THE RISE OF ISLAMIC MILITANCYTHE RISE OF ISLAMIC MILITANCY
Survey the new landscape of violent Islamic militancy and the immediate impression is of an impenetrable chaos. There are scores of groups who all apparently subscribe to the same basic principles of Islamic extremism but who have different names, are based in different places, and have apparently different priorities, tactics and strategies. By one count there are thirty-three individual militant groups in Pakistan alone.1
In the appalling violence in Syria, there are hundreds of ‘brigades’ of fighters who are Islamic militants by most definitions.2 There are two Talibans, each of which is split into a multitude of different factions. There is al-Qaeda, of course, and then a bewildering array of its supposed affiliates, most of which operate with varying degrees of autonomy and most of which are, predictably, fractured themselves. Then there is the Islamic State, with a whole new range of connections. There are freelancers, lone wolves, stray dogs, self-starters, clean-skins, leaderless networks, cells and even ‘groupuscules’, all of which apparently have the power to cause harm, though whether greater or lesser is sometimes unclear. There is virtual militancy online, real militancy offline. None of this is static and the evolution of Islamic militancy is neither linear nor uniform. All is in constant flux.
But we can still make sense of this apparent chaos and confusion. Actors within contemporary Islamic militancy can still be divided into three broad categories.3 The first is that of the major groups, of which there are only two.
Al-Qaeda was founded more than twenty-five years ago by Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born propagandist and organiser, in Pakistan, where most of its remaining senior leadership is probably still based. Emerging from the chaos of the last years of the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupiers and their local auxiliaries, the group’s goal was to unite and focus the disparate elements of the fractious, parochial, squabbling extremist movement in order to bring radical reform of society, states and religious practice in the Middle East, primarily, and beyond. During the early 1990s, bin Laden, the son of a wealthy construction tycoon, had little idea of how to reach that goal but by the end of the decade, from a base in Afghanistan, had decided that attacks on the US would be the most effective strategy. Strikes against the ‘Far Enemy’, the US and its allies, would take the place of campaigns against the ‘Near Enemy’, the local regimes in the Islamic world, including in bin Laden’s native land, which he regarded as primarily responsible for the myriad problems facing Muslims everywhere. Bin Laden and a small group of close associates went on to orchestrate several of the most important terrorist operations in recent decades, including the one which is arguably the most spectacular in centuries, which on 11 September 2001 killed 3,000 people and destroyed the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center, one of New York’s most distinctive landmarks, as well as badly damaging the Pentagon, the home of the US Defense Department. Though al-Qaeda is now undoubtedly very much diminished compared to a decade ago, it has nonetheless repeatedly proved itself tenacious and resilient, with significant powers of regeneration. Its current leader, the veteran Egyptian militant Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a pragmatist who lacks bin Laden’s talent for or interest in public relations and has adjusted the strategy of targeting the ‘Far Enemy’ to have a greater focus on the ‘Near Enemy’. He has, however, frequently reaffirmed his and his organisation’s desire to kill large numbers of Westerners, in Europe, the US and around the world, and continues to make considerable efforts to do so. Al-Zawahiri, with a small number of remaining veteran militants and a large number of newer recruits, heads ‘al-Qaeda central’ – also known as ‘old al-Qaeda’ or ‘al-Qaeda senior leadership’, AQSL in the acronym-ridden world of counter-terrorism.
The challenger for pre-eminence in the world of Islamic militancy is of course the Islamic State. There are, naturally, many similarities between the two groups. The rivalry between them can usefully be compared with that between top football teams who have different styles, visions and cultures but play the same sport. Both clearly share much in terms of world view and values. Both are led by individuals who demand absolute obedience, though they rarely get it. Both have resources to distribute – money, expertise, opportunity for combat experience or training, safe havens, communications capabilities – and can provide access to further streams of funding or recruitment. Both have established and respected names, or ‘brands’. Both provide a psychological focus for anyone who is drawn towards extremist violence, even many thousands of miles away, who needs and wants to feel part of something bigger. They are the two largest nodes in the vast network of networks which constitutes modern Islamic militancy.
