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Canada Military News: Defence Minister and Prime Minister of Canada correct- isis is not a war thing- it's a spoilt perversion l.... WAR WITH ISIS those Roman Empire wannabes AS USELESS AS TITTIES ON A BULL ???- they are just a spoilt pervasive entity – like the 60s and 70s ..... spoilt rich freakshows for attention- No nation could police the world’s humanity. The ideal was/is dangerously vague. Isis worst enemy is their pride and arrogance and will b their downfall- oldies like us have seen it all b4 ie red brigade-flq-basque-facism –ireland –Mugabe-bosnia- etc- imho –links- The Middle East must stop pampering their rich despots and thieves sponsored and spolit by USA and United Nations under the guise of humanity....arabs and Persians and make their citizens matter more- #popefrancis is right- it’s time for peace, humanity, love and environment ...
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Canada not at war with ISIS: Trudeau
THE CANADIAN PRESS
Mar
23, 2016
, Last Updated: 2:14 PM ET
OTTAWA -- The Liberal government says Canada is not
at war with Islamic militants -- a view not shared by ally France.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs
Minister Stephane Dion are rejecting the "at war" label just one day
after the bombings in Brussels that killed more than 30 people and injured 270.
After the attacks, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls
said Europe was "at war."
The bombings in Brussels came four months after the
attacks in Paris that left 130 dead.
The militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant has claimed responsibility for both incidents.
Trudeau, who made his comments during a CBC Radio
interview, and Dion -- speaking in the House of Commons foyer today -- both say
the conflict with ISIL does not fit the true definition of war.
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Milestones: 1993–2000
The War in Bosnia, 1992–1995
In 1991 and 1992, Yugoslavia disintegrated under the pressures of ethnic conflict, economic issues, and the demagoguery of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. The secessions of Slovenia and Croatia triggered warfare in both new nations, with the United Nations inserting a peacekeeping force, the U.N. Protective Force (UNPROFOR), in mid-1992 to stabilize the situation. The U.N. further imposed an arms embargo on the region, seeking to dry up the flow of arms to the combatants. Serbian forces executed widespread “ethnic cleansing” in occupied areas, creating horrific scenes of refugees and concentration camps that seemed unthinkable in modern Europe.Bosnia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in 1992 raised the violence to a new level, triggering a war that lasted over three years and exemplified the complexities of the “post-Cold War” strategic environment. The population of Bosnia-Herzegovina was comprised of three ethnic groups: Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim. Initially, Croats and Serbs expanded their territorial control at the expense of the Bosnian state, with the Serbs, supported by Serbia and the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), eventually controlling about 70% of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Shifts in territorial control were accompanied by widespread ethnic cleansing.
While the situation in Yugoslavia was a constant subject of discussion at the highest levels of the Bush Administration, President George H. W. Bush and his advisors considered the situation in the Balkans to be primarily a European issue, to be addressed by the European Union. The lack of U.S. response became an issue in the 1992 presidential campaign, as candidate Bill Clinton advocated a “lift and strike” policy—lifting the arms embargo, which was operating at the disadvantage of the Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and conducting airstrikes against Bosnian Serb forces.
Following Clinton’s electoral victory, the new administration set to work quickly with Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright to shape a more active U.N. role in the conflict. In early January 1993, during the final days of the Bush Administration, the United Nations and the European Union had agreed upon the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP) for Bosnia. A month later, the U.N. Security Council established a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the United States initiated night airdrops of food to the Muslim enclaves. By March the U.N. authorized enforcement of a no-fly zone in Bosnia, implemented by the United States Air Force in Operation Deny Flight, the first armed engagement of U.S. forces in the former Yugoslavia. Following the Bosnian Serbs’ rejection of VOPP, the U.N. declared the Muslim enclaves of Sarajevo, Bihac, Tusla, Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde to be “safe areas.” The Security Council did not, however, provide for the defense of these areas.
On May 1 President Clinton sent Secretary of State Warren Christopher to consult with the major NATO allies and with Russia in order to gain support for the “lift and strike” strategy. This effort failed, exposing issues that would hamstring NATO’s actions in the conflict for another two years. Alliance members participating in UNPROFOR were concerned that their troops, lightly armed and widely dispersed, were likely to be taken as hostages and did not share Washington’s enthusiasm for an air campaign. Wide divergence between the alliance’s national perspectives on the conflict and very little European domestic support for armed intervention added to the Administration’s problems. NATO’s inability to reach consensus on an effective response to the atrocities called into question the future of the alliance in post-Cold War Europe.
Gridlock in the alliance was mirrored by gridlock in the U.S. interagency policy process. The Department of Defense was very reluctant to commit to a role in the Balkans, concerned as it was about a protracted occupation or guerrilla warfare. Ambassador Albright was active in promoting a western response but she had little influence on the overall administration policy. There was also little domestic support in the United States for intervention in the Balkans, though the violence, documented by cable television news, kept the issue in the public eye.
In June 1993, Serb attacks on the Srebrenica “safe area” led the U.N. Security Council to authorize the use of air power “to support UNPROFOR in the performance of its mandate.” The resolution established a “dual key” arrangement between the U.N. and NATO in control of tactical air power responding to Serbian attacks. This arrangement proved difficult for Washington, as the U.N. was extremely reluctant to authorize any effective combat action on the part of NATO.
On February 5, 1994, a mortar shell exploded in the Markala marketplace in Sarajevo, killing 69 civilians. The attack led to the declaration of a 20-kilometer weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo. A confrontation with the Bosnian Serb forces was averted through Russian mediation.
In early April, Bosnian Serb forces launched an offensive against Gorazde. Following the killing of a UNPROFOR soldier by Serbian artillery, NATO launched an air strike. In turn, Bosnian Serbs surrounded a contingent of UNPROFOR soldiers, and their commander, Ratko Mladic, threatened that none would survive if NATO repeated the air attacks. In the immediate aftermath, the United States led the formation of a Contact Group to spearhead policy toward the conflict. The group agreed on a set of principles for any peace settlement: Bosnia would remain a single state, comprised of the Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb entity, and these entities would be linked by constitutionally-agreed principles. The group further agreed to a map of Bosnia-Herzegovina where the Muslim-Croat federation controlled 51 percent of the territory and the Serbian entity controlled 49 percent. While the Bosnian Croats and Muslim groups signed a cease fire between their forces under the terms of the 1994 Washington Agreement, the Bosnian Serbs rejected the plan. The military balance also began to equalize, as Serbia cut off support to Bosnian-Serb forces while Croatia and Bosnian-Muslim forces built up via an increasingly porous arms embargo. The year closed with a four-month truce negotiated by former President Jimmy Carter.
The spring of 1995 brought renewed combat, with Muslim and Croatian forces now on the offensive in western Bosnia-Herzegovina. Without logistical support from Serbia, Bosnian Serb forces retook U.N.-secured weapons, brushing aside UNPROFOR guards. When NATO responded with air strikes, the Serbs took UNPROFOR troops hostage, using them as human shields. NATO deployed a combat-ready Rapid Reaction Force to Bosnia to reduce the vulnerability of the widely scattered UNPROFOR units.
In July, the Bosnian Serb commanders launched an offensive against the eastern enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa; they massacred over 7,000 men in Srebrenica. The mass killing served as a tipping point to western resolve to bring a decisive end to the conflict. Convening in London on July 21, NATO agreed on the effective end of the “dual key” policy for controlling air strikes, with authority for strikes delegated to UNPROFOR and NATO commanders in the field. The alliance further agreed that any future attacks on safe areas would result in a sustained air offensive.
On August 1, Croatian and Bosnian forces launched a powerful offensive, Operation Storm, against Bosnian Serb-held territory in western Bosnia. The offensive rolled eastward, displacing many thousands of Serb refugees and steadily moving the territorial balance toward the 51/49 balance called for by the Contact Group. The new Assistant Secretary of State for Western Europe, Richard Holbrooke, had seized a major role in policy toward the Balkans, and sought to orchestrate a cease-fire and negotiated settlement. When a mortar shell exploded in the Markala marketplace in Sarajevo on August 25, NATO executed Operation Deliberate Force, an intense two-week series of attacks on Serb military positions.
The combination of the ground offensive, NATO’s air campaign, and Holbrooke’s tireless diplomacy yielded a cease-fire by the end of September. On November 1, negotiations among the three parties opened at Dayton AFB, OH. The parties reached a hard-fought agreement on November 21 and the Dayton Accords, formally the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, were signed in Paris on December 14. The NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) deployed into Bosnia-Herzegovina on December 20.
Last modified: October 31, 2013
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This article says it all...
UK- Bombing Isis fails war’s most critical imperative, so where is the opposition?
Terrified to be seen as weak, our political leaders have
backed a half-war they have no capacity to end
I cannot recall a conflict so swamped by incoherence as the one in northern Iraq. The awfulness of Isis has given the something-must-be-done-even-if-it’s-stupid lobby an ostensibly crushing moral ascendancy. The right takes comfort in faux belligerence: David Cameron’s party conference speech frothed with “evil people, pure and simple”; it dripped with killed children, raped women, genocides and beheadings. He declared that “some people seem to think we can opt out of this. We can’t. There is no walk-on-by option.”
He then walked on by. He suggested that a bit of bombing would do the trick while conceding that “troops on the frontline” would be “Iraqis, Kurds and Syrians fighting for the safe and democratic future they deserve”. None would be British. The adjectives were apocalyptic, the response cosmetic.
The left was no better. Neither Ed Miliband nor Nick Clegg mentioned voting for military action in their recent conference speeches. Were they ashamed? Labour’s pragmatic strain was clearly eroded by long years of whipped support for Tony Blair’s wars. We remain in ignorance of Miliband’s strategy. It may have been in the “forgotten cupboard” of his speech. He muttered something about support for “overnight action against Isis”, but did not explain his strategy of airstrikes in Iraq but not in Syria. As for Clegg, he didn’t even mention a conflict for which he is actively responsible as deputy prime minister. He might assert that “we are the only party that refuses to trade in fear”, but that is precisely the currency of his security policy.
All these leaders have a terror of being thought of as a wimp. The same is true in America. There, Barack Obama may have been elected on a platform of withdrawal from foreign wars, but he too must scamper from helicopter to White House dodging jibes of impotence. His plea that “doing stupid stuff” is no answer to a global crisis is derided by his old secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. “Great nations need organising principles,” she says, whatever they may be. “Not doing stupid” lacks what the New Yorker last month called the “snarl and swagger” that Americans want in their leaders, even if they lead to defeat.
That war has all the best tunes is a truism. So is the relief that governments in trouble have long drawn from foreign adventures and manufactured foreign threats. Cameron is emerging as a typical politician of fear, with his hyperbolic elevation of Isis as a menace that “we must deal with or they will deal with us, bringing terror and murder to our streets”. An inability to differentiate between lethal criminality and national security is dangerous in a democratic leader.
Governments face peculiar pressures. That does not go for oppositions. Their duty is to challenge and, if necessary, oppose a reckless state. The ageing cold war diplomat George Kennan was appalled when George W Bush was heading for war in Iraq. If Saddam Hussein posed any threat to America or the world, he said, it was trivial and war was “just not worth it”. But Kennan reserved his full fury for the “shameful and shabby” opposition Democrats, who were refusing to call Bush to account out of a “timid concern for the elections”. Closing down debate was what led to mission creep, with countries ending up “fighting for entirely different things you had never thought of before”. If democracies could not openly discuss war for fear of seeming unpatriotic in the eyes of idiots, they were doomed.
This is vividly displayed by the Isis predicament. The war motion passed by the House of Commons on 26 September – yes to bombing Iraq, no to troops on the ground – received just 43 votes against. Canada’s parliament mustered 134 against. Did it really need General David Richards to point out last month that bombing made no sense without ground forces to follow? The enemy would simply relocate. The war, Richards said, would go on for ever unless a competent land army was involved. As it was, British jets were finding little to bomb. Two more Tornados were sent to raise the British deployment to eight, because, I am told, Denmark had sent seven.
Britain’s strategy is to howl blue murder and then declare a sort of half-war. A conflict we have neither the intention nor the capacity to end, and that should be contained regionally, is being internationalised. We bequeathed a bunch of warrior zealots a nation in a state of anarchy and a vast arsenal to play with. If the region cannot handle them, they may have to rampage themselves to exhaustion. Their victims desperately need our aid, as do the victims of war everywhere, but not our bombs. For the price of a bombed pick-up truck you can feed a refugee camp for a year.
Humanitarian intervention has drifted far from the ideal of charitable aid to become a liberal’s surrogate for war; it is licensed machismo. It emerged in the 1990s, largely in Somalia and Yugoslavia, without a coherent philosophy or rules of engagement. In 1992, Henry Kissinger – no interventionist slouch – warned America against going beyond preaching “moral and humane concern” and trying to impose that concern on the world by force. It would become a habit, as if not doing so would imply that “American life would have lost meaning”. No nation could police the world’s humanity. The ideal was dangerously vague.
In 1999, Tony Blair’s “adrenalin” speech in Chicago sought to goad America into a ground war in Kosovo (in my view justified). But even he set out specific criteria for such intervention. These included that military action should be sensibly undertaken, that there should be a coherent long-term strategy, and that British interests be correctly identified. Few of Blair’s criteria are met in the case of Isis. It fails war’s most critical imperative – once known as the Powell doctrine – that it be fought all out and ended quickly. The Isis adventure looks like costly, half-hearted window dressing. As for fighting another Hitler, history must be dead.
We might expect all this from the right of the political spectrum. But from the left?
• This article was amended on 14 October 2014 to remove a reference to Michael Foot opposing the Falklands War. He supported the sending of a task force in 1982.
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Zenobia, ruled Palmyra in Syria, was everything the ISIS
isnot- This ancient warrior queen was incredible- http://ind.pn/1hU9WrS
The ancient warrior queen who's guaranteed to irritate Isis
Zenobia, who once ruled Palmyra in Syria, was everything the
militants are not
'Queen Zenobia's Last Look Upon Palmyra' by Herbert Schmalz Public Domain
A warrior queen of the Middle East who almost brought the Roman Empire to
its knees represented everything that Isis is not in her once-glorious reign.Zenobia once ruled her home region Palmyra, the Syrian historical city laid waste to by the militant group.
A descendant of Egyptian leader Cleopatra, Zenobia was a powerful military and economic leader in pre-Islamic Syria.
Her era is completely at odds with the misogyny of Isis' ideology - rejected by the majority of the world's Muslims - and is a powerful alternative narrative of history which needs reinstating, argues the Huffington Post.
"She was beautiful and highly educated, and made herself a ruler in the very masculine world of the Arabian desert," Richard Stoneman, honorary visiting professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter told the news website.
"She took on the might of Rome, the world's greatest empire, and nearly succeeded in creating a breakaway state."
The warrior queen was born in Palmyra, a Roman province in the third-century centred on the city of the same name - the one which Isis militants have been blowing up throughout August for its supposedly idolatrous buildings.
After the death of her husband the king and her stepson, Zenobia took the throne and led her army to conquer parts of Syria, Turkey, Jordan and Egypt and build up the Palmyrene Empire – largely the same area Isis has within its sights now.
This was unheard of for women of her day and demonstrated Zenobia's strong relationships with military and business leaders at the time, experts told the Huffington Post.
Yet her historic legacy has been co-opted by the Bashar al-Assad regime - still believed by human rights groups to have killed more civilians than Isis - who has used it to justify his own succession to power, according to The New Yorker.
And her legacy is at risk of being lost altogether, literally as well as metaphorically, as Isis continue to eradicate her city.
The buildings now being destroyed were in part built and defended under her rule from the Roman general Aurelian - until the full weight of the Roman Empire came down on the region and crushed the Palmyrene rebellion.
It is little wonder ideologues such as Isis members, like so many dictators and regimes before them, wish to re-write history to present themselves as the true and inevitable inheritors of land.
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Comment July 20, 2015 Issue
Homage to Zenobia-The New Yorker
By Lawrence Wright
The battle in May over the Syrian town of Palmyra was
notable for being isis’s first major
military victory against the forces of the Assad government. The Army fled,
leaving the jihadis in control of sizable gas reserves, the brutal prison where
thousands of Islamists and political dissidents had formerly been held (which
they blew up), and the ruins of a fabled dominion that was once ruled by a
queen named Zenobia, who dared to threaten the power of imperial Rome.
Zenobia’s empire reached across Egypt and through much of modern-day Turkey.
Her city’s remains are now in the hands of a force that wages war on
civilization, both modern and ancient.
“Zenobia was esteemed the most lovely as well as the most heroic of her
sex,” Gibbon wrote in an awestruck account of her brief reign. “She claimed her
descent from the Macedonian kings of Egypt, equaled in beauty her ancestor
Cleopatra, and far surpassed that princess in chastity and valor.” The only
contemporary representation we have of Zenobia is on a coin, which makes her
look rather witchlike, but Gibbon’s description of her pearly-white teeth and
large black eyes, which “sparkled with uncommon fire,” cast a spell over future
historians, both in the West and in the Arab world, who quarrel over nearly
everything having to do with Zenobia and her confounding legacy.She was probably in her twenties when she took the throne, upon the death of her husband, King Odenathus, in 267 or 268. Acting as regent for her young son, she then led the army in a revolt against the Romans, conquering Egypt and parts of Asia Minor. By 271, she had gained control of a third of the Roman Empire. Gibbon sometimes portrays the warrior queen as a kind of well-schooled Roman society matron. “She was not ignorant of the Latin tongue,” he writes, “but possessed in equal perfection the Greek, the Syriac, and the Egyptian languages.” Palmyra’s abundant wall inscriptions are in Latin, Greek, and an Aramaic dialect, not Arabic. But to Arab historians, such as the ninth-century al-Tabari, Zenobia was a tribal queen of Arab, rather than Greek, descent, whose original name was Zaynab, or al-Zabba. Among Muslims, she is seen as a herald of the Islamic conquests that came four centuries later.
This view, popular within the current Syrian regime, which boasts Zenobia on its currency, also resonates within radical Islamic circles. Glen Bowersock, a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, says, “I suspect isis believes Palmyra to be somehow a distinctively Arab place, where Zenobia stood up to the Roman emperor.” Indeed, isis fighters, after seizing Palmyra, released a video showing the temples and colonnades at the ruins, a unesco World Heritage site, intact. “Concerning the historical city, we will preserve it,” an isis commander, Abu Laith al-Saudi, told a Syrian radio station. “What we will do is pulverize the statues the miscreants used to pray to.” Fighters then set about sledgehammering statues and shrines.
Zenobia’s nemesis was the Roman emperor Aurelian, who led his legions through Asia Minor, reclaiming parts of the empire she had taken. Near Antioch, she met him with an army of seventy thousand men, but the Roman forces chased them back to their desert stronghold. During the siege of the city, Aurelian wrote to Zenobia, “I bid you surrender, promising that your lives shall be spared.” She replied, “You demand my surrender as though you were not aware that Cleopatra preferred to die a queen rather than remain alive.” Zenobia attempted to escape to Persia, but was captured before she could cross the Euphrates. Palmyra was sacked after a second revolt. Aurelian lamented in a letter to one of his lieutenants, “We have not spared the women, we have slain the children, we have butchered the old men.”
Today, that dire role is being enacted by the isis invaders. They have killed scores of civilians near Palmyra and executed soldiers in its ancient amphitheatre, in order to make yet another grotesque video documenting a new age of barbarism. In a region once ruled by a strong-willed queen, women who don’t bend to ISIS’s narrow beliefs may be sold into sex slavery.
Some Arab sources adhere to the theory that Zenobia committed suicide before she could be caught. Gibbon follows Roman accounts that place her in Rome as the showpiece of Aurelian’s triumphal procession. “The beauteous figure of Zenobia was confined by fetters of gold; a slave supported the gold chain which encircled her neck, and she almost fainted under the intolerable weight of jewels,” he writes. The grand homecoming apparently elicited a snarky response from the commentariat. According to the “Historia Augustus,” Aurelian complained, “Nor would those who criticize me, praise me sufficiently, if they knew what sort of woman she was.” Instead of beheading her in front of the Temple of Jupiter, once a common fate of renegades, he awarded her a villa in Tivoli. The historian Syncellus reported that she married a Roman senator; their descendants were listed into the fifth century.
As isis occupies the ruins of Zenobia’s city, it is worth comparing the goals and the acts of this modern phenomenon with those of Palmyra nearly two thousand years ago. “It was one of the most extraordinary cities in antiquity,” David Potter, a professor of Greek and Roman history at the University of Michigan, says. “It was literally a city where East meets West.” Palmyra, which in Western portrayals comes across as a kind of desert Camelot, was a center of learning and tolerance, enriched by its exposure to the outside world, as caravans from China, India, and Arabia passed through on their way to the Roman provinces. The city reached its multicultural zenith during Zenobia’s reign; although it was a largely pagan society, Jews and Christians also formed part of the social fabric and were represented at court. Zenobia herself may have been Jewish, or a convert, several sources suggest.
Perhaps Zenobia’s ambition outstripped her resources, but the ideal of an Arab empire equal to that of Rome still animates the dreams of many. The great Arab civilization of modern time still awaits its champion, but it is the values embodied by Zenobia and her city that will be the hallmarks of its success, and not isis’s rejection of modernity, its persecution of believers in other faiths, its subjugation of women, and its abolition of history. ♦
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QUOTE: ISIS bears the closest resemblance to,
in fact it looks like a carbon copy, of the Kharijites of the seventh century, especially its
radical branch, the Azraqites, followers of Nafi al-Azraq. Azraqites were the
first in Islamic history to terrorize the populace with horrendous, violent
acts and were the first to make a distinction between true Muslims versus
nominal Muslims. That they were the first “terrorists” of Islam and the first
to make such a distinction is not at all a coincidence as the latter induced
the former.
What Black & White
thinking misses about ISIS/Daesh & why it Matters to us All
By contributors
| Jan.
6, 2015 |
By Neslihan Çevik | (Daily Sabah) —
To combat radicalism, EU countries
should avoid considering an increased interest in the origins and nature of
Islam as a sign of potential radicalization, while Muslim states should
encourage the youth to analytically inquire about their religion and
systematically reject radical Islamism based on that inquiry
Debates on whether the Islamic State of Iraq
and al-Sham (ISIS) represents Islam or is a malevolent distortion of the
religion continue to divide not only Western skeptics and Muslims outraged by
ISIS, but also domestic political frontlines in the U.S. and EU. This debate
gained new momentum as renowned German journalist, Jürgen Todenhöfer, 74,
managed to gain exclusive access to ISIS-controlled territories, reporting that
the group is much stronger than we realize, concluding that to defeat the
militant group we must have a deeper understanding of what it is and what it
stands for.
If we were to follow a linear logic, we
would conclude, as have the skeptics of Islam, that ISIS represents and stands
for Islam. After all, ISIS is composed exclusively of Muslims, it claims to
speak in the name of Islam, it has declared itself to be the caliphate, and it
overwhelmingly quotes Quranic verses and concepts while slaughtering Muslims
and clerics, beheading Westerners, tearing down places of worship and
historical sites and forcing women and girls into the sex trade and slavery.
Moreover, the violent doctrine and militancy of the 21st century’s self-claimed
caliphate are not without historical precedence – they, in fact, rekindle parts
of the Islamic past.
There is, however, one simple fact that
linear logic misses – something belonging to the past does not make that thing
authentic or true. That is, the past that ISIS revives and continues is not the
“true Islam,” untouched by modern reform, but a part of the Islamic past that
fell far outside the belief system and practices of normative Islam by the
standards of the same Early Islam itself.
ISIS bears the closest resemblance to,
in fact it looks like a carbon copy, of the Kharijites of the seventh century, especially its
radical branch, the Azraqites, followers of Nafi al-Azraq. Azraqites were the
first in Islamic history to terrorize the populace with horrendous, violent
acts and were the first to make a distinction between true Muslims versus
nominal Muslims. That they were the first “terrorists” of Islam and the first
to make such a distinction is not at all a coincidence as the latter induced
the former.
Needless to say, Azraqites considered
themselves the only true believers within the entire Muslim world of the time,
and their camp was the adobe of Islam. Whoever remained outside their camp and
did not submit to their view was only nominally Muslim, and those Muslims,
living within the Muslim community, threatened the purity of Islam. Kharijites
drove this distinction from the Quranic dichotomy of “mumin” versus “kafir,” or
believer versus unbeliever, but they corrupted the inner structure of these
concepts and flawed their etymological meanings.
With the Kharijite distinction of real
versus nominal Muslims, kafir no longer simply meant unbeliever as defined by
the Quran, it now meant heretic. Azraqites took it a step further declaring
non-Kharijite Muslims to be “mushrik” – one who commits the unpardonable sin of
idolatry. There was more corruption to come. Azraqites ruled that a single sin
would excommunicate a Muslim, although this very clearly went against the
Quranic doctrine on sin. They also considered it to be lawful to kill whomever
they defined as a disbeliever, spoil their possessions and slaughter and
enslave their women and children. With this flawed interpretation, Azraqites
denounced prophets of the past as heretics and their contemporaneous Prophet
Ali, the cousin of Prophet Muhammad, as a sinner, subsequently assassinating
him. Furthermore, a number of them engaged in the practice of “istirad” –
asking people to expose their beliefs – the choice was simply between death and
submission to the Azraqite view of Islam.
It was based upon this corruption of
Quranic concepts that Azraqites formulated their version of Islam, laying the
foundations for radical Islamism from 18th century Wahhabism to today’s radical
Islamist terrorism. We should briefly take note that the Azraqites were not
theologians, not in the sense of the dialectic study of belief. Rather, their
belief system was developed under shadow politics mainly focused on defeating
their opponents on the question of the rightful ruler of the “umma” – the
community of Muslims.
It is difficult not to see the stark
similarities between the actions and religious doctrine of ISIS and that of the
Azraqites. By declaring itself the caliphate, ISIS gave more than a political
message. It has declared its camp as the adobe of Islam, composed of only true
believers. Whoever remains outside the caliphate is a “kafir,” in the sense of
the word used not by the Quran, but by the Azraqites. Just like the seventh
century fanatics, ISIS too, based on the distorted formula of disbeliever
versus believer, considers it lawful to kill anyone who it sees as an
unbeliever be they Muslim, non-Muslim, Sunni clerics, women, children, and
enslave them, spoil their possessions and burn their places of worship.
Early Islamic theologians from Ibn Hazm
to Taftazani to al-Ghazali, who disagreed upon many aspects of Islamic
theology, tightly agreed that “kafir” only meant unbeliever and one who
professes to believe is considered a believer. Moreover, major schools of
Islamic thought agree that belief is inner belief and the locus of it is the
heart. God is the only one that can know one’s heart, not even the prophets
have that ability, or indeed the duty, to separate true-Muslims from nominal
Muslims. The hadith makes this clear. In response to a man who accused others
for pronouncing what is not in their hearts, the Prophet Muhammad said: “I
assure you I have not been sent [to you as a messenger of God] in order to
split open the hearts of men.”[i]This demonstrates that no authority other than
God can judge sincerity of the confessor nor can one confer another’s spiritual
destiny. In regard to unbelievers, Islamic doctrine is unambiguous – it
absolutely forbids killing unless there is a need for self-defense.
