Knowing the enemy (part II)

Da’wa (the call)

Within Islam itself, da’wa means the call to Islam given by Mohammed: a call to turn away from false gods and to the worship of the one true god. Most Muslims today also think of it as missionary work, either in other countries or possibly in day-to-day conversations.

Jihadis have a very different view. Because they believe that the entire Islamic community has fallen away from God, their da’wa is aimed first and foremost at other Muslims, not the unbelieving world. Muslims who won’t answer that call must be killed. One group in Algeria actually calls itself the Salafist Group for Da’wa and Fighting. Ironically, then, many Muslims are giving money to charities the whole purpose of which is to turn them into jihadis. The money is not going off to convert the unbelievers, but is being aimed against them. This goes on quite a bit in the US.

Ideological, political and military components

It is vital to understand that the jihadis’ war is first and foremost against other Muslims, who are the majority of the victims. This war has ideological, political and military components.

Ideologically, the message is aimed almost entirely at other Muslims. In 1996, Bin Laden put out a “Declaration of war against the US” that was incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t spent several years reading Islamic theology, law and history. That declaration was aimed at other Muslims, to convince them to join up. The 1998 declaration, with its short bullet points, was aimed at the West.

Politically, the jihadis are creating a caliphate on the backs of other Muslims, forcing them to follow their vision of sharia. When the Taliban imposed its version of sharia, the people of Afghanistan and Muslims generally were far from happy with it, seeing it as counter to what they understood Islam to be. Fallujah was a religious city even before the Wahhabis showed up, but once that version of Islamic law was imposed on them, and after the Americans left in April 2004, the jihadis began cutting off people’s hands and beheading people. They haven’t been able to regain a foothold there because the citizens, having experienced life under that version of Islamic law, do not want it again.

Militarily, most of the people who have been killed by the jihadis have been Muslims. In Iraq, a few thousand Americans have been killed and tens of thousands of Muslim Iraqis. The jihadis don’t care if 50 Muslims are killed in a bombing that kills one American because to them, those Muslims aren’t Muslims. If you’re supporting the Americans, you’re collaborators and nonbelievers. The jihadis have been fighting a war with us, however. That’s the one we tend to take interest in.

Justifications

Most of the ideas I’ve been discussing have to do with the jihadists that have signed up or began with Bin Laden and al-Qaida. The main difference between them and the rest of the jihadis is this first point on prioritizing who the enemies are going to be. Ninety percent of jihadis believe, based on a Quranic verse, in taking on the local enemies before any far enemy. In the early 1990s, when Bin Laden began to change his mind about who he should be focusing his attack on and became convinced that it was the US, he had no Quranic justification. So he had to go back to a 13th-century theologian named Ibn Tamiyya who argued for taking on the greater unbelief first. With Ibn Tamiyya as the justification, Bin Laden called the US the greater unbelief, the bigger enemy. Without US support, all those lesser enemies or near enemies, whether it’s Israel or the Saudi government, would collapse. Bin Laden did not win this argument with the rest of jihadis: hardly anyone signed up with him in his global jihad against the US, only four small groups. Otherwise, he was marginalized and still is today within the jihadi community.

As to war plans, to the jihadis, the only correct way of war is to follow the method of Mohammed, who had a specific, God-given plan. Within Islamic history there was one perfect moment of time and all of the rest of history is an attempt to recreate that. So this God-given plan is eternal and must always be followed. The jihadist version of Mohammed’s plan goes something like this: Mohammed started off in Mecca, gave da’wa to the residents there and was rejected. He attracted a tiny vanguard of believers, but mostly was rejected and reviled, forced to migrate to Medina. There he found welcomers (ansar) who took him in, sheltered him, and were convinced through his initially peaceful preaching that Islam was a good idea. Then he was permitted to carry out attacks to begin an external jihad against his enemies. Defensive attacks became offensive raids, winning over more and more territory and more and more supporters, and eventually Mecca fell almost without a fight.

This explains much about Bin Laden’s life. He began life in Mecca, where he had notions that people should follow him but no one did. He won a small group around him, but then was persecuted and forced to migrate first to Sudan and then to Afghanistan. Once there he tried to attract people and began carrying out attacks on those people in other places that had been oppressing him. He believes that eventually he’ll be able to return to Mecca, which will fall without a fight.

The basic ideas of jihadism come from three main sources. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th-century preacher, revived the definition of tawhid discussed earlier. He also believed that there were no believers left except for him. Accordingly, he would try to win people over by preaching, and if they wouldn’t listen, he was allowed to kill them. This encompasses most of what you need to know about jihadism. Notice that his jihad was not against unbelievers, but against other Muslims. One of the first things he did when he had enough followers was to gather them together and head off to Najaf, in what would become Iraq, and burn the shrines there. Hatred of the Shi’a is built into this ideology right from the start.