But when looked at more closely, IS and al-Qaeda differ enormously. There is a deep personal animosity between their leaders – al-Baghdadi has repeatedly made a point of explicitly repudiating the authority of al-Zawahiri and claiming to be the true inheritor of the legacy of bin Laden. The Islamic State has explicitly rejected the ‘Far Enemy’ strategy and has prioritised the struggle against the ‘Near Enemy’. It has shown itself most interested in the immediate seizure of territory and local resources, limiting its involvement in international terrorism against the West to attacks on tourists in Muslim-majority countries while calling for local actors in Europe or the US to mount individual attacks themselves. There are other significant differences too. The leadership of al-Qaeda went to significant lengths to minimise violence between Muslims, seeing fitna, meaning ‘division’ and referring to the differences between Muslims (rather than between Muslims and non-Muslims), as one of the fundamental reasons for the problems facing the Islamic world as a whole. By contrast, sectarian violence against co-religionists is fundamental to IS, arguably its raison d’être. IS has accused al-Qaeda of being more interested in publicity than anything else. Al-Qaeda has accused IS of indiscriminate violence.4 The older group has always seen the creation of a new caliphate as a long-term aspiration; the Islamic State went ahead and declared its existence in June 2014. Another difference, exposing an important distinction in the intellectual approach and backgrounds of the leadership of each group, is their respective attitudes to the apocalyptic prophecies which have emerged as a major component of Islamic militant thinking in recent years. The final confrontation with the forces of unbelief was, for al-Qaeda, a distant prospect and part of a popular tradition that educated men like bin Laden and his immediate associates largely disdained; for IS it was not just imminent but actually taking place.5 These two groups are the major players, the market leaders, in today’s militant world and so it is natural that they compete, but the reasons for that competition go well beyond a simply desire to win or retain the top position among extremist groups. The battle between al-Qaeda and IS is over the future direction of the entire Islamic militant movement. As we shall see in chapters 3 and 4, their differences illustrate some of the most important debates and dilemmas facing extremists over recent decades, and the rivalry between them is thus a key factor in determining the nature of the current threat facing the West and its evolution in the future. It is too early to call a winner.
The second category within contemporary Islamic militancy (and the subject of chapters 5 and 6) includes all those other active groups with some degree of organised structure. A number of these have a formal connection to one of the major groups. These relationships vary from loose support to genuine allegiance implying total obedience to orders from above. There are four current official affiliates of al-Qaeda: in Yemen (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP), in Somalia (al-Shabaab), in North Africa and the Sahel (al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, AQIM) and in Syria ( Jabhat al-Nusra). All of these groups can and do act independently of the central leadership of al-Qaeda, particularly in the local campaigns which occupy the vast majority of their time and energy. They nonetheless broadly recognise al-Zawahiri’s leadership. All exist in places with a history of violent Islamic militancy often going back decades. Three of them – AQAP, al-Shabaab and AQIM – have been constructed out of older groups that include elements which long pre-date any involvement with ‘al-Qaeda central’.6
The Islamic State has evolved a different outreach model, relying on the simple example of the new religious and political entity it has created, its apparent military success and propaganda to win support among Muslim communities worldwide. Many of the group’s advantages have come from its ability to integrate a large number of diverse Sunni militant networks within Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Syria. Some of these ‘internal affiliates’ had existed independently for a long time. All were crucial to the group’s early successes. It would have been odd if IS had not sought to replicate this model externally too. Between November 2014 and March 2015, IS announced the foundation a series of ‘governorates’, or ‘territories’, in Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and West Africa. These too integrated a series of pre-existing networks, while creating new ones. Yet this overarching network is still very much a work in progress and it is still too early to judge how successful this project will be.
Of all these groups, only one has so far shown any systematic interest in striking in the West. This is al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has been linked to a series of technologically advanced bids to bring down passenger planes in the US and claimed responsibility for the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine in Paris, in January 2015.
Within this second category there are also many independent groups. A large number of these are based in South Asia and include the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, as well as a range of other groups in both countries and in India and Bangladesh. Some are purely sectarian outfits; others have a regional if not international reach. There are also independent Islamic militant groups in Syria, Mali, Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, small factions in Gaza, in Malaysia and Indonesia, the Philippines, the Caucasus, western China and elsewhere. All subscribe to the same broad world view as al-Qaeda and IS but are much smaller, concentrating almost exclusively on local, parochial struggles. Again, as with the affiliates, some are simply the latest protagonists in conflicts that have been going on for decades. Their relations with each other and with the bigger players are dynamic, reacting to circumstance and, particularly, to internal power struggles or the efforts of local authorities and security forces, both civilian and military. Some of these independent actors have cooperated with major groups on occasion, a few have even done so more or less systematically. For example, individuals within the Pakistani Taliban, the fractious coalition of groups responsible for the Peshawar school massacre of December 2014, in which 132 children were killed, have collaborated with al-Qaeda repeatedly. But this does not make it an al-Qaeda affiliate. As we will see, one trend currently emerging is an increasing degree of contact and coordination between these independent outfits, without involving the senior leadership of either al-Qaeda or IS. Many of the groups in this second category – both affiliates and independents – are really more coalitions of fragmented factions than coherent hierarchical organisations. Several have successfully attacked Western or international interests locally but few currently appear capable or willing to launch attacks in capitals in Europe or the US. Although for this reason they receive less attention than they perhaps deserve in the pages that follow, they are still dangerous in a variety of ways. They channel volunteers to groups more committed to an international agenda, provide opportunities for combat experience and training for new recruits, experiment with new tactics which can later be adopted elsewhere, destabilise areas of the world which are of critical strategic importance to the West, and create chaos and anarchy in zones which in turn open opportunities for other groups seeking to target Europe or the US.