Furthermore, as I wrote extensively here, belief requires the freedom of choice
– one must believe out of volition and through deliberating, inferring and
evaluating what she believes.
ISIS violates all of these elements that
are core to Islam’s belief system, elements that assign God absolute authority
and as such, endow the individual with moral autonomy and freedom of choice
while rebuking controlling tendencies of the state or community, particularly
when these institutions would try to assert authority over the believer in
ultimate spiritual matters.
Recognizing that what ISIS stands for is
not Islam itself but its perversion is not just an intellectual exercise to
defend Islam it has quite practical consequences. It affects the ways in which
we think about and produce policies for de-radicalization.
In the early 2000s, EU countries’
counter-radicalization programs focused on the prison system and protection of
the public from terrorist attacks. As radicalization of young Muslim immigrants
has become a mounting challenge in Europe, more recently policies have started
to concentrate on de-radicalization, seeking to prevent Muslim youth from being
recruited to terrorism in the first place. This is the right direction to go,
yet there is an overarching problem. EU countries tend to associate radicalism
with the putatively innate radical nature of Islam. In other words, any young
man or woman who is a practicing Muslim or is devout becomes a potential
terrorist. Such an erroneous start leads to the erroneous result that
de-radicalization must require de-Islamization of Muslim youth.
France for instance, the country with
the highest Muslim population in Europe. A few months back, the Academie de
Poitiers prepared a document enlisting individual indicators of Muslim
radicalization. Some of the signs that schools and teachers were to monitor
included weight loss due to fasting during Ramadan, rejecting tattoos, having a
long beard and adopting Muslim attire – religious practices themselves were
depicted as signs of radicalization. There are various problems here. This
approach fails to recognize the difference between expressions of piety and
radicalization, and undermines individual rights, moral freedoms and religious
plurality, and it violates secular principles by assigning the state the
authority to oversee how much religion one can have.
The same French document also considers
an increased interest in Islamic history, origins and the nature of Islam as a
sign of potential radicalization. This is a graver problem. A growing
individual interest in understanding Islam’s message is not a cause of
radicalization. On the contrary, it has been the decline of individual thinking
and reflection on religion in Muslim societies that have enabled radicalism in
the first place. This trend that started back in the ninth century along with
the rise of anti-philosophic Islamic currents was reinforced by post-colonial
authoritarian states, be they secularist or Islamist, which oppressed
individual moral agency, prevented development of religious identity and
co-opted religion to make it serve state power and ideologies.
To combat radicalism we need to revive
the individual thinking about Islam that is no longer satisfied with inherited
knowledge, imposed from above whether it is the state or an authoritarian
community. Only after that is one able to discern with certainty between what
is flawed and what is not. Paradoxically, the rise of ISIS has had a very
constructive consequence in that sense as it has finally awakened a
consciousness among Muslims, individually and collectively, to analytically
inquire about their religion and systematically reject radical Islamism based
on that inquiry. It is essential to keep this interest awake and channel it in
the right direction to instill Muslim youth with a proper knowledge of Islam.
This rising interest gives a great opportunity to the world to dry the roots of
radicalism, and to Europe to tackle the issue of de-radicalization without
violating its own democratic principles, unless of course, it is cut out by
policies informed by Islamophobia.
Neslihan Çevik, Ph.D., is Associate
fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia
& Board member, Post-Colonial Studies Research Center, Üsküdar University
Reprinted with author’s permission from Daily Sabah
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Related video added by Juan Cole:
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The True Believers Sam Harris and Graeme Wood discuss the Islamic State
Graeme Wood writes for The
Atlantic, where he covers a wide range of subjects, including education,
science, books, and politics, and he has reported frequently from the Middle
East since the early 2000s. In the March issue of the magazine, he published a
lengthy investigation of the ideology of the so-called Islamic State—which
included the controversial claim that the Islamic State is, despite its deep
unpopularity with most Muslims, Islamic.
Wood was kind enough to
speak with me at great length on this topic.—SH
Harris: You’ve interviewed me at least once before, Graeme. I’m sure of that, because I remember physically choking you. So it’s fun to turn the tables and get a chance to ask you a few questions.
Wood: It’s my pleasure. And
you’re right: The last time I saw you, you were in a position to murder me, but
you resisted. I owe you a favor.
Harris: Well, it’s
good to stay out of prison, if nothing else. However, I’m afraid the abuse
won’t end there. It now strikes me that doing a proper interview is a little
bit like cutting another person’s hair: It looks easy until you get the
scissors in your hand. Given that I’m not a journalist, I think you should
expect an impressive lack of professionalism from me here.
For those who may not be
familiar with you, let’s start with your background. As I recall, you have a
long-standing interest in the Middle East. You also have a habit of traveling
halfway around the world to talk to obnoxious people.
Wood: I started in journalism
at The Cambodia Daily, in Phnom Penh, when I was 19. In 2002, I moved to
the Middle East and started freelancing. I traveled to almost every country in
the region, learned enough Arabic and Persian to get around and do spot
interviews, and spent most of my time in Egypt and Iraq. I was last in Iraq in
late 2012, when I did a solo trip from south to north, from the Faw Peninsula
near Basra all the way to Kurdistan, including into Mosul, before its invasion
by the Islamic State.
Harris: Did you understand
how dangerous that was, or was soon to be, at the time?
Wood: I had no idea that Mosul
would soon collapse. But in the couple of days I was there, I visited a
military base I had known during the American occupation. It had become a ghost
town, as if the Iraqi soldiers who were supposed to be securing the city had
been raptured up. Given how derelict it looked, I wasn’t completely surprised
that ISIS, as the Islamic State was called at the time, was able to overrun the
city. The Iraqi army didn’t even seem to be present where you’d expect them to
be barracked.
Harris: So you’ve
spent a fair amount of time in the region as a journalist. And the most recent
product of these labors is the current cover
story in The Atlantic on the Islamic State. Congratulations
on producing such a fine piece. I must say it came as a relief to finally read
the plain truth in print, which is a strange thing to say, given how horrible
the truth is. But your article meets a need that was just not being fulfilled.
Almost no one in the media has been willing to draw a straight line between the
religious ideology that members of the Islamic State espouse and their barbaric
behavior—which, while absolutely shocking in its details, isn’t remotely
surprising, given what they believe. I recommend that our readers immediately
read your Atlantic essay as background to this conversation, if they
haven’t already.
How has the article been
received?
Wood: I’m pleased to see that
it has baffled a lot of people. Much of the initial wave of reaction has come
from people who desperately wanted it to say one thing or another, and who
reacted by assuming that it fell into their predetermined classifications of
pieces about politics, Islam, or terrorism. It is gratifying to write a story
so resistant to classification that people have to pretend it says things it
doesn’t just so that it fits in their mental categories.
Many enemies of Islam,
and I consider you one of them even though I exempt you from this charge of
misreading, have wanted to read the story as claiming that Islam is responsible
for terror, or that ISIS is Islam. In fact it denies these claims explicitly
and has a long section about literalist Muslim objections to ISIS. Many Muslims
have, ironically, read the piece in exactly the same way, assuming it blames
Islam for ISIS. That misreading, I think, is because it’s easier to argue
against the anti-Islam point of view than to reckon with the possibility that
Islam contains multitudes, like other religions, and that some of them are
very, very nasty indeed, even though they share the same texts as the not-nasty
ones. People are also frustrated by the fact that the piece discusses religion
but has no time for talk of a “clash of civilizations,” and in fact argues that
one of our main policy goals should be to avoid this. Finally, some readers are
desperate to see my article as a portrayal of Muslims as savages, and cannot
process that I am actually arguing something like the opposite, and
specifically about ISIS. Its members aren’t brainless brutes who cannot
think—that’s the Orientalist view, and ironically it’s the view that a lot of
people who would call themselves anti-Orientalists take when reading the piece.
ISIS members are often highly sophisticated people, just as capable of
intelligent critical thought as anyone else. They are simply evil.
Then, finally, there’s
the very interesting reaction of people who condemn the article for being
“Islamophobic” in effect if not in intent, because people who hate Muslims will
use it and ignore the parts about Muslims’ overwhelming rejection of ISIS. I’ll
just say that Muslims, of all people, should be wary of assigning guilt to
texts because of how they’re invoked by hate-filled people.
Harris: We’ll get
into all of those things. And I’m really looking forward to this discussion.
But I should clarify this notion that I’m an “enemy of Islam.” Granted, I’ve
not always been as careful as I now am when speaking on this topic, so I’ve
earned the label. One could certainly say that as a vocal atheist, I’m an enemy
of all religion. So, in that sense, I’m an enemy of Islam too. But for the
purposes of a conversation like this, I’m actually an enemy of “Islamism,” not
Islam per se. Islamism, as you know, is the desire on the part of a minority of
Muslims to impose their religion on the rest of society (and jihadis are the
minority of Islamists who attempt to do so by force). Anyone who’s not an
Islamist himself must be an enemy of that project, whether he thinks
about these things or not.
The distinction between
Islam and Islamism is important. I’ve just written a short book with the Muslim
reformer Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance (Harvard
University Press, June 2015). When talking to Maajid, my primary goal wasn’t to
win the fight against Islam in favor of unbelief. Rather, it was to honestly
discuss the problem of Islamism and to find some way of addressing it. Of
course, I had a few critical things to say about mainstream Islam too, but I’m
under no illusions that our near-term objective is to persuade 1.6 billion
Muslims to give up their religion and declare themselves atheists. However, as
with many religions, the boundary between beliefs that appear benign and those
that suddenly prove dangerous isn’t so easy to find. My main concern is always
to look at the role that specific unfounded ideas are playing in the world, and
to counter the ones that seem most harmful.
Let’s talk about the
Islamic State. As you point out, many people allege that it isn’t Islamic.
Happily, your article makes it clear how delusional that claim is. As you know,
I didn’t need any convincing on this point. From the moment the Islamic State
emerged, it felt almost as if I had invented it as some kind of thought
experiment to prove that everything I wrote in The End of Faith was
true. These people are a crystalline example of the problem I described in that
book—as is the response of liberal apologists who have been saying that their
behavior has nothing to do with Islam. Rather, we’re told that burning people
alive in cages, crucifying children, and butchering journalists and aid workers
is an ordinary human response to political and economic instability. Even representatives
of our own State Department assert this.
I can’t imagine how comically out of touch with reality we appear from the side
of the jihadis.
However, even for someone
like me, who didn’t need to be convinced of the connection between jihadism and
religion, there was much to learn in your article. And so, again, I urge our
readers go back and read
it.
You begin your essay by
summarizing the confusion that many people experience on this topic, and you
cite comments by Major General Michael Nagata, the Special Operations Commander
for the US in the Middle East. He is on record as admitting, I believe in a
closed-door session, that he didn’t understand the appeal of the Islamic State.
Specifically, he said “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand
the idea.”
I remember reading that
in the New York Times and getting furious. I take your point in the
article that jihadism is not monolithic, and there are both religious and
political differences among many of these groups. But if there is anything in
this world that is not a secret—if there is any intellectual or moral
problem that just solves itself—it is this question of what is appealing about
joining a group like the Islamic State for a person who actually believes in
the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. It’s about as psychologically
mysterious as my daughter’s wanting to go to the ice cream store. I can’t say
that I’ve defeated the idea, but I absolutely understand it.
It’s one thing for the
president to deny the link between religious belief and jihadism in
public—that’s a propaganda campaign that seems doomed to fail—but it’s another
to learn that our military leaders are expressing confusion about this behind
closed doors. I find that terrifying. Perhaps you can comment on this
background set of facts before we get into the details of your article.
Wood: I’ve had people come to
me after the piece appeared and ask me how I got this information, as if the
information were difficult to find. It was kind of them to assume that I had to
work very hard to get it. But as anyone who watches the Islamic State closely
knows, it manufactures propaganda at an industrial pace, and its members are
eager to explain themselves. They publish fatwas in Arabic and many other
languages represented among the foreign fighters. And they take great pains to
describe why they do what they do.
These fatwas and
religious edicts are produced by a council of scholars. ISIS has learned men
working on these issues and putting out judgments using texts within the
discourse and traditions of Islam. They’re not discussing whether something is
right in a vague, secular sense. They are using the language of Islam and
drawing, indisputably, upon its traditions of religious discourse, especially
the Qur’an and the hadīth (the sayings of the Prophet) and the lives of
Muhammad’s first followers.
Because there have been
so many kidnappings and public executions of journalists, it’s easy to assume
that to report on the Islamic State requires some kind of derring-do, or a
willingness to expose oneself to danger. I didn’t have to go to the Islamic
State at all, and I think it would have been fatal to do so. Instead I went to
London and to Melbourne.
There are people walking
the earth as free men who speak with a voice that, as far as I can tell, is
indistinguishable from that of the Islamic State. The discourse and language
they use, the modes of justification, all fall within the traditions of Islam.
I use the word “traditions” in the plural advisedly, because these are
traditions they have chosen at the expense of others that are preferred by the
vast majority of Muslims around the world.
To say that they are
“Islamic” could mean one of two things. It could mean that they fall into this
diverse and contradictory traditions of Islam, or it could mean—as I think a
lot of people want it to—that they express the one true Islam. I take no
position on that second point, but I can clearly say on the first one that they
are well within the bounds of what has historically been considered part of
Islam. They believe there is one god, and that Muhammad is his messenger, and
that the holy texts are the Qur’an and the hadīth. By any rational
standard, they are Muslims—maybe bad Muslims, but Muslims anyway.
Harris: I think I
should comment on this distinction, because I’m often accused of taking that
second line and alleging that the true Islam is the faith of the jihadis.
Then I’m accused of doing the terrorist’s work for him by propagandizing for
this intrinsically intolerant version of the faith. But that’s not actually
what I do. I grant that there are many possible readings of the Qur’an and the hadīth.
There’s simply no question that many different traditions have emphasized one
reading or another. All I argue is that there are more or less plausible, more
or less straightforward, more or less comprehensive readings of any scripture.
And the most plausible, straightforward, and comprehensive readings tend to be
the more literalistic, no matter how self-contradictory the text. So, for
instance, when it says in the Qur’an (8:12), “Smite the necks of the infidels,”
some people may read that metaphorically, but it’s always tempting to read it
literally. In fact, a line like that fairly cries out for a literal reading. Of
course, some Muslims believe that such violent passages must be read in their
historical context. But it seems even more natural to assume that the words of
God apply for all time. So it’s no accident that the Islamic State has made a
cottage industry of decapitation.
In my view, one really
can’t blame the religious dogmatist for resorting to literalism once he has
accepted the claim that a given book is the perfect word of the Creator of the
universe, because nowhere in these books does God counsel a metaphorical or
otherwise loose interpretation of His words. In fact, many scriptures contain
passages that explicitly forbid that kind of reading.
But, like you, I don’t
take a position on there being one true interpretation of scripture.
It’s just that there are plausible readings and less so, and to my eye the
Islamic State is giving a very plausible reading of the Qur’an and the hadīth.
That’s a terrible problem, because one can’t stand up and say that this
behavior is un-Islamic. Of course one can do this, as President Obama
repeatedly has—but his denials sounded about as credible as those of one former
president the moment images of a semen-stained dress appeared on the evening
news. One publicly flouts the obvious at one’s peril.
However, more important
than the connection to scripture is the fact that the people who are devoting
their lives to waging jihad really believe what they say they believe, however
those ideas got into their heads. The psychological problem that secularists
must overcome is the basic doubt that anyone believes in paradise. I’ve
actually had anthropologists and other overeducated people look me in the eye
and insist that no one believes in martyrdom and that even suicide
bombers are merely concerned about politics, economics, and male bonding. Some
experts on terrorism sincerely think that no one is ever motivated to act on
the basis of religious ideas. I find this astonishing.
Wood: I am not a social
scientist, but I see two important, contradictory tendencies in social science,
and they’re relevant here. One is to not take literally what people say and to
think more deeply about root causes, especially material ones, that explain
people’s spiritual, theological, ideological statements—
Harris: Don’t lose
your train of thought—I warned you, I’m not a journalist. I just want to point
out that this effort to get at root causes only ever runs in one direction. No
one doubts the political and economic justifications that people give for their
behavior. When someone says, “Listen, I murdered my rich neighbor because I
knew he kept a pile of money in a safe. I wanted that money, and I didn’t want
to leave a witness,” nobody looks for an ulterior explanation for that
behavior. But when someone says, “I think infidels and apostates deserve to
burn in hell, and I know for a fact that I’ll go to paradise if I die while
waging jihad against them,” many academics refuse to accept this rationale at
face value and begin looking for the political or economic reasons that they
imagine lie beneath it. So the game is rigged.
Wood: Yes. However, the
countervailing current in social science is the tradition in ethnography and
anthropology of taking seriously what people say. And this can lead to the
exact opposite of the materialist, “root causes” approach. When
Evans-Pritchard, for example, talks about witchcraft among the Azande, he’s
describing exactly what they say and showing that it’s an internally consistent
view of the world. This is something that anthropology has done quite well in
the past, and it gives us a model for how we can listen to jihadis and
understand them without immediately assuming that they are incapable of
self-knowledge.
What I’m arguing for in
the piece is not to discard either type of explanation but to remember the
latter one and take the words of these ISIS people seriously. Even though at
various points in the past we’ve ignored political or material causes, this
doesn’t mean that ideology plays no role, or that we should ignore the plain
meaning of words.
Of course, we don’t know
what people actually think. Maybe they’re self-deluded; maybe they don’t really
believe in the literal rewards of martyrdom. We can’t know; we’re not in their
heads. But this lack of knowledge cuts both ways. Why do so many people
instantly resort, with great confidence, to a material explanation—even or
especially when the person himself rejects it? It’s a very peculiar
impulse to have, and I consider it a matter of dogma for many people who study
jihadists.
Harris: Yes,
especially in cases where a person meets none of the material conditions
that are alleged to be the root causes of his behavior. We see jihadis coming
from free societies all over the world. There are many examples of educated,
affluent young men joining organizations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State
who lack any discernible material or political grievances. They simply feel a
tribal connection to Muslims everywhere, merely because they share the same
religious identity. We are seeing jihadis travel halfway around the world for
the privilege of dying in battle who have nothing in common with the
beleaguered people of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Somalia whose ranks they are
joining, apart from a shared belief in the core doctrines of Islam.
The other side of this
coin, of course, is that even the most grotesque, seemingly nihilistic actions
of the Islamic State become perfectly rational—which is to say,
straightforwardly self-interested—given the requisite beliefs. Once you imagine
what it would be like to actually believe in paradise, and in martyrdom as the
surest way of getting there, it becomes obvious why someone would want to join
the Islamic State. If a person truly believes that the Creator of the universe
wants him to wage war against the evil of unbelief and that the Islamic State
is the very tip of His spear, he has to be insane not to join the cause.
Wood: And that’s really one of
the things that social sciences have triumphed in doing: explaining that within
certain boundaries, rationalities lie behind what at first looks like mere
craziness or barbarity. Just calling behavior craziness is a trap that a lot of
ISIS-watchers have fallen into. If you see members of the Islamic State as
thrill-kill nihilists, then you’re not giving them enough credit.
It’s very difficult to
sit across from one of these people and listen to his scholarly, often
fascinating, view of history and then walk away thinking, “Oh, that person is
simply crazy. He needs to be in an asylum.” Such a person has specific
premises, and his conclusions follow plausibly from them. I think we should pay
him the compliment of acknowledging his underlying rationality.
Harris: Yes, but nor
are these people “simply evil,” as you stated at the beginning of this
conversation. Calling them “evil” can be as misleading as calling them “crazy.”
I’m sure jihadism is selecting for thrill seekers and psychopaths to some
degree. But I doubt that it’s a large variable. If 1% of the general population
is suffering from psychopathy, let’s nudge that up to 10% for the Islamic
State—an increase that would still do nothing to explain the larger phenomenon.
I see no reason to think
that most jihadis are psychologically abnormal. The truth is far more
depressing: These are mostly normal people—fully capable of love, empathy,
altruism, and so forth—who simply believe what they say they believe.
Wood: I take your point. But
since what they say they believe in is the goodness of slavery, crucifixion,
and public executions of street magicians, as shorthand I will continue to call
them “crazy.”
Harris: Of course.
We can call them “evil,” too—for they are guilty of immense evil. I just don’t
want people to be confused about what’s really going on here. Normal people,
under the sway of bad ideas, are capable of anything.
No doubt you saw that Vice
documentary on the Islamic State that was released on YouTube. It
seems to have been made just a few weeks before the Islamic State revealed how
hostile it was going to be toward journalists. They hadn’t killed James Foley
yet. Were those Vice guys the luckiest people on earth?
Wood: The Vice
journalist was Muslim, and I think that matters. And the Islamic State is not
totally shut off: When I started talking with its supporters in London, one of
them asked me, “Why don’t you go there?” His second question was, “Why
don’t you go there and take me with you?” He wanted to immigrate and to show me
how wonderful life was there. I told him exactly why I wouldn’t go. (The
conversation turned surreal very rapidly, about the time I patiently explained
that I did not want to be beheaded. Sometimes these things seem to need to be
vocalized.) And he understood. But he said, “Look, if you approach the
Islamic State and you say, This is my purpose for coming: I want to see the
following things; I want you to tell me about the following things; and I want
your guarantee of safety while I’m there, they will give you that if they
decide it’s worth their time to cooperate with you.”
Harris: That
wouldn’t surprise me at all. However, I don’t recommend you put the theory to
the test.
Wood: As you may know, in at
least one instance they have made good on that promise. An eccentric German
former magistrate named Jürgen Todenhöfer went to the Islamic State and
returned with extraordinary footage. He came back agreeing that its members are
serious about religion. They acted like true believers, and they didn’t break
character during his trip.
Harris: I do
remember that. Todenhöfer also made it very clear
that the foreign recruits who are coming to join the Islamic State are not
beleaguered, hopeless dropouts, but bright-eyed “winners,” as he put it, who
are absolutely convinced of the truth of their religious beliefs.
Wood: Yes. There’s a lot of
mystery about the day-to-day life of the Islamic State, despite all the social
media messages that are coming out, and a lot of willingness to credit a view
of these people as barbarians—not just moral barbarians but truly babbling,
inhuman types. For example, the whole idea of this Jihad al-Nikah—the “sex
jihad,” whereby devoted young women offer themselves sexually to mujahedin in
Syria—I think is a fiction. I don’t think these people would do that. What
proof do I have? Only that it seems out of character, and that the
evidence that it’s happening doesn’t look strong either.
But journalists and other
outsiders are willing to believe things about these people. Some commentators
will just straight-up lie about ISIS. There was a widely cited op-ed in The
Guardian by a sociologist named Kevin McDonald who argued that rather than
trace the intellectual origins of the Islamic State to medieval Islam, we
should trace them to revolutionary France.
Harris: I’m glad I
missed that one.
Wood: You can make the
argument that ISIS is reactive to modern borders, and that such borders are a
construct of modern states that owed their existence to certain historical
trends in early modern Europe. However, his argument was based on the claim
that in his inaugural sermon in Mosul, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi quoted from
Maududi, a Pakistani Islamist, at length. McDonald used the word
“quoted.” That speech is everywhere. It’s very easy to find. There’s not
a single quote from Maududi in it. There’s no quote at all. McDonald just made
it up. This, as far as I can tell, is an example of a lie in the service of a
predetermined dogma about a group that’s very easy to caricature and
misunderstand.
Harris: I now have a
rogues’ gallery in my mind of pseudo-liberals, both Muslim and not, who are
reflexive apologists for theocracy. These people will deny, at every turn, the
link between deeply held religious convictions and bad behavior. According to
them, all the mayhem we see in the Middle East is “blowback.” Everything is a
product of our callous meddling in the affairs of other countries. We have no
enemies in the world but the ones we’ve made for ourselves by being bad actors
and rapacious guzzlers of oil. Many of these people appear to have been
bewitched by Noam Chomsky.
Wood: Part of this might be
love of the underdog. Next to the United States, which is such a prosperous
country and so lucky in so many ways, everyone looks like an underdog,
especially anyone coming out of one of these terrible regions like Syria or
Iraq.
Harris: I have no
doubt that’s true, although I would then ask, Why don’t we hear similar apologies
for North Korea coming from this same group of liberals?
Wood: That’s an interesting
comparison. I think one clear difference is that it’s easier to imagine the
Islamic State fighters wearing Che Guevara caps and acting as some kind of
grassroots phenomenon. Whereas if you try to do the same with North Korea, the
comparison is obviously inapt, because North Korea has all the styling of a
fascist state, complete with uniforms and goose-stepping. The Islamic State is
a fascist organization too. It exists only to forbid everything that isn’t
required. But it does have recent origins in a Zapata-like movement, in the
sense that some of its members are people of the land, who recently experienced
great woe at the hands of their governments. It’s difficult to cast North Korea
in that kind of light.
Harris: Do you have
other ideas about why it’s so tempting for liberals to ignore the link between
jihadism and religious belief?
Wood: There’s also a deep urge
to deny agency to the Islamic State, and I think it’s fundamentally connected
to a reluctance to see non-Western people as fully developed and capable of
having intelligent beliefs and enough self-knowledge to express them. These
people articulate well-thought-out reasons for what they do. And yet ignoring
what they say somehow gets camouflaged in the minds of liberals as speaking up
for them. It’s delusional.
Harris: Again, the
fact that most jihadis are generally rational, even psychologically normal, and
merely in the grip of a dangerous belief system is, in my view, the most
important point to get across. And it is amazing how resolutely people will
ignore the evidence of this. Justin Bieber could convert to Islam tomorrow,
spend a full hour on 60 Minutes confessing his hopes for martyrdom and
his certainty of paradise, and then join the Islamic State—and Glenn Greenwald
would still say his actions had nothing to do with the doctrine of Islam and
everything to do with U.S. foreign policy.
Tell me a little more
about what it was like to interview Musa Cerantonio and Anjem Choudary.
Wood: Anjem Choudary is a
fixture on Fox News. He talks to Sean Hannity, and many people would say that
those two deserve each other. He’s known for screaming about the greatness and
supremacy of shari’ah. But I had no interest in the screaming. Instead,
I wanted details. We had a lucid, friendly exchange about what he believed a
fully shari’ah-compliant caliphate would look like. I found him
articulate, informed, and pleasant company in this regard. When I say
“informed,” I mean he had answers to all my questions. They might not have been
the right answers, but he was able to answer pretty much everything I could
come up with about the Islamic State, about how it looks and why it’s so
wonderful.
And he did this
unflinchingly, even when he was endorsing what I would call rape or
slavery—what even he would call slavery, in fact. This was not a tough
call for him. If he has any compunction about these practices, it was
completely undetectable. That was not true of some others I’ve interviewed who
have literalist views of Islam. To be in the presence of someone who can say,
in this modern day, that slavery is a good thing and that to deny its goodness
is an act of apostasy was a very unsettling experience.
