A Treatment for Radical Ignorance About Islamic Radicalism

Just as a commitment to containment of the Soviet Union served as a framework for U.S. foreign policy during the cold war, so the “war on terror” animates the foreign policy of the Bush administration. This struggle, in George W. Bush’s words, is “a war unlike any other.” Here, the enemy is vague, and terrorist groups are less the primary target than the conceptual glue holding together disparate policies toward Washington-defined “rogue states” such as Iran, Sudan, Syria, North Korea, and Saddam’s Iraq. One difficulty with such a poorly defined war was admitted by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in a notorious leaked memo in the fall of 2003, when he wrote, “Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.”

A Middle East specialist can only be astonished that anyone, much less an enormously powerful U.S. cabinet secretary, would lump together secular, Arab nationalist Baath Party apparatchiks with Al Qaeda and the Deobandi seminaries of northern Pakistan that trained the Taliban, and then, elsewhere, relate them all to the disputatious schoolmen of Qom, Iran. Among the 55 wanted Iraqi Baathists referred to by Rumsfeld was Mikhail Yuhanna, a Christian Iraqi born in Mosul, who rose under the nom de guerre Tariq Aziz to become deputy prime minister. He adhered to Baathism precisely because it was a secular ideology that recognized Christians as full citizens. The Christians of Syria are also notoriously pro-Baath, fearing that the alternative is the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Rumsfeld himself, of course, took the same position in 1983 and 1984 when he served as Reagan-administration envoy to the Iraqi Baath regime seeking to counter the influence of the radical Shiite Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran.

It is almost as if, in the scenario popularized by the French historian Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge, we are presented with a list of random things from another age and place, things that seem wholly unlike to us, but which an alien way of thinking or “episteme” has ordered as similar. The business of inventing a new episteme, in which ramshackle, toothless, third-world regimes are imagined as dire military threats to the United States and are connected by innuendo, conspiracy theory, and fraudulent documents to tiny Muslim extremist groups (often from a rival branch of Islam!), is booming in the hothouse think tanks of Washington. These “foundations” and “institutes,” often backed by billionaire cranks, are ideologically monochrome, with “fellows” hired for their voting records, and they routinely publish sham “scholarship” that rises on the best-seller lists. Books such as Khidhir Hamza’s Saddam’s Bombmaker (Scribner, 2000), influential in making the case for an Iraq war, was promoted by Benador Associates, which represents a number of such right-wing, inside-the-Beltway intellectuals. It and many similar tomes are chock full of blatant falsehoods unchecked by any peer review, and are widely cited by decision makers and talking heads.

Elements of the Washington power elite, formed in the cold war, have attempted to configure the Muslim world as the new Soviet Union. R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, even suggested that the cold war was World War III, and that the “war on terror” is World War IV.

The problem, of course, is that the Muslim world is not actually like the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a state, and although it was always much weaker and much poorer than the paranoid hawks in Washington imagined, it was a power to be reckoned with. Almost all the states of the Muslim world, in contrast, are close friends and allies of America. As for Muslim publics, they evince an enthusiastic appreciation of democracy in all the polls taken, and mainly criticize the United States on specific policies and the immorality of Hollywood films. They do not hate our way of life, or at least no more than does America’s own Bible Belt. While small Muslim radical groups with deadly intent and capacity do exist, they would logically be better targeted by Interpol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation than by the Pentagon.

So many extraneous efforts have been tacked on to the so-called war on terror, from basing rights in Uzbekistan to the repression of marsh Arab Shiites who have joined the radical Mahdi Army militia in the Maysan province of Iraq, that the original occasion for American public alarm — the 9/11 attacks — seems often in danger of being forgotten or slighted.

