Debating the War of Ideas

Debating the War of Ideas

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Debating the War of Ideas Edited by Eric D. Patterson and John Gallagher

DEBATING THE WAR OF IDEAS

Copyright © Eric D. Patterson and John Gallagher, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61936–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Debating the war of ideas / edited by Eric D. Patterson and John Gallagher. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–61936–4 (alk. paper) 1. War on Terrorism, 2001– 2. Terrorism—Religious aspects—Islam. 3. Jihad. 4. Democracy. I. Patterson, Eric D. II. Gallagher, John. HV6432.D432 2009 355.0201—dc22

2009017836

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CON T E N T S

Foreword

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Preface

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List of Contributors

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One

Approaching the War of Ideas John Gallagher and Eric D. Patterson

1

Two

Jihadism’s War on Democracy Walid Phares

Three

“Dangerous Concepts” and the Struggle Within: Reclaiming State and Politics from the Islamists Maajid Nawaz

Four

Sharing with Equals: Modernity, Fundamentalism, and the Future Karen Armstrong

Five

Taqiyya: War and Deceit in Islam Raymond Ibrahim

Six

Debates over Just War and Jihad: Ideas, Interpretations, and Implications across Cultures James Turner Johnson

21

35

55 67

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Seven

The War of Ideas: The Role of the “Afterlife” Alan M. Dershowitz

101

Eight

The Clash of Civilizations? Akbar Ahmed

111

vi Nine

Contents Debating Absolutism and Pluralism in Contemporary Islam Asma Afsaruddin

Ten

Democracy, Religion, and the War of Ideas Eric D. Patterson

Eleven

Inter-civilizational Conf lict between Value Systems and Concepts of Order: Exploring the Islamic Humanist Potential for a Peace of Ideas Bassam Tibi

Twelve

The War of Ideas as Therapy: Ref lections on a Eureka Moment in the “War on Terror” Abdelwahab El-Affendi

131 143

157

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Thirteen

Waging Trans-epistemological Warfare Jarret M. Brachman

Fourteen

Counter-radicalization and Europe’s New Security Dilemma Lorenzo Vidino

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The Struggle for Islamism in the Levant: The Case of Northern Lebanon Bernard Rougier

221

Dissonance and Denial: U.S. Foreign Policy and the War of Ideas Robert Spencer

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Fifteen

Sixteen

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Select Bibliography

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Index

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FOR E WOR D

Conf licts to advance political ideas are ever-present throughout history. The twentieth century was marked by “warring ideas” where ideologies associated with blocs of nations collided, producing not only economic and political competition, but also large-scale war and loss of human life. The Cold War victory over totalitarianism and the apparent consensus of the 1990s in favor of political and economic democratization did not last, as the tragedy of September 11, 2001 attests. In fact, as this intriguing volume reveals, the alleged consensus simply never was. Debating the War of Ideas presents an important array of views on core ideological issues affecting millions around the world, particularly the West and the Muslim world (broadly defined). It offers valuable insights into the complex, often highly divergent perspectives of this debate, one that has at times manifested itself through armed conf lict. Policy makers, diplomats, scholars, and military commanders—from all sides—must understand the nature of this debate as the basis for making decisions that will greatly impact the duration and direction of this intense struggle. Understanding the war of ideas is a leadership issue. Released one year after 9/11, the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy stated, “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” An important assumption of the U.S.-led invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq was that people everywhere value “freedom” similarly and will readily embrace the opportunity to increase individual liberty, even if such an opportunity is provided through the military force of an external power. Both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were brutal oppressors of freedom and dissent, and it was believed that removing them would lead to rapid, widespread popular action in support of democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law. Further, it was thought that the security, governance, and economic development necessary for sustainable self-government would develop mostly uncontested, albeit with help. Yet, events have not unfolded so deliberately in either case. It seems clearer now that a sustainable model for national success whether in the West, the Muslim world or anywhere, must fully account for the deeply held personal and collective beliefs of the

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people—their ideas about issues like governance, justice, social identity, reform, and so on. Simply put, ideas matter. The apparent differences between the people of the West and the Muslim world are exceeded by the beliefs they have in common about humanity, respect, opportunity, peace, and cooperation. Yet, in the execution of policy and politics, much seems to get lost in translation. As the former commander of Task Force 134 (Camp Bucca theater internment facility in Iraq) from 2007–2008, I had an opportunity to interact firsthand with thousands of Iraqis who had been involved in actively opposing both the Iraqi Security Forces and Coalition forces. Through a program of proper care and custody, family involvement, religious teachings with moderate Islamic clerics, literacy training, and continuing education, we were able to better understand the detainee population as individuals, as Iraqis, and as Muslims. This reintegration program not only achieved remarkably low recidivism, but it helped put citizens committed to stability and reconciliation into Iraqi society. Progress was based on understanding, just as the “Anbar Awakening” in 2007 ref lected a greater understanding of the Coalition among Iraqis. As the late Sheikh Abd al-Sattar Abu Risha stated, “The insurgency occurred because we saw you Americans as invaders. The Awakening occurred because we realized you were our allies.” Those seeking a better understanding of the ideological aspects of this broader conf lict must realize the complexity of how Western and Muslim societies interact. The wide-ranging views presented in these sixteen essays demonstrate this complexity, and are sure to arouse disagreement in every reader. That is the point of this book: to showcase the rival viewpoints present in this debate. Issues discussed within these essays include: How long has this “war” been underway, and how has it changed over time? Is it between the West and the Muslim world, or mostly a struggle within the Muslim world? Do democratization and globalization strengthen Muslim and Western ties, or exacerbate the perception that Islam is threatened? Do the broad freedoms of Western liberalism represent hope, or an extreme individualism that weakens society’s moral foundation? Is Islam peaceful and tolerant, or rigid and violent? Is there a duality in Islam that must be addressed? Does U.S. foreign policy underestimate the importance of sovereignty and self-determination? Is there an inevitable “clash of civilizations?” And how can the various actors and interests in this debate move forward? Of course, one important way to move forward is to learn and try with some humility to understand the competing viewpoints. This is not to say one cannot determine some ideas are better than others and therefore worth fighting for, but understanding the different perspectives is the foundation of constructive dialogue and progress. This understanding is, perhaps, the beginning of the end of the fighting. —Dr. Doug Stone, Major General, United States Marine Corps (Retired)

PR E FAC E

It began on a bus. The coeditors of this book had met just months before, but were entering a one-year period of government service together. The bus was taking us to an orientation retreat and we fell to talking about our studies and teaching and how our intellectual interests were intertwined with our work. In John’s case, he had just finished three years teaching at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and had brief ly visited Iraq just weeks before. As an Army officer, he had served in the Sinai, Germany, and Kosovo in previous years. Eric, a career political scientist, was just leaving two years as a visiting scholar at the State Department where he had worked on and traveled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Eastern Africa. For two hours on that bus ride in September 2007, we applied a very simple notion to U.S. foreign policy, global affairs, and the war on terrorism: “ideas have consequences.” We agreed that U.S. foreign policy was at its best when it refused to back down on its core intellectual commitments: this was the legacy of Truman, JFK, and Reagan. We saw President Bush attempting the same with his “freedom agenda,” but we noted how major elements of the freedom agenda were disregarded by senior administration officials, and that U.S. policies were often contradictory or just ineffective at defining our interests and promoting shared values. That conversation, which tested the patience of other passengers, ranged widely: Bush’s speeches and the National Security Strategies of 2002 and 2006, how different presidential candidates in the forthcoming presidential election might engage the War of Ideas, the original work of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, issues of public diplomacy and strategic communications, the unequal role of government agencies, the ambivalence of some government officials about “Western values” as cultural imperialism, the universality of human rights and civil liberties, applying the notion of “warring ideas” to Latin America and the authoritarian regimes in Beijing and Moscow, and the critical matters of culture, religion, and language proficiency (how many U.S. government employees speak Dari or can read Arabic?).

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We began with the concept that ideas not only have consequences but genealogies, and envisioned a project wherein those genealogies were presented and their consequences forecasted, both as ideas and as policy. We soon realized that to do this—to map out major contours of the global War of Ideas—was beyond our resources. Consequently, we sought help. We reached out to numerous contemporary voices, some of the very best minds on the issue of a War of Ideas between the West and sectors of the Islamic world. Due to the increasingly targeted nature of journals, opinion pages, book sales, and blogging, many public intellectuals tend to “preach to the choir,” or better, are simply heard by their own choir. Our goal was to break this model. Hence, we sought 10–20 competing voices from across partisan, religious, cultural, and geographic perspectives, to put their voices side by side within one book—and let the reader decide on the most compelling arguments in the War of Ideas. We ended up sending out about three dozen invitations over a seven-month period. The ultimate constitution of the book represents not only a diversity of intellectual viewpoints, but also authors originating from the United States, Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia. All of the contributors, as well as those unable to participate, are animated by the sense that the War of Ideas is entering a new phase: a new president has taken office, the world financial crisis is on everyone’s mind (including Osama bin Laden’s, according to a recent statement), Afghanistan and Pakistan are reeling from political turmoil, and it is unclear how the philosophical confrontation will evolve. President Obama quickly acknowledged there is a War of Ideas; just a few days into his presidency, told the Muslim world via al-Arabiya that the ideas of al Qaeda “are bankrupt.” The result of that bus ride, and many discussions since, is a collaboration between distinguished scholars on the War of Ideas, broadly defined. We are grateful to each chapter contributor for his or her participation in this effort. We appreciate Palgrave-Macmillan for supporting this endeavor, and thank Caryl Tuma for invaluable research assistance and manuscript support. We acknowledge the patient fellow passengers, our White House Fellow colleagues, and all close friends today: Lou Bremer, Anne Neuberger, Julissa Marenco, Stacey Hawkins, Kathy Spletstoser, Andy Smarick, Travis Matheson, Dawn Dunlop, Bobbi Doorenbos, Kristine Singley, Patrick Conway, Jaewon Ryu, and Jaime Areizaga. Finally, we dedicate our work on this volume not only to our families, but also to the many families who have sacrificed and suffered great loss in this struggle. In our youth we witnessed the victory of freedom in the last “war of ideas.” Our hope is that our children—Spencer, Jane, Hannah, and Faith—see a similar triumph of ordered liberty, regard for human life, and equality over the new authoritarians.

CON T R I BU TOR S

Asma Afsaruddin is professor of Islamic studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on the religious and political thought of Islam, Quranic hermeneutics and hadith, Islamic intellectual history, and gender. She is the author and/or editor of four books, including The First Muslims: History and Memory (Oxford: OneWorld Publications, 2008) and Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002). Afsaruddin is currently completing a book manuscript about competing perspectives on jihad and martyrdom in premodern and modern Islamic thought and another on contemporary issues in Islam. Her research has won funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, among others. Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University. He is considered “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam,” according to the BBC. He is former high commissioner of Pakistan to Great Britain, and has advised Prince Charles and met with President George W. Bush on Islam. His numerous books, films, and documentaries have won prestigious awards and his books have been translated into several languages including Chinese and Indonesian. Ahmed’s most recent book, Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization, is published by the Brookings Institution Press. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in addition to his tenure appointment at American University. He was nominated as the “Most Inspiring Person of the Year 2005” and was a finalist in the poll conducted by Belief Net. Karen Armstrong is one of the most popular writers on religion today. She has authored twelve books, including the best-seller A History of God (Ballantine, 1994), and created a six-part documentary television series in England on the life of Saint Paul. At age seventeen she took vows of chastity and poverty, and entered the Roman Catholic order of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. Seven years later she left the convent and in 1982 published

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her first book, Through the Narrow Gate (St. Martin’s Griffin), which chronicles her life as a nun. Armstrong’s achievements as an independent scholar focusing on the three great monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, have earned her a reputation as a major contributor to interfaith understanding and respect. Jarret M. Brachman is an internationally recognized specialist on al Qaeda strategy, media, and ideology. From 2004 to 2008, he served as the director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy (West Point). Brachman now directs the Center for Transportation Security at North Dakota State University and routinely advises local, state, and federal law enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies and the private sector on counterterrorism matters. He has testified before the House Armed Services Committee and the British House of Lords and his research is regularly cited in the international press. His book Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice was published in 2008 by Routledge Press. Alan M. Dershowitz has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer” and one of its “most distinguished defenders of individual rights,” and “the best-known criminal lawyer in the world.” He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz, a graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, joined the Harvard Law School faculty at age twenty-five after clerking for Judge David Bazelon and Justice Arthur Goldberg. He has also published more than one hundred articles in magazines and journals such as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Nation, Commentary, Saturday Review, The Harvard Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, and more than three hundred of his articles have appeared in syndication in fifty national daily newspapers. Professor Dershowitz is the author of twenty-seven fiction and nonfiction works with a worldwide audience. His most recent titles include Rights From Wrong (Basic Books, 2004), The Case For Israel ( John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2003), The Case For Peace ( John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2005), Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence ( John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2007), Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways (W. W. Norton and Co Inc, 2006), Finding Jefferson—A Lost Letter, A Remarkable Discovery ( John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2008), and The First Amendment In An Age of Terrorism ( John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2008). Abdelwahab El-Affendi is a senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, and coordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam Programme. Educated at the Universities of Khartoum, Wales, and Reading, he is the author of numerous books, including Rethinking Islam and Modernity (Islamic Foundation, 2001) and The Conquest of Muslim Hearts and Minds: Perspectives on U.S. Reform and Public Diplomacy Strategies (Brookings, 2005). Dr El-Affendi was member of the core team of authors of the Arab Human Development Report (2004) and is member of

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the advisory board and a contributor to the 2005 report. He is also member of the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, a member of the board of directors of Inter-Africa Group, and a trustee of the International Forum for Islamic Dialogue. John Gallagher is a U.S. Army officer and a former director in the Office of Iraq and Afghanistan Affairs at the National Security Council (2007–2009), where he also served as a 2007–2008 White House Fellow. Prior to the fellowship, John was an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point where he taught courses on Western liberalism and political Islam, American politics, and counterterrorism. A recipient of the William F. Murdy Award for teaching excellence, John was the president of the West Point Chapter of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi and the director of West Point’s national-merit scholarship program. An Army infantry officer who has served with the 82nd Airborne Division and 1st Armored Division, John graduated from West Point in 1994 and holds two master’s degrees with distinction from The University of Chicago, one in public policy and another in political theory. John is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, was selected as an American Swiss Foundation and French American Foundation young leader, and served as a delegate to the American Academy of Achievement’s International Summit in 2008. Raymond Ibrahim is the associate director of the Middle East Forum and editor/translator of The Al Qaeda Reader. He writes daily for Jihad Watch. A widely published author on radical Islam, Ibrahim regularly discusses that topic with the media. He regularly lectures at universities and briefs governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command, the Department of State, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. On February 12, 2009, he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’ House Armed Services Committee regarding the educational/epistemological failures that dominate American discourse concerning Islam. James Turner Johnson is professor of religion and associate of the graduate program in political science at Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, where he has been on the faculty since 1969. His research and teaching have focused principally on the historical development and application of moral traditions related to war, peace, and the practice of statecraft. Johnson has received Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and various other research grants and has directed two NEH summer seminars for college teachers. His most recent books are The War To Oust Saddam Hussein (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), Morality and Contemporary Warfare (Yale, 1999), and The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Tradition (Penn State, 1997). Johnson is a trustee, editorial board member, and former general editor of The Journal of Religious Ethics, coeditor of The Journal of Military Ethics, and a member of professional societies in the fields

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of religion and political science. He has lectured to academic, military, and general audiences in the United States and abroad. Maajid Nawaz is director and cofounder of the Quilliam Foundation and was formerly on the U.K. national leadership for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). He was involved in HT for almost fourteen years and was a founding member of HT in Denmark and Pakistan, and eventually served four years in an Egyptian prison as an Amnesty International “prisoner of conscience.” In prison, Maajid gradually began changing his views until finally renouncing the Islamist ideology for traditional Islam and inclusive politics. Maajid now engages in counter-Islamist thought-generating, writing, debating, and media appearances. He has spoken at various fora internationally ranging from the grassroots at City Circle London, to addressing the U.S. Senate in Washington D.C., and regularly comments on national and international news and newspapers. Maajid holds a BA (Hons) from SOAS in Arabic and Law and an MSc in political theory from the London School of Economics, with modules in “Religion and Politics” and “Conf lict, Violence and Terrorism.” Eric D. Patterson, PhD was a White House fellow (2007–2008) and now serves as assistant director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs in addition to being a visiting assistant professor of government at Georgetown University. He is also the project director for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Taskforce on Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy. Prior to this he was on faculty at Vanguard University in California. For 2005–2007 he was a foster fellow at the U.S. State Department where he studied and worked on the issue of international illicit trafficking in small arms and light weapons, focusing on and traveling to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and numerous African countries. He is the author or editor of five books, including Christianity and Power Politics Today (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008) and Just War Thinking: Morality and Pragmatism in the Struggle Against Contemporary Threats (Lexington Books, 2007). He has also published a dozen scholarly articles in journals such International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Journal of Political Science, International Politics, Security Studies, and International Relations. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of numerous scholarly associations, and has been awarded Calihan and Rotary Ambassadorial fellowships. Walid Phares is senior fellow and director for the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington (2001–2007). He was professor of Middle East studies, ethnic and religious conf lict at the Department of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) from 1993 to 2006. He is a leading expert on the War of Ideas, and his recent books include The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008) and The War of Ideas Jihadism against Democracy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).

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Bernard Rougier is a lecturer in political science at Clermont-Ferrand University, France, and author of ‘Le Jihad au quotidien’ (Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), recently released in English as Everyday Jihad. Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of eight books on Islam and jihad, including the New York Times best-sellers The Truth About Muhammad (Regenery Publishing Inc, 2006) and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Regenery Publishing Inc, 2005). Spencer is a weekly columnist for Human Events and FrontPage Magazine, and has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the U.S. Central Command, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. intelligence community. Spencer’s books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Italian, Finnish, and Bahasa Indonesia. Bassam Tibi was born in Damascus, Syria, and migrated to Germany when he was eighteen to study in Frankfurt. He has been a German citizen since 1967. He is a widely published scholar, and is the author of The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder (University of California Press, 1998). He has at several universities, most recently at Göttingen University as well as Cornell and Yale in the United States. Lorenzo Vidino is an analyst at the Investigative Project on Terrorism and the Jebsen Center at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is the author of Al-Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad (Prometheus Books, 2006).

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CH A P T E R

ON E

Approaching the War of Ideas John Gallag he r and Eric D. Pat te r son

War is political philosophy by other means.1 Politics is merely the process by which institutions—rules—distribute society’s benefits and obligations according to the philosophical ideas upon which people, leading their collective lives, have conferred legitimacy. 2 The War of Ideas is a battle for this perception of legitimacy and accompanying popular support. Simply put, political philosophy is a hypothesis: if condition, then outcome. If a polity is organized according to a particular philosophical narrative and structure, then justice, security, and human f lourishing will result. Plato, for example, advocated a rightly ordered society of philosopher kings, an auxiliary or guardian class, and producers—that is, rulers, those supporting and guided by the rulers, and the ruled. Plato supplemented this social organization with the “Noble Lie” or “Myth of the Metals,” claiming the respective social classes have gold, silver, and brass in their souls. 3 Of course, those on the lower end of society’s benefits and privileges would believe they were not deprived as a result of some political or earthly injustice, just the harsh reality of the condition of their birth. These people are less likely to revolt. Socrates asserted that humanness includes an innate sense of justice. Whenever humans live collectively, a political philosophy narrative necessarily emerges to establish order, legitimacy, and a sense of justice to the social existence. Rulers and their institutions perpetuate the philosophy, distributing benefits and burdens through policy outcomes that are binding on the members of the society. Of course, with every policy outcome, there are winners and losers. As long as the policy “losers” re-engage established institutions (in the hope of someday becoming policy winners), the established order endures.4 But, if policy losers believe themselves to be on the receiving end of injustice (and redress within the rules is perceived as fruitless), over time they will likely “reach for their guns,”5 asserting that resistance (even

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public violence), is in the pursuit of justice. And sometimes it is. Regardless, the struggle is not rooted in differing political institutions or processes; it is rooted in competing philosophical claims over what constitutes justice and, ultimately, political legitimacy. The discussion in this volume represents just such a competition.

Plato to NATO Figures like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Kant, Adam Smith, De Tocqueville, Nozick, Rawls, and many others all contributed a variation of the same thing to what has become Western Civilization: a narrative and social organization (or refinement of existing dominant ideas) promising a more just society and greater human f lourishing. It is important to note that whenever such a narrative actually delivers on what it promises (or is perceived to have done so), the society believes it has found a superior philosophy and model for governing, and it begins to take a universalist turn. This is understandable and largely unavoidable. Since societies exist collectively in a relative state of anarchy, the presence of neighbors organized according to different political philosophies (and associated political structures) constitute competition and a potential threat. To “export” a system of government beyond one’s borders in order to promote justice and f lourishing is perceived as making others better off while simultaneously reducing a threat. Of course, this has the added benefit of strengthening one’s own standing in the balance-of-power system. This aligning of idealism and self-interest is generally too much for rulers to resist. Even a cursory review of U.S. security policy reveals the clear inf luence of the West’s philosophical heritage on its engagement internationally. Notions of popular sovereignty; equality; the right to decide one’s rulers; and freedom of political participation, conscience, speech, and religion are treated as universal. The importance of grasping and maintaining power is critical as well. These notions are bi-partisan, span administrations, and are perpetually ref lected in the U.S. National Security Strategy. We see Hobbes in the social contract reference, Locke in the limited government and toleration references, Machiavelli in the importance of power, and so on. Of course, many of these ideas were already regarded as legitimate in the colonies by the mid-1600s (Locke’s work on human understanding and toleration would not be published until decades later, in 1689). Coupled with the “rugged individualism” required to survive in the colonies, England’s attempt to bind colonists with policy outcomes resulting from a system of unequal political participation— like the Stamp Act (1765)—fueled a perception of political illegitimacy. The King was still the colonists’ King, but there was no “Noble Lie” that quite legitimized this system or the harsh response from the British upon Colonists who sought redress within (and eventually outside) existing institutions. The colonies had developed a philosophical narrative about what constitutes a just

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society and were willing to fight, kill, and die for it. That people fight for their conception of political, cultural, and religious legitimacy—and believe the human f lourishing they lack is best obtained through a rightly ordered, just, self-determining society (especially if this social organization and narrative have been previously “validated” historically)—is noteworthy. The West, generally, is characterized by popular sovereignty, representative government, secular political processes, freedom of political participation and speech, and the obligation to obey laws (favorable outcomes or not) because its citizens participate directly in creating them.6 This allows for peaceful adjudication between competing claims—the best chance for more favorable policy outcomes in the future—within this system, which reinforces itself. The Articles of Confederation and the eventual “Miracle at Philadelphia” in 1787 represented the institutionalization of the ideas of liberty, limited government, popular sovereignty, and freedom of religion. The Constitution, separation of powers, and three branches of government are not the ideas; they are the institutions and rules formed to uphold and protect the ideas. America’s claim to be the most just and f lourishing society grew stronger after improvements in equality for women and minorities in the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991. Swift victory in the Gulf War in 1991 and economic, technological, political, and continued military dominance in the 1990s only strengthened the claim. Of course, the United States’ forward posture associated with containment did not shrink after the disintegration of the Berlin wall in 1989 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The emergence of the United States as the world’s lone superpower only served to increase the opportunity and perceived responsibility to orient outward, to “export,” the social organization and political philosophy that had made it all possible. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the emphasis on democracy promotion as a means to defeat impending threats, particularly the threat of terrorism, only intensified. However, after more than two hundred years, Americans—people and policymakers alike—seem to define political legitimacy more by institutions than by its ideas. Yet, ideas tend to give rise to the institutions, not the other way around. Much of the United States’ policy of democratization— since World War II and including the “Freedom Agenda” under President George W. Bush—has emphasized the promotion of democratic institutions on the assumption that the philosophical basis for these institutions would take care of itself. After all, it is thought, freedom is better than oppression, and who does not want popular sovereignty and the freedom to believe and say whatever one wants? It turns out even those who deeply desire these noble ends also want to ensure their beliefs about justice, truth, morality, and faith adequately account for this individualism, these liberal norms, and institutions. In many cultures where democracy is strongly promoted by the West (particularly the United States), this is cause for much public debate, competition, compromise, reform, and concessions—which takes time. Yet, people want to know that as they move in the direction of greater individual liberty,

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secular democratic institutions, freedom of conscience, and the rule of law, they are also moving in the direction of cultural, historical, and religious authenticity7—not away from it. For the diverse peoples of Islam, it is important that a step in the direction of political and religious pluralism not be a step away from devoutness or a right-relationship with God, individually or collectively. Where these steps are perceived to lead in diverging directions, there is reluctance at best and violent resistance at worst, to external efforts to “make others better off.” The distinction between the promotion of ideas and the promotion of institutions is essential to understanding this War of Ideas. Promoting institutions that codify increased freedoms is not the same as the advancement of ideas that legitimize increased freedom and associated institutions. In fact, the former can work at cross-purposes with the latter. America need only look to its own Amish communities to find some who actually prefer to limit individual freedom and narrow their personal behavior out of faithful obedience, submission to God, and in pursuit of greater moral significance.

