Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (22 page)

This is why it is necessary to distinguish Islamist terror from radical Islamism. Radical Islamist social movements of the twentieth century were part of an ongoing search for an effective response to a twin dilemma: imperial occupation and social reform. Like the Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt, their starting point was reform. They were not looking for a doctrinal response in spiritual matters but a political and social response to a this-worldly
dilemma. Driven more by intellectuals than by clergy, these movements argued that Islam is not “a mere religion” but is more like a political ideology that addresses all aspects of our social existence. The concern of Islam is not only theology and ethics but also politics and law, economy and social justice, even foreign policy. Though it began by calling for the building of a supranational Muslim community (umma), as had the poet and philosopher Muhammed Iqbal in early-twentieth-century India, radical Islamism sprouted different national versions as it adapted to different nation-states. Like Hizbullah and Hamas, it occasionally resorted to terror—violence against civilians—without embracing it as a consistent policy. The shift from a supranational commitment to an orientation defined by the political community within state boundaries has been the most dramatic in movements such as Hizbullah, which has entered the electoral process and given up the idea of establishing an Islamic state, and Hamas, whose critique of the PLO is less and less that it betrayed Islam and more and more that it betrayed the Palestinian people.

Hizbullah

The founding of Hizbullah was a direct reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and the subsequent introduction of western troops under the banner of the Multi-National Forces (MNF). Iran responded to this by dispatching fifteen hundred Revolutionary Guards to the Syrian-controlled Bekaa valley. Soon after, Hizbullah was secretly organized under Iranian sponsorship. Hizbullah’s short history can be divided into two phases. The first, the military resistance against Israeli occupation, lasted from 1982 to 1985, the year of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon. During this time, Hizbullah created two organizations: Islamic
Resistance, said to be responsible for “suicide attacks against Western and Israeli targets,” and Islamic Jihad, “which led more conventional attacks against Israeli troops in the south.” In this first phase, Hizbullah aimed to establish an Islamic republic in Lebanon, ruled by Islamic law as part of an Islamic state larger than Lebanon.

The shift in Hizbullah’s ideological and political orientation toward a secular notion of the state was the result of a leadership struggle that followed two major changes in the region. The first was the end of Israeli occupation in Lebanon and, following it, the end of the civil war (1985-1989) between Hizbullah and Amal, two organizations vying for political leadership of the Shi’a community in Lebanon. The second was the leadership change in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to a less-ideological political orientation. The new party leadership in Lebanon under Sheikh Fadlallah “called constantly for a dialogue with Christians … on the values shared between Muslims and Christians, and Hizbullah officials called for establishing a non-confessional system without defining it in explicit terms, thus leaving the characteristics of the system open to debate.” This was tantamount to a call for the secularization of politics in Lebanon. In Lebanon’s parliamentary elections of 1992, “the first open elections in more than two decades,” Hizbullah backed non-Shi’a candidates, both Sunni and Christian, in an attempt to broaden its appeal. Hizbullah won eight seats, including those won by two Sunni and two Christian candidates.

The Hizbullah case reinforces the lesson of the contemporary civil war in Algeria: that reform is better engineered from within than imposed from without. The revocation of a democratic process in Algeria, triggered by the refusal to honor the results of the 1991 election, had been motivated by a secular fear that its outcome would hand over power to religious extremists, eventually
endangering both secularism and democracy. It recalls a similar sidestepping of the democratic process in Vietnam out of fear that it would deliver power to Communists who would deny the same rights to their opponents. This kind of reasoning ignores the fact that the tension between democratic processes and undemocratic outcomes is one that is integral to every democracy, most recently evident in the American election of 2000. It cannot be an argument for abrogating democracy, only for devising effective safeguards to entrench the process in the face of outcomes that may undermine it. Second, it masks a dogma that equates secularism with an already existing institutional arrangement, particularly the kind of arrangement that came to define European political life beginning in the seventeenth century. Predicated on a notion that the only mode of global coexistence for different cultures (now civilizations) is parallel existence—tolerance—this dogma is certainly premature and does not exhaust other historical possibilities that also lay emphasis on engagement and critique.

Iran

Algeria and Iran reveal contrasting examples of radical political Islam in contemporary history. Both underscore the importance of letting social movements—whether religious or secular—work through internal ideological and political struggles in an autonomous fashion. When they have been allowed to operate within legal frameworks, social and political movements, though not necessarily democratic, have strengthened the conditions for democracy by expanding participation in the political process. The possibilities of this are best glimpsed in Iran, where the broad Islamist movement has given rise both to democratic demands and to a growing feminist movement.

The point is made by Richard Bulliet, a social historian of
medieval Islam at Columbia University. “The revolutionary regime,” he points out, “came to power intent on reversing the Shah’s liberal legislation concerning women” and “quickly accomplished this goal and mandated severe restrictions on women’s dress, employment, and behavior.” Yet only “two decades later, an active Islamic feminist movement in Iran has seen a woman take her place at the cabinet table as director of women’s affairs and another attain the rank of vice president.” In addition, “the parliament has put in place a body of legislation that makes the Iranian laws of marriage and divorce among the most liberal in the Islamic world.” Bulliet writes with an understanding that Algeria and Iran provide official America with two contrasting options. He is also quite clear as to which option to take: “The Algerian must not become a regional norm supported actively or tacitly by the United States.” At the same time, Iran is less a model than a lesson. The lesson is that of democracy: instead of thinking of modernity as an import into Islam, one needs to be sensitive to the emergence of an Islamic modernity, arising from processes within Islamic societies.