Harris: Presumably,
he thinks that in a normative condition of a caliphate, you would be put to
death, perhaps several times over. But I can imagine that given the social
demands of meeting a stranger and having an ordinary conversation, none of this
intolerance bled through in the form of interpersonal ill will.
Wood: Well, the question of
whether he thinks I should be put to death turns out to be a little bit more
complicated. He certainly thinks that Americans are fair game, given that
America is attacking the Islamic State. That said, he can imagine places for
non-Muslims in the Islamic State. One place is slavery. Another place is dhimmitude,
a condition of acknowledged subjugation for Jews and Christians, whereby they
pay a tax and get the protection of the caliphate. These are the conditions
that he could imagine for me.
But we had a cordial
conversation, and he even bought me cookies and sweets. I pointed out to him,
“Look, the Islamic State, which you seem to be entirely in favor of, counsels
its adherents to poison infidels, and now you’re giving me food. Is this
something I should be worried about?” And his answer, of course, was entirely
prudential. He said, “Is Islam going to be better off if Anjem Choudary goes to
prison for the rest of his life because he poisoned some journalist who just
wanted to talk to him about the faith?” This was roughly how Cerantonio
responded as well, and neither of them was rude to me, let alone violent.
Harris: Well, I’m
chagrined that this was also the reason I gave for not choking you to death in
our first interview. But I happened to be joking.
Wood: I’ve never heard
Choudary disavow anything the Islamic State has said or done. So I assume he
agrees with the proclamation that had recently been issued at that point,
saying that those who pledged allegiance to the caliph should run down
Frenchmen with their Citroëns, poison the wells of Brits, or at least spit in
the faces of infidels if they were constrained from doing anything more
serious.
Harris: Presumably,
Choudary thinks homosexuals should be put to death, and polytheists as well.
Wood: Well, polytheists can be
enslaved.
Harris: Of course.
Interfaith dialogue is a wonderful thing.
Wood: And about homosexuals
being put to death, there’s an interesting point there, too. Choudary and Musa
Cerantonio, the Australian, are both prevented by law from saying what they
really think. Cerantonio was most explicit about this: Saying that one supports
the Islamic State is essentially copping to being a member of a terrorist
organization, and then one can be put in jail. So they danced around the issue
a bit. In Choudary’s case, saying that homosexuals should be put to death could
be considered illegal in the United Kingdom. So he’d have to say it in a
general kind of way, rather than say, “Let’s stone Stephen Fry.”
Harris: Why hasn’t
Choudary gone to live in the Islamic State? Is there some hypocrisy
there, or is he just legally barred from travel?
Wood: His passport has been
confiscated. But he claims that he would go if he could. I think he very likely
would. Certainly his followers have.
One of Choudary’s prize
students, a man named Abu Rumaysah, was taken in by the police for questioning
and told to return the next day with his passport. Needless to say, he didn’t
go back to the police station. He got on a bus, went to Paris, and then made
his way to Turkey. The day I saw Choudary, which was weeks after Abu Rumaysah’s
departure from the UK, Abu Rumaysah tweeted out a photograph of himself with
his newborn baby and a Kalashnikov. The hashtag read #GenerationCaliphate.
Harris: What is the
solution to the problem of people like Anjem Choudary freely espousing
terroristic views, propagandizing for a treasonous cause, advertising its
merits, and effectively recruiting jihadis in the West? What do you think
should be done about him, if anything?
Wood: I guess I’m exposing my
American bias by saying that I don’t think he should be prevented from
propagandizing at all. I think he should have the freedom to say exactly what
he thinks, and I should have the freedom to listen to him. Having his speech
curtailed would give him prestige.
Harris: Many people
have wondered why Western governments don’t just deport people like this to the
societies where they claim to want to live. Let’s forget for the moment the
legal and diplomatic problems in doing that. If we could drop someone like
Choudary in Iraq or Yemen or some other place and say “Good riddance,” do you
think that would be counterproductive?
Wood: I think fulfilling his
wish for a ticket to the Islamic State would be essentially neutral in effect.
We would not miss him, and the Islamic State would gain very little—just a
loudmouth who speaks fluent and articulate English and is beyond prime fighting
age. But even if the balance were different, I’d still think it’s wrong to use
the force of the government to police a person’s ideology or thoughts.
Harris: Yes, it
would be a dangerous precedent to set, because which other ideas might become
deportable offenses in the future? So I share your American intuitions here and
think that people should be free to say absolutely anything they want to say. I
think the laws against Holocaust denial that exist throughout much of Western
Europe, for instance, are idiotic and totally counterproductive.
It also occurs to me that
some governments may view people like Anjem Choudary as very useful, in that
they act like bug lights for jihadis. I can imagine that if an intelligence
service watched Choudary going about his day, it might get much more useful
information than it would if he weren’t free to be a religious fanatic, calling
for the destruction of the very society that guarantees him affordable medical
care and safe working conditions.
Wood: This is a classic
problem in dealing with terrorism. It’s a conflict between law enforcement and
intelligence. If you let someone stay free and keep doing his stuff, however
dangerous or illegal, he may lead you to bigger fish and so forth.
This tension comes up a
lot when trying to study the Islamic State, because its members have such a
robust social media presence that it’s a very useful way to get a sense of how
they talk to each other and what they think about. However, the most common
topic of conversation among their fanboys on Twitter is “Here’s my new account.
It’s my 86th.”
Harris: Because
their accounts keep getting deactivated?
Wood: Precisely. They’re
unquestionably violating Twitter’s terms of service. Just as Twitter doesn’t
want to show people having sex, it doesn’t want to show someone having his head
sawed off. It’s not an unreasonable policy, but from the perspective of someone
like me, who wants to know more about what members of the Islamic State think,
it would be nice to be able to just read their posts.
Harris: We should
note that the Islamic State has now called for Muslims to
kill Twitter employees —including one of the founders, Jack
Dorsey—in retaliation.
What do you think we
should do about ISIS recruits who hold Western passports? Some have burned
them, no doubt. And some will die over there, or simply never want to leave so
happy a place. But what about the prospect that some hundreds, or even
thousands, of Americans, Europeans, Australians, and so forth will return to
their home countries fully steeped in the glories of jihad? What should we do
about them?
Wood: I’m less worried than
most about the Westerners who head over there. I absolutely guarantee there
will be attacks in Europe, North America, and elsewhere perpetrated by
returnees from the Islamic State. They will be horrific and will kill, I
suspect, hundreds. But the orders of the caliphate are unequivocal: You should
attack overseas only as an alternative to immigrating (what they call making hijrah)
to the Islamic State. They are playing a long game, and are trying to stock up
live bodies and talent in their state, so that they can prepare for an
expansionary war and eventually the conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and
Europe. This is a different project from the old al-Qaeda model of sending out
suicide bombers from Afghanistan to the West to blow up trains, buses, and
buildings. And although the Islamic State wants a civilizational war, of
Muslims versus Crusaders, I think they’re consciously avoiding terrorist
attacks on Western targets that would provoke too strong a response too soon.
If they bombed the Super Bowl, they’d probably be looking at a ground invasion
within weeks. They want the invasion, but on their own schedule.
There are two important
things to be said about this. First, we have to get used to the idea that a
certain number of people are going to be shredded or burned or shot to death in
terrorist attacks. We should limit ISIS’s ability to attack, but also limit the
effects of those attacks by not freaking out or disfiguring our politics or
acting rashly just because some true believers shoot up a kindergarten. The
attacks will be tragedies, but we have to accept that they are part of modern
life, and keep their real effects in perspective.
Second, we should realize
that many of those heading over there are going not to live but to die. Sure,
some migrate with their families and intend to make a new life under a
caliphate. But the most violent of them are put to use locally, as suicide bombers
and soldiers for the Islamic State against its immediate enemies, such as the
Iraqi army. That is bad for our allies but good for us, so I could even imagine
a policy whereby Islamic State supporters are allowed to go and to fight, and
we bomb them to smithereens, and everyone’s happy, especially the dead guys.
One might even say that that strategy resembles the one implemented right now.
The ones who survive may
well come back, and that will be a major security issue. I hope I’m not being
unduly optimistic when I say that I think many of them will have soured on the
caliphate after discovering how oppressive and iniquitous it is, and after
realizing that there are no Crusaders on the ground to fight—just Iraqis and
Kurds and Syrians. For some, these are perfectly adequate villains, but others
will be surprised at how mundane, sterile, and empty of promise life under a
theocracy can be.
Harris: Have you
watched any of the Islamic State’s execution videos?
Wood: I’ve watched many of
them.
Harris: I haven’t,
and I’m a little surprised by that. At one point, I think I just decided that
the trade-off between their information value and emotional toxicity didn’t
seem worth it. From your perspective as a journalist, what is the value in
watching those videos?
Wood: I would start by
describing not the value but the cost. It’s a terrible thing. I feel
diminished, permanently, by having watched them.
On the other hand, you
can learn a lot. First of all, you can often tell by the language they’re using
who their intended audience is. If it’s in Arabic, it’s for local consumption;
French, obviously for French jihadis in the Islamic State or for possible
recruits. And you can see how they tailor their message. You can see what they
think motivates someone in France to come to Syria, burn his passport, and blow
himself up. This is all very valuable information. They never just have an
image of a guy drawing his knife across another man’s throat. It’s always:
Here’s a speech, so listen up. All this rhetoric repays very careful study.
Harris: My
understanding is that in the videos of the executions of high-profile
hostages—the journalist James Foley, for instance—they don’t show the actual
moment of decapitation. They show the start of the execution, and then they cut
to reveal the severed head placed on the torso of the corpse. And yet in other
execution videos, they show the entire process. Is that true? And if so,
why do you think that’s the case?
Wood: Yes, that is true. There
are many theories about why it’s the case. I think it would take stronger
powers of deduction than I have to explain exactly why they do it, but one
candidate hypothesis is that the guy we have come to call “Jihadi John” is not
the one actually doing the beheading in these cases. Another is that
decapitation by hunting knife is so messy that it doesn’t make great propaganda
unless you edit parts out. If you’ve slaughtered an animal, then you know that
there are certain autonomic responses that can prevent things from going as
planned. And it could really ruin the video if someone gurgled unpleasantly, or
kicked or bucked his head. It’s often thought that these hostages are drugged
or have been promised that if they just behave as instructed, they’ll be killed
quickly off camera.
Harris: That raises
another point I’ve wondered about: Why is it that we always see these
prisoners obediently going to their slaughter and in certain cases even
expressing some final piece of propaganda? Why would they be compliant past the
point where they know that they are going to be killed? Why don’t we see
any last-minute attempt to defend themselves, to harm their attackers, or to
just spoil the propaganda? Have we ever seen something like that?
Wood: Well, we have seen it,
actually. There was one case, an Italian named Fabrizio Quattrocchi, who was
kidnapped during the Iraq occupation. As his captors were about to kill him, he
said, “I will show you how an Italian dies,” while tearing off the hood he was
made to wear. They shot him dead on the spot, and the video was useless as
propaganda. By now they’ve got procedures in place to keep that from happening.
The most obvious of
those, and we know this from what released captives have said, is mock
executions. These hostages have been through it before. They’ve sat there and
not been killed. So up until the very last moment they may believe that it’s
yet another sadistic trick from Jihadi John, and not a sadistic non-trick.
Harris: I’m amazed
and ashamed to say that this possibility never occurred to me. I’ve known about
mock executions, of course. But I never understood their purpose, apart from
terrorizing people. What a diabolically brilliant way to control a person’s
behavior at a moment when he would otherwise have no rational reason to comply
with your demands.
Is there anything else
that surprised you about your meetings with Cerantonio and Choudary?
Wood: I was surprised to find
that I would happily have spent more time with them. In fact, they had more
time for me than I had for them. They didn’t want me to walk away without
having asked every question I wanted to ask. Again, the idea that you have to
struggle to find out what the Islamic State wants, and what its ideology is, is
a myth. They’ll happily tell you. Actually, they would probably consider it sinful
not to.
Harris: One of the
more interesting things you discuss in your article is the way in which the
religious dogmatism of the Islamic State makes it strategically and tactically
rigid. You write at one point, “Its religious views make it constitutionally
incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its
survival.” Can you say more about that?
Wood: There are rules for
being caliph, and when al-Baghdadi gave his inaugural sermon, he said, “This is
a big burden. I hope to discharge it. I beg you to set me straight when I’m
going astray.” This sounds like a pretty standard bit of humble political
boilerplate you might hear from a senator, or Fidel Castro. But in this case,
it’s more. I talked with Islamic State supporters who described certain kinds
of acts that could be tactically or strategically useful for the survival of
the state, but that would invalidate the rule of the caliph. For example, the
Islamic State isn’t a member of the UN. Presumably, such recognition would be
good from their point of view, but these supporters said that UN membership
would invalidate the caliphate. In fact, it would not just invalidate it but
compel them to fight against it. If al-Baghdadi were to meet his international
counterparts in a Geneva conference room, shake hands, and be told, “All right,
your caliphate is recognized, and you can occupy this new seat at the United
Nations,” these Islamic State ideologues say that he would not only cease to be
caliph, but he might even cease to be a Muslim, and they would be obliged to
wage war against him.
You might think that a
nascent state would be trying to get recognition in the international system.
But it doesn’t have any option for that—at least not without doing away with
the whole ideological edifice that’s proved to be so attractive to the people
who have joined the cause.
Harris: Very
interesting. Shouldn’t we exploit this dogmatism? If you had full control
over US military and foreign policy, what would you recommend we do?
Wood: We have to think about
this with some humility, with respect to what we can do—that is, with
some understanding of what our tool kit consists of. And I think it’s
abundantly clear that we are not good at massive occupations of countries we
poorly understand. Not only that, we just don’t have the appetite for it. We
ought to be very gentle in our turning of the knobs in this situation. That’s
not to say there’s not an imminent crisis. We are, after all, talking about an
organization that would be delighted to kill hundreds of millions of people.
It’s not saying, “Oh, unfortunately we have to do this.” It’s saying, “We
get to do this.” So there’s an understandable impulse to stop it
immediately.
But I think we might be
in a situation analogous to seeing someone writhing around on the ground in
front of us, showing every symptom of having appendicitis. But instead of being
surgeons, armed with sterile scalpels, we are just laymen who once read a first
aid manual and have no tools other than a rusty soup can. There’s no good
option, even though we recognize the problem. The overwhelming probability is
that the patient will die a terrible death, and we will have to watch.
Harris: But consider
their infatuation with apocalyptic prophecy, which you described in your article.
Wouldn’t you be tempted to just align with it and draw them into the field at
Dabiq? Why not score a decisive victory against the most energized
jihadis on earth?
Wood: The prophecy you’re
talking about, related to the city of Dabiq, is mentioned in what are
essentially the footnotes to Muslim apocalyptic scripture. It’s not a major
tradition, but the Islamic State dredged it up because Dabiq is in its
backyard, and it’s been foretold that it would be the site of a battle that
would be one of the steps leading to the apocalypse. Members of the Islamic
State have taken so much interest in this place, and they constantly refer to
it in their propaganda. I think that if we massed an army there and met them in
battle, they would be routed.
Harris: It seems
that they wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to engage us there,
especially if we told them that we intended to build a gay-porn palace on the
site, or some other sacrilege. It seems that these guys are telling us with
every breath how to wage psychological warfare against them.
Wood: That’s roughly what they
would like us to do: show up at Dabiq and fight them. But the way to wage
psychological warfare against them would be not to show up there and
fight them. This is what they expect and want. And they think they’ll win.
Harris: But isn’t
that totally delusional? Our intelligence services have estimated that
they have 30,000 fighters. The Kurds put the number at 200,000.
Whatever the true figure, we have the most dangerous and incorrigible religious
maniacs alive telling us that if we only make the right noises, they’ll show up
in the middle of an open field at daybreak and just turn their credulous faces
skyward, expecting to see Jesus swoop down from the clouds and declare that
he’s been a secret Muslim all this time.
Wood: Jesus actually comes to
the party later, in Jerusalem. But your point about their weakness is correct.
The Islamic State does not have, for instance, an air force. So that alone
would make it awfully difficult for them to vanquish the Crusader armies at
Dabiq. They would not last long against U.S. Marines.
Harris: So why not
act on this information? It seems to me that the psychological and propaganda
value of our resulting victory is not something to wave away lightly. Imagine
the effect this would have on true believers everywhere: They’ve created a new
caliphate, and the new caliph is just swell. All the prophecies are coming to
fruition, so an army of the purest jihadis to exist in a thousand years rides
into this final battle and gets smashed by infidels. And God just sits on his
hands.
Just as important, this
would be a situation in which we could avoid creating a lot of collateral
damage. This battle could actually take place in an unpopulated area.
Wood: It’s tempting, isn’t
it? I think it’s a bad idea, for reasons I’ll get into. But it’s amazing
that the suggestion hasn’t been more widely mooted already. I think one reason
for that is that we don’t take them seriously when they talk about Dabiq. We
think that it can’t possibly be the case that they would actually do that. And
of course I don’t know what they would do. But they are constantly talking
about what they would do, both among themselves and to us. It could be that
they’re lying to themselves, too, or they’ll conveniently find loopholes in the
prophecies when it becomes clear they’ll be routed. But I think there’s a basic
incredulity on our side that they could possibly do something as suicidal as
face off against NATO using the tanks that they captured from the Iraqi Army
and haven’t yet read the manuals for.
But here is my main
reason for thinking that our appearing to conform to prophecy would be a bad
idea: The point of all propaganda is to create narratives about the world.
Their view—and the view of jihadis everywhere, really—is that Muslims are under
attack by a Crusader West. So if we say, “All right, we’ll take you up on that”
and crush them in battle, that would confirm their narrative for other Muslims
who are already inclined to believe that the West is at war with Islam. That’s
not a view I would like to encourage.
Harris: That’s
interesting, for a variety of reasons. First, it would seem to preclude our
fighting the Islamic State at all, but we are already doing so. Or is it your
view that we can fight them, but actually winning would be too provocative?
Second, I think if you examine the underlying concern about inflaming the
Muslim world against us, it rests on a remarkably pessimistic view about how
close otherwise peaceful Muslims are to turning into jihadis. I’m not saying I
know this fear to be unfounded, but I think we should acknowledge how grim a
picture of the Muslim world that is.
Of course, the claim is
not peculiar to you. And I may be reading into what you’ve said an opinion that
I’ve seen expressed elsewhere many times before. The idea is that if we don’t
walk on eggshells until the end of history as we fight jihadis, taking great
pains to deny any link between the chaos they cause and the doctrine of Islam,
then we’re doomed to provoke more-mainstream Muslims into choosing the wrong
side in this conflict. Thus, when President Obama talks about this problem, he
insists that we are at war not with Islam, Islamism, or even Islamic extremism
but with generic “extremism” and with a “perversion” of a glorious religion.
One of the things that is
so refreshing about your article is that you didn’t do that. But you now seem
to be saying that we must be very careful not to do anything that could give
fodder to a “clash of civilizations” narrative. Well, let’s spell out this
concern. What are you actually worried about? Are you worried that millions of
people who would never have been jihadis are suddenly going to become
jihadis? These people are now living peacefully in the West and share our
values, but the moment we smash these murderous lunatics at Dabiq, millions of
dentists and taxi drivers and shopkeepers and business executives in the West
are going to go berserk?
Wood: I’m worried that the
outcome of a Dabiq rout would be as follows: A large number of mujahedin would
be dead, much to the pleasure of both sides. The Islamic State would be
militarily weakened. But it was already weak, compared to the U.S. or NATO.
We’d have a situation slightly improved, militarily, and for our efforts we’d
have granted the Islamic State’s propaganda its central premise, which is that
Crusaders are out to kill Muslims and will come to crush them whenever they
become strong. Over the long term, the military gains might not be worth the
propaganda loss.
I certainly don’t think
that “mainstream” Muslims are people we have to worry might choose the wrong
side in this conflict. But I think that there is a particular type—and it’s
quite segmented by sex and by age, as well—of people who are spoiling for a
fight. They really are waiting for confirmation of this “clash of
civilizations” narrative. They’re a small percentage of the Muslim population.
Granted, the Muslim population is 1.6 billion, so even a small percentage is a
lot of people. But it’s those people—a very targeted demographic—that we’re
talking about.
Harris: Understood.
But, again, let’s spell out the concern. If we’re talking about 1 percent,
we’re talking about 16 million people. That’s a huge insurgent army, even if
it’s spread over 50 countries. Is that what you’re picturing?
Wood: Well, I think 1 percent
is an exaggeration, especially if we mean fighters, rather than just passive
supporters. I grant that the numbers are large—that’s undeniable. Almost any
percentage of 1.6 billion people is going to be enormous. But I just don’t
sense that the buy-a-ticket-to-Syria appeal is there for any but a tiny
minority.
Harris: Agreed. I’m
not claiming that most Muslims, or even a significant percentage of Muslims
find the Islamic State secretly appealing. But, as you say, almost any
percentage of 1.6 billion people represents an intolerable number of aspiring
martyrs. Even one tenth of one percent is a problem. Just imagine what
would happen if there were 1.6 million active jihadis worldwide—people who were
willing to put their lives on the line every day to destroy our open societies.
That would be intolerable. So, one can only hope that there is a huge disparity
between what people profess to believe, and what they truly believe, because
the poll numbers on this topic are not at all consoling. No question posed
about suicide bombing, shari’ah, or martyrdom is so retrograde or
morally suspect as to win only 0.1 percent approval in the Muslim community. In
fact, the lowest percentage I’ve ever seen in support of suicide bombing
against civilians in defense of Islam has been 3 percent (in Pakistan). Most
Muslim countries profess far
greater approval than that. In fact, it would be conservative to say
that 10 percent of Muslims worldwide support suicide bombing against civilians
in defense of the faith—please note the terms “suicide,” “civilians,” and
“faith” in that sentence. We are, by definition, talking about religiously
motivated terrorism. A hundred and sixty million supporters of that worldwide
is terrible to contemplate. Less polling on these questions has been done in
the West, but the data from the UK is also not encouraging. In the immediate
aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in the London, for instance, nearly one
in four British Muslims felt that the bombings were justified. So we
are essentially in the position of merely praying that our polls are wrong by
several orders of magnitude.
As you can see, I share
your concern about alienating Muslims on the basis of how we engage the Islamic
State. I just want us to acknowledge how absurdly bleak a picture this is. We
are talking about people who may be in danger of picking the wrong side in a
war between 7th-century barbarians—who have enthusiastically reintroduced
crucifixion, slavery, and the auto-da-fé to daily life—and Western democracy.
The fact that we even have to consider this possibility is shocking.
This brings us to a
distinction that you mentioned in your article, between currently active
Islamists who are behaving badly, and those who are playing a longer game and
appear willing to wait for generations to have their time in the sun. I suspect
that the latter are the sorts of people you worry might be tipped into behaving
badly if we aligned ourselves with prophecy and eradicated the Islamic State in
such a way as to suggest that the West is at war with Islam.
Wood: You are referring to a
group of Salafis known as “quietists.” The Islamic State leader
identifies as Salafi, which means that he takes as his sources of authority the
Qur’an, the hadīth of the Prophet Muhammad, and the actions of the
generations immediately succeeding Muhammad. But his group is identified with
jihadi Salafism, and it is opposed strenuously by a majority of quietist
Salafis who generally don’t believe in killing people to impose their views on
the world. In fact, they feel obliged to follow even unjust rulers.
The percentage of the
world’s 1.6 billion Muslims who identify as Salafi—who subscribe to this
literalist version of Islam—is quite small, probably single-digit. The
percentage of Salafis who would identify as jihadis is vanishingly small. And
then, of course, within that population a lot are going to be noncombatants
because they’re too old, or too young, or whatever. So we’re still talking
about large, but perhaps now manageable, numbers.
The point of bringing up
this quietist group is to say that the problem isn’t Islam, or even Islamic
literalism. Most literalist Muslims are essentially harmless, or even better
than harmless—nice people you would like to have as neighbors. So the
specificity of interpretation that leads to the Islamic State is really quite
narrow.
Harris: Well, I
think you are being a little too sanguine about the prospect of having
run-of-the-mill Salafis as neighbors. After all, we’re still talking about
people who want to see their religious views imposed on the rest of humanity
eventually—with woman veiled, and gays and apostates killed. That’s not a
potluck I’d be so eager to attend. But even if I were to accept the rosy
picture you’ve painted, it seems to argue for what one would hope could be our
default position here, which is total lack of concern about narratives. Why
can’t we say, “We recognize that Islam is a million different things and that
some versions of it are tolerant, peaceful, etc. But a jihadi death cult is
destroying Syria and Iraq right now, and we’re going to kill these barbarians
tomorrow. Any of you peaceful people inclined to pick the wrong side here?”
What you seem to be
expressing is a fear that there could be a mass changing of sides based on some
secret sympathy, or some susceptibility to moral confusion, even in the face of
the clearest case for a just war that may have ever existed. Whatever the
underlying causes of this form of jihadism, at the end of the day we have pure,
fanatical, implacable evil vs. basic human sanity.
Wood: The Salafi neighbor may
not be the neighbor you’d choose, if you could pick from a menu of atheists and
liberals and, more generally, people who didn’t care what you thought about
god. I’d just point out that there are many religious people whose beliefs
about a far-off apocalyptic battle, and mass conversion at the sword, do not
affect their lives much at all. People are good at compartmentalizing, and if
they weren’t, the world would hardly be livable.
This question of latent
support for jihadism is complicated. There are some who have this style of
religious impulse, I suppose we could say, who really want a kind of
literalism, and some of those who might have gone a quietist route might in
that case be induced to choose an actively jihadi one. All people, as far as I
can tell, have a desire or need to identify with a social group, and the
countries that we’re talking about that produce potential jihadis are places
where everything has broken down. They are some of the worst and most hopeless
places to live, so—
Harris: Wait. What
about the thousands of recruits coming from the West to fight alongside these
people?
Wood: They, too, are from
places that are socially broken down. And to say that is not to excuse them,
but it does give us a sense of why they’ve reached out for a medieval doctrine
that they embrace wholeheartedly. Harris: I’m sorry—did someone just hand you
a glass of Kool Aid?—the idea that most jihadis are radicalized owing to
poverty or lack of economic opportunity is a fiction (1,
2,
3).
Wood: It’s not poverty. But I
think it is a lack of meaning or fulfillment in their lives, related to deep
malaise and feelings of rejection or dissatisfaction with the worlds where they
live. I don’t know why Birmingham or Marseilles has come feel so barren for
these people. But you can hear the alternatives posed starkly by the Islamic
State people trying to attract new fighters on Twitter: “Are you going to join
the struggle? Or are you going to stay home and eat fried chicken?” If you
think the high point of your life in England is going to be eating KFC, the
promise of joining the greatest battle the world has ever known might be pretty
attractive. In places like Syria, where even KFC is unattainable, the choice is
even starker.
Harris: But, of
course, many of us experience such existential concerns early in life. That is
why I find these people so easy to understand. In my twenties, I spent two
years on silent meditation retreats—which, however you look at it, is a fairly
extreme thing to do. I wasn’t satisfied just eating fried chicken either. As it
turns out, this was one of the best things I ever did. And I now see this
strange behavior as part of an entirely rational project of understanding the
human mind more deeply and becoming a better person in the process. But if I
had been convinced at the time that the Qur’an was the perfect word of God, and
that only paradise matters, who knows how fully I might have wasted my life.
