Center for a New American Security

A lot of people in Western Europe and North America (OK, possibly Australia too) are of the opinion that Islam = death, destruction and terrorism (with some female hating thrown in). Even those with a slightly more charitable bent of mind will automatically assume that the only way forward for the Muslim world is a development process that mirrors what happened in the West. This is not only a little limited in imagination but also plays into the latent fears of many in the Muslim world. Fears which are then skilfully manipulated by the messages put out by extremists.

Which is why I was surprised and pleased to see this pop into my inbox courtesy of the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor:

"CONTROVERSIAL GATHERING OF ISLAMIC SCHOLARS REFUTES AL-QAEDA’S IDEOLOGICAL CORNERSTONE"

I don't want to paste the full article as it's fairly long, so I'll sum it up. The gathering in question was a conference held in Turkey in late March attended by some of the most respected and widely followed Islamic scholars in the Muslim world.

Jamestown reports: "The conference was sponsored by two Muslim NGOs: the Global Center for Renewal and Guidance (GCRG) and Canopus Consulting. The GCRG describes itself as an "independent educational charity." Its president is Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah, a well known Mauritanian scholar of Islam who teaches at King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia. The GCRG vice-president is Shaykh Hamza Yusuf (a.k.a. Mark Hanson), an American convert to Islam who runs the Zaytuna Institute for Islamic studies in California."

The conference was held in Turkey's Mardin Artuklu University. The location's relevance in the grander scheme of things is that Mardin lends its name to the "Mardin Fatwa", the Islamic legal ruling issued by Taqi al Din Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 - 1328) who argued that it was Islamically permissible for Muslims to declare other Muslims apostates and set about killing them. Sound familiar? Yep, it's Ibn Taymiyyah's Islamic legal arguments that the likes of al-Qaeda use to justify everything from rising up against a tyrannical regime run by Muslims to suicide bombings and beheadings.

The scholars taking part in the conference (find a list of them here) issued a declaration (but not a fatwa) saying: "Anyone who seeks support from [the Mardin] fatwa for killing Muslims or non-Muslims has erred in his interpretation and has misapplied the revealed texts".

I wasn't aware the conference was taking place, but was really interested to hear that it had because many of those involved have also contributed to the project I'm working on in Pakistan, which is called Karvaan-e-Amn (there's a little Union Jack link that will give you the English version). Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah recorded a discussion programme for Pakistani television and Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric of Bosnia came on an official visit despite the security situation.

Make no mistake, you might not have heard about these people, but they are extremely influential in large bits of the Muslim world. They represent the mainstream world of Islamic scholarship that extremists cannot challenge head on since they don't have the same sort of traditionally recognised grounding. Instead, they rely on a different sort of legitimacy - the kind you gain from fighting a war or spending time in jail (or both). Imagine a "scientist" who got his "degree" on the internet telling people with doctorates in astrophysics from both MIT and Cambridge that while locked away by the government for discovering a secret project to build superweapons a dying alien imparted to him the secret of interstellar space travel... and it involves a food processor.

To help give you an idea of the kind of following I'm talking about, here's a few lines from an article I wrote in the Telegraph a year back when I covered a different gathering in Mali attended by similar figures:

"As the conference delegates started arriving in Bamako, the extent of their influence became clear. Shaykh Tijane Cisse from Senegal commands the devotion of over 50 million people in West Africa... Fifteen minutes after he arrived at the hotel without prior announcement, word spread around the city of his presence and a steady flow of followers formed a line leading to his room."

Looking back, "steady flow" was an understatement, the place was mobbed.

Sadly we are at a point where these men need to take a stand against an ideology that was pretty much buried with Ibn Taymiyyah and the Mongol horsemen he had in mind when he formulated it. It was dug up again in the 20th century by men and women who psychologically needed an Islamic justification to confront the injustices they felt were all around them.

