Ordinarily it would be proper if I plunged directly into my topic. By way of beginning I might say something like the following. To the extent that there is global terrorism, this is now, unlike in the recent past, more or less entirely associated with what has been termed radical Islam. Up to 30 years ago, global terrorism was Marxist. I would go on to say that radical Islam is a diverse phenomenon, describe its varieties and go on to enumerate its various causes and assess their relative weight.
But I’m not going to proceed in this fashion. Somewhere down the line I will address these questions. But these are not ordinary times and ordinary questions. So I must first begin not with what and why but with who. Who are the radical Muslims and who are the terrorists? Why proceed in this fashion?
I must make clear that I am not talking about all Muslims when I speak of radical Islam. Radical is a restrictive adjective. It does not refer to all Muslims. Even more restrictive is the term terrorist. Not all radical Muslims are terrorists. But how many of each are there? It would be important to know. There are after all more than a billion Muslims and a proper number would give us some idea of the proportions of the threat to America, not to mention other places. But the fact is that nobody knows. There are some who say or perhaps argue that there are no more than a few thousand terrorists and a few millions of radical Muslims. Others suggest that a quarter to a third of Muslims have become radicalized and that those willing to participate in terrorism are very substantial number. Still others, trying to be conservative in both directions – neither too alarmist nor too complacent – propose a figure of 10 per cent. But as I said before no one really knows. We have only guesses.
Moreover, whatever the number is it is not fixed. I leave aside the terrorists for the moment and focus on that larger group of Muslims who have been radicalized. This group sympathizes with the terrorists and frequently provides support of different kinds. But this number waxes and wanes. It does so in accord with the success or failure of the terrorists. No one has put the reason for this better than the arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden in the famous home video released in December. There was at the time of its release a great focus on the fact that in it Bin Laden admitted his responsibility for the attack of 9/11. But this is not all he discussed. In it he talked about his strategy and how he expected 9/11 to advance his goals. He used an equine analogy, saying that when there is both a strong horse and a weak horse, people are naturally drawn to the strong horse and regard that horse as good. They want to have or be with that horse. People are influenced by considerations of what is powerful and successful. Bin Laden indicated that by conducting attacks on the United States, including those of 9/11 and others which led up to it, he expected to show people that he was the strong horse. This would attract even more supporters to him and perhaps lead to violent events in other countries, including Muslim countries. In all this he would expand the power and range of radical Islam and his terrorist agenda.
Bin Laden’s equine logic was not faulty, especially in the Muslim world. But for the time being it is working against him rather than for him as a result of the American counter attack and its success. He has become the weak horse rather than the strong horse and sympathy or support for him has diminished. It must in my opinion be diminished further by visiting upon him further defeats as well as defeats upon all those inclined to support and protect him and other terrorists, up to and including states which are involved. This will of course be good for us. But I also believe that it will be good for the Muslim world. For the latter will then be forced to conclude that the terrorist program and that of radical Islam is a dead end. This is the condition of seeking an alternative Muslim future.
It is fair to say that the importance of this is not appreciated universally. Some argue that the attacks on the terrorists create sympathy for them and that their defeat creates despair. It is further argued that despair is one of the roots of terrorism and therefore one is only likely by this course of action to encourage further terrorism. People need hope and bin Laden gives it to them. Perhaps he does. People certainly need hope. But to put it simply they need the right kind. The hope Bin Laden offers is the wrong kind. Precisely if he does give a certain kind of hope it is our responsibility to induce despair. Only then might the Muslim world properly address the genuine causes of its despair and have a chance of conceiving and pursuing the right kind of hope.
This brings me at last to one of the announced subjects of this talk – the causes that have given rise to radical Islam and the terrorists who live off of it. But properly speaking, I should speak first of what radical Islam is. I am departing from this procedure and the Platonists amongst us may object. I hope to satisfy them later on. I also hope that it will become clear why it is useful to proceed in this fashion.
So let me proceed to the causes of radical Islam and begin by enumerating and addressing some of the factors that are now often described as so-called “root causes.”
One cause often cited is poverty. Poverty it is said leads to desperation and desperation to violence. Another is demographics, meaning by that the explosion of the population in many Muslim countries, an explosion which now means that a vast portion of the population, often a majority, consists of young people below the age of 25. Owing to economic stagnation, many or most of the young males lack jobs and prospects. This coupled with the violent tendencies of young males creates a vast pool from which radicals and terrorists can recruit.
