This is the second of a series of lectures for the Hillsdale College Summer Hostel program, “Islam and the West.”
Muhammad founded a monarchic regime and an imperial state upon a prophetic religious doctrine. Authority remained personal, as in all the ancient regimes—not scientific-bureaucratic, as in the modern state. The subject owed allegiance first to God, then to the Prophet/Monarch. Allah differs from the God of the Bible, however, in that he is first and foremost not a spirit but a will. This inclines Islam against viewing reason as authoritative, as in the Christian emphasis on God as Logos or Word.
With time and schisms, traditional Muslims often contented themselves with less-than-strict caliphs who ruled over societies in which clerics had influence, but did not necessarily exercise direct political rule. For Islamists, rule to enforce the Sharia comes back to the center, as it had been under Muhammad himself. But Islamists face a problem Muhammad never saw: rather than the tribes of ancient Arabia, or the surrounding loosely-organized empires, Islamists operate in societies in which centralized political rule intrudes more into everyday activities than it ever did anywhere in ancient and medieval empires. This is why scholars often call Islamism “political” Islam, although Islamists themselves, thinking of their enterprise as a return to Muhammad’s practice, regard such a phrase as redundant. Given the Islamic emphasis on God as a supreme Will rather than as a supreme Word, or a reasoning God with whom one may speak, and even argue (as the prophets of Israel did), political Islam isn’t really political in Aristotle’s strict sense. Rule doesn’t involve give-and-take or consent but command and obedience.
But the more radical Islamists are not simply throwbacks to the seventh century, no matter what they may claim. For one thing, they deploy terror as an instrument of policy. Although conquest and rapine date back a long way in the long story of human misconduct, with empires being built on the threat of ‘subordination or death,’ terror or fear was exercised as an instrument of modern state-building, seen most clearly in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who invokes the terrors of civil war to enforce the counter-terror exercised over violent factions by the modern state, the “mighty Leviathan.” Marxism-Leninism (which, as we’ve seen, influenced some of the Islamists) took this much further, deploying statist terror as an instrument of remaking human nature. The most comprehensive argument for this policy may be found in Leon Trotsky’s Marxism and Revolution, but Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were the most notable practitioners of it among Marxists, and Lenin and Stalin were imitated by tyrants on the Right, particularly Adolf Hitler.
Terrorism developed as a revolutionary tactic under conditions of modern statism, as a way of fighting the fear-inspiring mighty Leviathan. This is the most dramatic of the modern dimensions of Islamism. You will not find homicide-suicides in the Koran, although you will find militants and martyrs in the service of extending Islamic empire. Islamism thus entwines Islamic ideas with modern ones, Muhammad with Machiavelli. In the case of homicide-suicide terrorism, the synthesis has produced an action that neither of its forebears commended. Machiavelli and Hobbes hardly recommended that the prince or monarch sacrifice himself in the establishment of the state; as for Muhammad, martyrdom was to be at the hands of the infidel, not at one’s own hand.
I mentioned yesterday that Islamism also reflects the egalitarianism of modernity. The social equality that Tocqueville describes yields republican regimes or despotism. Under Islam, with its less-than-firm commitment to reason, despotism has been the more frequent outcome. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the elimination of the caliphate by the statist-nationalist modernizer, Mustafa Kemal. That same breakup also saw the advance of modern, statist empires—Great Britain, France—into the Middle East. Both indigenous and foreign rulers in the Middle East thus deliberately depoliticized their societies (in Aristotle’s sense of “political”); this left such civil-social organizing as was permitted to the Islamists, who have the Koran-inspired courage to organize themselves despite tyrannical rule and to deliver the social services corrupt and incompetent statists have failed to provide. That is, the secular nationalists who wrested rule from the Western imperialists after World War II squandered the political capital they had built up in that struggle by their very despotism and also by copying the Soviet model of economic development, a model that didn’t compete effectively in the world market anywhere it was tried.
The decline of local aristocracies in the face of the onslaught of modern statism brought a vast democratization to Islam. This is a circumstance likely to produce ‘self-made’ religions or variations of religions, designed to appeal to popular passions. Under the Islamic regime-ethos, voluntary martyrdom results in no pain at death and of course promises great rewards in Paradise. Further, because one’s birth, life, and death are all predetermined by Allah, civilians (including children) killed n terrorist attacks were destined to die, anyway, so there is no moral harm in doing God’s will. For example, in one jihadist publication, women are instructed to understand that “The blood o our husbands and the body parts of our children are our sacrificial offering.” When the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the use of children as human mine-sweepers during the war with Iraq, he described this as a “divine blessing” for the children. It is easy to see how such practices, backed by such ideas, might destabilize modern states that are new, despotic, corrupt, and incompetent. And so it has. Given the fact that Islam is a form of universalism or internationalism, a democratized and hyper-fanatical form of Islam will appeal to many—especially many young men—who resent their local nation-state.
