WORM'S EYE

Muslim religious fundamentalism or intégrisme, is inextricably interwoven with an extreme political philosophy which can perhaps best be described as-

"Fascism in islamist dress", and can be referred to as "salafist" or "islamist".

Although salafists (islamists) use (or more accurately, misuse) Islamic texts and traditions, salafist movements are not simply religious sects but political movements inspired in large part by European extremist doctrines of the far right and left.

The following extract from an excellent paper is a good introduction--

Bin Laden and Islamist Terrorism
Docent, dr.scient.pol. Mehdi Mozaffari, Aarhus Universitet

In this study Islamism is defined as “an Islamic militant, anti-democratic movement, bearing a holistic vision of Islam whose final aim is the restoration of the caliphate”.

It is militant in the sense that it uses all possible means, including violence and armed fighting. It is anti-progressive in the sense that it considers modernity as a plot against the integrity of Islam. Its vision is holistic and based on the absolute indivisibility of the trinity (Dîn, Dunya and Dwala), that is Religion, Way of life, and State. This indivisibility is permanent and eternal. Its ultimate goal boils down to the fulfilment of this said trinity on a global scale. This goal is justified in Mohammed’s message, prophet of Islam. This definition covers all the great common traits of all Islamist movements (to differentiate it from the Islamic movements). Now that we have defined Islamism we will now search the causes of the emergence of this movement.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 resulting to the rise of the new Turkey as a secular and ‘westernized’ state was a shock to huge majority of Muslims. Confronted with the new situation, Muslims took three different and rival directions: 1) Liberal and democratic, 2) Authoritarian, and, 3) Islamists.

The Liberal trend did not succeed, partly because of hostility from some Western countries, United Kingdom in particular. The authoritarian trend reigned the longest in its diverse forms (military, traditionalist and secular). This trend still remains the dominating tendency in the Middle East.

Islamists took power in Iran in 1979 and in Afghanistan in 1996. With regard to Marxists, the fact is that they have never played an important role in this region. Marxists however came to power in Afghanistan from 1977 to 1979, followed by the Soviet invasion of the country.

This study is focused on Islamists, both as states and as movements. The Islamist trend came about in Egypt in 1928 and extended to all Muslim countries in its diverse forms and interpretations. This current always did and still seems to proliferate in essentially traditionalist urban, lower and middle class stratums. These stratums embrace a large jumble of different categories such as schoolteachers, lower civil servants, technicians, a few young priests, certain young officers, and particularly shopkeepers, merchants and tradesmen. In spite of their diversity these groups can be very easily mobilised. Mosques, numerous religious centres, societies (dawrah and halqah) serve as their favourite meeting spots.

For them, the West represents one single block without any nuances or variations whatsoever. In their reasoning, the Western political doings directed towards Muslims and other oppressed peoples are simply a direct product deriving from the philosophical and theoretical foundations of the West. In order to successfully fight against these political doings they must imperatively attack and reject the Western theoretical foundations.

Therefore, it is this closely related discourse that one finds with Hassan al-Banna, Mawdudi, Hassan al-Turabi, Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama Bin Laden, to cite only the most illustrious theoreticians and practitioners of Islamism. In this particular context, Mawdudi writes that:

“[we] aspire for Islamic renaissance on the basis of the Qu’ran. To us the Qur’anic spirit and Islamic tenets are immutable; but the application of this spirit in the realm of practical life must always vary with the change of conditions, increase of knowledge…We have to arrange these ideas and laws of life on genuine Islamic cross lines so that Islam once again becomes a dynamic force; the leader of the world rather than its follower”.

It is in the same spirit, but in more virulent terms that Ayatollah Khomeini already in the first years of his government declared:

“Muslims the world over who believe in the truth of Islam, arise and gather beneath the banner of twhid (divine unity) and the teachings of Islam! Repel the treacherous superpowers from your countries and your abundant resources. Restore the glory of Islam, and abandon your selfish disputes and differences, for you possess everything! Rely on the culture of Islam, resist Western imitation, and stand on your own feet”.