Yet another cause cited are the actions of America and other Western countries. These are alleged to have treated the Muslim world unjustly and even to have humiliated it. Contemporary examples are principally three-fold: American if not Western support for Israel; American sanctions on Iraq which are alleged to have caused vast suffering among the Iraqi people; the American “occupation” of Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest territory. In the last case, what is meant is the presence of American troops and bases on Saudi soil which are a vestige of the vast assemblage of forces which conducted the Gulf War and forced Iraq to retreat from its occupation of Kuwait. Although Bin Laden regularly cites all three as American crimes, he reserves special animus for the last. To these three grievances, one may now add America’s attack on Afghanistan and its Taliban regime, including the bombing of innocent civilians, as well as the pressure placed on other Muslim countries, such as Pakistan.
Connected with these factors is another alleged cause - the feeling among Muslims that they are powerless to redress these injustices and humiliations. They do not even have the power to redress the injustices to which their own governments subject them. Muslim countries, practically everywhere, do not afford their citizens political participation. They are by and large ruled by autocrats, some more, some less benign. Muslims therefore find little avenue for political expression and redress except through the affirmation of radical Islam. One might add that Muslim governments sometimes indulge and even encourage such affirmations, at least in speech, as a means of directing popular anger away from themselves and towards other objects, like America, the West and Israel.
This general situation might be understood as the fault of Muslims or Muslim rulers. But it is also frequently treated as a result of American policy. America, it is argued, has supported autocratic regimes where they have been friendly to us and have made little to no effort to encourage democratic participation. Prominent examples include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah and even Iraq when it was presumed to be a bulwark against the radical new Iranian regime founded by Ayatollah Khomeini. We even sided with Pakistan against India, though the latter was and is a democracy, when India was allied with the Soviet Union. Finally, of course there is the case of Afghanistan itself since during the Soviet Occupation we sided with the Muslim resistance which later turned out to be far from being democratic and representative.
In all these cases, it is charged that we have put our specific national interests however conceived – stability, oil etc. – ahead of democratic principle and the interests of the ordinary Muslim citizen.
There is without question something to all of these explanations – in some cases more and in others less. The least important is poverty since the majority of the leaders of radical Islam have come from middle class or rich families and most have received a Western education.
Frustration at the lack of prospects and the incapacity to affect this through political participation is a more serious cause. But this may stated more generally. The Muslim world is politically, economically and scientifically stagnant not only vis-à-vis US and Western Europe but East and Southeast Asia. The Muslim world has little if any power collectively. This means not only that it is unable to address real or alleged injustices. It is humiliating as such to lack power. It has so little power that it cannot redress injustices committed by one Muslim state on another.
A case in point is Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the American presence in Saudi Arabia in which it resulted. As I mentioned the latter is regarded by bin Laden as a particularly grievous matter. Bin Laden did not and does not regard Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as legitimate. But he argued at the time that it could be and should only be repulsed by an Arab Muslim force. He himself offered to assemble such a force out of the so-called Afghan Arabs, Arabs who had fought against the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan. Never mind that this probably would not have worked. In that event Sadam’s occupation of Kuwait and maybe even of Saudi Arabia would be preferable to an “occupation” of American troops, representatives of the Crusader-Zionist Alliance. Better a bad Muslim than an infidel, no matter how useful.
In this way Bin Laden and other terrorists indicate that the lack of power, especially vis-à-vis the West, is central to their concerns. They claim to have adopted terror precisely because it is the weapon of the weak.
The whole state of affairs is perhaps best captured by the rumor that swept the Muslim world just after 9/11. According to it, the attack was not the work of Muslims or al-Qaeda. Rather it was the work of either Israel or the US or both. The goal was to provide a pretext for the massive American attack that followed and that served the purpose of further weakening and humiliating the Muslim world.
This rumor, fantastic as it may sound, is widely believed. To support it various facts are alleged; these are too ridiculous to bear consideration. More interesting is the circumstantial argument made in behalf of the thesis. It is asserted that Muslims and especially Arabs could not have carried out this attack. It was so to speak an organizational impossibility. For the attacks were well-timed and well-coordinated and reflected careful planning and patience.
This, as the argument goes, proves that Muslims had no hand in it. Because none of these are so-called “Muslim characteristics.” In particular, it is asserted that Muslims are never on time for anything.
The embrace of this rumor obviously serves a certain purpose. It allows Muslims to absolve themselves or at least their world of responsibility for the attack. Indeed, it even allows them to engage in righteous indignation at yet another misfortune visited upon them in the form of a false accusation.
But it is also of course an expression of the sense of one’s powerlessness and in itself it is an acknowledgement of a certain humiliation.
