It is the perfect day to write a blog post about jihad, as early this afternoon (Monday, Feb 2) I will be lecturing on the topic to my students at Trent. It also gives me something to do; at the moment it is 10 AM and I am on a greyhound bus, travelling from Toronto to Trent in Peterborough through a snow storm that has seriously slowed down traffic. The bus left Toronto at 7:30 AM and normally at this time I would already have arrived. It looks like I will be there by noon--more than two hours late.
But those are first-world problems (it is actually quite comfortable in the greyhound bus). There are folks all over the world who are dealing with much worse, especially in those countries that have become the main targets of Islamic extremism. Of course, the West is also a target; just a few weeks ago, the murder of cartoonists in Paris shocked the West to its core, as did the London bombings, the attacks in Spain, and, of course, 911. But these atrocities, as bad as they are, were relatively less severe than the attacks that take place almost daily in Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and other countries that radicals have targeted. This points to a fact that is often ignored: Muslims themselves are the biggest victims of Islamic extremism, at least in terms of the sheer numbers of deaths and frequency of attacks.
Before proceeding, it is worth writing a few words about terminology. The title of this blog post is "Jihad", and I often refer to the extremists as "jihadists". There is a simple reason why I do this: the extremists themselves, as they remind us repeatedly in their media communiques, believe that they are carrying out jihad. Thus to call them "violent extremists" as the Obama administration has done has more to do with trying to be inoffensive than with scholarly objectivity. The analyst must aim to be precise and accurate, and this means, among other things, that when we discuss political actors, we pay attention to what they themselves say about their motivations. If, for example, an anarchist claims to carry out violence because he aims to create an anarchist society, we should take him at his word and call him an anarchist even though there are many anarchists who object to the use of violence. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, about jihad: the fact that many Muslims object to the use of violence for political ends does not mean that jihadists who do commit acts of terror should not be labeled according to their self-identifying categories.
The more interesting question is how to explain jihad, at least its modern variant. After 911, a flurry of books and articles were produced that aimed to answer that question, and some of the arguments entered the political zeitgeist and even influenced policy. One of the more popular ones that still resonates with many is that contemporary jihad is a consequence of poverty or the lack of economic opportunities in Muslim countries. The political version of this idea suggests that the lack of political openness, or democratic structures, also plays a role. The logic is the following: liberal democracies provide citizens with leaders who are accountable to their citizens' demand for economic growth and other goods. In contrast, authoritarian countries are seething cauldrons of cronyism and despotism, places where the masses of unemployed youths do not have mechanisms to express their disaffection. Many, as a consequence, turn to radical ideologies because, like the utopian ideas of yore, they provide simple explanations as well as a framework for political action to address the ills of their society.
This view is held by both the centre-left and and centre-right in the West. The theoretical foundations are liberalism: its assumptions of human nature are that people everywhere desire the same things, such as freedom, economic well-being, and autonomy, and for liberals, the only political structure that can realize those wishes is liberal democracy. One can understand why this idea would be attractive to many Westerners. First, it is amenable to policy and hence control. If it is true, then, of course, foreign policy should be orientated towards promoting liberal democracy. Second, it is seen as a confirmation that people are everywhere the same, or want the same things, which is a core assumption of the universalist ontology of philosophical liberalism. Lastly, it confirms the liberal theory of history as progress: radicals, with their willingness to kill innocents and die for their utopian fantasies, are perceived as backwards, remnants of a superstitious age when millions were willing to give their lives for God. Secularism will eventually seep into the culture of non-Western societies, and as that happens, there will be fewer people willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their diety.
There is only one problem with this argument: it is not supported by evidence. Let's start with the attackers of the Twin Towers. The 911 hijackers were not poor or dispossessed. Rather, most were upper-class and university educated, some with graduate degrees. They all spent a considerable amount of time in Western countries, and hence had direct experience of the goodies of the West's political-economic model, but rather than becoming converted to the virtues of liberal democracy, they wanted and were able to inflict an unprecedented amount of damage to it. That fact compliments the results of research conducted by Marc Sagemen (which I will be presenting to my students) which shows, on the basis of a representative sample, that terrorists tend to be much more educated and well-off than average. In addition, poverty and despotism are not unique to the Muslim world. Both are or were present in many Asian and African countries, and yet they did not produce organizations like Al Qaeda. Despite all the evidence against this position, there are still prominent Westerners like Thomas Friedman who endorse it. Even the Economist, which usually produces analytically rigorous accounts of international political issues, expresses the idea that the only long-term solution to terrorism is liberal democracy in the Muslim world.