Into these Wizard of Oz-like miasmas a few brave academics have stepped with books that evince a clearsighted vision and solid expertise. Among the best of these is Fawaz A. Gerges’s The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. Gerges, a solid academic and a native Arabic speaker of Christian heritage who is originally from Lebanon, focuses on the core Al Qaeda group — veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Gerges explains that modern Muslim radicalism was founded on a new form of fundamentalist religion and a rejection of secularism and the colonial heritage that had so powerfully shaped most Muslim nation-states. It initially focused on internal goals.

These movements had sought to transform the largely secular Egypt of Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser or revolutionary, post-independence Algeria into Islamic states. Some of these groups turned to violence in their quest to overthrow local governments. Drawing on the radical ideas of the Egyptian literary critic Sayyid Qutb, some cultlike groups developed a doctrine that Muslims who disagreed with them, especially government officials, were not really Muslims and should be excommunicated and sometimes also killed. Most classical Muslim jurists forbade individuals from declaring holy war or jihad, which is a prerogative of state and high religious authorities. The “jihadi” or “holy war” movement from about the 1970s innovated in allowing excommunication and jihad on an individual and almost vigilante basis, but those doctrines are viewed as heretical by mainstream fundamentalist groups such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Despite dramatic actions such as the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt in 1981 and the Algerian guerrilla raids of the 1990s, all these “holy war” movements were decisively trounced in the Arab world. Gerges is the first academic to make extensive use of participant memoirs from the Islamic Jihad group of Ayman al-Zawahiri, published in Arabic in recent years. He also conducted interviews with Islamists, though these tended to be less radical or violent than the typical Al Qaeda member.

Gerges rehearses the by-now-familiar story of how a transnational radical Muslim network was formed as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. decision to fight it by financing, and having Saudi Arabia finance, Islamic paramilitaries or mujahedin (“freedom fighters” in the parlance of then-President Ronald Reagan). He adds depth and breadth to the story of the rise of Al Qaeda, however, by deploying Arabic sources, including evidence of internal debates over strategy, thus adding new dimensions to the narrative constructed by the Washington Post journalist Steve Coll, whose magisterial Ghost Wars (Penguin Press, 2004) is based on Western-language sources and on interviews. For instance, Gerges emphasizes that the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri went off to Afghanistan in 1984 in part out of a conviction that “we have been defeated” in Egypt as a result of the government crackdown after the assassination of Sadat. From the published memoirs of a bin Laden bodyguard, Gerges marks the period of reorientation in which bin Laden decided to wage war on the Americans — the entry of U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the Persian Gulf war, and their subsequent basing in the Arabian peninsula.

Gerges examines the controversies of the 1990s over al-Zawahiri’s decision to merge his Islamic Jihad with Al Qaeda, which seems to have been impelled both because the regime of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had successfully cracked down on it and starved it of financial support, and because al-Zawahiri was attracted to bin Laden’s charisma and vision of world Islamic revolution. The Egyptian may also have overestimated his ability to influence the new joint organization. Gerges points out that the overwhelming majority of Salafi Jihadis, or Muslim revivalists dedicated to vigilante holy wars, declined to join Al Qaeda in this period. Indeed, the leadership of the rival Islamic Group in Egypt’s Tura prison turned pacifist in 1997, in part in revulsion at Islamic Jihad’s mowing down of Western tourists at Luxor in Egypt. The Islamic Group was originally led by the violence-prone blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, now in federal prison. The younger, imprisoned Islamic Group leadership wrote a four-volume Gandhian reinterpretation of the Koran, which Gerges is the first to discuss, even briefly. He also devotes many pages to the critique that the newly pacifist leaders of the rival Islamic Group have offered of Al Qaeda since 1997.

Gerges emphasizes the danger of Al Qaeda, despite its small size. He points to the charisma and managerial skills of bin Laden, the impact of the organization’s recruitment networks and videotapes, and its ability to bring aboard high-powered engineers willing to plan and carry out a daring suicide mission that exploited technical holes in American airline security.

