Knowing the enemy (part I)

Ideology

Jihadis are a small minority within the Islamist movement that believes violence must be used in order to create the perfect Islamic state. Within jihadism there are disagreements about at whom this violence should be aimed, how it should be carried out, what it will accomplish, and what the Islamic state law will look like when it is finally created. Here, I address those jihadis who agree with al-Qaida and affiliated groups on several important issues.

Only a very small minority of Muslims believe in violence and are willing to participate in it, which — in addition to great FBI work—explains why no attacks have been carried out in the US since 9/11, and why there have been few attacks in Europe or other places.

Jihadist ideology can be reduced to unusual definitions of four Islamic words (tawhid, jihad, caliphate and da’wa) and a few simple concepts. The jihadis believe, first, that they’re the only true Muslims in the world, the saved sect, the victorious party; that they’re the only ones going to Paradise. Second, they believe that hostile unbelievers control the world and have only one purpose in life, the destruction of Islam. In fact, according to several histories put together by jihadis, the entire purpose for the founding of America was to destroy Islam. Thus, thirdly, jihadis feel that war against the hostile unbelievers is permitted, because they’ve been attacked and aggressed against for at least ninety years, since the May 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement (which divided the Middle East into areas of influence for France, Great Britain and others). Bin Laden frequently references that agreement. Other jihadis have a more expansive vision of this war, believing it began either with the Crusades or fourteen hundred years ago or even with the creation of man. To them, history has been a constant fight between the believers and unbelievers, light and dark, truth and falsehood. Thus, for jihadis, all their wars have been defensive.

Finally, jihadis want to create an Islamic state for all the reasons that Islamists do — so that Islam will be correctly practiced, so that sharia law will be imposed, etc — but also to carry on this eternal war. Eternal war is the only foreign policy they envision for the caliphate, or Islamic state. When the war ends, it will be Judgment Day, the end of time. This is a dark, Manichean vision of the world.

As noted, the jihadis have very specific views of the concepts of tawhid, jihad, the Islamic state and da’wa.

Tawhid (one god)

Tawhid, the belief that there’s only one god and only he deserves to be worshipped, is as central a concept to Islam as the concept of the Trinity is to Christianity. Neither term actually appears in the sacred texts. But tawhid is understood from everything that is contained in the sacred text.

Most Muslims believe that — if one worships gods other than the true God—it is up to God to judge the unbeliever after death. God might have mercy on the unbeliever or he might not, but it’s his judgment, not something for other Muslims to decide. The jihadis agree that one should only worship the true God, but they also believe that tawhid includes the idea that God is the only law giver, only he — not people, kings or states — has sovereignty. Therefore, if anyone claims to have the right to make laws, he’s actually making a religious, not political, statement. He’s saying “I’m God. I know better than God. Here’s my vision for how humans should act.” In fact, they have committed Shirk, the worst sin within Islam. The jihadi believes that he has the right to immediately judge that person and send him to hell — there must be judgment here and now.

This implies that democracy is a foreign religion, not a political system. The jihadis feel that attempts to impose it are in fact efforts to convert Muslims to a different religion. In Iraq before the elections I saw posters proclaiming that “Anyone who votes in these elections has declared themselves an enemy of God and is following a foreign religion. Election booths are the places of worship for the foreigners.” If this makes little sense to us, it didn’t make much sense to most Iraqis, either. This is a minority, Wahhabi view, not the widely accepted vision, of tawhid.

Jihad (struggle)

Jihad is one of the most complex terms within Islam, with multiple definitions that seem to contradict one another. The term began as one thing and became something different within some hundred years of Mohammed’s death, and in the 19th and 20th centuries it evolved again.

Jihad means struggle or to strive hard for something. It doesn’t mean warfare. There’s a different word for war, and when Mohammed wanted to talk about war, he used that different word. There are two separate ways jihad is used in the Quran. One is striving to understand the Quran itself or to follow God more closely, the other is struggling or fighting against the unbelievers. After Mohammed’s death there was an outburst in Islamic fervor that led to the conquest of vast swaths of territory from Spain all the way to India within two hundred years. At the time it was viewed as a miracle, and therefore the term jihad began to change.