Ka’bah to Kabul The claim that God saved Ishmael’s life in the desert and later revealed, through his prophet Muhammad, the truth about an ideal society and God’s enduring blessing upon his people was greatly bolstered by Islam’s ascent soon after its founding. The rapid assimilation of this belief by previously factional and disparate tribes, and the spread of Islam after 622 AD throughout and beyond the region serves as validation of the original revelations and confirmation of God’s guiding hand for the faithful. It also suggests Islam’s “universalist turn” was well underway. From 750 to 1258 AD the Abbasid Dynasty, centered in Baghdad, represented one of the most f lourishing societies on earth. Although the Abbasids were defeated by the Mongols in 1258, the Mongols soon converted to Islam. However, Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328 AD) asserted through numerous writings that despite the Mongols adopting the pillars of Islam, the presence of customs and beliefs external to Islam meant they were not sufficiently devout and could justifiably be fought. Indeed, Ibn Taymiyyah suggested the Mongols were able to defeat the Abbasids precisely because the Abbasids had so openly embraced customs, thinking, and inf luences external to Islam. Ibn Taymiyyah remains one of the most referenced philosophers in all of Islamic thought,8 and this “devoutness” approach is continually invoked to attempt to justify resistance and violence against those in power who are considered insufficiently pure. As several of the contributors to this volume report, the devoutness test has found its more modern stewards among figures like Al Wahhab, Mawdudi, Hassan al Banna, Sayid Qutb, Faraj, and the modern day writings of Maqdisi, Al Suri, Zawarhiri, and in part, Osama bin Laden. Whether the political philosophies of the Muslim world (lacking a better term for the diverse peoples of Islamic faith, culture, law, and tradition)

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can, or should, fully embrace popular sovereignty, representative government, equality, rights for women and non-Muslims, and freedom of conscience is an important theme in this book. There are wide differences even among “mainstream” Muslims on these issues. And even when many agree that these “liberal” principles are fully compatible with political Islam, many staunchly oppose their introduction through external intervention and “nationbuilding.” Visitors to the United States from Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani communities—usually journalists or local religious leaders9 —often insist that “militancy” and extremism are expanding in their countries because of the presence and actions of “foreign forces.” Yet, they struggle to answer why this extremism has so long been present in the Muslim world or how communities might deal with aggressive insurgents seeking greater power and inf luence in the absence of these international forces. The perception of international forces as invaders explains, in part, the difficulty in Iraq and Afghanistan with strategic communications and inspiring widespread, active popular support.10 Perceptions of the nature of these forces are maligned, intentions are difficult to measure, and behavior can be misinterpreted or distorted. Kinetic [military] actions to defeat insurgents, development efforts, and partnerships with the government and local leaders (who are sometimes viewed as corrupt or as not having the interests of the people in mind) can all be contextualized into an insurgent “script.” For example, in Afghanistan the Taliban routinely distort facts to do this, and the communications infrastructure in Afghanistan and its media consumers have not yet progressed enough so that lies do not pay. This gives the Taliban a clear upper-hand. Part of the War of Ideas is the recognition that in the battle for legitimacy and popular support—whether on a grand strategic scale or an operational scale—every action is itself a communication, generating what one might more accurately call “strategic reputation.” Actions must be understood for the potential they have to communicate, and tactical-level actions can be easily misinterpreted or mischaracterized, with strategic consequences.11 For example, a road constructed through international efforts to better connect two villages for commerce purposes that is instead characterized by insurgents or sympathetic local leaders as a route by which “invaders” will move weapons and ammunition (to bring violence to the Afghan people) will have a very limited positive effect. Or, if international forces detain an individual on legitimate charges, but the local perception is that he was innocent and therefore any person in the community is likely to be detained without justification, the benefit from removing him from the street is entirely offset by the increased distrust and decreased support among the population. The Taliban understand well that inf luencing public perception—controlling this narrative space—is the goal because it drives how the population behaves. International forces are still coming to the recognition that the War of Ideas is the center of gravity in such conf licts, and that public perceptions of legitimacy driving popular action will, ultimately, be decisive in the outcome of the entire effort.

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In the “global war on terror,” there are two ideological narratives competing for the assent of those who would either support or oppose the violent jihadists. The revolutionary “strict adherence” narrative suggests that if Muslims embrace the most rigid interpretations of Islam and reject modern political institutions and thought, they will be restored to a right relationship with God, Muslim lands will return to the dominance and f lourishing once present in the Muslim world, and the West will be defeated. A “democratization” narrative, currently the West’s only real ideological offering to Muslims, suggests that if Muslims embrace democratic institutions (generally secular political processes, constitutionalism, free markets), they will begin to experience the freedom, well-being, and stability seen in the West (but not present in most of the Muslim world). Unfortunately, the democratization narrative overlooks the fact that the post-enlightenment political philosophy that makes democratic institutions in the West legitimate designates the people as sovereign, whereas in Islam, God is sovereign and the people have a responsibility, as subjects to God, to obey God’s laws—which Eric Patterson and Maajid Nawaz note in their chapters in this volume. Therefore, freedom of conscience and political participation can actually be interpreted as a threat or departure from justice in society. However, there are strains of thought prevalent in Islam that not only allow for liberalization but, according to many scholars, require it.12 Therefore, a third hypothesis that would better compete with the revolutionary Islamic narrative might contend that Islam in its purest form is, in fact, more liberal and pluralistic (qualities associated with Islam’s rapid growth in the first few centuries) suggesting that to embrace true Islam is to embrace “liberal Islam,” which predates Western enlightenment by one thousand years and is therefore the most legitimate way to God’s blessing. Similar arguments are made by Bassam Tibi, and Asma Afsaruddin in the chapters that follow. An essential question then emerges: How should the West shape its political, economic, military, cultural, and technological engagement with the Muslim world to better foster the emergence of these strains of liberal Islamic thought? Karen Armstrong notes in her chapter that it was not always this way; indeed, there was a time when Western ideas were not seen as outlandish or sinister by conservative Muslims in the greater Middle East and Central Asia. Nonetheless, today’s Islamists attempting to manipulate the public narrative against the West have it easy. Writings that attack almost every aspect of Western life and culture are nearly ubiquitous, and as a body of thought constitute a carefully constructed “script” depicting hatred and distrust between the “unbelievers” and the umma. It portrays the West, and the United States in particular, with a corrupt and degenerate nature that its actions repeatedly confirm. American intentions can never be trusted, nor can its words be taken at face value. Even behaviors that are empirically altruistic should be seen as a

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tactic to further the West’s intent to humiliate Islam and subjugate Muslims. The steady message of revolutionary Islam13 includes a continual claim of the following: (1) Islam is under attack from the jahiliyyah,14 led by the United States; (2) fighting against the jahiliyyah is the duty of every Muslim,15 those who fight will be rewarded richly, and the fight will ultimately end in victory16; and (3) the trials, poverty, hardships (and lack of government capacity and basic services) so common to Muslim lands today are the fault of the West and have continued only because Muslims have not been devout enough.17 Islamists insist that purging the umma of corrupting Western political systems and thought will restore the land to God’s blessing, usher in an end to widespread material deprivation, and serve as a beacon of hope for all true believers. Implicit in these claims is that Muslims face a state of “supreme emergency,”18 that any and all means of warfare are just, and that the ongoing efforts of the West to democratize (promote its way of life politically, economically, and even technologically) are part of a larger scheme to globalize the world into Western beliefs and ways.19 Radicalized elites weave this religious perspective into the very real needs of the population and existing antigovernment grievances20 —and have no shortage of volunteers for acts of violence or suicide terrorism 21 as a result. The vast majority of Muslims are not persuaded by this narrative, but those who are nevertheless constitute a large number of elusive, formidable, and largely undeterable enemies. Advancing the War of Ideas requires recognizing that these enemies are inspired by a philosophy that is a threat to both the West and Muslim societies.

A Religion of Peace? Is Islam inherently a religion of peace? This is a question addressed and debated by several authors in this volume, including Karen Armstrong, Robert Spencer, and Raymond Ibrahim. Hundreds of millions of adherents embrace Islam as a religion of peace and live their entire lives faithfully and accordingly. This sentiment also permeates the highest levels of the U.S. government. President Bush repeatedly asserted that the violent extremists are evil-doers, criminals, and murderers—not followers of a great faith. President Obama has adopted a similar characterization. Yet there are increasingly vocal dissenters who argue Islam’s orthodoxy, properly understood, has no tolerance for unbelievers and calls true adherents to strive to oppose, dominate, harass, and ultimately defeat any who will not submit. They offer as evidence the fact that public criticism of Islam as intolerant and as a “driver of violence” is often met with violence toward those who are publicly critical. This important consideration is a prevalent theme within these pages, ref lecting a galvanizing issue within the broader War of Ideas debate. Indeed, the issue of Islam as peaceful or violent seems to have taken a firm place on the list of public policy issues that align starkly across liberal and conservative lines in

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America. Liberals insist Islam deserves deep respect as a nonviolent religion. Conservatives insist all who value “liberal” freedoms should recognize the nature of this ominous threat. In fact, in February 2009, Democratic members of the U.S. Congress held a hearing on outreach to the Muslim world (extolling Islam as peaceful) while simultaneously Republican members of Congress hosted Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders and the International Free Press Society for a viewing of Wilders’ controversial film Fitna. That said, there seems to be another War of Ideas voice emerging on this point: it asserts that settling whether Islam is peaceful or violent doctrinally is not critical. As long as there are adherents who will painstakingly weave Islamic doctrine into a body of political and religious thought that inspires brutal, often gruesome intolerance and violence, this theological-political philosophy must be acknowledged for what it is and its followers directly defeated. Were the president of the United States to assert publicly and repeatedly that America is at war with this particular belief system because it drives attacks against innocent people globally, including Americans, would this circumvent accusations from those who claim America is waging war against Islam (because such accusations would suggest these violent beliefs represent Islam)? Would this not also allow U.S. leaders and policymakers to more easily dedicate resources, policy analysis, and public debate more freely to the defeat of this ideology, without fear of portraying America as attacking a world religion? It might also enable Muslim and other leaders across the globe to say more boldly: “We support the defeat of these violent beliefs (which are not Islamic) and these perpetrators (who are not true Muslims)—and will do more to interdict the promotion of these non-Islamic beliefs wherever they are taught or disseminated.” It is difficult to move the debate or strategy forward in the War of Ideas when there remains so much dissention over the true nature of Islam. Fittingly, almost all of the chapter contributors in this volume speak to this issue.

Debating the War of Ideas: Competing Perspectives Due to the urgent nature of global affairs, and specifically the ongoing conf licts in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the broader conf lict of ideas and ideologies in international relations, the coeditors of this book invited prominent voices and thought leaders of various disciplines, experiences, and varied perspectives to address questions such as the following: What is the War of Ideas? Is it really a war? Is it analogous to an earlier ideological conf lict such as the Cold War, Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” or something/ nothing else? What “ideas” are being contested? Can there be a “Truce of Ideas” or a “Peace of Ideas?” What would such look like? With a new president in Washington, D.C., what “new thinking” (perestroika) would you recommend to parties in the War of Ideas?

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Hence, the purpose of this book is to provide the reader—within a single book—a wide range of viewpoints on the War of Ideas. The reader will find a number of key themes emerging. One is the consensus by many of the contributors that part of the War of Ideas is an intra-civilizational war for legitimacy, authority, and authenticity among Muslims themselves. A parallel theme regards the War of Ideas as what Bassam Tibi calls an “intercivilizational conf lict,” and what to do about it. A third theme analyzes the blame laid by both the West as well as its critics as to the genesis, meaning, and stakes of globalization and the War of Ideas. A fourth involves short case studies of what governments are doing, or should be doing, from Washington, D.C. to Berlin to Islamabad. Additionally, many of the authors emphasize the importance of interpretive approaches (hermeneutics) to understanding the philosophical orientation (i.e., epistemology) of the antagonists. Walid Phares provides a history of three waves of the War of Ideas, both within the Muslim world as well as between it and the West. Phares first called our attention to this struggle, but went largely unheard, over two decades ago. In contrast, he has been an important voice in both London and Washington in both the previous and current administrations. Phares terms the first War of Ideas as the struggle within the Muslim world by Islamist organizations for primacy, and the uneasy alliance between conservative regimes and Islamists against Communism in the Cold War. By the 1980s, the Cold War phase was ending with victories by Khomeinists in Iran and later the Salafist mujahedin in Afghanistan. The second War of Ideas was that of the immediate post– Cold War period, in which early al Qaeda and other Islamists proclaimed jihad against the West—despite the West’s inability to come to terms with either the declaration or the reality of war (e.g., the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, etc.). The events of 9/11 mark the advent of the third War of Ideas, one that has been half-heartedly fought by Western governments, including the United States. Phares provides an important historical overview of the terms of the debate, the historical evolution of different brands of jihadism, as well as policy prescriptions for the West in taking on these threats. Maajid Nawaz is uniquely experienced to weigh in on the War of Ideas: he was formerly a senior leader the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) in the United Kingdom and was a founding member of HT in Denmark and Pakistan. He eventually served four years in an Egyptian prison as an Amnesty International “prisoner of conscience,” where his views began to change. He ultimately renounced the Islamist ideology for traditional Islam and inclusive politics. His essay dives into the “internal ideological struggle between Islamists and Muslims,” to refute “Islamists who claim that religiously neutral politics is contrary to Islam.” He focuses specifically on the issue of “sovereignty.” Nawaz demonstrates that sovereignty is a Western political concept, one for which there is no historical parallel or term in Arabic. Thus, when Islamists utilize terminologies of “political sovereignty” based on God’s

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commandments and shariah, they are actually importing colonial artifacts from the same sources that they claim to be warring against. Nawaz provides a vast catalogue of classical and contemporary Muslim sources on issues of politics, sovereignty, law, and faith. He argues that Islamism is not a theology, it is an ideology, and that contemporary Muslims must take it on as such: “Only by reclaiming history and Islam, state and politics, can Muslims reassert the political, moral and theological high-ground over Islamists.” In other words, Muslims can look to the rich religious and historical heritage of classical Islam, as well as its antecedents and interlocutors (e.g., ancient Greece) for examples of pluralism, the rule of law, and representative government consonant with deep Muslim faith. Prominent religion scholar Karen Armstrong considers what has changed the views of many Muslims toward the West over the past one hundred years. She reports that a century ago those Muslims who were able to experience the Western world at first hand found it congenial and deeply in tune with their own traditions. They certainly did not recoil from the new ideals of liberty and democracy instinctively; in Iran, in particular, the mullahs were often in the vanguard of change and development. There was no inherent “clash of civilizations,” no “war of ideas.” She recognizes that there are multiple causes, from the “distortions” and colonial activities of the West (“Western people have cultivated a distorted image of Islam as an inherently violent faith that conquered only by the sword . . . ”) to the radicalism of a tiny group of violent extremists (e.g., al Qaeda). Most importantly, however, she points to differences in how the West and the Muslim world experienced modernization. Western countries were able to modernize gradually and semi-independently based on technical and social innovation. Muslim countries, in contrast, were late developers: “the modern spirit in the Muslim world was characterized by dependence rather than independence and imitation rather than innovation.” Dependence and imitation characterize the colonial and postcolonial relations between most Muslim societies and the West, and this is exacerbated by religious fundamentalisms. In the end this does not mean that mainstream citizens and their governments cannot take responsibility for better relationships in a partnership toward security and mutual respect—there is no preordained War of Ideas. The reader might come to the conclusion that some of the authors in this book hold such different views regarding the ideas of war and peace in the Quran and throughout the Islamic world that no bridging the divide is possible. Yet, Raymond Ibrahim provides an interpretive and historical bridge between those who view Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance and those who see it as likely to be repressive and violent. He argues that the sociopolitical context of Islam vis-à-vis its neighbors provides the crucial conditions for violence or

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peace, at least for those committed to Islamism. He writes that in Islamic history the “ulema were baff led” because the Quran contains peaceful and tolerant verses, as well as violent and intolerant ones. “To resolve this quandary, the ulema developed the doctrine of abrogation (naskh, supported by Quran 2:106) which essentially maintains that verses ‘revealed’ later in Muhammad’s career take precedence over the earlier ones, whenever there is a contradiction.” How does this help us understand conf lict in the Islamic world? A look at the historical evolution of Islam provides the answer. Because, in the early years . . . Muhammad and his community were far outnumbered by the infidels and idolaters, a message of peace and coexistence was in order. However, after he migrated to Medina and grew in military strength and numbers, the violent and intolerant verses were “revealed,” inciting Muslims to go on the offensive—now that they were capable of doing so. In short, this example has held: when Muslims are weak and in a minority position, they should preach and behave according to the Meccan verses (peace and tolerance); when strong, they should go on the offensive, according to the Medinan verses (war and conquest). The vicissitudes of Islamic history are a testimony to this dichotomy, best captured by the popular Muslim notion that, if possible, jihad should be performed by the hand (force), if not, then with the tongue (propaganda), and if that too is not possible, then with the heart, or one’s intentions. The preeminent Just War scholar James Turner Johnson problematizes the notion of a “war of ideas” between Islam and the West, but concludes that the term is useful in describing two clashes: first, “contemporary radical Islamism has insisted that there is such a fundamental conf lict . . . a fight to the death between the two cultures”; second, one within Islam itself . . . the battle between the radical Islamists and other Muslims to define the meaning of Islam for the contemporary world, and in the conf lict between radical Islamism and Islamic tradition itself. As a result, there is at least a three-way conf lict of ideas here, as radical Islamism defines itself through hostility not only toward Western societies and Western culture but also against understandings of Islam different from the normative constructions of radicals. Johnson compares Western and Muslim traditions of the “just war” and distinguishes them from the positions of violent Islamists, as can be found

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in The Neglected Duty, the so-called creed of Sadat’s assassins; the Charter of Hamas; and Osama bin Laden’s 1998 Declaration on Armed Struggle against Jews and Crusaders. Johnson argues that the reality of Islamic history and jurisprudence is that there are multiple schools of thought and interpretation on many of these issues, so the cassus belli of Islamists (recovering an artificial global caliphate based on a universal shariah) is based on false and doctrinaire historicism. Instead, there are multiple points of contact and possibility for engagement between interpretations of Muslim law and the Western legal tradition. Such an approach does not overlook real differences between Western and Islamic traditions, but it also allows for the exploration of genuine commonalities. Having served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Akbar Ahmed is uniquely suited to analyze contemporary international affairs and the War of Ideas. Ahmed, now a professor at American University, notes that many Muslims, and citizens from around the world, are revolted by some of America’s ubiquitous inf luences. Although he approvingly cites U.S. engagement on human rights and democracy, he also points out the failings of contemporary America’s unrestrained individualism, hyper-independence in all its forms, and material self-indulgence—all promoted around the world via globalization. Ahmed rightly notes that the critique of American materialism and exceptionalism is being made not only in the Middle East, but in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Far East as well. At the same time, he sadly notes, Islamic “models of moderation and tolerance . . . are falling into disrepair.” He writes, Muslim fury and despair arise not only from the perception that U.S. policies are misguided. There are also inner demons. Muslims today . . . suffer from what I call the “Taj Syndrome.” A building like the Taj Mahal evokes the glittering past for Muslims. Its physical splendor juxtaposed with the painful and wretched present triggers a mixture of emotions—pride, anguish, and anger: pride at the splendor of the past, anguish at the reality of the present, and anger at the uncertainty of the bleak future. Ahmed concludes, “Western and Islamic civilizations are moving further and further away from their cherished ideals of justice, compassion, and wisdom and unless there is universal will to halt the momentum of this clash, the violence may become an unending global nightmare.” Asma Afsaruddin asks, “Can the collective memory of Muslims retrieve past precedents in support of pluralism and respect for diversity today?” Afsaruddin observes that most societies look to their own historical narratives to provide lessons for the present as well as the future. She considers how “absolutist” (hardline, radical) and “pluralist” (modernist, reformist) remember the past and configure the present, specifically with regards to the nature

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of shariah, the nature of the so-called Islamic state, and definitions of jihad. She asserts that pluralists are the more historically reliable: Modernists typically approach the past in a critical and forensic manner which allows them to strip away the accumulated layers of myth over time and retrieve the more historically credible personas of the earliest Muslims (salaf ) and their variegated beliefs and practices. Such an approach has led them to discover the seeds of democratic governance, gender egalitarianism, and even religious pluralism in the lives of the salaf, seeds they toss into today’s fertile ground in the hope that they will take root among Muslims. In contrast, “the absolutists, who claim fidelity to the practices of the earliest Muslims, have fallen dangerously short of providing a credible platform for reform and renewal in Muslim-majority societies.” She concludes than rather than a World War of Ideas, “This internal struggle between the absolutists and the pluralists for ‘the soul of Islam,’ . . . is the real crisis for Muslims”; it can only be resolved by a widespread commitment to Muslim pluralism overcoming the absolutists within their own societies. The worldviews of the Islamic world and of the West both hold explicit and implicit assumptions about the role of religion and society. Eric Patterson considers three sets of religious assumptions that are the cause of misunderstanding, disagreement, or deadly contest depending on the circumstances. The most controversial is religious freedom, particularly the right of individuals to practice their faith openly and to change religions. This is a nonnegotiable item, or should be, for Western foreign policies but prosecution and persecution occur daily in conservative Muslim societies. Afghanistan is a case in point: despite liberation and massive funding from the West, recent indictments (with the death penalty looming) for apostasy and blasphemy disclose that this is a matter of life and death for minority faiths. Second, a related issue is that of misunderstanding America’s model of “separation of church and state.” Patterson argues that many in Muslim-majority societies are familiar with French separationism (laicite), which radically banishes faith from the public sphere. Consequently, when they hear of Western “secularism” or “separationism” they tend to have the French example in mind, rather than America’s model where the state does not intrude in collective or individual faith, but where religion can and is robustly expressed both privately and in the public square. A third religious dispute in the War of Ideas is disagreement over the notion of sovereignty: Must the Western political conception of the consenting governed (popular sovereignty) always be at odds with the religious notion of God’s sovereignty? Islamists from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden argue “yes,” although representative governments such as Turkey and Indonesia seem to offer an alternative. Again, Bassam Tibi argues that the War of Ideas is an inter-civilizational conf lict caused by the “return of the sacred” to the political sphere in domestic and

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international relations, and he proposes a solution. More specifically, Tibi argues that the past generation has witnessed a crisis in international relations as well as the discrediting of secularist models of governance (e.g., fascism, Communism, pan-Arabism). To meet the crisis, many parts of the globe—particularly the Muslim world—have experienced the rise of what he calls “religionized politics.” In the Middle East, the Islamist narrative associated with thinkers like Sayyid Qutb and his intellectual descendants saw the fall of the Ottoman caliphate as due to its moral decay; similarly, the failures of secular Arab nationalism— most notably in the 1967 and 1973 wars—as compared to the victories of the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the 1980s, suggest that Islamism is the path not only to virtuous living but to a resurgent Islamic civilization. Tibi points at failures in U.S. foreign policy, such as supporting authoritarian regimes and the “racialization” of politics following 9/11, as lending legitimacy to Islamist narratives of persecution and rivalry with the West. He is also critical of the negative aspects of Western hegemony. For a solution, Tibi observes the long history of Islam and points to its golden era of tolerance, openness, scholarship, and diplomacy as a model for today. More specifically, he calls for an “open Islam” against global jihad to overcome inter-civilizational war. He argues, This position is compatible with the tradition of Averroes who put Islam in harmony with the rational worldview of Hellenism. As much as medieval Islamic rationalists were receptive to the Hellenization of Islam, contemporary Muslims could embrace cultural modernity to give its values an Islamic underpinning. Such an effort would end their predicament with cultural modernity in line with reviving the heritage of Islamic rationalism. How should we understand 9/11 and the events since that momentous date? Abdelwahab El-Affendi observes that the 9/11 Commission Report provided a “Eureka Moment” for Americans, which cleared the confusion and solved the mystery about why the United States was attacked. He argues that 9/11, and what it revealed about America’s place in the world, suggested that the U.S. self-paradigm as a benevolent leader (and servant) of international life was in disrepair. The Report, and the “Letter from America” signed by sixty American intellectuals from across the political spectrum, was a form of therapy to restore confidence in the system and reassure the citizenry. They did so by framing the attack as an assault on humanity (America’s values are universal) at large, and thus justified the U.S. military response. El-Affendi argues that we should see 9/11 as a crisis in American, and Western more generally, self-perception and that the idea of a War of Ideas is problematic. El-Affendi also demonstrates how a similar “complex operation of paradigm salvation” was occurring in parts of the Muslim world, and how “paradigm repair” efforts comfort both the masses and intellectual elites lest their traditional narratives contradict the challenges of new information.

