The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (15 page)

Oil wealth also had negative political effects, by inhibiting the development of representative institutions. “No taxation without representation” marks a crucial step in the development of Western democracy. Unfortunately, the converse is also true—no representation without taxation. Governments with oil wealth have no need for popular assemblies to impose and collect taxes, and can afford, for some time at least, to disregard public opinion. Even that term has little meaning in such societies. Lacking any other outlet, new and growing discontents also find expression in religious extremist movements.

It has now become normal to describe these movements as fundamentalist. The term is unfortunate for a number of reasons. It was originally an American Protestant term, used to designate certain Protestant churches that differed in some respects from the mainstream churches. The two main differences were liberal theology and biblical criticism, both seen as objectionable. Liberal theology has been an issue among Muslims in the past and may be again in the future. It is not at the present time. The literal divinity and inerrancy of the Qur’an is a basic dogma of Islam, and although some may doubt it, none challenge it. These differences bear no resemblance to those that divide Muslim fundamentalists from the Islamic mainstream, and the term can therefore be misleading. It is however now common usage, and has even been translated literally into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.

The eclipse of pan-Arabism left Islamic fundamentalism as the most attractive alternative to all those who felt that there has to be something better, truer, and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside. These movements feed on privation and humiliation and on the frustration and resentments to which they give rise, after the failure of all the political and economic nostrums, both the foreign imports and the local imitations. As seen by many in the Middle East and north Africa, both capitalism and socialism were tried and have failed; both Western and Eastern models produced only poverty and tyranny. It may seem unjust that in post-independence Algeria, for example, the West should be blamed for the pseudo-Stalinist policies of an anti-Western government, for the failure of the one and the ineptitude of the other. But popular sentiment is not entirely wrong in seeing the Western world and Western ideas as the ultimate source of the major changes that have transformed the Islamic world in the last century or more. As a consequence, much of the anger in the Islamic world is directed against the Westerner, seen as the ancient and immemorial enemy of Islam since the first clashes between the Muslim caliphs and the Christian emperors, and against the Westernizer, seen as a tool or accomplice of the West and as a traitor to his own faith and people.

Religious fundamentalism enjoys several advantages against competing ideologies. It is readily intelligible to both educated and uneducated Muslims. It offers a set of themes, slogans, and symbols that are profoundly familiar and therefore effective in mobilizing support and in formulating both a critique of what is wrong and a program for putting it right. Religious movements enjoy another practical advantage in societies like those of the Middle East and north Africa that are under more or less autocratic rule: dictators can forbid parties, they can forbid meetings—they cannot forbid public worship, and they can to only a limited extent control sermons.

As a result the religious opposition groups are the only ones that have regular meeting places where they can assemble and have at their disposal a network outside the control of the state or at least not fully subject to it. The more oppressive the regime, the more it helps the fundamentalists by giving them a virtual monopoly of opposition.

Militant Islamic radicalism is not new. Several times since the beginnings of the Western impact in the eighteenth century, there have been religiously expressed militant opposition movements. So far they have all failed. Sometimes they have failed in an easy and relatively painless way by being defeated and suppressed, in which case the crown of martyrdom brought them a kind of success. Sometimes they have failed the hard way, by gaining power, and then having to confront great economic and social problems for which they had no real answers. What has usually happened is that they have become, in time, as oppressive and as cynical as their ousted predecessors. It is in this phase that they can become really dangerous, when, to use a European typology, the revolution enters the Napoleonic or, perhaps one should say, the Stalinist phase. In a program of aggression and expansion these movements would enjoy, like their Jacobin and Bolshevik predecessors, the advantage of fifth columns in every country and community with which they share a common universe of discourse.

Broadly speaking, Muslim fundamentalists are those who feel that the troubles of the Muslim world at the pres-ent time are the result not of insufficient modernization but of excessive modernization, which they see as a betrayal of authentic Islamic values. For them the remedy is a return to true Islam, including the abolition of all the laws and other social borrowings from the West and the restoration of the Islamic Holy Law, the shari‘a, as the effective law of the land. From their point of view, the ultimate struggle is not against the Western intruder but against the Westernizing traitor at home. Their most dangerous enemies, as they see it, are the false and renegade Muslims who rule the countries of the Islamic world and who have imported and imposed infidel ways on Muslim peoples.

