Al-Qaeda (8 page)

Reformist movements, based on a ‘return’ to the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sunna, have been a recurring pattern in Islamic history. There have been successive waves of dissent and schism, all of which have been rooted in a specific social and political context. An early example was Islam’s split into Sunni and Shia branches, within a century of
Mohammed’s death, over whether a direct descendant of the Prophet should be appointed over the broader community’s favoured candidate when appointing the
caliph
, the leader of the umma, a position in which were vested significant military and political powers, but no inherent religious authority. The origins of the split were political and personal, though the division later became enshrined in doctrine (and, many scholars say, by ethnic divisions between Persians and Arabs).
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The Shias felt that to appoint anyone but a descendant of the Prophet was a departure from, and thus a corruption of, the ideals of the Prophet. Another early example is that of the
Kharijites
, ‘those who go out’ (from the Arabic
kharaja
), who preached a radical, puritanical egalitarianism, accusing the successors of Mohammed of forgoing his true message. The Assassins, a radical Shia group, are another example. Over the centuries, many Muslim dissident movements have accused the ulema of being complicit with the corruption of the Islamic message. The clergy, whose influence is often underestimated by Western commentators, are often seen as self-serving, co-opted partners of an evil worldly elite.
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A key dissident for contemporary radical thinkers, often quoted by bin Laden and modern Islamic militants, is the fourteenth-century conservative Islamic scholar Taqi al-Din ibn Taimiya. Ibn Taimiya is seen as the spiritual father of modern radical revolutionary Sunni Islamic activism. The fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258 had been an appalling shock for devout Muslims at the time. After centuries of military expansion and political and cultural superiority, most Muslims had considered the conquest of the caliphate and of Islam by infidels to be impossible. A similar shock was to be felt more than five centuries later on Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Ibn Taimiya reasoned that the weakness that had allowed the defeat was a result of the failure of the Muslim community, or umma, to properly follow the injunctions of the early holy texts. He was hounded into exile in Damascus, where he continued his campaigning, spending much of his life in prison as a result.

Several key concepts within Islam have a powerful resonance in current times. The division of the world into categories, including the
dar ul harb
(the realm or house of war) and the
dar ul Islam
(the realm
of Islam), is one and has been repeatedly quoted by bin Laden. Another key resource is what Malise Ruthven calls the ‘Mohammedan Paradigm’.
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Mohammed was forced to flee Mecca by the wealthy rulers, who liked neither his rejection of their authority in favour of God’s nor his attacks on the worship of the idols in the main shrine in the city, the Ka’aba, on which a lucrative pilgrim industry was based. Mohammed, unable to practise his religion, secretly left for the city of Medina, then called Yathrib, with a small group of followers. His flight in 622
CE
is known as the
hijra
, and its significance is such that the Islamic calendar is dated from that event, not Mohammed’s birthday or his first revelation. Such a flight in the face of oppression is explicitly recommended by the Qur’an.
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The next years were hard, with Mohammed caught between the suspicion of many of the people of Medina and the military might of Mecca. But he prevailed, defeating the Meccans at the battle of al-Badr in 624
CE
and eventually winning over the people of Medina. He was able to return to his home city in triumph in 630
CE
, dying two years later. Muslim reformists, from the Kharijites through the Assassins to bin Laden, have consciously mimicked the hijra and withdrawn from a society that opposes them to live as ‘true’ Muslims and to launch a campaign that they believe will, like Mohammed’s, eventually be successful. Following the Mohammedan Paradigm they understand that they will be tried by periods of oppression and difficulty but, as they follow Allah’s will and Mohammed’s injunctions, they, or the generations that follow them, will eventually triumph. For bin Laden and his associates, this model of flight (hijra) and struggle (jihad) is hugely powerful and frequently features in their statements. (One good example is the video released by al-Qaeda on 10 September 2003 that showed bin Laden walking in the mountains of Afghanistan.) But it brings practical problems. The withdrawal isolates the enlightened from the masses that they need to mobilize to achieve their aims.
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On his return to Mecca, Mohammed established a society known ever since among Muslims for its justice. Justice, and its opposite, injustice, is again a very powerful motivating resource within Islam and has obvious social and political elements. As with the anticlericalism directed at the ‘establishment’ ulema, this stress will be familiar to
anyone who has studied Western European, and indeed American, revolutionary or dissident movements. It is disappointed aspirations, a sense of unfairness, that are critical in motivating much ‘revolutionary’ political action, not absolute deprivation, and this helps explain Islamic militants’ constant reference to the ‘humiliation’ of the umma. The aspiration is not world conquest but world leadership by the umma, conceived of as a replication of the political, cultural, military and social superiority enjoyed by Muslims between the seventh century and the time of the European Renaissance. The opposite of justice, tyranny, or
zulm
, can and must be resisted, as it was by the Prophet and his earliest followers, by ibn Taimiya and by so many other movements over the centuries.

