The Guardian, July 10 2005.
Along with the death and injury they inflicted, Thursday's bombings were a demonstration of an unpalatable truth. The threat of indiscriminate terror will be with us in any future we can realistically foresee. Terror has causes and it is right that they should be identified. The war in Iraq has given al-Qaeda a major boost, enabling it to link its extremist agenda with grievances that are widely felt in Islamic countries. At the same time, it has resulted in a massive diversion of resources from the real work of counterterrorism and significantly boosted terrorist recruitment.
The 'war on terror' suggests terrorism is a global phenomenon but, actually, it remains almost entirely national or regional in its scope and goals. The Tamil Tigers do not operate worldwide any more than the IRA or Eta. Only al-Qaeda has a genuinely global reach, and it has been strengthened by American policies that have turned Iraq into a terrorist training ground.
Western governments have helped make al-Qaeda what it is today, but it would be folly to imagine that any shift in their policies can neutralise the threat it now poses.
No longer the semi-centralised organisation it was before the destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda has mutated into a brand name that covers an amorphous network of groups that are linked together mainly by their adherence to an apocalyptic version of Islamist ideology. This network is the vehicle of a movement that has more in common with Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult whose members planted sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground, than it does with any version of traditional Islam.
It is a network that seems to be replicating itself in Europe and other advanced industrial regions, and if it turns out that the London bombings were al-Qaeda-related, the group that committed them could prove to be largely homegrown.
Despite the high level of globalisation of many of al-Qaeda's activities, it is a mistake to think it acts solely as an external trigger for terrorist activity. In fact, we may be witnessing the emergence of an indigenous version of terrorism in this country, and it is important that we understand that this is by no means unprecedented. Some of the most advanced industrial nations have produced terrorist movements, often driven by apocalyptic ideologies, in which the existing world is believed to be on the brink of an imminent, total and violent transformation.
Consider the US and Japan. In the decades before 9/11, terrorism in America was very much an indigenous phenomenon. The Oklahoma bombing of 1995, which killed more than 160 people, emerged out of a netherworld of shadowy right-wing militias that grew up during the Eighties and early Nineties. The world view of Timothy McVeigh, who planted the bomb, was shaped by neo-Nazi groups which believed the US was on the brink of a huge conflict in which it would be partly destroyed, racially 'purified' and then reborn.
The Aum movement grew out of Japan's subculture of new religions. Recruited from Japanese and American universities, and containing engineers and scientists with expertise in pharmacology and genetics, its followers looked forward to the annihilation of most of the human species. Only cult members would survive in the new world that would arise after the conflagration.
Apocalyptic beliefs of this kind recur in the most scientifically advanced societies and they have a long history. In late medieval times, they animated Christian millenarian movements, and the belief that an old world was ending and a new one beginning has been used as a justification of terror at least since the Jacobins, who, more than any other group, can take credit for originating the idea that society can be regenerated through violence.
A similar view inspired anarchist practitioners of propaganda by deed in the late 19th century. In the 20th century, versions of apocalyptic belief were not far under the surface of the Nazi and communist regimes, both of which were notable for their readiness to deploy terror and mass killing as instruments for reshaping human nature and society. Common to all these movements was the belief that the old world was ending and a new one coming into being, whose arrival could be hastened by the systematic use of violence.
In terms of its apocalyptic mindset, al-Qaeda is not unique, nor is it peculiarly Islamic. It is the most recent expression of a tradition of terrorism which has deep roots in Western religious beliefs and in modern revolutionary politics. The idea that violence can be used to remake the world has a powerful appeal, and if al-Qaeda is distinctive, it is in the ruthlessness with which it implements this belief.
Unlike most other terrorist movements, it seeks deliberately to maximise civilian casualties,and, as we saw in Madrid, its members are ready to embrace death in order to avoid capture. It is a potent mix and al-Qaeda seems to be attracting a new generation of recruits who have grown up in some of the world's richest countries.
Terror is not now, if it ever was, something that comes to us from outside. It is a part of the society in which we live. Both liberals and neoconservatives believe terrorism can be dealt with by removing its causes. The truth is less reassuring. Al-Qaeda has mutated into a decentralised, often locally based type of apocalyptic terrorism and, in this new guise, seems to be acquiring a formidable momentum. We are going to need all our resources of wisdom, guile and determination to deal with it.
Showing posts with label Terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terrorism. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 July 2008
How Marx Turned Muslim
The Independent, 27 July 2002.
Not ancient, but modern: John Gray argues that Islamist militants have Western roots
Some years ago -- just over a dozen, to be exact -- there was a good deal of talk about the collision of East and West. In the media and academy, the Cold War was routinely described as a clash between western liberal democracy and something else (Russian despotism, perhaps) that was definitely not western. In fact, the communist system from Lenin to Gorbachev was one of several attempts to turn Russia into a western society that the country had experienced since Peter the Great.
Soviet Marxism did not spring from an Orthodox monastery. It was one of the finest flowers of the European Enlightenment. Equally, the USSR was nothing if not an Enlightenment regime. The Soviet state was the vehicle of a westernising project from start to finish. The Cold War was a family quarrel among western ideologies, in which rival versions of political universalism struggled for hegemony.