The true sense of this discourse becomes clearer if one takes a retrospective look at the temporal context in which the first Islamist discourse was pronounced. As we indicated above the formulation of such a discourse dates back to 1928. This date is very significant, four years after the downfall of the Ottoman Empire and the restoration of a secular Turkey. At this particular time the fall came across to the Muslim Sunnites as a terrible shock. The latter feared that this event could put an end to Islam as a complete religion.

This would inescapably bring the Muslims to abandon the sacrosanct norms of Islam and adopt European norms. It is particularly because of this reflex of loss of identity and fear of total and permanent submission to the West that the most faithful groups to a traditional Islam came into the scene organising themselves under the banners of Islam.

The Muslim Brothers organisation (Ikhwan al-Muslimin) founded in Ismailliya in Egypt was the first and by far the most sensational reaction to this fear. Thus Islamism was born and will develop during the course of the 20th century while retaining its initial message.

Central to the political objectives of salafist movements are--- The "islamist" education of the masses by charismatic teachers and leaders;

The revolutionary building of "islamist" states - where rule would be by a theocracy--an islamist dictatorship of the proletariat;

The building the "new Califate" - a transnational theocracy; Eventual world domination by the "islamist" movements

To understand something about the salafists, it is necessary to go back in time. See also-- Islam and World System: a lecture given in Michaelmas Term, at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, on 21st October, 1998 by Professor Immanuel Wallerstein, Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University

Just as the Christian world started to demonise Islam from the time of the Crusades (or earlier), in the Muslim world today, the Crusaders are equally demonised in popular culture. It will be seen that terrorist leaders, such as Bin Laden, frequently use the epithet "crusader" as a term of abuse and as a term to recruit sympathisers.

Professor Bernard Lewis, the Bush Administration's guru on these matters, attaches much importance to the Crusades. In his recent pop-history- "The Crisis of Islam", Lewis points out that, for Arabs, the Crusades came to be seen as "an early prototype of the expansion of European imperialism into the Islamic world".

If the truth were known, at the time they took place, the Crusades were of peripheral importance to the Islamic world. The Mongol invasions, especially the sack of Baghdad in 1258 and successful Muslim resistance to it were more significant to Muslim rulers and people of that era. The Arab world only identified the Crusades as a single and significant enterprise after they had ended and had been largely forgotten.

The present islamist view of the Crusades actually finds its origin in the 19th Century re-evaluation of the morality of the Crusades by Western historians. These new Western re-evaluations of the Crusades spread to the Middle East through the elite (often Christian Arabs) who could read Western languages. The Crusades became a theme in Turkish political debate by the late nineteenth century, and the cynically self-interested dismemberment by Britain and France of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I fed Muslim fears of the West.

As Dr. Mozaffari points out in the extract from his paper cited above, it is hard to over-estimate the profound shock the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and more importantly, the Ottoman Caliphate had on the Sunni Muslim world.

In Andrew Mango's definitve English-language biography of Atatürk [ Atatürk, Andrew Mango, ed 1999 John Murray], he describes the three decisions of Ataturk:

(1) to set up a unified secular education system; (2) to abolish the Ministry responsible for Islamic law and religious foundations; and (3) to abolish the caliphate; as being nothing more or less than "a cultural revolution".

We agree. It was perhaps as revolutionary in religious terms as was the break with Rome under Henry VIII. Instead of the faith being allowed to exercise ultimate supremacy over the state, the earthly institutions of religion are, so to speak, nationalised and made subordinate to the state.

Liberty of belief remains. The direct dialogue between man and his Creator remains. The state may (and, we would argue, must) protect the free exercise of religious belief. But the state claims and exercises the right to set limits on what believers may and may not do in the public expression of that belief.

The establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 encouraged further historical parallels and a formerly marginal event, the Crusades, became the symbol of Western conflict with Islam.

Thus it was in the 20th Century that the Crusades became a symbol of Western colonial political oppression and profiteering. Revolts and nationalist independence movements against colonial and neo-colonial influences started in the Muslim world around 1900 - although to be exact in some cases the revolt had never really ceased since the colonial powers invaded.

