The Passing Fad of Jihad
My response to Terror remembrances of bombs past, an article written by The Globe and Mail’s London correspondent, Doug Saunders. In it, Saunders draws parallels between those Che-loving, bomb-making 70’s era urban guerrillas and today’s Islamic jihadists. As Saunders writes, “violent leftist revolution was a Seventies fashion… violent Islamism may be the same.” He couldn’t be more wrong.
Doug,
As someone who has spent the past two years filming in countries like Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, with a specific focus on infiltrating jihadist groups, I found your Islamism article to be shockingly off the mark. There is simply no basis for comparing today’s Muslim terrorists/insurgents to the 70’s era urban guerrillas. And to do so isn’t only historically inaccurate but also extremely dangerous as it seriously deludes the public about the very real threat posed by these groups.
Let’s be clear. The Weathermen, SLA, and Red Army Faction drew their inspiration from Marxist/Maoist revolutionaries who were operating in fascist or colonial societies. Vastly different than the democratic political systems - namely Germany and the US - these “bomb-making university grads” were attempting to disrupt. To illustrate, let’s take just two of their major inspirations: Cuba’s Che Guevara and Brazil’s Jose Marighella. Each of which achieved very different results, which should have been instructive for the would-be revolutionaries.
Guevara (and Castro) ultimately won critical public support for their Cuban revolution, which was supported through a network of rural peasant communities who had had enough of their Spanish masters. And even after the revolution, Cubans generally backed the murderous tactics deployed by Guevara in the name of halting counter-revolutionaries. But the case of Marighella, who’s Manual for the Urban Guerrilla became the playbook for the First World upstarts, is more instructive. He was fighting against a vicious US-backed military dictatorship in Brazil and his blueprint for revolution was based on “the propaganda of the deed.” Unlike the Cubans, insurgents in Sao Paolo - with its population of 8 million - could not zip out to the countryside for rest and supplies after a big fight against the fascists. So Marighella wrote his Manual with precise instructions on assassinations, bank robberies and bombings - all of which, he hoped, would serve to inspire and energize the citizenry, galvanizing them into a mass revolt against the dictatorship. Of course, he was wrong. The people were too terrorized to do anything of the sort and Marighella was killed after two priests were tortured into giving up his whereabouts.
It’s one thing to hatch these ideas while living under intolerable conditions. It’s quite another to cut-and-paste them into a liberal democratic paradigm. The reason the Weathermen and their ilk faded out so fast was because they had zero public sympathy, were (for the most part) buffoons, and were essentially operating in a vacuum.
Not so with the jihadists. It would be nice to think that the “mood will dissolve.” But the reality is that it won’t. Unlike the SLA and Weathermen, who were using violence to sway a population living in a functionally democratic society, jihadists are fighting against (real or perceived) US-backed military dictatorships (Pakistan), sanctioned torture that breaches the Geneva Conventions (Guantanamo), terrorizing of indigenous Muslim populations by US-backed allies (Israel), genocide (Clinton’s sustained bombing and sanctions of Iraq which allegedly killed over 500,000), occupation of Muslim land and looting of resources (Iraq), and even the overthrow of democratically elected governments (Algeria). Now I don’t know how much traveling you’ve done outside London, but you don’t need to go much further than the East end to find large groups of extremely angry Muslim men and women who will cite any of the above as justifications for the jihad. And it’s getting worse.
I spent time with members of the now-disbanded radical group al-muhajiroun, many of whom have since been arrested under Britain’s tough new anti-terror laws for non-violent crimes. One man, Abdul Muhid, got 4 years for holding up a (violently worded) banner at the London cartoon rally. While I can’t argue with the public’s clamor for action against the agitantes, the British are actually radicalizing their own Muslims with these kinds of clampdowns faster than the occupations of Iraq and (the unholy mess that is) Afghanistan. Remember, the 7/7 bombers weren’t the crazy-eyed protesters like Mahid and his group. No, they were quiet, middle class kids. And the 07 Glasgow attack? Mild-mannered doctors.
Are you and I getting the same newspapers?
Now go a little farther out of your bubble… try Jenin in the occupied territories where I spent some time with Zakaria Zubeidi, leader of the al Aqsa brigades, who has to turn away widows and young men who want to be martyrs. Or maybe to Jakarta where I rolled with Ustadz Farign, who hosted al-Zawahiri when he came to plot 9/11 and whose entire family has dedicated itself to overthrowing the vastly corrupt, ultraviolent secular government of Indonesia. I filmed a training camp with over 20 young boys, all highly intelligent, rational students, who want to turn Indonesia’s archipelago into a base for al Qaeda to destroy American imperialism.