I think Anjem Choudary is
more representative of the type than you give him credit for. Let’s take him at
his word and accept that he would join the Islamic State if given the chance.
Needless to say, he’s not coming from a society that’s socially broken down. In
fact, he’s on television more than almost anyone I can name at his level of
notoriety. And he has a law degree. This isn’t about lacking options in life.
Wood: Oh, yes. If Anjem
Choudary were not a preacher, he would probably be a very rich lawyer.
Harris: Right. So
how do you explain that? Islamism is the man’s full-time obsession.
Wood: I think he is straightforwardly
a true believer.
Harris: Right. And
it is the true believers, irrespective of their socioeconomic background, that
we should be worried about.
Wood: It is also interesting
to note that Choudary was a real sinner in his youth. I don’t think he dwells
on it, but nor does he conceal it. I think the fear of hellfire really does
motivate him.
Harris: Wonderful.
We have our next Saint Augustine.
Wood: Yes, right. So I think
that there are multiple reasons why this narrative would be attractive to
people, and they amount to a sizable number of people who would end up, at the
very least, cheering on the forces of the Islamic State if we agreed to meet it
adherents on their terms.
Harris: It strikes
me as such a strange fear to be obliged to consider. And to have it be the primary
concern that closes down specific military options just seems uncanny. Again,
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you. This may, in fact, be the very reason
why we shouldn’t attack the Islamic State in a way that might actually defeat
it. But to admit that is to admit that we are already hostages of a sort. It’s
very depressing.
Wood: The decision not to
attack them that way is a natural outgrowth of acknowledging that they mean
what they say. If they really think there is a war brewing between Muslims and
the West, then you don’t convince them otherwise by telling them to bring it
on.
What you can’t do is
pretend that they don’t think about religion seriously at all. Some of the
things you hear said about the Islamic State include, “All scholars are opposed
to them.” But that just isn’t true. There are scholars who are in the
Islamic State. They’re not well-known, but they’re certainly engaging
critically with the texts of Islam. And if you ask the Islamic State, “Where are
all your scholars?” the answer will be, “Most of our scholars are dead,” or
“They’re in a state of siege by Crusaders. Where are your scholars? They’re in
palaces in Saudi Arabia saying things that are demonstrably false about Islam.”
So what we’ve got here is a situation where anyone who’s intelligent enough to
see what’s before his eyes knows that huge numbers of scholars have been
co-opted by politics—either the politics of the Middle East or the politics of
the United States. Hypocrisy is something people can sniff out.
Harris: It’s
actually worse than that. Many of these palace-caged scholars articulate a
brand of Islam that is indistinguishable from what the Islamic State is
implementing. It’s just that there’s some fine print in al-Baghdadi’s caliphate
user agreement that they can’t sign off on. Nevertheless, what they say about
jihad, martyrdom, infidels, apostates, and so forth would allow them to check
every other box. And these aren’t obscure figures. Some of these people have tens of millions
of Twitter followers. When you watch translated videos from The Middle East
Media Research Institute (MEMRI),
you see that these preachers appear to be everywhere. They preach more or less
exactly what the Islamic State is doing. Perhaps they say in other contexts
that they don’t support the Islamic State, for one reason or another, but their
reasons can’t run very deep.
Wood: These differences
between the palace scholars and ISIS seem minor, but I would encourage you to
see them as significant. Yes, these people want a caliphate. And yes, they want
to implement shari’ah—which includes the stoning of adulterers, the
beheading of apostates, and so forth—but they want to achieve these things in
the fullness of time. That final distinction represents an important
difference.
Harris: No doubt we
want to encourage that orientation over the alternative.
Wood: In fact, I try
studiously not to take a position on which one of these views is correct. I
just don’t have any credibility as a non-Muslim to say whether one scholar or
another espouses the best form of Islam. However, if I were able to choose what
people believed, I’d hope it was the caliphate-later view. Of course, there are
Christians who think about the end times, which are also not envisioned as very
pleasant. If you ask them, “Is it happening now?” some of them will say yes.
But very few of them will act as if they actually believe it’s happening
now. If they’re envisioning a terrible bloodbath at some unimaginably distant
time, I can live with that.
Harris: Understood.
Well, Graeme, I really enjoyed speaking with you, and I appreciate your taking
the time to have this conversation. Congratulations again on your cover story.
It was extremely well done and much needed.
Wood: Thanks very much, Sam.
This has been great.
----------
ISIS, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the West
by Salim
Mansur
June 14, 2015 at 5:00 am
June 14, 2015 at 5:00 am
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- What principally mattered in accepting Christian support was whether such support served the followers of Islam in spreading the faith. The same thing could also apply to an alliance with the Jews and Israel in defending Saudi interests.
- In the age of totalitarianism -- which in the last century flourished under the various headings of Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Hitler's National Socialism and Maoism -- Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb added Islamism. Shariah, as God's law, in covering and monitoring every detail of human conduct, as Qutb insisted, is total; its enforcement through jihad made for an ideology -- Islamism -- consistent with the temperament of the totalitarian era.
- American support in the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after 1945 was crucial. The transformation of imperial and militaristic Japan into a peaceful democracy was testimony to how American support can make for a better world. In the Korean Peninsula, American troops have held the line between the North and South since the end of the Korean War in 1953; this has made the vital difference in turning South Korea into a democracy and an advanced industrial society.
In a hard-hitting essay
on ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) for The Daily Mail,
the 2001 Nobel Prize winning author, V.S. Naipaul, wrote: "ISIS could very
credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich."
Among the writings on Islam and Muslims in recent years, Naipaul's, as in the
books Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, have been perhaps
the most incisive and penetrating in exploring the extremist politics of the
global Islamist movement from inside of the Muslim world. And that ISIS on a
rampage, as Naipaul observed, revived "religious dogmas and deadly
rivalries between Sunnis and Shi'as, Sunnis and Jews and Christians is a giant
step into darkness."
Ever since the relatively
obscure Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stepped forth on the pulpit of the Great Mosque in
Mosul, Iraq, on June 28, 2014 to announce the rebirth of the Caliphate
(abolished in 1924 by the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), with
al-Baghdadi himself assuming the title of Caliph Ibrahim, the ruling head of
the ummah, or worldwide community of Muslims, many might agree with
Naipaul, despite the hyperbole -- he has left out a potentially nuclear Iran --
that "ISIS has to be seen as the most potent threat to the world since the
Third Reich."
It is baffling to read about
or watch the sweep of terror spawned by ISIS in the name of Islam -- a world
religion with a following approaching two billion Muslims. It is insufficient
merely to point out that the barbarism of ISIS reflects its origins in the
fetid swamps of the Sunni Muslim insurgency of post-Saddam Iraq. But ISIS is
neither a new presence in the Arab-Muslim history, nor is the response to it by
Western powers, primarily Britain and the United States, given their
relationship with the Middle East over the past century.
We have seen ISISes before,
and not as al-Qaeda's second coming.
The first successful
appearance of an ISIS in modern times was the whirlwind with which the Bedouin
warriors of Abdulaziz ibn Saud (1876-1953) emerged from the interior of the
Arabian Desert in 1902 to take hold of the main fortress in Riyadh, the local
capital of the surrounding region known as Najd. Some twenty-four years later,
this desert warrior-chief and his armies of Bedouin raiders defeated the ruling
Sharifian house in the coastal province of Hejaz, where lie Islam's two holy
cities, Mecca and Medina.
Husayn bin Ali (1854-1931),
Sharif of Mecca and Emir of Hejaz, had joined his fate with the British against
the Ottoman Empire during World War I. One of his sons, Prince Feisal, led the
"Arab Revolt" for independence from Ottoman rule made famous by T.E.
Lawrence (1888-1935). But in the aftermath of the Great War, which brought the
Ottoman Empire to its ruin, Bedouin tribes in the interior of the Arabian
Desert were jostling for power, and the House of Sharif Husayn proved inept at
maintaining its own against threats posed to its rule over Hejaz, and as the khadim
[steward] of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Another Englishman, a
counterpart to T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), was Harry St.
John Philby (1885-1960), sent as a British agent during the Great War into the
interior of the Arabian Desert. Philby would get to know Abdulaziz ibn Saud;
eventually he worked for Ibn Saud as the warrior-chief rose in power and
prominence. Philby chronicled the emergence of Abdulaziz ibn Saud as "the
greatest of all the kings of Arabia," and wrote the history of Ibn Saud's
tribe and people under the title Arabia of the Wahhabis. In the West,
ironically, Philby is better known as the father of Kim Philby, the Soviet
double agent, instead of the confidant of the founder of modern Saudi Arabia.
Philby apparently became Muslim, took the name of Abdullah, and lived among the
Arabs.
The defeat of the Sharifian
forces in Hejaz in 1925 cleared the path for Abdulaziz ibn Saud's eventual
triumph in creating the eponymous Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The fall of Mecca to the
Bedouin warriors known as the Ikhwan, or the Brethren (to be
distinguished from the movement known as Ikhwan al-Muslimin [Muslim
Brotherhood] founded by the Egyptian Hasan al-Banna in 1928), ended the
ambition of Sharif Husayn and his sons to rule Arabia with the support of the
British. The Sharifian defeat also meant that Britain would not have to referee
the conflict between two of its allies -- Sharif Husayn and his sons on one
side, and Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his Ikhwan warriors on the other --
competing for mastery over Arabia.
Philby's loyalty to Abdulaziz
ibn Saud restrained him from mentioning the terror and havoc Ikhwan
warriors perpetrated in the occupation of Hejaz and the capture of Mecca and
Medina.[1] But he was
effusive in describing what he viewed as the renewal of Islam's original
revolution in the desert soil of its birth. He became the premier salesman of
Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his family to the outside world, as T.E. Lawrence was of
Prince Feisal and the Sharifian claims to rule the Arabs.[2] Philby wrote,
"Ibn Sa'ud made it clear
from the beginning that he would tolerate no criticism of or interference with
God's law on earth... On Friday, January 8th, 1926, in the Great Mosque of
Mecca after the congregational prayers, Ibn Sa'ud was proclaimed King of the
Hijaz with all the traditional ceremony prescribed by Islamic precedent. It was
at once an act of faith and a challenge to the world: to be made good in due
course, without deviation from the principle on which it was based, to the
glory of God, of whose sustaining hand he was ever conscious amid all the
vicissitudes of good and evil fortune, which in the long years to come were to
lead his people, under his guidance, out of the wilderness into a promised land
flowing with milk and honey. The great fight, of four and twenty years almost
to the day, was over; and a greater span, by nearly four years, yet lay before
him to develop the fruits of victory for the benefit of generations yet unborn:
generations which 'knew not Joseph', nor ever heard the war-cry of the
Ikhwan."[3]
ii.
The objective of the ISIS is
apparently to remake the map of the Middle East, which was drawn by Britain and
France as victorious powers in World War I, following the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire in 1918. The goal is to unite the Fertile Crescent -- the region
between the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf -- under the newly
resurrected Caliphate's rule, where "God's law" will rule without
anyone's interference -- much as Saudi Arabia's founder, Abdulaziz ibn Saud,
announced in 1926 on entering Mecca.
ISIS's self-proclaimed
leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in announcing the re-establishment of the
Caliphate, have set for ISIS a hugely ambitious program, even if it seems
anachronistic for Muslims in the twenty-first century.
But ISIS's gamble to engineer
the creation of the Caliphate and obliterate the post-WWI settlement is not
entirely far-fetched when considered in the context of the making of Saudi
Arabia.
There is also the shared
doctrine of the Wahhabi-Salafi interpretation of Islam, which Abdulaziz ibn
Saud insisted, and ISIS insists, is the only true Islam; all other
versions and sects of Islam among Muslims are denounced as heresy or, worse, as
apostasy, to be violently punished.
The collapse of the Ottoman
Empire let loose forces in the Middle East, some of which were contained by
Britain and France, as victorious powers, in accordance with their Sykes-Picot
Agreement of 1916.
In the Arabian Peninsula,
Britain kept in check the forces let loose, preventing their spillover into the
Fertile Crescent, until one coalition of Bedouin warriors led by Abdulaziz ibn
Saud emerged as clear winner over the territories previously held by Turkey in
the Fertile Crescent.
The deep forbidding interior
of the Arabian Peninsula consists of the highlands and desert of Najd, far
removed from what were once the major centers of the Islamic civilization at
its peak. Inhabited by Bedouin tribes, deeply conservative in their customs and
manner of living, and disapproving of the ways of the outside world, Najd was a
primitive backwater of the Middle East and was left on its own.
The emergence of Abdulaziz
ibn Saud as the ruler of Najd and Hejaz in the 1920s, and then as the monarch
of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia under the watchful eyes of Britain as the
hegemonic power in the Middle East after the World War I, was not merely the
result of one coalition of Bedouin tribes trouncing its opponents for the
spoils of war. It was also the victory of a doctrine -- of Wahhabism,[4] to which
Abdulaziz ibn Saud was wedded as a legacy of his family and tribal history, and
which provided the religious and ideological legitimacy for the so-called
"conservative revolution" or the Wahhabi version of Islamic
"reform" he heralded in establishing his kingdom.
iii.
In the nine decades between
the triumph of Abdulaziz ibn Saud and the rise of ISIS, Wahhabism emerged from
the margins of the Muslim world to become the dominant face of Sunni Islam, which
claims the allegiance of the vast majority of Muslims. This occurred as a
result of Ibn Saud's instincts and the discovery of oil in his kingdom. As a
warrior-chief, he knew his limits on how far to push against the interests of
Britain; and negotiated the subsequent embrace of his kingdom and leadership by
the United States, which replaced Britain as the protector of the regional
order.
History is full of surprises,
and so it is with the history of Wahhabism. Muslims who heard about it or
encountered its practitioners during the nineteenth century, viewed it with
disdain, yet it came to almost represent and somewhat define mainline Sunni
Islam towards the end of the twentieth century. According to the historian
Hamid Algar, "Wahhabism is essentially a movement without pedigree; it
came out of nowhere in the sense not only of emerging from the wastelands of
Najd, but also its lack of substantial precedent in Islamic history."[5]
The founder of Wahhabism,
Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab (1703-1791), was a Najdi born in a small town called
'Ayaina. His grandfather had been the town's religious elder and qadhi
(judge), and his father followed him. The founder was reputedly precocious in
his religious education and, according to Philby's account, based upon what he
learned in the service of Abdulaziz ibn Saud, "some of his forbears may
well have known or heard the preaching of the famous Unitarian Ibn Taymiyyah,
who was the main source of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab's inspiration."[6]
By 1745, Abdul-Wahhab had
acquired a reputation as teacher, preacher, and reformer, with religious
training acquired by spending time in the holy city of Medina. Apparently
committed to the moral and spiritual reform of fellow Muslims, he announced a
program of commending virtue and condemning vice in his native city. While he
acquired some followers, he also generated controversy and opposition among
those who viewed his preaching as too literal and harsh. Eventually when asked
to leave 'Ayaina, he headed for Dar'iya in the neighbourhood of Riyadh, and
there sealed a relationship with the local chief, Muhammad ibn Saud (?-
1765). Thus was born the historic alliance between the founder of what became
the Wahhabi movement and the chief of the Saudi clan of central Arabia, whose
progeny was Abdulaziz ibn Saud.
The main thrust of
Abdul-Wahhab's "reformist" teaching was to purge his people's belief
in Islam of superstitions, devotion to holy men as saints, tomb-worship and
reverence of the dead. He insisted on the literal and explicit meaning of the
Quranic text, and of applying Quranic penalties, such as the cutting off the
limbs of thieves and stoning of adulterers. He declared those who violated what
he understood to be the teachings of the only true faith to be mushrikin
(idolaters), against whom jihad (holy war) was not merely permissible
but obligatory: "their blood could legitimately be shed, their property
was forfeit, and their women and children could be enslaved."[7]
At the time, Abdul-Wahhab's
inclinations were reformist. According to one of the most respected Western
scholars of Islam, Sir Hamilton Gibb, there remained those "pagan Arabs
who accepted the dogmas of the Koran without completely giving up their old
beliefs. What Muhammad [the prophet] did for them was to superimpose upon the
deposit of Arabian animism a supreme controlling power in the personality and
activity of an all-powerful God."[8] Abdul-Wahhab's
"reformist" concerns seem motivated by a loathing of the practices he
railed against, as shirk (idolatry), which contaminated the purity of
Islam's strict monotheism.
Abdul-Wahhab's doctrinal
solution was to "purify" Islam by insisting that any practice that
detracts from -- or interposes itself between -- the unquestioning submission
to God, was shirk and, therefore, haram (forbidden). His
uncompromising insistence on tauhid (Oneness or Unity of God) set the
stark division between Islam and kufr (disbelief), and between Islam and
shirk.
Abdul-Wahhab's precursor in
this respect was Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), whose theology was shaped by the
calamity of the Mongol invasion of the Arab world.
Ibn Taymiyyah blamed the
weakness and corruption of the Arab world on the borrowings from non-Muslims of
un-Islamic ideas. These, he believed, had prepared the ground for the
devastation brought upon Muslims by the Mongols. He saw the Mongol calamity as
God's punishment visited upon Muslims for deviating from the true path of
Islam.
Ibn Taymiyyah's enmity
towards the Shi'ite Muslims as heretics, and his polemics against Christians as
Trinitarians and, therefore, not strictly monotheists, laid the basis for the
even more narrow and intolerant doctrine Abdul-Wahhab later preached in the
arid and isolated environment of Najd.
Ibn Taymiyyah's emphasis on tauhid,
which inspired Abdul-Wahhab, was a warning for Muslims to beware of Christians
and Shi'ite Muslims, whom he denounced as falsifying the true belief.
Abdul-Wahhab extended Ibn
Taymiyyah's polemics and bigotry also against the Sufis, who are devoted to the
spiritual and mystical dimension of Islam, labeling them as deviationists or
polytheists. In the end, Abdul-Wahhab's theology, mimicking that of Ibn
Taymiyyah, was characterized by the tendency to pronounce takfir on
Muslims: accusing them of apostasy or disbelief. As these accusations of
apostasy spread, they provoked among Muslims irreparable disagreements, which
the followers of Abdul-Wahhab would seize upon as casus belli for their jihad.
The "reform" of
Abdul-Wahhab to "purify" Islam was a return to the imagined
simplicity of the early years, when the prophet Muhammad preached against idol
worship among the Arabs. Abdul-Wahhab spurned the traditional consensus of the ulema
(religious scholars) and the fuqaha (jurists) that had been worked out
between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries, referred to as the classical
period of Islam.[9]
This consensus reflected the
highest achievement of Muslims. Through cultural exchanges, Islam was emerging
from its native and backward environment of Arabia, far removed from ancient
civilizations of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) and Persia. Despite wars,
the Islamic civilization was being shaped over the remains of empires that Arab
armies had defeated. Gibb explained:
"After the end of the
Arab-Muslim conquests there was a period of three centuries during which the
territorial spread of Islam, though vast indeed, remained practically stable.
This gave time and opportunity for a thorough interpenetration of the religious
attitudes and beliefs of the original Arab immigrants and of the peoples with
whom they mixed to form the medieval Muslim nation. In the course of these
centuries, after a long stage of theological disputes, a certain equilibrium
was reached. The theology of Islam was established in logical and rational
terms, and this achievement did something to counteract the influence of
grosser superstitions."[10]
After the death of Muhammad
in 632, Arabs and Muslims had swept forth into the world. The prophet had
accomplished his mission of implanting among the pagan Arabs the worship of One
God, in Arabic Allah, the God of Abraham as the Quran repeatedly
affirms. Upon his death, the future of Islam and Muslims was an open book with
blank pages to be filled in. But there was no heavenly mandate for the role of
Caliph (khalif in Arabic, meaning successor), or for wars of conquests
or empire. These came about as innovation, and as military offensives defeated
far superior and more cultured adversaries. Justifications for such innovations
(for instance, the office of Caliph) and military conquests were found in
retrospect, or discovered, or invented -- all based on the Quran or on the oral
reports of the life and practice of the prophet (hadith), which Muslims
came to accept as normative.
Within a generation of the
prophet's demise, his successors, under the title of Caliph, became rulers of
empire. Their pomp and power rivaled, and often exceeded, those of the
Byzantine and Persian rulers.
Islam, as a faith and
submission to the idea of One God, evolved into Islam as a civilization, and
there arose the necessity of reconciling the two. Devising the administration
of empire became the task of the early generation of learned Muslims. In the
context of the ancient world, their achievements were significant. The high
standing the Islamic civilization achieved during the classical period of Arab
and Muslim history later acquired a near-sacred status in the imagination of
generations of Muslims up to the present times.
As centers of the high
Islamic civilization, except for the revered status of the two holy cities of
Mecca and Medina, became located outside of Arabia, the rest of Arabia once
more became the backwater of civilization. From the remoteness of Najd, the
contents of the high Islamic civilization could be thought of as departures
from the prophetic era, and as corrupting Islam.
Abdul-Wahhab came to consider
developments that distanced Muslims from the simplicity of early Islam as
innovations, and since innovations (al-bid'ah), in his austere view,
brought corruption, he denounced any innovation unacceptable as deviation or
heresy.
Abdul-Wahhab's doctrine was
thus a repudiation of traditional Islam as represented by the highest authority
in the Caliphate, and of the shared consensus of the mainline Muslim scholars
of his time. His alliance, cemented in 1745, with Muhammad ibn Saud, started
the jihad he evidently wanted to wage against those Muslims he denounced
as deviants for refusing to accept his doctrine. For the next half-century, the
Saudi-Wahhabi alliance nearly succeeded in the conquest of most of Arabia.
Muhammad ibn Saud died in
1765. He was succeeded by his son Abdul-Aziz who waged the jihad
zealously, with the approval and blessings of Abdul-Wahhab until the latter's
death in 1791.
In 1803, Abdul-Aziz's
warriors, under the command of his son, Sa'ud, took Hejaz and entered Mecca.
There they repeated what they had done earlier in Iraq. In Philby's account,
"[Sa'ud] suddenly
appeared before the holy town of Karbala [the site where Husain, the grandson
of the prophet and venerated by the Shi'ites as their third Imam, was brutally
killed by the Arab army of the Caliph in Damascus in 680 A.D.] in March 1802.
After a short siege it was carried by storm, and given over to slaughter and
pillage; the inhabitants were killed without mercy in the streets and houses;
the great dome of the tomb of Husain was demolished, and the bejeweled covering
of his grave carried off as spoil; and everything of value in the town was
collected and taken off to the watering of al Abyadh, near Samawa, where Sa'ud
settled down for a space to count his gains and distribute them in the
traditional manner. He then returned to Dar'iya to receive the congratulations
of his father and his people on the first doughty blow struck in the service of
the true faith against a dispensation which was regarded in Wahhabi eyes as the
incarnation of infidelity. It was certainly an act that shocked the world far
beyond the limits of the Shia' persuasion: and may be regarded as the
starting-point of a general revulsion against Wahhabism, which was to have
disastrous consequences for the Wahhabi State. But there was only joy in
Dar'iya without reserve; and the pattern set at Karbala was soon to be copied
in the holy cities of the Hijaz before the tide of retribution began to
flow."[11]
Revulsion against Wahhabism,
as Philby wrote, eventually moved the Ottoman Empire to act. The sack of Mecca
by the Wahhabis was a mighty slap on the face of the Caliph in Istanbul and,
despite the strains on the resources of the Ottoman rulers since the French
invasion of Egypt under Napoleon's command in 1798, an Ottoman army was raised
and sent by Egypt's governor, Muhammad Ali Pasha, into Arabia.
The Saudi-Wahhabi warriors
were driven out of Hejaz by the soldiers of the Caliph, the ruler of the
Ottoman Empire; and Mecca was re-captured in the early months of 1813, bringing
an end to Wahhabi rule in the two holiest cities of Islam. The Ottoman army then
pushed forward by stages into the interior of Arabia. The Saudi-Wahhabi
stronghold of Dar'iya capitulated in September 1818. The power of the
Saudi-Wahhabi alliance was broken; Hejaz was restored to the rule of the
Ottoman Caliphate; and Mecca returned to the stewardship of the House to which
Husayn bin Ali [Sharif Husayn] belonged.[12]
The defeat of Saudi-Wahhabi
power confined Wahhabism to the interior of the Najdi desert.
The restoration of Ottoman
rule in Hejaz also meant restoring in Mecca the traditional Islamic consensus
reached by the ulema during the classical period of Muslim history.
Wahhabism -- as an aberration of primitive minds far removed from, and suspicious
of, civilization -- was destined to pass into history as a footnote, but for
the fatal error of the Ottoman rulers in entering the Great War in 1914 on the
side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
iv.
The conquest of Arabia by
Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his Ikhwan warriors in the first quarter of the
twentieth century was cruel and bloody. It also occurred under the gaze of the
British in the region, and the material support Britain provided at critical
stages of the march of the Saudi-Wahhabi warrior-chief, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, to
power.
The English created a myth
that Abdulaziz ibn Saud was a great unifier of the tribes of Arabia. Philby was
at the head of those who spun their tales of the Saudi warrior as among the
greatest of the Arab leaders, even going to the absurd length of comparing him
to the Prophet of Islam. "Like the Prophet Muhammad," Philby wrote,
"'Abdul-'Aziz ibn Sa'ud was also a man of destiny."[13]
The facts were alarmingly
opposite. Abdulaziz ibn Saud massacred his way to conquering Arabia. In towns
such as Taif, Bureida and Al Huda, the Wahhabi Ikhwan slaughtered the
townspeople. They tried to destroy the tomb of the prophet in Medina and desecrated
cemeteries in Mecca. They also spread death and devastation among the Shi'ite
Muslims in the eastern parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Hatred for Shi'ism as a
heresy is deeply rooted in the Wahhabi doctrine. Wahhabis believe that the
Shi'a reverence for Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the prophet, as Imam
(religious leader) has made Ali co-equal to the prophet or placed Ali even
ahead of the prophet, thereby committing an unforgivable transgression of shirk,
or polytheism.
The Ikhwan of
Abdulaziz ibn Saud were checked from raiding what is now called Iraq -- and
pillaging the Shi'ite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, as the Wahhabi warriors
had done in the early nineteenth century -- by the frontier marked out between
Arabia and Iraq by Sir Percy Cox, the British High Commissioner in the Persian
Gulf region.
Despite the efforts of Saudi
apologists, both native and Western, to airbrush out the horrors perpetrated by
Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his army in subduing the tribes of Arabia, the memory of
that gory history persists. Saïd K. Aburish, an Arab historian and journalist,
wrote,
"It was an atmosphere
where the sword of the executioner had a recognizable name, the rakban,
or "necker," and it was well known and feared as the guillotine
during the French Revolution... No fewer than 400,000 people were killed and
wounded, for the Ikhwan did not take prisoners, but mostly killed the
vanquished. Well over a million inhabitants of the territories conquered by Ibn
Saud fled to other countries: Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait."[14]
Fortune, however, would smile
on Abdulaziz ibn Saud, as the discovery of plentiful oil transformed the status
of his kingdom in the sight of Western powers and the newly formed states in
the region. But first he had to settle the tensions within his coalition of Ikhwan
warriors, grown suspicious that he might be turning his back on them. The
intolerance of others is one of the defining characteristics of the Wahhabi
doctrine and its adherents. They saw his increasingly close relationship with
the British, even willingness to be instructed by them as their paid agent,
disapprovingly.