Today, we are watching a rerun of that uncomprehending struggle. Of course, much has changed. Unlike communism, political Islam does not purport to be secular. For that reason alone, it is a puzzle for the many who still hold to the atavistic 19th-century faith that secularisation is the wave of the future. But the view that something called "the West" is under attack from an alien enemy is as mistaken now as it was in the Cold War.
Islamic fundamentalism is not an indigenous growth. It is an exotic hybrid, bred from the encounter of sections of the Islamic intelligentsia with radical western ideologies. In A Fury for God, Malise Ruthven shows that Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian executed after imprisonment in 1966 and arguably the most influential ideologue of radical Islam, incorporated many elements derived from European ideology into his thinking. For example, the idea of a revolutionary vanguard of militant believers does not have an Islamic pedigree. It is "a concept imported from Europe, through a lineage that stretches back to the Jacobins, through the Bolsheviks and latter-day Marxist guerrillas such as the Baader-Meinhof gang".
In a brilliantly illuminating and arrestingly readable analysis, Ruthven demonstrates the close affinities between radical Islamist thought and the vanguard of modernist and postmodern thinking in the West. The inspiration for Qutb's thought is not so much the Koran, but the current of western philosophy embodied in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Qutb's thought -- the blueprint for all subsequent radical Islamist political theology -- is as much a response to 20th-century Europe's experience of "the death of God" as to anything in the Islamic tradition. Qutbism is in no way traditional. Like all fundamentalist ideology, it is unmistakeably modern.
Political Islam emerged partly from an encounter with western thought, but also from revulsion against the regimes founded in Egypt and elsewhere in the aftermath of European colonialism. In Jihad, Gilles Keppel argues al-Qa'ida turned to global terrorism because, like fundamentalist groups in other countries, it has failed to achieve its revolutionary goals on home territory. In a magisterial study of the rise and decline of political Islam, Keppel maintains that Islamist movements have never gained sufficient support to produce a sustainable alternative to democracy. He argues compellingly that the failed Khomeinist revolution in Iran gained much early support from western-educated Marxists "projecting the messianic expectations of communists and Third World Peoples on to revolutionary Shiism".
The aspirations of these westernising radicals were defeated when Khomeini set about constructing a theocratic regime. That regime proved highly repressive, but -- if we credit recent reports of pro-western demonstrations -- it failed to eradicate the yearning for a more pluralist government.
The political failures of radical Islam in Iran and elsewhere leads Keppel to conclude that "the Islamist movement will have much difficulty in reversing its trail of decline". Here he may be optimistic. As he notes in his analysis of the Saudi regime, a major source of Islamist strength comes from the growing numbers of dislocated young men in the Gulf. The Gulf States are rentier economies, dependent on a single depleting resource to sustain exploding populations. Fuelled by an insoluble Malthusian dilemma, Islamist movements may well gain enough momentum to overturn pro-western regimes. The likely outcome is chronic instability for the region.
In the first and last chapters of The Clash of Fundamentalisms, a hastily assembled collection of autobiographical vignettes and commentaries on Islamic themes, Tariq Ali writes that he is not a believer. The veteran leftist need not be taken literally. What he means is that he has rejected Islam for another faith: a rather crude version of Enlightenment humanism.
The Clash of Fundamentalisms is well worth reading, if only because it shows that the harshest critics of fundamentalism are often exponents of a rival fundamentalism. Tariq Ali performs a valuable service by reminding us that Islam was once a tolerant and pluralist religion, more intellectually advanced than anything Christendom had to offer. Ironically, though, he seems to pine not for the complex culture that Islam once animated, but for that monument to Enlightenment fundamentalism, the former Soviet Union.
Here Ali unwittingly testifies to an important truth. A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with neo-liberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from "non-western" traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims.
In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind, the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: "the West" against the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel.
Not ancient, but modern: John Gray argues that Islamist militants have Western roots
Some years ago -- just over a dozen, to be exact -- there was a good deal of talk about the collision of East and West. In the media and academy, the Cold War was routinely described as a clash between western liberal democracy and something else (Russian despotism, perhaps) that was definitely not western. In fact, the communist system from Lenin to Gorbachev was one of several attempts to turn Russia into a western society that the country had experienced since Peter the Great.
Soviet Marxism did not spring from an Orthodox monastery. It was one of the finest flowers of the European Enlightenment. Equally, the USSR was nothing if not an Enlightenment regime. The Soviet state was the vehicle of a westernising project from start to finish. The Cold War was a family quarrel among western ideologies, in which rival versions of political universalism struggled for hegemony.
Today, we are watching a rerun of that uncomprehending struggle. Of course, much has changed. Unlike communism, political Islam does not purport to be secular. For that reason alone, it is a puzzle for the many who still hold to the atavistic 19th-century faith that secularisation is the wave of the future. But the view that something called "the West" is under attack from an alien enemy is as mistaken now as it was in the Cold War.
Islamic fundamentalism is not an indigenous growth. It is an exotic hybrid, bred from the encounter of sections of the Islamic intelligentsia with radical western ideologies. In A Fury for God, Malise Ruthven shows that Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian executed after imprisonment in 1966 and arguably the most influential ideologue of radical Islam, incorporated many elements derived from European ideology into his thinking. For example, the idea of a revolutionary vanguard of militant believers does not have an Islamic pedigree. It is "a concept imported from Europe, through a lineage that stretches back to the Jacobins, through the Bolsheviks and latter-day Marxist guerrillas such as the Baader-Meinhof gang".
