Religious Ideology and the Roots of the Global Jihad

Salafi Jihadism and International Order

J. Turner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137409560
• eBook ISBN: 9781137409577
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

The events of 9/11 prompted questions as to the origins, nature and purpose of international jihadist organisations. In particular, why had they chosen to target the US and the West in general? Turner's book provides a unique, holistic insight into these debates, taking into account historical perceptions and ideology as key factors.

1

Prominent Debates on the Proliferation of Salafi Jihadism

This book addresses the controversial topic of terrorism. The term is understood here absent of any normative connotations, but rather as politically motivated asymmetrical violence. In particular, this work investigates Salafi Jihadism, a specific brand of terrorism that is related to Sunni Islam. This kind of political violence has been known by various terms, including Islamic terrorism, Islamist terrorism or even Islamic fascism. However, none of these accurately articulates the appropriate meaning. The most suitable term for the phenomenon under investigation here is Salafi Jihadism, understood as representative of those who take a position that could be said to embody a ‘respect for the sacred texts in their most literal form and an absolute commitment to jihad’.1 In the simplest terms, Salafi Jihadism is a religio-political ideology based on a fundamentalist conceptualisation of Islam that informs the actions of organisations like al-Qaeda. It contains a broadly defined format for a political order that unifies the Islamic peoples and governs them by a legitimate religious authority. It promotes violence in all its forms as a means for achieving this objective. The origins and ideological background of Salafi Jihadism will be further detailed in subsequent chapters.

In the years following 9/11, IR scholars, political scientists, experts on Islam and the Middle East, the foreign policy community, governments and essentially every person in the Western world sought to understand the events that had taken place. This evolved into an inevitable attempt to explain the rationale of the jihadists or to discover, as Bernard Lewis noted over a decade before, ‘the Roots of Muslim Rage’.2 Copious volumes of literature began to emerge and grow exponentially in the ensuing months, with theories and proposals as to what the motivations for the strikes were and what al-Qaeda, the organisation believed to be responsible, was intent upon accomplishing. More simply, why had this group of Islamic militants come to be in conflict with the US? Discussions on Salafi Jihadism, particularly in the US, had largely been marginalised outside of the realm of scholarship and the intelligence community despite its consistent appearance in the form of political violence and publications.3 Post-9/11 theories have ranged from ludicrous conspiratorial assertions of CIA and Jewish plots to beliefs concerning the wrath of divine judgment, perpetuated by both Muslim and Christian fundamentalists. A number of mainstream theories took hold in the immediate aftermath of the event that have continued to affect the ways in which scholars attempt to conceptualise Salafi Jihadism and these are to be addressed here specifically.

Notable Middle East scholar Fred Halliday argued that the emergence of Islamist movements which are hostile to the West and the US are not the result of some trans-historic phenomenon of which Islam is a part. Rather, he insisted, it is the result of particular contemporary social and economic conditions people face.4 However, Edward Said maintained that civilisations and identities cannot be removed from currents and counter currents of history.5 Said’s assessment would appear warranted.

Samuel Huntington perceived a transhistoric notion of civilisational identity as the cause of friction between the Islamic and Western worlds in his well-known work Clash of Civilizations,6 and, in 2002, he declared an end to ideologies, proclaiming they had been replaced by ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic loyalties.7 Other scholarship looks to more contemporary issues such as globalisation and the challenge of modernity. Numerous scholars claim that globalisation is the root of suspicion and loathing of the West.8 Eqbal Ahmed echoed these economic and sociological claims in ‘Profile of the Religious Right’, contending that religio-political movements in the Middle East are often the result of societies moving from the traditional/agrarian to the urban/capitalist.9

In 1970, Ted Gurr proposed a theory of ‘relative depravation’ that linked political uprisings to purely economic circumstances.10 Gurr’s work specifically focused on nineteenth-century rebellions in the Western world but, arguably, many of the conclusions he made could also be offered as explanations for the rise of Islamist extremist violence in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This notion has captured the minds of many scholars attempting to unravel the mystery of Salafi Jihadism. Muhammad Hafez refutes Gurr’s claims, looking to causes beyond severe poverty and other suggestions derived from ideas based on conceptions of psychological alienation or unfulfilled ­modernity. He concludes that the Islamic world must be conceptualised as unique and that grand narratives, which may apply in other parts of the world, are not sufficient in analysing the Muslim world. He argues that extremism is, instead, a reaction to iron-fisted, predatory state aggression from the ruling elites that forces Islamists to react defensively.11

Perceptions of American imperial ambitions and Western intrusion in the Middle East, from the medieval Crusades to the present, are commonly cited as a source of conflict, most notably in the discourse of the Islamists themselves. There is a US-directed globalisation that is reminiscent of a new ‘Manifest Destiny’ which emerges as a brutal hegemonic order. Jihad, then, is the only credible alternative to this globalist injustice.12 Mark Hubbard complements these claims in stating that the failure to build a modern identity in the Middle East, free from external influences, is the source of friction.13 G. John Ikenberry refutes these imperial assertions describing an American liberal grand strategy that is not imperialism but, instead, an American-led democratic order that has no historical precedent.14 The dissenting position asserts that it is precisely this American insistence on a one-size-fits-all notion of democracy that is, in part, what drives extremists’ actions.15 In addition to these claims are notions of otherness and exclusion described as Islamic Orientalism. This is argued to have discursive parallels with Islamism itself, preventing understanding and interaction with the other,16 causing Muslims to be caught in their own otherness and forced to devise strategies of resistance.17