Abdulaziz ibn Saud sought to
pacify the leaders of the Ikhwan in his entourage with gold and other
forms of wealth. He told them to go back to their women and their homes, and
enjoy the largesse he readily offered them. He advised them that with the
conquest of Arabia attained, there could be no further role for ghazzu
(the customary Bedouin practice of raiding), as in the past. Yet, as he failed
to win over the hardliners among the Ikhwan, a showdown became
unavoidable. In March 1929, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud and his loyal warriors
confronted the dissident Ikhwan veterans outside the village of Sabila,
and offered them one final gesture of reconciliation by asking them to
surrender peacefully and return to their homes. The offer was refused, and the
king ordered his men to mow down the opposition with their British-supplied machine
guns. Some five thousand Ikhwan mutineers were killed; the rest fled to
Iraq and Kuwait, only to be pushed out in the open by the authorities and
bombed by Britain's Royal Air Force.[15]
This explosive tension at the
heart of the Saudi-Wahhabi partnership remains; it is essentially irresolvable.
Although it may be managed or contained, there is no moderation, nor any
allowed. The Wahhabi doctrine is fundamentally intolerant of others, especially
of Muslims who reject Wahhabism. This doctrinally-based bigotry leaves Wahhabis
at unease with anyone who does not share their creed, and fearful of alien
cultures contaminating or undermining their own closed tribal ways. According
to Hamid Algar, there is "a fear of perceived deviation at the very heart
of Wahhabism and helps to explain its intrinsically censorious nature."[16]
Abdulaziz ibn Saud dealt with
the Ikhwan mutineers in the customary manner of the tribal code of
justice: he executed them. Those among the Ikhwan warriors who remained
loyal, he recruited into what eventually became the National Guards, the
trusted militia of the Saudi-Wahhabi partnership.
However, the ghosts of the Ikhwan
mutineers mowed down in the plains of Sabila haunt the kingdom. Their grievance
against the ruling House of Saud is occasionally aroused by what is sometimes
regarded as its too intimate embrace of the Western powers.
In the second half of the
twentieth century, oil made Saudi Arabia and its rulers unimaginably wealthy.
It was also a double-edged sword: threats to the Saudi kingdom mounted. The
earnings from oil were "rental" income, received from sale of a
natural resource that required very little native ingenuity or work. As the
earnings mushroomed, the headache for the Saudi rulers came from the dilemma of
how to administer this massive infusion of petrodollars without disrupting too
flagrantly the Wahhabi-approved customs of the kingdom. This felicitous
headache was compounded by the envy of non-Saudi Arabs; by the appeal of
secular nationalism across the Arab Middle East; and by the migrant foreign
workers needed in large numbers to meet the labor shortage triggered by the
construction boom. Native Saudis, who received a subsidy, lacked incentive to
work. Consequently, the kingdom had to cope with the presence of foreign
workers who wanted equitable treatment based on international standards, in a
country wary of all things foreign.
Change is both unavoidable
and disruptive, irrespective of how it is managed or checked. In awakening to
the modern world with its pressures for change, Saudi Arabia was set on a
collision course between the old and the new. But despite being in the news
since emerging as a central player in the global economy, due to its immense
oil reserves and potential new discoveries, the kingdom has remained mysterious
to the outsiders. As John R. Bradley, a Western journalist who lived and worked
there, observed, "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so extraordinarily
introverted and completely closed to outsiders, is perhaps the world's last
great, forbidden country."[17]
Hence, those whom Saudi
largesse would not appease grew loud in their denunciations of the corrupting
influence of the new ways. The ghosts of the Ikhwan mutineers worked
their spell, and Juhayman al-Utaybi, a hardline Wahhabi who had served in the
National Guard, gathered others around him to strike at the heart of Islam's
sacred institution, the Grand Mosque of Mecca, which the Saudi dynasty is sworn
to protect.
Al-Utaybi came to believe
that since the House of Saud was corrupt, it had lost its legitimacy to rule
Arabia. His father and grandfather were Ikhwan warriors who had
participated in the rebellion against Abdulaziz ibn Saud on the battlefield of
Sabila. He recalled the grievance of the Ikhwan against their king for
turning soft on Wahhabi principles; by the time he plotted his own rebellion,
the signs of Saudi deviation appeared to many devoted Wahhabis to be too
pronounced.
The evening of November 20,
1979 marked the beginning of the year 1400 in the Islamic calendar. On that
night, al-Utaybi led his supporters to incite a general Wahhabi-led uprising
against the Saudi rulers by seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca, where Muslim
pilgrims from around the world gather for their annual pilgrimage, the Hajj.
The rebellion was crushed and
al-Utaybi was executed, along with those of his followers captured with him in
the Grand Mosque. But the rebellion, although it was likely doomed to fail,
revealed that the most lethal threat to the kingdom was and remains internal.
It arises from the contradiction at the heart of the Saudi-Wahhabi partnership:
the Wahhabi fear of deviation as the Saudi rulers seek to administer the
kingdom awash with petrodollars and pressed by the forces of change on all
sides.
v.
Al-Utaybi's rebellion against
the House of Saud was hushed up by the Saudi-Wahhabi authorities, and pushed
down the memory hole of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. According to Yaroslav
Trofimov, author of The Siege of Mecca, "In the years after the
Mecca uprising, the Saudi government tried its best to erase these bloody
events from public memory. The subject of Juhayman remains taboo in the
kingdom, strenuously avoided by Saudi historians and ignored by official
textbooks."[18]
There were, however, other
events in the Middle East and beyond in 1979 of even greater immediate
consequences than the siege in Mecca. In February of that year, the Shah of
Iran left Tehran in the wake of a revolution that turned Islamic, and which
brought an old Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-89), back from
exile to become its leader. Then, on November 4, two weeks before the siege of
Mecca occurred, hardline student followers of Khomeini stormed the U.S. embassy
in Tehran and took American diplomats as hostages. The Americans would be held
for 444 days, before their release in January 1981.
Additionally, in December
1979 came the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. It would spark a
near decade-long Soviet-Afghan war, which also became -- at the beginning of
Islam's fifteenth century -- a holy war or jihad of Muslims against
infidels. It set the stage for the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union
in December 1991, bringing to an end the Cold War, which for nearly half a
century, had defined the main security tension between East (communism) and
West (capitalism) in global politics.
The making of the Islamic
Republic of Iran in the Middle East upset the regional equilibrium between
monarchies and republican states. The ruling Shi'ite clerics in Tehran
broadcast their intent to export the Islamic revolution, and provocatively
gestured to Shi'ite Muslims in neighboring Arab states to create a common front
with Palestinians and other disenfranchised segments of the population, against
Israel and undemocratic regimes headed by Sunni dictators and dynastic rulers.
Saddam Hussein, the Sunni
despot in Baghdad, felt the tremors of the Iranian revolution most intensely.
His "republic of fear," as the Iraqi Shi'ite author and dissident,
Kanan Makiya, described Saddam's Iraq, was a narrowly based autocratic regime
drawing upon the sectarian loyalties of Sunni tribes in a state where Shi'ite
Muslims made up two-thirds of the population.
Iran's revolutionary threat,
although also feared by the Sunni rulers of the Gulf states, including the
House of Saud, was left to the Iraqi leader to countermand. Saddam Hussein
viewed himself as the leader and defender of the "Arab nation," and
as the rightful successor to the place that Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser once
held in the imagination of Arabs. In his view, and in the opinion of most
Arabs, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat had betrayed Nasser and the "Arab
nation" by going to Jerusalem in November 1977 and making peace with
Israel.
Saddam Hussein launched a
pre-emptive war against Iran in September 1980. He hoped that by striking at
Iran, still unsettled after the upheavals of the revolution, a regime change in
Tehran might be brought about. It was a huge miscalculation. After the initial
shock, Iran went on the offensive. The Iran-Iraq war turned into a nearly eight
year, grinding waste of men and materiel, finally ending in August 1988 with a
UN-brokered ceasefire.
vi.
History is full of unintended
consequences. In retrospect, the Soviet-Afghan war and the Iran-Iraq war of the
1980s prepared the conditions for the explosive events of 9/11 and after.
The Iran-Iraq War left the
Iraqi despot, Saddam Hussein, in terrible dilemma. His recklessness exposed him
as vainglorious and foolish. It also left him in severe debt to those Arabs, in
particular to the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, who had bankrolled with their
petrodollars his war against Iran. When Saddam Hussein requested debt
forgiveness, the ruling house of Kuwait declined.
Saddam Hussein could not
stomach the response of the Emir of Kuwait -- it rankled him as ingratitude. He
had taken Iraq to war against Khomeini's Iran in defense of Arabs and Sunni
Islam against the Persians and their Shi'ite heresy. The Kuwaiti Emir's ingratitude
could not go unpunished; so Saddam Hussein dispatched his army to take over
Kuwait. The raging folly of Saddam Hussein set the stage for the U.S.-led first
Gulf War of February 1991 -- Operation Desert Storm -- to liberate Kuwait and
defend Saudi Arabia.
vii.
Abdulaziz ibn Saud, whose
career had spanned the first five decades of the twentieth century, died in
1953. His legacy was to leave the second Saudi-Wahhabi state, named the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia -- the first Saudi-Wahhabi state was launched by Muhammad ibn
Saud and Abdul-Wahhab, in the mid-18th century -- in the care of the House of
Saud he had restored, by ruthlessness and cunning, to power. Since his death,
his sons Saud, Feisal, Khalid, Fahd, Abdullah, and Salman have successively
ruled the Kingdom.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,
when founded, was hugely anachronistic, a throwback to the values and customs
of the seventh century in an age defined by science and man's quest for
knowledge and adventure beyond his planetary home. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
remains a bundle of contradictions held together from within by a religious
doctrine -- Wahhabism -- violently imposed and maintained, defended from the
outside by the protective shield the United States has provided.
The famous photograph of Abdulaziz
ibn Saud meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1945 aboard the
U.S.S. Quincy symbolizes the incongruity of the Saudi-American "special
relationship." About the meaning of this relationship to the Saudi rulers,
Prince Feisal, Abdulaziz ibn Saud's son, remarked to President John Kennedy in
1962, "After Allah, we trust the United States."[19]
|
The famous photograph of
Abdulaziz ibn Saud meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1945
aboard the U.S.S. Quincy symbolizes the incongruity of the Saudi-American
"special relationship." (Image source: U.S. Navy)
|
In the absence of oil, it is
unlikely there would be any relationship of the sort which the United States
cultivated with the House of Saud. Saudi Arabia is a totalitarian state under
the banner of Allah, and protected, as if Allah arranged it, by the United
States. This special relationship, however, rests uneasily upon the minds of those
Saudis who take their Wahhabism seriously and are offended by any real or
perceived dilution of, or deviation from, their creed.
Fahd (1922-2005), the fourth
son of Abdulaziz ibn Saud, succeeded his brother Khalid as king in 1982. With
Saddam Hussein's army driving into Kuwait in August 1990, the threat to Saudi
Arabia seemed imminent. Fahd approved the deployment of American forces inside
the kingdom with the consent of the blind Sheik, Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, the Chief
Mufti and the highest juridical authority in the kingdom, and other leading
Wahhabi clerics.
Approval for stationing
American forces inside Saudi Arabia carried a certain amount of risk, despite
the support of the Wahhabi religious leaders. In one of his many private
conversations with Philby, Abdulaziz ibn Saud had confided his views about
Christianity and Christians; his remarks also revealed the strange thinking of
his people. On the basis of Philby's private papers, his biographer, Elizabeth
Monroe, repeated those conversations between Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his English
confidant, Philby:
"He [Abdulaziz ibn Saud]
told Philby that by his standards Christians were of a kindred faith because
they were 'people of the Book'; being believers according to their lights, they
were less abhorrent to him than lax Muslims -- mushriqin, or people who
associate other beings such as saints with the worship of God. Purity of faith
was more important to him than all else; the easy-going habits of the Hijazis
and the Turks, with their acceptance of corruptions unknown to early Islam,
their deviations into heretical byways, their veneration of shrines and their
tolerance of music, smoking, and strong drink were anathema to him and to his
people... By no means all believers agreed with him about Christians or about
the possible wisdom of helping the British. To some of his men, all Christians
were dogs, unfit to eat with or even to speak to, and he, by dealing with them,
was as reprehensible as the Sharif... But he was not lax; he was a reformer and
by extending his territory he was spreading the faith as first conceived.
Christian allies were permissible if alliance served Islamic ends."[20]
What principally mattered in
accepting Christian support, therefore, was whether such support served the
followers of Islam in spreading the faith, or whether it corrupted those
followers and besmirched Islam. This same thinking could also apply to an
alliance with the Jews and Israel in defending Saudi interests, should such
need arise.
There were, all the same,
those Saudis who viewed the American military as a Christian-Jewish Crusader
army, violating the purity and sacredness of the land with the two holiest
cities of Islam. To hardline Wahhabis, the sight of American soldiers on Saudi
soil was intolerable. The unintended consequence of the American-led liberation
of Kuwait and defense of Saudi Arabia was the hardening of denunciation of the
House of Saud by dissident Saudi Wahhabis.
In May 1991, a body of
dissident Wahhabi theologians sent a letter to Sheikh Bin Baz. The main thrust
of the letter was that the dependence of the kingdom for its security on
foreign non-Muslim armies was evidence that the House of Saud had renounced true
Islam. The letter was alarming: the criticism had come from within the Saudi
society, and it revealed a widening gap between those Wahhabi theologians
defending the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance, and those increasingly critical of the
House of Saud for laxity.
Among the Wahhabi critics of
Saudi rulers, Bin Baz heard from Osama bin Laden. In an open letter published
in mid-1990s, Bin Laden rebuked the Wahhabi religious leaders for approving the
decision of King Fahd to invite American forces into Saudi Arabia. He denounced
this as a recipe for disaster for the Muslim umma or community, and
condemned the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance as apostates collaborating with Western
powers.[21]
By the time Osama bin Laden
wrote to Sheik Bin Baz, a profound change in the radical discourse of religion
and politics within the Muslim world had occurred. Two apparently separate
currents of extremist Muslim or Islamist thinking had merged; ironically, the
House of Saud had been instrumental in bringing them about.
One current was the Wahhabi
doctrine, from its inception onwards doctrinally located at the margins of
Sunni Islam. The vast majority of Sunni Muslims viewed Wahhabism with disdain,
as an extremist, life-denying perversion of traditional Islam, and as
inherently bigoted and violent. But as Saudi money poured forth, spreading
Wahhabi theology across the Muslim world and into the West, the House of Saud,
flush with petrodollars, gradually altered the mainstream Sunni Muslim view of
Wahhabism.
The other current was the
innovation in Muslim thought presented by the Egyptian, Hasan al-Banna
(1906-49), as the founder of the Ikhwan al-Muslimin (the Muslim
Brotherhood). Another Egyptian responsible for the brand of extremist theology
associated with the Muslim Brotherhood was Sayyid Qutb (1906-66); his influence
as the ideologue of radical Islam, or Islamism, among a new generation of
Muslims born in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, would exceed that
of al-Banna.[22]
While Hasan al-Banna and
Sayyid Qutb were contemporaries and were both influenced by political
developments in Europe between the two world wars, Qutb, unlike al-Banna, also
experienced military rule in Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser and drew upon this
experience -- he was eventually imprisoned and hanged by Nasser's regime -- to
deepen the Islamist critique of secular regimes in the Muslim world.
The defeat of the Ottoman
Empire in the Great War, followed by the abolition of the Caliphate, had left
pious Muslims at a loss. For the next half-century, politics in the Muslim
world was primarily driven by secular nationalism and the pressures to modernize
traditional societies in imitation of the West. But there were also persistent
questions raging below the surface, in opposition to those in power, on how to
return -- "reform" -- Muslim societies back to their authentic
Islamic roots.
The Islamist answer was that
corrupting influences had taken hold of the Muslim umma long before the
Western powers conquered Muslim lands. The writings of Ibn Taymiyyah were
revived, and his theology updated as an explanation of why the Muslim umma
in modern times was broken and distraught. Hasan al-Banna saw himself and the
movement he founded as deepening and broadening the "reformist" ideas
inherited from an earlier generation of thinkers and activists, Muhammad 'Abduh
(1849-1905) and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935).
Rashid Rida was an advocate
of Islamic reform through critical reading of the Quran and return to the
prophetic traditions of the earliest, or the first three generations of Muslims
-- al-salaf al-salih (pious ancestors). From this advocacy emerged the idea
of "Salafism," which in turn became the hallmark of the Muslim
Brotherhood and its offshoots across the Muslim world.[23]
Salafism and Wahhabism were
doctrinally convergent; members of the Muslim Brotherhood, once the Saudi
kingdom was established, found their staunchest ally and financiers in the
House of Saud and among the Wahhabi clerics.
As the Canadian scholar of
Islam and Muslim history, Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith, noted, the Salafiyah
movement, led, in "willingly accepting Wahhabi influence, to a
reinvigorated fundamentalist activism" in the twentieth century.[24]
Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid
Qutb, in turn, further deepened the Wahhabi doctrine pertaining to the notion
of jihad, and broadened its appeal for Muslims by turning jihad
into an obligatory duty for the believer. This duty was not, as Sayyid Qutb
described in Milestones (the most widely read ideological text of
Islamism), merely a matter of personal striving for self-improvement; it was,
instead, engagement in the holy war to establish God's law on earth.
In Sayyid Qutb's description,
"Islam is the way of life ordained by God for all mankind... and orders
practical life in all its daily details. Jihaad in Islam is simply a name for
striving to make this system of life dominant in the world."[25] For Qutb, jihad
as holy war was not simply one of the central pillars of Islam; it was
inseparable from the meaning and practice of Islam.
For Hasan al-Banna, the
allure of death and dying for Islam was ennobling. He wrote about the "art
of death" (fann al-mawt), and how "God grants a 'noble life'
to that nation alone which 'knows how to die a noble death.'"[26]
In Hasan al-Banna's preaching
of jihad, to be truly Muslim required accepting martyrdom. With
such preaching, which made martyrdom a desired goal for Muslims, the path was
paved for homicidal acts carried out by individuals willing to die in jihad
for spreading Islam.
In the age of totalitarianism
-- which in the last century flourished under the various headings of
Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Hitler's National Socialism and Maoism -- Hasan
al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb added Islamism.
Shariah, as God's law, in
covering and monitoring every detail of human conduct, as Qutb insisted, is
total; its enforcement through jihad made for an ideology -- Islamism --
consistent with the temperament of the totalitarian era.
Islamism in its Shi'ite
version, as Khomeinism, triumphed in Iran with the establishment of the Islamic
Republic.
Among Sunni Muslims, Islamism
spurred the jihadist activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots
within Egypt, among Palestinians, and in North Africa among Algerians. Armed jihad
became a freelancing activity of Muslims wherever many, or even a few, gathered
and raised the banner of fighting for the honor, or for the spread, of Islam.
In October 1981, a cell of jihadi
soldiers within the Egyptian army killed President Anwar Sadat for his
"betrayal of Islam" in embracing Israeli leaders, and for signing a
peace treaty with the Jewish state.
It was in Afghanistan, during
the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s, that jihad as a theology and
totalitarian ideology, in other words as Islamism, came to its own. That jihad
was the result of a collaborative effort of Salafist-Wahhabi warriors and
volunteer recruits, financed by the House of Saud, Saudi citizens, and Gulf
petrodollars, and armed with weapons from friendly states, including the United
States.
viii.
The Soviet-Afghan war, or the
Afghan jihad as it came to be known, hugely emboldened the Islamist
movement. In Osama bin Laden, this movement found its figurehead, its chief
organizer, and its principal financier. In March 1997, Bin Laden gave an
interview to Peter Arnett of CNN in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. In response to
Arnett's question about the significance of the Afghan jihad, Bin Laden
answered:
"The influence of the
Afghan jihad on the Islamic world was so great; it necessitated that
people should rise above many of their differences and unite their efforts
against their enemy... As for the young men who participated in jihad
here, their number was quite big, praise and gratitude be to Him, and they
spread in every place in which non-believers' injustice is perpetuated against
Muslims. Their going to Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan and other countries is but
a fulfillment of a duty, because we believe that these states are part of the
Islamic world."[27]
Bin Laden organized al Qaeda
as the base for supporting the network of Islamist warriors in the global jihad
he planned to ignite.
The unfolding confusion in
world politics after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold
War, the beginning of the crack-up in the Middle East that followed the Gulf
War of 1991, and the effects of the Balkan wars on Muslim opinion all assisted
Bin Laden's plan to keep increasing jihadi pressure on the American
presence inside Saudi Arabia and within the Middle East, by striking at
American installations and personnel. By the time he gave his CNN interview, he
had figured out the dynamics of a "virtuous circle" in the tactics
and strategy of the global jihad. According to the journalist Jason
Burke:
"Successful attacks
would bring in recruits, money and prestige and mobilize and radicalize the
'Arab street.' [Bin Laden's] enhanced capability would then allow more
successful attacks, which would accelerate the process. His aim had always been
to instigate. When the situation had become sufficiently radicalized, his own
interventions would be unnecessary. The Muslim youth would have cast off their
illusions, embraced the true Islamic path and launched their own attacks
against the tyrannical oppressors."[28]
In giving the 1997 CNN
interview, Bin Laden and his inner circle of al Qaeda militants also understood
the importance of the media in the dynamics of the "virtuous circle."
As news organizations broadcast terrorist attacks claimed by al Qaeda, it would
generate new recruits and funds for the jihadi terrorist network; and
the greater or more outrageous the terrorist attacks on civilian and military
targets, more time the media would spend on reporting them, further raising the
profile of Bin Laden and al Qaeda among Muslims worldwide.
The 9/11 attacks on the twin
towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington,
were spectacular in planning and execution; and the visual effects stunning to
the global audience, as the world media broadcast the towers brought down in
flames after al Qaeda jihadi terrorists had flown hijacked airplanes
into them.
A few weeks after 9/11, Bin
Laden spoke with Taysir Alluni, reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, for the
Qatar based television news, Al-Jazeera. Bin Laden volunteered, "I
say that the events that happened on Tuesday September 11 in New York and
Washington are truly great events by any measure, and their repercussions are
not yet over."[29]
Osama bin Laden had exceeded
even his own expectations to instigate the United States as the "Great
Satan" -- the appellation used by Iran's Khomeini -- to go to war in the
Muslim world.
Bin Laden had instigated two
wars: the second Afghan war and the war in Iraq for regime change. He had drawn
American troops into the vortex of the Middle East, to be the catalyst for radical
change at the center of Arab Islam and to raise the stakes for the House of
Saud as apostate collaborator with the "Great Satan." He may have
suspected that the hunt for him might lead to his being killed, as it
eventually did, when U.S. Navy SEALs killed him at his hideout in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, on May 2, 2011. But to his followers, he had blazed the path of
martyrdom.
In December 2004, Osama bin
Laden had posted, on the website of the Global Islamic Media Front, the most
damning indictment of the House of Saud. There was no longer any ambiguity in
his message to his jihadi followers, and no effort was made to soften
his critique of the rulers of Saudi Arabia. He declared,
"The Saudi regime has
committed very serious acts of disobedience -- worse than the sins and offenses
that are contrary to Islam, worse than oppressing slaves, depriving them of
their rights and insulting their dignity, intelligence, and feelings, worse
than squandering the general wealth of the nation... It has got to the point where
the regime has gone so far as to be clearly beyond the pale of Islam, allying
itself with infidel America and aiding it against Muslims, and making itself an
equal to God by legislating on what is or is not permissible without consulting
God."[30]
Since 1945, at the end of the
Second World War, conflicts of varying sorts and intensities had raged across
the Middle East. The creation of Israel in 1948 launched a set of Arab-Israeli
wars that have persisted despite the efforts of the great powers to find an
acceptable settlement for both Jews and Palestinians. The Arab-Israeli wars,
however, have paled in intensity and casualty figures beside the conflicts
within the Arab world and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Through the decades,
during these intra- and inter-Arab conflicts, Saudi Arabia remained more or
less protected with American support.
The rebellion led by
al-Utaybi in November 1979, however, had revealed the internal fissures in
Saudi society, which if ignited could lead to bigger conflagration. Osama bin
Laden understood this internal reality of the country of his birth. In striking
at the distant enemy -- the United States -- on 9/11, he lit the fuse inside
Saudi Arabia. One of the most insightful scholars of Arab politics, Professor
Fouad Ajami (1945-2014), an Arab-American, wrote in 2004,
"It was a matter of time
before the terrible wind that originated in the Arabian Peninsula returned to
its point of origin. The jihadists had struck far and wide. They had taken the
Wahhabi creed, stretched it to the breaking point, and turned it into an
instrument of combat. Where the creed had once taught obedience to the rulers,
it now turned its wrath on the 'infidels' defiling the sacred earth of Arabia.
In Arabia, it was a time of denial. In the year behind us, the bubble in which
the Saudi kingdom was sheltered burst, and today there is a running war between
the forces of order and zealots who have put down roots in a realm that once
thought car bombs and kidnapping were the lots of other lands."[31]
Few in the West, and even
fewer in the United States, had any inkling of Ajami's reference in describing
what Osama bin Laden had set in motion. The founder of al Qaeda had awakened
the ghosts of Ikhwan, the Bedouin warriors and Wahhabi zealots who once
rode with Abdulaziz ibn Saud in spreading terror beyond their arid inner
sanctum of Najd. When the Ikhwan warriors threatened the House of Saud
in the making, Abdulaziz ibn Saud had mowed them down with weapons supplied by
the British. Years later, like the forgotten Ikhwan warriors,
Salafi-Wahhabi jihadists, raised for holy war by Osama bin Laden, still
threaten the House of Saud and the entire post-WWI order in the Fertile
Crescent.
ix.
ISIS is "the Islamist
phoenix," in the description of the oil and energy specialist, Loretta
Napoleoni. It has arisen from the depredations of the Iraq War and the
worsening conflict inside Syria following the "Arab Spring" uprising
of 2011. The difference between al Qaeda and ISIS is that the former remained a
network of jihadi warriors and the latter is a state in formation.
Osama bin Laden had spoken about
the restoration of the Caliphate, and Mullah Omar of Afghanistan had taken for
himself the title of Amir al-Mu'minin ("Commander of the
Believers") in the aftermath of the Soviet-Afghan war.
