|
What is it that makes ‘them’ tick, or, in the phrase that marked the days after September 11, 2001: “Why do they hate us?” What are the springs and the cogs that activate the bloodthirsty jihad launched against India, Israel, the United States, Britain and the West in general? Admittedly, there would not be much of a jihadi war if it had not been played, sustained and supported by a number of states: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Saddam’s Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and a few more. But the enabling and sometimes orchestrating role played by states does not account for the jihadi mindset, even if the ideological output, the indoctrination and the propaganda that issue from those states greatly contribute to it. The entire ‘food chain’ of modern jihad rests on a world-outlook that is the daily sustenance of its members.
The investigation of the “mind of jihad” has only started. Within the limitations of the present article, the author will try to give a broad-brush description of an avenue of research that could allow us to escape the series of vexing shibboleths often trotted out to answer the questions posed at the outset. Among those yarns: there is no Islamic terrorism, it is but an invention of the U.S. government to persecute Muslims and Arabs (Fawaz Gerges, John Esposito) [1]; Islamism is past its peak anyway and not really dangerous (Gilles Kepel, Olivier Roy) [2]; the victimological doctrine of “grievances” (Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are among its standard bearers) and its associate, the quasi-Marxist dogma that finds the “roots” of terror in poverty and its sister-dogma in obfuscation, which roots it all in generic “frustration,” as if it were the preserve of Muslims or their natural condition to be “frustrated.” Jihad is also presented as a rational-choice means to an end (Robert Pape) [3], and its causes are purported to lie with “occupying powers,” mostly Western, while, incredibly enough, religion and ideology are thus said to be of no significance for jihad or terror itself.
We are further told that jihad means “effort” and “striving in the way of Allah.” Muslim clerics and leaders have often been heard making disingenuous denials such as “the authors of such acts are not Muslim… no real Muslim could, etc.” (e.g., Khaled Abou El Fadl). [4] Most Muslim societies have in fact not only tolerated, but encouraged, applauded and lionized jihadi terrorism: the killers may be a numerical minority, but they enjoy a great deal of admiring support, as public opinion polls carried out in the Muslim world have repeatedly shown. [5]
Contemporary terror carried out in the name of jihad differs from most forms of terrorism recorded in modern history: its scope, ambitions and designs are world-wide; the depth of popular support it enjoys, its desire and ability to wage war throughout the world against its chosen enemies – the rest of the world – are equally unprecedented. One trait is even more novel in modern history: Russian Nihilists of the 19th century, the ferocious Macedonian IMRO of the early 20th, IRA bombers or even Basque assassins gave death, they did not love it. [6] What may be the most distinctive characteristic of jihadi terror is summed up by the oft-repeated phrase: “We love death more than you love life” in its many variants.
In the abundant traditional jurisprudence of jihad, the holy warrior, though he is willing to meet his death and die a martyr on the field of battle, does not seek death: the distinction is considerable. [7] For the modern jihadi, as the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hasan al-Banna wrote « The Quran has commanded people to love death more than life. Unless the philosophy of the Quran on death replaces the love of life that has consumed Muslims, they will reach naught. Victory can only come with the mastery of the art of death. »[8] The hypnotic chant of the Brotherhood, itself a principal matrix of modern jihad, is explicit: Allah ghayatuna/ Al-rasul zaimuna/ Al-Quran dusturuna/ Al-Jihad sabiluna/ Al-mawt fi sabil Allah asma amanina/ Allah akbar, Allah akbar: “God is our goal, The Prophet is our leader, The Quran is our constitution, Jihad is our way, Death in the service of God is the loftiest of our wishes, God is great, God is great.”