It's also a measure of how badly "the war for hearts and minds" (to use a cliche) is going when it seems as if the standard bearers of the mainstream are actually the minority. So, if you happen to be among those  that think Islam is all about killing people and dragging society back to the 7th century, you have friends who.. well, actually do want to kill people and drag society back to the 7th century. And if you think that Muslims need to be converted/de-Islamised or any of the other Ann Coutler type stuff then you are giving ammunition to people like these guys:

"Reaction also came from an Iraqi militant group, Jaysh al-Fatihin (Conquering Army), which denied that circumstances had changed since the Mardin fatwa. "All of us know that the incidents most similar to our [present] situation were those that happened in the time of Imam Ibn Taymiyya..."

When Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric was in Pakistan he suggested that perhaps if Muslim scholars in the past had done a better job championing the cause of social and economic development along with accountable government and social justice maybe they wouldn't need to be now refuting an ideology their forebearers had not thought worth commenting on. Today, the problem that men like Dr Ceric, Shaykh Bin Bayyah and Shaykh Tijane face is that they cannot criticise the actions of Muslims in the light of Islamic injunctions without someone saying they are apologists. The Muslim versions of Ann Coulter are quick to point out, "If you don't condemn the injustices of the Western oppressors and their agents, you are excusing their actions."

If we all want to go forward in a non-Ann Coulter type way it is going to involve listening to grievances, because shouting them down or putting your fingers in your ears doesn't make them go away. It just gives someone else less savoury the opportunity to exploit them.

This NYT article is a good follow on from the academic paper in the last post.

Now, Londonstani has always been more than a little skeptical about Saudi and Egyptian de-radicalisation efforts. Mainly because it has seemed mostly political in its objectives. ie. to convince Western allies that they are part of the solution and not the problem. Also, there's the huge elephant-shaped question of the Saudi government's own domestic policies. These de-rad schemes usually happily bypass this by blaming "deviant" ideology.

However, this scheme touches on what we were discussing in the last post; psychological issues.

"Though the Saudi government tends to explain its rehabilitation program in purely Islamic terms, as an effort to correct theological misunderstandings, the new program also addresses the psychological needs and emotional weaknesses that have led many young men to jihad in the first place."

and..

"Though the exact nature of the role that religious belief plays in the recruitment of jihadists is the subject of much debate among scholars of terrorism, a growing number contend that ideology is far less important than family and group dynamics, psychological and emotional needs. “We’re finding that they don’t generally join for religious reasons,” John Horgan told me. A political psychologist who directs the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State, Horgan has interviewed dozens of former terrorists. “Terrorist movements seem to provide a sense of adventure, excitement, vision, purpose, camaraderie,” he went on, “and involvement with them has an allure that can be difficult to resist. But the ideology is usually something you acquire once you’re involved.”

Psychological factors are not exclusive to young men from poor backgrounds. And, there's no suggestion that "mental deficiencies" are the only factor. Rather, there is an underlying thought processes going through a young man's mind when he's getting fired up listening to someone talk about the need to fight to protect weak Muslims. Does it give him a sense of self importance that was otherwise lacking? Is he willing to absorb with relative passivity the ideology being presented to him because the rhetoric is fulfilling a more personal need?

The motivating factors for radical extremism are different in different societies. Although, in Londonstani's experience the psychological aspect is similar, to some degree, amongst British born/raised and Saudi Muslims, who both come from relatively affluent societies.

Londonstani's been taking a peek at the dark side recently. You might wonder what this means. Has he been hanging out with Jihadis, again? Has he decided to call it a day with journalism and take up a government job?

Nope, it's much worse. Londonstani's been reading academic papers... yes, a complete mortal straight-to-hack-hell sin. He's not yet willing to admit (publicly at least) that the white towers of academia have even an iota of knowledge to impart to hard working journalists who spend time actually among the subjects studied from afar in dusty libraries.

However....

After spending quite a bit of time with radicals in London, Londonstani was pondering whether theologically based initiatives to de-radicalise were actually of any use. It was difficult not to get the niggling feeling that while the young men he was talking to justified their ideas Islamically, there were other more mundane issues of belonging, group dynamics, access to social mobility, community dynamics etc coming into play. By the end of the time Londonstani spent with them, he couldn't help wonder whether these guys would have happily made up the ideology they were spouting if it hadn't already existed before.