It conveys the sense that it is humbling to be a citizen of a Muslim country and in conventional terms it is. Islam and its politics count for very little in the world. They would count for nothing at all but for two things – population and oil.
This would be bad enough. But it is made worse still by the fact that the current situation is seen by Muslims through the prism of the full sweep of Muslim history, from the founding of Islam in 622. It is especially seen in the light of its first 1000 years.
During that period Islam not only counted for something politically in the world. It counted for more than anything else – more than any other civilization and more than any country. Muslim states were the most powerful politically and militarily and they were more prosperous. The Muslim world has then a glorious past – a truly glorious past. Its glories included not only political and military success but great cultural, intellectual and scientific achievements.
As I said this situation lasted for about a thousand years. As late as 1600, a Muslim state, the Ottoman Empire, was the most powerful state in the world and one of the most impressive political and military achievements of all time.
But the crucial fact today is that the glorious period of Islam is, at least for the present, is in the past. Islam has a glorious past but a dismal present and perhaps a dismal future as well. This weighs heavily on the Muslim world.
The sense that this is the case is not entirely new and therefore is not by itself an explanation of the rise of radical Islam and terrorism. For at least 200 years and perhaps earlier, the important powers within the Muslim world have been aware of Islam’s decline and have tried to remedy it. There have in fact been many attempts to do so and they have adopted a whole variety of means, most of which were designed to lead the Muslim world to adopt and adapt things which were thought to have made the Western world strong (Socialism, Nationalism etc.).
All of these have failed. A sad but particularly eloquent statement is:
We tried liberalism and military dictatorship, a multiparty system and one-party rule, capitalism and socialism, an alliance with the East followed by an alliance with the West, Egyptian nationalism and pan-Arabism. . . . Our writers and journalists have turned their coats a thousand times; we sang praises of our rulers and then we damned them, we built statues to these rulers and them tore them down, we named streets after them, then changed these names. We fought Israel then made peace with it, we resisted American influence, then succumbed to it; we signed a friendship treaty with the Russians then tore it up. What haven’t we tried yet? What remains to us other than plunging deep into a past that we have adorned, from which we have deleted all that was painful and problematic and retained what was bright and worthwhile? (Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, 229-230).
As Ahmed Amin says, radical Islam presupposes these earlier efforts and represents the latest in the line. But it claims that it is different from all the rest in that it has abandoned the unhealthy and fruitless attempt to imitate the West and returned to seeking an Islamic solution. Indeed, that Islam is itself the solution is the most typical slogan of the radicals. It is the solution to the long decline of Islamic political and military power, material prosperity and prestige.
And for a moment on 9/11 it did seem to be the solution, in the sense that it had attacked America, the world’s greatest power, the world’s so-called hyper power, and done it damage, significant damage materially, symbolically and spiritually.
That is why the first reaction in some, perhaps many parts, of the Muslim world was not, as in the rumor I mentioned earlier, “we couldn’t have done it,” but rather “we did do it,” and a celebration of that fact.
But radical Islam or at least its terrorist variety is not a solution. Or at best only a partial and perverse one. It can seek to destroy us and it might succeed. It would need to renew its attacks and it would need new weapons as well – weapons of mass destruction or perhaps the weapons of cyber-warfare. These would not necessarily destroy us simply but disrupt and render chaotic our normal way of life. We had a sample of that in the days following 9/ll.
As I said this approach might succeed in a certain way. It is always easier to destroy then to build and create.
But that would not as such restore vitality to the Muslim world itself. At best it would bring the non-Muslim world to a level lower and more equal to that of the Muslim world.
Brings us back to the question of radical Islam itself and what precisely it is. I have already mentioned something of its general orientation as it emerged against earlier efforts of reform. This general tendency proposes what it calls a return to Islam, an Islam which allegedly existed in the pristine days of the prophet Muhammed, his companions and true successors. According to this view, it was the failure to adopt this approach which doomed all earlier reform efforts to failure.
The emergence of this view is often dated to the 1920’s and the creation of a group, in Egypt, generally known as the Muslim Brotherhood. This group and its various offshoots has been and remains important. But the situation today presents a more complicated picture by virtue of other important strands of this movement.
One is what may be termed Khomeinism after the founder of the Iranian and Shiite version of radical Islam and the first successful founder of a modern radical Muslim state. It is true that as an adherent of Shiism the minority branch of the two main forms of Islam there may be differences which separate him from the Sunnite version of radical Islam. Nevertheless, the fact that Khomeini was successful proved to be enormously inspiring to other radical Muslims, including Sunni radicals. Moreover, as has been recently shown, Khomeini himself and some of his most important companions were originally influenced by earlier Sunni radicals who formed part of the Muslim Brotherhood movement.