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Jarret M. Brachman argues that the United States has been “impotent” in waging a war of ideas against al Qaeda. This is because the United States has failed to take into consideration the importance of epistemology (theory of knowledge) and hermeneutics (interpretive approaches). He writes, “the [U.S.] government [is characterized by a] total lack of understanding about the role that epistemology plays in engaging target populations . . . [and] a pervasive inability to think about al Qaeda through hermeneutical lenses.” Brachman explicates the clash of epistemologies as between Western values and modernity versus what he calls “Jihadi-Salafism,” a narrow scriptural positivist/ literalist epistemology that is “a fanatical outgrowth” of mainstream Salafist answers to the question “What is knowledge?” Al Qaeda’s approach is unique in the Muslim world, extremely narrow, and directly contradicts Western theories of knowledge and authority, such as on issues of legitimate authority for government, democracy, and the role of shariah in society. Brachman concludes that only when the United States utilizes hermeneutical tools for interpreting, and then engaging, al Qaeda’s religious and ideological claims, can it be effective in formulating “strategies to discredit the al Qaeda movement.” The security institutions of Western governments have taken different approaches to understanding, engaging, and when appropriate, challenging Islamists in their populations. Lorenzo Vidino provides a case study of how European governments have taken different approaches to the issue. He theorizes that how governments define extremism and radicalization is critical to how their policies develop. For instance, the British government has been open to close partnership with nonviolent Islamist organizations but in Denmark there has been considerably more reluctance. In each case, “soft approaches to counterterrorism” in Europe tend to look for some sort of Muslim “interlocutors,” but there is wide debate as to whether engaging nonviolent Islamists is counterproductive. Vidino evaluates the security environment, the mandate of government institutions, and government assessment strategies as an approach to a comparative understanding of the policies of Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and elsewhere. He concludes that governments face a difficult balancing act, particularly if nonviolent Islamists are, as some believe, practicing a “positive radical f lank attack.” This is the idea that more moderate wings of a political movement improve their bargaining position when a radical fringe emerges. This forces governments to “lower the bar” as to who acceptable partners are in the fight against violent extremism. Vidino wonders if short-term gains nonetheless will prove to have negative long-term consequences. A case in point is the United Kingdom’s famous decision to shut down a notorious mosque, with its basement full of weapons and three biochemical warfare suits, and later hand over the establishment to a different Muslim group. Bernard Rougier provides a case study from Northern Lebanon to demonstrate the conf licting trends, ideas, loyalties, and motivations of Islamist actors in the Levant. He asserts that it is necessary also to understand the local and regional context, in this case the struggle among regional powers—Iran,

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Syria, Saudi Arabia—for control over the overall orientation of Islamism in the Middle East. He writes that there are two “systems of crisis”—the Levantine and the Gulf: The two systems are crossed by different sets of issues. The Levant system of crises is overshadowed by the Israeli-Palestinian question, the struggles—both internal and regional—for control over the Palestinian cause, and the extent of Syrian inf luence in Lebanon. The Gulf system of crises is characterized by sectarian tensions between Shias and Sunnis in Iraq, the rejection of U.S. military presence in the Gulf, and the assertion of a Sunni religious identity drawing on the various strands of Salafism. Northern Lebanon, or better Greater Syria (bilâd al-châm) happens to be at the intersection of both systems of conf lict, and thus Islamist militancy takes on three different interpretations of the fight, resulting in three overlapping figures of Islamism in bilâd al-châm: the muqâwim (the resistance fighter), the muqâtil (the defensive fighter), and the mujâhid (the jihad fighter). Robert Spencer disagrees with analyses that suggest the Quran and Islamic tradition generally promote tolerance, pluralism, and peace and thus that “extremists” like al Qaeda are somehow theological mutations. Instead, he offers scriptural and historical references to jihad, pointing to an obligation to make holy war, to notions of universal and ongoing struggle against nonMuslims, and the like. Spencer argues that this tradition is not only in the Quran and the hadiths but also in the mainstream juridical literature of all the four recognized schools of Muslim jurisprudence: the Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanafi, and Hanbali. He reports the many scholars and references on which not only al Qaeda, but other Muslims more generally, rely to justify persecution of non-Muslims, anti-Semitism, dissimulation, and violence. He argues that Western foreign policy suffers from cognitive dissonance and denial: Western leaders like Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama assert that Islam is a religion of peace, despite the evidence of widespread violence in the greater Muslim world; and further, that the United States may partner with almost any international actor (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood) to attempt to advance prosperity within Muslim populations and therefore U.S. interests despite the tarnished recent history of such groups. He writes, Obama appeared to be banking everything on the notion that the ideas that bring one the most material prosperity are the ideas that everyone in every case will choose. Unfortunately for him (and us), this is not always the case . . . they [U.S. leaders] fail to take into account that the jihadists may have beliefs of their own that lead them to hate the West—beliefs that are independent of anything the United States is doing or has the power to change.

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Conclusion: Are We Safer? In sum, and in light of the massive resources expended in the “war on terror” and the self less sacrifices of those doing the fighting, development work, and diplomacy in harm’s way, the question often posed is: “Is the United States safer today than it was on 9/11?” If measuring safety by attacks on the homeland, one must conclude “yes”—and this is a monumental achievement. However, this way of thinking reveals a weakness in the West’s approach to the War of Ideas and the nature of this violent-extremist enemy. Understanding that a “networked” enemy is one that is affiliated through information sharing and ideology but is not necessarily consolidated territorially (and is therefore capable of migrating if a preferred territory is denied), a better question is: “Are we deeper into conf lict and confrontation today than we were on 9/11? Further, is the number of people identifying themselves in opposition to the West and willing to take action against it (whether physical action, monetary support, ideological support, etc.) greater than on 9/11?” Posed this way, it seems the clear answer is that we are not safer. Of course, there remain those who consider the threat from this network of violent nonstate actors minimal when compared with the specter of great power war or emerging threats from rogue states. But, of these potential threats, only this network of radicalized, nonstate actors can essentially “match” America’s force-projection capability. One of the United States’ greatest strengths relative to other nations is its ability to project and sustain forces nearly anywhere in the world. No other nation comes close to this capability. Yet, because of the Islamists networked nature, they have the ability to reposition leaders and “locally produce” forces. They essentially have the ability to be anywhere America is. Further, only this networked enemy can force project inside the United States. Yes, serious threats exist externally from nations with WMD, and the possibility of a conventional attack on the United States cannot be ruled out entirely, but only this networked enemy can generate a real threat (including a WMD threat) inside America’s borders, on U.S. soil. Understanding the War of Ideas is essential to any strategy to deal with this threat. The threat is not minimal, and it must be taken seriously. Consider a fortress with enemies always seeking new ways to scale or penetrate its walls. The efforts to thwart these intruders are certainly critical, but if these actions play into a narrative that the fortress occupants are at war with the much larger population with which the intruders claim affiliation, the hillside beyond the fortress will continually fill up with would-be intruders. If, after years of killing and capturing these intruders, protectors of the fortress observe a massive increase in the number of people gathered on the hillside, the fortress is not safer. Continuing to kill and capture the intruders is necessary, but without a serious strategy to identify, clearly understand, and de-legitimize the philosophical narrative that is inspiring those gathering on the hillside the fortress may be fighting the radicalized intruders nearly forever.

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Therefore, as many authors in this volume note it is (1) critical to engage the Muslim world politically, economically, militarily, culturally, and technologically in a way that strengthens the shared interests between it and the West, (2) to understand the violent jihadist beliefs and “script” (and how not to exacerbate its resonance), and (3) to enable existing “moderate” voices in Islam (emphasizing ijtihad and shura to promote pluralism, human rights, toleration, and freedom of political participation) to shape ideas and institutions in a way that, in the first place, causes the enemies gathering on the hillside to dissipate,22 and, in the second place, causes those people previously on the hillside to come to regard the attackers not only as their enemies, but to also regard them as the true enemy to justice, human f lourishing, and God’s blessing upon their society. The people deciding to purge themselves of this enemy represent a shared interest with the West and the only real definition of victory in this multigenerational struggle. And it is a struggle in which the War of Ideas is the center of gravity.

Notes 1. Adapted from Clausewitz’s famous dictum, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Eliot and Peter Paret (Princeton: University Press, 1989). 2. William Ebenstein and Alan O. Ebenstein, Introduction to Political Thinkers, 2nd ed. (New York: Wadsworth, 2001). Were people not leading collective lives—were there no distribution of scarce resources, division of labor, specialization of function, security in the collective— they would not need a political philosophy to order these conditions. 3. Plato’s Republic, Book III, 415a. 4. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon, eds., Democracy’s Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, August 1999), p. 4. 5. Ibid, p. 10. (And before they turn to violence, groups usually adopt a name characterizing the justness of their cause—citing liberation, freedom, Godly struggle, etc.) 6. Emphasis on legitimacy, citizenship, and political processes in the West relative to the Muslim world is informed by Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (Wilmington, DE: ISI Book, 2002). 7. Emphasis on authenticity from the work of Dr. Robert Deutsch, cognitive anthropologist. 8. William McCants and Jarret Brachman, eds, Militant Ideology Atlas (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy, 2006), p. 7. “Aside from the Quran and the hadith (records of the Prophet’s words and actions), the fatwas by [Ibn Taymiyyah] are by far the most popular texts for modern Jihadis, particularly his writings about the invading Mongols. These texts are important to the modern Jihadi movement because 1) Ibn Taymiyyah is the most respected scholar among Salafis, 2) he crafted very good arguments to justify fighting a jihad against the foreign invaders, and 3) he argued that Mongol rulers who converted to Islam were not really Muslims. The last two arguments resonate well today with the global Jihadi agenda.” 9. Visiting as part of the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program, through the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs. 10. Although preferences for international forces over the Taliban in survey data remain high, the level of popular support that translates into voluntary, risk-accepting behavior on the part

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11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

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of the population to improve their own security, governance, and economic development remains low. Briefing on “Afghanistan: Public Opinion Trends and Strategic Implications” by Craig Charney of Charney Research, June 2008. Part of the kinetic actions to defeat insurgents sometimes results in the tragedy of Afghan civilian casualties, which has a major negative impact on public perception of international forces. Charles Kurzman, ed., Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press USA, November 1998). Some scholars use “political Islam” or “Islam-ism,” either of which is preferable to “Islamic Fundamentalism.” Portions of this paragraph are adapted from John P. Gallagher and Bradley L. Bowman, “Democratization and U.S. Grand Strategy,” in Choices: An American Government Reader (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, June 2005). Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Damascus, Syria: Dar Al-Islam, 1964), p. 41. Jahiliyyah is an Islamic term for “ignorance” that typically refers to the time prior to the seventh-century emergence of Islam. Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) used the term to refer to a nation/government that does not recognize the authority of the Sharia, and is therefore illegitimate and an enemy of true Islam. This includes secular Muslim governments, but is more forcefully used by Qutb to describe Western inf luence. Osama Bin Laden, “Text of Fatwah Urging Jihad against Americans” (The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, p. 3). Qutb, Milestones, pp. 22, 80. Ibid., pp. 7–10. Winston Churchill’s term to describe the Nazi threat in World War II. He cited a state of supreme emergency to justify the indiscriminate bombing of German cities. According to Michael Walzer ( Just and Unjust Wars), supreme emergency refers to a situation where “danger [is] of an unusual and horrifying kind” (p. 253) as well as “an imminent catastrophe” (p. 232). Islamist leaders do not use this phrase, but they characterize (in fatwahs, declarations of jihad) the “threat” from the West in a similar way, and thus set the conditions for the brutal, indiscriminate attacks so often seen in “political Islam.” Qutb, Milestones, pp. 11, 12, 37, 41, 46, 82. Briefing by Craig Charney of Charney Research on January 29, 2009. Individuals join these organizations based on some combination of three motivations: (1) intrinsic motivation from either being a part of a movement where one’s individual participation will bring a benefit to a group the actor cares about, or from a personal loss or grievance; (2) selective incentives that accrue to the individual like pay, camaraderie, non-falsifiable promises in the afterlife; and (3) increase in social identity for self and family from the participation. Combinations of these motivations are difficult to predict, making “profiling” difficult. Also, once the individual joins (say, mostly for the pay), motivations can shift (say, toward ideology). Karen Armstrong, a well-known British author on world religion, states (paraphrasing) “There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. Religion is about immoderate love and immoderate belief.” However, this makes no distinction between immoderation of personal belief and what the believer does or does not demand be ref lected in public policy (and therefore binding on others). I submit that a passionate, fully immoderate believer who is willing to express his or her preferences via a political process and who acknowledges the legitimacy of outcomes of this process—even when they differ from the believer’s preferences—is a “moderate.”

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CH A P T E R

T WO

Jihadism’s War on Democracy Wal i d P hare s

The term “War of Ideas” began appearing in the years following the al Qaeda terror attacks against the United States on 9/11. In the days following the massacres, the mainstream media displayed a stunning lack of determination in identifying where aggression was coming from and why. In the hours following the bloodshed in Manhattan, Pennsylvania, and Washington where about three thousand—mostly civilians—were killed, the main question raised by networks, publications, and commentators was, “Why do they hate us?” Incredibly revealing, this slogan told the world and the public at home that America did not know who the “they” (i.e., the attackers, who they represent, and what they wanted) were. It also underlined another stunning revelation: that what mainstream intellectuals understood from 9/11 was that sheer “hate” was the reason, and worse, the roots for this so-called hatred were unknown. Al Qaeda’s onslaught on American soil signaled the start of what was called since, the “War on Terror.” But historical precision tells us that in reality the jihadi war on the United States and other democracies began several years earlier. The sudden post–Cold War rise of combat Salafists (al Qaeda and others) against American and Western targets in the 1990s and the actions taken by Khomeinists (Iran and Hezbollah) since the early 1980s preceded America’s campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq by two decades. Popular and media reactions to the 9/11 attacks in the United States revealed a dramatic reality: The public—let alone the Government—did not know that the jihadists have been at war with America and other democracies for many years before the Twin Towers attacks. During the summer of 2004, the 9/11 Commission asked the tragic question repeatedly: “How come we were at war for years before the attacks and

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we did not know it? How come the U.S. government—multiple administrations—did not know it, nor did it inform the people and take action?” The Commission’s hard question was warranted as al Qaeda declared war against the United States, “the infidels, Crusaders and the Jews” at least twice during the 1990s in tandem with terror attacks in 1993, 1998, and 2000. The other major question that sprung from the Commission’s long and painful hearings was: How come Americans and other democracies did not know about the jihadi wars being waged for decades? These two grand lines of inquiry puzzled many citizens since 2001 as they realized that there was indeed a war waged by the jihadists and that for too long the public and most of its representatives did not realize it was happening. As a result, two types of literature expanded in the United States, and later in Europe and the West. One set of books, articles, and panels insists that terrorism is waged by segments of Arab Muslim societies frustrated with Western policies in general and U.S. foreign policy in particular (e.g., economic disenfranchisement and in some cases racism). The second type of literature links the violence performed by the terrorists directly to Islamic theology. The wedge between the two explanations was wide and has grown larger. Both literatures, though, failed to see or explain the jihadi threat as a movement with global strategies, tactics, and rational steps. In 1979, fourteen years before Professor Samuel Huntington published his famous article (turned into a book in 1996) “The Clash of Civilizations” in Foreign Affairs (1993), I published my first book al taadudiya (Pluralism) with a second volume dedicated to the analysis of the “relationship between Civilizations,” focusing in some chapters on the worldwide ramifications of historical jihad. During the 1980s I published more books and articles projecting the rise of jihadism and arguing that its ideologues were camouf laging its strategic intentions. Unluckily, perhaps, the body of my work was mainly in Arabic and went unnoticed in the West, as probably was the case with similar intellectual efforts during the Cold War. During the 1990s, this time from the United States to where I relocated, I published a few pieces, testified to and briefed Congress and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) about the rising and forthcoming threat of jihadi terror. My warnings—as were those of other intellectuals and journalists in this field—were not heeded. Most of the arguments and points I made after 9/11 finally found ears to listen, but had already been made long before the official start of the “War on Terror,” but they had not impacted the debate, let alone the decision-making process back then. In my later findings I established that one major reason why neither the American public was aware of basic realities in the region nor the U.S. government was acting to counter the rising threat was a full-f ledged campaign waged by jihadi forces, both financial and militant, to disable American and Western abilities from perceiving, understanding, and eventually countering the

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expanding menace. In short, what allowed the jihadist campaign to strike surprisingly at Western interest provoking incoherent debates about the so-called war on terror was in fact a “War of Ideas” unleashed by the very ideological forces standing behind the jihadi militant networks and regimes. Not only were the United States and the West targeted by a jihadi war since the 1980s (Khomeinists) and the 1990s (Salafists), but more importantly, democracies were submitted to a War of Ideas since the 1970s at the hands of a bloc of regimes and ideological circles, whose main characteristics were and continue to be sympathizing with the jihadist ideologies and practicing authoritarianism domestically. In 2005 I wrote my first post-9/11 book, Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against the West, outlining what I established as past and future strategies by the global jihadist movements. In 2007 I wrote another book titled The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracies in which I demonstrated how jihadi forces were able to win their first and second Wars of Ideas against their liberal opponents. Last, I followed up with a third book, The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad, suggesting how to defeat their totalitarian ideologies and support democratic forces in the Arab and Muslim world. This chapter is an additional contribution to the discussion as to the conditions for success against radicalization. One major condition for advancement in the confrontation is for the public in liberal democracies to understand the actual equation and the essence of the so-called War of Ideas. Indeed, eight years after 9/11 and after successive attempts by the U.S. government, by most European institutions, and by NGOs on both sides of the Atlantic, the definition of this War of Ideas is still unclear, and in many cases, utterly wrong. To most architects of the Western War of Ideas waged as of 2004, the issue has been one of public relations and “American image abroad.” The U.S. government’s various agencies in foreign policy and defense have invested significant time and funds to develop what they deemed “strategic communications” aimed at “swaying hearts and minds” of Arabs and Muslims. More recent efforts in the United States and Europe focused on what they coined “counter radicalization” efforts. But the essence of both campaigns was still short of determining the actual threat in the War of Ideas: it is the ideology that produces radicalization and thus the swaying of opinions. Therefore, I have been arguing, and continue to do so, that first we need to identify the “ideology” and what constitutes a threat within the components of this ideology. Then, we must understand the strategies used by the doctrinaires and followers of this ideology across its various streams and branches, before we design the counter-strategies. Historically, the campaigns by jihadi forces to win their own battle inside the Arab and Muslim world before taking it to the West and beyond can be categorized into three “Wars of Ideas.”

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Walid Phares The First War of Ideas: 1950s–1990

A historical observation of systematic efforts on behalf of Islamist regimes and networks to spread their ideology shows that while their attempts to expand began with their rise in the 1920s, their strategic expansion took place during the latest part of the Cold War. The Wahabbis, not very inf luential in their first stages, concentrated on rooting their doctrine inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia until oil revenues allowed them to begin the process of ideological export in the mid-1950s. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the late 1920s, also attempted to spread across the region with little success. The penetration by the Ikhwan of Arab societies was slow and suppressed by authoritarian regimes. Taking advantage of the East-West confrontation for decades, the global Salafists (Wahabbis, Ikhwan, and others) focused on expanding Islamist ideology inside the Arab and Muslim world. I term these efforts as the first War of Ideas engaged by the Islamists within their own societies while the West and the Soviets were waging their mutual ideological and propaganda wars at each other. In a sense, the first War of Ideas launched by the world’s jihadists—first the Salafists and followed later by the Khomeinists—profited from the capitalist-Marxist clash of ideas to score advances within Muslim societies and assert the slogan often chanted “la sharqiya, la gharbiya, umma wahda Islamiya” (No East, no West, one and unique Islamic umma). It took the Salafists and Khomeinists the bulk of the twentieth century to organize their movements and rise to inf luence. Sheikh Yussuf Qardawi, leading ideologue of the modern jihadist movement and top commentator on al Jazeera for more than a decade, often asserted that “Islamist awareness” was moving forward and upward after the collapse of the Caliphate, taking advantage of the titanic clashes taking place within the infidel world (kuffar), first during World War II and then during the long Cold War. In his estimate, the spread of the Islamist ideology—at the expense of its liberal and secular competitors—was possible partly because the powers on the other side were destroying each other: fascists versus Allies then democracies versus Communists. Khomeinism had a similar assessment of the success. Ideologues such as Sheikh Hassan Fadlallah, ideological mentor of Hezbollah, often theorized that the Islamist forces were able to surge dramatically in the Muslim and Arab world because of the failure of the West to attract youth and the public to “progressive and liberal ideals.” But this global ideology of Islamism-jihadism, emerging between the two postwar giants, had its own rivalries and difficulties. Sunni-based Salafism and Shia-rooted Khomeinism were at odds on doctrinal, theological, and political levels. Wahabbis and Ikhwan framed Iran’s Islamism as “unorthodox.” The mullahs in turn accused the Sunni Islamists of reinstating the oppressive Muawiya Caliphate at the expense of the Shia. Jihadism’s two branches did not rise to merge; that is a firm finding. But

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both trees developed common grounds, even though not in coordination: the culture of jihadism against all infidels, liberal and progressive Muslims, the West, Communism, Israel, India, Russia, as well as against polytheist Asian and African cultures. Global jihadism had more in common against the rest of humanity than differences within the ranks of the jihadists. Hence the ideological efforts by the Wahabbis, Ikhwan, Deobandis (branches of Salafism), and the Khomeinists converged into the creation of the vastest pool of indoctrinated jihadists in modern times. The radicalization within Muslim societies and its diaspora that the international society began to discover and worry about as of 9/11 began decades ago at the hands of a long-range, patient, and relentless double network of Islamist-jihadists, backed by significant financial resources made available by oil revenues. The first War of Ideas was essentially ideological and educational. The jihadist networks concentrated most of their efforts on widening the pool of indoctrinated youth via madrassas, mosques, Hawzas, orphanages, hospitals, state propaganda, and religious polices, in addition to political movements. The forces of radicalization differed in their strategies of confrontation with the foe. The Salafists designated Communism as the main enemy, relegating Western capitalism to the position of future enemy. Hence Wahabbis and Ikhwan escalated the fight against the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes and parties, culminating in the clash in Afghanistan after 1979. For that purpose the Salafi web accepted a tactical alliance with the United States and the West to achieve the immediate goal. This attitude was explained—wrongly by Western apologists—as a real long-term alliance with the Islamists against the Marxists. The price of such an interpretation was for America and its allies to abandon liberals, human rights activists, and minorities to the advantage of the Islamists. This abandonment was the first strategic failure of the United States to predict the future: scrambling after 9/11 to find the “moderates” is really too late after decades of laissez-faire. However, there was another reason for this abandonment of democratic forces in the region. Indeed, the 1973 oil shock sent a strong message to Western industrialized democracies: hands off domestic affairs of the region’s regimes, which also translated in forbidding the free world from assisting liberal causes under authoritarian regimes as was the case with the Kurds, Berbers, Southern Sudanese, dissidents, Arab democrats, and so on. On their part, the Iranian jihadists condemned both “infidel powers” equally. Ayatollah Khomeini blasted the USSR and the United States simultaneously as “Satan” but his regime and its ally Hezbollah targeted America intensely. The slogan al mawt li amreeka (death to America) was shouted twenty-two years before the planes of al Qaeda blasted the Twin Towers. In short, Western concessions to the Islamists during the Cold War allowed the latter to expand their ideology geometrically and irreversibly.

