Landscapes of the Jihad

Militancy, Morality, Modernity

Faisal Devji

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780801459498
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What are the motives behind Osama bin Laden's and Al-Qaeda's jihad against America and the West? Innumerable attempts have been made in recent years to explain that mysterious worldview. In Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji focuses on the ethical content of this jihad as opposed to its purported political intent. Al-Qaeda differs radically from such groups as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah, which aim to establish fundamentalist Islamic states. In fact, Devji contends, Al-Qaeda, with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action, actually has more in common with multinational corporations, antiglobalization activists, and environmentalist and social justice organizations. Bin Laden and his lieutenants view their cause as a response to the oppressive conditions faced by the Muslim world rather than an Islamist attempt to build states.Al-Qaeda culls diverse symbols and fragments from Islam's past in order to legitimize its global war against the "metaphysical evil" emanating from the West. The most salient example of this assemblage, Devji argues, is the concept of jihad itself, which Al-Qaeda defines as an "individual duty" incumbent on all Muslims, like prayer. Although medieval Islamic thought provides precedent for this interpretation, Al-Qaeda has deftly separated the stipulation from its institutional moorings and turned jihad into a weapon of spiritual conflict. Al-Qaeda and its jihad, Devji suggests, are only the most visible manifestations of wider changes in the Muslim world. Such changes include the fragmentation of traditional as well as fundamentalist forms of authority. In the author's view, Al-Qaeda represents a new way of organizing Muslim belief and practice within a global landscape and does not require ideological or institutional unity.Offering a compelling explanation for the central purpose of Al-Qaeda's jihad against the West, the meaning of its strategies and tactics, and its moral and aesthetic dimensions, Landscapes of the Jihad is at once a sophisticated work of historical and cultural analysis and an invaluable guide to the world's most prominent terrorist movement.

1

EFFECTS WITHOUT CAUSES

Towards the end of The 9/11 Commission Report its authors make the following remarks about the globalization of Al-Qaeda’s jihad:

The 9/11 attack was an event of surprising disproportion. […] It was carried out by a tiny group of people, not enough to man a full platoon. Measured on a governmental scale, the resources behind it were trivial. The group itself was dispatched by an organization based in one of the poorest, most remote, and least industrialized countries on earth. […] To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away. To members of al Qaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we were.1

It was indeed the “surprising disproportion” between Al-Qaeda’s severely limited means and seemingly limitless ends that made a global movement of its jihad. And therefore it was the very distance between a poor country like Afghanistan and a rich one like America that made its members “more globalized than we were”. Such a thesis is not paradoxical, since all it does is recognize that the local causes of Al-Qaeda’s jihad—men, money, motives and munitions alike—have vanished into the immensity of their own global effects. This jihad is global not because it controls people, places and circumstances over vast distances, for Al-Qaeda’s control of such things is negligible, as The 9/11 Report testifies, but for precisely the opposite reason: because it is too weak to participate in such a politics of control. For an instrumental politics of this sort to be possible, after all, some proportion between its causes and effects is required, whereas the global consequences of Al-Qaeda’s jihad have outstripped its local causes, and so have exceeded its intentions, to take on a life of their own well beyond the politics of control.

Politics had dealt with moments of excess in the past, when the unintended consequences of its actions spun out of control, but these moments did not displace political intentionality as such. So while there is nothing new in the story of consequences that outstrip their causes, creating a landscape of their own beyond any politics of control, Al-Qaeda’s jihad has become globalized only within such a landscape of unintended and even accidental effects. Terrorist movements of the past, whose equally dispersed acts of violence were intended to keep their causes at the centre of international concern, had also stretched the link between these causes and their effects to breaking-point. A telling example of this is found in Jean Genet’s memoir of the Palestinian movement in the 1970s, which before the intifada was dominated by expatriate groups. Its politics, too, was expatriated in acts of international terrorism, for whose effects the often unseen and inaccessible Palestinian homeland functioned as an almost mythical cause. At least this is how Genet describes the fantasies of Palestinian militants whom he knew:

“Our Palestinian graves have fallen from planes all over the world, with no cemeteries to mark them. Our dead have fallen from one point in the Arab nation to form an imaginary continent. And if Palestine never came down from the Empire of Heaven to dwell upon earth, would we be any less real?”

So sang one of the fedayeen, in Arabic.

“The lash of outrage was urgent. Yet here we are, a divine people, on the brink of exhaustion, sometimes close to catastrophe, and with about as much political power as Monaco,” answered another.

“We are the sons of peasants. Placing our cemeteries in heaven; boasting of our mobility; building an abstract empire with one pole in Bangkok and the other in Lisbon and its capital here, with somewhere a garden of artificial flowers lent by Bahrain or Kuwait; terrorizing the whole world; making airports put up triumphal arches for us, tinkling like shop doorbells—all this to do in reality what smokers of joints only dream of. But has there ever been a dynasty that didn’t build its thousand-year reign on a sham?”