In his readings, he came across a paper comparing Sayyid Qutb, Marxism and National Socialism.

These lines near the end stood out:

"Since radical Islamism is not simply an aggressive variant of Islamic belief, but an
interpretation of the Qur’an in modern categories, it is an illusion to think that the
people attracted by this ideology can simply be turned around by information
and education. Rather, it is necessary to react to the ideology’s strategy of
unmasking the promises of modernity which have not been kept. To be able to do
this, however, one needs to realise that radical Islamism is part of the inside strug-
gle for the right understanding of modernity, a ‘dark side … of modernity’ as
Eisenstadt calls it. As long as western societies are unwilling to recognise the
modern character of radical Islamism, they will continually underestimate its
power over people and its attractiveness."

Interesting..

Londonstani has just realised that there is a cross over of reference points between the narrative Maajid Nawaz is describing and what is understood in the wider world.

When he talks about western-backed puppet regimes; many Muslims believe that it's likely ALL leaders in the Islamic world are actually Western backed. This includes countries like Syria, Iran, Ghaddafi etc. where the present policy of the United States seems hostile to those governments.

It's this tacit understanding that serves as a backlight to the conspiracy theories that pop up so often. And like all sweeping simplistic generalisations it emanates from a gap between people's outlooks and the events they see around them. For example, Muslims in Britain in the 1990s, found it hard to understand why America would want to go to war with Saddam who was an ally just a couple of years before. Therefore, there must be something dodgy afoot. Or, a more contemporary situation; Afghans find it hard to believe the US can put a man on the moon and built a floating battle island but not bring a bunch of warlords to heel, supply electricity, fix an economy or squash a ragtag army. Therefore, the Americans must secretly be supporting the Taliban. Al Qaeda's propaganda is very effective at tapping into these unvoiced suspicions. It's not like you hear Syrian President Bashar al-Asad saying, "Hey guys! You know what? I'm not a Western lackey."

However, to keep a sense of perspective, it has to be remembered that some silly percentage of Americans thought Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. And, many, many British people will tell you that Osama Bin Laden in the president of Pakistan.

In anycase, what follows below is the rest of Nawaz's introduction, where he describes his move away from the radical Islamist outlook he had adopted.

"In prison, I had time to contemplate my ideology and discuss it with other prisoners.

"Some of the people inside had been imprisoned from a young age for involvement in attacks carried out inside Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s by Islamic Jihad. Some of these people had changed their ideas and others had only become more stringent in outlook.

"One of the things that shocked me was how exclusionary Islamist ideology became the further you followed its route. I knew one man in prison who would condemn everyone he came across as a "kafir", unless they could prove their Islamist credentials to him. He basically lived in a world where he was the only true Muslim.

((Londonstani would like to add - at the risk of putting words into Nawaz's mouth - that he was probably also shocked by the realisation that those acting with the purest Islamist intentions can cause suffering, that the most committed Islamists can have violent disagreements, that many of the answers he sought involved simple solutions such as good governance, accountability and justice. And that many of his fellow prisoners could easily go from being the oppressed to becoming the oppressors because although they had beards and wore robes, their understanding of how to wield power was not very different from their jailers.))

"For a year after my return I continued with Hizb ut Tahrir. But I was suffering inner turmoil. Questioning the ideology of Islamism is like questioning your faith.

"But this is what I realised: Islam is a religion. This religion can cater for more than one political ideology. God did not reveal one political or economic system, he only laid out guidelines. So much of it is open to interpretation.

"I studied in prison. As an Islamist, I believed that sovereignty is for God alone. But then I realised that sovereignty is a modern concept. And that anyone who says sovereignty is for God is saying he is God because he is saying that he has sole right to say what God thinks.

"Isn't it about time we realised that political ideas are not from scripture but drawn up according to our preferences.

"In terms of identity, I realised that the companions of the prophet called themselves by their ethnic titles. For example Salman al Farsi - Salman the Persian. So you can be Muslim and Pakistani, Muslim and Syrian or Muslim and British.

"We have to promote debate so Muslims can develop a social contract which allows us to replace dictators.