Islamist politics are driven by two very different movements. Radical Islamists see the reorganization of society as the only way to change the state, while conservative Islamists see the seizing of power as the sole way to change either state or society. Not always democratic, radical Islamists like Hizbullah or the FIS in Algeria demand that everyone—including women—participate in public life. In contrast, conservative movements not only oppose female presence in public life but also tend to be violently sectarian. Both radical and conservative Islamists claim to adhere to sharia (a rule of law), but the conservative notion of sharia excludes any meaningful
space for democracy. The difference lies in their respective attitude to ijtihad, an institution that allows for legal principles to be interpreted in light of changing historical contexts. Conservative, state-centered Islamists are vigorous defenders of a rule of law, but they understand law as divine law and see any form of democracy as corruptive of it. This is why the true dividing line between society- and state-centered Islamists is not the commitment to a rule of law but to popular participation in state affairs.

Islamist statism has arisen from different routes. One is the endeavor of unpopular regimes—such as the Zia dictatorship in Pakistan—to legitimize power. The other route—the main one in these times—is exemplified by the late Cold War project in central Asia, the American jihad. Whereas the imperative to seek popular support in a democratic contest has forced radical Islamist movements like Hizbullah to develop national roots, the absence of that possibility—and, in some instances, the fear of that same contest—has led statist movements to turn supranational. Not only did this kind of imperative tie Zia’s state to the American jihad, it also led to the formation of an international cadre of uprooted individuals who broke ties with family and country of origin to join clandestine networks with a clearly defined enemy.

One can conclude, therefore, that political Islam is a modern political phenomenon, not a leftover of traditional culture. To be sure, one can trace several practices in political Islam—opium production, madrassah education, and the very notion of jihad—to the era before modern colonization. In fact, opium, madrassah education, and al-jihad al-akbar were all reshaped and remade within modern institutions as they were put in the service of a global American campaign against the “evil empire.”

Political Islam is a diverse movement with multiple and even
contradictory elements. I have argued that it is useful to distinguish between society-centered and state-centered movements, with moderates and radicals on each side. Inasmuch as they are committed to a strategy of change that calls for increased popular participation in politics, society-centered movements resemble Latin American social movements inspired by Christian liberation theology. In contrast, state-centered movements try to contain popular political participation and see the state—rather than society or any sector of it—as the true subject of historical change. Rather than being vehicles for popular pressures from below, they reflect elite-driven attempts to dam the flow of popular participation.

State-centered Islamist political movements should not be equated with terrorism. As long as authoritarian movements remain confined within national borders and adhere to even a semblance of a rule of law—as with the Zia dictatorship in Pakistan, the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan—the potential for terror remains sheathed. The emergence of terror goes along with the erosion of a rule of law. The distinction between a lawful dictatorship and terror outside the law will help us distinguish between the Taliban, on the one hand, and the mujahideen, on the other. In Afghanistan, after the Soviet Union was defeated, terror was unleashed on the Afghani people in the name of liberation. Eqbal Ahmad observed that the Soviet withdrawal turned out to be a moment of truth, rather than of victory, for the mujahideen. As mujahideen factions coalesced into two rival forces, one more extreme and ideological than the other, and fought for power, they shelled and destroyed their own cities. Precisely when they were ready to seize power, the mujahideen lost the struggle for the hearts and minds of their own people. That was the explanation of how a “liberation” force could
lose power literally at the moment of having taken it, to a student force that had not participated in the war of “liberation.” Once the Taliban began to run the state, its brutality took the form of a harshly patriarchal rule, the main targets of which were young people and women.

In contrast, al-Qaeda was a transnational movement whose violence was unrestrained by any form of law. Al-Qaeda members, originally recruited from dozens of countries around the world, found they had no home to return to when the jihad ended. John Cooley gives the example of North African recruits, many of whom “feared to return” and “stayed in the postwar training program for future terrorists, financed mostly by private Saudi and other Arab funds.” Rootless, bewildered, and embittered hostages to a social condition that made them more or less prone to political nihilism, they were the strike force against the empire they had come to understand, in language they shared with Reagan, as “evil.” The source of privatized and globalized terrorism in today’s world, the international jihadis are the true ideological children of Reagan’s crusade against the “evil empire.”

Chapter Four
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E
ven after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, America’s low-intensity conflict against militant nationalist regimes continued well into the next decade, right up to 9/11. From a Reaganite point of view, this made perfect sense. Was it not the Reagan administration that had concluded that the real threat of war did not lie on the plains of Europe but in the Third World, where successful insurgencies were leading to militant nationalist regimes, which (it claimed) were nothing but Soviet proxies? The Reagan response was proxy war. Built on the Nixon Doctrine—“Asian boys must fight Asian wars”—as applied by Henry Kissinger, its effect was to redesign American war strategy. Instead of a possible confrontation with Soviet ground troops in Europe, it prepared to wage low-intensity conflict against militant nationalist regimes in the Third World.

By 9/11 the methods changed drastically, from low-intensity
proxy war to high-intensity direct warfare. That shift was made possible by a changed political climate in post-9/11 America: not only had security become a concern, but this concern was received initially with empathy from most of the world. For the Bush administration, this was a golden opportunity to shed the inhibitions of the Cold War and declare open season on militant nationalism. From this point of view, a war against militant nationalism would conclude the unfinished business of the Cold War. The ambition to smash militant nationalism was summed up as a call for “regime change” and—in true Reaganite fashion—“democratization.” In a flash of less than two years, the United States moved from the invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to that of Saddam Hussein-ruled Iraq. Whereas the Taliban had been pinpointed as hosts of al-Qaeda, there was little legitimate effort to connect the invasion of Iraq to the terror that was 9/11. This is because the “war on terror” had moved on, from addressing broadly shared security concerns to targeting militant nationalism.