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Walid Phares The Second War of Ideas: 1990–2001

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the rapid democratization of central and eastern Europe, the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the crumbling of the last militarist regimes in Latin America, and with the signal sent by the Tiananmen Square protest, the earthquake produced by the explosion of democratic revolutions at the end of the Cold War shifted priorities for the global jihadist web. On the one hand, the examples of huge marches in the streets of downtowns formerly ruled by secret polices were too menacing for sister regimes in the Arab and Muslim world. Khomeinists, Wahabbis, Baathists, and other dictatorships in the region felt compelled to preempt potential democratic copycats in their own midst, costing power and wealth of the ruling elites. On the other hand, the Islamist networks, particularly those turned violent jihadists during the war in Afghanistan, realized their calling to replace the discredited authoritarian establishment in the Arab Muslim world. Hence a convergence of strategic interests came to life between traditional Islamists in power and surging jihadists across the region. The new direction of the global web targeted the West and its liberal democracies, but each stream had a different interest. The Wahabbis and other Islamists in power in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Sudan, and other countries, the Iranian regime and the vast network of Muslim Brotherhoods with branches within Europe and North America poured sizeable funds, diplomatic inf luence, media, and cadres into the most powerful battle of ideas in modern history. Their aim was to block the rise of an awareness in the West regarding the necessity of backing the spread of democracy in the Greater Middle East and beyond. The main thrust of the second War of Ideas took place mostly in Europe’s Western democracies, the United States, Canada, and within other democracies. It was embodied by an immense investment of hundreds of millions of petro dollars into the educational, media, and intellectual institutions in the West specializing in foreign policy, national security, and other related academic fields. The goal was to delay the rise of a consciousness vis-à-vis the rise of jihadi ideologies and the severe problems of human rights in the region. After the West intervened on three continents to “back democracy,” toward the end of the Cold War, many of the Muslim world’s regimes feared a similar repeat in their countries. The best strategy employed by these elites was to take refuge under “religious legitimacy,” and the best defense of this legitimacy was to create a barrage within the West obstructing any criticism of jihadism and its derivatives. Accordingly, the chain of financial and lobbying moves in most inf luential liberal democracies was very successful. The petro dollar regimes, forming a consortium closer to cultural imperialism, targeted departments of Middle East studies, international relations, history and other political entities on American, European, and other Western campuses seizing control of setting the curriculum, determining the issues to research and teach,

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and in many cases selecting the instructors and scholars. Oil funding practically eliminated the study of human rights, democratization, minorities, feminism, and jihadist ideologies from Western academia. Graduates of corrupted Middle East studies and its related fields populated the realms of the Foreign Service, mainstream media, and teaching. The 1990s witnessed the eradication of Western capacity to produce an independent knowledge of the region’s multiple dramas and threats. The second War of Ideas, mostly via soft power, subverted national security expertise in America and other democracies and took out its ability of lending support to civil societies south and east of the Mediterranean. While NATO intervened twice in Yugoslavia and the United States exclusively in Panama and Haiti, and East Timor was miraculously saved, the oppressed peoples of Southern Sudan and Lebanon, as well as ethnic communities in jeopardy such as in Darfur, the Kurds, the Berbers of North Africa, and many more were left to their fates. Women were abandoned to gender apartheid in Afghanistan and Iran and students and intellectuals were facing suppression across the region with little interest in Western capitals. The reason behind this general abandonment of the underdogs in the Arab and Muslim world was none other than the victories scored by authoritarian petro powers in America and Europe. Since the only “Middle Eastern conf lict” recognized by the public debate in the international arena was the conf lict between Israel and the Palestinians, all other “tragedies” were dismissed as interference in the region’s affairs. Equally lethal to international investigation into the region’s ideological debate was the more dangerous dismissal by petro lobbying of the nature of jihadism. The latter was framed as a spiritual enterprise, a theological question, and in best conditions, a mere reaction to U.S. policy and past European colonialism. The Western public was deprived of a scientific—even basic— understanding of the jihadi doctrines, movements, and aims. The most efficient success of the second War of Ideas was to take out Western abilities to see the strategic expansion of the ideology at the roots of many terrorist movements and regimes. Any investigation of either the mass human rights abuses of the peoples inside the realm of the “Muslim world” or the nature of jihadism was met by a campaign of demonization and guilt imposition via concepts such as “Islamophobia,” “Zionism,” or “legacy of colonialism.” The push by the petro regimes and their supporters during the 1990s was the shield under which pools of radicalization continued to grow in the East and public opinion was neutralized in the West. However, there were other, even more lethal, consequences of the second War of Ideas. The more radical Jihadists, including al Qaeda, the Taliban, other Salafists, and Hezbollah found the most fertile grounds in their own recruitment not only in the region but also within the West. The short ten years separating the end of the Cold War from the start of the War on Terror were very dense in ideological warfare waged by the global jihadist web. But the latter has morphed into

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three large creatures, two of Salafi nature and one Khomeinist. The classical Salafi mainstream continued to include the Wahabbis, Muslim Brotherhood, and the Deobandis. Their strategy was to resume the thrust of the first War of Ideas into the post-Soviet era. Their efforts doubled inside the Muslim world, creating more media networks such as al Jazeera and expanding the madrassas, and also accelerated throughout the West by widening the funding of Middle East studies and backing the apologist lobbies. The essence of this group’s war plans was to delay Western awareness of the ideological threat while seizing the political culture in the region as a permanent fact. However, the classical Salafists had no intentions on clashing openly and violently with liberal democracies, but on taking it from the inside, or at least paralyzing its counter-action for as long as needed until the war was won by ideological penetration. But the second generation Salafists, led by the rise of al Qaeda, broke away from the stealth War managed by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahabbis. Bin Laden and his ilk shattered the camouf lage by issuing the two major declarations of jihad in 1996 and 1998 and by disseminating the corresponding fatwas throughout the radicalized pools. Al Qaeda’s priority in the 1990s and beyond was to recruit for the military war and engage in it, not to expand jihadism silently among followers within the West. Hence 9/11 changed the equation.

The Third War of Ideas: 2001–2009 By striking hard and at the heart of American society, al Qaeda shattered the “silent strategies” of the classical Salafists. The U.S. public rose to question the “existence” of a threat and thus demanded to know who that “enemy” is and what it wanted? Hence the debate about the existence of a foe was open in America leading to a debate about what to do about it. The Western War of Ideas began as a result of the shock of 9/11 but that war was not really won in eight years. Across the Atlantic, the jihadists shook off the European public opinions by striking in Madrid and London and rising in France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. The third War of Ideas was in fact triggered by sensational jihadi actions in the West prompting two schools to clash: on the one hand, analysts explaining the existence of a jihadi threat, and on the other hand, scholars claiming U.S. foreign policy is the trigger of terrorism. Gradually, more citizens were convinced that there was a threat coming from the Arab and Muslim worlds that they did not know enough about but there was a debate about its nature. Some literature focused mostly on the idea of the Islamic religion attempting to link violence to theology. Other research determined that the issue has to do mostly with ideology rather than strict religion. That is the debate inside the West. But the most dramatic dynamics of this third War of Ideas was the explosion of dissidence inside the Arab and

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Muslim world. Gradually since 2001 and increasingly since the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, counter-jihadi forces and democracy voices expanded. Profiting from the Western debates, seizing opportunities on the battlefields to organize their own democratic agenda, and maximizing the use of alternative media such as Internet chat rooms and blogging, Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim dissidents and human rights activists shattered their side of the wall by bringing the story of oppression to the international arena. Former slaves from Sudan, ex-political prisoners, reformists, opposition leaders, exiles, and other figures from democracy activism in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other parts of the region entered the discussion as to the battle of ideas. The issue was not reduced to being extremist in the Arab and Muslim world or not; it became about being active in the struggle for democracy or being against it. Unlike its two predecessors, the Third War of Ideas widened in multiple directions: First, by means of a campaign by the classical jihadi powers (backed by oil producing regimes) to suppress two narratives in the West—one that jihadism is behind terrorism, and second that democratic dissidence in the Middle East is the response to radicalization. Wahabbi and Khomieinist funding and inf luence have been fiercely attempting to counter the rise of consciousness about these two issues in liberal democracies. One of the main tools used by classical jihadi lobbying is the so-called charge of “Islamophobia.” Any investigation of Islamism—even as an ideology—is being met by attacks accusing the counter-jihadists and the democracy dissidents as anti-Islamic. Second, a campaign by the international jihadists, al Qaeda, and its nebulous allies to further mobilize the body of militants into terror. This campaign runs parallel to the classical jihadi efforts to block the debate about jihadism. Hence, the combat jihadis are profiting from the shield provided by their competitors. In this third War of Ideas, al Qaeda and Hezbollah recruit and radicalize using a lethal ideology, while the Wahabbis, Muslim Brotherhood, and the Iranian Khomeinists secure the protection of this ideology. Third, Western governments have been deploying efforts to de-radicalize the jihadists “after” they have been indoctrinated, which presents tremendous difficulties. The results have been meager and rarely show success, for short of responding to the ideological claims and delegitimizing them, Western efforts are useless and costly. Fourth, counter-jihadist NGOs and intellectuals in the West are attempting to awaken their own societies regarding the mounting threat. They hope to provoke a mass awareness of the menace leading to strategic measures. But the community of experts, commentators, and activists is divided as to the arguments and strategies. While some narrow their focus on theological

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debates, others concentrate on single issues. No global strategies in the War of Ideas have been duly set up. Finally, democratic dissidents have continued to be active, but as for the counter-jihadi community, it is very divided and often focused on particular local causes.

The State of the War of Ideas: 2009– Under the Bush administration, the War of Ideas witnessed mutations and changes. While discourse at the level of the president, his main spokespersons, and Congressional leaders from both parties regarding jihadism and democracy was moving in the direction of encouraging pluralism and isolating radicalism, the trickling down within the bureaucracy was not followed through. While the directives from the top levels aimed at encouraging an ideological confrontation with the jihadist ideology and backing of the prodemocracy forces, the body of experts tasked with the mission acted against the aforementioned goals leading to the collapse of U.S.-backed efforts. Most projects, including media production, funded by the American taxpayer deviated from their original aim by pressure groups sympathetic to either Salafi or Khomeinist lobbies. Eight years after 9/11, government expertise in the domain of strategic communications was unable to define the ideology behind the threat and in many cases framed it as a socioeconomical or political reaction to U.S. policy, not a sui generis doctrinal construct. The Bush administration’s push to wage a campaign against the radicals was not followed by its own bureaucracy. Across the layers of the executive branch and agencies, including defense, intelligence, homeland security, and diplomacy, a compromised expertise halted the process of support to democracy forces, blocked public intellectual awareness of the jihadi threat, and moved to partner with Islamist movements at the expense of Muslim democrats. But the Bush administration’s declarations in support of democracy in the region encouraged many NGOs, dissidents, and democracy activists to become bolder and engage in their own struggle on the frontlines against terror and extremism. Even if the Third War of Ideas from 2001 to 2009 did not produce strategic successes due to the inf luence of the oil producing regimes and their inf luence inside the West, the most successful results were ironically achieved by non-supported segments of Middle East societies. In Lebanon, the Cedar Revolution took advantage of Franco-American pressure to engage in a democracy uprising. In Sudan, the Darfur human rights activists pushed for the cause of genocide to be heard. Iraq’s democratic parties, although coming second after the traditional parties in elections, rose again. In Afghanistan, women made strident advances in political integration. Minorities across the region became louder in their quest for cultural rights as the Berbers, Kurds, Assyrian-Chaldeans, and liberals at large

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from the Peninsula to the Maghreb organized. The War of Ideas waged by the U.S. government was stymied by the combined efforts of international jihadi lobbies and hostile bureaucratic circles within the administration. But oddly the “freed” civil society forces in the region moved up and consolidated their gains. In response to the rise of democratic and human rights elements in the Greater Middle East, jihadists and militant Islamists in the region and the diaspora reverted to deterrence against liberal democracies to preempt the most dangerous menace against terror ideologies: an alliance between progressive forces in international society and liberal forces in the Muslim world. Hence a multipronged strategy was developed by regimes affiliated with the OIC and OPEC (mainly Iran, the Wahabbis, Muslim Brotherhoods, Qatar, Syria, Sudan, etc.) to block the realization of the alliance between the West and democrats in the Muslim world. The gist of this campaign is to deter the United States and its allies from backing the liberal forces in the region under the charge of “unilateral intervention in the affairs of other countries” while simultaneously blocking the democracy forces in the Muslim world from reaching out to the international community under the accusation of “serving the interests of imperialism and colonialism.” The ultimate objective of the authoritarian and jihadi forces is to preemptively break the alliance between the free world and the suppressed civil societies in the region. Inside the Arab and Muslim diaspora in the West, the jihadists—both Salafists and Khomeinists—have been winning the battle of political socialization, simply because governments have been seeking the expert advice of an academia sympathetic to the Islamists. Both in Europe and in North America, the jihadophiles do not exceed 12 percent of the communities but they control the “microphone” and relationship with authorities. Hence the representation of the silent majority is hijacked by the radicals. While the counter-jihadists, progressives, liberals, and human rights activists reach around 15 percent, their outreach to the majority is limited because of the failed policies of Western governments, themselves relying heavily on an expertise compromised by the jihadi financial power. With the Obama administration taking over, chances for going in either direction are equal. The first African American presidency should be inclined to assist minorities in jeopardy worldwide and particularly in the Arab world. In principle, an Obama presidency cannot avoid coming to the rescue of Darfur, Mauritania’s slaves, Algeria’s Berbers, as well as assist the Kurds, the Lebanese, women, students, and other suppressed segments of Middle Eastern societies. But the Obama administration’s engagement in dialogue with the Iranian and Syrian regimes and potentially with the Taliban and other jihadists can have significant consequences on the state of democracy forces in the region. In addition, the adoption of a lexicon by the U.S. and European bureaucracies calling for a ban on the use of

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terms indicting the jihadists will also strengthen the inf luence of the radicals instead of curbing their appeal. The next few years will better show in which direction the U.S. government and the West will go in terms of the War of Ideas. Most evidence indicates that the authorities will withdraw from this ideological confrontation, leaving the arena to the jihadi lobbies. But there is also evidence that democracy forces in the region, even if abandoned by the West, will continue to struggle in their own War of Ideas against the jihadists and authoritarians.

Conclusion If the U.S. government (both the administration and Congress) would change course from engagement with the authoritarian regimes to engagement with civil societies, and if other liberal democracies would come together in shaping a joint strategy of confronting the radicals by allying themselves with the democrats in the Greater Middle East, I would make the following policy recommendations to win the third War of Ideas. First, identify the counter-jihadi and liberal activists and intellectuals within the Muslim, Arab, and Middle Eastern communities in the West and empower them so that they can present an alternative to their communities in the battle of ideas and let the debate take place naturally. If given equal opportunities, the democratic forces will win these debates. Second, identify the progressive, liberal, and democratic forces as well as human rights activists in the Muslim and Arab world and across the Greater Middle East and extend enough help to enable them to engage in their own battle of arguments and ideas. The most powerful response to radicalization is democratization, not in terms of political process only (election and vote) but in terms of political culture. When individuals choose democratic political culture, they opt for pluralism and the respect of human rights as recognized universally. And when they do so, they reject Salafism and Khomeinism and the latter’s interpretation of conf licts and international relations. Third, engage in mass public education and information of civil societies in the West and throughout liberal democracies about the threat of jihadism as an ideology and the challenge faced by the region’s democrats. Without a full understanding of the confrontation by the public within the United States, Europe, and other democracies, no international support can be sustained to win the War of Ideas. Fourth, address the ideological roots of terror as a prelude to addressing its political grounds. One needs to remove jihadi terrorism from the equation to allow Palestinians and Israelis to reach peace, the Lebanese to reach security, and the Iranians, Syrians, Sudanese, and other societies achieve social peace. But above all, regardless of where government policies will head and the choices to be made by leaders and politicians in the years to come, it is crucial

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to continue the debate and develop platforms for an ongoing discussion of the problem. The ideologically rooted threat cannot be dismissed as a side effect of politics as usual. It has and will continue to have a profound and dramatic effect on human history. The goal of any War of Ideas must be to advance freedom and equality as solid ground for stability and peace.

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CH A P T E R

T H R E E

“Dangerous Concepts” and the Struggle Within: Reclaiming State and Politics from the Islamists M a aj i d Nawaz

In 1996 a global Islamist group proclaimed the intellectual and political battlefield between their Islamist ideology and the West. It was and remains a call primarily to Muslims because the ideological struggle, which in recent years has violently affected America and the world, has in fact been playing out for decades inside Muslim-majority nations among Muslims themselves. Attacks on the United States have “embroiled the United States in [this] intra-Muslim ideological battle . . . ”1 Here is what they said: Dear Muslims . . . you must wake up and realise the reality behind what the infidels and their followers are plotting. You are today called upon to defend your creed, your ideology . . . It is time to distinguish Truth from Falsehood as clear and distinct as life is from death. On one side, the side of Falsehood—are America, the infidel West and your rulers and their supporters . . . allured by Capitalism and seduced by its way of life, together with those who call for democracy, pluralism, human rights and free market policies. And on the other side, the side of Truth—are those carriers of the Islamic call . . . from among the Muslim people who adhere to their ideology. It is indeed a decisive battle in which your destiny is determined . . . there is no room for neutrality in this decisive battle.2 Today, Islamists attempt to monopolize political, intellectual, and cultural discourse by defining the legitimacy of any sociopolitical order based upon its conformity, or lack thereof, to their ideology, an anachronistic

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politicization of the faith of Islam. Non-Islamist Muslims, of varying political persuasions, have gradually found themselves on the back-foot. Unable to rebut Islamist assertions without sounding anti-Islamic or prostatus quo, normal Muslims have been accused by Islamists of being agents of Western soft power to advance the infidels’ political ideology against Islamism. They were assisted upon that by agent intellectuals who invite to Western thoughts with passion, defend them, and struggle against the Islamic civilisation, standing with blind sincerity to the side of the Ummah’s3 enemy . . . Thus it is truly considered a violent intellectual struggle between the two civilisations; Islamic and Capitalist. This clash is so clear that it requires no evidence, for we are living it daily no matter how much some intellectuals and the Capitalists inf luencing them attempt to hide it . . .4 The culmination of this ideological struggle has been that Islamists have, by and large, succeeded in capturing not only the imagination of large swathes of Muslims, but frustratingly have also managed to impose upon non-Islamists their own terms of intellectual engagement. This is despite the fact that Islamism itself is a direct by-product of colonialism and the very “Western thought” that Islamists are so critical of. Thus it is with growing frustration that one reads in the literature of contemporary academics and policymakers, Muslims or otherwise, references to Islam as defined through an Islamist frame of reference. This is summarized in the assumption that Islam is indeed a political ideology with its own distinct sociopolitical systems that somehow require reconciliation with modernity. The U.K. government’s most recent counterterrorism strategy, known as Contest 2, explicitly and rather unhelpfully refers to Islam as an ideology, “building our engagement with global centers of Islamic ideology . . .”5 Such a line prematurely surrenders the debate that Muslims have been waging against Islamists from the outset. Rather than asserting Islam as a faith, which like many others once inspired a civilization, such language begins with the assumption that Islam is an ideology, at odds with democracy and at odds with any religiously neutral political order because it possesses its own ideological alternative. Bizarrely, the same U.K. government strategy slips into using language befitting only the Islamist ambition of resurrecting the medieval classification, which was not exclusively Muslim, of defining political identity along exclusively religious lines, rather than on allegiance and citizenship. The policy paper embarrassingly divides the world into Islamic and non-Islamic lands, known respectively as Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Kûfr to Islamists,6 “Veterans of the Afghan war and others from across the Islamic and non-Islamic world travelled to fight in Chechnya.” 7

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It is with regret that one also finds academics falling prey to this entrapment by engaging on the subject through the Islamist prism. Hence, the intellectual debate against Islamism is surrendered, and with it Islam and history are ideologically redefined. Islamists of course receive such intellectual assumptions with glee, for they have been trying to convince the Muslim masses for a long time that Islam is a distinct ideology. Islamist tracts regularly refer to Western statements reinforcing their own Islamist view that it is Islam itself, and not Islamism, that is embroiled in a clash of civilizations with the West. Recently, the following has been mentioned in the book “The End of History” written by the American thinker Fukuyama: “The Capitalist system is the eternal salvation for man on Earth. Islam, despite its weakness and disintegration, threatens this new victorious way of life” . . . The Orientalist Bernard Lewis said about Islam and Capitalism: “They are contradictory. There is no scope for dialogue.”8 In fact, Islamists refer to such commentators as “people (who) know Islam in its reality, rather even better than some Muslims.”9 The surrender of this debate by some non-Islamists is no doubt due to their assumption that Islamists do indeed represent a continuity of medieval Islamic tradition, and that Islam is indeed at odds with any sociopolitical order not engineered exclusively along shariah codes. It is no great leap to recognize how adopting such Islamist terms of engagement immediately marginalizes those Muslims arguing for political pluralism, democracy, and a religiously neutral political order in the name of Islam and against Islamism. It is to reset that balance and to redraw these lines in the aforementioned internal ideological struggle between Islamists and Muslims that this chapter has been written. It is an effort to reclaim state and politics from the Islamist hegemony, and an attempt at breaking the current monopoly of such discourse by Islamists who claim that religiously neutral politics is contrary to Islam. By doing so, this chapter aims to place Islamism on the back-foot, where it firmly belongs, and to empower the mainstream in their decades old struggle against totalitarian ideologies. This aim is illustrated through a case study, perhaps the most central of Islamist political principles that runs contrary to democratic and religiously neutral politics, the question of to whom sovereignty belongs in Islam: God or the people.

Defining the Ideology of Islamism In understanding what the ideology of Islamism is, it would help to begin with the name. The suffix “-ism” has been added to Islam so as to draw attention to the political nature of the subject matter. Islam is a faith. Islamism is

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an ideology that anachronistically uses Islam the faith as a justification. The presence of the word Islam in Islamism, like social in socialism, indicates the justificatory claim made by the ideologue rather than an admission of the validity of such a claim. When dealing with this question one must remain cognizant of the fact that the majority of Muslims are not Islamists. The natural question then arises: what is the difference between an Islamist and an ordinary Muslim who may be politically active? Just as there is no one single definition to Communism, it is likewise for Islamism. This, of course, does not mean that Communism does not exist just as it does not mean that there is no such thing as Islamism. Identification will be attempted by considering Islamist’s ideology, law, people, and state. The following four basic indicators can help identify Islamism. The first is the Islamists belief that Islam is not a religion, but a divine political ideology surpassing Communism and Capitalism.10 The second indicator is the Islamist claim that the Muslim personal religious code, known as the shariah, demands implementation at the state level as codified law. In other words, what is legal and what is illegal under state law must be synchronized with Ĥal āl (permissible) and Ĥarām (impermissible) of the religious code. The third indicator is the Islamist notion of the ummah, or Muslim religious community, forming a political rather than simply a religious identity. This has parallels to the Communist idea of the international proletariat. The final indicator is the Islamist dream of having an ideological entity to represent the earlier mentioned three elements in the form of an expansionist Muslim bloc, the ‘Islamic state’, or Caliphate.