The struggle against zulm is jihad. Indeed an effort against, or for, many things, is jihad. The root of the word is the Arabic
jhd
, meaning strain, effort, struggle, endeavour or striving. The word ijtihad, the effort to interpret, comes from the same root. According to one well-known hadith, Mohammed distinguished two jihads: the greater, against oneself, and the lesser, against another. It does not necessarily mean ‘holy war’ as is so often said. Indeed one can have the jihad of the heart, of the pen, of the tongue, of the sword and so on. Islamic scholars and jurists have argued over the exact definition of jihad throughout Islamic history.

The problems of defining jihad condense many of the key issues highlighted above. Mohammed’s pronouncements on jihad vary and, taken together, show clearly how political and engaged Islam has always been. Early Islamic scholars dealt with the ambiguities by showing how Mohammed’s injunctions were appropriate to the various stages of his struggle. Early Qur’anic verses, delivered to Mohammed between 610 and 623
CE
while his community was small, unpopular and barely tolerated by vastly superior forces, urge patience and the spreading of the word of Islam through non-violent means alone. ‘There is no compulsion in religion, for the right way is clear from the wrong way,’ the Qur’an says (2:256). After the time of the hijra, Allah appears to have given permission for Muslims to engage in defensive warfare. Later verses, received by Mohammed when at the height of his power, enjoined an offensive against unbelievers: ‘fight
and slay the pagans wherever ye find them and seize them, beleaguer them and lie in wait for them’ (9:5). These verses, known as the ‘sword verses’, were held by the ulema of the powerful and expansionist Ummayad and Abbasid dynasties to abrogate the previous more pacifistic Qur’anic injunctions. This interpretation provided a religious justification for armed expansion by the newly confident dominant ruling group. Though modern moderates prefer to quote the early verses, contemporary radicals, such as bin Laden, following the ideologues of the Ummayads and the Abbasids, maintain that they are abrogated by the later more aggressive verses. Abdallah Azzam makes this point explicitly. Writing in 1986 he said: ‘The sword verses abrogate around 140 verses on jihad… revealed previously… They give a definite answer to anyone who questions [the Qur’an’s] clear definition [of jihad].’
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In November 2002, Mohammed al-Massari, the British-based Saudi Arabian dissident, circulated a lengthy rebuttal of moderate Muslims’ claims, post-11 September, that the jihad of bin Laden and the hijackers was wrongly conceived. These moderates, his circular said, were trying to ‘water down Islam to make it more palatable for their Christian and Zionist masters’. The only true definition of jihad ‘is fighting for the sake of Allah… True believers will never be deflected from this task… The highest jihad is having your blood spilled’.
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So, like almost all Islamic practice and belief, the doctrine of jihad is the product of various readings and applications of the principles of the sacred texts, each in specific historical and political contexts.
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Despite this, there are a number of elements in the doctrine of jihad that are widely accepted and are important to any attempt to comprehend 11 September or any other modern act of ‘Islamic terrorism’. There are, for example, both defensive and offensive elements in the contemporary Islamic militant’s understanding of jihad. In the ‘cosmic struggle’ between the forces of good and evil, jihad is seen as largely defensive. A sense of last-ditch defence is a common theme in the writings of Islamic militants. It is not sophistry but a manifestation of a genuine sense that they are warriors engaged in a desperate struggle for survival against an aggressive and powerful enemy intent on humiliating, weakening and eventually destroying them. This is a more
extreme version of the widespread perception in the Middle East in particular that the West has never abandoned the project of the Crusades and therefore poses an existential threat to the Umma.