It is the third category that currently most worries counter-terrorism officials. These are the ‘inspired warriors’, the volunteers, the radicalised individuals in the West who, with or without the assistance of groups in any of the above categories, commit violent acts ‘in the name of God’ in their home countries or elsewhere. Most form small networks, a few act almost entirely alone. The three men who killed seventeen in Paris fall into this category, so too do the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, and the two Nigerian-born converts who killed a soldier in east London in May of that year. Many such networks are driven by group dynamics, as much as ideology. In their structure and often language too, they resemble gangs or other equivalent communities. Some are described by sociologists as ‘fictive kin’ or imagined families. It is no coincidence that British militants refer to each other as ‘brother’. The vast proportion of the thousands of young Europeans who have made their way to Syria to fight would be included in this category, though only a fraction of those who return have so far attempted to execute violent acts in their native countries. So too would the substantially more numerous volunteers from cities and towns along the North African shoreline, from Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, from the Caucasus and particularly central Asia. This new form of low-level extremist activity is also seen in the Asian subcontinent where hundreds of young men from India, Bangladesh and the Maldives have all made their way to Syria and Iraq to join IS or have become active at home, and in the Far East. In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim majority country, the numbers involved remain small but are important nonetheless.
Collectively, this third category is living proof that terrorism is a social activity like many others, albeit a repugnant one. As we will see in chapters 7 and 8, the lone wolves are not really lone but embedded within a much wider and deeper culture of Islamic militancy. Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old of Algerian origins living in south-western France who went on a shooting spree which left seven dead in 2012, had spent years mixing with people whose views could accurately be described as extremist, even if they never directly took part in any violence themselves. Those who struck in Paris in January 2015 had years of involvement in a series of interlinked militant networks, some committed to attacks in France, others to violence overseas. Bigger conspiracies do not evolve in some kind of social vacuum either. Police investigating bombings in Istanbul in 2003 estimated that several hundred people had some kind of idea of what was being planned, but none had informed the authorities.7 Britons turning up in Pakistan in 2006, East Africa in 2010 and Syria in 2014 were tangentially connected to networks involved in the 7/7 bombings of 2005. These webs of personal relations involved scores if not hundreds of different people, few of whom were directly involved in acts of violence.
Indeed, few extremists commit acts of violence. In fact, many may explicitly oppose them, certainly ‘at home’ and, less often, abroad. This raises important questions. The killers of the soldier in London had spent years among people who, if aggressive in rhetoric, certainly did not call for attacks on British servicemen in the UK and would almost certainly have attempted to stop the planned murder had they known of it. However, what such people share with the bombers, or stabbers, or shooters is a conviction, based on selectively sampled holy texts, mythologised historical examples, legends, conspiracy theories, prejudice and circular argument, that good and evil, belief and unbelief, the West and the world of Islam are engaged in a cosmic struggle ongoing for 1,300 years (at least). Such views are not restricted to the offline world either. An online community of the sympathisers, fellow travellers, preachers, retweeters, Facebook posters and others exists too. This also propagates and shares the anti-Western sentiments, the anti-Semitism and homophobia, the prejudices and the aspirations that are fundamental to Islamic extremism today.
But the relationship between ideas and actual violence is complex. Extremist views are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for Islamic militant violence. There are many today who strive for revolutionary change of a type the vast majority of Britons or Americans or Europeans would abhor, but who do not believe that violence is the right strategy to attain their ends. Rightly, we continue to debate what protest and argument we collectively believe is acceptable in our societies, what is fair opinion or hate speech, what is legitimate criticism of, say, US foreign policy in the Middle East, and what is unfounded and inflammatory. Our third category – which I call the ‘movement’ of Islamic militancy – therefore only includes all those men (and increasingly women) across the West and the Islamic world, who exist outside the organised groups and who believe not only in the cosmic conflict outlined above but that victory in that struggle will only come through violence, and who furthermore either seek to commit terrorist acts themselves or actively help or encourage others to do so. The movement is thus the tangible manifestation of a violent ideology and worldview. It is described primarily in the last third of this book though is present, in one form or another, throughout. It is perhaps the most significant development of the last decade and may well be the most durable. Without it, none included in the other categories can thrive, or, possibly, exist.
These, then, are the three categories which can help us make sense of the threat we face today: two major groups or nodes of activism; a range of other networked organisations, of which some are formally linked to bigger ones, as well a large number of independent groups; and finally a broader community whose members, if disorganised, still adhere to the same, surprisingly well-defined, ideology and methodology as other militants.
Many of the elements of today’s militancy have been present for decades. Foreign fighters were travelling from the UK to fight in extremist groups in Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan former princedom, in the late 1990s. In 1994 Algerian militants hijacked an Air France passenger jet and may have planned to crash it into Paris. Suicide bombing dates back to the early 1980s and suicide attacks go back much further. But as the world changes, new circumstances produce very different results. Changes may not be immediately evident, however. Often, a new kind of militancy emerges only gradually, complementing rather than supplanting what went before. Towards the end of the last decade, some analysts thought they detected an overall decline in modern Sunni militancy. I was one of them. This was in part real but it was also a result of a transformation taking place within the movement, one that would turn out to leave it perfectly poised to exploit the chaos of the Arab Spring.