The Muslim Brothers’ twin, the Saudi Ikhwan, whose wholesale massacres over twenty years of wars won Abdulaziz ibn Saud his kingdom, served under a clear-cut creed: “in wars of religion, we exterminate everybody.” [9] Nowadays, the former imam of the great mosque of King-Saud University, Riyadh, Sheikh Mohsin al-Awaji, can state: “the glory of the [Islamic] nation appeared when our Prophet taught us the industry of death – when he taught us how to create death. Then life became cheap in our eyes… This we see as the industry of death.” [10]
In this thanatophilia, Shiite radicals do not distinguish themselves from their Sunni opposite numbers. [11] Witness the bloodlust of “Islamo-Marxist” Ali Shariati as well as that of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeiny. His doctrine of “Red Shiism,” Shariati calls “the manifestation of the blood revolution.” [12] The cult of martyrdom that plays the central role in the doctrine is embodied in the phrases: “Die before you die “ and “ If you can, give death. If you cannot, die.” [13] Shariati had appropriated and reformulated the Sartre-Fanon creed according to which to kill a White Man is a double liberation, since it liberates the Colonized by allowing him to retrieve his identity stolen by the Colonizer, and it liberates the Colonizer by liberating him (in death) of his identity as a Colonizer. [14] Hear Khomeiny’s own words, in a 1979 speech at a school of theology: “Islam grew with blood (…) The great Prophet of Islam in one hand carried the Quran and in the other a sword; the sword for crushing the traitors and the Quran for guidance. For those who could be guided, the Quran was their means of guidance, while as for those who could not be guided and were plotters, the sword descended on their heads. Islam is a religion of blood for the infidels but a religion of guidance for other people. We have sacrificed much blood and many martyrs… We do not fear giving martyrs.” [15]
A broad spectrum of modern Muslim thinking is united in a cult of death, a yearning for blood, in a lust to inflict pain and a passion for giving death, a sadistic craving to assert one’s power through such means. The Arab-Muslim world abounds in jihadis who proudly profess their love of death, who despise life on Earth, who exalt the path of Death and maximize the attraction of an After-Life gained through the choosing and the giving of death: Egyptian Muslim Brother Sayyed Qutb and Pakistanis doctrinaire of Jihad Maulana Mawdudi, Lebanese Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, defunct PLO leader Arafat, sundry “Marxist” and Islamist Palestinian leaders, Osama bin Laden and his cohort Zarqawi who luxuriates in being called the “Sheikh of Slaughterers. ” The doctrine of modern jihad has grossly altered traditional proportions by radically depreciating life and exalting death. For any society love of death is unnatural and aberrant. It is so considered in Muslim jurisprudence. It goes against society’s survival. It is, quite literally, a nihilistic impulse that leads a society to its self-destruction.
The contemporary ascendancy of nihilism in the Arab-Muslim world, however, is not an unheard-of occurrence in world history. The mighty Millenarian cults that wreaked havoc of much of Europe for more than four hundred years, from the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, into the 16th, espoused a strikingly similar belief-structure. The essential isomorphism of our contemporary jihadi with the insurgent Europeans of yore is striking.
In a society disoriented by rapid change, whose members lived precarious lives, their traditional certainties shattered by rapid change, these eschatological and often apocalyptical cults moved people by their hundreds of thousands, recruited them into utterly self-destructive patterns of behavior, caused them to engage in indiscriminate slaughter of chosen scapegoats, Jews, the Clergy, the rich. Inspired by Millenarian prophecy, mesmerized by prophetae who promised them more than Salvation, self-brainwashed into desperate belief, these masses, Taborites of Bohemia, Flagellants of Italy and the Flanders, members of the Paupers’ Crusade, Pastoureaux of France, Anabaptists of Germany, Brotherhood of the Free Spirit throughout Europe – all shared a common belief-structure, as was magisterially shown by the British historian Norman Cohn in his classic The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. [16]
Pseudo-Christian sectarians of yore, Muslim jihadi of today all share a belief-structure, that of Gnosticism, this parasite of the monotheist religions which has shadowed them from Antiquity. God had invested the Gnostics with a unique mission, a task of cosmic proportion, the final victory of Good over Evil, the final destruction of Satan. God spoke through the Gnostics, who were possessed of a perfect knowledge, who knew God’s plan, knew how to erect here and now the perfect world. They were Perfect, they were above all laws, they were the law unto themselves. Whatever they did was sanctified by the nature and dimension of their mission, no matter what it may be in the eyes of normal mores and traditions. They brought Salvation to the world now. Salvation demanded gigantic human sacrifices, the shedding of torrents of blood: the Millenium would not come without huge slaughters of sinners. “Soon we will drink blood for wine,” one of them wrote, “Kill every one of them!”. Salvation would be collective, terrestrial, imminent, total, miraculous.
The Gnostics of Antiquity had believed in an individual Salvation gained through Knowledge (gnosis in Greek) of a metaphysical and ontological nature, whereas the medieval and the modern ones have made it into a collective adventure: their collective “knowledge” will lead to the establishment of the Millenium, or, today, the ultimate, imminent triumph of Islam. The dualist nature of the world of the jihadi is one of the most glaring signs of their Gnosticism: Allah -vs- Shaitan, jihadis-vs-jahiliyyah, “true” Muslim-vs-the rest of the world of kufr, infidelity. The Gnostic component in Islam has thus radically eliminated its rival, non-Gnostic components.
