past but in the postbipolar twenty-first-century world. The return of the sacred, the ascendance of nonstate actors in world politics, and the emergence of transnational movements that act globally do not represent the return of any known history. The transformation of classical jihad37 from a holy war for the spread of Islam—subject to rules—into an irregular war without rules, carried out as an Islamist world revolution, is likewise a modern invention. All of these things occur in a world-political context that originates in the nostalgia of political Islam but is new.
This novelty compels us to abandon traditional wisdom and engage in new reasoning to understand how the rise of politicized religion has become one of the major issues of international affairs. This political religion that legitimates jihad in the path of God articulates an intercivilizational conflict that is not about terror but about the order of the world.38 The Kantian concept of world peace based on secular, democratic nation-states is challenged by Qutb’s vision of an Islamic peace39 achieved by jihad through a world revolution.
The West as a Competing Civilization and the New World Disorder
The political agenda of the jihadist branch of Islamism is articulated in cultural terms as a war against a competing civilization. It is essential to understand that the cause of antagonism is not only the outsize political power that underpins Western hegemony but Western values and knowledge. Islamists view Cartesian rationalism as an expression of “epistemological imperialism.” The intellectual undercurrent of jihadism is a de-Westernization of the world. Alongside their concept of world order, the Islamists would impose a new cultural narrative.
To explain this issue I draw on the tradition of Hedley Bull, as well as Stanley Hofmann’s idea of an emerging “world disorder.”40 The Islamist threat is neutralized by Islamists’ inability to create the order they envision. They resort to violence but lack the power to accomplish what they pronounce. Nonetheless, jihadism does not remain idle. The result is international destabilization: the irregular war of jihadism helps Islamists compensate for their enemy’s technological superiority, but this asymmetrical warfare cannot take them beyond destabilization and disorder. The envisioned order of “God’s rule,” despite its ability to mobilize followers, will always remain a mirage. Nonetheless, the Islamist internationalism of global jihad has to be taken most seriously as an ideology and movement of world revolution in postbipolar politics.
Thus the issue with, for example, al-Qaeda41 relates to more than mere terrorism. Al-Qaeda is engaged in a civilizational competition between two concepts of order. This is not Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” which in any case he saw as impending and unpreventable. The return of religion to world politics has already happened, and it presents a most pertinent and urgent problem for international security. There is a need for new approaches in the study of international relations to account for politicized religion as one of the major sources of the current crisis of order.
To properly understand the ongoing competition between civilizations over the order of the world, Western experts must realize that structural globalization does not bring any automatic universalization of Western values. On the contrary, development generates a crisis of meaning that results in the emergence of a great variety of non-Western defensive cultures. Globalization of structures without Westernization of values has been occurring worldwide. Seen in this context, the return of the sacred in a political shape must be viewed as an effort at de-Westernization. This novelty is not properly understood in the West. Western cultural relativism is not the solution but rather a dead end that exacerbates the incomprehension. Postmodern cultural relativists seem unable to comprehend that Islamism is an absolutist ideology that never compromises. In an encounter of relativism and absolutism, the cultural relativists are the losers.
For a proper understanding of contemporary international affairs, the work of Raymond Aron and Hedley Bull is more promising. The Islamist revival’s civilizational challenge to the existing world order embraces political, cultural, and religious issues alike. Perceiving a “Judeo-Christian conspiracy”42 directed against Islam, jihadist Islamists think their “revolt against the West”—captured well in Bull’s essay on the subject—is the right resort. They mobilize their jihad in pursuit of de-Westernization. The implication is that there can be no world peace without a change in the Islamist worldview.
Raymond Aron notes that throughout the history of humankind there has been a heterogeneity of civilizations. The ideological commitment of persons like bin Laden and globally networked movements like al-Qaeda to the Islamist order of pax Islamica ignores this civilizational diversity. The Islamist, in challenging the existing world order, creates dividing lines that would separate Muslims from the rest of humanity. This is the context in which relations between Islam and the West are now developing. The trenches are being dug deeper every day.
Here I am compelled once again to invoke the precursor and foremost thinker of contemporary political Islam, Sayyid Qutb. Perceiving a deep civilizational crisis of the West, he challenged the existing world order in cultural terms. Only the competing civilization of Islam, he believed, could resolve this crisis, and it had to do so by establishing Islamic dominance. In his pamphleteering, in particular Signposts along the Road and World Peace and Islam, Qutb proposed that only Islam was in a position to overcome the global crisis and rescue humanity. To reiterate: this is the source of the worldview of bin Laden and of all the al-Qaeda jihad fighters. It is not the view of a “crazed gang” or of criminals but the authoritative expression of mainstream jihadist Islamism. The rejection of the Westphalian order in world politics and its replacement by an Islamic order is shared by all branches of Islamism, peaceful and jihadist.