Tracking such trends is difficult. Officials at MI6 ruefully spoke to me of how, as the impact of the Syrian conflict became clear, they had to build an entire new ‘grid’ of intelligence material, effectively setting aside a decade of work.8 In May 2014, President Barack Obama told cadets at West Point that the main threat to the US was no longer from ‘al-Qaida central’ but from ‘decentralized al-Qaida affiliates and extremists, many with agendas focused on countries where they operate’.9 Even at this late stage, weeks before the fall of Mosul, Obama failed to mention what was then the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.10 His statement was not inaccurate, but was incomplete. During their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the better US senior officers frequently reminded their juniors that if they thought they had understood a threat, it meant it was time to reassess everything they believed they knew. The threat from Islamic militancy is a work in progress. However familiar it may seem, it is always ‘new’.
For this reason, any attempt to describe the threat at its current state of evolution requires us to know something of the origins of Islamic militancy as a whole. This means knowing something of the demographic changes that destabilised the Muslim world in the 1960s and 70s, the rise of three particularly influential ideologues, and the revolutionary and religious models of thought that inspired them, and the Soviet war in Afghanistan that provided the testing ground, networks and inspiration for action.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century it is easy to forget that the link between terrorism and religious fanaticism is, in fact, a relatively recent one. Of course there have always been religiously inspired violent extremists. The Jewish zealots who stabbed eminent Romans to death on the streets of first-century Jerusalem, the Thugs in what became today’s India who killed in the name of the Hindu goddess Kali, or the Shia Muslim sect which became known as the Assassins have all been cited as forerunners of today’s religious terrorists.11 But terrorism as a concept is far more recent than any of them. Its origins are to be found in late-eighteenth-century, post-Enlightenment, revolutionary Europe, and specifically in the reign known as ‘the Terror’ of the French revolutionaries. For most of its history, it has been dominated by actors motivated by ethnic, nationalist, separatist or secular revolutionary agendas. Attacks by groups with a primarily religious agenda occurred only rarely. Until the early 1980s, the most famous terrorists with Middle Eastern groups were Leila Khaled, a hijacker still seen as a feminist icon today, and Carlos the Jackal, a promiscuous, hard-drinking Venezuelan playboy.12
The terrorist act that changed all this was the assassination of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in Cairo in October 1981. Sadat’s killers were very different from most of the terrorists of the decade before. As he fired on Sadat amid a crowd of dignitaries attending a military parade, Khaled al-Islambouli, the young officer who led the assassins, shouted: ‘I have killed Pharaoh and I do not fear death.’ The reference to the ancient rulers of Egypt was a deliberate framing of Sadat’s regime as pagan and un-Islamic. The killing was to be understood as a first step towards replacing it with a new religious rule. In fact, al-Islambouli and his co-conspirators were far from alone in their hatred of Sadat and what they believed he stood for, nor in their desire to see a revolutionary transformation of society along religious lines. The small group responsible for the president’s death was one of scores of such cells that had formed in Egypt over the previous decade. And there were similar groups in virtually every other country in the Islamic world. These in turn were on the outer fringe of what was in fact an ideological movement that had taken hold throughout the Middle East and the broader Muslim world at the time: a generalised rediscovery of religious observance and identity, coupled with a distrust of Western powers and culture.
In the century between 1830 and 1930 almost the entire Islamic world, from Morocco’s Atlantic seaboard to the easternmost tip of Java, from the central Asian steppes to sub-Saharan Africa, was invaded or subjugated or both by non-Muslim powers. These included Russians and Han Chinese (in south-west China or Turkestan), but primarily they were European. The technological, economic and military superiority of the invaders inevitably prompted much interrogation in the Muslim world as to the failings that had led to this debacle. Often the appearance of Western soldiers, sailors, scientists and, eventually, administrators simply revealed the essential weaknesses of local institutions – a sclerotic clerical establishment, corrupt or incompetent rulers, archaic administrations, antiquated financial systems which discouraged investment, or rigid educational systems that failed to stimulate innovation or critical thinking. Fierce debates pitting reformists against traditionalists had been taking place long before European armies and fleets arrived, but when they did the effect was dramatic and traumatic.
Almost all the invasions provoked a violent reaction among many local people. Resistance took many forms but, naturally enough in a deeply devout age, religion played a central role. Islam provided a rallying point for local communities more used to internecine struggle than campaigns against external enemies. From Western Africa to the Far East, European troops and their local auxiliaries battled men whose motivations might be wildly different but who all shared a profound belief that they were acting in defence not only of their livelihoods, traditions and homes but of their faith.13 All were eventually crushed. The technological and other advantages of the invaders were simply too great and the divisions among their enemies too deep. But to the believer, even these failures reinforced their faith: if victory was a sign of the favour of God, defeat was evidence the true path had been abandoned.