State and Sovereignty between Muslim Tradition and Islamist Revisionism Reversing History: The Islamist Attempt at Inversing the European Reformation Al-Im ām Ahmed Ibn Taymiyah,11 the theologian most quoted by Islamists, states: One who says that the question of leadership (Im āmah) is the most important ruling of the D īn (religion) is a liar according to the consensus (Ijm ā’) of Muslims, both the Sunni and the Shia. In fact it is Kûfr (apostasy) since the matter of belief (Im ān) in God and His Messenger is more important than the question of leadership (Im āmah), and this is something known in the D īn by necessity. So the unbeliever does not become a believer until he testifies that there is no god but God,

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and that Muhammad (saw) is a Messenger of God . . . he would never mention leadership (Im āmah) to them . . . So He made them brothers in religion due to repentance. When the non-believers in the time of the Messenger (upon whom be peace) became Muslims, then the rulings of Islam were mandated upon them. The leadership (Im āmah) was never mentioned to them. No one from the people of knowledge reports such a thing from the Messenger of God (upon whom be peace); neither via a singular (Ahad) narration nor a mass transmitted report (Mut āwatir). Rather, we know by necessity, the Prophet (upon whom be peace) never made mention of leadership (Im āmah), neither in general allusions or specifically; so how can it be the most important matter from the religious rulings . . . It would have been obligatory upon the Prophet (saw) to explain to his people (Ummah) remaining after him, just as he explained to them the matters of prayer (Şal āh), alms (Zak āh), fasting (Şawm) and pilgrimage (Ĥajj), and just as he precisely explained the matters of belief (Im ān) . . . and it is known that the question of leadership (Im āmah) is not explained in the Book and the example of the Prophet (Şunnah) as these matters are explained. If someone were to say “it falls under a general text or is arrived at through the principle, what is necessary for the accomplishment of an obligation is an obligation, or something alluded to an indication in a further text.” It would be said; Even if this were correct, then it would at most be considered a part of the braches (Fur ū’) and details not a fundamental aspect of the religion, a pillar of belief (Im ān).12 The notion that political sovereignty belongs to the shariah, or to God, is what many Islamists of varying persuasions generally agree upon.13 To consciously reject this notion, with reasoned argumentation, is judged by many Islamists to be Kûfr (apostasy). Islamists use this principle as an axiom against which the Islamic nature of the law-making process in any given state is judged. If statutes are justified exclusively through the Islamic scriptural reasoning of those who adopt such laws, they are considered Islamic; if they are not, they are considered Kûfr. This further entails that in an “Islamic state” there is no legislature, and no law-makers, as legislation is the attribute of God alone. Rather, there is interpretation, consultation, and adoption of law as performed by the consultative assembly. Any state upholding the people to be sovereign has therefore violated a basic tenet of Islamic faith, that God is the legislator, and has set up a rival to God’s authority in the form of people. In fact, the principle has acquired such importance that Islamists have elevated it to the level of Islamic doctrine, as al-Muwdūdi comments, Its primary basis that as Allah Almighty is the Creator, Master and real Patron of the Universe and Man, He alone is Man’s Ruler, He alone has

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the right to give Man Faith (D ī n) and Law and judge the disputes of man and tell what is Truth and what is falsehood. No other being has any right whatever to be man’s lawgiver. In other words, like the natural sovereignty, the sovereignty with regard to lawmaking also is vested only in Allah. No man or creature, apart from Allah, can be the bearer of this sovereignty. And if a person does not recognize and accept this Divine rule of Allah, it is merely futile for him to recognize the natural sovereignty of Allah.14 It is rather telling that the Islamists’ favored theologian Al-Im ā m Ahmed Ibn Taymiyah—as cited at the outset of this section—explicitly declares that political leadership is not at all fundamental to Islamic belief. Al-Muwd ū di’s fascination with raising political sovereignty to a doctrinal level runs in direct contradistinction to the man most accused of being the theological forefather to Islamism, Ibn Taymiyah. Consequently, when considering the matter of sovereignty, there is no “Crisis of Islam” as described by Bernard Lewis.15 Indeed, there is only a crisis of modern revisionist Islamism.

“Sovereignty is for the Shariah”: A Concept Foreign to Islam The concept of political sovereignty (al-Siyādah or al-Ĥākimiyyah) is entirely alien to both Islam and traditional Muslim political discourse, to the extent that there is no word for it in the classical Arabic language. This does not mean however that the concept is abhorrent in itself, but rather that there is nothing intrinsically Islamic about it. Sovereignty is a Western term, introduced into Islam by a process of theo-legal reasoning (Ijtih ād). Islamist literature itself states, “Its reality is that this word is a Western term, which means the one who exercises and controls the will.”16 In any lexicon, the complete absence historically of a word used to describe an abstract notion indicates that the people of that tongue had not yet articulated that particular concept. In modern times, sovereignty in Arabic is rendered Siyādah, derived from a root noun—Sayyid—used to denote mastery. Another modern term used by Islamists is al-Ĥākimiyyah, an abstract noun derived from the Arabic root al-Ĥûkm, “to arbitrate.” The mere fact that a modern derivation was required demonstrates that there is no classical equivalent for the idea; otherwise the preexisting classical word would have sufficed. Furthermore, to claim that the notion of “sovereignty for the shariah” is a pillar of the Muslim creed (‘Aq īdah) is to ignore that classical Muslim manuals are entirely bereft of any references to such an idea. Traditional scholars’ books on creed, jurisprudence, and philosophy consistently fail to mention, by word or meaning, that the legitimacy of a system and its laws is tied to their compatibility with the shariah. Rather, the extent of any discussion in such

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books is restricted to two elements: first, legitimacy of authority vis-à-vis the creed of a ruler as an individual, and not his laws,17 this will be elaborated upon further later. Second, as per his laws, discussion has occurred over the right of Muslims to conscientiously object to a ruler’s edicts if they decisively violate the religious code (shariah). In such cases, however, it has been stressed traditionally that this by no means invalidates the basis of the ruler’s legitimacy.18 The third category, of the state’s legitimacy hinging upon sovereignty belonging to God, is conspicuous only due to its absence. Therefore, the Islamist claim that a Muslim ruler who issues edicts running contrary to the shariah is in violation of God’s sovereignty (Siyādah), and hence invalidates his and his system’s legitimacy is a modern innovation. This does not automatically render the claim illegitimate. It follows though that the introduction of this foreign concept of sovereignty into Islamic discourse is merely an Ijtih ād and hence cannot be held up to be a definitive (Qati’i) matter of creed, with its opposite being apostasy, or Kûfr. On a similar note, by claiming that sovereignty belongs to the shariah Islamists insist, as a matter of doctrine, that all legislation adopted by the state must be derived exclusively from Islam. This view represents a failure to recognize that the state or al-Dawlah (the idea of a separate entity enjoying legal personality), legislation or Tashr ī ’, and drafting and codification of laws or Sann and Taqn īn al-Qaw ān īn are all modern phenomena, not inherent to Islam in the slightest. The words Dawlah (state), Tashr ī ’ (legislation), and Taqn īn (codification) used to describe these three terms are all post-Prophet Arabic derivations. Any attempt at reconciling them with Islam is but an Ijtih ād, not a fixed and preordained matter of creed. This again means that contrary opinions cannot be considered apostasy, or Kûfr. In fact, when discussing legitimacy, medieval Muslim jurisprudence refers to a ruler and his edicts, and not to the modern idea of a “Kûfr” or Dawlah, or to whether Tashr ī ’ is from God. The ruler’s edicts are to be obeyed unless they explicitly command to definitive sin, in which case they are to be disregarded.19 In commanding to sin it was never said that the ruler would be in violation of God’s sovereignty, and his “state” would now be somehow rendered illegitimate. Consequently, one cannot claim that the notion of an Islamic state is fundamental to Islam when the words state and “legislation” are not even present in the Quran or Sunnah. As said previously, early jurists preferred to ask about the person of the ruler, whether he was a Muslim or not, rather than referring to the concept of a state, which they had not yet arrived at. On this matter Islamists are guilty of the very charge they so often lay against others: adopting thought paradigms traceable back to colonialism and then, in a very modern way, calling for political change through the prism of unconsciously adopted Western ideas. There is nothing inherently wrong in doing this, as wisdom is the lost property of the believer,20 but the real colonized mind is the mind that fails to recognize that it has been colonized. Islamism emerged from colonialism by adopting European political

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paradigms, from both the Eastern and Western blocs, as a means by which to affirm identity as defined against the other. It is a limited reaction from within the same political prism, like that of a child that detests its own parents.

Deconstructing Nabhāni’s Reasoning in the Sovereignty Principle Nabhā ni, a founding Islamist, has attempted to co-opt this Western term “sovereignty” by trying to reconcile it with Islamic scripture, So if an individual exercised and controlled his own will (Irādah), he would be sovereign over himself, but if his will was controlled and exercised by other than himself he would be a slave. (If ) The Ummah . . . was controlled by herself via some of her individuals, to whom she willingly and freely granted the right of controlling that will, she would be considered sovereign over her own self. Whereas if her will was controlled by others against her wishes she would be considered enslaved. That is why the democratic system states . . . sovereignty belongs to the people i.e. the people exercise their own affairs and elect the delegates they wish and give them the right to control their will. This is the reality of the sovereignty which we want to apply the verdict on. The verdict regarding this sovereignty is that it belongs to the shariah and not to the people (ummah). The will of the individual is not controlled by himself as he pleases but by the commands and prohibitions of God. Similarly, the ummah (people), is not controlled by her own free will where she acts as she pleases but is rather subjected to the commands and prohibitions of God.21 That this reasoning is clearly an Ijtih ād should go without saying. The process of allocating a foreign word within Islamic discourse, as has been done here, cannot but be an Ijtih ād. It is not only possible, but also perfectly reasonable to arrive at a different conclusion. Hence, differing with Nabh ā ni’s conclusion via another Ijtih ād cannot be considered un-Islamic by Islamists. In fact, Nabh ā ni’s view quoted earlier rests upon the notion of human will (Ir ādah) and an assumption that being obliged to adhere to the shariah equates to not possessing one’s own will. On the contrary, it is perfectly plausible to conclude that man is obliged to obey God, yet has the Ir ādah to decide whether or not he wants to. Taken from this angle, man can be said to be sovereign over his own will, yet be religiously obliged to consider God in his decisions. Furthermore, a people can be sovereign over their own will, yet be religiously obliged to being God-conscious when drafting law to determine that will. It must follow for anyone making such an argument that since sovereignty hinges upon controlling will, the people are sovereign. 22

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Moreover, the reasoning given earlier states that a nation, if controlled by others against her wishes, loses her will and hence her sovereignty. It is then elaborated in the extract that the same nation may also choose to grant some individuals from among itself the right to determine her will, thus being sovereign over itself. By accepting in abstract the mere possibility of this happening, it must be accepted that any nation submitting to God’s law also does so by its own free will. It seems that the reasoning here is confusing the de jure duty to adhere to God’s law with the de facto right to choose to do so voluntarily.

Traditional Perspectives in Ascribing Rule to People Contrary to Islamist claims, a scriptural basis exists for the view that rulings should be ascribed to people and not to God. The following hadith (Prophetic tradition) forbids jurists from ascribing their rulings to God. Muslim jurists are commanded to ascribe their rulings to themselves, for they know not God’s true ruling. “If you surround a (defeated) people who asked you to pronounce God’s ruling upon them, then do not pronounce God’s ruling upon them, but rather pronounce your ruling upon them, for you know not God’s ruling.”23 Al-Im ām al-Nawawi’s24 view on the prohibition mentioned in this hadith is that it is cautionary, rather than proscriptive.25 Al-Im ām al-Sarakhsī26 quotes the view of Abu Ĥan ī fah’s students al-Q ādi Abu Yūsuf and al-Im ām Muhammad al-Shaybā ni27 on this hadith: And by it Muhammad (al-Shaybā ni), God have mercy upon him, deduces that it is not permitted to pronounce God’s verdict upon those who are surrounded . . . Muhammad (al-Shaybā ni), may God have mercy upon him, says that it is not permitted to pronounce God’s ruling upon them as is mentioned in the hadith . . . In this wording there is (also) evidence for the people of the Sunnah and majority (Ahl al-Sunnah we al-Jam ā’ah) that a jurist (Mujtahid) is at times correct and at others errs, for he (the Prophet) says “ for you know not what God’s ruling for them is,” and if every jurist (Mujtahid) was correct he would have inescapably known God’s ruling for them via theo-legal reasoning (Ijtih ād). As al-Im ām al-Sarakhsī relates, and contrary to the modern doctrine of political sovereignty belonging to God—where state laws are viewed as nothing less than adopted divine laws—Ĥanafi scholars agreed that ascribing rulings (al-Ĥukm) to God was originally prohibited, with some dispute as to whether it remains prohibited. It follows therefore that it is certainly not apostasy to ascribe rulings (al-Ĥukm) to people. In fact, according to al-Im ām al-Shaybā ni’s stance it is prohibited to ascribe rulings to any thing other than the people who make them.

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It is important to note that these jurists who discussed the meaning of this hadith interpreted it in a general sense by widening its application to the classical theological dispute over whether a jurist (Mujtahid) who interprets divine scripture can be said by others to have erred. These theologians, therefore, did not restrict this hadith to its specific cause of revelation but rather accepted its general applicability. In modern times, Muslim jurists such as al-Shaykh ‘Abd Allah bin Bayyah 28 have again used this hadith in its general sense. The Shaykh explains his view that, with the demise of the Prophet (upon whom be peace), this hadith indicates that political authority passed from being entirely religious to a more temporal authority in the hands of religiously inspired Companions of the Prophet (upon whom be peace).29 An important note in this regard is the reason for why the Prophet 30 chose the particular wording ascribed to him in the hadith. This is elucidated by al-Im ām al-Sarakhsī who, after discussing this, comments, The benefit here is that the doubt of scholarly disputation (al-Khil āf ) is avoided by pronouncing upon them our ruling and judging them by our opinion. However, this (doubt) is not avoided by pronouncing upon them God’s ruling, considering that the jurist (Mujtahid—who will derive God’s ruling) may be correct, and may be incorrect. This is the benefit of using such wording.31 Hence, it is al-Im ām al-Sarakhsī ’s view that by simply ascribing rulings to oneself, and then by making them binding as a ruler issuing a temporal judgment, this avoids the theological dispute that may arise. This is because if rulings are pronounced in their capacity as theological rulings (Ijtih ādat), people will be within their remit to have their own theological interpretation, claiming that the ruler’s Ijtih ād may be wrong, and hence not follow it. By naming his ruling as simply his own binding temporal law, the ruler escapes theological disputation. Based upon this, and contrary to Islamist claims of sovereignty belonging to God, there is clear prophetic advice to ascribe political rulings to man, and a cautionary prohibition against ascribing such rulings to God. The debate within Muslim circles over ascribing ruling to people is, as a matter of fact, as old as Islam itself. Al-Shaykh Wahbah Zuhayli32 cites responses of the Prophet’s Companions to Kharijite claims that “the rule is for none but God.” The Kharijites had rebelled against the authority of Islam’s fourth Caliph, al-Im ām Ali. When Ali decided to allow for a compromise on the matter, he called upon a third party to arbitrate between him and the Kharijites based upon principles enshrined in the Quran: “The Kharijites rejected the permissibility of any form of arbitration (al-Ta ĥk īm), for arbitration is for none but Allah, the exalted. They repeated what was said by one of their speakers, ‘No rule but God’s rule’ and ‘We accept not that men rule

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in matters of God’s religion.’ ” Zuhayli then cites Caliph Ali ibn Abī Tā lib’s response to the second of these slogans, He (Caliph Ali) responded to the second of these statements by the words, “We did not delegate arbitration (Ta ĥk īm) to men, rather we delegated arbitration to the Quran, yet this Quran is but lines written between two covers. It does not speak with a tongue, and must necessarily rely upon an interpreter. Hence, men speak on its behalf.”33 Zuhayli continues to quote another of the Prophet’s Companions, ibn ‘Abbā s,34 responding to the Kharijites, When they said “No rule but God’s rule,” he said, “Indeed, you are correct, there is no rule but God’s rule, and it was God who delegated the ruling (Ĥakkama) to people in the case of marital discord, as it was God who delegated ruling (Ĥakkama) to people in disputes over the killing of game. So I ask, is the arbitration of men in marital discord and in the killing of game better, or the arbitration of men in the affair of leaders that will put and end to blood being spilt?” . . . God has delegated His affair to men over a quarter of a Dirham (single unit of currency), and over a rabbit and its like from game, “O you who believe, do not kill game whilst you are in pilgrimage. Whosoever deliberately kills game from amongst you, then he must recompense for the like of what he killed from domestic animals. This is to be judged (Ya ĥ kum) by a just person from amongst you.”35 So I ask you for God’s sake, is the rule of men in a rabbit and its like better, or their rule in matters of blood and reconciliation? Know that if God willed, he would have ruled, and not left it to men. And about women and their husbands God said, “And if you feared that they may separate then send an arbiter (Ĥakam) from his family and an arbiter from yours.”36 Therefore, God has made the rule by men a protected Sunnah (Prophetic example). 37 It is notable from this passage that these Companions had no theoretical qualm with ascribing ruling (al-Ĥukm) to people, rather than God.

The Need for a Political Authority and State It is not the purpose of this work to claim that Muslims need no political authority whatsoever. Rather, it is to say that Islam has not predefined any one single model of political authority, and has certainly not predefined any political theory related to such authority. Past debates have existed between jurists on whether Islam obliges political authority per se. However, it is

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important to remember the context of these debates. They were not about whether Islam has defined a specific “Ruling System.” Rather, they were restricted to discussing the need for any form of political authority in general. These discussions addressed whether anarchy was permissible in Islam or whether political authority was foundational (A şl) to religious creed or merely a branch (Far’a). Some Kharijites38 argued that political authority was neither from the foundations of the religion, nor from its branches. The Shia stance was that political authority (Im āmah) was A şl to religion, but was nevertheless postponed till the return of the Messiah. Hence, though politically theocratic in theory, the Shia clergy became largely secular in practice because they were waiting for the return of the Messiah. 39 Sunnis, on the other hand, argued that some sort of political authority was mandatory but was not from the foundations (Us ūl) of religion. Rather it was from its branches (Fur ū’) and devised by people. Theologians devised this distinction in Usūl and Fur ū’ to aid themselves in identifying the core tenets of the faith. This served to delineate where juristic difference (Ikhtil āf ) was tolerable (the Fur ū’) and where it was not acceptable (the Usūl). Regarding political authority and the distinction in religion between Usūl and Fur ū’, al-Im ām al-Ghaz ā li40 states, Know, however, that error regarding the status of the Caliphate, whether or not establishing this office is a (communal) obligation, who qualifies for it, and related matters, cannot serve as grounds for condemning people as Unbelievers. Indeed, Ibn Kaysā n41 denied that there was any religious obligation to have a Caliphate at all; but this does not mean that he must be branded an Unbeliever. Nor do we pay any attention to those who exaggerate the matter of the Imamate (leadership) and equate recognition of the leader (Im ām) with faith in God and His Messenger.42 Nor do we pay any attention to those who oppose these people and brand them Unbelievers simply on the basis of their doctrine on the Imamate. Both of these positions are extreme.43 At this stage it could appear that al-Im ām al-Ghaz ā li and others are arguing that Islam has fixed and mandated a specific Islamic ruling system as part of the branches of religion, due to their usage of the term Caliphate. However, though this mistake is often made by Islamists citing such passages in support of their arguments, it is clear that the context of these words are clearly about something else entirely. What al-Ghaz ā li and others address is the need in Islam for an authority to safeguard the religion. They do not claim that Islam has fixed the shape, form, and structure of this political authority. In other words, all that al-Ghaz ā li is saying is that some jurists believed that Islam could allow for anarchy, while others made authority essential to the creed,

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and hence denying it would be akin to apostasy. Nevertheless, the majority position was in between these two extremes. Islam didn’t predefine authority to the extent that to differ with one model or another is deemed apostasy. Yet also, it did mandate some form of governance and order to society. The subtlety of this context is lost on Islamists when citing such passages. Hence, the immediate assumption is that anyone who argues against Islamism is supporting al-A şamm’s earlier mentioned claim that political authority is not needed at all. On the contrary, what is being claimed is that political authority, though needed to preserve the freedom to practice religion, is not predefined by religion. Hence, people must put their minds to use in defining the best form and model of governance. Islamists may retort here that al-Ghaz ā li and others have used the term Caliphate in such passages to describe the type of political authority needed. This rebuttal makes the mistake of assuming that the Caliphate is a predefined and fixed system of governance. Sadly, such an assumption has been adopted by many a non-Muslim commentator too. However, this assumption fails to recognize that the terms Caliph and Caliphate were merely used to denote political authority. Medieval Muslim jurists had no fixed system in mind when using these terms. Indeed, various Caliphates differed with each other considerably over time and place. This is why jurists and theologians alike used these terms interchangeably with the terms Im ām and Im āmah (leader and Imamate), Şulţā n and Şal ţanah (Sultan and Sultanate), and Am īr and Im ārah (Emir and Emirate). Such usage ref lected the interchangeable way in which these terms were used in the scripture itself. In fact, even a founding Islamist, Nabhā ni, recognized this, As for the title given to him, it is the title of Khalī fah (successor), or Im ām (leader), or Am īr al-Mu’min īn (Prince of the believers) . . . it is not obligatory to adhere to these three alone, rather other titles that indicate the same meaning are permitted to use for he who supervises the affairs of Muslims, such as Ĥākim (ruler) of the believers, Ra’īs (president) of Muslims, Şulţā n of Muslims and others that do not contradict this meaning. As for titles that have a specific meaning that contradict the Islamic rules related to ruling such as King, or President of the Republic, or Emperor, then they are not permitted to be used as they contradict the Islamic rules.44 Nabh ā ni’s only caveat was that the title of the system and leader should not contain specific meanings that contradict the “Islamic rules related to ruling” as defined by him. It should be clear at this stage, however, that by using the term Caliphate in the context that he did, al-Ghaz ā li meant nothing more than political authority and its leader. As such this author wholeheartedly accepts his point. Islam, and indeed any religion for that

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matter, would fare better if it existed under a political authority that protected the right of its people to practice their faith. From its inception, therefore, Islam mandated the use of political authority to protect the right to worship God, and to establish justice, where such worship is denied or where injustice prevails. This is a far cry from the predefined divine system of Islamists. With this in mind, it is pertinent to consider here some passages used by Islamists to lend legitimacy to their claims that Islam fixes a certain model of Islamic ruling. For instance, Al-Im ām al- Māwā rdi45 begins his book al-A ĥk ām al- Şul ţāniyyah with this very discussion, There is a consensus of opinion that the person who discharges the responsibilities of this position must take on the contract of Imamate of the Ummah (people)—although A şamm,46 exceptionally, differs in this matter. There is a difference of opinion, however, as to its obligation, that is, as whether it is obligatory for rational reasons or because it is prescribed in the shariah.47 Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalā ni makes this same point, Al-Nawawi said they (the jurists) were unanimous on the obligation of appointing a Caliph, and that this was a scriptural obligation, not a rational one. Some, like al-Asamm and some Kharijites differed however, by saying that appointing a Caliph was not obligatory. Further, some Mu’tazilites48 differed with this too by their saying that appointing a Caliph was obligatory by ration and not text. Both views are invalid.49 After considering the aforementioned observations about the context of this dispute, it becomes clear to see how these passages—by referring to the obligation of appointing a Caliph—relate merely to the need for an authority to exist. They do not illustrate the need for a predefined and divinely ordained “Islamic Ruling System,” called the Caliphate or the Islamic state by Islamists. These models developed in the context of the debate between the Kharijites on the one hand and the Shias on the other. What is said in these passages, and is accepted by this writer, is that having an authority and leader(s) is both common sense and prescribed by Islam. Islam, like any civilized religion, favors authority to anarchy. This, however, is not the subject of this work. The purpose here is therefore to rebut the Islamist claim that Islam has fixed the type, form, and structure of this political authority and has restricted Muslims to one specific political theory of governance. Islamists are simply wrong in their claim that the specific and defined system is called the Caliphate, and the style of governance adopted by the Caliph must be centralized.50

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Conclusion Rather than dangerously posing this discussion as a War of Ideas between Islam and the West, which would be a true surrender to the Islamist terms of engagement, the key to success is to “convey to Muslims the understanding that they need not make such a choice, because the values cherished by Western civilizations are the same as those embraced by classical Islam.”51 Only by reclaiming history and Islam, state and politics, can Muslims reassert the political, moral, and theological high-ground over Islamists. Only by refusing to engage in this ideological struggle through the Islamist terms of engagement can non-Islamists hope to “Prevail in the longer term over the ideology that gives rise to Islamist terrorism.”52 Islam must not be juxtaposed against Western civilization, as if there are no Western Muslims, or as if the opposite of West is not East but Islam. What have come to be known as Western values today are the culmination of centuries of human heritage, traceable back to Greece through medieval Arabs, translated from Arabic into European languages via Muslim Andalusians. In summary, until it is recognized that Islamism forms a distinct modern political ideology and is not extracted from traditional Muslim theology, little chance exists in successfully addressing the rise of Islamism and its various protagonists. This chapter represents a nascent attempt at distinguishing Islamism from the tradition of Islam. In their desire for an Islamic state, Islamists represent a peculiar blend of modernity, represented in their goal of establishing a state, coupled with a desire to return to medieval Muslim jurisprudence, represented in the law they wish for their modern state. Islamist and jihadist movements are hence modern beasts, not at all traditional in their political ideology, or party organization. Ideologies cannot be defeated by force, as Islamist groups’ continued presence under very hostile conditions demonstrates. Rather, “the U.S. is caught up in a clash within a civilization.”53 Therefore, a serious effort to challenge the core of this ideology through the power of intellectual persuasion and reclaiming traditional Islamic theology, coupled with a real and serious look at policies that facilitate recruitment for ideologues, is a more assured longerterm strategy.54

Notes 1. Michael S. Doran, “Somebody Else’s Civil War,” Foreign Affairs, 81, no. 1 (2002), 23. 2. The American Campaign to Destroy Islam or al- Ĥamlah al-Amrik ī yyah Lil Qad ā’ ‘Ala al-Isl ā m, issued by Ĥizb ut-Ta ĥ r ī r (1996), Arabic original, pp. 17–18; English translation, p. 32. 3. Ummah is used by Islamists in the sense of a global political bloc, rather than as a religious community. See The Roots of Violent Extremism and Efforts to Counter It, Testimony of Maajid Nawaz before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental

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7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

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14. 15.