Finally, there is Wahhabism which is the reigning form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. This movement was founded more than 200 years ago in the 18th century by a man called Ibn abd-al- Wahhab. It came to light and to power slowly through an alliance with one Arabian family and clan – the Saudi. The latter set out to conquer the Arabian peninsula and succeeded in subduing the greater part and conquering Mecca and Medina, the two most holy Muslim cities. They accomplished the latter in the 1920’s with the help of Wahhabism. The latter provided the Saudi family with a certain amount of legitimacy as well as fanatic energy.
Until recently, Wahhabism’s association with an apparently traditional situation and group – a bedouin Arab clan – and the fact that it was already 200 years old meant that it was often treated outside of radical Islam. But it might just as easily be regarded as the very first modern radical Islamic movement. At a minimum, it preaches the same return to a pristine Islam. Equally important is the fact that it has drawn increasingly close to other radical Islamic groups since the late ‘60’s and ‘70’s. This culminated in the Bin Laden’s establishment of the terrorist network known as al-Qaeda. This involved the merging of various radical groups, in particular Wahhabi radicals like bin Laden with Egyptian radicals like his second-in-command, al-Zuwahiri.
Wahhabism also thinks of itself as a worldwide movement and has attempted to spread its view with the help of wealthy and powerful partisans throughout the Muslim world. This was plain through its influence on the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. It also means the support throughout the world of schools, mosques, imams and teachers who embrace the Wahhabi view and aim to spread it. This is true in various parts of the Muslim world like Pakistan and Indonesia. It is also true in Western countries including the United States.
There is at least one more factor that complicates a characterization of radical Islam. As I mentioned, it consistently appeals to the earliest period of Islam and claims that its principal goal is to reestablish that kind of Islam. It aims at a purification of Islam from the corruption it is alleged to have undergone. Part of this corruption entails the intrusion of Western ways into the Islamic world. But the corruption is not exclusively Western. The present tradition of Islam is itself corrupt and became so even before the West became dominant. It includes things like the trend towards Islamic mysticism known as Sufism and generally speaking the privatization of religion as personal practice. This is why one has to go back to the absolute beginning. This is asserted to require at least three things. One is a very determined focus on the Qur’an and to the depreciation if not complete neglect of most other traditional religious literature. This one sees reflected in the curriculum of the medresehs or religious schools set up by the radicals in Pakistan and other places. Indeed, the radicals frequently know little of traditional Islamic learning except for the Qur’an. The second is the establishment or reestablishment of Sharia, the Muslim law, as the actual law of the land in Muslim countries. This means the application of Muslim law to all areas of life, civil, criminal and social – meaning family and personal law – as well as religious ritual and observance. The third is the embrace of jihad or holy war both to defend Islam from Western assault and to advance it where possible. As a result particularly of the second requirement, Jihad, in parts of the Muslim world the radicals are known simply as Jihadis and that is perhaps the name we should use as well.
However, despite the orientation by the past or original Islam, radical Islam is a contemporary or modern movement. It is an ideology or ism. This means among other things that along the way it has adopted and adapted some things which were originally features of other modern movements or more to the point Western movements, like Fascism and Communism. Indeed, earlier Muslim radicals often had a certain admiration for these movements and sometimes cooperated with them insofar as they were enemies of Western democracies. Because this is the case and because the movement I have called radical Islam often transcends traditional Islamic distinctions, for example Sunni and Shiite, there has been a large and continuing debate about what term to apply to it. A remarkably large number of names have been proposed both before and after 9/11.
Let me provide a sample:
1. Radical Islam
2. Fundamentalist Islam
3. Political Islam
4. Militant Islam
5. Islamism
6. Neo-Kharijite – after an early Muslim sect
7. Islamo-Fascism
8. Islamic Nihilism
This list will probably continue to grow. It may grow because this movement may change as it has in the past to embrace new things and drop old ones. It is a work in progress if that is the right word.
Where does that leave us today? At the present time, what seems most important about radical Islam is the fact that Wahhabism seems more and more to be playing a leading role. As I said before from being the sectarian view of an obscure Arabian clan it has become a worldwide movement. This could change but for the present it presents the United States and other Western countries with a particular problem for its home base remains Saudi Arabia.
I suspect that in the near term the future of relationship with Islam, radical or otherwise, will turn on two things: The success of our arms in bringing the terrorists to heel and our approach to the challenge of Wahhabism.