Most of these movements had faded by the beginning of the twentieth century and the great upheaval of the First World War, but not all of them. Violence continued into the 1930s in places such as British India’s ‘North-West Frontier’, in Italian Libya and in Palestine. Even where there were no foreign rulers, some local ‘tyrants’ faced the same kind of resistance. In 1929, for example, Afghans rose up against their king, who had decided to ‘modernise’ his country with a series of radical reforms.
But violence was not the only response. In India, in the aftermath of the failed revolt against British rule in 1857, the Deobandi school chose to isolate themselves and their community in order to insulate their Islamic culture from Western influence (even if they adopted a Western-style syllabus system in their religious schools). Others favoured wholesale adoption of Western ideas and values, on the grounds that their superiority had been all too brutally proven. This was the approach of the founders of the Islamic University at Aligarh, who believed that elite young South Asian Muslims should and could rival their Western counterparts in the arts, sciences and sports. But there was also a middle road. In India, a political organisation called Jamaat Islami was founded in 1926. It sought religious and cultural renewal through non-violent social activism to mobilise the subcontinent’s Muslims to gain power. This approach involved embracing Western technology and selectively borrowing from Western political ideologies, while rejecting anything seen as inappropriate or immoral. In the Middle East in 1928, an Egyptian schoolteacher called Hassan al-Banna founded an equivalent group: the Muslim Brotherhood. Like the South Asian Jamaat Islami, it combined a conservative, religious social vision with a contemporary political one. For its followers, the state was to be appropriated, not dismantled, in order to create a perfect Islamic society. This approach was later dubbed Islamism. Across the Islamic world there remained those who rejected any compromise at all. It was only through violence, such men maintained, that the rule of the West could be brought to an end, and their own societies reformed and redeemed. In contrast to them, the Brotherhood, like Jamaat Islami, prioritised – purely pragmatically – peaceful activism.
By the early 1960s, European powers had withdrawn from much of the Islamic world, but the challenges that they and the societies they represented remained. Many newly independent regimes adopted nationalist, quasi-socialist and broadly secular ideologies seen by many of their citizens, not unjustifiably, as Western imports. Again, this was accepted, even welcomed, by some, ignored by others, and deeply resented by many. The establishment of the state of Israel, now recognised by the international community after a bloody war and the flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from lands they had worked or owned for generations, acted as a new focus for diverse grievances among Arab and Muslim communities. Anti-Semitism had long existed in the Islamic world but, fused with anti-Zionism, gained a new and poisonous intensity. Defeat in the Arab–Israeli war of 1967 deepened a sense of hurt, loss and humiliation.
More importantly, these regimes now also faced the challenge of immense demographic change. In Egypt, for example, the population had doubled between 1800 and 1900 and doubled again by 1950; by 1978 it had doubled once more to reach 40 million. The urban population grew disproportionately as land shortages and economic opportunities drew people to the cities. Around 2.5 million people lived in Cairo in 1950. Six million lived there in 1970. By 1980 the sprawling, seething metropolis covered around 140 square miles and was home to 10 million people. Most of the migrants from the countryside ended up in cramped tenements, squatter camps, even cemeteries, without proper water or electricity, sanitation, schools, health care or policing. Food was in short supply, and expensive. At the same time, a vast expansion of university tuition over previous decades meant that many of those who were unemployed had the expectations that go with literacy and education. Less tangible was a crisis of values. In the new shanty towns and low-rise apartment blocks, tribal bonds that had structured communities in the countryside counted for little, traditional leaders lost their authority, villagers who married, worked and played together were scattered, extended families broken up. For the older people there was loss. For those young enough not to know anything of the former rural life, there was disorientation.
The vision of the country’s ruler did not provide much help. Sadat had wanted to turn his country into a prosperous, pro-Western nation. This required, he believed, the replacement of the socialist-style economic policies of previous decades with a new capitalism and so he launched a programme of reforms designed to encourage private enterprise and attract foreign investment. Over the course of a decade, the top 5 per cent of the population saw its share of national income grow from 15 to 24 per cent, while the share of the lowest 20 per cent dropped by four points to 13 per cent. Perhaps most importantly, the critical middle 30 per cent in Egypt saw their share of GDP halved.14 The new private health clinics were too expensive for all but the very wealthy. New roads were built but there was almost no investment in public transport. Prices soared as inflation raged unchecked, officially hitting 35 per cent by 1979.