In a brilliantly illuminating and arrestingly readable analysis, Ruthven demonstrates the close affinities between radical Islamist thought and the vanguard of modernist and postmodern thinking in the West. The inspiration for Qutb's thought is not so much the Koran, but the current of western philosophy embodied in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Qutb's thought -- the blueprint for all subsequent radical Islamist political theology -- is as much a response to 20th-century Europe's experience of "the death of God" as to anything in the Islamic tradition. Qutbism is in no way traditional. Like all fundamentalist ideology, it is unmistakeably modern.
Political Islam emerged partly from an encounter with western thought, but also from revulsion against the regimes founded in Egypt and elsewhere in the aftermath of European colonialism. In Jihad, Gilles Keppel argues al-Qa'ida turned to global terrorism because, like fundamentalist groups in other countries, it has failed to achieve its revolutionary goals on home territory. In a magisterial study of the rise and decline of political Islam, Keppel maintains that Islamist movements have never gained sufficient support to produce a sustainable alternative to democracy. He argues compellingly that the failed Khomeinist revolution in Iran gained much early support from western-educated Marxists "projecting the messianic expectations of communists and Third World Peoples on to revolutionary Shiism".
The aspirations of these westernising radicals were defeated when Khomeini set about constructing a theocratic regime. That regime proved highly repressive, but -- if we credit recent reports of pro-western demonstrations -- it failed to eradicate the yearning for a more pluralist government.
The political failures of radical Islam in Iran and elsewhere leads Keppel to conclude that "the Islamist movement will have much difficulty in reversing its trail of decline". Here he may be optimistic. As he notes in his analysis of the Saudi regime, a major source of Islamist strength comes from the growing numbers of dislocated young men in the Gulf. The Gulf States are rentier economies, dependent on a single depleting resource to sustain exploding populations. Fuelled by an insoluble Malthusian dilemma, Islamist movements may well gain enough momentum to overturn pro-western regimes. The likely outcome is chronic instability for the region.
In the first and last chapters of The Clash of Fundamentalisms, a hastily assembled collection of autobiographical vignettes and commentaries on Islamic themes, Tariq Ali writes that he is not a believer. The veteran leftist need not be taken literally. What he means is that he has rejected Islam for another faith: a rather crude version of Enlightenment humanism.
The Clash of Fundamentalisms is well worth reading, if only because it shows that the harshest critics of fundamentalism are often exponents of a rival fundamentalism. Tariq Ali performs a valuable service by reminding us that Islam was once a tolerant and pluralist religion, more intellectually advanced than anything Christendom had to offer. Ironically, though, he seems to pine not for the complex culture that Islam once animated, but for that monument to Enlightenment fundamentalism, the former Soviet Union.
Here Ali unwittingly testifies to an important truth. A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with neo-liberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from "non-western" traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims.
In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind, the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: "the West" against the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel.
A Trail of Terror Strecthing 200 years
The Times, 30 June 2007
At a time when Islamist terrorism seems to have returned to the centre of London, it is easy to forget that during the 20th century terror was used on a vast scale by secular regimes. Today suicide attacks are automatically linked with a belief in martyrdom followed by paradise in the afterlife. Yet suicide bombing of the kind we now confront is a terrorist technique that was developed by people with no such beliefs. Though they claim to reject all things modern and Western, Islamist terrorists are continuing a modern Western tradition of using systematic violence to transform society. The roots of contemporary terrorism are in radical Western ideology – especially Leninism – far more than religion.
Lenin saw himself as belonging in a European revolutionary tradition that began with the French Jacobins, whose use of terror he criticised only because he believed it was insufficiently merciless. For Lenin, as for Robespierre, terror was not just a means of defending the revolution against enemies but also an essential tool of social engineering.
Together with Trotsky, Lenin set up concentration camps, instituted a system of hostages to ensure obedience in suspect groups and executed about 200,000 people between 1917 and 1923. The Bolshevik leaders were clear that state terror was indispensably necessary for achieving a communist society in which the State – along with war, property, and religion – would no longer exist. It was Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, who pioneered state terror in Russia, and they did so in order to realise a vision of Utopia.
In this way the Bolshevik leaders were part of a long tradition, which continues today. In late 19th-century Russia there were the Nihilists – revolutionary intellectuals who believed spectacular acts of individual terror could shake the existing order to its foundations and help to inaugurate a new world. A seminal figure was Sergei Nechaev, author of Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869), in which he defended blackmail and murder as legitimate political strategies. We tend to think of a nihilist as someone who scorns all human ideals, but Nechaev and his like believed passionately in science, social progress and human goodness. In terms of revolutionary strategy they differed from Lenin, who condemned individual acts of terror as ineffective; it was highly organised state terror that he favoured. Yet Lenin and the Nihilists were at one in their faith that terror was necessary to advance Enlightenment ideals of human progress.
It might be thought that with the rise of Islamism, secular terrorism has died out. This is far from the truth. Suicide bombing may now be the Islamist technique of choice, but it was the Tamil Tigers – a Marxist-Leninist group that recruits mostly from Hindus in Sri Lanka, but which is militantly hostile to all forms of religion – that devised it. It was the Tamil Tigers that developed the explosive belt worn by Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, and up to the Iraq war the Tigers had committed more such attacks than any other organisation.