Hedley Bull never read Qutb, but he was aware that the civilizational “revolt against the West” is best “exemplified in Islamic fundamentalism.”43 With the postbipolar crisis of international order, Qutb’s ideas have become widely disseminated in the world of Islam. By articulating a new role for Islam, they give the Islamists great appeal. The fact that political Islam can be traced back to 1928 and the founding of the Society of Muslim Brothers shows clearly that it predates the end (and even the beginning) of the cold war. Yet for much of its history political Islam could not mobilize much popular support. What Aron called the “heterogeneity of civilizations” was veiled by the bipolar world order. Today, this veil is gone. Heterogeneity, reemergent, is underpinned by politicized religion.
That the civilizational project of an Islamist order is unlikely to succeed does not mean that its chief target, the Westphalian order, is safe. One may ask, are we heading “beyond Westphalia”?
There is nothing sacred about the Westphalian order. It is fully legitimate to question its existence and attempt to renegotiate its foundations under conditions of a changed world. Still, neither the violence of jihadist Islamism nor the ideology of hakimiyyat Allah, divine rule, offers a promising alternative. These options are not even approved by all Muslims, because Islamism is not Islam. I doubt that non-Muslims and democratic Muslims would accept the Islamist concept of order. However deep the crisis of the secular nation-state may grow, for a religiously diverse humanity, no alternative based on a particular religion can be admitted. Why?
On the state level, the nizam Islami (Islamic system)44 is a totalitarian political pronouncement that is not acceptable to anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who is committed to freedom and democracy. Experts familiar with the original literary sources of Islamism know well that Islamists talk about this nizam, not about the restoration of the traditional order of the caliphate of Sunni Islam, because the caliphate is not acceptable to the Shi’a. The ecumenical-minded ideologues of political Islam prefer to unite the umma under the nonsectarian banner of an overall Islam directed against non-Muslims. We can conclude that the Islamist is a political man of action first, and simultaneously a man of religion by worldview. Therefore one can speak, as Jansen does, of “the dual nature of Islamic fundamentalism.”45 Religion, ethnicity, and culture are all sources of conflict between Islam and the West. In the case of jihadism, intercivilizational competition is the motive for violence. It is foolish to consider Islamist jihadism a passing phenomenon or a reaction to current events. In Chapter 1 I took issue with Gilles Kepel, who predicts the end not only of jihadism but of Islamism altogether. This is a grave mistake. Jihadist Islamism is much more than terrorism, and it needs to be understood in a way that moves beyond the facile rhetoric of a “clash of civilizations” or the obsessions of a “war on terror.”
Civilizations Do Not Fight Wars, but Jihadist Warriors Do
The first suggestion of an approach to understanding the new challenges to world order was presented by Barry Buzan in his 1991 book People, States, and Fear,46 which addressed the problem in a way that went beyond conventional military wisdom and interstate relations. A decade later, the 9/11 attacks reminded everyone that security studies will have to deal with a new pattern of war: the irregular war of jihadism. But while the violence of terrorism needs to be understood from a new perspective, we have not traveled very far down this road. The complexity of the war in Afghanistan against jihadism remains poorly understood by most analysts. The change of administrations from Bush to Obama has brought no change in the level of understanding. Commentators and policymakers alike reduce the new warfare to an “insurgency” and pay too little attention to religion and culture. The new American military strategy in Afghanistan relies heavily on counterinsurgency tactics developed during the Iraq War. These tactics are better than sending columns of tanks, but they address only part of the problem—and not the most important part. To be sure, the war is not between the civilizations of Islam and the West, but jihadism is warfare fought by violent Islamists. They are warriors, not “criminal extremists.”
Statistically oriented political scientists like Robert Pape,47 who argues in his 2005 book Dying to Win that jihadism is a social movement that has little to do with religion, fail to understand jihadism or the religious ideology that underpins it. The concept of a politicized world religion cannot be grasped properly with quantitative tools. To understand how a religious formula can mobilize a vision of world revolution, one needs to grasp how Islam is addressed as one invented umma and how this imagined community is mobilized against the West. Can political Islam succeed in turning the imagined Islamic umma to the service of its jihadist ideology of irregular war? No quantitative method could ever answer this question.
Islamists who refer to religion in the pursuit of nonreligious ends constitute a minority of the Islamic umma, but they are well organized and well equipped, and their message is appealing to many. Their small numbers matter less than the efficiency of their global networks and their ability to mobilize. These groups are very capable of creating disorder through irregular war. How can this warfare be contained?