Or, finally, Pakistan, where I was shooting up until 2 days before Bhutto’s assassination. I had traveled there with Khalid Kelly, another member of Britain’s banned al-Muhajiroun. Kelly cannot return home for fear of arrest and has not seen his sons Osama (yes, named after his hero) and the newborn Muhammed (now the second most popular boys name in Britain) for months. We crossed into the NWFP and were in a nearby village when Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, the Interior Minister and confidante of General Musharaf, was targeted by a suicide attack in his mosque on the Muslim celebration of Eid. Suicide attacks, once unheard of in Pakistan, have now become standard in the guerrilla war against the military. With the (impossible) dream of controlling a nuclear Pakistan, many jihadists see Pakistan as the most important battleground in the new century. Imagine how it is for ordinary Pakistanis, who just want to live their lives in peace and prosperity, when America’s new MLK, Barack Obama, declares his intent to unilaterally deal with Pakistan if they do not get their house in order. When it is precisely the lie of “American democracy” that has enabled a dictatorship in their land and emboldened the jihadists liberals like Obama want to stop!
Now, as a Canadian living in the United States, I am wary of the neo-conservative propaganda that seeks to amplify, and indeed, exaggerate the jihadi threat. But I am equally concerned about those who underplay it either out of reactionaryism or sheer ignorance. All it does is serve to disarm the public in the face a frighteningly real danger, one which we desperately need to address as a global community if we are going to avoid successive (and more devastating than 9/11) terrorist attacks. More, it proves the point that people in the West, in who’s name soldiers are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, have no grasp on what this fight is truly about.
Stephen Marshall
February 3rd, 2008 at 3:34 am
why is it that one has to state the obvious over and over again? that said, thanks for the good post. (maybe at the end you leave too much open, maybe you should -again- have made reference to the pincer the security state and the jihadists are forming to keep their grip on… well, us, simply.)
February 3rd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
good point marcus… but then, you’ve made it, so we’re all set!
February 5th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
You appear to have spent some time with these ‘jihadists’ and yet learnt nothing about them.
Al Mouhajiroun are/were about as dangerous as my granny (who is a Muslim too so she must be a potential suicide bomber too).
The Islamic world during the 19th century was fascinated by ‘the west’ and its technology and economy. Many were seduced. A group of modernists ‘reformed’ Islam to make it fit into the ‘western world’. Two men were especially influential, they influenced the Ikhwani Muslimeen (Muslim brotherhood). Muhammad `Abdu and his teacher Jamaluddin al-Afghani
http://www.marifah.net/forums/index.php?s=c66a278be9f86ba33b18b0f4fa96239b&showtopic=2581&pid=10464&st=0&#entry10464
They ’secularized Islam’ the new generations of Muslims especially in the Arab world adopted this secularism…they may use ‘Islamic language’, but their actual actions and thoughts are modernist/rationalist/nihilist…they are marxists and believe in social/political revolution and clothe it with Islamic language.
I find it difficult to believe that someone like you who is supposed to have spent time with these people and be so ignorant. You are either a disinfo agent or a liar.
February 5th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
not sure where it’s stated that muhajiroun are dangerous. never got that impression, except perhaps to themselves. they do however have the lingo down. besides i listed far more authentic sources than that group and anyways, the point of this response was to say that the ideological and political motivation driving jihadists is far more substantial and contextual than that which was driving the 70s era guerrillas.
as for your interpretation of the modernist/rationalist/nihilists, they are definitely Marxists of a stripe, but i think you’d have an interesting discussion with Anjem and Abu Izzadeen. both of you claim the other is not truly Islamic. while i doubt their way is anything close to what Muhammed would wish, obviously that’s not for us to decide. but if you’re suggesting there is no base to the antipathies expressed by the jihadists, then i don’t know what Islamic countries you’ve visited. but my experience has been very different. and if you’re suggesting they are not a problem or a threat or a force that should be dealt with… that the rational side of the complaint (ie. Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan) should not be digested and dicussed, then i wonder who you are. because i believe there is value in these points. and that if we don’t deal with them with authentic desire for Islamic autonomy, then the jihadists will always have their base of support, real or imagined.
February 6th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Not many, however I know the intellectual roots of the modernists. There are two broad branches, one is traditional and ‘wahabi’ with roots in the harsh Arabian desert, the other is modernist rooted in Egypt with well educated and middle class followers. The two merge in many parts of the Islamic and especially Arab world. They both more or less reject traditional Islam and jurisprudence (mathabs). Their more recent inteligensia (people like Qutub and Maududi) are just western educated journalists or engeneers, they had no grounding in Islamic knowledge.