The first wave of suicide attacks in Lebanon in the Eighties was also mainly the work of secular groups. Of 41 attacks between 1982 and 1986, including the attack in 1983 that killed more than 100 US Marines, 27 were carried out by members of leftist groups such as the Lebanese communist party and the Arab Socialist Union. Only eight were Islamists, and three were Christians (including a woman high school teacher).
Secular terrorism has had a formative influence on the threat we face at present. Islamist thinkers have taken from Lenin a modern faith that is not found in either traditional Islam or Christianity – the idea that through the systematic deployment of violence a new world, even a new humanity, can be brought into being. Medieval Europe was the site of almost continuous warfare and religious persecution, while Islam has been divided, sometimes violently, practically from the beginning. Even so, before modern times it was never imagined that the use of violence could initiate a perfect society, or rid the world of immemorial evils.
This is a nonsense that emerged only with the Jacobins, to be inherited by Marx and later exponents of the radical Utopian strand in Enlightenment thinking. It is hideously inhumane to torture and terrify people in order to save their souls, but to do so in order to establish universal freedom is supremely absurd.
Faith is dangerous, as evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens never cease reminding us. But fanaticism comes in many guises. We would do well to remember that it was secular faith that inspired much of the terror of the last century. The fantasy that society can be progressively transformed by violence inspired some of humanity’s worst crimes, and it casts a poisonous spell today.
At a time when Islamist terrorism seems to have returned to the centre of London, it is easy to forget that during the 20th century terror was used on a vast scale by secular regimes. Today suicide attacks are automatically linked with a belief in martyrdom followed by paradise in the afterlife. Yet suicide bombing of the kind we now confront is a terrorist technique that was developed by people with no such beliefs. Though they claim to reject all things modern and Western, Islamist terrorists are continuing a modern Western tradition of using systematic violence to transform society. The roots of contemporary terrorism are in radical Western ideology – especially Leninism – far more than religion.
Lenin saw himself as belonging in a European revolutionary tradition that began with the French Jacobins, whose use of terror he criticised only because he believed it was insufficiently merciless. For Lenin, as for Robespierre, terror was not just a means of defending the revolution against enemies but also an essential tool of social engineering.
Together with Trotsky, Lenin set up concentration camps, instituted a system of hostages to ensure obedience in suspect groups and executed about 200,000 people between 1917 and 1923. The Bolshevik leaders were clear that state terror was indispensably necessary for achieving a communist society in which the State – along with war, property, and religion – would no longer exist. It was Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, who pioneered state terror in Russia, and they did so in order to realise a vision of Utopia.
In this way the Bolshevik leaders were part of a long tradition, which continues today. In late 19th-century Russia there were the Nihilists – revolutionary intellectuals who believed spectacular acts of individual terror could shake the existing order to its foundations and help to inaugurate a new world. A seminal figure was Sergei Nechaev, author of Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869), in which he defended blackmail and murder as legitimate political strategies. We tend to think of a nihilist as someone who scorns all human ideals, but Nechaev and his like believed passionately in science, social progress and human goodness. In terms of revolutionary strategy they differed from Lenin, who condemned individual acts of terror as ineffective; it was highly organised state terror that he favoured. Yet Lenin and the Nihilists were at one in their faith that terror was necessary to advance Enlightenment ideals of human progress.
It might be thought that with the rise of Islamism, secular terrorism has died out. This is far from the truth. Suicide bombing may now be the Islamist technique of choice, but it was the Tamil Tigers – a Marxist-Leninist group that recruits mostly from Hindus in Sri Lanka, but which is militantly hostile to all forms of religion – that devised it. It was the Tamil Tigers that developed the explosive belt worn by Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, and up to the Iraq war the Tigers had committed more such attacks than any other organisation.
The first wave of suicide attacks in Lebanon in the Eighties was also mainly the work of secular groups. Of 41 attacks between 1982 and 1986, including the attack in 1983 that killed more than 100 US Marines, 27 were carried out by members of leftist groups such as the Lebanese communist party and the Arab Socialist Union. Only eight were Islamists, and three were Christians (including a woman high school teacher).
Secular terrorism has had a formative influence on the threat we face at present. Islamist thinkers have taken from Lenin a modern faith that is not found in either traditional Islam or Christianity – the idea that through the systematic deployment of violence a new world, even a new humanity, can be brought into being. Medieval Europe was the site of almost continuous warfare and religious persecution, while Islam has been divided, sometimes violently, practically from the beginning. Even so, before modern times it was never imagined that the use of violence could initiate a perfect society, or rid the world of immemorial evils.
This is a nonsense that emerged only with the Jacobins, to be inherited by Marx and later exponents of the radical Utopian strand in Enlightenment thinking. It is hideously inhumane to torture and terrify people in order to save their souls, but to do so in order to establish universal freedom is supremely absurd.
Faith is dangerous, as evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens never cease reminding us. But fanaticism comes in many guises. We would do well to remember that it was secular faith that inspired much of the terror of the last century. The fantasy that society can be progressively transformed by violence inspired some of humanity’s worst crimes, and it casts a poisonous spell today.
The Pathology of Faith. John Gray reviews The Islamist
The Literary Review.
