Great Addition to the Jihadist Studies Literature

Check out the latest offering from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions within Al-Qaida and Its Periphery, edited by Assaf Moghadam and Brian Fishman.  This is an edited volume that looks at all sorts of internal jihadist debates such as over the notion of takfir, tactics, strategy, and many other things.  It’s the usual bang-up job from the CTC and it would be a useful antidote to those who think that the jihadists are actually more pure in their understanding of Islam than other Muslims.  (I say “would be” because I rather doubt that the people who believe that will read this book.  Call me cynical and I’ll plead guilty.)  The New American foundation had a great launch for this book a couple weeks ago and they have posted the video online.

Every one of the essays in this volume shows why the jihadist movement cannot only be understood as a single united entity.  My own work, it is true, has tended to show them as a united entity.  (See e.g. this and this.)  That said, I do not believe that that is the only way to understand them.  Rather, I think it is merely a way, albeit an indispensible one, to think about them.  The differences among jihadists are equally important. 

The analogy I give is with communism.  During the Cold War there were decided differences among, say, Soviet Communism, Chinese Communism, Hungarian Communism, Albanian Communism, and Eurocommunism.  That said, the adherents of these various movements could all, quite correctly, be said to be communists.  One would have been hard-pressed to understand any of these without knowing something about Marx, Lenin, Mao, the dialectic, the proletariat, etc.  At the same time, these differences which seemed so minor to those of us where were small “d” democrats were felt very passionately by the communists.  This fact opened up opportunities for us.

So it is, I think, with the jihadists.  At the risk of sounding blasphemous, the jihadists are many, yet they are one.

Jihadism: Two New Items Worth Reading

Given that Leah Farrall is in Australia, I’m alarmed that I’m awake when she is posting, but she’s got a very interesting piece up about the recent toner cartridge bomb plot and what it says about the relationship between Al Qaida and Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.  Check it out.

Also, there’s a nifty rant against the “Shaykhs of the Religious Satellite (Channels) and Their War Against the Advocates of Islamic Forums” on the Ansar al-Jihad English language forum.  This article is just the latest piece to show how the jihadists are, from their point of view, very much isolated within the Islamic world.

Meanwhile, there’s a delightful new piece of “jihadist strategic studies” just out that I will be blogging about tomorrow, inshallah.  And when I say “tomorrow,” I mean later today.  Sigh.

What Connection between Religion and Terrorism?

Recently the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations put out a report arguing for the United States to pay more attention to religion as it conducted its foreign affairs.  The report did not merely put this in the context of terrorism, but it certainly included terrorism among the issues it addressed.

The report argued that:

Without a more serious and thoughtful engagement with religion across a host of issues and actors, U.S. foreign policy will miss important opportunities…. And, we will undermine our ability to protect citizens from violence perpetrated by religious extremists. Indeed, pushing an uncompromising secular alternative can have the unintended effect of feeding extremism by further threatening traditional sources of personal, cultural, and religious identity.

At about the same time, Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University posted an article on ReadingIslam.com summarizing the key points of his 2007 book, Who Speaks for Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think. Esposito implicitly argues for less attention to religion as we consider issues of counterterrorism.

Who’s right?  Esposito notes that:

For decades, scholars and pundits have been debating about how terrorists and extremists are created. The causes of terrorism are said to be psychological (terrorists are abnormal, deranged, irrational), sociological (they lack education, are alienated social misfits), economic (they’re poor, unemployed, hopeless), political (they reject democracy, freedom, human rights), and religious (they’re fanatics, zealots, believers in a violent religion that rejects modernization and technology).

He then goes on to say that his studies–which are quite consistent with other work in the field–suggest that things like unemployment, poverty and lack of education do not appear to cause terrorism.  Nor are terrorists typically crazy.