So sang a third fedayeen.2

The disproportion between a Palestinian cause “with about as much political power as Monaco”, and the international terror that was its effect, certainly bears comparison to Al-Qaeda’s jihad. Also com-parable was the national cause of Palestine being rendered mythical within its own international effects. Yet these Palestinian excesses were finally legitimized within an order of intentionality dedicated to the establishment of a national state. What makes today’s jihad different is the increasing ordinariness of such excesses, whose global effects exist outside the politics of control, and which are detached from its traditional categories, like that of statehood. As the kind of acts that have moved beyond the rationality of intentions, such excesses now characterise the totality of the jihad’s action, which has lost intentionality because it has lost control over its own global environment. For instance the attacks of 9/11, im-maculately planned and executed though they were, lacked intentionality because Al-Qaeda could neither control nor even predict their global repercussions. Hence the actions of this jihad, while they are indeed meant to accomplish certain ends, have become more ethical than political in nature, since they have resigned control over their own effects, thus becoming gestures of duty or risk rather than acts of instrumentality properly speaking.3 This might be why a network such as Al-Qaeda, unlike terrorist or fundamentalist groups of the past, has no coherent vision or plan for the future.

It is perhaps their lack of political control, and therefore also of intentionality, that explains why groups engaged in the jihad, unlike “classical” terrorist outfits, appear to find it so difficult to claim responsibility for their acts. It is one thing to name and laud martyrs who have given their lives for the struggle, but another to take credit for their actions. Osama bin Laden, for example, is generally suspected simply of denying his role in such actions, or of false modesty, when he insists on limiting his responsibility for the various attacks of which he has been accused merely to instigation or incitement.4 But when we consider that Bin Laden also, and no matter how disingenuously, sees these acts merely as the reflections of oppressive conditions in the Muslim world, it becomes clear that for him such actions are themselves only effects that have moved well beyond the politics of causes, intentions, mobilization and the like.5 Indeed Olivier Roy, in his book Globalised Islam, argues that Al-Qaeda’s jihad does not in fact result from oppressive or disturbed conditions in the Muslim world, and especially not in the Middle East, because its fighters often have no experience of such conditions, and in any case tend not to involve themselves in the political struggles of their own countries, choosing instead to battle in more exotic locations like Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. According to Roy, then, the global jihad has to be distinguished from local struggles not simply by its geographical sweep, but also because it has become an individual duty for which these causes have been reduced to abstractions. He even suggests that such local struggles exist for it only as stereotypes, their anti-imperialist content being taken over wholesale from the international Left.6

Al-Qaeda’s refusal to take responsibility for acts like those of 9/11 (or to do so only very ambiguously) is worth reflecting upon, because it distinguishes the jihad from terrorism as we have known it since the nineteenth century, for which the recognition achieved by such claims to responsibility was crucial. Given the attenuation of intentional action in a global environment, where its effects can no longer be predicted or controlled, this anonymity or ambiguity of responsibility in the jihad becomes an illustration of the anonymity or ambiguity of intentionality itself within a global dispensation. In this respect Osama bin Laden’s speculations on the causes of 9/11, as reported in an interview with the Pakistani newspaper Ummat on September 28, 2001, are telling indeed:

The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be anyone, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the US itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot forget the American-Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge [sic] him.

Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till [sic] the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usama and Taleban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush Administration approved a budget of 40 billion dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance. Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the US secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the US Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it is President Bush or any other US President, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United States? That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks.7

What Osama bin Laden says in this lengthy statement is far more interesting than why he says it—presumably to evade retribution for the attacks of 9/11. For one thing the variety of possible causes he invokes for these attacks are ones of realpolitik alone and have no religious dimension, being very unlike his statements on the jihad in this respect. And for another they consist of conspiracy theories and half-truths that have an all-too familiar ring, possessing therefore a plural audience rather than a singularly Muslim one. Indeed some of these possible causes, like the secret “government within the government”, have a distinctly American provenance and are well established in that country’s popular culture. All Osama bin Laden need have done was to watch a television show like the X-Files or a film by Oliver Stone to concoct the statements that he uttered in his interview. Such causes are nothing but stereotypes, and are I think deployed as such, because responsibility has itself become a kind of stereotype in a landscape of global effects—where acts lose intentionality because they can no longer control their own outcomes.

