Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (14 page)

Rather, as with current jihadi operations, anarchist attacks were usually carried out by peer groups (mostly friends and sometimes kin) who self-organized in operations of relatively few people. As with jihadism, anarchist ideology and operations often parasitized preexisting local ethnic and national aspirations and organizations: for example, the Serbian “Black Hand,” which plotted the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand, sparking World War I. Following the war, Bolshevism effectively co-opted militant anarchism as a world political force. The process culminated with Stalin undermining the anarchists on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, giving a temporary victory to fascism and impetus for another world war.

With communism’s demise came the unipolar world and a vacuum for jihad’s rise.

THE AL QAEDA RIPTIDE

Al Qaeda today is mostly an idea; more a violent Islamist revivalist social movement than a terrorist organization. The Al Qaeda of the media is just a small organization within this larger social movement. After the U.S.–led invasion of Afghanistan, its shattered remnants mostly fled to the Pakistan frontier, where they now spend much of their time hiding out in caves from Predator drones. But the viral movement continues to fester among immigrant youth in Europe, and to spread in places like Yemen, Somalia, the Sahel, and the World Wide Web, where explosive dreams of glory can easily outshine the inglorious drudgery of deadened hopes.

Al Qaeda’s story has been told before,
¹³
so here I give just a brief overview. People often confuse Al Qaeda the terrorist organization with the Qaeda-inspired jihadi social movement, because for about five years, 1996–2001, Al Qaeda more or less controlled the social movement. The segment of that movement that emerged as a threat to the United States came out of Egypt. Most of the leadership and ideology of Al Qaeda hews to the philosophy of Egypt’s Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), who was hanged by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser for sedition, and from Qutb’s intellectual progeny, who assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, released most of those arrested three years later.

Some of the men released, who continued to be harassed by the Egyptian police, migrated to Afghanistan to fight in a “holy war” against the invading Soviets (1979–1989). With the end of the Soviet-Afghan War, they continued jihad. These Arab outsiders actually didn’t fight in the Soviet-Afghan War except for one small battle at Jaji, which was primarily defensive: The Arabs had put their camp on the main logistical supply line, and in the spring of 1987 the Soviets tried to destroy it. The Arabs were actually more the recipients of a Soviet attack then the initiators of any action themselves. The United States, which was funneling money and supplies to the far more important groups of Afghan mujahedin, had no contact with the Arabs in Afghanistan. Neither, really, did the Afghans themselves, who resented the Arabs trying to tell them how to worship and make jihad. That’s also why almost no Afghans were closely associated with Al Qaeda until after 9/11, when America bombed them into togetherness.

After the war, many of these foreigners returned to their countries. Those already deemed terrorists couldn’t return and remained in Afghanistan. In 1991, Algeria and Egypt complained to Pakistan that it was harboring terrorists, so Pakistan expelled them. Some of the most militant made their way back to Algeria, which was in a civil war, or to Sudan, invited by Hassan al-Turabi, the Sorbonne-educated leader of Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front.

Although Qutb became a leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which first proposed to reestablish the organic wholeness of the Muslim world in a political program, his later followers, including the person who eventually became Bin Laden’s closest sidekick, the Egyptian pharmacologist and surgeon Ayman Zawahiri, rabidly rejected the brotherhood’s willingness to compromise with the secular authority of the state, even temporarily. Zawahiri repudiated the traditional injunction to promote the consensus of the community
(jima)
and foreswear discord
(fitna).
He argued that harmony would be restored when apostates, infidels, and those who challenge territorial ascendancy by “pure Islam”
(salafi)
were destroyed.

Salafi
(from
salaf,
“ancient ones” or “predecessors” in Arabic) is an emulation, an imitation of the legendary Muslim community that existed at the time of Mohammed, which Salafis believe was the only fair and just society that ever existed. A very small subset of Salafis believe that the necessary goal of creating a Salafi state in a core Arab country cannot be achieved peacefully, either through mere force of ideas—no matter how true or noble—or through democratic elections. In this worldview, to even speak of democracy is blasphemy because the imposition of God’s law cannot be left as a matter of choice among mortals. The religious utopia that jihadis seek strongly resembles the secular utopias in nineteenth-and twentieth-century European thought, such as fascism’s organic ethnic community or communism’s classless international society.

Takfir wal Hijira (Excommunication and Withdrawal), founded in Egypt in 1971 by agricultural engineer Shukri Mustafa, first elaborated the ideology of Qutb and began to put it into practice. Mustafa called for withdrawal from Egyptian society, which he considered alienated from the Muslim community, or
kafir.
In 1977 the group carried out its first action by kidnapping a Muslim cleric (more in reaction to police harassment than intent to attack society).

Mustafa, who was captured and executed in 1978, inspired members of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyah (the Islamic Group), an umbrella organization for militant student groups formed after the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1970s to avoid a confrontation with the police and army. Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyah militants were inspired by Mustafa’s followers, who were tortured in prison but held fast to their faith. The umbrella organization included a group that called itself Tanzim al-Jihad, or simply Al Jihad (created in 1980), of which Zawahiri became an emir, or leader. Zawahiri was never directly implicated in the 1981 assassination of Sadat, but he was imprisoned all the same. Released in 1985, Zawahiri left for Saudi Arabia and then traveled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he treated Muslims wounded in the war against the Soviets and met Osama Bin Laden.

Zawahiri continues to urge jihadis everywhere to inflict the greatest possible damage and cause the maximum casualties on the West, no matter how much time and effort operations take, and regardless of the consequences. Unconstrained by concrete concerns for what will happen to any population that supports them, deracinated jihadis can seriously consider any manner of attack. This includes apocalyptic visions of nuclear weapons inflicting millions of casualties on the United States unless it changes its foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world.
¹⁴
Fortunately, there’s no indication that Al Qaeda ever had the capability to acquire such weapons, and it has such ability much less now than before.