Worse still, a growing economic gap between rich and poor was accompanied by a growing cultural gap. During bread riots in Cairo in 1977, favourite targets for arson and vandalism were nightclubs – of which more than three hundred opened during the decade – and luxury US-made cars – of which imports had gone up fourteen times.15
Both were symbols of the lifestyle of an elite that was enjoying greater connection with the rest of the world, and particularly the West, but which was increasingly detached from the majority of the Egyptian population. By the end of the decade, more than 30 per cent of prime-time television programming was from the US, with episodes of Dallas repeated ad infinitum. Inequality was combined with a sense of cultural invasion. It was an explosive mix.16
Of course, decades of Western-influenced nationalism and socialism had not dispelled the deep religiosity of many believers. In this time of crisis, some turned inwards, to mystic, personal strands of their faith. Others went in the opposite direction, into their communities, seeking change. One obvious alternative to the apparently bankrupt ideologies of leaders across the Muslim world was Islamism, of the type promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East and Jamaat Islami in South Asia. For a start, it appeared authentically local. It was also well organised, with a strong presence on university campuses and in professional bodies. Islamism promised to re-establish confidence and pride and to provide a solution to the many pressing challenges now faced by tens of millions of people. If the roots of modern Islamic militancy lie anywhere it is here: in the resurgence of Muslim faith identities and the activism of the 1970s. Throughout this crucial decade, Islamists gained support. Alongside them was the minority who called for violence to bring about revolutionary change and usher in a new, just order.
In Egypt, those advocating violence were young, twenty-seven years old on average, and mainly from rural or small-town backgrounds. Al-Islambouli, the man who shot the president, was twenty-six and from the upcountry town of Mallawi. Most had come to Cairo or Alexandria for further education, and were living with other students or by themselves. Almost all were the first in their families to study for a degree. Two-thirds of their fathers were middle-ranking government employees. They were upwardly mobile. Those who were working had done well: they included pharmacists, doctors, teachers, engineers, army officers. Most had achieved very high grades in public exams. Most came from stable families. That they saw Zionists, Jews, the US and Communists as eternal enemies of Muslims, Arabs and Egyptians was hardly exceptional. They were definitively not ‘abnormal’.17
However, if the multiple crises of Egypt in the 1970s could have been mapped, these men lay at their intersection. If they were insulated from the worst of the soaring prices, or had marginally better homes than those in the slums, they had much greater ambitions, both personally and for their country, and a keen sense of injustice. Recent immigrants, living far from their families, they also suffered acutely the loss of community and solidarity of the village or small town. In the phrase of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian sociologist who studied them in depth at the time, they represented the ‘raw nerve of Egyptian society’.18
Of course Egypt was not the only country in the Islamic world to have developed a ‘raw nerve’ in the mid- to late 1970s. Nowhere from Morocco to Malaysia remained untouched by the religious revival, nor by strains of Islamism and extremism. These varied hugely, but the profile of those involved in violent activism was strikingly similar everywhere.
In Iran, for all of its differences – a Shia rather than a Sunni tradition; a Persian rather than an Arab heritage – the parallels with Egypt were clear. Improved living conditions meant that by the mid-1970s two-thirds of the population was under thirty. There were eight times as many students at new universities and colleges in 1977 as there had been fourteen years earlier. Year-on-year growth rates averaged 8 per cent as agriculture was mechanised, factories built and infrastructure extended. The urban population exploded: in the space of a decade, Tehran’s population grew from 3.3 million to an astonishing 5.1 million. Settled on the southern edge of the city, the new migrants experienced the same dislocation and uncertainty as their counterparts in Cairo.19 Inflation led to soaring prices. A wealthy elite, with foreign-educated children and holidays in Paris, was increasingly distant from the rest of the population. Bitter memories of a CIA-backed coup that had overthrown a popular prime minister in 1953 and decades of clerical and popular anti-US sentiment made the reigning Shah’s pro-Western tilt even less sustainable. Violent repression bred more violence, and eventually revolution.
Saudi Arabia too was suffering traumatic transformation. This was largely owing to the discovery of huge quantities of oil a year or so after the kingdom was founded in 1932. Saudi Arabia’s revenues went from less than a million dollars before the Second World War to more than $50 million in 1950. It is difficult to think of any historic parallel to this sudden deluge of wealth on what was a poor, conservative, isolated nation. By the late 1960s, the average Saudi income was approaching that of the US. The real spike came in 1974. In response to Western support for Israel during the 1973 war, Middle Eastern producers imposed an oil embargo that sent the price per barrel from about $3 to more than $12. Saudi state expenditure went from around $2 billion in 1972 to an incredible $35 billion in 1976.20 Vast construction projects were launched – of roads, mosques, palaces and shopping malls. Old neighbourhoods were bulldozed. Entire cities appeared out of nowhere. Foreigners poured in, with new hotels and office blocks built to accommodate them. There were even moves by the relatively reformist King Faisal to open the proliferating new educational establishments to women, who were now appearing on television (itself a relatively recent introduction) for the first time. Once again, there was violence. In 1979, hundreds of extremists led by Juhaiman al-Utaiba, a former national guardsman of Bedouin origin, stormed the main mosque at Mecca and then proceeded to hold off security forces for days, inflicting heavy casualties. Utaiba and his followers were from a variety of backgrounds, and, other than in their youth, do not fit the same profile as militants in Iran and Egypt and elsewhere at the time who were largely newly educated members of the urban middle class, but their vision was similar.