So, is it religion that causes terrorism?  Does Islam in particular have a terrorism problem?  Esposito thinks not and he observes that “radical” Muslims, which he defines as those who thought that the September 11 attacks were justified, don’t seem to be more religious than “moderate” Muslims.  He writes:

Does personal piety correlate with radical views? The answer is no. Large majorities of those [Muslims] with radical views and moderate views (94% and 90%, respectively) say that religion is an important part of their daily lives. And no significant difference exists between radicals and moderates in mosque attendance.

He goes on to suggest that radicals simply wield religion instrumentally:

Examining the link between religion and terrorism requires a larger and more complex context. Throughout history, close ties have existed among religion, politics, and societies. Leaders have used and hijacked religion to recruit members, to justify their actions, and to glorify fighting and dying in a sacred struggle. [Emphasis added.]

Esposito uses the example of suicide bombings as a proxy for his broader argument that the cause of terrorism is political grievances.  He draws on the work of Robert Pape to argue that suicide bombings typically are done for strategic political purposes.  In other words, Esposito seems to be saying that politics/grievances–>violence and also politics/grievances–>religious rhetoric.

Here is where the conceptual trouble starts.  Nowhere does Esposito explain why the causal relationships might not go in the opposite direction: religion –>politics/grievances–>violence.  The possibility that religion might shape political views seems like a very commonsense idea that should not be dismissed out of hand.  Think, for instance, of all the people who are raised Catholic from birth and then later in life, when they grow old enough to learn what abortion is, decide that they are pro-life.  Is it a surprise that they should make such a decision?  I think not.  Surely no one would think it unreasonable to assume that many of them were influenced by their faith as they decided which side of this political question to come down on.

I’m a big believer that absent a specific reason to think otherwise, we should believe what other people say.  Sayyid Qutb, the founder of Salafi Jihadism spoke to precisely this question in his manifesto, Milestones, albeit from a conspiratorial angle.  He seemed clear in his mind that he was describing (and calling for) a religious struggle:

The enemies of the Believers may wish to change this struggle into an economic or political or racial struggle, so that the Believers become confused concerning the true nature of the struggle…The Believers must not be deceived, and must understand that this is a trick.  The enemy, by changing the nature of the struggle, intends to deprive them of their weapon of true victory.

Now it is true that Esposito makes a convincing case—one that I believe—that there is no particular connection between Islam writ large and violence, but that is where his analysis stops.  What about particular kinds of Islam?  I’m perfectly willing to grant that Islam doesn’t have a terrorism problem, but I also think that there is compelling case to be made that Salafi Jihadism, a sub-set of Islam does.

Worse yet, Esposito seems implicitly to be suggesting that there is only one cause for terrorist violence.  However, there is no particular reason to think that that must be true.  In fact, one of my personal analytic biases is that almost nothing is monocausal outside the realm of Newtonian physics.  Might it not be the case that one’s politics and one’s religion affect each other and that sometimes violence spurts out from that tangled interaction?

The Chicago study, then, is right on the money, at least as far as I am concerned.  Ideas, including religious ideas, matter in the real world.  In the end, we should address legitimate political grievances when we can but also we should not be afraid to recognize the power of and do battle with pernicious ideas, even when they come in religious form.  This requires a far more sophisticated public discourse about the relationship between religion and violence than typically comes from the Islamophobes or from scholars of Islam such as Professor Esposito.

Working with The Bin Laden Tapes

Hopefully you caught the story about Professor Flagg Miller (Assoc. Prof. of Religious Studies at UC Davis) and the Bin Laden tapes on NPR’s On the Media.  The Chronicle of Higher Education also recently ran an article along similar lines about him and his. 

Prof. Miller, whom I know very slightly as a result of having overlapped with him as a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been working with a collection of some 1500 tapes acquired by CNN in Afghanistan in 2001.  Apparently they came from a house occupied by Bin Laden.  The tapes include recordings of a broad swath of Al Qaida activities, ranging from religious and military content to weddings to cooking breakfast.  CNN offered them to the Intelligence Community but it wasn’t interested.  Now the tapes are at Yale University and on Miller’s computer.  Miller, it should be said, is a fine choice to take a first hack at these tapes.  His last major project dealt with audiocassette poetry and Yemeni culture. 