Perhaps the greatest impetus to the spread of the Takfiri doctrine that allows targeting of fellow Muslims was the Algerian civil war. The violent conflict, which cost some 200,000 lives during the 1990s, began in December 1991, when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win the national elections. The secular National Liberation Front (FLN), which had ruled the country since independence from France in 1962 (and still does), canceled voting after the first round. After the FIS was banned and thousands of its members arrested, Islamist guerrillas, led by returning veterans from the Soviet-Afghan War, began an armed campaign against the state.

The guerrillas formed themselves into several groups, principally the Islamic Armed Movement (MIA), based in the mountains, and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), based in the towns. They initially targeted the army and police, but soon started attacking civilians in a calculated campaign to instill terror and provoke the government into counteratrocities that would further alienate its popular support. Zawahiri, especially, took their lesson to heart, but he needed Bin Laden’s charisma and money to globalize a new mode of action.

Takfiri doctrine represents an extreme form of Salafism, and modern Salafism is historically related to Wahabism. But it is important to understand that Wahabis are not Takfiris; nor are most Salafis. Just as Calvinism rejects opposition to the (Protestant) state, so a central tenet of Wahabism is loyalty to the (Saudi) state and rejection of violence against fellow (Sunni) Muslims. Nearly all Saudis are also Salafis, as are many Egyptians. But most reject Takfiri doctrine and even deeply oppose it (much as most Christian fundamentalists reject Christian supremacist doctrine).
¹⁵
We offend millions by simply denouncing “Salafis.”

The Khartoum period is critical in the development of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization and to the Takfiri theology that allows targeting of civilians and fellow Muslims. One of Sudan’s “guests” was Bin Laden and the group around him, which had called itself Al Qaeda ever since the last stages of the Soviet-Afghan War. Another guest was Zawahiri, the leader of Al Jihad, an older and distinct group but one allied with Al Qaeda since its beginning. In June 1995, with Khartoum’s complicity, Zawahiri’s group unsuccessfully tried to kill Mubarak on his visit to Ethiopia. A few months later, Zawahiri sent two suicide bombers to blow up the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan. Although most of the 76 people killed and wounded were Muslims, and Pakistan itself was then supporting the most radical mujahedin in Afghanistan’s ongoing civil war and funneling mujahedin into Kashmir to fight India, Zawahiri reasoned that any innocent loss of life or damage to Pakistan would be rewarded in paradise as a necessary sacrifice for the cause. At first Bin Laden wasn’t happy about the attack, but he would soon come to embrace Zawahiri’s new theory of “martyrdom” and suicide-bombing tactics.

In Khartoum, the jihadis reasoned that they had been unable to overthrow their own governments—the “near enemy,” including Zawahiri’s native Egypt and Bin Laden’s native Saudi Arabia—because these governments were propped up by the “far enemy,” America. The jihadis decided to redirect their efforts. Instead of going after Egypt and Saudi Arabia, they would attack America. Because of intense pressure and threats from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and international sanctions imposed by the United States, Sudan was forced to expel Zawahiri, and then Bin Laden. In August 1996, within two months of returning to Afghanistan, Bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring war on the United States.

The fatwa clearly articulated the new goals of this movement, which were to force America out of the Middle East so that the movement would then be free to overthrow the Saudi monarchy or the Egyptian regime and establish a Salafi state. The suicide bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1988 and the USS
Cole
in 2000, as well as the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, were intended to advance this goal.

But the jihadi movement today is no longer under the control of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization and is no longer primarily aimed at freeing Muslim homelands from perceived occupiers. It has become the speckled fight of small, self-organizing groups of mostly young men who dream of belonging to a revolutionary global Islamic movement that would dispense Islamic justice. For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists
(ulema)
has set down rules of interaction to cover almost any matter of trade, war, or peace between
Dar al-Islam
(The House of Islam, Land of Islam) and
Dar al-Kufar
(the House of Unbelief) or
Dar al-Harb
(the House of War). Always clearly grounded in passages from the Koran, these rules have contained lethal sanctions against apostates, idolaters, and those who challenge Muslim territorial dominance and the God-given right and duty to expand that dominance across the world.

Traditionally, however, there have been strong limits on using violence except when the House of Islam is under direct threat of physical attack. If there are no strong leaders and armies to defend, then it becomes a
fard al-’ayn
—a sacred duty incumbent upon every Muslim individual—to repel the infidel by any means necessary. According to Sayyid Qutb, “When they attack Dar al-Islam, it is
fard al-’ayn, fard
for every Muslim, woman or man, to fight.”
¹⁶
As Bin Laden and Zawahiri put it in a 1998 fatwa calling for “Jihad against Crusaders and Jews”:

Ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries…. On that basis, and in compliance with Allah’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order that their armies move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.
¹⁷

No mercy, no quarter. What the jihadi movement has done in the twenty-first century is to take such reasoning two steps further. First, because there is no pure Islamic state anywhere, then the whole world must be a House of War. Again, Qutb: “A Muslim has no country except that part of the world where the
Sharia
of God is established.”
¹⁸
Second, because Islam is under global attack by America and the forces of globalization, then the whole world is a global battlefield under the injunction of
fard al-’ayn.
“American Crusader interests are everywhere,” reiterated Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri in 2010 in the name of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula: “Attack them and eliminate as many enemies as you can.” As the social movement has spread to the diaspora, it has become increasingly global in scope and apocalyptic in vision. That’s the bad news. But as it washes through the margins of societies, it has also become more scattered and disjointed—materially, psychologically, and philosophically. And that’s probably good news.