But he also argues that bin Laden’s September 11 operation against “the far enemy,” the United States, failed in important ways. It did not succeed in mobilizing most Salafi Jihadis into Al Qaeda — they instead rued the subsequent American intervention against them. Even many Al Qaeda members of long standing deserted bin Laden in the aftermath and excoriated him in tell-all memoirs, speaking of his “catastrophic leadership” of the movement, which resulted in the overthrow of the Taliban and the scattering of the jihadis. In Gerges’s telling, the audio and video broadcasts of al-Zawahiri and bin Laden in the period after their decisive defeat in 2001-2 are in large part a response to their internal critics and a play to return to leadership of the international jihadi movement. The thrust of Gerges’s argument is that Al Qaeda was on the ropes when the Bush administration invaded Iraq and, by granting a grand cause to radicals such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may have created a second generation of an internationalist and deadly Al Qaeda.

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon come at the subject from different sources and perspectives, but arrive at broadly similar conclusions in The Next Attack. Both served on the National Security Council staff in the 1990s and have devoted their careers to security issues. In many ways, their book is an extension of the last chapter of Gerges’s, on the impact of the Iraq war and of Bush-administration policies after September 11, 2001. In this wide-ranging, informed, and excellent work, the authors argue that Iraq in particular has reinvigorated the jihadi movement, in the Middle East and among the growing Muslim communities of Europe.

They begin with the best connected account in English of the preparations for and carrying out of the Madrid railroad bombings of March 2004. They conclude that this was a local operation, but that it was inspired by bin Laden’s call six months earlier for revenge on European countries that joined the United States in occupying Iraq. They worry that the operation was put together with lightning speed, and in Europe, by persons not already under surveillance. They point to the similarities to the July 7 London Underground bombings of 2005, which took place just before the book went to press. In both cases, it can be argued, from the evidence of subsequent interviews with persons close to the principals, that the Iraq war and occupation of Iraq by the United States and coalition allies were the main motivators of the attacks. This was a new generation. The volunteer jihadis going to fight in Iraq typically had never before been involved in such violence and were often young men from middle- and lower-middle-class professions in North Africa, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Western Europe.

The authors fret about a new wave of jihadist violence, perpetrated by veterans of the anti-American struggle in Iraq who return to homes in the Middle East and Europe, further morphing Al Qaeda and creating an extremely difficult challenge for law enforcement. That these discontents’ ideas spread on the Web along with helpful tips on making bombs and volatile chemical cocktails makes them all the more formidable.

Benjamin and Simon are not sanguine about the Bush administration’s approach to threat assessment, and they underline its preoccupation with rogue states at the expense of cooperating with allies against asymmetrical threats such as Al Qaeda and its copycats. They point out that former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz swallowed the implausible conspiracy theories of Laurie Mylroie about an Iraq connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was actually carried out unaided by the Egyptian radical Islamic Group. Mylroie’s theories, debunked by the CIA and the FBI, were purveyed into print and widespread influence by the American Enterprise Institute. Inability to see the threat for what it is has impelled the Bush administration to chase dangerous chimeras, and that chase has often so trampled people as to turn them into threats.

Benjamin and Simon are in my view overly alarmist about the European Muslim community, but their survey of radical currents within it is very good. While bombings such as those in London and Madrid are not to be taken lightly, so far the jihadis are an oddity in Europe. Economic immigrants are usually law-abiding, fearing that deportation will end their dreams of a better life. It should be remembered that many European Muslims of the second generation are rather distant from Islam. The “Beurs,” or Francophone children of North African immigrants in France, often know little Arabic or even how to pray, and their fury in the fall of 2005, visited on the hapless Citroëns of the bidonvilles around Paris and a few other cities, had far more to do with economic and educational marginalization than with religion. As in the Middle East itself, the networks of violent activists are tiny, however dangerous they may be in a high-tech society. But the authors are perfectly correct that the Bush administration has made relations between the United States and the Muslim world worse, not better, and has discounted asymmetrical challenges in favor of an ill-conceived military occupation of a major Muslim country.