>but my experience has been very different. and if you’re suggesting they are not a problem or a threat or a force that should be dealt with… >
They are nothing but a phantom created by the western ruling elites to achieve their own socioeconomic and geopolitical aims. Sure there are groups of jihadists, but their power has been exaggerated, their aims are mistaken and mis-represented dialectically within the west by western ‘experts’. The rhetoric of the jihadists is given focus by the mass media for its own reasons and it is carefully crafted and edited to deliver the aims of the ruling elites so that ‘the people’ fall in line behind their ’solutions’. It is classic dialectical Thesis, Anti-Thesis, Synthesis all falsely driven by an unknown power .
I am an ordinary Muslim who knows my religion, I know its people I know their roots and culture. Iraq was a secular state under Sadam invaded under false presences by Blair and Bush. Afghanistan was a war zone for 30 years…and the US hired the Northern Alliance (a bunch of thugs) to get rid of the Taliban. The US is no Globo Cop…it is a Globo Theif, pretending to be looking for justice. Its all lies anyone not indoctrinated by the Mainstream Media knows what is going on. The billions of dollars being spent on Propaganda are being wasted… People know Bush is a war criminal as is Blair and that democracies allow people like them to do whatever they like, including raise taxes, increase indebtedness and to serve their billionaire banker masters. Amazingly these jihadists their words and actions appear to be benefiting the global elite and its agenda!! Coincidence? I doubt it
February 6th, 2008 at 11:23 am
“People know Bush is a war criminal as is Blair and that democracies allow people like them to do whatever they like, including raise taxes, increase indebtedness and to serve their billionaire banker masters.”
again, i agree with everything you are saying. and this was indeed the point of the letter. these feelings, beliefs, convictions (whether Westerners agree with them or not) are widely held in the Muslim world and this is why the jihadists differ from the urban guerrillas. and as this imperial drive continues, i believe, the radical front will only be emboldened. not fade away…
February 7th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I will not try to speak to the authenticity of this Muslim group or that (as is partially discussed above); but I do question your rhetoric Stephen. Though it’s obviously intentionally tempered here and there, it comes off as sounding akin to much of the alarmist rhetoric we get here in the West.
Perhaps some of this is driven by your foil, Doug Saunders, and his admittedly bad historical analogy. I think, though, that some of it may be because you have developed a slightly bent perspective having personally met with a number of actual radicals and got a sense for their “really realness”. The threat we’ve been warned of does indeed have a corporeal form …
Yes radical Islamists present a problem for the west; but it’s also true that every problem is an excellent way for those with the “solution” to that problem to gain power. The radical “Islamists” may be a threat to our lives, but they are not a threat to our civilization — nor is tackling radical Islamism “the challenge of the 21st century” as some have described. Those who characterize the situation as such (I know you are not one) see an opening to advance their own world view, which to my estimation is a form of (intractably paradoxical) democratic-fascism.
Doug Saunders goes too far and thus trivializes a significant dilemma (yes we do need to focus on promoting policies that will stem the growing radicalization of the Muslim world against the West); but I would suggest that we have a double dilemma in that, as Mr. Muhammad stated, we have a community engaged in a dialectical play with the radical forces they want to warn us of – this community is the collective force of neo-imperialism, corrosive militarism, and xenophobia, all of which threaten the West from within (not to mention the rest of the world from without). In talking of anything akin to an “Islamic threat”, we must be careful not to fall into the language or symbolic games of those who would seek to gain by inflating this problem. This is certainly what you risk doing when as part of a piece dealing with the real threat of Islamic terrorism, you do things like casually mention that the second most popular name for boys born in England is “Muhammad” (a rhetorical device menaced at its periphery by the binary opposition of rival “civilizations” with the new and dangerous one threatening to supplant the old, traditional, and “rightful”, first one).
February 7th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Shahid, thank you for this. I guess it’s a tricky line to dance, being critical of one writer’s downplaying of a real threat while avoiding the trap of beating a drum for the neo-conservative (or whatever we call it) war dance. So if my language comes off as inflammatory or alarmist, I take that as a valid critique. It may well be, as you suggest, a reaction to Saunders’ simple mantra. I guess the major thrust for me in writing the piece, - as you obviously see, was to remind Westerners that crazy as the jihadists may sound, we can’t write off the legitimate grievances that, in some way, are at the root of this conflict.
February 11th, 2008 at 11:18 am
I think that’s fair. It is a pretty fine line to walk for sure.
February 17th, 2008 at 9:35 am
The Wahhabis were created by the British Empire in the 1700s in order to eviserate the Ottoman Empire, and all of these groups like the so-called Muslim Brotherhood are based upon Wahhabism.
Wahhabism is NOT an indigineous Muslim group, they were created by the British. If the Muslims wish to get out of the mess they are in today, they need to strike at the root of their problems, which is Wahhabism.