Mary Habeck - Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror

Knowing the Enemy

Knowing
the
Enemy

Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror

Mary R. Habeck

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON

Copyright 2006 by Yale University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Habeck, Mary R.
Knowing the enemy : jihadist ideology and the War on Terror / Mary R. Habeck.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-11306-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. TerrorismReligious aspectsIslam. 2. Islam and world politics. 3. War
on Terrorism, 2001. I. Title.
BP190.5.T47H33 2006
297.272dc22 2005015210

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The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
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Knowing the Enemy

Immediately after September 11, 2001, Americans agonized over the reason why nineteen men hated the United States enough to kill three thousand civilians in an unprovoked assault. The list of explanations offered by analysts and scholars was long and variedU.S. policies in the Middle East (most especially Americas support for Israel), globalization, U.S. arrogance, imperialism (cultural, political, and economic), and the poverty and oppression endemic in many Arab countries were all blamed as the root causes for the attacks. Other observers, like President George W. Bush, argued that it was the very existence of the United States that led to the attacks. In this view certain nations and people fear and envy what they do not have for themselvesthe freedoms, democracy, power, and wealth of the United Statesand this alone is enough to explain why the towers had to fall.

Among all these explanations the one voice missing was that of the attackers themselves: what were the reasons that they gave for the attack? Their deaths should not prevent us from listening to them, because they belong to a larger extremist group that has not been shy about sharing its views with the entire world. To understand why they hate us we therefore need first to know where to look and who listen to: our first question must not be why do they hate America? but who is it that hates America enough to kill? Not all Arabs and not all Muslims chose to carry out the attacks, but rather a particular type of militant with specific views about a need to resort to violence. Knowing who these people are, and what their views are, we will then be able to hear what they themselves say and why they decided to kill as many Americans as possible that September day.

Any answer to this initial question must acknowledge the fact that the hijackers were Muslims and that al-Qaida, the group they were associated with, claimed to carry out the attacks in the name of Islam. But we must be clear about the relationship between these men and the religion of Islam. Just as not all Muslims deliberately murdered three thousand innocents in New York City, Washington, D.C., and rural Pennsylvania, it would also be misguidedeven evilto suggest that all Muslims desired the deaths that happened that day. Indeed, though demonstrations in support of the hijackers and protests against U.S. policies have occurred since, the Muslim street has not risen, taken up arms, and attacked America. The few thousand extremists who are fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq pale in comparison to the bloodshed that would occur if the entire Islamic community decided to kill Americans.

Yet it would be just as wrong to conclude that the hijackers, al-Qaida, and the other radical groups have nothing to do with Islam. As we shall see, these extremists explicitly appeal to the holy texts (the Quran and sunna, as laid out in the hadith) to show that their actions are justified. They find, too, endorsement of their ideas among respected interpreters of Islam and win disciples by their piety and their sophisticated arguments about how the religion supports them. The question is which Islam they represent. As the religion of over a billion people, Islam does not present a united face, and it is practiced in a variety of ways: syncretistic forms in Indonesia and Africa; traditional beliefs in rural areas of central Asia, Egypt, Iran, and North Africa; secularized variants in Tunisia, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; and mystical Sufi sects, which dominate large swathes of the Muslim world. None of these versions of Islamwhich encompass the vast majority of the worlds Muslimshave called for a war against the United States. To blame Islamfull stopfor September 11 is not only wrongheaded, it is ultimately self-defeating in the struggle that confronts America. By lumping Muslims into one undifferentiated mass it threatens to radicalize the more than billion believers who do not want the United States destroyed.

Some analysts have suggested that the attackers should be identified with fundamentalism or Islamism, the reforming Islam that calls for a revival of the religion and a return of Islam to political power. But Islamism likewise represents neither a unified nor uniform phenomenon. The term describes, rather, a complex of often antagonistic groups with differing beliefs, goals, and methodologies for attaining their ends. Some of these groups (such as Turkeys Justice and Development Party [the AK]) are committed to democratic processes and to the international system. To identify parties like the AK with the terrorists of 9/11 threatens to confuse rather than clarify the situation. It prevents a differentiation between Islamists with whom one can hold discourse and work with as friends and allies, and the armed gangs who may need to be dealt with through force.

This book will argue that the nineteen men who attacked the United States and the many other groups who continue to work for its destructionincluding al-Qaidaare part of a radical faction of the multifaceted Islamist belief system. This factiongenerally called jihadi or jihadisthas very specific views about how to revive Islam, how to return Muslims to political power, and what needs to be done about its enemies, including the United States. The main difference between jihadis and other Islamists is the extremists commitment to the violent overthrow of the existing international system and its replacement by an all-encompassing Islamic state. To justify their resort to violence, they define jihad (a term that can mean an internal struggle to please God as well as an external battle to open countries to the call of Islam) as fighting alone. Only by understanding the elaborate ideology of the jihadist faction can the United States, as well as the rest of the world, determine how to contain and eventually end the threat they pose to stability and peace.

Some might object that nationality, social factors, and historical processes are more important than religion in explaining the larger motives of these hijackers and their reasons for carrying out their attack. All nineteen men were Arabs, and fifteen of them even came from one country, Saudi Arabiasurely, supporters of this view argue, such factors must account for their involvement in this heinous act. Public intellectuals such as Edward Said, and experts like Tariq Ali and Tariq Ramadan, have concluded that the colonization of Islamic lands and their (often) forcible Westernizationmodernization is cause enough for the radicals to strike out at the United States. In these analyses religion is taken as epiphenomenal; economic, political, and social factors are seen as the basis for any serious explication of the extremists actions. The argument of this book, however, is that all these factors (nationality, poverty, oppressive governments, colonization, imperialism) only partially explain a commitment to extremist religious groups. These are important underlying issues that may push Muslims toward some sort of violent reaction, but they do not, by themselves, explain why jihadis have chosen to turn to violence now, and why the extremists offer religious explanations for all their actions. Muhammad Atta and the other eighteen men who took part in the September 11 attacks were middle-class and well-educated, and had bright futures ahead of them. They participated in the hijackings not because they were forced to do so through sudden economic or social deprivation, but because they chose to deal with the problems of their communityfor religious/ideological reasonsby killing as many Americans as they could. Explanations that focus on the negative effects of colonization require similar qualification. Although colonization was certainly a traumatic experience for the Middle East (as it was for the rest of the colonized world), its impact again explains neither the timing nor shape of the current extremism. If the entire purpose of jihadism is to break an imperial stranglehold on the Islamic worldsymbolized by U.S. support for Israelwhy did the U.S. become the focus of Sayyid Qutbs anger in the early 1950s (more than a decade before the United States became associated with Israel)? Moreover, how do the effects of colonization account for the fact that one of the earliest jihadist thinkers, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, developed his version of radical and violent Islam long before the West colonized Islamic lands, indeed at a time when Islam seemed triumphant? Other Islamic extremists in Africa, men like Usman dan Fodio, Muhammad al-Jaylani, and Shehu Ahmadu Lobbo began jihads aimed at restoring true Islam before Europeans became a factor in West Africa. Meanwhile Shah Wali Allah articulated a new vision of forcing Islam on Hindus for their own goodthrough jihadat the very same time as Wahhab was preaching his version of offensive jihad against apostate Muslims.