Global Futures

Tamara Sonn

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781509504428, 9781509504411
• eBook ISBN: 9781509504459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

New York, Washington, Madrid, London and now Paris Ð the list of Western cities targeted by radical Islamic terrorists waging global jihad continues to grow. Does this extreme violence committed in the name of Islam point to a fundamental enmity between the Muslim faith and the West?

In this compelling essay, leading scholar of Islam Tamara Sonn argues that whilst the West has many enemies among Muslims, it is politics not religion that informs their grievances. The longer these demands remain frustrated, the more violence has escalated and recruitment to groups like Islamic State has increased. Far from quelling the spread of Islamic extremism, Western military intervention has helped to turn nationalist movements into radical terrorist groups with international agendas. Islam, Sonn concludes, is not the problem, just as war is not the solution.

1
Islam v. the West?

Is Islam an enemy of the West? It may sound like an odd question. How can an ancient global religion be an enemy of a modern geopolitical region? But if you pay attention to the news, there seem to be good reasons to think it is. Threats from terrorists claiming that their religion commands them to either convert or kill everyone are all over the cybersphere. And those threats started even before September 11, 2001, when 19 Arab terrorists attacked the United States. In 1996, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (d. 2011) published a “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” the cities Mecca and Medina, the birthplace of Islam, in his home country, Saudi Arabia. In 1998, he issued another message, this time ordering Muslims worldwide to kill Americans and their allies – both civilian and military – and to take their money, too. Bin Laden said this was the duty of every able-bodied Muslim in any country. American troops are doing the work of the devil, he said, and since the United States is a democracy, all Americans must be held responsible for their government’s policies. Less than six months later, al-Qaeda operatives detonated truck bombs at two US embassies in Africa, killing over 200 people. After 9/11, Bin Laden was at it again, gloating over the successful attacks in New York and Washington, which killed nearly 3,000 people. They were followed by terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004, which killed nearly 200, and in London in 2005, killing over 50 people. Though neither the Madrid nor London attacks were claimed by al-Qaeda, they were undoubtedly inspired by them. So if al-Qaeda represents Islam, it would seem that Islam is indeed an enemy of the West.

Since 9/11, anti-West Muslim groups appear to have multiplied. In 2002, the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram burst upon the scene. It started out demanding strict Islamic law in Muslim northern Nigeria, but within a few years it was calling for control of the whole country. In 2015, Boko Haram upped the ante yet again, announcing that Nigeria was only the beginning. From there it would expand across all of Africa and use it as a base to take over the entire world. Anyone who doesn’t submit to Boko’s law, said its leader Abubakar Shekau, has to either die or become a slave.

Boko Haram has pledged allegiance to the most successful terrorist group to date, Islamic State (formerly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIL, and ISIS, and also known as Daesh¹). IS has taken control of territories in western Iraq and eastern Syria. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, insists that his group is the vanguard for global Islamic domination. Islam, he says, is locked in a final showdown with “disbelief.” The time for peace is over, al-Baghdadi declares; until the entire earth submits to Islamic law as he interprets it, Muslims must wield the sword. That is the way it must be, he says, until Judgment Day.

And it is not just twenty-first-century terrorist groups that have pledged war against the West. Every year the government of Iran commemorates the 1979 revolution that brought it to power, with loud public denunciations of America. Marg bar Amrika! – “Death to America!” – is their refrain. Leader of the 1979 revolution Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1989) referred to the United States as “the Great Satan” – and that phrase caught on. It seemed to capture the idea that there was a single source behind all the problems facing Muslim countries, and that source is the United States. In fact, that was the inspiration behind Osama bin Laden’s founding of al-Qaeda in the late 1980s. Instead of just working against specific Western allies like Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda would go straight to the source. Muslims have a duty to fight the United States – that “monstrous” and “decadent” force – Bin Laden said, because it is, quite simply, “the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.”²

No wonder some far right politicians and commentators are able to argue that Islam is an enemy of the West. Dutch politician Geert Wilders has referred to the Qur’an, Islam’s sacred scripture, as the Islamic Mein Kampf, and wants it banned in the Netherlands. Even before the current refugee crisis, he called for an end to Muslim immigration into Europe. Otherwise within 20 years, he said, Muslims will control the continent and impose their “sick” and “fascist” ideology. Wilders is convinced that Islam is indeed at war with the West. French politician Marine Le Pen seems to agree. Again, even before the Syrian refugee crisis, she was concerned about Muslim immigration from France’s former colonies in North Africa, and compared it to the Nazi occupation during World War II. It may not be military occupation, said Le Pen, but Muslim immigration threatens the very survival of French civilization. American writer Robert Spencer offers similar advice to the United States. He warns that the US is preparing the way for its own destruction by allowing Muslims into the country. Maybe Islam didn’t start out as a fascist religion, but over time, Spencer claims, it has become a “stealth” project. Its objective: to impose Islamic law on all Americans, making all non-Muslims “legal inferiors.” Islam, Spencer asserts, is nothing short of a post-Nazi, post-Stalinist global totalitarian threat. In 2010, Spencer co-founded the American Freedom Defense Initiative with political activist Pamela Geller. Also known as Stop Islamization of America, the organization is the counterpart of Stop Islamization of Europe, founded in 2007 by Danish and English activists. The founders of these groups share the fear of a globalizing, fascist Islam, and feel compelled to awaken the world to the Islamic conspiracy. In 2015, right-wing American political commentator Glenn Beck published It IS About Islam, purporting to expose the true Islamic plan to take over the world. It is not just extremists who are the threat. Beck says Islam, the religion, and its scripture, the Qur’an, call for the subjugation of all non-Muslims and condemn them to hell. This is the reason for the “siege against America under way today.”³

