Brooks, Bourgeois Rebels, bin Laden and Zawahiri
David Brooks explains that the terrorists are not anti-Modern Islamic
medievalists. They are in fact, like all terrorists, composed of middle
to upper middle class educated, alienated young men who seek to give
their lives meaning.
In other words, the conflict between the jihadists and the West is a conflict within the modern, globalized world. The extremists are the sort of utopian rebels modern societies have long produced.What does all of this mean?
In his book "Globalized Islam," the French scholar Olivier Roy points out that today's jihadists have a lot in common with the left-wing extremists of the 1930's and 1960's. Ideologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism. It draws the same sorts of recruits (educated second-generation immigrants, for example), uses some of the same symbols and vilifies some of the same enemies (imperialism and capitalism). -David Brooks, NY Times
The first implication, clearly, is that democratizing the Middle East, while worthy in itself, may not stem terrorism. Terrorists are bred in London and Paris as much as anywhere else.Why democratizing the Middle East is worthy in itself does not occur to me. However it is encouraging to see that the neoconservative bouey-in-the-mainstream Brooks no longer believes that democracy is some sort of cure-all salve for political radicalism and political violence. It is also encouraging that Brooks recognizes at least the difficulty of assimilating Islam. But Brooks is only half-right on his second point. The bin Laden movement is an attempt to fuse the nationalism of Muslim nations with the alienated radicalism coming out of second generation bourgeois Muslims immigrants. Attempting to "isolate the nationalists from the jihadists" would have been difficult in the first place, it is made more difficult when the clumsy foot of American power dances the democracy two-step over the Iraqi landscape.
Second, the jihadists' weakness is that they do not spring organically from the Arab or Muslim world. They claim to speak for the Muslim masses, as earlier radicals claimed to speak for the proletariat. But they don't. Surely a key goal for U.S. policy should be to isolate the nationalists from the jihadists.
Third, terrorism is an immigration problem. Terrorists are spawned when educated, successful Muslims still have trouble sinking roots into their adopted homelands. Countries that do not encourage assimilation are not only causing themselves trouble, but endangering others around the world as well. David Brooks, NY Times
The sobering fact about this war is that it is also not, as some conservatives and traditionalists (particularly Catholics) have argued, a religious war (disguised as a political one) between a modern and desacralized Christendom and a vigorous, unmodern Islam. I hate to disappoint my friends but this is not true. It is a convenient way of framing the debate, and rhetorically it is supposed to be helpful in the "culture war" that contests for the "soul" of Christendom. The war may become something of a religious war someday- but today it is primarily political war (dressed up, on the Muslims side as a religious war). The goal is to oust American money and power from Muslim nations, particularly in the Middle East so that Muslims can achieve their political ambitions - whether that be toppling regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, or engendering another pan-Arab war against Israel. Since, American power is seen as 1) unjust and 2) an obstacle - bin Laden ruled that it was not only lawful but a duty of Muslims to kill American soldiers and civilians and those who help them.
bin Laden's message calls out first, not to Islamic religious sentiments but to political ones - whether the nationalism of Muslims outside the Western world, or the alienation and searching radicalism of second generation immigrants within the Western world. bin Laden's fatwa bases its call for warfare on Americans and their allies on a list of political grievances.
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.Political grievances are later dressed up in religious garb. Muslims are today not being forbidden from making their haaj by American power in Saudi Arabia the way Christians were prevented from making pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the days preceding the Crusades. This bin Laden movement is not, as some have described the first Crusade "an armed pilgrimage" or an assertion of religious rights. It is a quest for power, control and influence.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So now they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. Osama bin Laden
Zawirihi, an eye-specialist by training, terrorist by choice issued a "warning" to the British today that underscores the political dimension of the war.
He said the two top Western allies risked losing thousands of lives if they did not pull out of Iraq or end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Muslim lands. "These policies (of British Prime Minister Tony Blair) will bring them more destruction after the explosions of London," Zawahiri said. -Times of OmanIt is the "policies" that Zawahiri seeks to see changed. If these men are intent on exacting a price, in flesh and treasure from American, for our foreign policy, it is no longer enough to assure ourselves, that because we are dealing with murderers and terrorists we will not change our policies. What is the price an over-arching global power can expect for its policies? Are we willing to pay it? Do we want to make Zawahiri a prophet when he says :
"The truth that (President George W.) Bush... hides from you is that there is an exit from Iraq except through immediate withdrawal. Any delay will mean only more dead and losses... If you do not leave today, you will inevitably leave tomorrow, but only after (you suffer losses) of tens of thousands of dead and many more injured." - Ayman al-Zawahiri as reported in the Times of Oman
Posted on 8/4/2005 11:02 AM
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Michael Brendan Dougherty
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Source: Trading Cricket for JihadNothing has changed during the war on terror as much as our definition of the enemy.In the days after Sept. 11, it was commonly believed that the conflict between the jihadists and the West was a conflict between medievalism and modernism. Terrorists, it was said, emerge from cultures that are isolated from the Enlightenment ideas of the West. They feel disoriented by the pluralism of the modern age and humiliated by the relative backwardness of the Arab world. They are trapped in stagnant... -
Source: Fatwa Against AmericaPraise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)"; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said "I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and
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DUBAI –– Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri warned Britain and the United States of more horror and destruction in a new videotape shown on Al-Jazeera television Thursday.He said the two top Western allies risked losing thousands of lives if they did not pull out of Iraq or end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Muslim lands.