16. 17.

Maajid Nawaz Affairs, July 10, 2008, p. 7. Accessed on March 31, 2009: http://www.quilliamfoundation. org/images/stories/pdfs/us-senate-submission-09–2008.pdf. The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilisations, issued by Ĥ izb ut-Ta ĥ r ī r (2002), English, p. 36. Pursue, Prevent, Protect, Prepare: The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism, Presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for the Home Department by Command of Her Majesty, HMG (March 2009), p. 96. Accessed March 31, 2009, at http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/news-publications/publicationsearch/general/HO_Contest_strategy.pdf ?view=Binary. See, e.g., The Way For Revival, p. 3 (now known as The Method of Ĥizb ut-Ta ĥ r ī r for Change by Hizb ut-Tahrir [al-Khil ā fah Publications] London, no date corresponding to the original Arabic Minh āj Ĥizb ut-Ta ĥ r ī r fi al-Taghy ī r, p. 6. Pursue, Prevent, Protect, Prepare, p. 24. Dangerous Concepts to Attack Islam and Consolidate Western Culture or Maf ā h ī m Khatira Li Darb al-Isl ā m wa Tark īz al-Had ā rah al-Gharbiyya, issued by Ĥizb ut-Ta ĥ r ī r (1998). Arabic original, p. 9, English translation, p. 18. The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilisations, p. 38; emphasis added. “Hizb ut-Tahrir” by Ĥizb ut-Ta ĥ r ī r (no date) al-Khil ā fah Publications, p. 1. Al-Im ā m Taqi al-D ī n A ĥ med Ibn Taymiyyah al-Harr ā ni (1263–1328), a Muslim jurist, theologian, reformer, and warrior originally of the Hanbali school of thought. Heavily criticized by certain orthodox scholars of his time, Ibn Taymiyyah unwittingly inspired, and has been greatly misunderstood by, much of Islamism and Jihadism today. For an academic endeavor in vindication of this scholar see the works of Oxford professor Ya ĥya Michot. Nyazee, Professor Imr ā n A ĥ san Kh ā n, Theories of Islamic Law: The Methodology of Ijtih ā d, Perspective of Islamic Thought Series (International Institute of Islamic Thought and Islamic Research Institute, Isl ā mab ā d, 1994), p. 124, quoting al-Im ā m Taqi al-D ī n A ĥ med Ibn Taymiyyah, in his Minh ā j al-Sunnah, vol. 1, p. 20. Note: though this citation came in the context of ibn Taymiyyah’s criticism of the Shia notion of the Im ā mah (leadership), his words are general and consideration is given to their generality (al-’Ibra bi al-’Um ū m). See al-Nabh ā ni, Taqi al-D ī n: “The Ruling System in Isl ā m” by Ĥizb ut-Ta ĥ r ī r (al-Khil ā fah Publications, London), p. 43, corresponding to the Arabic “Ni źā m al- Ĥukm fi il-Isl ā m,” p. 41. For further reading, see also Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Chicago: Islamic Book Service, India, 2006) and Abu al-Ĥ asan al-Mawd ūdi, “The Meaning of The Qur’ā n,” Introduction to S ū rah al-Shū ra, chapter 42: “Its primary basis that as Allah Almighty is the Creator, Master and real Patron of the Universe and Man, He alone is Man’s Ruler, He alone has the right to give Man Faith (Din) and Law and judge the disputes of man and tell what is Truth and what is falsehood. No other being has any right whatever to be man’s lawgiver. In other words, like the natural sovereignty, the sovereignty with regard to lawmaking also is vested only in Allah. No man or creature, apart from Allah, can be the bearer of this sovereignty. And if a person does not recognize and accept this Divine rule of Allah, it is merely futile for him to recognize the natural sovereignty of Allah.” Al-Mawd ūdi, “The Meaning of The Qur’ā n” (multiple publishers) Introduction to S ū rah al-Shū ra, chapter 42. For examples of Bernard Lewis’ acceptance of the Islamist paradigm of sovereignty for God, see his “Crisis of Islam—Holy War and Unholy Terror,” (London: Phoenix-Orion Books, 2004), pp. 6, 17, and 23. “The Ruling System in Isl ā m” by Ĥizb ut-Ta ĥ r ī r (al-Khil ā fah Publications, London, p. 43, corresponding to the Arabic “Ni źā m al- Ĥukm fi il-Isl ā m,” p. 41. See, e.g., al-Im ā m Ibn Hajr al-Asqal ā ni’s commentary on the Hadith of ‘Kûfr Buw āĥ’ in his exegesis of the Sah īĥ of al-Bukh ā ri.

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18. See al-Im ā m al-Nawawi’s commentary on the Hadith of ‘Kûfr Buw āĥ’ in his exegesis of the Sah īĥ of Muslim. 19. See al-Im ā m al-Nawawi’s commentary on the Hadith of ‘Kûfr Buw āĥ’ in his exegesis of the Sah īĥ of Muslim. 20. It has been narrated by Abu Hurairah that “wisdom is the lost property of the believer. Wherever he finds it he has more right to it”; see al-Tirmit ħ i (2687) and Ibn M ājah (4169). While this narration is sound in meaning, its direct attribution to the Prophet has been called into question by some. 21. “The Ruling System in Isl ā m” by Ĥizb ut-Ta ĥ r ī r, p. 43, corresponding to the Arabic “Niźā m al- Ĥukm fi il-Isl ā m,” p. 41. 22. Strangely, Nabh ā ni’s argument made here sounds quite fatalistic ( Jabriyy) yet, elsewhere, Nabh ā ni accepts that man controls his own will. See The System of Isl ā m (Ni źā m al-Isl ā m), Qad ā’ wal-Qadr, chapter 2 (al-Khil ā fah Publications, London). 23. Hadith from Sah īĥ Muslim on the authority of Buraydah. 24. He was al-Im ā m Mu ĥ iyy al-D ī n Ya ĥya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi al-Sh ā fi’i (1234–1278), the arbiter for the Sh ā fi’i school of jurists on matters pertaining to Sh ā fi’i law. 25. Al-Im ā m al-Nawawi in his explanation of Sah īĥ Muslim entitled “al-Minh āj Shar ĥ Sah īĥ Muslim ibn al-Ĥ ajjāj” (Beirut: D ā r al-Ma’rifah, no date), vol. 11–12, p. 267. 26. Al-Im ā m Shams al-D ī n Abū Bakr Muhammad al-Sarakhs ī al-Ĥ anafi (d. ca. 1090). Regarded as the arbiter in matters of Ĥ anafi jurisprudence (Fiqh) and author of the famous thirtyvolume source manual for Ĥ anafi jurisprudence, “al-Mab şūt.” 27. Al-Im ā m Muhammad ibn Ĥ asan al-Shaybā ni (d. ca. 805) was one of the two great students of Abu Ĥ an ī fah that attained the level of being an independent jurist (Mujtahid). Both al-Im ā m al-Sh ā fi’i and al-Im ā m A ĥ med ibn Hanbal, founders of two of the four schools of thought, are reported to have studied under him. 28. Al-Shaykh ‘Abd Allah bin Bayyah, born in 1935 in Mauritania, West Africa, is one of the Muslim ummah’s foremost living jurists (Mujtahid ī n). Formerly vice president to the first president of Mauritania, he currently lectures in King ‘Abd al-’Az ī z University in Saudi Arabia. 29. Al-Shaykh ‘Abd Allah bin Bayyah, “Al āqat al-D ī n bi al-Dawlah, Wijhat al-Na ź r al-Isl ā mi,” p. 9. Sourced from the official site of al-Shaykh ‘Abd Allah bin Bayyah: http://www. binbayyah.net/Pages/research/Projects/religenandstate.htm. 30. Upon whom be peace. 31. Al-Im ā m Shams al-D ī n Abū Bakr Muhammad al-Sarakhs ī, Kit āb al-Mab şūt (Beirut: D ā r al-Fikr, no date), vol. 5, chapter 10, the book of Siyar: 7, p. 1799. 32. Dr. Wahbah Zuhayli (b. 1932) is a Syrian jurist (Mujtahid) and graduate of Cairo’s al-Azhar University. Dr. Zuhayli now serves as the head of Damascus University’s College of Islamic Jurisprudence and Schools of Thought. 33. Al-Im ā m Al ī ibn Abī Ţā lib (599–661), the first male to embrace Isl ā m, Companion, cousin, and son-in-law to the Prophet (upon whom be peace) and fourth Caliph of Isl ā m. 34. ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Abbā s (618/19–687/88), Companion, cousin to the Prophet (upon whom be peace), and famous exegete of the Qur’ā n. 35. Rendition of the Qur’ā n, al-Mai’da: 95. 36. Rendition of the Qur’ā n, al-Nis ā’: 35. 37. Wahbah Zuhayli, Athar al- Ĥ arb f i al-Fiqh al-Isl ā mi, Dir ā sah Muq ā ranah or “Traditions of War in Islamic Jurisprudence, A Comparative Study” (Beirut: D ā r alFikr no date), pp. 763–764. Sourcing, al- Ĥ akim’s al-Mustadrak vol. 2, p. 150, ibn alQayyim’s I’l ā m al-Muwaqa’ ī n vol. 1, p. 213, ibn al-Jawzi’s Naqd al-’Ilm we al-’Ulem ā , p. 89, and see al-Usta ź Muhammad Sall ā m Madk ū rah’s al-Madkhal li al-Fiqh al-Isl ā mi, p. 390. 38. The Khaw ā rij (s. Kh ā riji) in Islamic theology are commonly known as the group that rebelled against al-Im ā m ‘Ali during his tenure as Caliph. They have been defined as:

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40.

41.

42.

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44.

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46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

Maajid Nawaz “those who revolt against the rightful leader (al-Im ā m al- Ĥaq) over whom the majority (al-Jam ā’ah) have consented, regardless of whether the rebellion (Khur ūj) occurred during the time of the Companions against the righteous leaders (al-A’immat al-Rashid ī n), or was after them against those who followed in excellence, or against the leaders in every time. The original rebellion harks back to the time of the Prophet (upon whom be peace), whereby certain hypocrites were not satisfied with his rulings, or that which he used to command and prohibit. Their leader was T ħu al-Khuwysarah al-Tam ī mi.” See al-Milal we al-Nahal al-Shahrast ā ni, vol. 1, pp. 18 and 155. Source: Zuhayli, Ath ā r al-Ĥ arb fi al-Fiqh al-Isl ā mi, Dir ā sah Muqā ranah, p. 762. This remained so until Ayatullah al-Khomeini developed the Wil āyat al-Faq ī h (Guardianship of Jurists) theory and took power in Iran. He argued that religious jurists themselves must guard political authority until the Mahdi (the rightly guided Im ā m) returns. Al-Im ā m Abu Ĥ amid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghaz ā li al-Sh ā fi’i (1058–1111), jurist, philosopher, and mystic, known as Algazel in the West. A Persian student of the famous Im ā m al-Haramayn al-Juwayni, and author of inf luential works such as “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” Tah ā fat al-Fal ā sah and “Revival of the Religious Sciences,” I Ĥyā’ ‘Ulū m al-D ī n. Abu Bakr ‘Abd al-Ra Ĥ m ā n ibn Kays ā n al-A ş amm (d. 816/18), a famous Mu’tazilite theologian, exegete, and jurist. See al-Baghd ādi’s Us ū l al-D ī n for a confirmation of al-A ş amm’s rejection of the need for authority. Al-Ghaz ā li is referring here to the Shi’ite position of the Imamate being of creedal importance. In modern times, however, Sunni Islamists have also adopted this mantra in an attempt to lend religious importance to their political mission. Sherman A. Jackson, On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Isl ā m, Studies in Islamic Philosophy Series (Oxford University Press, 2007) being a translation of al-Im ā m Abu Ĥ amid al-Ghaz ā li, Faysal al-Tafriqa Bayna al-Isl ā m we al-Zandiqah, p. 113 . Al-Shaykh Taqi ud-D ī n al-Nabh ā ni, “The Ruling System of Isl ā m,” by Ĥ izb ut-Ta Ĥ r ī r (al-Khil ā fah Publications,,London, no date), corresponding to the original Arabic, “Ni źā m al-Ĥukm fi il-Isl ā m” (D ā r al-Ûmmah), pp. 49–50. Al-Im ā m Abu al-Ĥ asan ‘Ali ibn Muhammad Ĥ abī b al-M āwā rdi (d. 1058), known in Latin as Alboacen, was a Sh ā fi’i judge and jurist based in Abbā sid, Baghdad. His most wellknown work is his book “The Ordinances of Governance and Religious Guardianships” or “al-A Ĥ k ā m al- Şulţā niyyah we al-Wil āyat al-D ī niyyah.” Multiple publishers in Arabic, e.g., Arabic al-A Ĥ k ā m al- Şul ţā niyyah we al-Wil āyat al-D ī niyyah (Beirut: D ā r al-Kutub al-’Arabi, 1990), no page reference. He is the same ibn Kays ā n al-A ş amm referred to in al-Ghaz ā li’s citation. Al-Im ā m Abū’l-Ĥ asan Al-M āwā rdi, A Ĥ k ā m al- Şulţā niyyah, The Laws of Islamic Governance (London: Tā h ā Publishers, 1996), p. 10, corresponding to the Arabic al-A Ĥ k ā m al- Şulţā niyyah we al-Wil āyat al-D ī niyyah (Beirut: D ā r al-Kutub al-’Arabi, 1990), p. 29. The Mu’tazilites were a school of medieval theology. They originated in eighth-century Basra, Iraq, when Wāşil ibn ‘A ţ a (d. 748) is said to have withdrawn from the lessons of al-Ĥ asan al-Ba şri after he disagreed over the issue of categorizing grave sinners as believers, preferring to say that they were between both belief and disbelief. Later, followers of this school called themselves “The People of Divine Unity and Justice” (Hal al-TawĤī d we al-’Adl) due to their zealous attempts to rationalize revelation. Al-Im ā m al-Ĥā fi ź ibn Hajr al-’Asqal ā ni,, Fat Ĥ al-B ā ri SharĤ ‘al ā Sah īĤ al-Bukh ā ri 13/208. See Article 35 of the Draft Constitution adopted by Ĥ izb ut-Ta Ĥ r ī r in The System of Isl ā m, Ni źā m al-Isl ā m (al-Khil ā fah Publications, London, no date) for the centralized nature of the Caliphs powers. Z. Baran, Ĥizb ut-Ta Ĥr ī r: Islam’s Political Insurgency, The War of Ideas (Washington, D.C.: The Nixon Center, 2000), pp. 13–14.

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52. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 2004), p. 363; emphasis added. 53. Ibid.; emphasis added. 54. The ideas expressed in this chapter are extracted from my forthcoming book entitled Islamism: The Last Man-Made Ideology.

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Sharing with Equals: Modernity, Fundamentalism, and the Future Kare n A rm strong

At the turn of the twentieth century, almost every single Muslim intellectual, with the notable exception of the Iranian activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897) who had witnessed the more negative effects of colonialism in India, was in love with the West and wanted their countries to emulate Britain and France. Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905), the Grand Mufti of Egypt, hated the British occupation of his country but was well-versed in European culture and felt quite at home with Europeans. After a visit to Paris, he made this famous and deliberately provocative statement. “In Paris I saw Islam but no Muslims; in Cairo I see Muslims but no Islam.” He meant that the modern Western economies produced conditions of justice and equity that came closer to the Quranic ideals than was possible in the unmodernized or partially modernized countries of the Islamic world. In 1906, leading Iranian mullahs campaigned alongside secular intellectuals for representative government, leading a revolution that forced the shah to accept their new constitution. Sadly, the Iranian parliament was not allowed to function freely: two years later the British discovered oil in Iran and had no intention of allowing the Iranians to interfere with their plans to use this oil to fuel the British navy. Nevertheless, most of the Iranian clergy continued to support the parliamentary ideal. In his Admonition to the Nation and Exposition to the People (1909) , Shaykh Muhammad Husain Naini (1850–1936) declared that the new constitution, which would limit the tyranny of the shahs, was the next best thing to the coming of the Hidden Imam, the Shiite Messiah who would inaugurate a rule of justice at the end of time.1 At this point, those Muslims who were able to experience the Western world first hand found it congenial and deeply in tune with their own

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traditions. They certainly did not recoil from the new ideals of liberty and democracy instinctively; in Iran, in particular, the mullahs were often in the vanguard of change and development. There was no inherent “clash of civilizations,” no “War of Ideas.” Ever since the time of the Crusades, Western people have cultivated a distorted image of Islam as an inherently violent faith that conquered only by the sword, but in fact Islam had a far better record of tolerance than Western Christianity. The Quran recognizes the validity of all the other major faiths, provided that they insist upon justice, equity, and practical compassion; all come from God. It insists that the Prophet Muhammad did not come to cancel out the messages of the other prophets—Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, or Jesus—but to bring their message to the Arabs, who had never had a scripture in their own language.2 It also commands Muslims to speak “in the most kindly manner” to the Jews and Christians, the “people of earlier revelation,” saying: “We believe in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon you: for our God and your God is one and the same.”3 Today some Muslim scholars argue that had the Arabs known about the Hindus and Buddhists or the Native Americans or Australian Aborigines, the Quran would have praised and endorsed their message too. It insists in the strongest terms that there must “be no coercion in matters of faith,”4 that everybody had his own din (way of life),5 and that it was not God’s will that all the people of the earth should belong to the same ummah (community).6 God was not the exclusive property of one tradition, but was the source of all human knowledge; the divine light could not be confined to a single faith or locality and was neither of the east nor the west.7 The Quran was, therefore, particularly suited to the realities of our plural world at a time when we are discovering the profound unanimity of the religious systems of humanity. Like the Jewish and Christian scriptures, it insists upon the importance of social justice; its bedrock message is that it is wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your wealth fairly and create a just and decent society where the poor and vulnerable are treated with respect. This also applied to women. The Quran gives women legal rights of inheritance and divorce that Western women would not receive until the nineteenth century. Like the New Testament, its overall message is positive for women, though later, as happened in the Christian world, men hijacked the faith and dragged it back to the old patriarchy. The Quran’s emphasis on equality made Muslim intellectuals enthusiastic about the modern democratic ideal. Like all the world’s religions, Islam traditionally supported monarchy, because that was the form of government best suited to a premodern economy, but there were principles in Islamic law that were essentially compatible with representative rule. Before passing new legislation, Islamic jurisprudence insists on the importance of shurah (“consultation” between the ruler and his subjects), ijmah (community “consensus”), maslahah (public “interest”), and

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ijtihad (“independent thinking,” the use of reason to reinterpret Islamic values to meet the needs of the day). The Quran also developed a just war ideology. It forbids aggressive warfare and the preemptive strike, and makes it clear that self defense was the only possible justification for hostilities.8 War was always a terrible evil, but it was sometimes necessary in order to preserve decent values, such as freedom of worship. Even here, the Quran did not abandon its pluralism: synagogues and churches as well as mosques should be protected.9 The Quran insists on the importance of mercy and forgiveness, even during armed conf lict.10 While engaged in hostilities, Muslims must fight steadfastly in order to bring the war to a speedy end, but the moment the enemy asked for peace, Muslims must lay down their arms.11 They must accept any truce, even if they suspect the enemy of double-dealing. And it is always better to sit down and solve a problem by rational, courteous discussion.12 True, retaliation was permitted as in the Jewish tradition—eye for eye, tooth for tooth—but it must be strictly confined to those who had actually perpetrated the atrocities and “he who shall forgo it out of charity will atone better for some of his past sins.”13 Later Islamic law developed additional principles of humane warfare. It forbids war against a country where Muslims are permitted to practice their religion freely; it outlaws the killing of civilians, the deliberate destruction of property, and the use of fire in warfare. Holy war was not one of the essential principles of Islam. The word jihad does not refer to armed conf lict but to the “effort” and “struggle” required to implement God’s will in a f lawed and violent world. Muslims are exhorted to strive in this endeavor on all fronts: intellectual, social, economic, spiritual, moral, and domestic. Sometimes they would have to fight, but this was not their chief duty. An oft-quoted tradition recalls Muhammad telling his companions after a battle: “We are returning from the Lesser Jihad (the battle) and going to the Greater Jihad,” the immeasurably more important and difficult struggle to reform their own society and their own hearts. It is true that Muslim rulers often engaged in wars for territorial aggrandizement and personal interest and dignified their military activities by calling it a jihad, but, like other kings and imperialists, they were motivated by political ambition rather than by religion. In the past, their religion had encouraged Muslims to embrace and absorb the shock of the new. They had always been able to adapt the mores and achievements of other civilizations creatively and use this to advance their own religious insights. This is the spirit that inspired the appreciation of Muslim intellectuals like Abdu for Western modernity. But as a result of the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, this early enthusiasm cooled and even soured. Like other peoples, some Muslims developed a defensive piety, popularly known as “fundamentalism.” In every region of the world where a modern, Western style society has been established that separates religion and politics, a countercultural religious movement has grown up alongside it in

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conscious reaction, so that fundamentalist movements have developed not only in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam but also in Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Confucianism. What is it about modernity that has caused such widespread disappointment and dismay?