Osama bin Laden is indiscriminate in his invocation of domestic and foreign causes for the attacks of 9/11, thus erasing any distinction between the two and operating instead at a purely global level, one in which the sheer range of the contradictory possibilities on offer demolishes intentionality itself as an explanatory category. After all, even if a single group was responsible for the attacks on America, the very existence of so many alternative culprits dis-sipates this responsibility in political terms—for they could have been perpetrated by someone else, and therefore might have produced very different consequences. Since none of these possibilities is foreclosed in Osama bin Laden’s interview, they continue to remain live issues, each with a similar potential for destruction that stems from the very nature of American power, rather than from the responsibility of any autonomous actor. This is made explicit in Bin Laden’s description of the domestic American politics that he suggests made US agencies dealing with narcotics or crime complicit in attacks such as those of 9/11. With this argument political intentionality becomes impossible because it possesses little if any autonomy, since Bin Laden is unable to separate the domestic causes of 9/11 from the foreign ones, or the local from the global, resulting in the disintegration of causality itself amid universal complicity. We shall see below that the only kind of action for which the jihad claims full responsibility is that paradoxical and individualistic act of self-destruction called martyrdom. Is martyrdom, then, the only way of rescuing moral autonomy because it is the only act for which responsibility can be claimed in the jihad?

New markets for our traders

There follow two examples of what I mean by the landscape of accidental effects within which a network like Al-Qaeda becomes global beyond a politics of intentionality. First are the East African attacks with which both Al-Qaeda and the new security regime administered by the United States began their global histories. The bombing in 1998 of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, followed by retaliatory missile strikes against military bases run by a Saudi expatriate in Afghanistan, as well as a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, together comprise a remarkably dispersed sequence of events in which the various killers and victims, causes and effects, countries and targets involved, shared neither history nor geography and had nothing to do with each other. They came to be related by accident rather than design. Yet it was only in this temporary configuration of disparate peoples and places that Al-Qaeda’s jihad was established as a global movement.

Although the countries attacked and most of those killed in Eastern Africa and Central Asia were unrelated to one another in every sense, not one even being denounced as another’s enemy, we cannot dismiss them simply as extras: the civilian casualties, innocent victims or collateral damage caught up in Al-Qaeda’s attacks and America’s retaliation. After all it was the variety of peoples and countries involved, more than anything else, which transformed these events into a series of global effects. Indeed it is the very distance of the jihad’s effects from its proclaimed causes that makes it into the global movement it is. What connected Kenyans, Tanzanians, Sudanese, Americans and Afghans within this order of global effects, then, was mere contingency, for they were related only formally and even despite themselves, beyond any schema of Al-Qaeda’s intentions.

The choice of Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam as targets, therefore, had nothing to do with their political or military status, nor even with the presence of American embassies there, since this is a com-monplace of capital cities the world over. It depended instead on the most local of causes, willing agents in the region, who transformed it into something quite random, since without such agents any other city may—or may not—have been targeted in as random a manner. Unlike its causes, then, which might be tied to shared objectives such as the removal of oppressive regimes in the Islamic world, a common interest in establishing a virtuous Islamic order, or ideas in common about the anti-Muslim policies of the United States and its allies, the jihad’s effects agglomerate diverse countries and peoples into relations that are divorced from any prior history and display little if any commonality. Yet it is precisely in this accidental universe that the jihad is globalized as a series of effects that have lost sight of their own causes.

A second example of a landscape of accidents within which the jihad becomes global are the commercial metaphors that recur in descriptions of Al-Qaeda’s operations. Like companies in the world economy, to which they are often compared, participants in the global jihad have neither the ability nor the inclination to control the territories within which they operate in any old-fashioned sense. Their relationship with these territories can instead be seen as a series of indirect and speculative investments. Just as with players in the global economy, participants in the jihad are drawn by their investments into a world that does not operate according to their intentions but seems to possess a life of its own. While the attacks of 9/11, for instance, were meticulously planned, they were at the same time completely speculative as far as their effects were concerned, since these could neither be predicted with any degree of certainty, nor controlled in any fashion. Practices of terror in the jihad, then, are akin to those of risk in the global economy. That companies and markets do not serve only as metaphors for the jihad is evident in Al-Qaeda’s operation of commercial enterprises in the Sudan and elsewhere. Moreover the group’s internal communications are peppered with references to markets and financial speculation, to the extent of Al-Qaeda being itself referred to as “the company”. Here, for instance, is a coded letter dated May 3, 2001, found in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in the computer of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s Egyptian lieutenant and founder of the Al-Jihad group. It is followed by a decoded translation:

We have been trying to go back to our main, previous activity. The most important step was the opening of the school. We have made it possible for the teachers to find openings for profitable trade. As you know, the situation down in the village has become bad for the traders. Our relatives in the south have abandoned the market, and we are suffering from international monopoly companies. But Allah enlightened us with His mercy when the Omar Brothers Company was established. It has opened new markets for our trad...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Effects without Causes
• 2 A Democratic History of Holy War
• 3 Monotheistic Geographies
• 4 Media and Martyrdom
• 5 The Death of God
• 6 New World Order
• Notes