I have raised many fundamental distinctions in this book: between Islamism and Islam; between jihadism and classical jihad.48 Along with these there are the more familiar differences within Islam between Sunnite and Shi’ite Muslims,49 exemplified by the Shi’i-Sunni conflict in Iraq. In fact there exists within Islam a greater religious diversity that can be politicized. This politicization is generating violence within the umma itself among Islam’s many divergent denominations and sects. The African varieties of Islam are entirely different from the pattern that prevails in Southeast Asia. Islam on the Indian subcontinent is a case in itself. Of course, the original Arab pattern of Islam is supposed to stand above religious and cultural diversity. Nevertheless, there is no monolithic Islamism.
Though it originated as a Sunni ideology, Islamist jihadism denies Islamic diversity and claims to unite all Muslim believers as soldiers of jihad. In this guise it is capable of borrowing ideas from other sects. The Muslim Brotherhood in its early years did not practice suicide terrorism, which is alien to Sunni Islam. It is a recent Shi’i innovation that has been adopted by Sunni Islamists. The Shi’i concept of taqiyya (dissimulation) has also been adopted by Sunni Islamists and given the new shape of iham (deception). Despite its sectarian mentality, Sunni Islamist movements lean on Shi’i martyrdom and borrow its legitimation of terror as tadhiya (sacrifice). What matters is that Islamist nonstate actors speak religionized politics in the language of multiple cultures. Long before Huntington, Islamists had developed their rhetoric of a “clash of civilizations.” The field of international relations needs to follow the Islamists’ lead and focus less on the state and more on religion, culture, ethnicity, and civilizations.
Yet civilizations cannot function as actors in world politics. Samuel Huntington was aware of this problem, and he believed he could bypass it by stating that each civilization can be led by a “core state.” He failed to see that this construct does not hold for Islam, for the simple reason that none of the fifty-six nominally Islamic nation-states is in a position to lead the entire umma. In addition, even though this group includes some rogue states, none of them is the central cause of jihadism in world politics. Iran’s state-sponsored jihadism comes the closest, but jihadism would thrive without it.50
The jihadist movements that constituted a threat in the “war on terror” are all nonstate actors. It is unfortunate that the American occupation of Iraq has inadvertently strengthened jihadism and the popular Muslim support for it and also provided Iran with a new venue in which to support Islamist groups. The war removed an ugly dictatorship but introduced new problems. The power vacuum created by the fall of Saddam Hussein was filled by Iran, which has become a regional superpower.51
Iran now claims to lead the Islamist “revolt against the West.” This notion turns an intercivilizational conflict into an international conflict52 and makes abundantly clear the importance of civilizational worldviews in world politics. In professional international relations and political science, with rare exceptions such as the enlightening article by Daniel Philpott published in the influential international relations journal World Politics in 2002, this issue is not yet part of the research agenda.
One can rightly criticize the American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq as a military occupation. But to speak of “crusaders,” as some U.S. scholars do, is to take sides in the propaganda war. Conflicting worldviews are involved. The conflict of worldviews and of different sets of norms and values has to find its place in the analysis of security. After all, the idea of order is always based on civilizational values, and intercivilizational conflict revolves around normatively different understandings of the state, law, religion, war and peace, and knowledge. In my 1995 book War of Civilizations, I do not deal at all with the military but rather focus on conflicting concepts of world order. One may argue that value-related conflicts have nothing to do with military capabilities, because civilizations have no armies. This is true, but values contribute to the emergence of real conflicts in a “war of civilizations.” The Islamists, whose military capabilities are not institutionalized, explicitly conceive their global jihad as such a war of ideas and worldviews.
The war of ideas was clearly an essential part of Hezbollah’s jihadist warfare in Lebanon in July–August 2006, and of Hamas’s in 2008–9. In neither case was the issue restricted to a movement fighting alone in an irregular war. The front was civilizational. On the state level Shi’ite Iran has become—thanks to the American invasion of Iraq—a regional power igniting conflicts that cannot be settled by military means. Neither the American superpower nor the mighty Israeli Defense Force could tame with their conventional means the irregular power of the Islamists. These believe they are involved in a cosmic war in the “mind of God”—a belief that is echoed in the global support these movements enjoy. Civilizational perception matters, as do facts on the ground. In world politics, perception is reality.
The attacks of September 11 and jihadist assaults elsewhere have demonstrated how closely values and worldviews are related to material violence. The Islamists committing these assaults were not acting as a “crazed gang,” but within the irregular war of jihadism. Their terrorism was the actualization of a conflict over civilizational worldviews—the fight over “what world order” in military form. Gangs do not involve themselves in this business. Gangsters take risks for material benefits, but they never sacrifice their lives for mere values. In this understanding, the Taliban and other jihadists are not “criminal extremists,” as criminals do not “die to win.” They are irregulars in a new pattern of warfare.