The point is clearly made in a tract by ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj, an Egyptian who was executed along with others in April 1982 on the charge of having plotted and instigated the assassination of President Sadat. His remarks throw some light on the motivation of that act:

The basis of the existence of imperialism in the lands of Islam is these self-same rulers. To begin with the struggle against imperialism is a work which is neither glorious nor useful, and it is only a waste of time. It is our duty to concentrate on our Islamic cause, and that is the establishment first of all of God’s law in our own country and causing the word of God to prevail. There is no doubt that the first battlefield of the jihad is the extirpation of these infidel leaderships and their replacement by a perfect Islamic order, and from this will come the release of our energies.
²

In the few moments that passed between the murder of President Sadat and the arrest of his murderers, their leader exclaimed triumphantly: “I have killed Pharaoh! I am not afraid to die.” If, as was widely assumed in the Western world at the time, Sadat’s offense in the eyes of the murderers was making peace with Israel, Pharaoh would seem a singularly inappropriate choice of epithet. Clearly, they were not referring to the Pharaoh of modern Egyptian schoolbooks, the embodiment of the greatness and glory of ancient Egypt. It is the Pharaoh of the Exodus, who, in the Qur’an as in the Bible, is the pagan tyrant who oppresses God’s people. It is no doubt in this sense that Usama bin Ladin spoke of President Bush as the Pharaoh of our day. At the time of the Exodus, the Children of Israel were God’s people. Present-day Muslims for the most part do not recognize the modern State of Israel as the legitimate heir of the ancient Children of Israel—in the Qur’an
Ban
Isr
’
l
—and the assassins of Sadat certainly did not approve of his deal with that state. But as the subsequent interrogation of the murderers and their accomplices made clear, the peace with Israel was, in their eyes, a relatively minor phenomenon—a symptom rather than a cause of the greater offense of abandoning God’s faith, oppressing God’s people, and aping the ways of the infidel.

CHAPTER IX

T
HE
R
ISE OF
T
ERRORISM

Most Muslims are not fundamentalists, and most fundamentalists are not terrorists, but most present-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such. Understandably, Muslims complain when the media speak of terrorist movements and actions as “Islamic” and ask why the media do not similarly identify Irish and Basque terrorists and terrorism as “Christian.” The answer is simple and obvious—they do not describe themselves as such. The Muslim complaint is understandable, but it should be addressed to those who make the news, not to those who report it. Usama bin Ladin and his Al-Qa‘ida followers may not represent Islam, and many of their statements and their actions directly contradict basic Islamic principles and teachings, but they do arise from within Muslim civilization, just as Hitler and the Nazis arose from within Christendom, and they too must be seen in their own cultural, religious, and historical context.

There are several forms of Islamic extremism current at the present time. The best known are the subversive radicalism of Al-Qa‘ida and other groups that resemble it all over the Muslim world; the preemptive fundamentalism of the Saudi establishment; and the institutionalized revolution of the ruling Iranian hierarchy. All of these are, in a sense, Islamic in origin, but some of them have deviated very far from their origins.

All these different extremist groups sanctify their action through pious references to Islamic texts, notably the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet, and all three claim to represent a truer, purer, and more authentic Islam than that currently practiced by the vast majority of Muslims and endorsed by most though not all of the religious leadership. They are, however, highly selective in their choice and interpretation of sacred texts. In considering the sayings of the Prophet, for example, they discard the time-honored methods developed by the jurists and theologians for testing the accuracy and authenticity of orally transmitted traditions, and instead accept or reject even sacred texts according to whether they support or contradict their own dogmatic and militant positions. Some even go so far as to dismiss some Qur’anic verses as “revoked” or “abrogated.” The argument used to justify this is that verses revealed during the early years of the Prophet’s mission may be superseded by later, presumably more mature revelations.

A revealing example of such deviation was the famous fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989, against the novelist Salman Rushdie because of his novel entitled
The Satanic Verses.
In the fatwa, the Ayatollah informed “all the zealous Muslims of the world that the blood of the author of this book . . . which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an, as also of those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, is hereby declared forfeit. I call on all zealous Muslims to dispatch them quickly, wherever they may be found, so that no one will dare to insult Islamic sanctities again. Anyone who is himself killed in this path will be deemed a martyr.”
¹
To supplement and anticipate the rewards of paradise, an Islamic charitable trust in Tehran offered a bounty to anyone who killed Salman Rushdie consisting of 20 million
tumans
(at that time about $3 million at the official rate, about $170,000 at the open-market rate) for an Iranian, or $1 million for a foreigner. Some years later the bounty, still unclaimed, was increased by the trust.

Not surprisingly, many uninformed readers in the Western world got the impression that “to issue a fatwa” was the Islamic equivalent of “to put out a contract”—i.e., to target a victim and offer a monetary reward for murdering him. Like madrasa, the word fatwa has acquired, in common international usage, a wholly negative connotation. This is in fact a monstrous absurdity.
Fatwa
is a technical term in Islamic jurisprudence for a legal opinion or ruling on a point of law. It is the shari‘a equivalent of the
responsa prudentium
of Roman law. The Islamic jurisconsult who is authorized to issue a fatwa is called a mufti, an active participle from the same root. In using a fatwa to pronounce a death sentence and recruit an assassin, the ayatollah was deviating very considerably from standard Islamic practice.