A more nuanced view comes from the French scholar of jihad Gilles Keppel. I assigned his book Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam (Harvard University Press) to my students because it is a well-researched and scholarly account of the subject, based as it is on his travels across the Middle East, his fluency in Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish, and on his many interviews of jihadists across the region. This large amount of data leads him to several conclusions. First, contemporary jihad has been propelled by decidedly modern circumstances, such as the failure of alternative ideologies to bring modernity to Middle East. Leaders such as Gamal Nasser, Hafez Assad (father of Bashar Assad), Saddam Hussein, and others have imported Western ideas, such as nationalism and socialism, that, it was hoped, would usher in modernization and increased standards of living. It did not turn out that way; in fact they brought in cronyism and despotism instead. Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, were able to capitalize on these failures, which explains why they were able to recruit individuals from various social classes, including urban professionals, merchants, and the slum dwelling masses, all of whom, in their own way, saw in the ideals of Islamism the potential vehicle for a better, more prosperous and just society. But these unmet expectations and frustrations can only go so far in explaining Islamism. As Keppel shows, the ideas of Islamists resonated because they were distilled from a culture where religion played an enormously influential role. Islamists' prescriptions of a more pure and just society flowed from a certain interpretation of the canonical texts--the Koran and the Hadith--and from the examples of Mohammed and his successors. This gave them an authenticity that Marxism, liberalism, and nationalism could not match. The social welfare activities of Islamists only added to their credibility especially when contrasted with a corrupt and inefficient state.
Islamic extremism is the violent variant of the phenomenon of Islamism, as both aim to create a utopia in the form of a caliphate, although they disagree on the means to that end: extremists are willing to commit violence, while Islamists take a more gradual approach.
To identify the evolution of Islamist thought, Keppel places emphasis on three thinkers in particular: Ruhllola Khomeni, Abul Mawdudi, and Sayd Qutb. All, in their own ways, expressed the narrative that Islam's place at the apex of global power was corrupted by elements that were alien to the religion, and all called for a return to the supposedly pure form that existed in the period of Islam's triumphant years. Just as early Muslims were able to conquer their much more powerful adversaries (the Romans and Sassanids), contemporary Islam could also defeat the global powers of the day, namely, the US and the USSR, provided Muslims embraced the original faith and discarded the corrupting elements that created disunity, weakness, and moral degradation.
Sayd Qutb was perhaps the most influential in the development of contemporary jihadists movements such as Al Qaeda. Qutb was an Egyptian bureaucrat who worked for the country's Ministry of Education. In the fifties he traveled to the US to learn about its education system, and, as this quote shows, he was appalled by the culture he saw, especially the role and status of women:
And this was in the fifties, that era that conservatives associate with sexual purity!.
These and other observations led Qutb to the conclusion that the West was incorrigibly corrupt and strengthened his conviction that the Westernization of Egypt must be reversed. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, whose self-declared animating principle is:
Qutb went on to produce works, such as Milestones, that became standard reading for Islamists and jihadists. Both Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden were strongly influenced by Qutb's call for the full Islamification of society and the implementartion of Sharia law. The ultimate program would be to unite Muslims, cleanse their societies of corrupting influences, and lay the basis for the domination that existed during Islam's golden age. One could say that all of today's Sunni jihadists are in one way or another a legacy of the utopian political program articulately expressed by Sayd Qutb.
Thus when we watch ISIS establishing a Caliphate over large swathes of Iraq and Syria, they are attempting to put into practice Qutb's vision of utopia, although it is unlikely that the latter would support the barbaric methods being used for that objective. And in a sense, the program of Islamists to establish a Sharia-based Caliphate is more authentic and culturally rooted than the activities of their opponents. After all, the Caliphate was the dominant political structure in the Muslim world until it was abolished by Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, a modernizer who detested religion and who brought the the first secular nation-state to a Muslim country. Subsequently, other states in the region which were provinces of the Ottoman Empire became nation-states. Gilles Keppel not unreasonably calls this episode very traumatic for Muslims; it confirmed Europe's dominance over them even though in previous centuries Islam oversaw golden ages emanating from Muslim empires with capitals in Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus. One could therefore sustain that ISIS's attempt to restore the Caliphate is an attempt to reverse this century old scar that still blights the region.
Unfortunately for ISIS, it is unlikely that their project will succeed, because the nation-state, for all its faults, is here to stay, and it is highly unlikely that the regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Gulf states are going anywhere. Although most of them are authoritarian, they enjoy a level of internal and external legitimacy that ISIS will never match. This does not mean, however, that the principles that motivate ISIS (and other jihadists groups) will be extinguished. As Gilles Keppel has shown, the desire for an Islamic utopia is deeply rooted and will continue to influence Islamist movements everywhere. ISIS is simply the most violent manifestation of that dynamic.