Pakistan and Bangladesh have been far less successful than Turkey as democratic states. The two states originated as the two wings of the single Muslim state created in 1947 at the partition of British India. Jinnah and his Muslim League wished Pakistan to be a Muslim state which was also a democracy. Unfortunately, Jinnah died in 1948 and his dream of a democratic Pakistan was never properly realised. The Pakistani state has tottered on from crisis to crisis and is perhaps today in its deepest crisis ever. In large part that crisis is due to salafist movements.

There were two so to speak "founding organisations" from which it can be said that the islamist terrorist organisations grew: Jamaat el Islami, and the, The Muslim Brotherhood.

One of the two, Jamaat el Islami has its origins in the Indian sub-continent.

Jamaat el Islami was founded in British India by Abul A‘la Maududi (1903-1979) and others and it continues as a powerful Transnational salafist movement now based in Pakistan but influential throughout Asia.

In its early days Madudi and the Jamaat al Islami called for Muslims to leave British India and settle in Afghanistan. They were very active in the founding and encouragement of the Pakistani Madrassas-- the cradles of the modern salafist terrorist movements - of which much more on the next page.

Most of the Arab nationalist movements in the countries colonised by the European powers: Nasserism in Egypt, the Baath in Syria and Iraq, the Neo-Destour in Tunisia, the FLN in Algeria, the PLO in Palestine were essentially secular.

They were also "socialist" in the Marxist sense of that word and in a nutshell these secular nationalist movements carried within themselves the seeds of their own destruction, because they looked for inspiration to the one party model of the fascist or socialist state and sought to transform their societies with the tools used in what the Algerian FLN used to refer to as "les pays frères socialistes" (FLN-speak for the Warsaw Pact states).

The rise of the Salafists in response to western imperialism can be traced back to The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan Al-Banna (1905-1949) and the similar Jamaat el Islami movement of Abu Ala Mawdudi (1903-1979) in Asia. These were not secular movements. They believed that the weakness and vulnerability of the Islamic states derived from the lapse of their societies from what they thought of as original "authentic" Islam.

The Muslim Brotherhood movement was politicised in the 1930's and drew much of its ideology from Mussolini's fascists. It exists today in more or less shadowy form and under a variety of names in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle Eastern Arab States.

Over the years, battles raged between the brotherhood adherents and the one-party secular states of Nasser in Egypt and the Baath in Syria and Iraq and the Hashemites in Jordan. The battle has been particularly bitter in Egypt where hundreds have been executed and thousands jailed in an endeavour to suppress the movement.

Salafist thought is either "gradualist" or "radical". Al Banna and Mawdudi represented the gradualist approach that aims to win popular support by persuasion and filling needs unmet by the state; hence the extensive charitable efforts by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a formula also to be found in the Hamas operation in the Gaza Strip.

However, part of the so-called "gradualist" approach has been the targeting of western consumerism and elites perceived as pro-western-- culminating in the case of Egypt in the assassination of the late great Anwar es-Sadat.

The "radical" wing of the Salafist movements follows the model of “revolution from above” articulated by Sayyid Qutub (1906-1966) who led the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and spent much of his time in jail trying to subvert the secular nationalist Egyptian governments of the time until he was executed by Nasser in 1966.

It was Qutub who advocated the creation of an islamist revolutionary elite that would impose the "Islamic" state in Egypt by the use of "every violent means necessary"-- a phrase which will be absolutely familiar to students of totalitarian movements.

The Iranian Revolution is a Shiite example of a radical salafist movement, and the insurgencies in Syria and Algeria provide Sunni examples.

The key attributes of these radical salafist movements are: the glorification of the armed struggle to establish the islamist state by force; the intention to build a modern califate for the whole world; the glorification of martyrdom as a means to that end; the belief that the struggle must be commenced by acts of terrorism; and all have their origins in the Banna, Maududi (and especially) Qutub ideology.

Al Quai'da is now the most famous example of a salafist movement, but it differs from the other radical salafist movements in a number of ways--in particular it specifically demonises the United States of America as the source of all the woes of the Arab and Muslim world.