Change is continuous, but the stresses it generates tend to accumulate, lying below the surface until eventually the earthquake comes. The broad-ranging religious revival was an expression of social and economic tensions building up over decades. The catalyst for the explosion was a series of events: military defeats, oil-price hikes, political choices by men like President Sadat of Egypt and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. Equally important, though, were the ideologues who formulated and promoted the new extremist thinking. Two thinkers in particular were hugely influential, and remain so today.
When police and intelligence officers raided the homes of those involved in the conspiracy to kill Sadat in the days after the assassination, they came across an unpublished booklet written by the leader and theorist of the cell, a 27-year-old engineer called Abdel Salam Farraj Attiya. The police did not know the work, nor the man who had written it. It was entitled ‘The Neglected Obligation’. Farraj had hoped the book’s incendiary content would be widely read, and hundreds of copies had been printed in an underground workshop in the slum neighbourhood of Embaba, but his immediate superiors feared the attention it would attract from the authorities and ordered its destruction. Only sixty copies survived.
But if Farraj and his work were new to them, the police also found writings by a man they had known very well indeed. This was Syed Qutb, a fastidious, celibate, misogynist school inspector, part-time literary critic and Muslim Brotherhood member. Qutb’s book Milestones has been repeatedly cited as the foundational text for the entire movement of contemporary Islamic militancy.21 Indeed, almost half a century later, works by both Farraj, who would be hanged alongside Sadat’s killers in April 1982, and Qutb, who had been hanged in 1966, still circulate widely: in mosque bookshops in London, as PDF files on the Internet, in the libraries of religious schools in Pakistan, passed from hand to hand in militants’ dormitories in Syria and, of course, still read in their authors’ homeland.22
The influence of left-wing ideologies in Farraj’s ‘Neglected Obligation’ or Qutb’s Milestones is striking. ‘After annihilating the tyrannical force, whether political or a racial tyranny, or domination of one class over the other within the same race, Islam establishes a new social and economic political system, in which all men enjoy real freedom,’ says Qutb, echoing The Communist Manifesto.23 They also both contain ideas of practical utility. But anyone tempted to think that these documents, and others like them, are esoteric literature dealing with abstruse theological debates is badly mistaken. They are revolutionary tracts, ideological handbooks for a new wave of militants. Both Qutb and Farraj saw a world divided between belief and unbelief, light and darkness, peace and war, justice and tyranny, virtue and vice, corruption and purity. These divisions were stark. There was no middle ground and no room for compromise. The imperative for men on earth was to work towards the triumph of righteousness over evil and wrongdoing.
Similarly, what inspired these men to act ‘in the path of God’ and guided their ideas on how to do so was not a spiritual calling. It was not a deep attraction to the principles of the Muslim faith, nor even a deep understanding of the injunctions contained within the holy texts of Islam. Instead it was a historical example: the achievements of the Prophet Mohammed and of the first generations of his followers, the so-called Salaf. This is as true for today’s militants as it was for Qutb, Farraj and their associates in the 1960s and 70s.
Muslims believe that the Prophet Mohammed was picked by God or Allah to be His messenger and to bring to Earth His final instructions on how human beings should conduct themselves individually and socially for eternity. But His message had immediate and specific relevance too. Arabia in the seventh century was fragmented and divided. Tribes fought tribes, sects battled sects. All worshipped their own local gods, whose effigies were placed in the main shrine, the Ka’aba, in the temple town of Mecca. This was an era of anarchy and iniquity. Mecca had benefited from a shift in trading routes and the city’s rulers had, over the course of a few generations, grown rich, in part from the pilgrimage trade. Such rapid transformation led to social tensions. Mohammed, who lived from 570 to 632 CE in the west of what is today Saudi Arabia, was a social reformer and dissident political activist as well as a spiritual guide. He offered reassurance and a vision of a better future. Following revelations received during a summer meditative retreat in a cave, he called for an end to crass consumerism and the implementation of social justice – as well, of course, as devotion to the one true authority that was God. His first converts were among his immediate family and associates.
Though initially the authorities in Mecca ignored him, it became increasingly clear to them that this new preacher and his message posed a threat. In 622 CE Mohammed was forced out of his home town and travelled to the city of Yathrib, now known as Medina, 220 miles away. This event, known as the Hegira, is considered so significant that it is the year zero of the Muslim calendar. In Medina, Mohammed grew his community of believers, known as the umma, through his own example, charisma, military abilities, judgement and capacity to unify, or destroy, warring tribes. He eventually defeated the Meccan forces and returned to his home town after eight years of exile, whereupon he swept away the idols and the corrupt rulers, and brought the people of the city together under his leadership.24
In the Middle East of the 1960s and 70s, this story, told and retold in the mosque, home and school, was familiar to all Muslims, whether practising, politicised or neither. Its echoes in the present were hardly lost on the new wave of extremist thinkers who drew on it heavily, secure in the knowledge that it could be cited as incontrovertible historical evidence of the righteousness of their cause, particularly when contrasted with the abject failures of their current leaders. Qutb, writing in lucid, accessible language quite unlike the register used by clerics, explicitly invoked the example of seventh-century Arabia when describing the Egypt of his day as plunged in jahiliyya, the chaotic, violent, tyrannical ‘ignorance’ that prevailed before the time of Mohammed. ‘Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice,’ he argued in Milestones. ‘The Muslim community must be restored to its original form . . . [It is] now crushed under the weight of . . . false laws and customs.’25 In the absence of a new prophet, he argued, Muslims had to act themselves to ensure the implementation of the law revealed to Mohammed, the sharia, in their own contemporary community. ‘A vanguard must set out . . . marching through the vast ocean of jahillyya which encompasses the whole world,’ Qutb argued.26 Farraj too maintained that it was because Muslims had ignored their duty to violently extirpate wrongdoing and combat the forces of unbelief that their community had lost the power of the first believers. It was this, he said, that had led to the divided, humiliated, weakened state of the Muslim world of the twentieth century.
