A friend asked me recently to explain a passage from Michael J. Totten's extraordinary travelogue in TCS:
I felt more welcome traveling in Tunisia than anywhere else I've ever been in my life. Partly this is no more than the legendary Arab hospitality, which I'm happy to report is alive, well, and understated. Even so, I'm more convinced now than before that the Terror War is strictly ideological. It has little or nothing to do with any clash of civilizations.
Serendipitously, I just happened to see something last night that kind of opened my eyes a bit to the world that Michael's article begins to reveal. On the edge of the Sahara, Duoz, Tunisia is far enough away from "authority" that the people are less intimidated than many current Muslims, so I think it provides a glimpse into a future only dimly viewed right now.
The event I saw didn't change my views so much as refine them. It was a lecture, simulcast on CSPAN and the Heritage Foundation website by a "Jihadist" expert from Yale named Mary Hadek. Right now she's about 7/8ths finished with her book on the topic, but I think she has produced a number of articles, and the reader can view a streaming video of the Heritage lecture here. The transcript of the lecture will probably be available in a few days on the Heritage website here, but it probably takes awhile to transcribe.
What Hadek did was to lay out the Jihadist ideology in relatively simple and straightforward terms that explain not only what they're doing or probably will do, but why they're doing it. To deal with Totten's statement directly, however, she said that about 20-30% of the Muslim population is what she'd call "fundamentalist" or "Islamist." The Jihadists, or the folks who interpret things in a way that demands violence and terrorism amount to only about 1% (one percent) of the Islamist population. Counting on my fingers this is something like 0.2% (two-tenths of a percent) of the population of the Muslim world, although probably a higher percentage in the Arab Middle East. Now, much of the 20 to 30% will give moral, and sometimes even material, support to the 0.2 to 0.3%, but they won't get directly involved.
According to the majority of the Islamic world the way that the "Jihadists" interpret terms like "jihad" and "the method of Muhammad" is sacrilege, and is (as one fellow in the audience at the Heritage lecture put it) "as uncharacteristic of Islam as the ideology of Goldberg, who assassinated Rabin, is of Judaism."
But the primary problem is that the repudiation of the Jihadists, or what Hadek calls the "normative evaluation of Jihadism," while it is sometimes voiced, is still pretty low key. That's partly due to fear, and partly due to the fact that most of the region lives under autocracy, with little hope of exit. (More on this later.)
So that takes care of the, as yet, diminutive size of the Jihadists movement (which doesn't mean that, unattended, it wouldn't grow, or that its impact is minimal). She also indicated that there are relatively simple schisms, not only between mainstream Islam, Islamism, and Jihadism, that we could exploit if we understood them, but she also talked briefly about the effect of the Iraq War.
First of all, there are three strategic divisions within the Jihadist movement (who think of themselves as the "Vanguard" that surrounded Muhammad in the early days) over the precise meaning of "the method of Muhammad." The divisions are related to the order of the attack, and which enemy must be destroyed first. They are:
1. First destroy the "near enemy" and then the "far enemy."
2. First destroy the "greater unbelief" and then the "lesser unbelief."
3. First destroy the "apostates" and then the "unbelievers." (The apostates generally include all Shia, by the way.)
Who are the "near enemy?" These are the kufr that occupy all "Muslim lands." Do you know, for instance, that not only was the attack in Spain planned at least a year before the invasion of Iraq, but that in spite of the "truce" there was a second attack planned for April 2, that was foiled? It would seem that this makes no sense to our way of thinking, because it would have radicalized the Spaniards. But Spain is considered "Muslim land" (al Andaluse) and the plan was to create a general uprising of Muslims within Spain and N. Africa to take back Muslim lands.
Bin Laden belongs to group #2, and actually began talking about the "Greater Kufr" as the US as long ago as the 1980s. Sayyid Qutb identified the US as the Great Evil as long ago as 1948, long before we were a serious "imperial power" in Arabia or the Middle East. He did this because of the "habits of unbelief" that he saw when he was here, and because of the influence of US culture that he could see elsewhere.
So, has Iraq galvanized and expanded the ranks of Jihadists?
1. She says that it undoubtedly has. There isn't much sense in arguing to the contrary. At the very least it has merged group 1 with group 2 because it has moved the US from the category of "far enemy" to "near enemy." But it's also true that US policy has been utilized as a recruitment tool, to some effect. However,
2. The US has also acted "as a huge beacon" within the Arab world, for those Muslims who yearn for a better life. It has given them hope that there's not only sanctuary and protection from the Jihadists and from the Islamist rhetoric, but from the autocrats that dominate their lives. "Help is on the way," not merely from the US, but from the liberal regimes and empowered Muslims that the US is helping to create with its "little project." And most Iraqis also are pretty happy with the way things are going, too. They hate the disorder and violence, but they're generally appreciative of the opportunity they have now, to create a "different society" in the Middle East. And they often despise those who stood in the way, which includes not only France and Germany, but the Left in general... and the UN, of course.
And that's what the rest of the statement is about, and why Americans are singled out for hospitality in Tunisia. It's a different kind of "Vanguard" that, in all modestly, I knew about before we had even contemplated going into Afghanistan.
And I should also say that although Hadek thinks that Iraq has given the Jihadists ammo for recruitment, she doesn't think the numbers are huge. At most they amount to 10,000 or so, and probably less. And some of these are beginning to get demoralized and have doubts, as the "method of Muhammad" begins to run into trouble. She subscribes to the "flypaper" theory. We've attracted them to a theater of operations where we have the advantage, and can bring our warrior element fully to bear on their warrior cultic version of Islam.
Hadek has allowed me to refine my "counter-wave" theory about what we're doing in the Middle East. It's really far more focused, and depends on the principle of leverage. We need not actually enter as a counter-wave to Islamism ourselves, because as yet we are still doing battle with the "vanguard." And to start the "counter-wave" we need only help to create a "counter-vanguard," within the Muslim world that is deeply committed to a reformed, and prosperous, democratic Islam. I think it's happening.
The issue that Hadek really didn't raise concerns the role played in the West by the group I call the "Marxisant Left," which includes a fringe element in the US Democratic party, but also the European Social Forum, etc. The are the legacy of the Fauristes in France prior to the Nazi invasion. So far the schisms within the Jihadist movement seem to line up favorably (in their terms at least) with the major schism in the West, and allows them to deploy various localized political tactics, such as the influence on the recent Spanish election, and the intimidation of the Philippines. But from the Jihadist's point of view this isn't so much a "strategy" as the exploitation of a tactic, in the larger strategy. It is less a comprehensive determination to manipulate Western politics than a tactical windfall. I'm almost certain that they probably attribute their "success" in this realm less to rational calculation than to their idiosyncratic adherence to the "method of Muhammad." And the success has far less to do with their planning expertise, than our ignorance of their weaknesses and schisms.
Posted by Demosophist at August 13, 2004 02:47 PM | TrackBack