Another feature of modernity is the valorization of commerce and industry as indispensable elements of the human conquest of nature. As modern commerce and industry developed, the use of oil to fuel large and powerful machines became prevalent, empowering those peoples on lands overlaying oil reserves. We recall the sharp increase in oil prices resulting from the embargo imposed by the Arab oil cartel in the mid-1970s. Revenues often went to support Muslim clerics, who were regarded by the monarchies as social counterweights to the communists—who, during the Cold War, enjoyed more formidable international support than local clerics could command. Further, urbanization brought peasants into the cities, where they kept their allegiance to the clerics but also came physically closer to the centers of state authority. The same held true for the influx of students into the universities; even fashionable Marxism could not appeal to students recently removed from the pious atmosphere of the countryside to the degree that radical Islamism could do, especially since Islamism incorporated Marxist motifs into a larger theological framework. Re-Islamization of Middle Eastern societies proceeded ‘from below,’ forming strong networks of person in but not of the modern state.
To put it in terms of the regime, Islamists amount to a new would-be ruling body or set of rulers on the geopolitical scene, one that represents its members as being of the ‘old regime’ of Muhammad.
Although Osama bin Laden died at the command of President Barack Obama and although bin Laden’s organization, Al Qaeda, has seen more prosperous days, his ideas live on. His story is now familiar. Born in 1957, he belonged to the generation of Arabs who would question nationalist secularism. As early as 1996 he called upon his fellow Saudis to “change the regime” of Saudi Arabia, which he regarded as a mere agent of the United States. The Saudi regime had “imposed on the people a life that does not appeal to the free believer”—a life insufficiently Islamic. Indeed, after World War I, the Saudis had allied themselves with the British, helping to bring down the last caliphate, the Ottoman Empire.
Bin Laden characterized the United States as “unjust, criminal, and tyrannical” on four grounds: it “stole our oil”; it “executed 600,000 Iraqi children” with its embargo following the first Gulf War; it supports Israel; it subordinates itself to Jews, the arch-tyrants of the modern world. Jews, and therefore the Americans they control, are servants of Satan. Americans did not cause the Soviet Union to fall; God did, and to claim otherwise is blasphemy. Bin Laden denied that the United States assisted the mujahedin in Afghanistan. In addition to being evil, the United States is contemptible; it is “weaker than the picture it wants to draw in people’s mind”—image-drawing being a marker of idolatry. Not only the American government but also the American people are contemptible, “a lowly people who do not understand the meaning of principles,” a “debauched” people—”the cowards of this age.” Economic relations might be permissible with such a rabble, insofar as those relations serve Islam. But in occupying the Arabian peninsula Americans have declared war “against God, his prophet, and the Muslims.” The only answer is jihad. “May God show them his wrath and give them what they deserve.”
Despite its many vices and weaknesses, America remains the most powerful country of the age. How to fight it? For this, bin Laden had no state of his onw, and even if he had, what state could stand against the United States? He needed an organization that could torment the Godless superpower without presenting a target American could destroy. In his war on Israel, Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasr Arafat had developed the policy of intifada, a low-level form of combat employing terrorism. This needed no state organization. Bin Laden in effect decided to take an Islamified intifada worldwide, and aim it at America.
“Al Quaeda” means “The Base.” The rugged terrain of Afghanistan, which for centuries has provided havens for outlaws, served as a useful launching pad for bin Laden’s jihad. Al Qaeda participated in the Afghan struggle against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Bin Laden developed an international cadre of jihadis, young men who had severed their social ties at home and replaced them with the strong bonds that form among warriors. After victory in that war, the bin Laden segment of the mujahidin did two things. In Afghanistan, they allied with the Taliban, Islamists backed by Pakistan. The Pak prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, had allied herself with one of the Pakistani Islamist parties in the hope of splitting the movement and co-opting it; she therefore sent aid to the Taliban, hoping to secure Pakistan’s western flank, and so to be able to concentrate her attentions on Pakistan’s perennially tense relations with India. With both Pakistani and Arab-Islamist backing, the Taliban founded the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996.
The Taliban solution to the problem of modern statism turned out to be very simple; they had no state at all, no modern bureaucracy. They spread throughout the country, enforcing moral codes, collecting tolls, and fighting the remnants of their local enemies. Meanwhile, bin Laden and his organization had a safe haven for their worldwide operations, aiming most immediately at the expulsion of the United States from Arabia, and then at the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy—preliminary steps toward the triumph of Islam throughout the world, God willing.