Success bred the idea that jihad was mostly about fighting. The Hadith, which were collected 100-150 years after Mohammed’s death, are all about fighting. The notion of internal struggle almost disappeared. One small group, the Sufis, did keep the idea of internal struggle alive, but none of their ideas were incorporated into the Hadith. (Today, 80 percent of the Islamic population has some connection to Sufism.) Over the four or five hundred years that Islamic law was codified, the notion of jihad as fighting dominated and turned it into just-war theory.

Two separate kinds of fighting were distinguished. One was an individual duty, that if Muslims were attacked, everyone in the community must join in the defense. The other was a communal duty, that if there were a certain number of Muslims out on the frontiers carrying out offensive raids, that was good enough for the community. So it has both offensive and defensive aspects.

The notion of an internal struggle remained within the Sufi community until about the 19th century, when Sufism began to spread widely and to influence and affect just about everybody’s thinking about the subject. The notion of the internal struggle became more and more important, and by the 20th century and certainly today, if you ask a Muslim what jihad is about, they will say “First, it’s about an internal struggle to follow God more closely, and only second is it an external struggle about defensive fighting if we’re attacked. Jihad as fighting is a matter for the state to decide.”

The jihadis hold that all this evolution over time is wrong, that there was only one true definition of jihad, and it was fighting right from the start. They attributed bad intentions to the Sufis (claiming they were afraid to fight), as they do to all their enemies. That’s actually purposeful, because within Islamic law, good intentions excuse almost everything. Thus to jihadis everyone has to have bad intentions. This is one of the reasons we may have trouble understanding them, and also explains why they have just as much trouble understanding us. If one has to read bad intentions into everything one’s enemy does, one will never understand what they are about.

Jihadis also believe that eventually they will repel all the people who have taken their lands, and that then they will have to go on the offense, because the war cannot end until the entire world has been conquered for their version of Islam. This is the defining point of the ideology of jihadism. To them, jihad is a matter for each individual since there is no authentic Islamic state to declare war. If you decide not to join them, you’ve declared yourself an unbeliever.

Islamic state (caliphate)

There are a wide variety of views within Islamic society about what kind of governance is Islamic. That is because Muslims define an Islamic state as a majority Muslim state. If a majority Muslim state decides on a given form of governance, it must be Islamically correct. On Islamic law, most Muslims will say “I think my laws should be Islamically inspired.” The Iraqi constitution in fact states this, meaning moral laws, because for most Muslims the only sense of morality comes from within Islam. So non-Islamic laws means immoral laws. Certain specific matters like divorce or inheritance law are generally widely understood, but other matters are vague. There is no idea of a correct form of governance.

A recent Newsweek article, “Caliwho? Why is President Bush talking about an Islamic caliphate? And what does the word mean?” made it sound as though President Bush had just made the word up. In fact, it has been around quite a while. What most Muslims understand about it depends on their country. In Iraq, they understand the Abbasid caliphate, which was centered in Baghdad and which saw the height of Islamic civilization, in their opinion. In Syria, they think the height of Islamic civilization was when it was focused in Damascus. If you ask the Turks, it was the Ottoman caliphate. The point is that there were numerous caliphates, and each country has their own notion therefore of what the caliphate was. What is agreed upon is that it happened a long time ago and can’t be brought back.

The jihadis, on the other hand, have very specific and yet maddeningly vague ideas about the caliphate, which to them is the only correct form of governance for a Muslim. It will have a caliph, territory, and the jihadis’ version of Islamic law. As to institutions, it needs only two: an army and an institution to promote virtue and prevent vice. There is no vision of economic, social or foreign policy, or a legislature, just the caliph, territory and Islamic law.

There are specific laws, rules and regulations within Islam covering on which foot one should enter a room, how to brush your teeth, how long your beard should be, how often women should shave, and yet they do not know what the state will look like. That is because Mohammed didn’t create a state or institutions, just a community of believers. The jihadis refuse to recognize that and insist they must have a state.

One gleans from the jihadis’ writings that after their state comes to control some territory and imposes its vision of Islamic law, then somebody will rise to prominence and be recognized by everyone as the caliph. This will turn the state into the caliphate, the only purpose of which is to spread the jihadist version of Islamic law so everyone is practicing it and to then make sure within the state that everyone is correctly practicing sharia. What the Taliban created in Afghanistan is a good image of the kind of state the jihadists believe they need to create in the caliphate. In fact, Bin Laden and Mullah Omar may have been within days of declaring Afghanistan the caliphate before 9/11, which was supposed to expel the US from all Islamic lands.