Ed Husain begins one of the chapters of The Islamist with a quotation from Syed Qutb, the chief intellectual founder of Islamism, outlining the purpose of Qutb's most influential book: 'I have written Milestones for this vanguard of Islamists which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be realised.' Qutb's use of the concept of the vanguard reveals one of the paradoxes of political Islam: a movement that is avowedly anti-secular, anti-modern and anti-Western, it has been profoundly shaped by modern Western secular ideologies. The idea of a revolutionary elite dedicated to leading the deluded masses to a perfect society is a borrowing from Lenin and the Jacobins rather than anything derived from Islamic theology, and - though the fact is rarely noted - the type of terrorism with which Islamist movements are most often identified originates not in the twelfth-century Assassins but with a present-day Leninist party. Suicide bombing is a technique that was pioneered and developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist organisation that until the Iraq war had committed more such attacks than any other single group. For all its talk of reviving a mediaeval caliphate, Islamism owes large debts to the European revolutionary tradition, and despite its tabloid description as Islamo-fascism radical Islam is better described as Islamo-Leninism.
Nearly all media commentary accepts Islamism at face value and endorses its self-image as the mortal enemy of the modern West. In contrast, Ed Husain, who has the penetrating insight of a former insider, is clear that this is the opposite of the truth. The idea of a pure Islamic state, he writes, is 'not the continuation of a political entity set up by the Prophet, maintained by the caliphs down the ages (however debatable)'. Rather, it is a response to secular modernity. It is striking how much Islamists have taken from Western thinkers who rejected traditional religions in order to promote surrogate political faiths. Husain shows how Taqi Nabhani, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who left to found the more radical Islamist organisation Hizb-ut Tahrir that Husain joined in his late teens, was much influenced by Hegel and Marx, while Nabhani's contempt for liberal democracy echoed that of Rousseau. 'Nabhani's ideas', Husain concludes, 'were not innovatory Muslim thinking but wholly derived from European political thought.' He might have examined other, more contemporary examples: for example, Ali Sharati, the predecessor of Ayatollah Khomeini as leader of Iranian Islamists in exile during the reign of the Shah, took his conception of martyrdom as a type of chosen death from Martin Heidegger, who for a time saw himself as the philosopher of the Third Reich. Rather than recovering Islamic tradition Islamist thinking has been shaped by the Western ideologues who - whether they realised it or not - supplied the intellectual armoury of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
A uniquely well-informed guide to the netherworld of British Islamism, Husain illuminates its many similarities with the Western-inspired revolutionary movements that wreaked such havoc in the twentieth century.
All the telltale signs of totalitarian thinking were present in the Islamists with whom he worked. They believed Zionist agents staffed the management of Tower Hamlets College where Husain moved to do his A levels after beginning his drift to Islamism at Stepney Green, an all-Muslim boys' school. In the prayer room at Tower Hamlets there was talk of a 'gay-Jewish conspiracy' to undermine Islamist efforts. Husain was inducted into a culture of secrecy - familiar to anyone who knows the workings of communist and Trotskyist parties - which aimed at penetrating other organisations (including George Galloway's Respect party) and using them as front organisations. Like movements of the far left in the past the Islamists were riddled with bitter internal conflicts. But in the eyes of the world they struggled to maintain a united front, and as Husain observes they did have one thing in common: 'we all despised traditional Islam'. Far from being an attempt to return to mediaeval conditions, Islamism is a prototypically modern ideology. A by-product of the dislocations of globalisation, it aspires to a new universal identity based on rejection of the past.
For Husain, during his period as a part of the self-styled vanguard of radical Islam, rejecting the past meant repudiating his family, and The Islamist is as much a memoir of personal struggle and inner growth as it is a report on a new type of extremism. Rebelling against his father (a pious Muslim appalled by his son's attachment to radical Islam), Husain came to see the easy-going pluralism of Britain today as a form of decadence. Under the influence first of a school textbook that emphasised Islam's incompatibility with secular politics and then of a friend with links with the radical East London mosque, he began to view himself as a jihadist committed to the violent overthrow of Western governments. It was as much the cruelty as the unreality of this vision that triggered Husain's disillusionment. Traumatised by the murder of a Christian fellow student and horrified by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he explored the subtle spirituality of the Sufi mystical tradition. Coming into contact with more scholarly and orthodox Islamic thinkers, he found an incomparably more humane version of his religion than that promoted by Islamists. From his confusion - which he recounts with fearless candour - he achieved a sense of spiritual purpose, which rather than alienating him from British society enabled him to appreciate its virtues.
The Islamist is first and foremost a riveting personal narrative, but it also carries a powerful and - for some - unfashionable message. Particularly among the new army of evangelical atheists, there will be those who see his story as another proof of the evils of faith schools and of religion in general. Yet Husain did not finally sever his links with Islamism by becoming a militant atheist and converting to an Enlightenment faith in humanity - as secular fundamentalists urge. He did so by rediscovering what he describes as 'classical, traditional Islam', which includes Sufi mysticism. At the same time as he rejected the pathological hostility of Islamists to the West he returned to a tradition that had not been deformed by Western political religion. Islamism is a real threat to peace and freedom in Britain just as it is in Muslim countries. But it is such a threat in virtue of what it has in common with creeds such as Leninism, from which it largely derives. Aside from all its social and geopolitical causes Islamism is at bottom an expression of the pathology of faith, and it will not be cured by another dose of the secular ideology it so faithfully mirrors.