US support for Israel is often cited as a significant grievance with US policy. A poll conducted by the Pew Institute found that 60 per cent of those surveyed in Lebanon and Jordan believed that Israeli interests influence US policy. Respondents identified Israel and the US as the states which most severely threaten their security. Up to 85 per cent of respondents cited Israel as the chief external threat and 72 per cent, the US.18 Shilby Telhami, in ‘What Arab Opinion Thinks of You’, made the point that the Arab-Israeli conflict has become the prism through which the Arab world conceptualises international events. In Telhami’s survey (conducted in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE), respondents were asked which elements of al-Qaeda they were sympathetic to. To this question 30 per cent chose the answer ‘stands up to the US’, while only 20 per cent chose the answer ‘stands up for Muslim causes such as the Palestinians’.19 This would appear to indicate that the Palestinian–Israeli conflict may not be the only prism through which the Arab world conceptualises international affairs.

These attempts at providing rather limited answers to broad and complex questions are problematic; they limit the origins of Salafi Jihadism to a temporal geographical fixed position, while ignoring the broad transhistorical and geographical tapestry of the question. Many of these explanations warrant merit but cannot stand alone. Where any number of these proposals may shed a certain light on the motivations of agents at the individual or even community level, they fail to paint a picture that can explain the problem in its entirety. As E. H. Carr notes, in attempting to establish causation it is necessary to ‘simplify the multiplicity of answers to subordinate one answer to another and to introduce some order and unity into the chaos of happenings and the chaos of specific causes’.20 To engage with the phenomenon of Salafi Jihadism, a broader perspective drawing upon the long, rich and complex history of Islam and the Middle East is required. The Palestinian question and the Arab-Israeli conflict may do well in explaining why Palestinians, who sustain attacks from the Israeli Defense Forces and live in the squalor of refugee camps, sympathise with al-Qaeda’s message and join its ranks, but it still leaves lingering questions, such as why, then, does Hamas not join forces with al-Qaeda? Poverty and destitution in the slums of Cairo and tough-fisted, long-surviving regimes may add illumination to the same in a local context, but it does not explain why some of the 9/11 hijackers, despite being educated, economically affluent men, chose to give up their lives for al-Qaeda’s cause.

This chapter attempts to dispel many of the long-standing assumptions regarding the nature of the conflict between Salafi Jihadism and the US. The contention set out here argues that the conflict with the Salafi Jihadists is a result of the US maintaining a status quo hegemonic position that is instrumental in ensuring the survival of Middle Eastern nation-states be they theocratic, democratic or authoritarian. It is not debated that al-Qaeda’s war with the US, from a tactical perspective, is born out of the political realities of the twentieth century, related to US hegemony. However, it is argued that this is a continuation of a long-running struggle that the US – as a hegemonic power that helps to maintain the status quo order – has become involved in. The previously mentioned assumptions assert that the issue is related to something intrinsic in the nature of the US in terms of values or policy, or something that can be related to contemporary events and perspectives, imagined or real, of Western power in the last 100 years: the Israeli state, modernity, globalisation, poverty, conflicts over values or a clash of civilisations. It is argued throughout this book that this is not the case. Though each of these themes is a part of the wider conflict and do have roles to play in the rise of late-twentieth-century international ‘terrorism’, none of these explanations on its own provides a satisfactory response. Walid Phares astutely assesses the post-9/11 Western understanding of Salafi Jihadism. ‘Even intelligence estimates five years after 9/11, still link the rise of Jihadism to poverty and global attitudes instead of seeing it as a result of mass mobilisation by jihadist ideologues and movements. Jihadists are mobilising radicalised Muslims not on the grounds of America’s image, but to follow the injunction of Allah.’21 The rise of Salafi Jihadism is rooted in a centuries-old struggle for order and power in the Middle East of which al-Qaeda is only the most contemporary contender. Al-Qaeda uses its Salafi Jihadist ideology to justify its cause and claims to legitimacy. Issues of poverty and global attitudes that Phares describes are only a part of the larger issue.

Globalisation, US foreign policy, support for authoritarian regimes, the state of Israel, economic hardship and differing cultural values and perceptions, all have a role to play in regard to the issue of Salafi Jihadist ‘terrorism’ directed at the US. They provide pieces of the puzzle but cannot be observed in isolation. Understanding the roots of Salafi Jihadism requires, as Frank Louis Rusciano notes, ‘a global perspective without necessarily negating other explanations’.22 Th...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Prominent Debates on the Proliferation of Salafi Jihadism
• 2 Historical and Ideological Challenges
• 3 The Islamic State
• 4 An Islamic Paradigm of International Relations
• 5 The Struggle for Unity and Legitimacy in the Imperial Age
• 6 The Struggle for Order in the Twentieth Century
• 7 The Rise of Salafi Jihadism and the Al-Qaeda Ideology
• 8 Glocalisation: Al-Qaeda and its Constituents
• 9 The International System and Salafi Jihadist Resistance
• Conclusions
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index