Prof. Flagg Miller

The Chronicle article tells how one of Prof. Miller’s students expressed her surprise that the jihadists ate breakfast.  I don’t want to overemphasize this particular incident, but it struck me straight away that a student of military affairs would never have made such a comment.  It’s a well known fact that warfare–whether one is stateless terrorist or a soldier in an uber-organized military of a nation-state–is largely made up of utterly boring stretches of time.  Many of the best war movies make this clear, but Das Boot is probably the foremost example. 

On the other hand, where Prof. Miller and probably his students have an advantage over many people who study or take part in armed conflict is in having deep human understanding of the enemy, or at least part of it.  Understanding the enemy, even empathizing with him, is not at all incompatible with fighting him; in fact, it adds to ones ability to fight him.  Thank you General Sun Tzu.  This, presumably, is one of the reasons why the Intelligence Community has showed some interest in funding Prof. Miller’s work.  (Bloody ironic, considering that they told CNN originally that they had no interest in the tapes.)  Quite sensibly, Miller turned down the offer on the grounds that accepting such finding might appear to taint his work.  

Professor Miller is writing a book on what he has learned from these tapes and I very much look forward to reading it.  His will probably be the first book I’ve ever read by someone whose training is in linguistic anthropology.  I heard him give a “work-in-progress” talk at the Wilson Center and he has some interesting things to say, including some potentially important revelations about previously unknown ideological influences on Bin Laden.  Miller also has some views on the origins of the term “Al Qaida” that come, in large part, from his work with the tapes.  In particular, he has argued that the people we think of as “al Qaida” did not start using that term until very late on, largely as a result of rhetorical interaction with the West.  Now, I do not agree with him on this question, but he makes some good arguments and if he is correct, then his argument has some small but real implications for people in the worlds of strategic studies, counterterrorism, and intelligence. 

U.S. forces have captured and will continue to capture a large number of documents, tapes, and other detritus from our jihadist enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and doubtless other places.  Digital copies of many of these records are going to end up accessible to scholars in the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) that the Defense Department is opening.  (More controversially, the CRRC will also hold copies of records from Saddam’s regime.)  However, having worked with these materials, it appears to me that the U.S. Government often does not bother to retain or at least duplicate the sorts of everyday materials that are so meaningful to scholars such as Flagg Miller.  For instance, it is known (see here , here and here) that in 2001 the U.S. military took materials  from the house of the then #3 person in al Qaida, Mohammed Atef a.k.a. Abu Hafs al-Masri.  Given that the intelligence community was not interested in the Bin Laden tapes, one can only wonder what was left on the cutting room floor from one of his deputies. 

If, as I suspect, all these enemy materials are being lost, it is a pity.  Though Miller is doing his research for his own academic reasons, as he should, it is helping to secure us all.  It would be good to give him more material to work with and it would be good to see others join him in this line of study.

Book Recommendation

Lest we get too wrapped up in violent jihad and all sorts of nastiness, everyone should read Sumbul Ali-Karamali’s The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing.

I was fortunate enough to go to college with Sumbul and I count her among my friends.  She and I certainly don’t always agree, but you will never find a more thoughtful and intelligent person. 

Excerpt from her bio on her website:

 ”Sumbul Ali-Karamali grew up in Southern California in an ethnically South Asian family. She earned her undergraduate degree in English, with Distinction, from Stanford University. After working as an editor in a publishing company, she attended law school and graduated with her J.D. from the University of California at Davis. She practiced corporate law in San Francisco for several years.  Although always a practicing Muslim, Sumbul began the formal study of Islam when she attended the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She graduated from SOAS with her L.L.M. in Islamic Law, with Distinction. She has taught Islamic law as a teaching assistant at the University of London, worked as a research associate at the Centre of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law in London, and lectured on Islam and Islamic law. She has had many articles published, both in mainstream news publications and legal journals…For enjoyment, Sumbul plays her violin, teaches the occasional Indian cooking class, and watches Star Trek reruns with her husband.”