However, the views of militants are also informed by a more offensive reading of jihad, as outlined by Syed Qutb, the Egyptian radical thinker seen as the principal ideologue of modern Sunni Islamic radicalism.
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Because Islam aims ‘to abolish those oppressive political systems under which people are prevented from expressing their freedom to choose whatever beliefs they want’, the aim of jihad is thus to tackle ‘the material obstacles’ such as ‘political power resting on a complex of interrelated ideological, racial, class, social and economic structures’ that are responsible for the perpetuation of oppression.
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‘After annihilating the tyrannical force, whether a political or a racial tyranny, or domination of one class over the other within the same race, Islam establishes a new social and economic political system, in which all men enjoy real freedom.’
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Jihad is thus an obligation on all Muslims. The political elements of Qutb’s thinking and the influence of contemporary left-wing thought (Qutb was writing in the early 1960s) is clear.

However, it is a mistake to see jihad as merely a tactic aimed at achieving a specific worldly goal. This point is critical in understanding why acts of spectacular terror, especially those involving the suicides of the attackers, occur. Fundamentally, acts of jihad are conceived of as demonstrations of faith performed for God by an individual. The immediate local aims or enemies are largely irrelevant. Jihad is part of the cosmic struggle, and thus to expect an immediate result from it would be presumptuous and wrong. ‘The scope of this struggle is not limited to this earth or to this life. The observers of this struggle are not merely a generation of men,’ says Qutb.
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In early 2002, Suleiman abu Gaith, a spokesman for bin Laden, said it again:

We believe we are still at the beginning of this war… So if we are killed or captured or the enemies of Allah manage to achieve one victory… we should not forget that this path is long and it is a path that the Muslims have to walk upon until judgement day.
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Though jihad will eventually result in victory, should Allah will it, that victory may be generations, centuries, even millennia away. It is the
act that is important, not its results. Jihad is conceived of as an eternal process of affirming faith that should be performed by all Muslims at all times. As pointed out above, the struggle of living as a good Muslim in a world of trial and temptation is jihad. Like so many other key Islamic concepts, jihad is thus uniquely transferable to any geographic or political context.
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This demonstrative, sacrificial quality in jihad combines with another essential element of Islam, the
Shahadah
, the ‘testament’ or the bearing witness, with a potency that is of critical importance for understanding what happened on 11 September.

The Shahadah is the first of the five ‘pillars of Islam’ that make a Muslim a Muslim.
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The call to prayer, the
adhan
, includes the lines ‘
ash-hadu an la illaha illallah, ash-hadu Mohammed ur rasulullah
’, which are usually translated as ‘I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, I bear witness that Mohammed is His prophet’. This submission to the sovereignty of God, and one God alone, is a political act. All other authority, whether that of the tribal leaders who ruled the Arabian peninsula before Mohammed received and propagated his message or the current Egyptian, Algerian or Saudi government, is superseded by God’s. The Shahadah is both a statement of profound personal faith and a declaration to others, a ‘bearing witness’. Being a witness needs someone other than God, who is after all omniscient, as an audience. The testament was aimed, understandably given Mohammed’s desire to make converts, at a believer’s fellow men. Jihad shares this demonstrative quality, particularly when combined with that ultimate affirmation of faith – martyrdom.