Ed Husain begins one of the chapters of The Islamist with a quotation from Syed Qutb, the chief intellectual founder of Islamism, outlining the purpose of Qutb's most influential book: 'I have written Milestones for this vanguard of Islamists which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be realised.' Qutb's use of the concept of the vanguard reveals one of the paradoxes of political Islam: a movement that is avowedly anti-secular, anti-modern and anti-Western, it has been profoundly shaped by modern Western secular ideologies. The idea of a revolutionary elite dedicated to leading the deluded masses to a perfect society is a borrowing from Lenin and the Jacobins rather than anything derived from Islamic theology, and - though the fact is rarely noted - the type of terrorism with which Islamist movements are most often identified originates not in the twelfth-century Assassins but with a present-day Leninist party. Suicide bombing is a technique that was pioneered and developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist organisation that until the Iraq war had committed more such attacks than any other single group. For all its talk of reviving a mediaeval caliphate, Islamism owes large debts to the European revolutionary tradition, and despite its tabloid description as Islamo-fascism radical Islam is better described as Islamo-Leninism.
Nearly all media commentary accepts Islamism at face value and endorses its self-image as the mortal enemy of the modern West. In contrast, Ed Husain, who has the penetrating insight of a former insider, is clear that this is the opposite of the truth. The idea of a pure Islamic state, he writes, is 'not the continuation of a political entity set up by the Prophet, maintained by the caliphs down the ages (however debatable)'. Rather, it is a response to secular modernity. It is striking how much Islamists have taken from Western thinkers who rejected traditional religions in order to promote surrogate political faiths. Husain shows how Taqi Nabhani, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who left to found the more radical Islamist organisation Hizb-ut Tahrir that Husain joined in his late teens, was much influenced by Hegel and Marx, while Nabhani's contempt for liberal democracy echoed that of Rousseau. 'Nabhani's ideas', Husain concludes, 'were not innovatory Muslim thinking but wholly derived from European political thought.' He might have examined other, more contemporary examples: for example, Ali Sharati, the predecessor of Ayatollah Khomeini as leader of Iranian Islamists in exile during the reign of the Shah, took his conception of martyrdom as a type of chosen death from Martin Heidegger, who for a time saw himself as the philosopher of the Third Reich. Rather than recovering Islamic tradition Islamist thinking has been shaped by the Western ideologues who - whether they realised it or not - supplied the intellectual armoury of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
A uniquely well-informed guide to the netherworld of British Islamism, Husain illuminates its many similarities with the Western-inspired revolutionary movements that wreaked such havoc in the twentieth century.
All the telltale signs of totalitarian thinking were present in the Islamists with whom he worked. They believed Zionist agents staffed the management of Tower Hamlets College where Husain moved to do his A levels after beginning his drift to Islamism at Stepney Green, an all-Muslim boys' school. In the prayer room at Tower Hamlets there was talk of a 'gay-Jewish conspiracy' to undermine Islamist efforts. Husain was inducted into a culture of secrecy - familiar to anyone who knows the workings of communist and Trotskyist parties - which aimed at penetrating other organisations (including George Galloway's Respect party) and using them as front organisations. Like movements of the far left in the past the Islamists were riddled with bitter internal conflicts. But in the eyes of the world they struggled to maintain a united front, and as Husain observes they did have one thing in common: 'we all despised traditional Islam'. Far from being an attempt to return to mediaeval conditions, Islamism is a prototypically modern ideology. A by-product of the dislocations of globalisation, it aspires to a new universal identity based on rejection of the past.
For Husain, during his period as a part of the self-styled vanguard of radical Islam, rejecting the past meant repudiating his family, and The Islamist is as much a memoir of personal struggle and inner growth as it is a report on a new type of extremism. Rebelling against his father (a pious Muslim appalled by his son's attachment to radical Islam), Husain came to see the easy-going pluralism of Britain today as a form of decadence. Under the influence first of a school textbook that emphasised Islam's incompatibility with secular politics and then of a friend with links with the radical East London mosque, he began to view himself as a jihadist committed to the violent overthrow of Western governments. It was as much the cruelty as the unreality of this vision that triggered Husain's disillusionment. Traumatised by the murder of a Christian fellow student and horrified by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he explored the subtle spirituality of the Sufi mystical tradition. Coming into contact with more scholarly and orthodox Islamic thinkers, he found an incomparably more humane version of his religion than that promoted by Islamists. From his confusion - which he recounts with fearless candour - he achieved a sense of spiritual purpose, which rather than alienating him from British society enabled him to appreciate its virtues.
The Islamist is first and foremost a riveting personal narrative, but it also carries a powerful and - for some - unfashionable message. Particularly among the new army of evangelical atheists, there will be those who see his story as another proof of the evils of faith schools and of religion in general. Yet Husain did not finally sever his links with Islamism by becoming a militant atheist and converting to an Enlightenment faith in humanity - as secular fundamentalists urge. He did so by rediscovering what he describes as 'classical, traditional Islam', which includes Sufi mysticism. At the same time as he rejected the pathological hostility of Islamists to the West he returned to a tradition that had not been deformed by Western political religion. Islamism is a real threat to peace and freedom in Britain just as it is in Muslim countries. But it is such a threat in virtue of what it has in common with creeds such as Leninism, from which it largely derives. Aside from all its social and geopolitical causes Islamism is at bottom an expression of the pathology of faith, and it will not be cured by another dose of the secular ideology it so faithfully mirrors.
