Al-Qaeda (54 page)

The concept of injustice is key. It is not absolute deprivation that causes resentment but, as many scholars have noted, deprivation following a period of aspiration-raising relative prosperity. In very general terms, and over the long term, the history of the Middle East and the Islamic world can be read in these terms. A lengthy period of international political and cultural dominance has left a legacy of expectation that is very much at odds with the region’s current second-rank status. The recent economic success of east Asia, for example, is felt as
wrong
. It is not fair, right or just. The relative economic success of Jews is profoundly resented, as outgoing Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohammed made clear in a grossly anti-semitic speech in November 2003 in which he queried why so few Jews could amass ‘so much
power’ when such a large number of Muslims were so feeble by comparison.
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This model of expectation, disappointment and perceived injustice works over a shorter time-span too. The expectations of the populations of many Middle Eastern countries were raised hugely as the Western imperialist system fell apart and the old regimes that had governed so incompetently and repressively were overthrown. Yet expectations of democracy and prosperity were swiftly disappointed. The number of intellectual activists whose fathers were involved in anti-colonial struggles is significant. So too is the number whose families unexpectedly suffered under the post-colonial regimes. Their sense of injustice is often deep.

And in the short term aspirations have been raised in an unprecedented way both by the extension of education to so many and by the exposure of virtually everyone in the Islamic world to images of the West, with its apparent democracy, sexual opportunity and wealth. Again the model of expectation, disappointment and perceived injustice fits the experience of millions of graduates, provincial immigrants to cities, doctors who drive cabs and ambitious civil engineers who teach basic arithmetic. It matches the experience of the 17-year-old Pakistani lower-middle-class youth torn between the mullah and MTV. If he accepts his desire to be part of the Westernized world he will have to address the fact that he will only ever enjoy an ersatz, inferior version of the ‘Western’ life of his equivalent in London or Los Angeles. His clothes will never be as up to date, his skin will never be the right colour, his chances of pre-marital sex will always be infinitely lower. An alternative, of course, is to reject the West and all it stands for in favour of the affirming, empowering certainties of radical Islam which teaches him that he is no longer subordinate, but merely denied what is rightfully his. In this, the struggle going on in the mind of the 17-year-old over how to deal with modernity, how to match the West’s advances without sacrificing one’s identity, how to reconcile Islam with the modern age, mirrors that within wider Islamic society. Most people, like our 17-year-old, try, as most do, to reconcile the two. None of these processes are easy. All generate anger, energy and resentment and the potential for violent protest.

The second group of activists emerged at the end of the 1980s and has become increasingly dominant through the 1990s. They are less educated, more violent and follow a more debased, popularized form of Islam. A good recent example would be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They are more unthinkingly radical, bigoted and fanatical. Instead of being drawn from frustrated, aspirant groups within society they are more often drawn from its margins, from those who have few expectations to be disappointed. This was very clear in Algeria in the mid 1990s where the most violent groups among the GIA drew their recruits from the poorest and most brutalized elements in society, in Pakistan where, in the same period, the various political Islamist groups found themselves forced to cede ground to those more rooted in the Deobandi medressa networks and in Kashmir where the teachers and doctors who formed the leadership cadres of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen have now been forced aside by the semi-educated militants of the new Jihadi groups. The same is true in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and in much of southeast Asia. The Bali bombers were largely uneducated. The men who blew themselves up in Morocco in May 2003 were from the poorest stratum of society, marginalized men living in a marginalized slum community. So were those among the Bedouin community in the Egyptian Sinai desert who attacked Red Sea resorts in July 2005.

The shift can also be seen in the West. At the beginning of the 1990s most of the Islamic activists living in London, or ‘Londonistan’ as it was called by critics of the British government’s liberal asylum policy, were highly politicized, educated and relatively moderate. By the end of the decade militants in the West included far more men like Richard Reid, a British petty criminal who tried to blow himself up on a transatlantic jet in December 2001 or Nizar Trabelsi, a former drug addict and refugee. These were poor, unemployed, angry people. The number of former convicts or asylum seekers among recently recruited Islamic militants is striking. The amateurish ‘second wave’ of bombers who tried and failed to follow the 7/7 attacks also fall into the category. Significantly, British security officers charged with countering Islamic terror in the UK have made the monitoring of prisons a priority.
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The third group are neither intellectuals nor marginal but drawn
from society’s mainstream. This makes them all the more problematic, in terms of the security threat they pose and in terms of analysis. Bombers with this profile have emerged most recently, largely in Europe. A handful of such men figured in the Madrid bombing, they provide the vast bulk of suspected militants arrested in France, Holland and Belgium in recent years and this profile fits the London bombers. They are likely to provide most of the attackers in the years to come in the crucial battleground that western Europe will become. Their motivations are rooted in a complex and dynamic mix of identity crisis, politics in its broadest sense and reactions to globalization that are still far from clear. Such militants are being created by profound challenges caused by changes in the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of western European societies and the way those changes are interacting with international events and new international identities. A clue as to the nature of the motivation of this new category of militant lies in the targets selected by the London bombers. It is significant that they did not strike at targets which represented political or military or even economic power, many of which remain relatively vulnerable. Instead they attacked the London tube at four particular points that represent best the extraordinary melting pot that the British capital has become in the twenty-first century: Aldgate East in the heart of the East End and in the middle of one of the country’s biggest Muslim populations; Edgware Road, where London’s Gulf Arab population is centred; Tavistock Square, one of the most cosmopolitan districts of the city with a huge shifting population of international students and tourists and King’s Cross, probably the most cosmopolitan place in one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth. In this, their targets are representative of the success of integration, not the lack of it. Like the 17-year-old Pakistani youth I imagined above, the same fundamental questions about identity in a globalized world are being posed for such men, in a manner made more pressing than ever by the strategy pursued by both sides in the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Their answers are sometimes rejectionist, reactionary and profoundly violent. This theme will become clearer in the years that come.
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These three groups are not rigidly defined and individual activists can show elements of all or neither. Men like bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and Abu Qatada have
managed, despite their own relatively prosperous backgrounds, to assume leadership of the most violent, ill-educated, inarticulate militant elements. But, despite the flaws inherent in any broad-brushed approach, this analysis may help us understand why terrorists act as they do.