Other salafist terrorist movements have targeted westerners in general-- for example the GIA in Algeria targeted all foreign nationals working in that country. But Al-Quai'da specifically targets Americans first.

The 9-11 Commission report says this about the ideological links between Qutub and Bin Laden (Chapter2, pp 51-2)--

Bin Ladin also relies heavily on the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood 11 executed in 1966 on charges of attempting to overthrow the government, Qutb mixed Islamic scholarship with a very superficial acquaintance with Western history and thought.

Sent by the Egyptian government to study in the United States in the late 1940s, Qutb returned with an enormous loathing of Western society and history. He dismissed Western achievements as entirely material, arguing that Western society possesses “nothing that will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence.”

Three basic themes emerge from Qutb’s writings. First, he claimed that the world was beset with barbarism, licentiousness, and unbelief (a condition he called jahiliyya, the religious term for the period of ignorance prior to the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed).

Qutb argued that humans can choose only between Islam and jahiliyya. Second, he warned that more people, including Muslims, were attracted to jahiliyya and its material comforts than to his view of Islam; jahiliyya could therefore triumph over Islam.

Third, no middle ground exists in what Qutb conceived as a struggle between God and Satan. All Muslims—as he defined them—therefore must take up arms in this fight. Any Muslim who rejects his ideas is just one more nonbeliever worthy of destruction.

Bin Ladin shares Qutb’s stark view, permitting him and his followers to rationalize even unprovoked mass murder as righteous defense of an embattled faith. Many Americans have wondered, “Why do ‘they’ hate us?” Some also ask, “What can we do to stop these attacks?” Bin Ladin and al Qaeda have given answers to both these questions.

To the first, they say that America had attacked Islam; America is responsible for all conflicts involving Muslims. Thus Americans are blamed when Israelis fight with Palestinians, when Russians fight with Chechens, when Indians fight with Kashmiri Muslims, and when the Philippine government fights ethnic Muslims in its southern islands. America is also held responsible for the governments of Muslim countries, derided by al Qaeda as “your agents.” Bin Ladin has stated flatly, “Our fight against these governments is not separate from our fight against you.” These charges found a ready audience among millions of Arabs and Muslims angry at the United States because of issues ranging from Iraq to Palestine to America’s support for their countries’ repressive rulers.

Bin Ladin’s grievance with the United States may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but it quickly became far deeper.

To the second question, what America could do, al Qaeda’s answer was that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the immorality and godlessness of its society and culture: “It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.” If the United States did not comply, it would be at war with the Islamic nation, a nation that al Qaeda’s leaders said “desires death more than you desire life.”

In common with other radical salafist terrorists, Al Quai'da targets civilians as well as military and government targets with equal venom. This is not new.

The Algerian GIA targeted priests and nuns as well as foreign seamen on cargo ships. But Al Quai'da sought the "grand symbolic gesture". The attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and on Washington DC on 11th September 2001 were the apotheosis of that policy.

The Egyptian & Sudanese Groups The principal active Egyptian Salafist groups grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood (see above) which itelf is still in existence and conducts charitable works and preaching among the poor and operates a number of political parties on a more or less legal basis. The two largest Salafist terrorist groups are Jamaat al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad both of which have been active since the 1970s.

Jamaat al-Islamiyya is Egypt’s largest Salafist militant organization.

Jamaat al-Islamiyya has a presence both in Egypt and worldwide. Its spiritual leader, the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, is serving a life sentence in the United States for his involvement in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

Jamaat al-Islamiyya conducted a violent campaign of attacks against governmental, Christian, and other targets in Egypt with the aim of overthrowing the Nasserist government and establishing a "pure" islamist state.

Islamic Jihad led by Ayman al-Zawahiri and the late Muhammad Atef had the same aims and was, if anything, more deadly and was responsible for the assasination of the late President Anwar es-Sadat in 1981. Ayman al-Zawahiri became Osama bin Laden's deputy in Al Qua'ida and is thought to be one of its top terror strategists and planners.