"Islamism has to take responsibility for the way it has contributed to radicalism. I believe that Islamism is a modern phenomenon that has been attached to Islam and is detrimental to Islam.

"Islamism is an ideology that believes sovereignty belongs to God and there is such a thing as an Islamic state. I don't think there is an Islamic state anymore than there is an Islamic car."

Back by popular demand, the long-awaited Book Club has returned.

Wars are by their nature dialectical struggles in addition to being physical ones. Clashes of human interest are stemmed as much by clashes in belief as they are by clashes in human interest. Indeed, at times it becomes impossible to define the boundary between interest and belief.

Today's struggle against extremist Muslim takfiris is very much a war of ideas in the same way that the Cold War was a struggle not just of the Warsaw Pact against NATO but of ideologies based on state control versus those premised on individual liberty.

While US doctrine through the Cold War and particularly with AirLand Battle doctrine, ignored the primacy of ideas for the calculus of steel, our small warriors of the Cold War who wrote, for instance, the counter-guerrilla manual recognized that one had not only to counter the guerrillas but also their ideology and "narrative." In the wake of Communist insurgencies, these warriors knew where to look to understand the ideas they were fighting. The Communist pantheon included Mao, Lenin, and Marx and, depending on the particular country various local, contemporary ideologues.

In our new struggle, however, very few of the warriors who fight, even while understanding the importance of defeating extremism and terrorism not only militarily but also in the realm of ideas, are well-versed in the canon of our enemies nor the internal logic upon which it operates. Very few of them even know this canon exists (or worse believe that the Koran is sufficient to explain the ideology of Osama bin Laden), and so today's book club focuses on the ultimate work of arguably the "Karl Marx" of al-Qaeda, Seyyid Qutb's Milestones.

Qutb himself received a secular higher education in Egypt and served both as a teacher and administrator within Egypt's secular public education system. He undertook graduate studies in the United States, and the experience radicalized him as an opponent of what he thought was the West's immorality. After joining the Muslim Brotherhood, he supported the Free Officers Movement and Nasser's 1952 coup only to eventually come to oppose Nasser for failing to implement Islamic law (Shari'ah). Nasser eventually had him thrown in prison, where Milestones was composed, and the text of Milestone's was used as the main evidence to send Qutb to the gallows. He was executed by Nasser in 1966.

Milestones' basic argument is that the world, after the death of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) reverted back to a pre-Islamic state called Jahiliyyah in Arabic. This Jahiliyyah, According to Qutb:

takes the form of claiming that the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behavior, and to choose any way of life rests with men, without regard to what God has prescribed…

The most extreme form of Jahiliyyah in the eyes of Qutb was the claim of sovereignty by the state.

Any system in which the final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the sources of all authority are human, deifies human beings by designating others than God as lords over men. This declaration means that the usurped authority of God be returned to Him and the usurpers be thrown out—those who by themselves devise laws for others to follow, thus elevating themselves to the status of lords and reducing others to the status of slaves. In short, to proclaim the authority and sovereignty of God, means to eliminate all human kingship and to announce the rule of the Sustainer of the universe over the entire earth.

Qutb believed that the state claim of sovereignty over the individual was a fundamental usurpation of their freedom to choose or reject the path of Islam. The rule of Islam was needed, he believed, not to force Islam upon unbelievers but rather to give them a choice:

It should leave every individual free to accept or reject it, and if someone wants to accept it, it should not prevent him or fight against him.

At first, this seems like less than a radical thought which could be accommodated by allowing Muslims to worship freely. Yet Qutb made clear that such accommodation within existing societies was not enough:

Sometimes it appears in the form of a society in which God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and His rule on earth is suspended…In this society, people are permitted to go to mosques, churches and synagogues; yet it does not tolerate people’s demanding that the Shari’ah of God be applied in their daily affairs. Thus, such a society denies or suspends God’s sovereignty on earth…

In fact, Qutb said:

Other societies do not give it any opportunity to organize its followers according to its own method, and hence it is the duty of Islam to annihilate all such systems, as they are obstacles in the way of universal freedom.