In this new pattern of war, jihadists use their bodies as bombs to assail persons and target infrastructure but also to attack the “cosmic enemy.” The major target of this action directe (to employ Georges Sorel’s term) is the order of the secular nation-state. The combination of a war of ideas and jihadism is meant to demoralize the enemy and make him uncertain. Under conditions of the new warfare no one knows what lies ahead. The objects of terror are not only what the Islamists label as “Jews and crusaders” but also, as we saw in Algeria and since 2003 in Iraq, ordinary Muslims who do not cooperate.
John Kelsay writes that “in encounters between the West and Islam, the struggle is over who will provide the primary definition to the world order.” He continues: “Will it be the West, with its notions of territorial boundaries, market economies, private religiosity, and the priority of individual rights? Or will it be Islam, with its emphasis on the universal mission of a transtribal community called to build a social order founded on pure monotheism natural to humanity?”53
For Islamists, of course, the answer is clear, readily found in the work of Sayyid Qutb, who writes in Signposts along the Road that only Islam is designed to lead all of humanity in a world order.
The atmosphere of the new cold war comes down to a confrontation of secular and religious worldviews. The issue is not simply a state of mind, a dispute over differences, or a matter of “freedom of faith,” as some Western apologists of Islamism contend. If this were the case, then one might prescribe tolerance. The issue is life and death in a practice of violence as terror.
The Findings
The analysis provided in this chapter can be summed up in three central statements:
The problem of order. Islamist fundamentalism is not merely an expression of existing cultural differences between Islam and the West. It expresses a civilizational disagreement over the world order. The jihadists’ irregular war is the articulation of this disagreement, and as such it cannot be countered by state armies. The new strategy that is required should be neither fixated on the state nor dominated by conventional military thinking.
Holy terror and irregular war. Jihadism is a variety of what Mark Juergensmeyer identified as “terror in the mind of God.” The fact and methods of terrorism are inextricable from its legitimation as “holy terror” practiced as irregular war.
Religious fundamentalism as a security issue. The existence of global jihad shows that the study of Islamism belongs to the field of security studies as part of the “new frontiers of security.”54 The traditional concept of security must expand to include religion and culture in order to deal with the challenge of irregular warfare.
The commitment to violence is among the basic features of jihadist Islamism. But violence is a means, not a goal in itself. The goal is the Islamic order. Jihadism operates on a religious legitimation for an irregular war presented as a true jihad. In reality, jihadist violence is a variety of terrorism and therefore not consistent with the ethics of classical jihad. Sadly, the religious institutions of the Islamic establishment fail to make a clear-cut condemnation of jihadist fundamentalists to help distinguish between them and ordinary, peaceful Muslims. The reluctance to do so arises from opportunism and fear. The unconvincing argument is put forward that there is no such a thing as jihadism and the terrorists have nothing to do with Islam.
Jihadist Islamism is highly appealing to young, socially marginalized Muslims in the Islamic diaspora. They are susceptible to recruitment, not so much because they like jihadism but because it provides comfort and meaning in a dreadful situation of hopelessness. In this regard, there exist other options: in Europe, either Europeanizing Islam or an Islamization of Europe.55 This issue does not sit well with Europeans, who in their inaction and indifference confuse freedom of faith and jihadist warfare, and thus unwittingly support jihadist internationalism. In the triangle formed by the world of Islam, the West, and the Muslim diasporic culture in Europe, the blurring of the lines between Islam and Islamism becomes highly consequential.
Some European states (such as Germany) limit the culture of citizenship to granting Muslim immigrants passports without ever allowing them to become true members of the community. Even those who are privileged to be a part of the middle class never succeed in being treated as equals; they remain “guest workers.” In my own case, which is by no means unique, I never escaped discrimination in my academic career and never became a member of the community of ethnic Germans. In ethnic Europe56 I failed to become in substance a German citizen, beyond legally holding a German passport. Living in Germany for five decades and writing twenty-eight books in German made no difference. My education and my knowledge of Islam help me to be immune to the anti-Western appeal of jihadist ideologues. But for ordinary Muslim immigrants who do not have the privilege of a higher education, Islamist activism in the diaspora57 and European racism conspire to make the idea of becoming a soldier of al-Qaeda very attractive. One result was recently noted in a New York Times article that described young Muslims born in Germany who journeyed to Afghanistan to join jihadist groups.58 The “othering” of Muslims in European societies creates fertile ground for the recruitment of jihadist Islamists.59 In the world of Islam itself it is becoming increasingly difficult to counter the appeal of jihadism among young people. Existing patterns of education in those mosques not controlled by the state do not undermine the jihadist ideology but rather promote it, and the traditional security approach of policing is unable to suppress it.60 The life of young Muslims has to be improved. Simple preservation of the status quo is not enough to defend freedom and democracy. Democratization in the world of Islam, better development policies, and institutions that build the principles of civil society against the authoritarian state are better means of dealing with jihadist Islamism in Islamic civilization. To accomplish this, however, will require cultural changes both in the world of Islam and in the West.