While citing the example of the first believers, Qutb and Farraj rejected the authority of contemporary clerics. Islam has no formal priesthood with powers of intercession but has instead a body of scholars whose rigorous training prepares them to interpret the texts of the past in the changed circumstances of the present. Qutb and Farraj explicitly rejected the argument, long maintained by official clergy throughout the Islamic world, that only those with the correct religious qualifications could decide when and where opposition to an established ruler was legitimate. They could hardly have argued otherwise as neither Qutb nor Farraj had any formal religious qualification themselves. They were not the first people to do so – the immensely influential Indian-born journalist Abd Ala’a Maududi, the founder of the Islamist Jamaat Islami organisation, had done so decades earlier – but in the ferment of the time their ideas resonated with a generation in the Islamic world impatient for change.27
This rejection of the authority of scholars, so many of whom had been carefully co-opted by state authorities, was genuinely revolutionary. If an individual had no responsibility to obey those who traditionally held power over a community, activism of a very new kind became legitimate. But it also prompted a more practical question. The extremists might be obliged to act. They might even now do so without the consent of parents, sovereigns or scholars. But they still did not have any power. So how was this transformation to be achieved? Once again, the life of Mohammed provided useful examples. Some attempted to reproduce the Prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina and his establishment of the first truly Muslim community. Hundreds of young men and a handful of young women followed Shukri Mustafa, a charismatic agricultural science graduate turned Islamist preacher, to desert caves where they tried to live as the first Muslims had done. Neither the physical nor political environment in Egypt was particularly conducive to such a venture. When the group kidnapped a well-liked former minister to force the release of some of its members who had been arrested, a violent confrontation with the authorities ensued. Mustafa was hanged for sedition, more than five hundred of his followers were imprisoned, and the experiment ended. Nonetheless, the movement had numbered between 3,000 and 5,000 active members at its height.28
Others chose to follow the example of the Prophet in his later years and to bring an end to the corrupting rule of those in power directly. In April 1974, a group of extremists attempted to take over the Technical Military Academy in Cairo, seize weapons stored there, and march on a meeting hall where many of the ruling elite were scheduled to hear the president speak. After eliminating the nation’s political leadership, they hoped to declare the Islamic Republic of Egypt, and implement their literalist, rigorous vision. The operation was a fiasco but, as the group’s members knew it would, its failure encouraged others.29 Seven years later Farraj and his group killed Sadat.
In the 1970s, the West might have been reviled but it was not a target for Islamic militants, even if their nationalist counterparts were causing mayhem in airports, at the Olympics and on the streets of Western capitals. Even Qutb, who loathed the US and all it stood for, had not actually wanted to use violence against the West. ‘I do not ever recall [Qutb] saying that we should wage war against America or Britain; rather he wanted us to be vigilant against the West’s cultural penetration of our societies,’ one of the theorist’s close associates later remembered.30 Sadat’s killers did not for a moment contemplate attacking European or American targets, even in Egypt, let alone further afield. So how, in the space of less than two decades, did the West become not just a target, but the primary focus of the most effective Islamic extremist group yet established?
One cause was the enduring influence of the Iranian revolution. Though left-wing ideologies also commanded significant support in Iran in the 1970s, it was the cleric Ayatollah Khomeini who most successfully mobilised the restive masses in the new urban shanty towns and slums. He did this partly by articulating many Iranians’ fear of Western cultural invasion with a savage brilliance. His success in instigating revolution in 1979 lent powerful credibility to his arguments, and rapidly the stock phrases of his newly triumphant Iranian Islamists – terms like the ‘Great Satan’, ‘Westoxification’ and the ‘Crusader–Zionist alliance’ – entered everyday vocabulary across the Islamic world. But Iran was rapidly plunged into its bloody war with Iraq and its global rhetoric was not backed by action. In consequence it was not in Tehran that the critical steps towards targeting the West were taken but further east, in what had hitherto been a geopolitical backwater: Afghanistan. Here, in the fertile chaos of a war between the Soviet-backed Afghan government and the insurgent mujahideen, emerged the principal axis of modern Muslim extremism: a new, updated, idea of jihad.31