The core of al-Qaeda was always small, consisting of fewer than 200 operatives, tightly controlled by bin Laden. But its network is vast; al-Qaeda-trained jihadis have fanned out into about 80 countries around the world in what capitalists might call a franchise operation. Among other things, this means that even if bin Laden and his core group were destroyed, the franchises or cells would live on, having been trained to act independently to subvert local regimes by terror. ISIL began as one of these cells, and eventually superseded the much-damaged al-Qaeda core as the world’s foremost Islamist terrorist-militant organization.
The expulsion of Israeli troops from Lebanon in the 1990s provided a small but important test case for this strategy. The leader of Islamic Jihad drew the lesson: “Our jihad has exposed the enemy’s weakness, confusion and hysteria. It has become clear that the enemy can be defeated, for if a small faithful group was able to instill all this horror and panic in the enemy through confronting it in Palestine and southern Lebanon, what will happen when the nation confront it with all its potential? Martyrdom actions will escalate in the face of all pressures [and is] a realistic option for confronting the unequal balance of power. If we are unable to effect a balance of power now, we can achieve a balance of horror.” Insofar as such “martyrdoms” destroy innocents, this Islamist strategy is unquestionably un-Islamic. However, the regime of democracy, prevalent in the West, solves this problem for al-Qaeda partisans; if the people are sovereign, then no one is innocent.
In a limited way, bin Laden’s achievement was impressive, if vile. This was a smart way to attempt to destroy modern statism, much more formidable than the various ‘anti-globalization’ groups on the Left who have been reduced to breaking shop windows and chanting at G-8 summits before getting swept away with tear gas and propelled water. Radical Islamists have focused precisely on the institutional structure of the modern world. The modern state justifies its existence primarily by providing security and, in the commercial republics, an orderly framework for liberty. The Marxist project—overthrowing the ‘bourgeois state’ and replacing it with ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat, leading to the elimination of all states worldwide and the advent of communism—has failed, and the anarchist or radical libertarian projects obviously partake of utopianism as well. A network of terrorists, however, effectively amounts to a non-governmental organization with guns, or an international drug cartel with ideas—indeed, with religious ideas and laws its members will die and kill for.
Such an organization can ‘network’ on the civil-social level, under the state’s law-enforcement radar screen. From there, it can do in a systematic way what anarchist bomb-throwers did, well, anarchically, and therefore impotently: delegitimize statism. Hence bin Laden’s appeal to American mothers in his 1997 CNN interview: “To the mothers of soldiers of American troops… I say if they are concerned for their sons, then let them object to the American government’s policy and to the American president.” To replace the modern state, bin Laden intended to found a stateless ummah under the regime of the Prophet Muhammad, ruling through clerics who invoked the prophet’s name. It is as if the Christian ecclesia or assembly had moved to substitute canon law for civil law wherever Christianity went, but with guns and bombs as backup.
To put it again in terms of regimes, a clerical aristocracy will arise out of modern social egalitarianism—an aristocracy trained, tested, and legitimized by its God-given successes as it has participated in a worldwide network organized by the founder, Osama bin Laden, in order to rule the world. It is worth noting that the egalitarianism of the modern project—the systematic attack on aristocratic classes, very often at the service of statist centralization—is no more consistently maintained in radical Islamism than it was in fascism or in communism. Fascism quite explicitly proposed a new aristocracy to replace the by-the-decadent ‘old regime’ aristocracies of Europe. Communism, for its part, proposed a supposedly temporary neo-aristocracy that the communists called the ‘revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat.’ Intellectually armed with Karl Marx’s self-described ‘scientific socialism,’ the revolutionary vanguard would lead the proletariat first to victory over the capitalist bourgeoisie, and then on to a classless and stateless society, ‘communism.’ For both fascism and communism the principal enemy was the existing aristocracy or oligarchy, the ‘plutocracy,’ which (they charged) pulled the strings of the pseudo-leaders of the democratic republics.
On this topic in Islamist thought, Ayman al-Zawahiri proves particularly instructive. Zawahiri began his professional career as a surgeon in the Egyptian army, but had joined the Muslim Brotherhood by the age of fourteen. He eventually led the still more radical group, Islamic Jihad. His book is titled Knights Under the Prophetic Banner, published in 2001. In effect, radical Islamism replaces the racial/national warfare of fascism and the class warfare of communism with religious warfare or jihad. Sounding very much like an Islamicized Marxist, Zawahiri calls forth the reconstitution of the relations between the “elites” and the “masses.” The elites must lead the masses in jihad, in a “scientific, confrontational, rational” manner. Elites must take care first to mobilize broad support among the masses before undertaking violent jihad; otherwise, they will be overmatched by the states. “The jihadist movement must move toward the masses, defend their honor, prevent injustice, and guide them along the path leading to victory.” It is up to the elites to enunciate aims and set strategy.