Modern Islamic terrorists are made, not born. There are various stages in that process of creation. The route to terrorism starts with a feeling that something is wrong that needs to be set right. This can be a real problem or merely a perceived injustice (or indeed both). The second stage is the feeling that the problem, whether cosmic or purely personal, cannot be solved without recourse to a mode of action or activism beyond those provided for by a given society’s political or legal framework. The next stage changes the individual from being an activist, even a militant, into a terrorist. It involves the acceptance of an ideology and the development of a worldview that allows the powerful social barriers that stop most people from committing acts of violence to be overcome. It means that individuals feel compelled to do appalling things. This process is happening at an increasingly rapid rate with security services now aware of individuals becoming powerfully radicalized in weeks. If volunteers are to be diverted from terrorism it is this process that we need to counter.

The root causes of modern Islamic militancy are the myriad reasons for the grievances that are the first step on the road to terrorism. It is not a question of absolute deprivation but of how deprivation is perceived. Yet social and economic problems, though the link to terrorism is indirect, are critical as a pre-condition. Such problems are growing more, not less, widespread and profound throughout the Islamic world. The economies of nations from Morocco to Indonesia are in an appalling state. Population growth may now be slowing but more than half of all Pakistanis and Iranians are under 20 years old. Egypt’s population is still predicted to grow by a quarter between 2000 and 2015. Saudi Arabia’s is likely to rise by more than 50 per cent in the next ten years.
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Unemployment, particularly among important groups such as graduates, is acute and real wages are stagnant. Growth in the Middle East during the 1990s has been under one per cent and
has barely picked up in real terms since.
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For hundreds of millions of people in the Islamic world, housing and sanitation are grossly inadequate. Many cities are on their way to joining ‘failed states’ as locations of endemic anarchy, violence and alienation.
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Everywhere, the gulf between rich and poor is increasing. And though Western European militants, particularly those from the third category outlined above, do not necessarily suffer physically, the new globalized Islamic identity, boosted by the new media and the events of recent years, means that the conditions in Gaza or in Iraq excite profound resentment in the UK or Germany too.

But these problems alone do not cause terrorism. If individuals have faith in a political system, a belief that they can change their lives through activism that is sanctioned by the state, or understand and accept the reasons for their hardships they are unlikely to turn to militancy. But there is little reason to be optimistic about the possible development of alternatives that might divert the angry and alienated from radical Islam in the near future. Only in a few small Gulf states has there been any genuine move towards reform in recent years. In Saudi Arabia, though the worst of the radical preachers have been muzzled, religious collections at mosques stopped and the possibility of local elections raised, genuine political reform is still unlikely. The fundamental compact between the house of al-Saud and the Wahhabi ulema remains strong. Though a new king is making impressive efforts in Morocco, it does not look like there will be any genuinely significant reform in Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Amman or the central Asia republics soon. One of the reasons for the evolution of more radical, debased and violent forms of protest is the tendency of governments in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world to repress moderate movements. Because they are scared of radical Islam taking power, such regimes block democratic reform. Because there is no reform, radical Islam grows in support. As national Islamic movements, moderate or violent, are crushed or fail, anger is channelled into the symbolic realm and into the international, cosmic language of bin Laden and his associates.

And this is the biggest threat of all. This is the crucial third stage that turns an angry and frustrated young man into a terrorist. This is
the moment when an individual begins to conceive of doing something more than shouting slogans or waving banners. And it is here that the newly dominant, globalized ‘al-Qaeda’, defined as a universally transportable, universally applicable ideology and worldview, is so important. To overcome the behavioural norms that restrain most balanced citizens in any society from acts of appalling brutality, particularly against those usually considered civilians, a powerful legitimizing discourse is needed. The ideologues of modern jihadi Salafi Islamic radicalism with their vision of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, belief and unbelief, the true faith and its opponents, provide one. For those who feel angry and disempowered, radical Islam provides an answer. Didar, the Kurdish suicide bomber, spoke of how the lessons he received from his prayer leader at the mosque in Arbil helped him understand why ‘things were not right in the world’. Pakistani militants I interviewed in a prison in India in late 2003 told me of how accepting the radical Islamic worldview was like receiving a revelation. Suddenly, they said, they comprehended why all the ‘bad things that happened’. Radical Islam provides a remedy too. The militants I interviewed said that the ideology they had bought into meant they understood ‘what steps they should take’.
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The real power of bin Laden’s discourse is that, like Marxism, it explains a personal experience by reference to a convincing general theory and then provides a programme of action that is comprehensible and convincing. And in explaining ‘injustice’ it justifies the most appalling actions.