It was here that Qutb marked his major departure from mainstream Islamic thought. Qutb rejected the idea of "defensive jihad," that is that violent jihad was only permissible in response to an external invasion of a Muslim homeland.

To begin with, Qutb rejected the very idea of a homeland as un-Islamic. The Land of Islam (Dar al-Islam) was not the traditional lands held by Muslims or the lands with Muslim leaders but was exclusively the areas held by true believers implementing God's law, Shari'ah. The rest of the word was the Land of War (Dar al-Harb--translated more eloquently as the "home of hostility" in Dar al-Ilm's very readable English translation). Because "all societies existing in the world today are jahili," all of the world was essentially the battleground where jihad must be waged, not just some traditional homeland, which was as jahili as the rest.

"Indeed," said Qutb, "people are not Muslims, as they proclaim to be, as long as they live the life of Jahilliyah."

This act of takfir, that is declaring other Muslims to be kafirs or unbelievers, has remained at the heart of continued Islamic debate even within extremist circles and continues to separate the extremists of Al Qaeda from fundamentalist Islamists elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Qutb argued in Milestones that the path to freedom under Islam is establishing Islam in one of the predominantly Muslim countries. In this country, the true believers must establish the "vanguard which sets out with this determination and then keeps walking on the path, marching through the vast ocean of Jahiliyyah..." This path admits no compromise:

In the world there is only one party of God; all others are parties of Satan and rebellion.

The believer must seek to break the chains of Jahiliyyah and succeed or be rewarded with martyrdom in the attempt. Talk is simply not enough. Violent jihad must first break the bonds of humanity's usurped authority over God and only then can those living within an Islamic society be convinced by words of the true believers to pursue the path of Islam.

While Qutb sought return to a world dominated by Islamic precepts, it would be wrong to call the ideology anti-modern as many have done. Qutb saw no issue in the study of the natural sciences, of war, public administration, and other fields and believed that Islam's Golden Age at the forefront of science had been the result of society's relative nearness to the time of the Prophet (PBUH) rather than a departure from Islamic law. In fact, it was permissible, Qutb wrote, to study these disciplines from a non-Muslim until such time as Muslims were capable of leading in these fields.

Perhaps what is most disturbing about Qutb's Milestones is his appeal to widely accepted human values as the basis for his rationale. Qutb rails against sexual immorality in a way that could be mistaken for a stolen line from a Jerry Falwell speech:

On the other hand, if in a society immoral teachings and poisonous suggestions are rampant, and sexual activity is considered outside the sphere of morality, then in that society the humanity of man can hardly find a place to develop.

Nor is his writing on racism so far off from the sayings of Dr. Martin Luther King:

The "grouping" of men which Islam proclaims is based on this faith alone, the faith in which all peoples of any race or color—Arabs, Romans or Persians—are equal under the banner of God.

Yet the end to which Qutb took this thought in Milestones is deeply disturbing--worldwide war until the ascendancy and dominance of Islam over all. His writing has been profoundly influential in shaping the thinking not only of the adherents of al Qaeda but even of thinkers as far afield as the Shiite Khomeini. Moreover, Qutb's status as a layman writing on Islam rather than a traditional Islamic scholar laid the foundation for other laymen such as Osama Bin Laden to issue fatwas, rulings on Islamic law, that seek to realize Qutb's vision.

Qutb remains central to the war of ideas as he remains central to the ideology of Al Qaeda's global insurgency. For instance Al Qaeda in Yemen's January publication of a pamphlet entitled "Echo of the Epic Battles" contains excerpts from Qutb's writings. A December call to violent jihad on the website Ana al-Muslim sites Qutb as part of the justification. The December issue of the "Vanguards of Khorasan" magazine, a propaganda piece dedicated to the insurgents in Afghanistan, discusses Qutb's writings.

In listing the martyrology of the Al Qaeda movement after the successful assassination of Abu al-Layth al-Libi, commander of Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, al-Sahab (al-Qaeda's media wing) included Seyyid Qutb in their list of martyrs.

Understanding our enemies in the conflict of the 21st Century is necessary although insufficient to defeat them. Seyyid Qutb's Milestones is a good place to start.