Ironically, it was the US and Egyptian governments which supported and encouraged the Afghanistan Connection.

After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA organised a program to support the Afghani Mujahiddin with arms and funds in cooperation with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Bin Laden, and called upon the Gulf states and Egypt to facilitate the travel of Arabs who wished to participate in the fighting.

Kamal Hassan Ali, then the Egyptian Minister of Defence at the time, announced the training of Afghani revolutionaries in Egyptian army camps. In 1980 the Egyptian Parliament issued an official invitation to Egyptian citizens to enlist in the Mujahiddin. Advertisements in the official papers invited young Egyptians to "join the caravan" traveling to Afghanistan. The Islamic seminary of Al Azhar which was and which remains a hotbed of islamist clerics also pitched in to recruit youth and send them over.

Many of those who went to Afghanistan went with the express purpose of gaining military expertise during their participation in battles there which would help them train their brothers and pass on their expertise. Starting in 1990, groups of them started returning to Egypt, some of them waiting for directives, others acting on their initiative.

The first Egyptian operation by Salafist terrorists after the Afghan - Soviet war was the assassination of Rifaat Al Mahgoub, the Speaker of the Egyptian Parliament, at the end of 1990 and there were many other attacks during the 1990s.

Hosni Mubarak's Egyptian government has waged a bitter campaign against Jamaat al-Islamiyya, Islamic Jihad, and other islamist groups. The government has largely succeeded in preventing many terrorist attacks in Egypt, but only at the price of egregious human rights abuses. It is thought that more than 20,000 islamists were detained without trial. Many were executed and many more were tortured.

The affluent whisky drinking, Mercedes driving bourgoisie of Egypt naturally condemn these groups and their terrorist activities, but the groups have massive support among the poor working classes of Egypt. The Cairo Times describes the islamists as "Egypt's only mass political movement".

Although the Egyptian government presently seems to be more or less in control of the internal situation, there are many militants from these movements outside Egypt as refugees - in England and Denmark and thousands of returned Afganis presently keeping a low profile.

Egyptians do not like to talk about it, but many Egyptian cafés in working class district burst into applause when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed.

Sudan, under President Omar el-Bashir, is a state which is under a Salafist government, the National Islamic Front, which aims to impose strict sharia law on all the Sudanese, including the 25% who are non Muslim. Sudan’s civil war, has lasted 47 years and pits the government against the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, based in the non-Muslim, sub-Saharan south of the country. The war has led to the deaths of about 2 million people and displaced millions more. The country has been on the State Department’s list of states that sponsor terrorism since 1993. Sudan has given shelter to Salafist and Middle Eastern terrorist groups, including Al Qua'ida, which used Sudan as its main operational and training base from 1991 to 1996. It is also though to be involved with Abu Nidal, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Other Regional Groups

Apart from the Egyptian and Algerian groups, there are smaller groups of Salafist terrorists in most countries where there is a sizeable Muslim population, e.g. Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Jemaah Islamiah in Indonesia, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen and Jaish-e-Muhammad in Kashmir, Jund al- Islam, Hamas and Tawhid in Iraqi Kurdistan, Chechen groups and more shadowy cells in Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and so on.

Finally there are the Salafist groups in and around Palestine--Abu Nidal (based in Iraq), Hamas and Islamic Jihad of which Hamas is the larger and has more poplar support. These groups were marginal until the Israeli repression in the occupied territories. They now have immense popular support. Hezbollah in Lebanon is also salafist, but it is a Shia group and is more linked to Iran than to the Al Qua'ida network. Ansar-al-Islam based in Kurdistan and Lebanon is now thought to be active in Iraq. All these overseas groups have connections with each other and to the Al Qua'ida - Jamaat al Islami - Taliban centres in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

The quantity of information freely available on the world wide web has increased by many orders of magnitude in the last 20 years. But there can be no doubt from materials now available that academics, intelligence services and others with an interest in Muslim and Middle East affairs were very well aware of the existence of Salafist terrorist groups from about 1979.