But when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
declared himself the Caliph and announced the rebirth of the Caliphate, he
turned the nostalgia of a broad segment of Muslims into a practical reality to
defend. As Napoleoni writes, "Though al Baghdadi's men are willing to die
for the Caliphate, their dream, by contrast, is positive and contemporary: they
want to experience the Caliphate on this earth, not only in the
afterlife."[32]
The question in the struggle
over the Fertile Crescent, over a dozen years after the 2003 American-led
regime change in Iraq, is whether the United States will hold the line between
Saudi Arabia and the ISIS-hatched Caliphate, or let that struggle spill over
into the kingdom. In the 1920s, the line was held by Britain, but after the
Second World War, Britain was an exhausted power and retreat from her vast
overseas empire became an imperative. In the wake of Britain's retreat, the
United States took upon itself the burden of maintaining regional order in the
Middle East.
In defending the regional
order (as shaped by the Sykes-Picot cartography from the Great War) against
Saddam Hussein's brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait, President George
H.W. Bush ironically brought into the open the nightmare scenario of what might
follow once the tyrant in Baghdad was removed. The terrible uncertainties of
post-Saddam Iraq deterred President Bush from sending American forces all the
way into Baghdad after they had routed the Iraqi army in Kuwait during the
first Gulf War in 1991.
The states of the Fertile
Crescent and the Gulf were, as Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir had once
remarked, "tribes with flags." Iraq was an entity created by Britain,
in which Shi'ites and Sunni tribes were to share power with the Kurds. It was
eventually held together by the Sunni-dominated military and by appeals to Arab
nationalism, which was a fiction. The Sunni Arab Muslims were a minority within
an Iraq with a Shi'ite Arab majority, and the Sunni Arab fear of Shi'ite
revanchism was fuelled by the awareness of how they had abused the Shi'ite
Muslims.
There was no mistake about
the nature of Saddam Hussein's brutal despotism, and the extent to which his
tyranny rested upon the fears of his Sunni clansmen. Soon after the Iraqi army
was expelled from Kuwait, Kanan Makiya imagined what could occur if the tyrant
were removed:
"After Saddam is gone,
when people's lives and those of their loved ones look as if they are on the
chopping block, Sunni fears of what the Shi'a might do to them in the name of
Islam are going to become the major force of Iraqi politics. The more Iraq's
Shi'a assert themselves as Shi'a, the greater will be the tendency of Iraq's
Sunni minority to fight to the bitter end before allowing anything that so much
as smells of an Islamic republic to be established in Iraq. They see in such a
state -- whether rightly or wrongly is irrelevant -- their own
annihilation."[33]
Makiya knew the tribal and
sectarian nature of his country, as did the jihadi warriors associated
with al Qaeda, who moved into Iraq in the wake of regime change in 2003. Their
deliberate assault on Shi'ite centers and shrines, masterminded by the ruthless
al Qaeda associate in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was designed to launch the
Sunni-Shi'a war in the Fertile Crescent. It worked: While American forces
tracked and killed al-Zarqawi in June 2006, ISIS has praised his deeds with
remembrance of him as one of its founding fathers.
The Salafi-Wahhabi holy
warriors also sensed that the American public would turn against a long and
ugly war of attrition in the Middle East, just as it had done with the war in
Vietnam. Under President Obama began America's military disengagement from
Iraq, after the American public had gradually turned sour with military
involvement in Iraq and the broader Middle East -- just as the Salafi-Wahhabi jihadi
warriors had sensed would happen.
Regime change in Baghdad had
led to the formation of a Shi'a dominated majority government. What Makiya
prophesied after the first Gulf War eventually came horribly true, as Iraqis
became trapped in the spiral of sectarian killings. The Sunni-Shi'a schism has
been the main divide in Muslim history since the early years of Islam, and in
recent years Sunni Arabs in Iraq began to perceive their respective interests
as under siege.
The Sunni insurgency in Iraq
has been fuelled by the desire to restore Sunni pride and identity, and to
reverse the slippage of Sunni power.
With the rise of ISIS, the
Sunni insurgency in Iraq and the Sunni rebellion in Syria against the minority
Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad became linked, and with this linkage the
frontier between the two states ceased to exist. ISIS has disrupted the Iranian
arc of influence and power that came out of Tehran and had passed through
Baghdad and Damascus into Beirut.
Although the rise of ISIS
might be threatening to the House of Saud's rule in Arabia, doctrinally the two
are natural allies in the Sunni-Shi'a conflict, which has the likelihood of
escalating into a new version of the 1980s' Iran-Iraq war. Saudi relations with
ISIS are shrouded in mystery, as have been Saudi relations with al Qaeda,
despite the public break with Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks.
The Saudis have, moreover,
redirected the internal opposition of hardline Wahhabi zealots into support for
jihadi politics abroad. The Sunni-Shi'a conflict provides ample
opportunity for the Saudis to co-opt ISIS in waging jihad against Iran
and its allies in the Fertile Crescent.
In Funding Evil,
Rachel Ehrenfeld documented Saudi funding of al Qaeda -- despite the special
relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States. As the history of the
Saudi-Wahhabi alliance in developing the kingdom is filled with bigotry and
terror, Saudi Arabia remains a state devoted to the cause of jihad in
spreading Wahhabism within the Sunni Muslim world and beyond.
In a report about a leaked
briefing on Saudi Arabia by the late scholar Laurent Murawiec, given in July
2002 to a Pentagon advisory committee, the Defense Policy Board, Thomas Ricks
of the Washington Post reported, "The Saudis are active at every
level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to
foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader."[34]
Murawiec's book on Saudi
Arabia, Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West, published in
2005, was an explosive account of the insidious ways in which the House of Saud
has been an incubator of Islamism and has funded the enemies of the United
States, such as the various affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood and the
Palestinian Hamas -- all while the House of Saud depended for its own security
on American protection. A Pentagon spokeswoman, after the briefing by Murawiec,
went on record to state that it did not reflect the official views of the
Department of Defense. This swift denial indicated the sensitivity inside
Washington on the questionable nature of American-Saudi relationship, which in
the context of 9/11 required the most serious reassessment, and which the
American leadership has resisted.
In the circumstances of
American military disengagement from Iraq and the investment in time and effort
made by President Obama to try and reach an agreement with Iran, the Saudi
rulers will support the ISIS-led war against the Shi'ite population in Iraq and
Syria. It was reported
in the British press that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudi
ambassador in Washington and former chief of Saudi intelligence, told Sir
Richard Dearlove, head of the British MI6, "The time is not far off in the
Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shi'a'. More than
a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."
ISIS's campaign to
consolidate its hold on its captured territories has been marked by the
deliberate ethnic cleansing of minorities in the region, and destruction of
ancient sites and artifacts found in the regional museums. As V.S. Naipaul
noted, "ISIS is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust."
The Saudi silence in the face
of mounting atrocities signifies, in the view of this author, acquiescence and
an embrace of ISIS.
There is method in the
genocidal violence perpetrated by ISIS against minority Christians and Yazidis,
and the majority Shi'ite Muslims in the region. It is to spread fear, to weaken
the opposition, and by the force of ideology and terror to reconfigure the
Fertile Crescent. As the Islamist ideologue Abu Bakr Naji has written,
"One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence,
crudeness, terrorism, frightening [others], and massacring." [35]
Abdulaziz ibn Saud, at the
head of his Bedouin Ikhwan warriors, would have heartily agreed with
Naji and would have approved the sweep of terror perpetrated by ISIS.
x.
The war for regime change in
Iraq after 9/11, launched by President George W. Bush, cannot be re-litigated
or undone. It was waged for reasons well-considered at the time, and the
expectation that regime change would eventually lead, with American support, to
the remaking of Iraq as a functioning democracy, was not unreasonable.
American support in the
reconstruction of Germany and Japan after 1945 was crucial. The transformation
of imperial and militaristic Japan into a peaceful democracy was testimony of
how American support can make for a better world of nations. In the Korean
Peninsula, American troops have held the line between the North and the South
since the end of the Korean War in 1953; this has made the vital difference in
turning South Korea into a democracy and an advanced industrial society.
But America changed in the
intervening decades since the Second World War. The immense burden of securing
the post-1945 world order through the Cold War decades and beyond has taken its
toll. The war in Vietnam stretched to its breaking point the public support for
indefinite overseas military engagement against hostile populations that
seemingly posed no immediate or existential threat to the country. In the Iraq
war, such public support for defeating insurgency and terror, for assisting in
nation-building, and for keeping secure the post-WWI settlement for the region,
eventually got drained.
It is crucial for the future
of the free world and for the security of America that fresh American
leadership would educate the American public about how desperately important it
is to support a return of the American military -- at least in the
numbers reached during the Iraq war between 2003 and 2009. This may perhaps
sound unlikely, given the public mood in an America tired of overseas military
involvement. Yet without American leadership, it cannot be expected that the
European Union will step into the breach to keep Western values and a free way
of life from being overwhelmed.
America's disengagement from
the Middle East has been a prelude to the likely reconfiguration of the Fertile
Crescent. Consequently, the world may soon find a new Middle East in which
Iran, especially with nuclear capability, and the Islamic State as a Caliphate
-- both openly expansionist powers -- will likely emerge as the new Shi'ite and
Sunni Islamic behemoths.
The broader Sunni-Shi'a war,
in which Saudi Arabia and ISIS together are pitted against a nuclear Iran, is
the ominous cloud that hangs over the Fertile Crescent and beyond. The
potential for other countries -- and terrorist groups -- in the region to
acquire nuclear weapons could turn the Sunni-Shi'a conflict into an apocalyptic
war.
There is, however, another
possibility. A Sunni Caliphate straddling the Fertile Crescent in partnership
with Saudi Arabia and the Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Iran might seek a modus
vivendi, after recognizing the futility of Sunni-Shi'a conflict in
perpetuity. Such an arrangement between the Sunni Caliphs of the Ottoman Empire
and the Shi'ite rulers of the Safavid Persian Empire once existed, despite
their mutual antipathy. In this scenario, the world would not be any worse off
than at present.
[1] He is mentioned only in passing the pillage of the Sharifian
palaces, and destructions of the domed tombs of pious men or Muslim saints
found in the two holy cities of Islam.
[4] For a brief study on the subject, see Hamid Algar's Wahhabism:
A Critical Essay (Oneonta, NY: Islamic International Publications, 2002).
[9] See G.E. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam: A History, 600 A.D.
to 1258 A.D. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1970).
[12] Husayn bin Ali, is Sharif Husayn, whose son was Prince Feisal,
alongside T.E. Lawrence. The Sharif family was Sunni, as were the Ottomans.
[14] S.K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the
House of Saud (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 24.
[17] J.R. Bradley, Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. xi.
[18] Y. Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in
Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda (New York: Doubleday,
2007), p. 251.
[19] Cited in Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics,
Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia (Toronto: Penguin
Canada, 2009), p. 72.
[21] See Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden.
Edited and Introduced by Bruce Lawrence (London: Verso, 2005). For Bin Laden's
letter to Sheik Bin Baz, see pp. 15-19.
[22] On the making and spread of Islamism see, for instance, Richard
P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1969, 1993); James Toth, Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy
of a Radical Islamic Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013); Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi', Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in
the Modern Arab World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996);
and Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2012).
[23] On Salafi, see the useful article by Bernard Haykel,
"Salafis," in Gerhard Bowering (editor), The Princeton
Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2013), pp. 483-84.
[32] L. Napoleoni, The Islamist Phoenix: The Islamic State and the
Redrawing of the Middle East (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014), p. 36.
[33] K. Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and
the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), p. 224.
[34] Thomas E. Ricks, "Briefing Depicted Saudis as Enemies,"
in Washington Post, Tuesday 6 August 2002, p. A01.
[35] Quoted in Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the
Army of Terror (New York: Regan Arts, 2015), p. 41.
Recent Articles by Salim Mansur
- Trump's Ban on Muslims: The Discussion the Media Won't Have, 2016-02-06
- Death by Lashing: Saudi Arabia, 2015-06-11
- Pakistan: Between Civility and Fanaticism, 2015-01-31
- Islam in the Rear-View Mirror, 2014-09-29
- Hamas's Absurd War against Israel, 2014-07-24
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Peter
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Jun 19,
2015 22:08
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Detailed research
paper [20 words]
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Anindya
Chatterjee
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Jun 18,
2015 07:22
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Great Article
[43 words]
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Steve
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Jun 15,
2015 23:11
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Fascinating
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Andrew
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Jun 15,
2015 15:34
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Barry
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Jun 15,
2015 03:40
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Versions of Islam???
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Abdul
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Jun 14,
2015 23:15
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Excellent Article -
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Mark
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Jun 14,
2015 21:44
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fine analysis but
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lee brock
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qwester
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Jun 14,
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Good to see
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A Must Read
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What reform has
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Oil is the key, and
the Cold War never ended. [326 words]
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Totalitarianism
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--------------
AP/The Atlantic
What
is the Islamic State?
Where did it come from, and what are its
intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western
leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times
published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special
Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that
he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not
defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past
year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not
Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion
about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.Related Story
Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.
The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.
We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.
Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)
Related Story
An interview with Graeme Wood:
The author describes how he tracked down the world’s most influential recruiters
for the Islamic State—and how they reacted after reading this story.
There is a temptation to rehearse this
observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political
concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic
State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light
of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a
seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the
apocalypse.The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam.
To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)
But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
Related Story
Control of territory is an essential
precondition for the Islamic State’s authority in the eyes of its supporters.
This map, adapted from the work of the Institute for the Study of War, shows
the territory under the caliphate’s control as of January 15, along with areas
it has attacked. Where it holds power, the state collects taxes, regulates
prices, operates courts, and administers services ranging from health care and
education to telecommunications.I. Devotion
In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video tracing its origins to bin Laden. It acknowledged Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi, the brutal head of al‑Qaeda in Iraq from roughly 2003 until his killing in 2006, as a more immediate progenitor, followed sequentially by two other guerrilla leaders before Baghdadi, the caliph. Notably unmentioned: bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, the owlish Egyptian eye surgeon who currently heads al‑Qaeda. Zawahiri has not pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, and he is increasingly hated by his fellow jihadists. His isolation is not helped by his lack of charisma; in videos he comes across as squinty and annoyed. But the split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has been long in the making, and begins to explain, at least in part, the outsize bloodlust of the latter.Zawahiri’s companion in isolation is a Jordanian cleric named Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, 55, who has a fair claim to being al-Qaeda’s intellectual architect and the most important jihadist unknown to the average American newspaper reader. On most matters of doctrine, Maqdisi and the Islamic State agree. Both are closely identified with the jihadist wing of a branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih, the “pious forefathers.” These forefathers are the Prophet himself and his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for all behavior, including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry.
The Islamic
State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate
the countdown to the apocalypse.
Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq
with the older man’s advice in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his
mentor in fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi’s
penchant for bloody spectacle—and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred of other
Muslims, to the point of excommunicating and killing them. In Islam, the
practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous. “If a
man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ ” the Prophet said, “then one of
them is right.” If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by
making a false accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death. And yet
Zarqawi heedlessly expanded the range of behavior that could make Muslims
infidels.Maqdisi wrote to his former pupil that he needed to exercise caution and “not issue sweeping proclamations of takfir” or “proclaim people to be apostates because of their sins.” The distinction between apostate and sinner may appear subtle, but it is a key point of contention between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Related Story
Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.
Musa Cerantonio, an Australian preacher
reported to be one of the Islamic State’s most influential recruiters, believes
it is foretold that the caliphate will sack Istanbul before it is beaten back
by an army led by the anti-Messiah, whose eventual death— when just a few
thousand jihadists remain—will usher in the apocalypse. (Paul Jeffers / Fairfax
Media)
Centuries
have passed since the wars of religion
ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of
arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with
which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic
State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be,
or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.
Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past,
Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to
deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that
calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look
instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies
arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living
in lands valued only for their oil.Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.
Related Story
Every academic I asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent me to Haykel. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent.
According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”
All Muslims acknowledge that Muhammad’s earliest conquests were not tidy affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in the narrations of the Prophet’s rule were calibrated to fit a turbulent and violent time. In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”
Our failure to appreciate the
essential differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda has led to dangerous decisions.
The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only
punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear
endorsement in the Surah Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth chapter, which instructs
Muslims to fight Christians and Jews “until they pay the jizya with
willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all Muslims
consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.”
Before the rise of the Islamic State, no group in the past few centuries had attempted more-radical fidelity to the Prophetic model than the Wahhabis of 18th‑century Arabia. They conquered most of what is now Saudi Arabia, and their strict practices survive in a diluted version of Sharia there. Haykel sees an important distinction between the groups, though: “The Wahhabis were not wanton in their violence.” They were surrounded by Muslims, and they conquered lands that were already Islamic; this stayed their hand. “ISIS, by contrast, is really reliving the early period.” Early Muslims were surrounded by non-Muslims, and the Islamic State, because of its takfiri tendencies, considers itself to be in the same situation.
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In October, Dabiq, the magazine of the Islamic State, published “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” an article that took up the question of whether Yazidis (the members of an ancient Kurdish sect that borrows elements of Islam, and had come under attack from Islamic State forces in northern Iraq) are lapsed Muslims, and therefore marked for death, or merely pagans and therefore fair game for enslavement. A study group of Islamic State scholars had convened, on government orders, to resolve this issue. If they are pagans, the article’s anonymous author wrote,
Yazidi
women and children [are to be] divided according to the Shariah amongst the
fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations [in
northern Iraq] … Enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and
taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah
that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of
the Koran and the narrations of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from
Islam.
II. Territory
Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are thought to have immigrated to the Islamic State. Recruits hail from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and many other places. Many have come to fight, and many intend to die.Peter R. Neumann, a professor at King’s College London, told me that online voices have been essential to spreading propaganda and ensuring that newcomers know what to believe. Online recruitment has also widened the demographics of the jihadist community, by allowing conservative Muslim women—physically isolated in their homes—to reach out to recruiters, radicalize, and arrange passage to Syria. Through its appeals to both genders, the Islamic State hopes to build a complete society.
In November, I traveled to Australia to meet Musa Cerantonio, a 30-year-old man whom Neumann and other researchers had identified as one of the two most important “new spiritual authorities” guiding foreigners to join the Islamic State. For three years he was a televangelist on Iqraa TV in Cairo, but he left after the station objected to his frequent calls to establish a caliphate. Now he preaches on Facebook and Twitter.
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Last June, Cerantonio and his wife tried to emigrate—he wouldn’t say to where (“It’s illegal to go to Syria,” he said cagily)—but they were caught en route, in the Philippines, and he was deported back to Australia for overstaying his visa. Australia has criminalized attempts to join or travel to the Islamic State, and has confiscated Cerantonio’s passport. He is stuck in Melbourne, where he is well known to the local constabulary. If Cerantonio were caught facilitating the movement of individuals to the Islamic State, he would be imprisoned. So far, though, he is free—a technically unaffiliated ideologue who nonetheless speaks with what other jihadists have taken to be a reliable voice on matters of the Islamic State’s doctrine.
We met for lunch in Footscray, a dense, multicultural Melbourne suburb that’s home to Lonely Planet, the travel-guide publisher. Cerantonio grew up there in a half-Irish, half-Calabrian family. On a typical street one can find African restaurants, Vietnamese shops, and young Arabs walking around in the Salafi uniform of scraggly beard, long shirt, and trousers ending halfway down the calves.
Cerantonio explained the joy he felt when Baghdadi was declared the caliph on June 29—and the sudden, magnetic attraction that Mesopotamia began to exert on him and his friends. “I was in a hotel [in the Philippines], and I saw the declaration on television,” he told me. “And I was just amazed, and I’m like, Why am I stuck here in this bloody room?”
The last caliphate was the Ottoman empire, which reached its peak in the 16th century and then experienced a long decline, until the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, euthanized it in 1924. But Cerantonio, like many supporters of the Islamic State, doesn’t acknowledge that caliphate as legitimate, because it didn’t fully enforce Islamic law, which requires stonings and slavery and amputations, and because its caliphs were not descended from the tribe of the Prophet, the Quraysh.
Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his Mosul sermon. He said that to revive the institution of the caliphate—which had not functioned except in name for about 1,000 years—was a communal obligation. He and his loyalists had “hastened to declare the caliphate and place an imam” at its head, he said. “This is a duty upon the Muslims—a duty that has been lost for centuries … The Muslims sin by losing it, and they must always seek to establish it.” Like bin Laden before him, Baghdadi spoke floridly, with frequent scriptural allusion and command of classical rhetoric. Unlike bin Laden, and unlike those false caliphs of the Ottoman empire, he is Qurayshi.
The caliphate, Cerantonio told me, is not just a political entity but also a vehicle for salvation. Islamic State propaganda regularly reports the pledges of baya’a (allegiance) rolling in from jihadist groups across the Muslim world. Cerantonio quoted a Prophetic saying, that to die without pledging allegiance is to die jahil (ignorant) and therefore die a “death of disbelief.” Consider how Muslims (or, for that matter, Christians) imagine God deals with the souls of people who die without learning about the one true religion. They are neither obviously saved nor definitively condemned. Similarly, Cerantonio said, the Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent god and prays, but who dies without pledging himself to a valid caliph and incurring the obligations of that oath, has failed to live a fully Islamic life. I pointed out that this means the vast majority of Muslims in history, and all who passed away between 1924 and 2014, died a death of disbelief. Cerantonio nodded gravely. “I would go so far as to say that Islam has been reestablished” by the caliphate.
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To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law—being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority. This last criterion, Cerantonio said, is the hardest to fulfill, and requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce Islamic law. Baghdadi’s Islamic State achieved that long before June 29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a Western convert within the group’s ranks—Cerantonio described him as “something of a leader”—began murmuring about the religious obligation to declare a caliphate. He and others spoke quietly to those in power and told them that further delay would be sinful.
Social-media posts from the Islamic
State suggest that executions happen more or less continually.
Cerantonio said a faction arose that was prepared
to make war on Baghdadi’s group if it delayed any further. They prepared a
letter to various powerful members of ISIS,
airing their displeasure at the failure to appoint a caliph, but were pacified
by Adnani, the spokesman, who let them in on a secret—that a caliphate had
already been declared, long before the public announcement. They had their
legitimate caliph, and at that point there was only one option. “If he’s
legitimate,” Cerantonio said, “you must give him the baya’a.”Related Story
Bernard Haykel, the foremost secular
authority on the Islamic State’s ideology, believes the group is trying to
re-create the earliest days of Islam and is faithfully reproducing its norms of
war. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness” about the group’s
dedication to the text of the Koran, he says. (Peter Murphy)
In
London, a week before my meal with Cerantonio, I met with three
ex-members of a banned Islamist group called Al Muhajiroun (The Emigrants):
Anjem Choudary, Abu Baraa, and Abdul Muhid. They all expressed desire to
emigrate to the Islamic State, as many of their colleagues already had, but the
authorities had confiscated their passports. Like Cerantonio, they regarded the
caliphate as the only righteous government on Earth, though none would confess
having pledged allegiance. Their principal goal in meeting me was to explain
what the Islamic State stands for, and how its policies reflect God’s law.
Choudary, 48, is the group’s former leader. He
frequently appears on cable news, as one of the few people producers can book
who will defend the Islamic State vociferously, until his mike is cut. He has a
reputation in the United Kingdom as a loathsome blowhard, but he and his
disciples sincerely believe in the Islamic State and, on matters of doctrine,
speak in its voice. Choudary and the others feature prominently in the Twitter
feeds of Islamic State residents, and Abu Baraa maintains a YouTube channel to
answer questions about Sharia.Since September, authorities have been investigating the three men on suspicion of supporting terrorism. Because of this investigation, they had to meet me separately: communication among them would have violated the terms of their bail. But speaking with them felt like speaking with the same person wearing different masks. Choudary met me in a candy shop in the East London suburb of Ilford. He was dressed smartly, in a crisp blue tunic reaching nearly to his ankles, and sipped a Red Bull while we talked.
Before the caliphate, “maybe 85 percent of the Sharia was absent from our lives,” Choudary told me. “These laws are in abeyance until we have khilafa”—a caliphate—“and now we have one.” Without a caliphate, for example, individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves they catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and this law, along with a huge body of other jurisprudence, suddenly awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the territory where the caliph is applying these laws. One of Choudary’s prize students, a convert from Hinduism named Abu Rumaysah, evaded police to bring his family of five from London to Syria in November. On the day I met Choudary, Abu Rumaysah tweeted out a picture of himself with a Kalashnikov in one arm and his newborn son in the other. Hashtag: #GenerationKhilafah.
The caliph is required to implement Sharia. Any deviation will compel those who have pledged allegiance to inform the caliph in private of his error and, in extreme cases, to excommunicate and replace him if he persists. (“I have been plagued with this great matter, plagued with this responsibility, and it is a heavy responsibility,” Baghdadi said in his sermon.) In return, the caliph commands obedience—and those who persist in supporting non-Muslim governments, after being duly warned and educated about their sin, are considered apostates.
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Abdul Muhid, 32, continued along these lines. He was dressed in mujahideen chic when I met him at a local restaurant: scruffy beard, Afghan cap, and a wallet outside of his clothes, attached with what looked like a shoulder holster. When we sat down, he was eager to discuss welfare. The Islamic State may have medieval-style punishments for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or fornication, stoning for adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in some aspects, progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit. Health care, he said, is free. (“Isn’t it free in Britain, too?,” I asked. “Not really,” he said. “Some procedures aren’t covered, such as vision.”) This provision of social welfare was not, he said, a policy choice of the Islamic State, but a policy obligation inherent in God’s law.
Anjem Choudary, London’s most notorious
defender of the Islamic State, says crucifixion and beheading are sacred
requirements. (Tal Cohen / Reuters)III. The Apocalypse
All Muslims acknowledge that God is the only one who knows the future. But they also agree that he has offered us a peek at it, in the Koran and in narrations of the Prophet. The Islamic State differs from nearly every other current jihadist movement in believing that it is written into God’s script as a central character. It is in this casting that the Islamic State is most boldly distinctive from its predecessors, and clearest in the religious nature of its mission.In broad strokes, al-Qaeda acts like an underground political movement, with worldly goals in sight at all times—the expulsion of non-Muslims from the Arabian peninsula, the abolishment of the state of Israel, the end of support for dictatorships in Muslim lands. The Islamic State has its share of worldly concerns (including, in the places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping the water running), but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda. Bin Laden rarely mentioned the apocalypse, and when he did, he seemed to presume that he would be long dead when the glorious moment of divine comeuppance finally arrived. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri are from elite Sunni families who look down on this kind of speculation and think it’s something the masses engage in,” says Will McCants of the Brookings Institution, who is writing a book about the Islamic State’s apocalyptic thought.
During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State’s immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory before the end of the world. McCants says a prominent Islamist in Iraq approached bin Laden in 2008 to warn him that the group was being led by millenarians who were “talking all the time about the Mahdi and making strategic decisions” based on when they thought the Mahdi was going to arrive. “Al-Qaeda had to write to [these leaders] to say ‘Cut it out.’ ”
For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need. Of the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa Cerantonio, the Australian, expressed the deepest interest in the apocalypse and how the remaining days of the Islamic State—and the world—might look. Parts of that prediction are original to him, and do not yet have the status of doctrine. But other parts are based on mainstream Sunni sources and appear all over the Islamic State’s propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.
The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.