Mary R. Habeck’s Knowing the Enemy is not in the same league with the other two books treated here. Habeck, who earlier wrote on tanks and continental armor doctrine between the First and Second World Wars, seems to know no Arabic, and she lacks the long experience and intelligence contacts of Benjamin and Simon. Habeck’s credibility is damaged by her unfamiliarity with the rudiments of Arabic naming practices. Thus, Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Wahhab is the founder of the main sect of Islam in Saudi Arabia. His name means Muhammad, the son of the Servant-of-the-Bestower. The Bestower is God, and Abdul-Wahhab is a construct that cannot be pulled apart without blasphemy, since a human being cannot be the divine Bestower. Moreover, Muhammad is the son of Abdul Wahhab. His surname is thus properly Ibn Abdul-Wahhab. Habeck jarringly calls him “Wahhab,” a name of God, and while it may seem a small error, to those in the know it speaks volumes. (You would not call a guy named Erik Thorsson “Thor.”)

Habeck makes useful thematic arguments, but I found it disorienting that she pulls evidence for her theses from everywhere without context. A medieval text from Egypt is cited alongside an obscure Web page created in London. Her discourse is also confusing. It is often difficult to know, without checking a footnote, whether she is describing a sentiment of the jihadis or of normative Islam. (She does generally admit a difference.)

She begins with a thesis that Al Qaeda cannot be dismissed as unrooted in Islam, and that its leaders draw on a rich vein of Islamic texts stretching from the Koran through sayings of the Prophet and medieval theologians, which have an undertone of violence. This argument is essentialist. She does not refer to the work of medievalists like Michael Bonner, showing that the main elements in the Muslim tradition of thinking about jihad were born on the Byzantine frontier long after the Prophet was dead. One might as well maintain that Jim Jones’s People’s Temple movement, which ended with poisoned Kool-Aid in Guyana, is best seen as rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions, from the bloodthirsty Book of Joshua to the tale of mass suicide at Masada. Cultlike groups such as Al Qaeda or Japan’s neo-Buddhist Aum Shinrikyo, or for that matter the violent Jewish Defense League in the United States, can always point to scriptural and historical precedents for their actions. Religious traditions are fluid and constantly reinterpreted by contemporaries, and no one is led to do something solely by some medieval text.

The book is best when Habeck concentrates on interpreting English-language pamphlets and Web sites by contemporary Muslim radicals, and here she makes a real contribution. She treats their critique of secularism, liberalism, and the separation of religion and state, which they identify as age-old Christian and Jewish attempts to undermine Islamic belief and power. She correctly argues that these radicals identify early opponents of Islam such as the Christian Byzantine power or the Medinan Jewish tribes that sided with pagan Mecca against the Muslims with contemporary Western political forces, thus reading contemporary developments back into sacred history. She has studied a number of important groups, such as the Hizb al-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, in unusual detail. If one did not have time to read all three books, however, Gerges’s treatment is more sophisticated and more grounded in reading original sources, and Benjamin and Simon have long practical experience as security specialists following these groups.

Those contemporary thinkers, academics, and policy makers who have trouble distinguishing between the Islam of the moderate King Abdullah II in Jordan and the radical Salafi Jihadis, or those who think Shiite, clerically ruled Iran has all along been behind the Wahhabi-influenced, Saudi- and Egyptian-dominated Al Qaeda, would do well to school themselves in the solid works of Gerges, and Benjamin and Simon. The picture they paint of the challenges facing the United States from radical Islam is far more realistic than anything you will hear out of the mouth of a talking head supplied by a Washington institute. These authors underline that perhaps the biggest security problem for the United States in the next generation will be self-inflicted, growing out of the elective Iraq war and its bloody aftermath.

Juan R.I. Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His books include Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2002).

http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 26, Page B6