Hassan al-Banna (1906-49) had a very different notion of where this jihad should be focused. He agreed that one has to practice Islam correctly in order to truly worship God and that most of the world had fallen away from true Islam. But he believed in preaching to win over other Muslims, reserving violence for the occupiers. He founded the Muslim Brotherhood, which immediately began to take on the British occupation of Egypt. Unfortunately or fortunately, the British left peacefully before al-Banna could carry out his violence. But they put in place rulers who to the jihadis were agent rulers for the British Empire. Al-Banna turned to violence against these agent rulers. They assassinated him, but not before this notion had caught on. Off and on throughout the 1950s and 1960s Gamal Abdul Nasser and others had to suppress these militants, who would flee to other countries like Syria, Palestine and Saudi Arabia and start new organizations. Maintaining this notion of fighting the occupation is their main purpose in life.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt maintained this until 1966, when some thousand of their leaders were rounded up and executed and the group renounced violence. But every such movement has its splinter groups, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s disagreed with this renunciation of violence.

Sayyid Qutb, the most famous Muslim Brotherhood member, came to the US in 1948 to study in Greeley, Colorado, where he was so disgusted by the decadence and repulsed by the lives of Americans that he became a radical. Returning to Egypt, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and was imprisoned.

While in prison he wrote a 30-volume commentary on the Quran, later condensed to a short manifesto called “Milestones Along the Way,” in which he reiterates that the main enemy is liberalism. Liberalism and democracy, he argued are a direct challenge to Islam as a way of life and the belief that God should be the only law-giver. Qutb was among those executed in 1966, but his brother Mohammed Qutb fled to Saudi Arabia and became a teacher; among his pupils was Bin Laden.

Let’s look briefly at some of the jihadist groups that evolved from these concepts. Today, Hamas is just a new name for the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. Notice how these groups evolve over time. They begin by attacking soldiers, government officials, and when that doesn’t achieve any results, they find justification to begin killing men, women and children. Likewise, the late Shamil Basayev’s people who carried out the 2004 Beslan school siege started off attacking Russian soldiers and government officials, then teachers, ordinary citizens and finally any Christians in Russia.

Al-Jihad was one of these splinter groups that didn’t agree with the Muslim Brotherhood’s renunciation of violence. They killed Anwar Sadat in 1981, and nothing changed. Who next — what about the tourists, who, they reasoned, were supporting the apostate ruler? So Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and Jihad Talaat al-Fath carried out a spectacular attack in Luxor in 1997, after which ten thousand members were rounded up and imprisoned. But seven years later they renounce violence, are let out of prison, and splinter groups immediately carried out attacks in Sharm el-Sheikh and the Sinai. One part of Gama’a al-Islamiyya argued that killing tourists doesn’t work, however, and they need to wipe out the real support for the Egyptian government: the US. This explains the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

Al-Qaida really began with this notion of the US as occupiers. Although they didn’t carry out the 1996 Khobar Towers attack, they obviously supported it. They began changing their minds about the right methodology in the mid-nineties looking to strike repeated blows at the US, who they now saw as the “greater unbelief.” After all, the US had left Beirut, Aden and Somalia. They thought that jihadis everywhere and the Islamic community would join them, and with an energized community, nobody would be able to stand in their way. But none of those things transpired. It took them about two years to adjust to that and try to devise another plan, which was to recreate Afghanistan in northern Pakistan and start over. They’ve now recreated their Islamic state in northern Pakistan, where they have 22 camps at last count. They’re turning out jihadis just like they did during the 1990s, and they’ve gotten a peace treaty signed with the Musharraf government, the likely duration of which may be measurable in months. Destroying this new Islamic proto-state will be a problem, since no one wants to invade the difficult terrain of ungoverned northern Pakistan. Al-Qaida has been trying to take over chaotic places like Somalia, Darfur and al-Anbar province, and this is a very frightening proposition.

There is one ray of hope. Atlanta writer Lee Harris has written about what he calls fantasy ideologies, such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. These are ideas and even states in some cases that are based on fantasies. When people try to put these fantasies into action, to create states based on them, those states may last for a while — I see the current conflict as a two-hundred year war — but eventually they will collapse under their own contradictions, or when they are challenged. They’re based on a false reading of human nature, of how the world works. The Taliban state could only survive as long as nobody took it on. So while in the short term I’m pessimistic about some of these issues, in the very long term I’m very optimistic about our chances for victory.