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Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the Islamic State’s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading. “Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” said a masked executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who’d been held captive for more than a year. During fighting in Iraq in December, after mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.
The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the enemy as Rome. Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a matter of debate. But Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army, and the Americans will do nicely.
After mujahideen reported having
seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in
spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts upon the arrival of the first
guests at a party.
After its battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the
caliphate will expand and sack Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the
entire Earth, but Cerantonio suggested its tide may never reach beyond the
Bosporus. An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal,
will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of
the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just
as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in
Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.“Only God knows” whether the Islamic State’s armies are the ones foretold, Cerantonio said. But he is hopeful. “The Prophet said that one sign of the imminent arrival of the End of Days is that people will for a long while stop talking about the End of Days,” he said. “If you go to the mosques now, you’ll find the preachers are silent about this subject.” On this theory, even setbacks dealt to the Islamic State mean nothing, since God has preordained the near-destruction of his people anyway. The Islamic State has its best and worst days ahead of it.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declared caliph by
his followers last summer. The establishment of a caliphate awakened large
sections of Koranic law that had lain dormant, and required those Muslims who
recognized the caliphate to immigrate. (AP)IV. The Fight
The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group’s actions. Osama bin Laden was seldom predictable. He ended his first television interview cryptically. CNN’s Peter Arnett asked him, “What are your future plans?” Bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.” By contrast, the Islamic State boasts openly about its plans—not all of them, but enough so that by listening carefully, we can deduce how it intends to govern and expand.In London, Choudary and his students provided detailed descriptions of how the Islamic State must conduct its foreign policy, now that it is a caliphate. It has already taken up what Islamic law refers to as “offensive jihad,” the forcible expansion into countries that are ruled by non-Muslims. “Hitherto, we were just defending ourselves,” Choudary said; without a caliphate, offensive jihad is an inapplicable concept. But the waging of war to expand the caliphate is an essential duty of the caliph.
Choudary took pains to present the laws of war under which the Islamic State operates as policies of mercy rather than of brutality. He told me the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies—a holy order to scare the shit out of them with beheadings and crucifixions and enslavement of women and children, because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.
Choudary’s colleague Abu Baraa explained that Islamic law permits only temporary peace treaties, lasting no longer than a decade. Similarly, accepting any border is anathema, as stated by the Prophet and echoed in the Islamic State’s propaganda videos. If the caliph consents to a longer-term peace or permanent border, he will be in error. Temporary peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied to all enemies at once: the caliph must wage jihad at least once a year. He may not rest, or he will fall into a state of sin.
One comparison to the Islamic State is the Khmer Rouge, which killed about a third of the population of Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge occupied Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. “This is not permitted,” Abu Baraa said. “To send an ambassador to the UN is to recognize an authority other than God’s.” This form of diplomacy is shirk, or polytheism, he argued, and would be immediate cause to hereticize and replace Baghdadi. Even to hasten the arrival of a caliphate by democratic means—for example by voting for political candidates who favor a caliphate—is shirk.
It’s hard to overstate how hamstrung the Islamic State will be by its radicalism. The modern international system, born of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, relies on each state’s willingness to recognize borders, however grudgingly. For the Islamic State, that recognition is ideological suicide. Other Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, have succumbed to the blandishments of democracy and the potential for an invitation to the community of nations, complete with a UN seat. Negotiation and accommodation have worked, at times, for the Taliban as well. (Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan exchanged ambassadors with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, an act that invalidated the Taliban’s authority in the Islamic State’s eyes.) To the Islamic State these are not options, but acts of apostasy.
The
United States and its allies have reacted to
the Islamic State belatedly and in an apparent daze. The group’s ambitions and
rough strategic blueprints were evident in its pronouncements and in
social-media chatter as far back as 2011, when it was just one of many
terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq and hadn’t yet committed mass atrocities.
Adnani, the spokesman, told followers then that the group’s ambition was to
“restore the Islamic caliphate,” and he evoked the apocalypse, saying, “There
are but a few days left.” Baghdadi had already styled himself “commander of the
faithful,” a title ordinarily reserved for caliphs, in 2011. In April 2013,
Adnani declared the movement “ready to redraw the world upon the Prophetic
methodology of the caliphate.” In August 2013, he said, “Our goal is to establish
an Islamic state that doesn’t recognize borders, on the Prophetic methodology.”
By then, the group had taken Raqqa, a Syrian provincial capital of perhaps
500,000 people, and was drawing in substantial numbers of foreign fighters
who’d heard its message.
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Our failure to appreciate the split between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and the essential differences between the two, has led to dangerous decisions. Last fall, to take one example, the U.S. government consented to a desperate plan to save Peter Kassig’s life. The plan facilitated—indeed, required—the interaction of some of the founding figures of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and could hardly have looked more hastily improvised.
Given everything we know about
the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it appears the best of bad
military options.
It entailed the enlistment of Abu Muhammad al
Maqdisi, the Zarqawi mentor and al-Qaeda grandee, to approach Turki al-Binali,
the Islamic State’s chief ideologue and a former student of Maqdisi’s, even
though the two men had fallen out due to Maqdisi’s criticism of the Islamic
State. Maqdisi had already called for the state to extend mercy to Alan
Henning, the British cabbie who had entered Syria to deliver aid to children.
In December, The Guardian reported that the U.S. government, through an
intermediary, had asked Maqdisi to intercede with the Islamic State on Kassig’s
behalf.Maqdisi was living freely in Jordan, but had been banned from communicating with terrorists abroad, and was being monitored closely. After Jordan granted the United States permission to reintroduce Maqdisi to Binali, Maqdisi bought a phone with American money and was allowed to correspond merrily with his former student for a few days, before the Jordanian government stopped the chats and used them as a pretext to jail Maqdisi. Kassig’s severed head appeared in the Dabiq video a few days later.
Maqdisi gets mocked roundly on Twitter by the Islamic State’s fans, and al‑Qaeda is held in great contempt for refusing to acknowledge the caliphate. Cole Bunzel, a scholar who studies Islamic State ideology, read Maqdisi’s opinion on Henning’s status and thought it would hasten his and other captives’ death. “If I were held captive by the Islamic State and Maqdisi said I shouldn’t be killed,” he told me, “I’d kiss my ass goodbye.”
Kassig’s death was a tragedy, but the plan’s success would have been a bigger one. A reconciliation between Maqdisi and Binali would have begun to heal the main rift between the world’s two largest jihadist organizations. It’s possible that the government wanted only to draw out Binali for intelligence purposes or assassination. (Multiple attempts to elicit comment from the FBI were unsuccessful.) Regardless, the decision to play matchmaker for America’s two main terrorist antagonists reveals astonishingly poor judgment.
Chastened
by our earlier indifference, we
are now meeting the Islamic State via Kurdish and Iraqi proxy on the
battlefield, and with regular air assaults. Those strategies haven’t dislodged
the Islamic State from any of its major territorial possessions, although
they’ve kept it from directly assaulting Baghdad and Erbil and slaughtering
Shia and Kurds there.
Some observers have called for escalation,
including several predictable voices from the interventionist right (Max Boot,
Frederick Kagan), who have urged the deployment of tens of thousands of
American soldiers. These calls should not be dismissed too quickly: an avowedly
genocidal organization is on its potential victims’ front lawn, and it is
committing daily atrocities in the territory it already controls.Related Story
Abu Baraa, who maintains a YouTube channel
about Islamic law, says the caliph, Baghdadi, cannot negotiate or recognize
borders, and must continually make war, or he will remove himself from Islam.Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.
The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State’s existence is high. But its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest. Al-Qaeda’s core is rare among jihadist groups for its focus on the “far enemy” (the West); most jihadist groups’ main concerns lie closer to home. That’s especially true of the Islamic State, precisely because of its ideology. It sees enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership wishes ill on the United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and the expansion to contiguous lands are paramount. Baghdadi has said as much directly: in November he told his Saudi agents to “deal with the rafida [Shia] first … then al-Sulul [Sunni supporters of the Saudi monarchy] … before the crusaders and their bases.”
Musa Cerantonio and Anjem
Choudary could mentally shift from contemplating mass death to discussing the
virtues of Vietnamese coffee, with apparent delight in each.
The foreign fighters (and their wives and children)
have been traveling to the caliphate on one-way tickets: they want to live
under true Sharia, and many want martyrdom. Doctrine, recall, requires
believers to reside in the caliphate if it is at all possible for them to do
so. One of the Islamic State’s less bloody videos shows a group of jihadists
burning their French, British, and Australian passports. This would be an
eccentric act for someone intending to return to blow himself up in line at the
Louvre or to hold another chocolate shop hostage in Sydney.Related Story
Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.
Even so, the death of the Islamic State is unlikely to be quick, and things could still go badly wrong: if the Islamic State obtained the allegiance of al‑Qaeda—increasing, in one swoop, the unity of its base—it could wax into a worse foe than we’ve yet seen. The rift between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda has, if anything, grown in the past few months; the December issue of Dabiq featured a long account of an al‑Qaeda defector who described his old group as corrupt and ineffectual, and Zawahiri as a distant and unfit leader. But we should watch carefully for a rapprochement.
Without a catastrophe such as this, however, or perhaps the threat of the Islamic State’s storming Erbil, a vast ground invasion would certainly make the situation worse.
V. Dissuasion
It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State “a problem with Islam.” The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy.
The Islamic State’s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: no question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else.
Non-muslims
cannot tell Muslims how to practice their
religion properly. But Muslims have long since begun this debate within their
own ranks. “You have to have standards,” Anjem Choudary told me. “Somebody
could claim to be a Muslim, but if he believes in homosexuality or drinking
alcohol, then he is not a Muslim. There is no such thing as a nonpracticing
vegetarian.”
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Baghdadi is Salafi. The term Salafi has been villainized, in part because authentic villains have ridden into battle waving the Salafi banner. But most Salafis are not jihadists, and most adhere to sects that reject the Islamic State. They are, as Haykel notes, committed to expanding Dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, even, perhaps, with the implementation of monstrous practices such as slavery and amputation—but at some future point. Their first priority is personal purification and religious observance, and they believe anything that thwarts those goals—such as causing war or unrest that would disrupt lives and prayer and scholarship—is forbidden.
They live among us. Last fall, I visited the Philadelphia mosque of Breton Pocius, 28, a Salafi imam who goes by the name Abdullah. His mosque is on the border between the crime-ridden Northern Liberties neighborhood and a gentrifying area that one might call Dar al-Hipster; his beard allows him to pass in the latter zone almost unnoticed.
A theological alternative to the
Islamic State exists—just as uncompromising, but with opposite conclusions.
Pocius converted 15 years ago after a Polish
Catholic upbringing in Chicago. Like Cerantonio, he talks like an old soul,
exhibiting deep familiarity with ancient texts, and a commitment to them
motivated by curiosity and scholarship, and by a conviction that they are the
only way to escape hellfire. When I met him at a local coffee shop, he carried
a work of Koranic scholarship in Arabic and a book for teaching himself
Japanese. He was preparing a sermon on the obligations of fatherhood for the
150 or so worshipers in his Friday congregation.Related Story
When Baghdadi showed up, Pocius adopted the slogan “Not my khalifa.” “The times of the Prophet were a time of great bloodshed,” he told me, “and he knew that the worst possible condition for all people was chaos, especially within the umma [Muslim community].” Accordingly, Pocius said, the correct attitude for Salafis is not to sow discord by factionalizing and declaring fellow Muslims apostates.
Instead, Pocius—like a majority of Salafis—believes that Muslims should remove themselves from politics. These quietist Salafis, as they are known, agree with the Islamic State that God’s law is the only law, and they eschew practices like voting and the creation of political parties. But they interpret the Koran’s hatred of discord and chaos as requiring them to fall into line with just about any leader, including some manifestly sinful ones. “The Prophet said: as long as the ruler does not enter into clear kufr [disbelief], give him general obedience,” Pocius told me, and the classic “books of creed” all warn against causing social upheaval. Quietist Salafis are strictly forbidden from dividing Muslims from one another—for example, by mass excommunication. Living without baya’a, Pocius said, does indeed make one ignorant, or benighted. But baya’a need not mean direct allegiance to a caliph, and certainly not to Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi. It can mean, more broadly, allegiance to a religious social contract and commitment to a society of Muslims, whether ruled by a caliph or not.
Quietist Salafis believe that Muslims should direct their energies toward perfecting their personal life, including prayer, ritual, and hygiene. Much in the same way ultra-Orthodox Jews debate whether it’s kosher to tear off squares of toilet paper on the Sabbath (does that count as “rending cloth”?), they spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that their trousers are not too long, that their beards are trimmed in some areas and shaggy in others. Through this fastidious observance, they believe, God will favor them with strength and numbers, and perhaps a caliphate will arise. At that moment, Muslims will take vengeance and, yes, achieve glorious victory at Dabiq. But Pocius cites a slew of modern Salafi theologians who argue that a caliphate cannot come into being in a righteous way except through the unmistakable will of God.
The Islamic State, of course, would agree, and say that God has anointed Baghdadi. Pocius’s retort amounts to a call to humility. He cites Abdullah Ibn Abbas, one of the Prophet’s companions, who sat down with dissenters and asked them how they had the gall, as a minority, to tell the majority that it was wrong. Dissent itself, to the point of bloodshed or splitting the umma, was forbidden. Even the manner of the establishment of Baghdadi’s caliphate runs contrary to expectation, he said. “The khilafa is something that Allah is going to establish,” he told me, “and it will involve a consensus of scholars from Mecca and Medina. That is not what happened. ISIS came out of nowhere.”
Related Story
Pocius doesn’t court any kind of official support from the United States, as a counterweight to jihadism. Indeed, official support would tend to discredit him, and in any case he is bitter toward America for treating him, in his words, as “less than a citizen.” (He alleges that the government paid spies to infiltrate his mosque and harassed his mother at work with questions about his being a potential terrorist.)
Still, his quietist Salafism offers an Islamic antidote to Baghdadi-style jihadism. The people who arrive at the faith spoiling for a fight cannot all be stopped from jihadism, but those whose main motivation is to find an ultraconservative, uncompromising version of Islam have an alternative here. It is not moderate Islam; most Muslims would consider it extreme. It is, however, a form of Islam that the literal-minded would not instantly find hypocritical, or blasphemously purged of its inconveniences. Hypocrisy is not a sin that ideologically minded young men tolerate well.
Western officials would probably do best to refrain from weighing in on matters of Islamic theological debate altogether. Barack Obama himself drifted into takfiri waters when he claimed that the Islamic State was “not Islamic”—the irony being that he, as the non-Muslim son of a Muslim, may himself be classified as an apostate, and yet is now practicing takfir against Muslims. Non-Muslims’ practicing takfir elicits chuckles from jihadists (“Like a pig covered in feces giving hygiene advice to others,” one tweeted).
I suspect that most Muslims appreciated Obama’s sentiment: the president was standing with them against both Baghdadi and non-Muslim chauvinists trying to implicate them in crimes. But most Muslims aren’t susceptible to joining jihad. The ones who are susceptible will only have had their suspicions confirmed: the United States lies about religion to serve its purposes.
Within
the narrow bounds of its theology, the Islamic
State hums with energy, even creativity. Outside those bounds, it could hardly
be more arid and silent: a vision of life as obedience, order, and destiny.
Musa Cerantonio and Anjem Choudary could mentally shift from contemplating mass
death and eternal torture to discussing the virtues of Vietnamese coffee or
treacly pastry, with apparent delight in each, yet to me it seemed that to
embrace their views would be to see all the flavors of this world grow insipid
compared with the vivid grotesqueries of the hereafter.
I could enjoy their company, as a guilty
intellectual exercise, up to a point. In reviewing Mein Kampf in March
1940, George Orwell confessed that he had “never been able to dislike Hitler”;
something about the man projected an underdog quality, even when his goals were
cowardly or loathsome. “If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it
seem like a dragon.” The Islamic State’s partisans have much the same allure.
They believe that they are personally involved in struggles beyond their own
lives, and that merely to be swept up in the drama, on the side of
righteousness, is a privilege and a pleasure—especially when it is also a
burden.Fascism, Orwell continued, is
psychologically
far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and
even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good
time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and
as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to
underrate its emotional appeal.
Nor, in the case of the Islamic State, its
religious or intellectual appeal. That the Islamic State holds the imminent
fulfillment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of
our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain
confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays
true to the Prophetic model. Ideological tools may convince some potential
converts that the group’s message is false, and military tools can limit its
horrors. But for an organization as impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State,
few measures short of these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if
it doesn’t last until the end of time.
----------
Red Brigades
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Formed
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September 1970
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Disbanded
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1984
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|
First Attack
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September 17, 1970: The Red Brigades set fire to the car
of a factory manager in Milan. (0 killed)[1]
|
|
Last Attack
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April 16, 1988: The Red Brigades kidnapped a chemical
engineer in Mestre. (No reported casualties) [2]
|
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Updated
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June 27, 2012
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Narrative Summary
The Red Brigades was Italy's largest, longest lasting, and
most broadly diffused left-wing terrorist group. At its peak the organization
had thousands of active members and supporters, with its strongest presence in
the industrial cities of Northern Italy. [3] It sought to overthrow the democratic
Italian state and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat. Its
primary targets were symbols of capitalism and the Italian state. These
included politicians, especially those of the center-right Christian Democratic
party, law enforcement, and factories. The organization cast its armed activities
as acts of self-defense, undertaken on behalf of workers facing repression from
factory bosses and police. [4]
The first pamphlet signed by the Red Brigades – then using
the singular "Red Brigade," or "Brigata Rossa" – appeared
at a Sit-Siemens plant in Milan in 1970 [5], but the roots of the organization extend back
to the late 1960s, as student and worker demonstrations spread throughout Italy
and protestors increasingly clashed violently with the police. The fall of
1968, known as the "autunno caldo" or "hot autumn," marked
a high point in such violence as well as an organizational turning point as
workers began to form collectives as alternatives to existing trade unions. The
Red Brigades' founders are believed to have decided to take up arms during a
November 28, 1969 meeting of the Metropolitan Political Collective (Collettivo
Politico Metropolitano), a coordinating group of leftist student and worker
movements, in Chiavari in the province of Genoa. [6]
Some two weeks later, a bomb exploded in Milan's Piazza
Fontana, killing 16 and wounding 87. At roughly the same time, two other bombs
exploded in Rome, wounding 16. Suspicion for the day's carnage initially fell
on the far left, members of which insisted that right-wing groups, likely aided
by elements of state intelligence, had planned the attack as a provocation. [7] What later came to be known as the
"Piazza Fontana Massacre" was seen on the left as the inauguration of
a "strategy of tension" pursued by the right in cooperation with the
state. [8]
Members of the Red Brigades attacked property rather than
people until 1972; arson against factory managers' cars was particularly
common, as were raids against the offices of right-wing organizations. [9] Beginning with the 1974 kidnapping of a
Genoa magistrate, the Red Brigades expanded their attacks to include
politicians and employees of the state. An April 1975 BR document outlining the
organization's "Strategic Direction" identified Italy's long-dominant
Christian Democratic party "the principal enemy." [10] The number of BR-directed attacks,
including kidnappings and shootings, spiked between 1977 and 1979. The
organization's best-known attack of the period was the kidnapping and killing
of Christian Democratic leader and former prime minister Aldo Moro in
1978.
The Red Brigades' activities began to decline in 1980.
Members began being arrested at higher rates, and those arrested began
increasingly to cooperate with authorities, leading to the capture of more
members. The group split numerous times over the period.
The Red Brigades ceased to exist as a unified organization around 1981. Its core successor, the Red Brigades Fighting Communist Party (BR-PCC) continued to stage high-profile attacks throughout the decade. The Red Brigades' original leaders, many of them in jail, continued to guide the BR-PCC until formally declaring the armed struggle finished in 1988. [11]
Attacks have been carried out in Italy under the name "Red Brigades" as late as 2002, though the attackers are likely not formally connected to the original organization. [12]
The Red Brigades ceased to exist as a unified organization around 1981. Its core successor, the Red Brigades Fighting Communist Party (BR-PCC) continued to stage high-profile attacks throughout the decade. The Red Brigades' original leaders, many of them in jail, continued to guide the BR-PCC until formally declaring the armed struggle finished in 1988. [11]
Attacks have been carried out in Italy under the name "Red Brigades" as late as 2002, though the attackers are likely not formally connected to the original organization. [12]
Leadership
- Antonio Savasta (Unknown to 1982): Savasta was the leader of the Venice branch of the Red Brigades. He was arrested in 1982.[13]
- Margherita Cagol (1970 to 1975): One of the founders of the Red Brigades, Cagol was Curcio's wife. She was killed in a shootout with police in June 1975.[14]
- Mario Moretti (1970 to 1981): Moretti was a founding member of the Red Brigades and confessed to having personally fired the shots that killed Christian Democratic Leader Aldo Moro. He was arrested in 1981 and freed in 1998.[15]
- Renato Curcio (1970 to 1984): Police arrested Curcio, along with co-founder Franceschini, with the help of an informant in September 1974. Curcio remained in prison for about four months until a BR squad directed by his wife and co-founder Margherita Cagol freed him and several others from prison in February 1975. Following his release, Curcio was among the authors of an April 1975 document outlining the BR's "Strategic Direction" and identifying Italy's long-dominant Christian Democratic party "the principal enemy" and "the political and organizational center of reaction and terrorism." Curcio was recaptured in Milan in January 1976. He is believed to have continued to guide the organization from prison.[16]
- Alberto Franceschini (1970 to 1984): Franceschini was arrested along with Curcio in 1974. He is believed to have continued to guide the organization from prison.
Ideology & Goals
- Anti-fascist
- Communist revolutionary
- Marxist
Size Estimates
- 1970: 50 (Terrorism and Security : the Italian Experience.)[18]
- 1979: 1,000 "militants" and "some 2,000 external support (Terrorism and Security: The Italian Experience.)[19]
- 1983: 100 "militants" and "200 external supporters." (Terrorism and Security: the Italian Experience.)[20]
Designated/Listed
N/A. [21]Resources
The Red Brigades got some revenue from kidnappings for ransom and from theft, which is also how they often acquired weapons. In absorbing smaller militant groups, the Red Brigades also took on their material assets, including those of the Gruppi di Azione Partigiana (GAP), which was financed by millionaire publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli until his death in 1972. [22] The group Soccorso Rosso (Red Aid) provided free legal services to left-wing operatives. By October 31, 1982, Italian police had discovered and dismantled some 200 bases belonging to the BR. [23]External Influences
The Red Brigades were influenced in their ideology and
methods by leftist and militant movements all over the world. As elements of
the Italian left moved toward a strategy of political violence in 1967 and
1968, Uruguay's Tupamaros provided a model of urban guerilla warfare at the
same time that Palestinian nationalist terrorism became more prominent in the
wake of the Six-Day war of 1967. [24] Philosophically, the BR borrowed from Lenin
and Mao.
More formally, members of the Red Brigades had contact with
other Western European militant movements extant in the 1970s, especially
Germany's Red Army Faction (RAF), whose 1977 kidnapping of business leader Hans
Schleyer was the model for the Aldo Moro kidnapping a year later. [25] The BR are also believed to have had some
connection with France's Actione Direct (AD) and have allegedly provided
training for them. [26]
Former Red Brigades members have told authorities that the
BR acquired weapons from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP), with Libya acting as intermediary, beginning in 1978 or before. [27] BR founders Renato Curcio and Margherita
Cagol visited Cuba. [28] There is disputed evidence that the Red
Brigades may have received funding from "Eastern bloc" communist
countries including Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. [29] One former brigadier has denied these
contacts, saying "The RB was formally prohibited from having contact,
making liaison, or receiving assistance from the Eastern Bloc." [30] A training camp outside of Benghazi, Libya
was allegedly used by Italian terrorists. Former members of the Red Brigades
have denied press accounts of training abroad, however, saying that the BR
instead used abandoned mines in Italy's mountains as training sites. [31]
Geographical Locations
Italian terrorist organizations of both the left and right were active primarily in the northwest and center of Italy. Left-wing groups concentrated on Milan, Turin, and Rome, whereas the militant right was most active in Milan and Rome. The BR was the only one of these groups with a strong presence in Genoa. [32] The merger with NAP gave the Red Brigades a foothold in Naples and elsewhere in the more-agrarian south, but the Red Brigades had difficulty sustaining formal "columns" there, particularly after NAP dissolved. [33] Though the BR had its strongest presence in the cities listed above, the organization was active in at least 16 of Italy's 20 regions over its lifespan. [34]Targets & Tactics
The Red Brigades typically attacked factories and the
offices of right-wing targets such as political parties or certain trade
unions. In its first few years such attacks were only against property and most
often took the form of office raids and car arson. Early Red Brigades
communiqués describe such attacks as punishments for specific
"anti-worker" actions, such as the firing of a coworker: "For
every comrade they hit, one of them must pay," or, more generally,
"for every eye, two eyes; for every tooth, an entire face." Thus,
when in late 1970 "first the bosses, then the unions" of Milan's
Pirelli plant fired a 50-year-old mechanic, "one of them, precisely the
'first on the list' (as suggested by many of the factory workers), found his
car destroyed." [35]
The Red Brigades' 1971 "self-interview" describes
such methods as a form of "armed propaganda," which served both to
recruit new members and to demonstrate "the conniving between power groups
and/or apparently separate institutions." [36]
The Red Brigades claimed its first attack against an
individual on March 3, 1972, with the kidnapping of a Sit-Siemens plant
manager. They released him the same day. After 1972, the Red Brigades carried
out targeted killings and kidnappings of factory managers, magistrates, and
political figures, particularly members of the Christian Democratic party.
The BR was one of few left-wing terrorist groups to engage
in kidnappings, and conducted by far the most of any left-wing terrorist group,
18 of 24 attributed to the entire terrorist left. [37] Most of the BR's kidnappings were
political, whereas other Italian leftist terrorist groups typically kidnapped
to raise funds through ransom. [38]
The BR adopted the practice of mass leg-shootings, also
called "kneecapping," in 1980, months after another leftist group,
Front Line (PL), pioneered the tactic. [39]
The Red Brigades did not carry out mass-casualty explosive
attacks. There were four such attacks in Italy between 1969 and 1980, all
attributed to right-wing terrorists. [40]
Political Activities
The Red Brigades abandoned overt political activity after a wave of arrests in 1972. [41]Major Attacks
- April 18, 1974: Kidnapping of Genoa Assistant State Attorney Mario Sossi. Sossi was the sixth person, and the first state employee, kidnapped by the Red Brigades. In its claim of responsibility, the BR called the kidnapping an attack "on the heart of the state." The group released him on May 23 in exchange for a court order, later blocked, to release eight BR-affiliated prisoners. ().[42]
- June 17, 1974: The BR killed two members of the right-wing party Italian Social Movement (MSI). (2 killed).[43]
- November 16, 1977: BR operatives shot Carlo Casalegno, deputy editor of La Stampa newspaper, on a street in Turin in broad daylight. Casalegno died of his wounds on November 29. (1 killed).[44]
- March 16, 1978: The BR kidnapped Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democratic party and a former prime minister. In the attack, members of the Red Brigades killed five of Moro's bodyguards. On April 15, a BR communiqué announced that a "People's Tribunal" (Tribunale del Popolo) had tried Moro and had condemned him to death for his role in the "counter-revolutionary function of the [Christian Democrats]." Until May, however, BR communiqués offered to exchange Moro for 13 imprisoned BR members, including founders Franceschini and Curcio. The Italian government refused. Police found Moro's body in a car on May 9, 1978. (1 killed).[45]
- May 20, 1981: The Red Brigades kidnapped a chemical engineer in Mestre. It was the last attack claimed with the name "Red Brigades" as the organization split into factions. (0).[46]
Relationships with Other Groups
The Red Brigades was the largest left-wing terrorist
organization in Italy, and most other left-wing Italian terrorist groups had
some relationship to it as either rivals or allies. Other organizations later
split off from the BR or were absorbed by it.