The Disappointment of Modernity During the sixteenth century, the peoples of Western Europe had started to develop a new kind of civilization, with an entirely different economy. Unlike all previous societies, which depended upon a surplus of agricultural produce that enabled them to fund their cultural enterprises, the economy of the modern West would be based on the technological replication of resources and the constant reinvestment of capital. This freed Europeans and Americans from the constraints of agrarian civilizations. No society before our own could afford the ceaseless replication of the infrastructure that we now take for granted. In all premodern civilizations—including those of the West—original thought was not encouraged, not because of an atavistic timidity but because a project that required massive funding and disruption would probably be shelved. This would lead to social unrest and it was thought more important to preserve what had already been achieved than to risk political instability. Many of the ideals that we now regard as sacred to the Western identity, such as democracy, free speech, toleration, and secularization, were the result rather than the cause of modernization and industrialization. More and more people, for example, had to be brought into the production process, even at a humble level—as clerks, printers, or factory workers—and that meant they had to receive a modicum of education. Once educated, they inevitably demanded a share in the decisions of government. It was found that those countries that did not democratize fell behind in the march of progress. Again, in order to utilize all their human resources, governments found it necessary to bring out-groups, such as the Jews in Europe, into the mainstream, though the events of the 1930s and 1940s showed that this toleration was superficial and that the old bigotry remained under the surface. Modernization in Europe and the United States was a long traumatic process that did not come into fruition until the nineteenth century. It was attended by bloody revolutions (as nations implemented more democratic modes of government), reigns of terror and dictatorships, wars of religion, the despoliation of the countryside, and the alienation and exploitation of workers in the industrializing cities. But at least the peoples of the West were able to modernize according to their own program: not somebody else’s. The modern state had two essential characteristics and without these qualities, however many computers, fighter jets, or skyscrapers a nation might have, it would not have the modern spirit. The first of these characteristics

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was independence—modernization had proceeded by declarations of independence on all fronts: religious (as Luther declared independence of the Roman Church), political (the American Declaration of Independence was a typical modernizing document), and intellectual (as scientists, inventors, and philosophers demanded the right to develop their new ideas without the supervision of the ecclesiastical hierarchy). The second was innovation. However disturbing the process, it was also dynamic and exciting. Western people were always discovering something new, inventing something fresh, pitting themselves against unprecedented problems, and coming up with wholly novel solutions. In the Muslim world, however, the modern economy did not come with independence but with colonial subjugation. Colonialism actually impeded modernization: those countries that were not subjected to foreign domination, such as Japan, were able to create their own distinctive version of modernity different from the former Western colonies. Further, because the West was so far ahead, the Muslim world could not innovate but only emulate. So the modern spirit in the Muslim world was characterized by dependence rather than independence and imitation rather than innovation. We can compare modernization to baking a cake. If you do not have the correct ingredients or a proper oven, you are unlikely to produce the f luffy cake featured in the cook book; the result could be very nasty indeed. Moreover, the Muslim countries did not have three hundred years to modernize at their own speed. They had to complete the entire process in a mere fifty years or so. As a result, much of the mainstream population, who had not had the benefit of a Western education and did not understand the massive changes taking place in their country, became alienated from a small Westernized elite, who were themselves emotionally and intellectually torn between two different cultural traditions. And because modernization was far too accelerated in the Muslim world, it was often experienced as an assault. When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938) secularized Turkey, he closed down all the madrassas, abolished the Sufi orders, and forced all men and women to wear Western clothes. These rulers wanted their countries to look modern, even though most people felt that they were being forced into fancy dress. In Iran, the shah’s soldiers used to parade through the streets, tearing off the women’s veils with their bayonets and ripping them to pieces. In 1935, Shah Reza Khan Pahlavi (1877–1944) ordered his troops to shoot at a crowd of unarmed demonstrators in the holy shrine of Mashhad who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress; hundreds of Iranians were killed that day. In such circumstances, secularization is not experienced as liberating but as a lethal assault upon religion. Muslims are not alone in this. Every single “fundamentalist” movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation; each begins with what is perceived to be an assault by secularists or modernizers and is convinced that the liberal or secular

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establishment is determined to wipe out religion.14 The rapidity of secularization in the Muslim world has made this fear and suspicion especially acute. We see this in the career of Muhammad Ali (1769–1849), an Albanian officer in the Ottoman army, who single-handedly dragged the backward province of Egypt into the modern world in a mere forty years. But he could only achieve this remarkable feat by the most ruthless methods. His method of secularizing Egypt consisted of systematically marginalizing the clergy (the ulama), deposing those sheikhs who defied him, seizing their revenues, and divesting the clergy of any shred of political power. In the face of this onslaught, the Egyptian ulama became cowed and reactionary. Because opposition was impossible, they turned their backs on change, and entrenched themselves in their scholarly traditions. They did not regard modernity as an intellectual challenge, but experienced it instead as a series of odious and destructive regulations, as a theft of their power and wealth, and as an agonizing loss of prestige and inf luence.15 While the Iranian mullahs were frequently in the vanguard of change, the Egyptian clergy would long resist any attempt to force them into the modern world. Even Muhammad Abdu could make little headway with them. Consequently Egyptians got no guidance from their clergy when they came into contact with Western ideas, and for many, secularization remained alien, foreign, and incomprehensible. Because these movements fear annihilation and diminishment, any further assault renders them more extreme. During the 1950s, President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970), president of Egypt, imprisoned thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood without trial, many of whom had done nothing more incriminating than attending meetings or handing out leaf lets. One of them was Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), a nationalist, scholar of English literature, and devoutly religious man, who was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor and witnessed first hand the brutality of Nasser’s concentration camps, where inmates were routinely subjected to physical and mental torture. In prison Qutb became a fundamentalist. When he heard Nasser vowing to privatize Islam on the Western model, secularism did not seem benign but evil. Muslims, he insisted, had a duty to defy the aggressive barbarism ( jahiliyyah) of their day by fighting so-called Muslim leaders like Nasser. Qutb’s ideology is still followed by Islamists today.16 In making jihad, meaning armed conf lict, central to his vision, Qutb was distorting the tradition he was trying to defend. This is a common feature of fundamentalism in every tradition. Qutb had been inf luenced by the Pakistani ideologue Abu Ala Mawdudi (1903–1979), who feared the effects of Western imperialism in the Muslim world and was convinced that in order to survive Muslims must be prepared for revolutionary struggle. The jihad could take many forms—intellectual, educational, and political—but as the last resort every able-bodied Muslim must be prepared for war. Mawdudi knew that this was a controversial interpretation of the traditional teaching on jihad, but argued that it was justified by the political emergency. Both

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Qutb and Mawdudi were preaching an Islamic liberation theology, similar to that adopted by Catholics fighting brutal regimes in Latin America during the 1960s. Because God alone was sovereign, no Muslim was obliged to obey any secular power that contravened the Quranic requirement of justice and equity. In rather the same way, in his opposition to the dictatorial Pahlavi monarchy, the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) preached a modern, third-world theology of liberation: Islam was “the religion of militant individuals who are committed to freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism.”17 Fundamentalisms are neither traditional nor orthodox movements. Be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh, these are radically innovative ideologies that could have taken root in no time other than our own. Far from representing the mainstream, these movements are essentially unorthodox. Qutb and Mawdudi were well aware that they were defying tradition, and Khomeini’s theory that a cleric should be head of state was shocking to the sensibilities of Shiite Islam, which had separated religion and politics as a matter of sacred principle since the eighth century. When people feel that their backs are to the wall, they can become aggressive. This is how we should understand the militant strain that has developed in Islam in modern times. Muslims have felt profoundly under attack by their own rulers and by foreign powers. To be sure, Muslim activists cite scripture to justify atrocities. But Western people must be aware that there is far more violence in both the Jewish scriptures and the New Testament than in the Quran. When extremists use scripture in support of criminal or belligerent activities, they do so selectively— carefully ignoring those texts that preach the importance of forgiveness and compassion. Christian fundamentalists frequently cite the aggressive Book of Revelation but rarely quote the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his followers to love their enemies, to turn the other cheek when attacked, and to refrain from judging others. When Osama bin Laden cites Quranic passages that urge Muslims to fight steadfastly in battle, he fails to mention the fact that these texts are in nearly every case immediately followed by equally strong directives to forgiveness and the cessation of hostilities.

Improving Understanding and Relations People in the West urgently need to become aware of Muslim history as well as their own. They should recall that far from always being in the vanguard of change, the West had its own difficult transition to modernity. When they witness the revolutions, sectarian strife, dictatorships, and social disruption that they deplore in the Muslim world, they should remember that Europe went through a similar bloody rite of passage during the sixteenth, seventeenth,

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and eighteenth centuries. They should realize that every culture has extremists and fundamentalists who in no way represent the mainstream. All too often Islam is depicted in the media, in politics, and in popular discourse as inherently violent and atavistically opposed to modernity. But even a cursory familiarity with Muslim history and tradition shows that this assumption is at variance with the facts. It is also dangerous for our security. Bin Laden has certainly been inf luenced by Qutb but he is an ideologue of a very different hue. He is less motivated by religion than by politics. The American scholar Robert Pape has made a careful study of suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004, including the al Qaeda atrocities of 9/11. He concludes: Overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka, to Chechnya to Kashmir, to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign— more than 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its major objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.18 Bin Laden, for example, cited the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land high on his list of complaints against the West. In a recent Gallup poll, only 7 percent of the Muslims interviewed in thirty-five countries believed that the 9/11 attacks were justified by Western foreign policy. They referred to ongoing problems such as Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Western interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries but they did not attempt to find a religious validation for these actions. The majority, who condemned the attacks, however, all gave religious reasons for doing so, quoting, for example, the Quranic verse that states that the taking of a single life is equivalent to the destruction of the entire world.19 The same pattern was evident in the suicide videos of the terrorists who attacked London on July 7, 2005, adding to their list of complaints the occupation of Iraq by British and American troops. Western politicians have sometimes maintained that Muslims hate our way of life: our freedom, democracy, and success. But the Gallup poll shows otherwise, finding that politically radicalized as well as moderately inclined Muslims admired Western technology, the Western work ethic, rule of law, and its political systems, including Western democracy, respect for human rights, freedom of speech, and gender equality. And a higher percentage of the politically radicalized (50 percent versus 35 percent of moderates) was convinced that “moving toward greater governmental democracy would foster progress in the Arab Muslim world.”20 Finally, when asked what they resented most about the West, its “disrespect for Islam” ranked high on the list

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of both radicals and moderates. What could Muslims do to improve relations in the West? Again, both radicals and moderates replied: “improve the presentation of Islam to the West, present Islamic values in a positive manner.”21 And what could Westerners do? In the words of a woman student of engineering in the University of Jordan: “The West must be willing to accept the true picture of Islam and not hold on to the negative picture that serves terrorists.”22 By nurturing a distorted view of Islam as an inherently cruel and violent faith, Western people are playing directly into the hands of extremists, who can argue that the West is incurably Islamophobic and bent on conducting a new crusade.

Sharing with Equals It is poignant these days to recall the early Muslim enthusiasm for Western modernity. After World War I, the European allies dismembered the Ottoman Empire, which had fought on the side of Germany, ignored pledges they had given to grant Arabs independence, and set up mandates and protectorates in the old Ottoman provinces. In 1922, Egypt was granted a measure of independence but Britain retained control of foreign policy and defense. Between 1923 and 1930, the popular Wafd party, which demanded the withdrawal of the British, won three large electoral victories but each time it was forced to resign under pressure from the British.23 There was an obvious double standard. The new democratic structures were only cosmetic and this dependence would not help Egyptians to develop the autonomy that was essential to the modern spirit. Democracy increasingly seemed a bad joke. Western support of dictatorial rulers in Muslim countries to secure a strategic position or a supply of cheap oil, the plight of the Palestinians, and the disreputable Suez Crisis of 1956 all contributed to a widespread distrust of the West. The position of the United States, which had not been involved in the colonial project, is particularly sad. In Iran before World War II, the Americans routinely berated the British for rigging the Iranian elections. After the Suez Crisis, the portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had forced Britain, France, and Israel to abandon their invasion of Egypt, was carried in triumph through the streets of Cairo alongside Nasser’s. After the demise of the colonial powers, there could have been a new chapter in Islamic/Western relations, but that, alas, was not to be. At the time of the Suez Crisis, the Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote that a healthy and functioning Islam was crucial because it had helped Muslim people to cultivate values and ideals that we in the West also share, because they spring from a common tradition. Their political travails during the twentieth century have led some ideologues to develop a fundamentalist, defensive strain that has distorted the Islamic tradition. But it is essential that Western people recognize that the extremism they deplore is

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also condemned by the majority of Muslims. The West also bears a measure of responsibility for the current tension. As Cantwell Smith pointed out in 1956, unless the Muslim learned to accept the West as a fact of life, it would fail the test of the twentieth century. But, he added, the West also had a problem. The “fundamental weakness” of both Western civilization and Christianity in the modern world is their inability to recognize that they share the planet not with inferiors but with equals. Unless Western civilization intellectually, socially, politically and economically, and the Christian church theologically, can learn to treat other men with fundamental respect, these two in their turn will have failed to come to terms with the actualities of the twentieth century.24 Unless we all—Muslims and Westerners alike—learn to do better, it is unlikely that we will have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.

Notes 1. Hamid Algar, “The Oppositional Role of the Ulama in Twentieth Century Iran,” in Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Scholars, Saints and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East Since 1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 238–240; Azar Tabari, “The Role of the Clergy in Modern Iranian Politics,” in Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Religion and Politics in Iran: Shiism from Quietism to Revolution (New Haven: CT: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 58–59. 2. Quran 3:84; 2:136; 12:111; 5:69. Quotations from the Quran are taken from The Message of the Quran, trans. Muhammad Asad (Gibraltar, 1980). 3. Ibid., 29:46. 4. Quran 2:256 5. Ibid., 109. 6. Ibid., 5:48. 7. Ibid., 24:35. 8. Ibid., 2:190. 9. Ibid., 22:36–40. 10. Ibid., 3:147–148; 8:16–17; 61:5. 11. Ibid., 2:193–194. 12. Ibid., 8:62–63. 13. Ibid., 5:45. 14. I have described the fundamentalist phenomenon in The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (New York and London, 2000). 15. Araf Lufti al-Sayyid Marsot, “The Role of the Ulama in Egypt During the Early Nineteenth Century,” in P.M. Holt, ed., Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt: Historical Studies from the Ottoman Conquest to the United Arab Republic (London, 1968), pp. 278–279; Daniel Crecelius, “Non-Ideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulama to Modernization” in Keddie, Scholars, Saints and Sufis, pp. 180–189. 16. Yvonne Hadad, “Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival,” in John L. Esposito, ed., Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York and Oxford, 1970).

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17. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), p. 28. 18. Interview with Scott McConnell, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” The American Conservative, July 18, 2005; John L. Esposito and Dahlia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims really Think (New York, 2007), p. 77. 19. Quran 5:32. 20. Esposito and Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?, p. 80. 21. Ibid., pp. 86–87. 22. Ibid., p. 87. 23. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols (Chicago and London, 1974), III, p. 171. 24. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam and Modern History (Princeton and London, 1957), p. 305.

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Taqiyya: War and Deceit in Islam R aymond I brah im

Today, at a time of wars and rumors of wars emanating from the Islamic world—from the perpetual Arab-Israeli conf lict, to the saber-rattling of nuclear-armed Pakistan and soon-to-be Iran, to the myriad and unnamed jihadis who daily promise “infidels” death and destruction—the need for non-Muslims to better understand Islam’s doctrines and objectives concerning war and peace, and everything in between (e.g., treaties) has become pressing. For instance, what does one make of the fact that, after openly and vociferously making it clear time and time again that its ultimate aspiration is to see Israel annihilated, an Islamist organization like Hamas also pursues “peace treaties,” insisting on various forms of concessions from Israel—and receives them? Moreover, even if the “true” nature of Islam were peaceful, that would not change the fact that some Muslims will assume, and therefore act upon the notion, that Islam does preach jihadi violence. In other words, many apologists for Islam concede that the “radical” interpretation is still that, an interpretation, albeit a f lawed one, that “hijacks” the true Islam. And since that is the case, since “radical Islam,” whether the true face of Islam or not, is still nonetheless a viable alternative for some, the West must conclude that it will have violent jihadist enemies for the foreseeable future. Before being in a position to assess the policy ramifications of such issues, one must first appreciate the thoroughly legalistic nature of mainstream Islam.1 For all the talk that Islam is constantly being “misunderstood” or “misinterpreted” by “radicals,” the fact is, relative to most other religions, Islam is a clearly defined faith admitting of little ambiguity: indeed, according to shariah (i.e., “Islam’s way of life,” more commonly translated as “Islamic law”), every conceivable human act is categorized as either forbidden, discouraged, permissible, recommended, or obligatory. “Common sense” and “universal opinion” are of little relevance to Islam’s notions of right and wrong.2

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All that matters is what Allah (via the Quran) and his prophet Muhammad (through the hadith) said about a subject, and how Islam’s greatest theologians and jurists—collectively known as the ulema (the “ones who know”)—have articulated it. Consider the concept of deceit. According to shariah, deception is not only permitted in certain situations but is deemed obligatory. Contrary to early Christian tradition, for instance, Muslims who were forced to choose between recanting Islam or suffering persecution were—and still are—permitted to lie by feigning apostasy. Other jurists have decreed that, according to Quranic verses forbidding Muslims from being instrumental in their own deaths,3 Muslims are obligated to lie in order to preserve themselves.4

The Doctrine of Taqiyya This is the classic definition of the doctrine of taqiyya. Based on an Arabic word denoting “fear,” taqiyya has long been understood, especially by Western academics, as “religious dissimulation” to be resorted to in times of religious persecution, almost exclusively by minority Shi’i groups living among hostile Sunni majorities, wherein the Shi’a constantly dissemble their religious affiliation vis-à-vis the latter. However, a closer examination of the doctrinal justifications of taqiyya reveals a much broader application. Taqiyya’s ubiquity is well demonstrated by the opening words of one of the few authoritative books devoted to the subject, Al-Taqiyya fi’l Islam, written by Professor Sami Mukaram. Taqiyya [“religious dissimulation”] is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it . . . We can go so far as to say that the practice of taqiyya is mainstream in Islam, and that those few sects not practicing it diverge from the mainstream . . . Taqiyya is very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era.5 Thus just as taqiyya is not limited to self-preservation (as will be delineated later on), so too is it not an exclusively Shi’i phenomenon. Of course, as a minority group often interspersed among a Sunni majority, Shi’a have historically had more reason to dissemble. Due to centuries of this, taqiyya has become “a pattern of behavior permitted by Iranian mores. In Iran it is accordingly not merely a religious principle among the Shi’ites, but it is also a social institution.”6 Revered Shi’i imam Ja’far as-Sadiq is on record as saying, “He is most excellent in the performance of his religious duties in the eyes of Allah who is best at observing taqiyya.” 7 Unlike the Shi’a, the Sunnis have historically had little reason to dissemble. From the start, Sunni Islam, under the “righteous caliphs,” burst out of Arabia subjugating much of southwest Asia, all of north Africa, and parts of Europe,

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and, throughout the Middle Ages, threatened to engulf all of Christendom. In a world where might made right, the Sunnis had little to apologize for, and much less to hide from the despised infidel. Ironically, Sunnis living in the West today find themselves in the Shi’a’s place: Now they are a minority surrounded by their traditional enemies—Christian “infidels”—even if the latter rarely act on, let alone acknowledge, this historic enmity. In short, Sunnis are currently experiencing the general circumstances that made taqiyya integral to Shi’ism.

The Articulation of Taqiyya Quranic verse 3:28 is often seen as the primary verse sanctioning deception vis-à-vis non-Muslims: “Let believers [Muslims] not take for friends and allies infidels [non-Muslims] instead of believers. Whoever does this shall have no relationship left with Allah—unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions.”8 Al-Tabari’s (d. 923) famous tafsir (exegesis of the Quran) is a standard and authoritative reference work throughout the entire Muslim world. Regarding 3:28, he writes: If you [Muslims] are under their [infidels’] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them, with your tongue, while harboring inner animosity for them . . . Allah has forbidden believers from being friendly or on intimate terms with the infidels in place of believers—except when infidels are above them [in authority]. In such a scenario, let them act friendly towards them while preserving their religion.9 Regarding Quran 3:28, Ibn Kathir (d. 1373, another prime authority) writes, “Whoever at any time or place fears their [infidels’] evil may protect himself through outward show.” As proof of this, he quotes Muhammad’s close companion Abu Darda, who said, “Let us grin to the face of some people [non-Muslims] while our hearts curse them”; another companion, al-Hassan, said, “Doing taqiyya is acceptable till the Day of Judgment [i.e., in perpetuity].”10 Other prominent ulema, such as al-Qurtubi (1214–1273), al-Razi (865–925), and al-Arabi (1165–1240), have extended taqiyya to cover deeds. In other words, if deemed necessary Muslims can behave like infidels—including by bowing down and worshiping idols and crosses, offering false testimony, even exposing fellow Muslims’ weaknesses to the infidel enemy—anything short of actually killing a Muslim: “Taqiyya, even if committed without duress, does not lead to a state of infidelity—even if it leads to sin deserving of hell-fire.”11 Is this why the Muslim American and U.S. Army sergeant Hasan Akbar attacked and killed his fellow service members in Iraq in 2003? Had his sense of ultimate allegiance finally come up against a wall when he realized Muslims

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might die at his hands? He had written in his diary: “I may not have killed any Muslims, but being in the army is the same thing. I may have to make a choice very soon on who to kill.”12

War is Deceit The earliest historical records of Islam (e.g., the Sira) further attest to taqiyya’s prevalence. Muslims are often depicted as lying their way out of predicaments— usually by denying or insulting Islam and/or Muhammad—even with the approval of the latter, his only criterion being whether their intentions (niyya) were pure.13 During the long wars with Christians, whenever the Christians were dominant, the practice of taqiyya became even more integral: “Taqiyya was used as a way to fend off danger from the Christians, especially in critical times and when Muslim borders were exposed to wars with the Byzantines and, afterwards, to the raids of the Franks and others.”14 None of this is surprising considering that Muhammad himself—whose example as the “most perfect human” is to be tenaciously followed—took an expedient view on lying. It is well known, for instance, that Muhammad permitted lying in three situations: to reconcile two or more quarreling parties, to one’s wife, and in war.15 According to one Arabic legal manual devoted to jihad as defined by the four schools of law, “The ulema agree that deception during warfare is legitimate . . . deception is a form of art in war.”16 Moreover, according to Mukaram, this deception is a form of taqiyya: “Taqiyya in order to dupe the enemy is permissible.”17 Several ulema attest to deceit’s integral nature to war: Ibn al-Arabi declares that “in the hadith, practicing deceit in war is well demonstrated. Indeed, its need is more stressed than the need for courage.” Ibn al-Munir writes “War is deceit, i.e., the most complete and perfect war waged by a mujahid is a war of deception, not confrontation, due to the latter’s inherent danger, and the fact that one can attain victory through treachery without harm [to oneself ].” And Ibn Hajar counsels Muslims “to take great caution in war, while [publicly] lamenting and mourning in order to dupe the infidels.”18 This ingrained Muslim notion that war is deceit traces back to the Battle of the Trench (627), which pitted Muhammad and his followers against several non-Muslim tribes known as “the Confederates.” One of these Confederates, Na’im ibn Mas’ud, went to the Muslim camp and converted to Islam. When Muhammad discovered that the Confederates were unaware of their co-tribalist’s conversion, he counseled Mas’ud to return and try to get the Confederates to abandon the siege. It was then that Muhammad memorably declared, “For war is deceit.” Mas’ud returned to the Confederates without their knowing that he had switched sides and began to intentionally give his former kin and allies bad advice. He also went to great lengths to instigate quarrels between the various tribes until, thoroughly distrusting each other,

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they disbanded, lifted the siege from the Muslims, and may have saved Islam from destruction in its embryonic stage.19 More demonstrative of the legitimacy of deception toward infidels is the following anecdote. A poet, Ka’b bin Ashraf, offended Muhammad, prompting the latter to exclaim: “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his prophet?” A young Muslim named Muhammad ibn Maslama volunteered but only with the caveat that, in order to get close enough to Ka’b to assassinate him, he be allowed to lie to the poet. Muhammad agreed. Maslama traveled to Ka’b and began to denigrate Islam and Muhammad. He carried on this way till his disaffection became convincing enough that Ka’b took him into his confidences. Soon thereafter, Maslama appeared with another Muslim and, while Ka’b’s guard was down, assaulted and killed him.20 Additional statements from Muhammad that cast deception in a positive light include: “Allah has commanded me to dissemble [mudawara] to the people just as he has commanded me to establish [religious] obligations”; “I have been sent with dissimulation [mudawara]”; and “whoever lives his life in evasion [mudawara] dies a martyr.”21

Taqiyya in Quranic Revelation It also bears mentioning that the entire sequence of Quranic revelations is something of a testimony to taqiyya; and since Allah is believed to be the revealer of these verses, he ultimately is seen as the perpetrator of deceit— which is not surprising since Allah himself is described in the Quran as the best makar, that is, “deceiver” or “schemer” (e.g., 3:54, 8:30, 10:21).22 This phenomenon revolves around the fact that the Quran contains both peaceful and tolerant verses, as well as violent and intolerant ones. The ulema were baff led as to which verses to codify into shariah’s worldview—the one, for instance, that states there is no coercion in religion (2:256), or the ones that command believers to fight all non-Muslims till the latter convert, or at least submit, to Islam (8:39, 9:5, 9:29)? To resolve this quandary, the ulema developed the doctrine of abrogation (naskh, supported by Quran 2:106), which essentially maintains that verses “revealed” later in Muhammad’s life take precedence over the earlier ones, whenever there is a discrepancy. But why the contradiction in the first place? The standard view has been that, since in the early years of Islam, Muhammad and his community were far outnumbered by their infidel competitors, a message of peace and coexistence was in order. However, after the Muslims migrated to Medina and grew in military strength and numbers, verses inciting them to go on the offensive were slowly “revealed,” always commensurate with Islam’s growing capabilities. In juridical texts, these are categorized in stages: passivity vis-àvis aggression; permission to fight back against aggressors; commands to fight aggressors; commands to fight all non-Muslims, whether the latter begin

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aggressions or not. Growing Muslim might is the only variable explaining this progressive change in policy. Thus the peaceful Meccan verses “To you your religion, and to me my religion”24 appear to have limited application by virtue of the fact that once Muhammad and his followers were in a position of authority, highly militant verses were issued demanding warfare and the subjugation of non-Muslims. Other ulema argue that the Quran was revealed piecemeal—from passive and spiritual verses to draconian legalism with a premium on conquest—simply to gradually acclimate the first Muslims to the duties of Islam, lest they be discouraged from the outset by the dramatic obligations of the later verses. 25 Verses revealed toward the end of Muhammad’s life—such as “Warfare is prescribed for you though you hate it”26 —may be indicative of this. However interpreted, the standard view on Quranic abrogation concerning war and peace verses is that when Muslims are weak and in a minority position, they should preach and behave according to the Meccan verses (peace and tolerance); when strong, they should go on the offensive, according to the Medinan verses (war and conquest). The vicissitudes of Islamic history are a testimony to this dichotomy, best captured by the popular Muslim notion, based on a hadith, that, if possible, jihad should be performed by the hand (force), if not, then the tongue (propaganda), and if that is not possible, then with the heart, or one’s intentions (niyya).27

War is Eternal That Islam legitimizes deceit during war is of course not all that astonishing; after all, as the Elizabethan writer John Lyly first put it, “All’s fair in love and war.” Other non-Muslim philosophers and strategists—such as Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes—justified deceit in warfare. Deception against the enemy during war is only common sense. The crucial difference in Islam, however, is that war against the infidel is a perpetual affair—until, in the words of the Quran, “all chaos ceases, and all religion belongs to Allah.”28 In his entry on jihad from the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Emile Tyan succinctly states: The duty of the jihad exists as long as the universal domination of Islam has not been attained. Peace with non-Muslim nations is, therefore, a provisional state of affairs only; the chance of circumstances alone can justify it temporarily. Furthermore there can be no question of genuine peace treaties with these nations; only truces, whose duration ought not, in principle, to exceed ten years, are authorized. But even such truces are precarious, inasmuch as they can, before they expire, be repudiated unilaterally should it appear more profitable for Islam to resume the conf lict.