On Suicide Bombers.
The New Statesman, 12 September 2005
Until very recently, most suicide bombers were secular in origin. The techniques of suicide bombing were first developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group operating in Sri Lanka that recruits mainly from the island's Hindu population, but which - like Marxist-Leninist parties everywhere - has always been intensely hostile to religion. Until 2003, the Tigers were responsible for more suicide bombings than any other single organisation in the world, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Communists and socialists were responsible for most of the suicide bombings that occurred in Lebanon in the early 1980s, forcing the withdrawal of US and French forces. More than a third of the suicide bombings committed by Muslims between 1980 and 2003 were the work of members of secular groups such as the Kurdistan Workers' Party. The situation changed with the invasion of Iraq. Until that time suicide bombing had been unknown in that country. Since then, there have been more suicide bombings in Iraq than in any other part of the world, many of them carried out by Islamists. Yet their principal objective is to drive US and allied forces out of the country, a goal shared by Ba'athist forces left over from Saddam Hussein's secularist regime.
The practice of suicide bombing originated in secular movements with specific political goals, and even where it attracts Islamist militants it is employed chiefly to advance a definite political agenda. This is the conclusion of Robert Pape's recent book Dying to Win: the strategic logic of suicide terrorism, the most rigorous empirical study of the phenomenon to date. Pape argues that suicide bombing is a rational strategy. It has no essential connection with religion. Viewed as part of what military theorists call asymmetric conflict - the struggle of the weak against the strong - suicide bombing is a cheap, highly focused and devastatingly effective technique of warfare. It worked in Lebanon, and it seems to be working in Iraq.
Pape's analysis does an enormous service in showing that what many view as the most senseless behaviour can be understood in rational terms, but that terrorism - even suicide terrorism - is not a simple phenomenon. People take part in it for a variety of reasons, and thinking of suicide bombing solely as a technique of armed struggle risks missing its role in giving meaning to the lives of the bombers. Becoming a suicide bomber may be a strategic decision in Baghdad, but the disoriented young men who carried out the 7 July attacks in London seem to have had no clear objectives, just an overwhelming sense of alienation from society. For them, becoming suicide bombers may have been a refuge from anomie, the feeling of purposelessness that has often fuelled the growth of cults.
In Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott seeks to uncover the motives of the 11 September 2001 hijackers. Who were they, how did they come together and - above all - why did they do what they did? McDermott aims to answer these questions by giving as full an account of the events leading up to the attacks as can be pieced together from the sources currently available. The result of his efforts, involving years of investigation using sources from all over the world, is a powerful narrative that presents the most convincing picture of the 9/11 hijackers to date.
In the media, terrorists are often portrayed as dysfunctional human beings, but McDermott demonstrates that there is no distinctive terrorist psychological profile. The hijackers had very different personalities, and most were remarkable for their ordinariness. Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, was an anxious and puritanical individual, but the pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, who seemed strict and withdrawn when he first arrived in Germany, soon emerged as an "easygoing, robust, hail-fellow-well-met young man who loved to sing and laugh". Ziad al-Jarrah (who piloted the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania) was a handsome young man from a thoroughly secularised middle-class family. He married a lively Turkish student with whom he seems to have been, for a time, genuinely happy. The pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour, was a "meek and quiet" person who worked hard to get his flying licence but found difficulty getting a job, and spent a lot of time surfing the internet.
These are not the demoniacal psychopaths of media legend, but average types, with an unexceptional range of traits and problems, yet they ended up mounting an attack that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people. As McDermott shows in a meticulous reconstruction, their involvement in terrorism was not the result of a single decision but the end point of a long period of drift. Ziad al-Jarrah came from a secular Muslim background, but along with a number of others who turned to terrorism, he converted to a cultish version of Islam in Hamburg. No doubt opposition to western policies was a crucial factor in this conversion, but so were the psychological benefits the converts gained. McDermott writes that they "chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world-view, in fact, of a new world". For these men, becoming jihadists - not in the sense in which jihad refers to the believer's struggle for his own soul, but rather that in which it enjoins incessant struggle against unbelievers - resolved a chronic existential crisis. From being drifters, they became warriors.
It is natural to look for a rational explanation of terrorism. How else can we hope to control it? But human behaviour is often irrational, and suicide bombing does not always have well-defined political ends. Sometimes it is more like behaviour of the kind that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 people committed mass suicide in 1978. History is full of such apocalyptic movements, not all of them religious: many Nazis and communists were ready to kill and die in order to destroy the existing order of things. By doing so, they injected a kind of meaning into their lives, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that it is the same need that drives some suicide bombers.
Terrorism of this apocalyptic variety cannot spread unless there is a wider sense of grievance against the world, but it is not the work of ice-cold strategists. The ends it serves are inchoate, and it can be extremely amateurish in execution. McDermott notes that Ramzi Yousef - the "terrorist mastermind", also known as Abdul Basit Karim, who organised the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center - was so casual and disorganised in his methods that a CIA official described him as an "ad hoc terrorist". Yousef had only the vaguest and most unrealistic political demands, and the Liberation Army he claimed to represent was a figment of his imagination. Yet his attack killed six people and injured a thousand more. Ad hoc terrorism is a serious business, but it does not require a special sort of person to engage in it. With the right background of grievance and alienation, anyone can join in.