But those are first-world problems (it is actually quite comfortable in the greyhound bus). There are folks all over the world who are dealing with much worse, especially in those countries that have become the main targets of Islamic extremism. Of course, the West is also a target; just a few weeks ago, the murder of cartoonists in Paris shocked the West to its core, as did the London bombings, the attacks in Spain, and, of course, 911. But these atrocities, as bad as they are, were relatively less severe than the attacks that take place almost daily in Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and other countries that radicals have targeted. This points to a fact that is often ignored: Muslims themselves are the biggest victims of Islamic extremism, at least in terms of the sheer numbers of deaths and frequency of attacks.
Before proceeding, it is worth writing a few words about terminology. The title of this blog post is "Jihad", and I often refer to the extremists as "jihadists". There is a simple reason why I do this: the extremists themselves, as they remind us repeatedly in their media communiques, believe that they are carrying out jihad. Thus to call them "violent extremists" as the Obama administration has done has more to do with trying to be inoffensive than with scholarly objectivity. The analyst must aim to be precise and accurate, and this means, among other things, that when we discuss political actors, we pay attention to what they themselves say about their motivations. If, for example, an anarchist claims to carry out violence because he aims to create an anarchist society, we should take him at his word and call him an anarchist even though there are many anarchists who object to the use of violence. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, about jihad: the fact that many Muslims object to the use of violence for political ends does not mean that jihadists who do commit acts of terror should not be labeled according to their self-identifying categories.
The more interesting question is how to explain jihad, at least its modern variant. After 911, a flurry of books and articles were produced that aimed to answer that question, and some of the arguments entered the political zeitgeist and even influenced policy. One of the more popular ones that still resonates with many is that contemporary jihad is a consequence of poverty or the lack of economic opportunities in Muslim countries. The political version of this idea suggests that the lack of political openness, or democratic structures, also plays a role. The logic is the following: liberal democracies provide citizens with leaders who are accountable to their citizens' demand for economic growth and other goods. In contrast, authoritarian countries are seething cauldrons of cronyism and despotism, places where the masses of unemployed youths do not have mechanisms to express their disaffection. Many, as a consequence, turn to radical ideologies because, like the utopian ideas of yore, they provide simple explanations as well as a framework for political action to address the ills of their society.
This view is held by both the centre-left and and centre-right in the West. The theoretical foundations are liberalism: its assumptions of human nature are that people everywhere desire the same things, such as freedom, economic well-being, and autonomy, and for liberals, the only political structure that can realize those wishes is liberal democracy. One can understand why this idea would be attractive to many Westerners. First, it is amenable to policy and hence control. If it is true, then, of course, foreign policy should be orientated towards promoting liberal democracy. Second, it is seen as a confirmation that people are everywhere the same, or want the same things, which is a core assumption of the universalist ontology of philosophical liberalism. Lastly, it confirms the liberal theory of history as progress: radicals, with their willingness to kill innocents and die for their utopian fantasies, are perceived as backwards, remnants of a superstitious age when millions were willing to give their lives for God. Secularism will eventually seep into the culture of non-Western societies, and as that happens, there will be fewer people willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their diety.
There is only one problem with this argument: it is not supported by evidence. Let's start with the attackers of the Twin Towers. The 911 hijackers were not poor or dispossessed. Rather, most were upper-class and university educated, some with graduate degrees. They all spent a considerable amount of time in Western countries, and hence had direct experience of the goodies of the West's political-economic model, but rather than becoming converted to the virtues of liberal democracy, they wanted and were able to inflict an unprecedented amount of damage to it. That fact compliments the results of research conducted by Marc Sagemen (which I will be presenting to my students) which shows, on the basis of a representative sample, that terrorists tend to be much more educated and well-off than average. In addition, poverty and despotism are not unique to the Muslim world. Both are or were present in many Asian and African countries, and yet they did not produce organizations like Al Qaeda. Despite all the evidence against this position, there are still prominent Westerners like Thomas Friedman who endorse it. Even the Economist, which usually produces analytically rigorous accounts of international political issues, expresses the idea that the only long-term solution to terrorism is liberal democracy in the Muslim world.