The BR's most important ideological rival was Front Line
(PL), the second-largest left-wing terrorist group in Italy. Several of the
PL's founders were dissident members of the BR who left the group because of
its strict hierarchy and the centrality of the armed struggle to its political
agenda. The PL viewed the hierarchy as counterproductive, and the armed
struggle as merely a tactic in a larger political program. The Red Brigades may
have begun to cooperate with the PL in the late 1970s as the smaller
organization declined and began calling for a unified proletarian force. The
BR's symbol, a five-pointed star, appeared on the PL's claim of responsibility
for a 1979 attack on a Turin school. [47]
The BR formed an alliance with Naples-based Armed
Proletarian Nuclei (NAP) in 1976. The BR had had difficulty extending its reach
into agrarian southern Italy due to its focus on the class struggle in
factories, which were concentrated in the industrial north. [48] Most of NAP's leadership was arrested
shortly after that, and the BR absorbed the remainder of the group's assets and
members. [49]
The BR absorbed several other smaller groups as well,
including Partisan Action Groups (GAP), which merged with the Red Brigades in
1970 after itself absorbing the October XXII Circle. [50]
The BR itself began to decline with the arrest of many of
its leaders in the early 1980s. The group split; its main successors were the
Red Brigades Walter Alasia Column (BR-WA), the Red Brigades Guerrila Party
(BR-PG), and the Red Brigades Fighting Communist Party (BR-PCC).
Community Relationships
Leftist extraparliamentary organizations represented a recruitment pool and a source of logistical and public relations support for the BR, especially Workers' Autonomy (Autonomia Operaia, AUTOP) and Workers' Power (Potere Operaiao, POTOP or PO). [51] This latter group formally dissolved in 1973, though prosecutors investigating the case argued that the "dissolution" was a cover for members' deciding to take up arms with the Red Brigades and others. [52]References
- ^ Barbato, Tullio. Il Terrorismo In Italia Negli Anni Settanta : Cronaca E Documentazione. Milano: Bibliografica, 1980. p. 52
- ^ Brigaterosse.org. "Breve storia delle Brigate Rosse (1970-1987), Parte III." Last updated March 15, 2007. Retrieved April 15, 2012, from http://www.brigaterosse.org/brigaterosse/storia/storia3.htm.
- ^ Della Porta, Donatella. Il Terrorismo Di Sinistra. Bologna: Il mulino, 1990. p. 92.
- ^ Brigate Rosse, "Prima intervista a se stessi," 1971. Available: http://www.brigaterosse.org/brigaterosse/documenti/archivio/doc0001.htm
- ^ Barbato, Tullio. Il Terrorismo In Italia Negli Anni Settanta : Cronaca E Documentazione. Milano: Bibliografica, 1980.
- ^ http://www.annidipiombo.it/piombo/cronologia
- ^ http://www.annidipiombo.it/piombo/cronologia/1971-potere-operaio
- ^ Sidney Tarrow, "Violence and institutionalization after the Italian protest cycle," in Catanzaro, Raimondo. The Red Brigades and Left-wing Terrorism In Italy. London: Printer Publishers, 1991, pp. 44-45.
- ^ Caselli, Gian Carlo, and Donatella Della Porta. Terrorismi In Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984. p. 77.
- ^ Brigate Rosse, "Risoluzione della direzione strategica, aprile 1975," April 1975.
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- ^ National Consortium for the Study of
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· ^ National Consortium for the Study of
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· ^ Singer, Daniel. "The Bloody
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· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
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· ^ Angelo Ventura, "Il Problema delle
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· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
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· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
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· ^ Raufer 1993, p. 324, and Meade, Robert C.
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· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
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U.S. G.P.O., 1984. p. 25.
· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
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U.S. G.P.O., 1984. p. 25.
· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. "Terrorism and
Security: The Italian Experience." Report of the Subcommittee on Security
and Terrorism of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, November
1984, p. 14.
· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
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Terrorism of the Committee On the Judiciary, United States Senate. Washington:
U.S. G.P.O., 1984. p. 86.
· ^ Caselli and della Porta, "The History
of the Red Brigades: Organizational Structures and Strategies of Action."
in Catanzaro, Raimondo. The Red Brigades and Left-wing Terrorism In Italy.
London: Printer Publishers, 1991. p. 73.
· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
Security : the Italian Experience : Report of the Subcommittee On Security and
Terrorism of the Committee On the Judiciary, United States Senate. Washington:
U.S. G.P.O., 1984. p. 26; http://www.brigaterosse.org/briga
· ^ Thomas Sheehan, "Italy: Behind the Ski
Mask," New York Review of Books, August 16 1979. Available: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/aug/16/italy-behind-the-ski-mask/?pagination=false;
Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and Security : the Itali
· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
Security : the Italian Experience : Report of the Subcommittee On Security and
Terrorism of the Committee On the Judiciary, United States Senate. Washington:
U.S. G.P.O., 1984. p. 26; Paul J. Smith, "The Italian Red B
· ^ Barbato, Tullio. Il Terrorismo In Italia
Negli Anni Settanta : Cronaca E Documentazione. Milano: Bibliografica, 1980. p.
260.
· ^ Ferrigno, Rossella. Nuclei Armati Proletari
: Carceri, Protesta, Lotta Armata. Napoli: La città del sole, 2008. p. 159.
· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
Security : the Italian Experience : Report of the Subcommittee On Security and
Terrorism of the Committee On the Judiciary, United States Senate. Washington:
U.S. G.P.O., 1984. 13.
· ^ Pisano, Vittorfranco S. Terrorism and
Security : the Italian Experience : Report of the Subcommittee On Security and
Terrorism of the Committee On the Judiciary, United States Senate. Washington:
U.S. G.P.O., 1984. p. 15.
· ^ Barbato, Tullio. Il Terrorismo In Italia
Negli Anni Settanta : Cronaca E Documentazione. Milano: Bibliografica, 1980. p.
20.
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Red Brigades
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Italian militant organization
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Alternative title:
Brigate Rosse
Red Brigades, Italian Brigate Rosse, militant left-wing organization in Italy
that gained notoriety in the 1970s for kidnappings, murders, and sabotage.
Its self-proclaimed aim was to undermine the Italian state and pave the way for
a Marxist upheaval led by a “revolutionary proletariat.”
The reputed founder of the Red
Brigades was Renato Curcio, who in 1967 set up a leftist
study group at the University of Trento dedicated to figures such as Karl Marx, Mao Zedong,
and Che
Guevara. In 1969 Curcio married a fellow radical, Margherita Cagol,
and moved with her to Milan, where they attracted a coterie of followers.
Proclaiming the existence of the Red Brigades in November 1970 through the
firebombing of various factories and warehouses in Milan, the group began kidnapping
the following year and in 1974 committed its first assassination; among its
victims that year was the chief inspector of Turin’s antiterrorist squad.
Despite the arrest and imprisonment
of hundreds of alleged terrorists throughout the country—including Curcio
himself in 1976—the random assassinations continued. In 1978 the Red Brigades
kidnapped and murdered former prime minister Aldo Moro.
In December 1981 a U.S. Army officer with the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Brigadier General James Dozier, was abducted and held captive by the Red
Brigades for 42 days before Italian police rescued him unharmed from a hideout
in Padua.
Between 1974 and 1988, the Red Brigades carried out about 50 attacks, in which
nearly 50 people were killed. A common nonlethal tactic employed by the group
was “kneecapping,” in which a victim was shot in the knees so that he could not
walk again.
At its height in the 1970s, the Red
Brigades was believed to comprise 400 to 500 full-time members, 1,000 members
who helped periodically, and a few thousand supporters who provided funds and
shelter. Careful, systematic police work led to the arrest and imprisonment of
many of the Red Brigades’ leaders and ordinary members from the mid-1970s
onward, and by the late 1980s the organization was all but destroyed. However,
a group claiming to be the Red Brigades took responsibility in the 1990s for
various violent attacks, including those against a senior Italian government
adviser, a U.S. base in Aviano, and the NATO Defense College.
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The Red Brigades' History in Italy
February 11, 2014 | 16:54 GMT
The political
transformations following World War I, including the rise of communism in
Russia and fascist dictatorships in Germany and Italy, introduced
new militant dynamics to Europe, as did the violence and devastation
of World War II. Throughout the Cold War, state-sponsored terrorism was
a Marxist-Leninist/Maoist phenomenon that spanned the globe. In Europe,
the Soviets and their allies trained and equipped left-wing terrorist
groups such as the Red Brigades in Italy, the Irish Republican Army and the Red
Army Faction in Germany to carry out bombings, kidnappings and targeted assassinations
to undermine their opponents in the West.
Formed in the
1970s and based in Italy,
the Red Brigades was a militant organization based on Marxist-Leninist ideology
that sought to destabilize Italy through armed struggle and remove the country
from NATO. Emerging from the rank and file of the 1960s worker and student
protest movements at a time when Italy was becoming more urbanized, the group
sought support from local trade unions in their fight against the
political elite. At its pinnacle, the Red Brigades group was
responsible for a considerable amount of violence, including assassinations and
robberies. Initially, the Red Brigades organization was active throughout
Italy, though its activities were concentrated around Reggio Emilia and in
large factory districts in northern Milan and Turin. In the late 1970s, the
group expanded into Rome, Genoa and Venice while increasing its membership and
operations.
In 1981, the Red
Brigades split into two factions, the Communist Combatant Party and the Union
of Combatant Communists. The tempo of the factions' operations continued
throughout the decade. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union
and the reduction of support for left-wing causes, Italian police intensified
security operations against the group. A large corruption scandal had brought down
Italy's postwar political system, and with its collapse emerged
centrist political outsider and media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. This, along
with political changes taking place elsewhere in Europe, eliminated whatever
ideological or social support remained for the Red Brigades. Remnants of the
Red Brigades may still be present in Italy, but any activities they carry out
will likely be of a criminal nature and not part of a meaningful militant
campaign.
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The October Crisis – FLQ – QUEBEC – CANADA 1960s
During the 1960s, a national liberation movement
sprang up in Quebec, calling for an independent province. One of its means of
action was terrorism. In October 1970, a Quebec minister and a British diplomat
were abducted.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The 1960s was a decade of profound change, both internationally and in Quebec. While Quebec was evolving due to The Quiet Revolution, many countries were achieving independence thanks to the trend towards de-colonization. Socialist groups, which had been popping up around the world for some time, started appearing in Quebec. During the 1960s, Quebec also witnessed the birth of groups that strove to achieve independence for the province without advocating terrorism or socialism. The most meaningful symbol of this movement was the creation of the Parti québécois.
SUMMARY
Le Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) is a national liberation movement that was founded in 1963. Its goal was to achieve Quebec independence by resorting to terrorism, if necessary. After several bombing attempts, particularly in 1968 and 1969, the FLQ orchestrated the abduction of British diplomat, James Richard Cross, on October 5, 1970, and of provincial minister, Pierre Laporte, later on October 10. Meanwhile, negotiations were being held with Robert Bourassa's Quebec government, and the FLQ's manifesto was broadcast on CBC radio on October 8. Faced with an impasse in the negotiations, the Quebec government demanded the help of the army on October 15 to assist the Montreal police in their efforts. The following day, the federal government, led by Pierre-Éliott Trudeau, proclaimed the War Measures Act. As a result, civil rights were curtailed and Canadian Armed Forces occupied several Quebec cities. Pierre Laporte was assassinated the next day, on October 17. Between 450 and 500 people were subsequently arrested, without warrant. The majority of the people were artists, unionists, intellectuals and individuals who supported Quebec nationalism. The crisis finally came to an end in December. James Richard Cross was released on December 3 in exchange for a safe-conduct to Cuba for Marc Carbonneau and the other abductors. On December 28, Paul Rose and his accomplices were arrested for the murder of Pierre Laporte.
Concepts
Quiet revolution
Period between 1960 and 1966 marked by reforms that modernized the Quebec State and society.
Socialism
Social doctrine that puts collective interests ahead of individual interests thanks to a form of State planning that ensures the development of a society.
Parti québécois
Political party founded in 1968 that promotes Quebec independence paired with an economic union with the rest of Canada.
Nationalism
Political movement that strives to acquire the necessary tools for a people (laws, organizations, etc.) so that they can control their own social, economical and political future.
Terrorism
Climate of fear that a political group attempts to instill in a society in order to create insecurity among the general population. These groups systematically use violence. The FLQ is a terrorist group.
Front de libération du Québec (FLQ)
Revolutionary movement that strives for an independent and socialist Quebec. This movement used propaganda and violence to promote its message. The FLQ is a national liberation movement that uses terrorism.
War measures act
Adopted in 1914, the War Measures Act assigns emergency powers to the federal government when it perceives a real or suspected threat of "war, invasion or insurrection. This act limits citizens' civil rights.
Civil rights
These rights include, among other things, the right to be protected against unwarranted or arbitrary arrests, detentions, searches and seizures, and the right to an attorney.
National liberation movement
Movement that seeks to achieve the liberation of an occupied country or a subjugated people. The means used to achieve this goal can range from negotiation to the use of violence.
Pierre Laporte
Politician born in 1921. A journalist and parliamentary correspondent for "Le Devoir" from 1945 to 1961, before being elected as a member of the National Assembly for the Quebec Liberal Party in 1961. He served as Minister of Municipal Affairs (1962-1966) and Minister of Cultural Affairs (1964-1966). He was one of the fiercest opponents of Maurice Duplessis and the Union nationale party. In 1970, he ran for leadership of the Quebec Liberal Party, but was defeated by Robert Bourassa, who later named him Minister of Immigration and Minister of Labour. He was abducted by the FLQ and assassinated the day after the War Measures Act was proclaimed. This event helped intensify the October crisis.
Pierre-Éliott Trudeau
Politician born in 1919 to a Quebec father and a mother of Scottish ancestry. In 1940, he entered the Université de Montréal to study law. This was during the World War II and as a student, Trudeau was obligated to join the Canadian Officers' Training Corps, even though he was opposed to conscription. After receiving his diploma in 1943, he pursued his studies in the United States, France and Great Britain. Upon his return to Canada in 1949, he supported unions and founded, with the help of other intellectuals, the magazine Cité libre to defend his ideas. In 1965, he was elected member of the Liberal Party of Canada, and named Minister of Justice two years later. He took over the leadership of his party in 1968, and won the federal election thanks to "Trudeaumania." Following the abduction of British diplomat James Richard Cross, he proclaimed the War Measures Act. Trudeau stood for a united Canada and a strong federal government.
Marc Carbonneau
Member of the FLQ and one of the key players in the abduction of British diplomat James Richard Cross. A Montreal taxi driver, Carbonneau participated in a Taxi Liberation Movement demonstration in 1969. Following the abduction of Cross, his name appeared on a list of the 13 most wanted people in Canada. He managed to arrange a safe-haven for himself to Cuba through the Quebec government in exchange for the release of James Richard Cross. His exile in Cuba lasted from 1970 to 1973, followed by an exile in France from 1973 to 1981. He then returned to Canada where he was charged with abduction and forcible confinement. In March 1982, he was sentenced to 20 months in prison and 150 hours of community work.
Paul Rose
FLQ cell leader, born in Montreal in 1943. He participated in his first strike at the age of 12 while working as a strawberry picker. In 1966, he worked as a French and math professor, then as a special education teacher for maladjusted children. He later became a member of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale (RIN) and participated in numerous demonstrations, in addition to becoming involved in several causes. During the October Crisis, he was named Chénier cell leader, and was responsible for Pierre Laporte's abduction, which landed him on the list of Canada's 13 most wanted people. He was arrested on December 28 and incarcerated for two and a half months in a small cell in Montreal at the Quebec provincial police headquarters. On March 13, 1971, Paul Rose was sentenced to life in prison.
James Richard Cross
British diplomat born in Ireland in 1921. He held a diploma in economics and political sciences and was a lieutenant in Britain's Royal Engineers Corps from 1944 to 1947. He later served as deputy secretary and assistant secretary of the Board of Trade until 1953. He then held several commercial attaché positions around the globe. In 1967, he was sent to Montreal. During the October Crisis, he was abducted by Marc Carbonneau, a member of the FLQ.
Robert Bourassa
Politician born in Montreal in 1933, and who studied law. He was elected member of the National Assembly for the Liberal Party in 1966, and was later elected party leader in 1970. After negotiations failed with the FLQ for the release of James Richard Cross, he called in the Canadian army. 24 hours later, Trudeau proclaimed the War Measures Act. Despite the crisis, he was re-elected in 1973.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The 1960s was a decade of profound change, both internationally and in Quebec. While Quebec was evolving due to The Quiet Revolution, many countries were achieving independence thanks to the trend towards de-colonization. Socialist groups, which had been popping up around the world for some time, started appearing in Quebec. During the 1960s, Quebec also witnessed the birth of groups that strove to achieve independence for the province without advocating terrorism or socialism. The most meaningful symbol of this movement was the creation of the Parti québécois.
SUMMARY
Le Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) is a national liberation movement that was founded in 1963. Its goal was to achieve Quebec independence by resorting to terrorism, if necessary. After several bombing attempts, particularly in 1968 and 1969, the FLQ orchestrated the abduction of British diplomat, James Richard Cross, on October 5, 1970, and of provincial minister, Pierre Laporte, later on October 10. Meanwhile, negotiations were being held with Robert Bourassa's Quebec government, and the FLQ's manifesto was broadcast on CBC radio on October 8. Faced with an impasse in the negotiations, the Quebec government demanded the help of the army on October 15 to assist the Montreal police in their efforts. The following day, the federal government, led by Pierre-Éliott Trudeau, proclaimed the War Measures Act. As a result, civil rights were curtailed and Canadian Armed Forces occupied several Quebec cities. Pierre Laporte was assassinated the next day, on October 17. Between 450 and 500 people were subsequently arrested, without warrant. The majority of the people were artists, unionists, intellectuals and individuals who supported Quebec nationalism. The crisis finally came to an end in December. James Richard Cross was released on December 3 in exchange for a safe-conduct to Cuba for Marc Carbonneau and the other abductors. On December 28, Paul Rose and his accomplices were arrested for the murder of Pierre Laporte.
Concepts
Quiet revolution
Period between 1960 and 1966 marked by reforms that modernized the Quebec State and society.
Socialism
Social doctrine that puts collective interests ahead of individual interests thanks to a form of State planning that ensures the development of a society.
Parti québécois
Political party founded in 1968 that promotes Quebec independence paired with an economic union with the rest of Canada.
Nationalism
Political movement that strives to acquire the necessary tools for a people (laws, organizations, etc.) so that they can control their own social, economical and political future.
Terrorism
Climate of fear that a political group attempts to instill in a society in order to create insecurity among the general population. These groups systematically use violence. The FLQ is a terrorist group.
Front de libération du Québec (FLQ)
Revolutionary movement that strives for an independent and socialist Quebec. This movement used propaganda and violence to promote its message. The FLQ is a national liberation movement that uses terrorism.
War measures act
Adopted in 1914, the War Measures Act assigns emergency powers to the federal government when it perceives a real or suspected threat of "war, invasion or insurrection. This act limits citizens' civil rights.
Civil rights
These rights include, among other things, the right to be protected against unwarranted or arbitrary arrests, detentions, searches and seizures, and the right to an attorney.
National liberation movement
Movement that seeks to achieve the liberation of an occupied country or a subjugated people. The means used to achieve this goal can range from negotiation to the use of violence.
Pierre Laporte
Politician born in 1921. A journalist and parliamentary correspondent for "Le Devoir" from 1945 to 1961, before being elected as a member of the National Assembly for the Quebec Liberal Party in 1961. He served as Minister of Municipal Affairs (1962-1966) and Minister of Cultural Affairs (1964-1966). He was one of the fiercest opponents of Maurice Duplessis and the Union nationale party. In 1970, he ran for leadership of the Quebec Liberal Party, but was defeated by Robert Bourassa, who later named him Minister of Immigration and Minister of Labour. He was abducted by the FLQ and assassinated the day after the War Measures Act was proclaimed. This event helped intensify the October crisis.
Pierre-Éliott Trudeau
Politician born in 1919 to a Quebec father and a mother of Scottish ancestry. In 1940, he entered the Université de Montréal to study law. This was during the World War II and as a student, Trudeau was obligated to join the Canadian Officers' Training Corps, even though he was opposed to conscription. After receiving his diploma in 1943, he pursued his studies in the United States, France and Great Britain. Upon his return to Canada in 1949, he supported unions and founded, with the help of other intellectuals, the magazine Cité libre to defend his ideas. In 1965, he was elected member of the Liberal Party of Canada, and named Minister of Justice two years later. He took over the leadership of his party in 1968, and won the federal election thanks to "Trudeaumania." Following the abduction of British diplomat James Richard Cross, he proclaimed the War Measures Act. Trudeau stood for a united Canada and a strong federal government.
Marc Carbonneau
Member of the FLQ and one of the key players in the abduction of British diplomat James Richard Cross. A Montreal taxi driver, Carbonneau participated in a Taxi Liberation Movement demonstration in 1969. Following the abduction of Cross, his name appeared on a list of the 13 most wanted people in Canada. He managed to arrange a safe-haven for himself to Cuba through the Quebec government in exchange for the release of James Richard Cross. His exile in Cuba lasted from 1970 to 1973, followed by an exile in France from 1973 to 1981. He then returned to Canada where he was charged with abduction and forcible confinement. In March 1982, he was sentenced to 20 months in prison and 150 hours of community work.
Paul Rose
FLQ cell leader, born in Montreal in 1943. He participated in his first strike at the age of 12 while working as a strawberry picker. In 1966, he worked as a French and math professor, then as a special education teacher for maladjusted children. He later became a member of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale (RIN) and participated in numerous demonstrations, in addition to becoming involved in several causes. During the October Crisis, he was named Chénier cell leader, and was responsible for Pierre Laporte's abduction, which landed him on the list of Canada's 13 most wanted people. He was arrested on December 28 and incarcerated for two and a half months in a small cell in Montreal at the Quebec provincial police headquarters. On March 13, 1971, Paul Rose was sentenced to life in prison.
James Richard Cross
British diplomat born in Ireland in 1921. He held a diploma in economics and political sciences and was a lieutenant in Britain's Royal Engineers Corps from 1944 to 1947. He later served as deputy secretary and assistant secretary of the Board of Trade until 1953. He then held several commercial attaché positions around the globe. In 1967, he was sent to Montreal. During the October Crisis, he was abducted by Marc Carbonneau, a member of the FLQ.
Robert Bourassa
Politician born in Montreal in 1933, and who studied law. He was elected member of the National Assembly for the Liberal Party in 1966, and was later elected party leader in 1970. After negotiations failed with the FLQ for the release of James Richard Cross, he called in the Canadian army. 24 hours later, Trudeau proclaimed the War Measures Act. Despite the crisis, he was re-elected in 1973.
--------------
Canada History
Prehistory | 2 Worlds Meet | New France | England Arrives | Clash of Empires | Revolution | British America | Reform/Revolt | Responsible Government | Confederation | Nation Building | Laurier | The Great War | Roaring 20's | Great Depression | WWII | The Peace | Cold War | Trudeau | PC's in Power | Modern Canada
Wind from the West | Avro Arrow
| Quiet Revolution
| Pearson
| NORAD | Liberals Win
Quebec | NDP
| Bill of Rights
| The Flag
| FLQ
| Expo 67
In the
early 1960's the culture of North America was evolving quickly towards a more
action orientated process of change. Quebec was no exception with the ongoing
reforms of the new Liberal government and the development of the Quiet
Revolution. The impact of revolutionary philosophy and politics also began to
spread the doctrines of violent action as a means of legitimate change, among
young people and university students. Figures such as Che Guevara,
Chairman Mao, and the writer Franz Fanon offered different interpretations of history
and politics where violence played a role in their ideas. The frustration at
the pace of change in Quebec lead some o believe that only violence would speed
the process up.
Various
people and groups such as the Belgian revolutionary, George Schoeters, and the
Palestine Liberation Organization were responsible for training some people in
Quebec who had taken to calling themselves the FLQ or the Front for the
Liberation of Quebec. (Front de libération du Québec). One of the principles of
terrorism is that in order to avoid a the destruction of the organization when
one or two members is captured, no central control and knowledge of all of the
members is ever organized. Groups of 2 to 10 members are formed under the
guidelines of the movements philosophy and are called cells. The FLQ had
several adherents to it's political objectives and some of the cell formed were
the Viger Cell, the Dieppe Cell, the Nelson Cell and the two that eventually
triggered the October crisis in 1970, the Liberation cell and the Chenier Cell.
Violent
attacks, bombings, bank robberies, kidnappings, and murders started in 1963 and
escalated as the years went by cumulating in the October Crisis with the
kidnapping of James Cross and Pierre Laporte. The paper known as Revolutionary
Strategy and the Role of the Avant Garde, which was released in 1966 formed the
backbone of the action plan of the FLQ. On March 7, 1963 a railroad bombing
took place on a line that Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was to travel on.
Over the
next few years more and more acts of violence took place and several case the
FLQ terrorists were arrested and jailed. Many were released within a few years.
Many more murders, bombings and acts of violence took place and in 1966 a
couple of FLQ members who had fled Canada to avoid arrest began a protest in
front of the United Nations. They were quickly arrested and in 1967 extradited
to Canada to face charges.
After the
euphoric year of 1967 with all of the centennial celebrations across Canada,
the FLQ activity began to pick up again. In February of 1969 the FLQ struck the
Montreal Stock Exchange by setting off a large bomb which injured 27 people and
then in September they managed to bomb the house of Jean Drapeau, the mayor of
Montreal.
In 1969
the South Shore Gang Cell of the FLQ was formed with members Paul Rose, Francis
Simard, Nigel Hamer and Jacque Rose. This cell would later be responsible for
the October Crisis.
Although
the escalation of violence did result in governmental action to counter the FLQ
and an increase in general security and eventually the invocation of the War
Measures Act during the October Crisis, the general population did not deem
government action as oppressive or overly authoritarian and hence the terrorist
tactic of alienating the public and government from each other failed.
After the
shocking murder of Pierre Laporte, a Cabinet Minister in Robert Bourassa's
Quebec government, the FLQ lost almost all public sympathy. With the rise of
the Parti Quebecoise as a reasonable alternative to terrorist activities,
the FLQ lost it's momentum and eventually died out.
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