Until very recently, most suicide bombers were secular in origin. The techniques of suicide bombing were first developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group operating in Sri Lanka that recruits mainly from the island's Hindu population, but which - like Marxist-Leninist parties everywhere - has always been intensely hostile to religion. Until 2003, the Tigers were responsible for more suicide bombings than any other single organisation in the world, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Communists and socialists were responsible for most of the suicide bombings that occurred in Lebanon in the early 1980s, forcing the withdrawal of US and French forces. More than a third of the suicide bombings committed by Muslims between 1980 and 2003 were the work of members of secular groups such as the Kurdistan Workers' Party. The situation changed with the invasion of Iraq. Until that time suicide bombing had been unknown in that country. Since then, there have been more suicide bombings in Iraq than in any other part of the world, many of them carried out by Islamists. Yet their principal objective is to drive US and allied forces out of the country, a goal shared by Ba'athist forces left over from Saddam Hussein's secularist regime.
The practice of suicide bombing originated in secular movements with specific political goals, and even where it attracts Islamist militants it is employed chiefly to advance a definite political agenda. This is the conclusion of Robert Pape's recent book Dying to Win: the strategic logic of suicide terrorism, the most rigorous empirical study of the phenomenon to date. Pape argues that suicide bombing is a rational strategy. It has no essential connection with religion. Viewed as part of what military theorists call asymmetric conflict - the struggle of the weak against the strong - suicide bombing is a cheap, highly focused and devastatingly effective technique of warfare. It worked in Lebanon, and it seems to be working in Iraq.
Pape's analysis does an enormous service in showing that what many view as the most senseless behaviour can be understood in rational terms, but that terrorism - even suicide terrorism - is not a simple phenomenon. People take part in it for a variety of reasons, and thinking of suicide bombing solely as a technique of armed struggle risks missing its role in giving meaning to the lives of the bombers. Becoming a suicide bomber may be a strategic decision in Baghdad, but the disoriented young men who carried out the 7 July attacks in London seem to have had no clear objectives, just an overwhelming sense of alienation from society. For them, becoming suicide bombers may have been a refuge from anomie, the feeling of purposelessness that has often fuelled the growth of cults.
In Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott seeks to uncover the motives of the 11 September 2001 hijackers. Who were they, how did they come together and - above all - why did they do what they did? McDermott aims to answer these questions by giving as full an account of the events leading up to the attacks as can be pieced together from the sources currently available. The result of his efforts, involving years of investigation using sources from all over the world, is a powerful narrative that presents the most convincing picture of the 9/11 hijackers to date.
In the media, terrorists are often portrayed as dysfunctional human beings, but McDermott demonstrates that there is no distinctive terrorist psychological profile. The hijackers had very different personalities, and most were remarkable for their ordinariness. Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, was an anxious and puritanical individual, but the pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, who seemed strict and withdrawn when he first arrived in Germany, soon emerged as an "easygoing, robust, hail-fellow-well-met young man who loved to sing and laugh". Ziad al-Jarrah (who piloted the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania) was a handsome young man from a thoroughly secularised middle-class family. He married a lively Turkish student with whom he seems to have been, for a time, genuinely happy. The pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour, was a "meek and quiet" person who worked hard to get his flying licence but found difficulty getting a job, and spent a lot of time surfing the internet.
These are not the demoniacal psychopaths of media legend, but average types, with an unexceptional range of traits and problems, yet they ended up mounting an attack that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people. As McDermott shows in a meticulous reconstruction, their involvement in terrorism was not the result of a single decision but the end point of a long period of drift. Ziad al-Jarrah came from a secular Muslim background, but along with a number of others who turned to terrorism, he converted to a cultish version of Islam in Hamburg. No doubt opposition to western policies was a crucial factor in this conversion, but so were the psychological benefits the converts gained. McDermott writes that they "chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world-view, in fact, of a new world". For these men, becoming jihadists - not in the sense in which jihad refers to the believer's struggle for his own soul, but rather that in which it enjoins incessant struggle against unbelievers - resolved a chronic existential crisis. From being drifters, they became warriors.
It is natural to look for a rational explanation of terrorism. How else can we hope to control it? But human behaviour is often irrational, and suicide bombing does not always have well-defined political ends. Sometimes it is more like behaviour of the kind that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 people committed mass suicide in 1978. History is full of such apocalyptic movements, not all of them religious: many Nazis and communists were ready to kill and die in order to destroy the existing order of things. By doing so, they injected a kind of meaning into their lives, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that it is the same need that drives some suicide bombers.
Terrorism of this apocalyptic variety cannot spread unless there is a wider sense of grievance against the world, but it is not the work of ice-cold strategists. The ends it serves are inchoate, and it can be extremely amateurish in execution. McDermott notes that Ramzi Yousef - the "terrorist mastermind", also known as Abdul Basit Karim, who organised the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center - was so casual and disorganised in his methods that a CIA official described him as an "ad hoc terrorist". Yousef had only the vaguest and most unrealistic political demands, and the Liberation Army he claimed to represent was a figment of his imagination. Yet his attack killed six people and injured a thousand more. Ad hoc terrorism is a serious business, but it does not require a special sort of person to engage in it. With the right background of grievance and alienation, anyone can join in.
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