A more nuanced view comes from the French scholar of jihad Gilles Keppel. I assigned his book Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam (Harvard University Press) to my students because it is a well-researched and scholarly account of the subject, based as it is on his travels across the Middle East, his fluency in Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish, and on his many interviews of jihadists across the region. This large amount of data leads him to several conclusions. First, contemporary jihad has been propelled by decidedly modern circumstances, such as the failure of alternative ideologies to bring modernity to Middle East. Leaders such as Gamal Nasser, Hafez Assad (father of Bashar Assad), Saddam Hussein, and others have imported Western ideas, such as nationalism and socialism, that, it was hoped, would usher in modernization and increased standards of living. It did not turn out that way; in fact they brought in cronyism and despotism instead. Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, were able to capitalize on these failures, which explains why they were able to recruit individuals from various social classes, including urban professionals, merchants, and the slum dwelling masses, all of whom, in their own way, saw in the ideals of Islamism the potential vehicle for a better, more prosperous and just society. But these unmet expectations and frustrations can only go so far in explaining Islamism. As Keppel shows, the ideas of Islamists resonated because they were distilled from a culture where religion played an enormously influential role. Islamists' prescriptions of a more pure and just society flowed from a certain interpretation of the canonical texts--the Koran and the Hadith--and from the examples of Mohammed and his successors. This gave them an authenticity that Marxism, liberalism, and nationalism could not match. The social welfare activities of Islamists only added to their credibility especially when contrasted with a corrupt and inefficient state.
Islamic extremism is the violent variant of the phenomenon of Islamism, as both aim to create a utopia in the form of a caliphate, although they disagree on the means to that end: extremists are willing to commit violence, while Islamists take a more gradual approach.
To identify the evolution of Islamist thought, Keppel places emphasis on three thinkers in particular: Ruhllola Khomeni, Abul Mawdudi, and Sayd Qutb. All, in their own ways, expressed the narrative that Islam's place at the apex of global power was corrupted by elements that were alien to the religion, and all called for a return to the supposedly pure form that existed in the period of Islam's triumphant years. Just as early Muslims were able to conquer their much more powerful adversaries (the Romans and Sassanids), contemporary Islam could also defeat the global powers of the day, namely, the US and the USSR, provided Muslims embraced the original faith and discarded the corrupting elements that created disunity, weakness, and moral degradation.
Sayd Qutb was perhaps the most influential in the development of contemporary jihadists movements such as Al Qaeda. Qutb was an Egyptian bureaucrat who worked for the country's Ministry of Education. In the fifties he traveled to the US to learn about its education system, and, as this quote shows, he was appalled by the culture he saw, especially the role and status of women:
“the American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive
capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty
lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and
in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it"
And this was in the fifties, that era that conservatives associate with sexual purity!.
 |
| This look outraged Qutb for its indecency |
These and other observations led Qutb to the conclusion that the West was incorrigibly corrupt and strengthened his conviction that the Westernization of Egypt must be reversed. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, whose self-declared animating principle is:
"Allah is our goal,
the Prophet is our leader, the Quran is our constitution,
Jihad is our way, and
death for Allah is our most exalted wish"
Qutb went on to produce works, such as Milestones, that became standard reading for Islamists and jihadists. Both Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden were strongly influenced by Qutb's call for the full Islamification of society and the implementartion of Sharia law. The ultimate program would be to unite Muslims, cleanse their societies of corrupting influences, and lay the basis for the domination that existed during Islam's golden age. One could say that all of today's Sunni jihadists are in one way or another a legacy of the utopian political program articulately expressed by Sayd Qutb.
Thus when we watch ISIS establishing a Caliphate over large swathes of Iraq and Syria, they are attempting to put into practice Qutb's vision of utopia, although it is unlikely that the latter would support the barbaric methods being used for that objective. And in a sense, the program of Islamists to establish a Sharia-based Caliphate is more authentic and culturally rooted than the activities of their opponents. After all, the Caliphate was the dominant political structure in the Muslim world until it was abolished by Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, a modernizer who detested religion and who brought the the first secular nation-state to a Muslim country. Subsequently, other states in the region which were provinces of the Ottoman Empire became nation-states. Gilles Keppel not unreasonably calls this episode very traumatic for Muslims; it confirmed Europe's dominance over them even though in previous centuries Islam oversaw golden ages emanating from Muslim empires with capitals in Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus. One could therefore sustain that ISIS's attempt to restore the Caliphate is an attempt to reverse this century old scar that still blights the region.
Unfortunately for ISIS, it is unlikely that their project will succeed, because the nation-state, for all its faults, is here to stay, and it is highly unlikely that the regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Gulf states are going anywhere. Although most of them are authoritarian, they enjoy a level of internal and external legitimacy that ISIS will never match. This does not mean, however, that the principles that motivate ISIS (and other jihadists groups) will be extinguished. As Gilles Keppel has shown, the desire for an Islamic utopia is deeply rooted and will continue to influence Islamist movements everywhere. ISIS is simply the most violent manifestation of that dynamic.