With this correct relationship between elites and masses, leaders and followers, solidly in place, jihad can proceed with a series of terrorist and guerrilla operations, operations that turn modernity against itself. Known in modern military circles as ‘asymmetrical warfare,’ terrorism and guerrilla war apply violent forc to the key, weak pressure points of the modern state. Thus disrupted, the state will collapse, despite its apparently vast logistical superiority. As mentioned earlier, the result will be the rule of the ummah, the body of the Islamic believers, the final worldwide ruling body. This body might be loosely organized under a worldwide empire or caliphate, but this would not be modern-statist. Thus will Islam accomplish, under the rubric of religious fervor, what communists could only dream of, and failed to do. But, then, the historical progress toward communism was seen as a merely human process, whereas the worldwide jihad has Allah on its side. Jihad has the highest of moral and religious purposes; in the words of the late Palestinian al-Qaedist, Abdullah Azzam, jihad “can purify souls and elevate them above reality…. Islamic society needs to be born, but birth takes place in pain and suffering.”
The American war in Iraq saw another instance of this strategy at work. In this case, the existing state having been removed not by jihadists but by the hated Americans, jihadists have sought to prevent the founding of a new state, particularly a new state founded as a democratic and commercial-republican regime. Such a regime would be especially dangerous to their cause, inasmuch as it might make Islamist vanguardism a matter of the ballot instead of the bullet and the bomb. Because rule by Islamists so often proves unpalatable where it is tried, no less an authority than Zawahiri himself has decried the possible establishment of republicanism in Iraq and vows to prevent it. In his view, democratic republicanism is a religion, an alternative, false religion in which human judgment and sovereignty, and law override God’s judgment, sovereignty, and law. Such republicanism gives authority to “man’s desires, whatever they may be,” “replac[ing] God absolutely.” The worldwide struggle of Islam therefore must aim finally at Satan’s tool, the worldwide movement toward democratic republicanism. Which regime will prevail on the earth?
No further proof is needed to show that the al-Qaedist strategy can prove formidable. It poses a much greater hazard than it might because the United States has other geopolitical fish to fry: the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia. These countries have revived a regime enemy of a century ago, the capitalist, military-oligarchic and monarchist regime of Wilhelmine Germany. But China and Russia are a lot bigger than Germany.
Nonetheless, Islamists face their own limitations. In the days following the September 11 attacks, I wondered aloud, “Where’s the follow-up?” Although this made some people around me a bit nervous, and I suppose I could have been more sensitive and considerate, it was clear then, a it has become even clearer since then, that while a worldwide terrorist organization can disrupt its enemies, it cannot quickly seize and hold political power in stable political communities. Indeed, bin Laden himself sometimes talked very much like a child of the television and Internet age, extolling attacks like those on September 11 for their symbolic meaning more than for any material effect. Whatever imagined effect such attacks may have in his imagined spiritual universe, Islamism is likely to will remain a physical threat to states for a long time, but (absent the possession of weapons of mass destruction) it is unlikely destroy any but the weakest of them. Islamism reminds one of the sort of chronic disease that persists in latent form within its host, deadly only if the immune system weakens. As STRATFOR analyst Scott Stewart wrote a couple of years ago, “following 25 years of armed struggle, the al Qaeda core is no closer to achieving its objectives than when it began. He adds that its strategy has always been a “long war strategy,” however.
This strategy was enunciated as early as 2008 by one of al-Qaeda’s most important surviving strategists, Abu-Bakar Naji, in his book Governance in the Wilderness, also translated as The Management of the Barbarians. Rather than attempting to control any specific territory, Islamists must mimic the globalization of its capitalist rivals, fighting wherever they can, as often as they can, all over the world. Terrorism must become entrepreneurial. The spectacular 9/11-style attacks may no longer be possible, but they may not be necessary if individuals and small groups within Muslim populations throughout the world can be motivated to plan and act. In this Naji rejects the ISIL strategy of founding a caliphate prematurely; this only gives the infidels a target to destroy with their overwhelming firepower. In addition to countries where such “wilderness” areas already exist—Algeria, Somalia, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, other Muslim countries that might become susceptible to this strategy include Pakistan, the north African states, Pakistan, and even Saudi Arabia. Precisely because Allah is on their side, Islamists can outlast all the infidels and triumph in the end.
Recent Comments