Reader Comments (4)
Our immediate predicaments, and bin Laden's immediate grievances, do not amount to religious conflicts. You are correct there. However, I would contend that this present conflict--along with the problem of increasing Islamic immigration--is part and parcel of the centuries-old struggle between Christendom and Islam. The latter has never made any secret about its desire to annihilate the former, and it made every advance it could against the infidel Rome until it had simply lost its ability to compete with us in material strength. Political though these conflicts may be, I hardly think there is a chance that bin Laden would object to U.S. presence so vehemently had the Arabian Peninsula been Christianized. Of course, if that had happened, many things would be different, but I digress.
We must regard anything bearing the crescent with some degree of caution. We must also try to reverse the current demographic trends before Islam completes its silent conquest of post-Christendom.
This of course flies in the face of Liberal sensibilities. It is deeply offensive to them. So what? Liberalism grew up in a safe cocoon in Europe and the United States and has never really dealt with Islam save in platitudes or bombs. Liberalism has never confronted such a religion. When it met resurgent post-Revolutionary Catholicism it turned towards religious discrimination - for its own survival it may have to do so again against Islam. But after the ideological earthquake that was the New Left - does the "Left" anymore have such quickness in its survival instincts? Does it have guts? I would answer: No. Post-modernism, deconstructionism and the lesser intellectual fads of multiculturalism has disarmed Liberalism intellectually.
But this is presuming that Islam ever mounts an actual homegrown ideological challenge. I sumbit that this will not happen unless Muslims survive the seduction of Western capitalist materialism (probably I think) and grow to be at least twenty or thirty percent of a given polity (not enough data to be sure). As the "war" stands now- we are talking politics, influence and power within certain Middle Eastern regimes. bin Laden sets this conflict rhetorically within the context of the spiritual convlict between the dal-ar Islam and the dal-ar Harb (do I have those correct?). But this is necessary posturing.
I don't agree. Islam seems thus far to have been fairly resillient (as Catholicism would be today had it not been castrated in the 1960's) and refuses to be digested by the deracinating effects of liberalism. If there is any doubt about that, consider, once again, that bin Laden's recruits tend to be well-off and well-educated, and that the recent Londonian terrorists had appeared to be fairly well-integrated into British society.
The "freethinkers" and atheists of whom Hitchens speaks hold an ideology that is deeply rooted in Western thought, albeit a severely tainted version of it. Freethought and atheism are foreign ideas to Islamic civilization, being as they are parodies of Christianity. That may be one reason why bin Laden has to appeal to religious fervor: the secularism of the Ba'ath and similar pan-Arab nationalist movements is withering fast. It also explains why we will fail to win over the hearts of Iraqis unless we find a way to reverse over a thousand years of Islamic cultural buildup.
Liberalism grew up in a safe cocoon in Europe and the United States and has never really dealt with Islam save in platitudes or bombs.
No argument there. I have often thought of that myself. I also think it is kind of a poetic justice, in a way, that France, Germany, and Britain--three nations who, by and large, have never confronted Islam (save for France very briefly in the 8th century)--will be the first three in the modern era who have to deal with the paradox of liberalism in the face of ever-expanding Muslim populations.
But this is presuming that Islam ever mounts an actual homegrown ideological challenge. I sumbit that this will not happen unless Muslims survive the seduction of Western capitalist materialism (probably I think) and grow to be at least twenty or thirty percent of a given polity (not enough data to be sure).
Unless we get a set of Le Penists elected across Europe, and unless the Liberal government in al-Qanada is toppled very soon, I think the latter point is quite likely, especially considering that Muslims' resistance to Western materialism gives them such a high fertility rate.
bin Laden sets this conflict rhetorically within the context of the spiritual convlict between the dal-ar Islam and the dal-ar Harb (do I have those correct?). But this is necessary posturing.
I believe it's dar al-Islam (House of Islam) versus dar al-Harb (House of War).
Posturing it almost certainly is. But even the Ottoman Sultan was likely posturing a bit at times. That did not make him any less of a threat to the existence of Christianity.
Liberalism could succeed in Europe because the lumieres could invoke and misinterpret authorities from pagan antiquity as champions of a non-Christian, purportedly 'rationalist' order that could present an alternative vision of what it meant to be Western. One did not have to repudiate the entire history of Europe, just the unfortunate medieval bits. Muslims do not have any such alternative, except perhaps in Iran and Egypt with kitschy nods to their antiquities. Likewise there is no tradition of exegesis and textual criticism that could spur significantly different interpretations of Islam. Muslims simply do not have the intellectual tensions within their own tradition to self-destruct in the same way that Christendom did in the Reformation and Enlightenment (likewise they do not possess the tensions to create much of lasting value), so there will be much more resistance to the inroads of liberal ideas among Muslims than there was in Europe. Liberalism will fail to take root among Muslims who still want to hold to their religious tradition, because one cannot square individual self-interest with the mentality of complete submission to God in Islam any more than one can do so as a Christian.
One minor historical note: Britain, France and Germany have had extensive acquaintance with the Muslims, but it has usually been a pose of indifference or support to further colonial goals. The Kaiser was the only one daft enough before Dobleve to dedicate himself to the improvement of the lot of Muslims and their "liberation."