The Millenarian-Eschatological strain very present in Islam was powerfully revived in the second half of the 19th century by the so-called Muslim “reformer,” “progressive” and “modernizer,” Jamal al-Din al Afghani, father of pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism, but most of all, reviver of the old Mahdist creed. He turned it into a workable, modern political ideology of a radical sort. As the British Islamologist H.A.R. Gibb wrote: “The heresy of Mahdism is its belief not only that the minds and wills of men can be dominated by force but that truth can be demonstrated by the edge of the sword.” [17] Further: “Mahdism has linked up with extreme nationalism to produce the swelling tides of popular discontent and revolutionary ardor which are familiar to all observers of the Muslim world today.” [18] Anti-imperialist al-Afghani loudly proclaimed that England hoped in vain “to stifle the voice of the Mahdi, the most awesome of all voices, since its power is even greater than the voice of the Holy War, which issues from all Muslim mouths. Does England… think herself able to stifle this voice making itself heard in all the East… proudly proclaiming the coming of the Savior whom every son of Islam awaits with such impatience? El Mahdi, el Mahdi, el Mahdi. ” [19]
Thirty years ago, Norman Cohn wrote: “during the half century since 1917 there has been a constant repetition, and on an ever-increasing scale, of the socio-psychological process which once joined the Taborite priests or Thomas Müntzer and the most disoriented and desperate of the poor, in phantasies of a final exterminatory struggle against ‘the great ones,’ and of a perfect world in which self-seeking would forever be banished… The old religious idea has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.” It should come as no surprise that Nazi and Bolshevik influences are to be spotted in so much of the genealogy, ideas and practices of contemporary jihad. [20] The German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin, whose analysis of modern “civil religions” as forms of Gnosticism I used, powerfully demonstrated the essential filiation between the Ancient and Medieval Gnostics, and modern “civil religions” which promised the Millennium here and now, in the name of various fetishes: Race, Class or others. With the changes and differences that a Muslim cultural idiom and religious fabric imply, Voegelin’s and Cohn’s analysis of Bolshevism and Nazism equally applies to what President Bush recently called “islamo-fascism” and “the ideology of jihadism” when he finally shifted attention from the means of the war launched upon us, terror, to the ends pursued by the jihadis.
Understanding the profound similarity between these disparate phenomena should allow us to pierce the fog of misexplanations that shrouds radical Islam and its favorite instrument, terror.
Laurent Murawiec is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. A translator of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (1999; in French), he is the author of La Guerre au XXIè siècle (2000; 2003 in Chinese); L’Esprit des Nations (2002); Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West (2005).
Notes:
1. See Jonathan Calt Harris, “Who Is Fawaz Gerges? Another problem Mideast scholar,” National Review, July 21, 2003. See John Esposito’s invention of “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” after Muhammad’s time, the termination of which he ascribes to an “imperial-papal power play” in Islam: The Straight Path, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, 58.
2. See Béatrice Bouvet and Patrick Dernaud Les guerres qui menacent le monde, Kiron - Editions du Félin, issued on April 11, 2001 for a collection of gems on the subject from leading French experts, who did not substantially differ from their colleagues world-wide.
3. “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism: It’s the occupation, not the fundamentalism,” The American Conservative, July 18, 2005, an interview with Prof. Robert Pape, whose recent book is a case of a scholar who sees what he believes rather than believe what he sees: Robert Pape, Dying to Win : The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, New York, Random House, 2005.
4. Khaled Abou El Fadl, “The Place of Tolerance in Islam,” in The Place of Tolerance in Islam, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 2002, 19.
5. See for instance Pew Global Attitudes Project, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=248
6. See a discussion of the Russian Nihilists in Walter Laqueur, Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the 21st Century, New York & London, Continuum, 2004 and in Alain Besançon, Les origines intellectuelles du léninisme Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1977.
7. See Alfred Morabia, Le ğihad dans l’Islam medieval, Paris, Albin Michel, 1993, passim.
8. Quoted in Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1969, 206-7.
9. Lewis Pelley, Report on a Journey to Riyadh (1865), London, 1866, reprint Cambridge, 1978, Oleander Falcon.
10. MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 400, July 18, 2002, Saudi Opposition Sheikhs on America, Bin Laden, and Jihad
11. This useful term is borrowed from Dr. Shmuel Bar, of the Inter-Disciplinary Center at Herzliya, Israel.
12. Ali Shariati, Red Shiism, Houston TX, Free Islamic Literatures, 1974, 8.
13. Farhad Khosrokhavar, Les Nouveaux martyrs d’Allah, Paris, Flammarion, 2002, 76.
14. Jean-Paul Sartre, introduction to Franz Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre, Paris, F, Maspéro, 1961.
15. Speech at Feyziyeh Theological School, Aug. 24, 1979, FBIS, Aug. 27, 1979, quoted in Barry Rubin & Judith Kolp Rubin (Eds.), Anti-Americanism and the Middle East: a Documentaryt Reader, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002., 32-3.
16. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, revised and enlarged edition, Oxford and NY, Oxford University Press, 1961-1970, 15.
17. H.A.R. Gibbs, Modern Trends in Islam, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1947, 120.121.
18. Ibid., 121.
19. Ibid., 272.
20. See Wolfgang Schwanitz, "Germany & the Middle East", The Middle East Journal, 58(2004)3 and Djihad Made in Germany. Deutsche Islampolitik im 19. und 20 Jahrhundert., trafo verlag Berlin 2005. |