There is no reason to doubt that leaders of global terrorist organizations believe Islam commands them to fight the United States and its allies to the death. But there are good reasons not to believe that they represent Islam. For one thing, many Muslims are themselves Westerners. The first Muslims to come to America were African slaves, as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today Muslims serve in US, Canadian, and European governments, and they are well represented in Western businesses, education, and the arts. Muslims comprise the second or third largest minorities in many Western countries. In addition, Western countries have strong bilateral relationships with numerous Muslim-majority countries. But the most obvious reason is that the vast majority of Muslims reject the claims of the terrorists. From 2001 to 2007, Gallup conducted the most extensive poll ever taken of Muslim public opinion worldwide (the results were published in 2007). Data from thousands of Muslims representing at least 90% of the global Muslim population showed that 93% condemned the 9/11 attacks as unjustified; the 7% who said they were justified gave political, not religious reasons for their views; and the majority said they admired many aspects of Western life.⁴ These results have been replicated in numerous regional polls since then. In 2015, for example, a Pew Research poll was conducted, showing overwhelmingly negative views of Islamic State among Muslims.⁵

These public opinion polls reflect the views of mainstream Muslim religious authorities, who unanimously condemn terrorism. Although their statements don’t make headlines the way terrorist proclamations do, Muslim religious authorities have repeatedly and publicly denounced terrorism ever since 9/11. University of North Carolina sociologist Charles Kurzman maintains a website⁶ listing official statements against terrorism, beginning with a joint statement issued just days after 9/11. This included the views of leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Palestine’s Hamas, Tunisia’s al-Nahda Party, and their counterparts throughout the world. “We condemn in the strongest terms the incidents [of 9/11],” the authorities proclaim, “which are against all human and Islamic norms.” The UNC site contains over 70 such joint condemnations, and links to many others. Numerous similar condemnations have been issued, most recently against Boko Haram and IS atrocities. They all hinge on the same principles: Islamic law forbids the killing of civilians, and the declaration of war by anyone but a duly recognized head of state – and even then it must be declared only as a last resort. Islamic law also forbids hostage taking, killing of political prisoners, the destruction of property, slavery, mistreatment of women, and forced conversions. Anti-terrorism statements by Muslims affirm Islam’s commitment to protecting human rights, including religious freedom, and the sanctity of life.

So clearly, from the perspective of the vast majority of Muslims, the global terrorists are outliers, which explains the revealing fact that most of their victims are actually Muslims. This trend also began long before 9/11. One of the forerunners of al-Qaeda was an Egyptian terrorist organization that became infamous for assassinating President Anwar Sadat in 1981. That was a standard political assassination: the assassins condemned Sadat for his authoritarian ways, as well as his collaboration with the United States and Israel, despite the latter’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. But the rationale offered by the assassins was unique: Sadat’s political actions, they claimed, demonstrated that he was a Muslim in name only. So they declared him an apostate, deserving of death. The process of declaring professed Muslims to be apostates was banned in Islamic law over a thousand years ago, but its use by terrorists has increased in the past decade. This accounts for the massive killing by global terrorists of fellow Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

But recognizing mainstream Muslims’ condemnation of terrorist tactics should not obscure the fact that mainstream Muslims have some of the same political concerns expressed by the radicals. Like all formerly colonized countries, Muslim-majority countries have had to deal with stunted economic and political development, and the social problems that result from those challenges. There are nearly 50 Muslim-majority countries in the world, and almost all of them were victims of European imperialism. (Some still are: the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte is a part of France; Chechnya, home of the Boston Marathon bombers’ family, is part of Russia; parts of traditional Morocco belong to Spain.) Most Muslim-majority countries did not get their independence until the mid-twentieth century, and often only with a great deal of effort. Yes, the petroleum industry has made some Muslims the richest people on earth, but those people are a fraction of the global Muslim population. Maldistribution is the name of the game. The richest states have the smallest populations. Oil-rich Abu Dhabi, for example, has under a half million citizens – fewer than Seattle or Dublin – and an average annual income of nearly $100,000 per person. But there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, nearly one quarter of the world’s population. The majority of them live in oil-poor Asia. Pakistan, for example, has 185 million people; some of them are very rich, but the majority live on under $4 a day. Perhaps one-third of the world’s Muslims live in Africa, where maldistribution is also a major issue. In Nigeria, Africa’s largest country and home of Africa’s richest man, the majority of the population lives on under $2 a day.

There are also areas where colonial-era conflicts remain unresolved: Palestine, occupied by Israel in violation of UN Security Council resolutions; Chechnya, controlled by Russia with an iron fist; and Kashmir, split between India and Pakistan while Kashmiris struggle for the chance to determine their own political future, for example. These are areas of concern to Muslims worldwide. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Islam v. the West?
• 2 Jihad: Message, Motivation, and Methods
• 3 Muslim Opposition to Terror
• 4 Shared Grievances
• 5 Mainstream Muslim Strategies
• 6 Religion Is Not the Root of Conflict
• Further Reading
• End User License Agreement