The deviation was not only in the verdict and sentence but also in the nature of the charge. Insulting the Prophet—the charge brought against Salman Rushdie—is certainly an offense in Muslim law, and the jurists discuss it in some detail. Almost all these discussions turn on the question of a non-Muslim subject of the Muslim state who insults the Prophet. The jurists devote considerable attention to the definition of the offense, the rules of evidence, and the appropriate punishment. They show great concern that accusations of this offense should not be used as a device to achieve some private vengeance, and insist on careful scrutiny of the evidence before any verdict or sentence is pronounced. The majority opinion is that a flogging and a term of imprisonment are sufficient punishment—the severity of the flogging and the length of the term to depend on the gravity of the offense. The case of the Muslim who insults the Prophet is hardly considered and must have been very rare. When it is discussed, the usual view is that this act is tantamount to apostasy.

This was the specific charge brought against Salman Rushdie. Apostasy is a major offense in Muslim law and for men carries the death penalty. But the important word in this statement is
law.
Islamic jurisprudence is a system of law and justice, not of lynching and terror. It lays down procedures according to which a person accused of an offense is to be brought to trial, confronted with his accuser, and given the opportunity to defend himself. A judge will then give a verdict and, if he finds the accused guilty, pronounce sentence.

There is however another view, held by a minority of jurists, that the offense committed by a Muslim who insults the Prophet is so great that one may, indeed must, dispense with the formalities of arraignment, trial, and conviction, and proceed directly with the execution. The basis of this view is a saying ascribed to the Prophet but by no means universally accepted as authentic: “If anyone insults me, then any Muslim who hears this must kill him immediately.” Even among the jurists who accept the authenticity of this saying, there is disagreement. Some insist that some form of procedure or authorization is required, and that summary killing without such authorization is murder and should be punished as such. Others argue that the text of the saying as transmitted makes it clear that the summary and immediate execution of the blasphemer is not only lawful but obligatory, and that those who do not do it are themselves committing an offense. Even the most rigorous and extreme of the classical jurists only require a Muslim to kill anyone who insults the Prophet in his hearing and in his presence. They say nothing about a hired killing for a reported insult in a distant country.

The sanctification of murder embodied in Khomeini’s fatwa appears in an even more advanced form in the practice—and the cult—of the suicide murderer.

If one looks at the historical record, the Muslim approach to war does not differ greatly from that of Christians, or that of Jews in the very ancient and very modern periods when this option was open to them. While Muslims, perhaps more frequently than Christians, made war against the followers of other faiths to bring them within the scope of Islam, Christians—with the notable exception of the Crusades—were more prone to fight internal religious wars against those whom they saw as schismatics or heretics. Islam, no doubt owing to the political and military involvement of its Founder, takes what one might call a more pragmatic view than the Gospels of the realities of societal and state relationships. Its position is nearer to that of the earlier books of the Old Testament, and to the doctrine of smiting the Amalekites, rather than to the Prophets and the Gospels. Muslims are not instructed to turn the other cheek, nor do they expect to beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks (Isaiah 2:4). These injunctions did not of course prevent Christians from waging a series of bloody wars of religion within Christendom and wars of aggression outside.

This raises the larger issue of the attitude of religions to force and violence, and more specifically to terrorism. Followers of many faiths have at one time or another invoked religion in the practice of murder, both retail and wholesale. Two words deriving from such movements in Eastern religions have even entered the English language:
thug,
from India, and
assassin,
from the Middle East, both commemorating fanatical religious sects whose form of worship was to murder those they regarded as enemies of the faith.

The practice and then the theory of assassination in the Islamic world arose at a very early date, with disputes over the political headship of the Muslim community. Of the first four caliphs of Islam, three were murdered, the second by a disgruntled Christian slave, the third and fourth by pious Muslim rebels who saw themselves as executioners carrying out the will of God. The question arose in an acute form in 656
C.E.,
with the murder of the third caliph, ‘Uthman, by Muslim rebels. The first of a succession of civil wars was fought over the question of whether the killers were fulfilling or defying God’s commandment. Islamic law and tradition are very clear on the duty of obedience to the Islamic ruler. But they also quote two sayings attributed to the Prophet: “There is no obedience in sin” and “Do not obey a creature against his creator.” If a ruler orders something that is contrary to the law of God, then the duty of obedience is replaced by a duty of disobedience. The notion of tyrannicide—the justified removal of a tyrant—was not an Islamic innovation; it was familiar in antiquity, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike, and those who performed it were often acclaimed as heroes.

Members of the Muslim sect known as the Assassins (from the Arabic
Hash
shiyya
), active in Iran and then in Syria from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, seem to have been the first to transform the act that was named after them into a system and an ideology. Their efforts, contrary to popular belief, were primarily directed not against the Crusaders but against Muslim rulers, whom they saw as impious usurpers. In this sense, the Assassins are the true predecessors of many of the so-called Islamic terrorists of today, some of whom explicitly make this point. The name
Hash
shiyya,
with its connotation of “hashish taker,” was given to them by their Muslim enemies. They called themselves
fidayeen,
from the Arabic
fid
’
—
one who is ready to sacrifice his life for the cause.