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Moreover, going back to the doctrine of abrogation, the vast majority of the ulema agree that Quran 9:5, famously known as ayat al-saif—the “sword verse”—has abrogated some 124 of the more peaceful Meccan verses.29 Thus, all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence agree that “jihad is when Muslims wage war on infidels, after having called on them to embrace Islam or at least pay tribute [ jizya] and live in submission, and the infidels refuse.”30 Obligatory jihad is best expressed by Islam’s dichotomized worldview that pits Dar al-Islam (the “realm of submission,” i.e., the Islamic world, or, more specifically, the world where shariah governs) against Dar al-Harb (the “realm of war,” i.e., the non-Islamic world) until the former subsumes the latter. Internationally renowned Muslim historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406 AD) articulates this division thusly: In the Muslim community, holy war [ jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. The other religious groups [specifically Christianity and Judaism] did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense . . . But Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.31

Treaties and Truces The perpetual nature of the jihad is highlighted by the fact that, based on the ten-year treaty of Hudaibiya (628), ratified between Muhammad and his Quraish opponents in Mecca, most jurists are agreed that ten years is the maximum amount of time Muslims can be at peace with infidels; once the treaty has expired, the situation needs to be reappraised. Based on Muhammad’s example of breaking the treaty after two years (by claiming a Quraish infraction), the sole function of the truce (or hudna)32 is to buy weakened Muslims time to regroup before renewing the offensive: “By their very nature, treaties must be of temporary duration, for in Muslim legal theory the normal relations between Muslim and non-Muslim territories are not peaceful, but warlike.”33 Hence “The fuqaha [ jurists] are agreed that open-ended truces are illegitimate if Muslims have the strength to renew the war against them [non-Muslims].”34 Even though the shariah mandates Muslims to abide by treaties, they have a way out, one obviously open to manipulation: if they believe—even without solid evidence—that their opponents may break the treaty, Muslims can preempt them by breaking it first. Moreover, some schools of law, such as the Hanafi, assert that Muslim leaders may abrogate treaties merely if it seems advantageous for Islam to do so.35 This is reminiscent of the following canonical hadith or saying by Muhammad: “If you ever take an oath to do something and later on you find that something else is better, then you should expiate

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your oath and do what is better.”36 And what is better than making Allah’s word supreme by launching the jihad anew whenever possible? That the sole purpose of peace treaties is to give Muslims time to strengthen their forces even has an etymological pedigree: The term denoting “advantage” (maslaha) is derived from the same root (s-l-h) that forms the word for “reconciliation” (sulh). The prerequisite for peace or reconciliation is therefore Muslim advantage. An authoritative Sunni legal text, al-Misri’s Umdat as-Salik, agrees: “There must be some interest [maslaha] served in making a truce other than the status quo: ‘So do not be fainthearted and call for peace, when it is you who are uppermost [Quran 47:35].’ ”37 One even finds curious anecdotes in the historical record that point to a Muslim proclivity for breaking treaties when advantageous: In Jean de Joinville’s chronicle of the Fourth Crusade, for example, there is a section titled “the Saracens refuse to be bound by truce.”38 In it, de Joinville recounts how, after a truce was agreed upon between the Muslims and Christians, when the former gained an unexpected advantage, their emir immediately abrogated the truce and went on the offensive. (The fact that Joinville’s chronicle does not appear to be biased against Muslims—as he also condemns Christians and praises Muslims—adds to its credibility.) More recently, and of great significance for Western leaders advocating cooperation with Islamists, the late Yasser Arafat, soon after negotiating a peace treaty criticized as conceding too much to Israel, addressed an assembly of Muslims in a mosque, where he justified his actions by saying, “I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraish in Mecca.”39 In other words, like Muhammad, the “moderate” Arafat gave his word only to annul it once, in the words of his Prophet, “something else better” came along—that is, once the Palestinians became strong enough to renew the offensive. Late last year, a new Islamic group associated with Hamas called Jaysh al-Umma (The Army of the Muslim Nation) stated clearly, “Muslims all over the world are obliged to fight the Israelis and the infidels until only Islam rules the earth.” Perhaps realizing their slip, they quickly clarified their position: “We say that the world will not live in peace as long as the blood of Muslims continues to be shed.”40 Which is it: until Muslim blood stops being shed in “Palestine” or “until only Islam rules the earth”? These are all clear instances of Islamists feigning openness to the idea of peace simply in order to buy more time to build up their strength, for “Islam’s ultimate mission, namely, the supremacy of Allah’s word over this world, is carried out by the jihad.”41

Philosophical Observations All of the earlier mentioned facts lead to the following critical question: If Islam must be in a constant state of war with the non-Muslim world—which need

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not be physical, as the ulema have classified several nonviolent forms of jihad, such as “jihad-of-the-pen” (propaganda) and “money-jihad” (economic)— and if Muslims waging this kind of warfare are permitted to lie and feign loyalty, amiability, even affection to the infidel, simply to further their war efforts—what does one make of any Muslim overtures of peace, tolerance, or dialogue to the non-Muslim world? This is not a new question and appears to have been on the mind of early legal philosophers, such as the Scottish professor of law James Lorimer (1818–1890), who wrote: “So long as Islam endures, the reconciliation of its adherents, even with Jews and Christians, and still more with the rest of mankind, must continue to be an insoluble problem . . . For an indefinite future, however reluctantly, we must confine our political recognition to the professors of those religions which . . . preach the doctrine of ‘live and let live.’ ”42 Such pessimism is borne out by the fact that every time Muslim nations have “reached out” for peace, it has always been when they have been in a weakened condition vis-à-vis infidels—that is, when they, more than their non-Muslim competitors, benefit from peace. This is the lesson of the last two centuries of Muslim-Western interaction, wherein the former have been militarily inferior and thus beholden to the latter. One wonders if the reverse would hold true. If, for example, the Palestinians suddenly became stronger than Israel and could annihilate it, and if Israel reached out for peace or concessions—would the Palestinians grant it? The answer to this question is evident in all those countries where non-Muslim groups live as minorities among Muslim majorities. While living in constant social subjugation (according to Quran 9:29), they are also sporadically persecuted and killed—such as a congregation of Coptic Christians who, in November 2008, assembled for prayer in Cairo’s Church of St. Mary and Anba Abraam, only to find twenty thousand rioting Muslims surrounding them, screaming “Allahu Akbar” while throwing stones at them.43 Yet one may ask: If Muslims must always wage war, why have there been long periods of relative peace between Muslims and non-Muslims? The problem with this otherwise plausible objection is that most Westerners have a limited understanding of history, and tend to focus on the modern era, when, if anything, Westerners have played a more aggressive role—from Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798, to the colonial era, to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Yet this overlooks the fact that, in the last couple centuries, the Islamic world has simply been incapable of going on the offensive, whether it wanted to or not. Therefore, Westerners tend to assume that Muslims do not want to go on the offensive, but rather live in peace with their non-Muslim neighbors—a purely Western, secular worldview. History demonstrates otherwise: whenever and wherever Muslims have been demonstrably stronger than their non-Muslim neighbors, they have always gone on the offensive. Finally, it should be understood that to jihadis, “radicals,” and the like, waging expansionist jihads is deemed an “altruistic” endeavor, not at all hostile or unjust. The logic is that the world, whether under democracy,

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socialism, communism, or any other system of governance, is inevitably living in bondage—a great sin, since humans must be enslaved to Allah alone, not other humans. In this context, Muslim deception can be viewed as a slightly less than noble means to a glorious end—Islamic hegemony under shariah rule, which is seen as good for both Muslims and non-Muslims.44 This view has an ancient pedigree: Soon after the death of Muhammad (634), as the jihad expanded beyond the peninsula, a soon to be conquered Persian commander asked the invading Muslims what they wanted. They memorably replied as follows: Allah has sent us and brought us here so that we may free those who desire from servitude to earthly rulers and make them servants of Allah, that we may change their poverty into wealth and free them from the tyranny and chaos of [false] religions and bring them to the justice of Islam. He has sent us to bring his religion to all his creatures and call them to Islam. Whoever accepts it from us will be safe and we shall leave him alone; but whoever refuses we shall fight until we fulfill the promise of Allah.45 Fourteen hundred years later—in March 2009—Saudi legal expert Basem Alem publicly echoed this view: As a member of the true religion, I have a greater right to invade [others] in order to impose a certain way of life [according to Shari’a], which history has proven to be the best and most just of all civilizations. This is the true meaning of offensive jihad. When we wage jihad, it is not in order to convert people to Islam, but in order to liberate them from the dark slavery in which they live.46

Hostility Disguised as Grievance Radical Islamists such as the leaders of al Qaeda have long maintained that the terrorism they direct against the West (e.g., 9/11) is merely reciprocal treatment for decades of Western/Israeli oppression. Yet their writings to fellow Muslims portray this animus as a product of religious obligation. For instance, when a group of prominent Muslims wrote an open letter to Americans saying that Islam seeks to peacefully coexist with others,47 bin Laden castigated them: As to the relationship between Muslims and infidels, this is summarized by the Most High’s Word: “We [Muslims] renounce you [nonMuslims]. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us—till you believe in Allah alone” [Quran 60:4]. So there is an enmity, evidenced

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by fierce hostility from the heart. And this fierce hostility—that is, battle—ceases only if the infidel submits to the authority of Islam, or if his blood is forbidden from being shed [i.e., a dhimmi], or if Muslims are at that point in time weak and incapable [i.e., taqiyya]. But if the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great apostasy! . . . Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred—directed from the Muslim to the infidel—is the foundation of our religion. And we consider this a justice and kindness to them.48 It bears repeating that this hostile weltanschauung is well supported by mainstream Islam’s schools of jurisprudence—all “radical-moderate” dichotomies aside. When addressing Western audiences, however, bin Laden’s tone changes; he lists any number of “grievances” for fighting the West—from the oppression of Palestinians, to the Western exploitation of women, and even U.S. failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol (for the environment)—all things intelligible from a Western perspective. Never once does he allude to fighting the United States simply because it is an infidel entity that must be subjugated. Indeed, he often initiates his messages to the West by saying, “Reciprocal treatment is part of justice” or “Peace to whoever follows guidance“—though he means something entirely different than what his Western audience expects by words such as “peace” and “justice.”49 This is of course a clear instance of taqiyya, as bin Laden is not only waging a physical jihad, but one of propaganda. Convincing a secular West (whose epistemology cannot comprehend the notion of religious conquest) that the current conf lict is entirely its fault only garners him and his cause more sympathy; conversely, he also knows that if Americans were to realize that, all political grievances aside—real or imagined—according to Islam’s worldview, nothing short of their submission can ever bring peace, his propaganda campaign would be quickly compromised. Hence the constant need to dissemble, “for war,” as Islam’s prophet asserted, “is deceit.”50

Muslim “Friends” Associated with Hamas, denounced by American politicians for “pursuing an extreme Islamist political agenda,” its members arrested for terrorism-related charges51—the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)52 is another Muslim group that appears to be less than sincere to its non-Muslim audience53; situated in the United States, it is also much closer to home. When it comes to the issue of jihad, perpetual warfare, even doctrines such as taqiyya— indeed, all that has been delineated in this essay—CAIR has been at the forefront of denying their existence.

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Could CAIR be taking lessons from the Muslim convert Mas’ud, whom Muhammad urged to go and live among the Confederate infidels, solely in order to mislead and betray them, so that Islam might triumph? The most obvious example of taqiyya, however, comes from Saudi Arabia— America’s “friend.”54 If any nation closely follows shariah, it is the Arabian kingdom, which refuses to allow the construction of a single church or synagogue on its land,55 bans and burns bibles,56 arrests, tortures, and sometimes kills Christians engaged in any kind of missionary activity,57 and, according to Islam’s apostasy laws,58 imprisons and executes Muslim converts to Christianity.59 Yet, for all that, in their attempt to portray Islam as a tolerant religion, a religion that merely seeks to coexist peacefully with others, top Saudis have been pushing for more “dialogue” between Muslims and non-Muslims,60 specifically Christians and Jews. Rather tellingly, however, Saudi Arabia refuses to host any of these conferences; after all, Muhammad’s deathbed wish was to expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian peninsula61—even though they were there centuries before Muhammad arrived on the scene. Moreover, the Saudis may well fear that a real debate—not just the perfunctory talk62 of “dialogue” and “mutual understanding” that typically occurs in interfaith conferences—might finally take place, once the non-Muslim participants discover that they are not free to practice their faiths on Saudi soil. The most recent interfaith conference was held in Madrid, where the Saudi ruler King Abdullah asserted, “Islam is a religion of moderation and tolerance, a message that calls for constructive dialogue among followers of all religions.”63 Mere days later, it was revealed that Saudi children’s textbooks still call Christians and Jews “infidels,” “hated enemies,” and “pigs and swine.”64 A multiple choice test in a fourth-grade book asks Muslim children, “Who is a ‘true’ Muslim?” The correct answer is not the man who prays, fasts, and so on, but rather “A man who worships Allah alone, loves the believers, and hates the infidels”—in other words, the very people with whom the Saudis say they want to engage in dialogue. When the Saudis call for “dialogue,” then, are they merely following the aforementioned advice of Muhammad’s companion Abu Darda: “Let us grin to the face of some people while our hearts curse them”?

Implications There is also a troubling epistemological aspect to taqiyya. Anyone who truly believes that no less an authority than God justifies and, through his prophet’s example, sometimes even encourages deception will not experience any ethical qualms or dilemmas about lying. This is especially true if, as John Locke first said, the human mind is indeed a tabula rasa shaped by environment and education: deception becomes second nature.

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Consider the case of Ali Mohammad—bin Laden’s “first trainer” and longtime al Qaeda operative. Despite being entrenched in the highest echelons of the terror network, his confidence at dissembling enabled him to become a CIA agent and FBI informant for years. People who knew him regarded him “with fear and awe for his incredible self-confidence, his inability to be intimidated, absolute ruthless determination to destroy the enemies of Islam, and his zealous belief in the tenets of militant Islamic fundamentalism.”65 Indeed, this sentence sums it all up: for a “zealous belief ” in Islam’s “tenets,” which, as seen, legitimize deception in order to make Allah’s word supreme, will certainly go a long way in creating “incredible self-confidence” when lying. Such is the dilemma: Islamic law unambiguously splits the world into two perpetually warring halves—Islam and infidelity—and obligates the former to subsume the latter. Yet if war with the infidel is a perpetual affair, if war is deceit, and if deeds are justified by intentions (niyya) in Islam, any number of Muslims will naturally conclude that they have a divinely sanctioned right to deceive, so long as they believe their deception serves to aid Islam, “until all chaos ceases, and all religion belongs to Allah.”66 Such deception will further be seen as a means to an altruistic end. All Muslim overtures for peace, dialogue, or even temporary truces must be seen in this light, evoking the practical observations of philosopher James Lorimer, uttered over a century ago: “So long as Islam endures, the reconciliation of its adherents, even with Jews and Christians, and still more with the rest of mankind, must continue to be an insoluble problem.”67

Notes 1. By “mainstream Islam,” I here refer to Sunni Islam, which accounts for some 90 percent of the entire Muslim body. The word “Sunni” is based on the Arabic word “sunna,” which, in context, refers to the habits and practices—the customs—of Muhammad as handed down through traditions (hadiths). 2. In fact, examples exist in Muhammad’s seventh-century statements that seem odd today, such as that women should “breastfeed” strange men whenever they are in each other’s company. In fact, an entire fatwa was recently issued, and then rescinded, from Al Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s most authoritative institution, regarding this: http://memri.org/ bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=IA35507. 3. See Quran 2:195 and 4:29. 4. Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi, At-Tafsir al-Kabir (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-’Ilmiya, 2000), vol. 10, p. 98 5. Sami Mukaram, At-Taqiyya fi ‘l-Islam (London: Mu’assisat at-Turath ad-Druzi, 2004), p. 7 (author’s translation). 6. Cyrus H. Gordon, “The Substratum of Taqiyya in Iran,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, April–June 1977, p. 192. 7. Etan Kohlberg, “Some Imami Shi’i Views on Taqiyya,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, July–September 1975, p. 396. 8. See also Quran 2:173, 2:185, 4:29, 16:106, 22:78, 40:28, verses cited by the jurisprudents as legitimating taqiyya.

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9. Abu Ja’far Muhammad at-Tabari’s Jami’ al-Bayan ‘an ta’wil ayi ‘l-Quran al-Ma’ruf: Tafsir at-Tabari (Beirut: Dar Ihya’ at-Turath al-’Arabi, 2001), vol. 3, p. 267 (author’s translation). 10. ‘Imad ad-Din Isma’il Ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Quran al-Karim (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-’Ilmiyya, 2001), vol. 1, p. 350 (author’s translation). Needless to say, radicals such as al Qaeda often stress this hadith; see, e.g., my The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 73. 11. Mukaram, At-Taqiyya fi ‘l- Islam, pp. 30–37. 12. See http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2005/04/hasan-akbars-chilling-diary-entries.html. 13. Mukaram, At-Taqiyya fi ‘l- Islam, pp. 11–12. 14. Ibid., pp. 41–42. 15. Sahih Muslim, chapter “Kitab al-Birr wa’s-Salat, Bab Tahrim al-Kidhb wa Bayan al-Mubih Minhu.” 16. Ahmad Mahmud Karima, Al-Jihad Fi’l Islam: Dirasa Fiqhiya Muqarina (Cairo: Al-Azhar, 2003), p. 304. 17. Mukaram, At-Taqiyya fi’l-Islam, p. 32. 18. See Raymond Ibrahim, The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 142–143. 19. Mukaram, At-Taqiyya fi ‘l-Islam, pp. 32–33. 20. Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 367–368. 21. Shihab ad-Din Muhammad al-Alusi al-Baghdadi, Ruh al-Ma ‘ani fi Tafsir al-Quran al-’Azim wa’ l-Saba’ al-Mithani (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-’Ilmiyya, 2001), vol. 2, p. 1165 (author’s translation). 22. While some English versions of the Quran euphemize makar as “planner” or “plotter,” the word most generically denotes (and, to Arabic ears, connotes) deception. Moreover, according to the definitive Hans Wehr Arabic-English Dictionary, the trilateral root “m-k-r” means “to deceive, delude, cheat, dupe, gull, double-cross.” One who takes on the attributes of “m-k-r”—such as Allah in the Quran—is described as “sly, crafty, wily, an impostor, a swindler.” In colloquial Arabic, a makar is a sly trickster, something like the Norse Loki. 23. See Ibn Qayyim’s Tafsir, in Abd al-’Aziz bin Nasir al-Jalil, At-Tarbiyya Al-Jihadiyya Fi Daw’ Al-Kitab Wa’l-Sunna (Riyahd: n.p., 2003), pp. 36–43. 24. Quran 109:5. 25. Mukaram, At-Taqiyya fi ‘l-Islam, p. 20 (author’s translation). 26. Quran 2: 216. 27. Yahia bin Sharaful-Deem An-Nawawi, An-Nawawi’s Forty Hadiths, p. 16 (accessed August 1, 2009). 28. Quran 8:39. 29. David Bukay, “Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam,” Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2007, pp. 3–11, f.n. 58. 30. Abd al-’Aziz bin Nasir al-Jalil, At-Tarbiyya Al-Jihadiyya Fi Daw’ al-Kitab Wa’l-Sunna (Riyadh: n.p., 2003), p. 7. 31. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqudimmah. An Introduction to History, translated by Franz Rosenthal (New York, N.Y.: Pantheon, 1958), vol. 1, p. 473; emphasis added. 32. Denis Maceoin, “Tactical Hudna and Islamist Intolerance,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2008, pp. 39–48. 33. Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1955), p. 220. 34. Karima, Al-Jihad fi ‘l-Islam, p. 461 (author’s translation). 35. Ibid., p. 469. 36. Muhammad al-Bukhari, “Judgements (Ahkaam),” Sahih al-Bukhari, book 89, translated by M. Muhsin Khan (accessed July 22, 2009). 37. Ahmad Ibn Naqib al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (Beltsville: Amana Publications, 1994), p. 605.

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38. Villehardouin and Joinville, Chronicle of the Crusades (New York: Dover Publications, 2007), pp. 183–184. 39. Daniel Pipes, “Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad’s Diplomacy,” Middle East Quarterly, September 1999, pp. 65–72. 40. Reuters, September 1, 2008. 41. Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam, p. 152. 42. James Lorimer, Institutes of the Law of Nations (Edinburgh: n.p., 1883), vol. 1, p. 124. 43. Assyrian International News Agency, November 26, 2008. 44. Sayyid Qutb—the “godfather of jihad”—perhaps best articulated this position in the modern era. See his Ma ‘alim Fi Al Tariq, or Milestones (Chicago: Islamic Book Service, India, 2006). 45. Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2007), p. 112. 46. “Saudi Legal Expert Basem Alem: We Have the Right to Wage Offensive Jihad to Impose Our Way of Life,” TV Monitor, clip 2108, Middle East Media Research Institute, trans., March 26, 2009, ur Way of Life. 47. Ibrahim b. Muhammad al-Shahwan, et al., “Correspondence with Saudis: How We Can Coexist,” AmericanValues.org (accessed July 28, 2009). 48. Ibrahim, The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 43. 49. See http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWNhNGMxZDk1NmEwZDQxMDdlOWNlZ jczZTEwMWE3ZTc=. 50. For more on the contradictory nature of al-Qaeda’s words, see http://www.meriajournal. com/en/asp/journal/2008/december/ibrahim/6.pdf. 51. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/washington/14cair.html?_r=1. 52. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6176. 53. http://www.meforum.org/916/cair-islamists-fooling-the-establishment 54. Stephen Zunes, “America and its ‘friend’ Saudi Arabia,” Asia Times (Hong Kong), May 23, 2003. 55. Wajiha al-Huweidar, interview, Alhurra television, January 13, 2008, in Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch, no. 1815, January 18, 2008. 56. The Christian Post (Washington, D.C.), August 10, 2007. 57. Tom White, “A Voice of the Martyrs Special Report,” John Mark Ministries (accessed July 28, 2009). 58. Muhammad al-Bukhari, “Dealing with Apostates,” Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 9, book 84, hadith 57, translated by M. Muhsin Khan (accessed July 28, 2009). 59. Asia News (Bangkok), December 17, 2004. 60. MSNBC.com, March 25, 2008. 61. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim, “Evacuation of the Jews from Hijaz,” book 19, chapter 20, no. 4363, translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqui (accessed July 28, 2009). 62. See, e.g., Agence France-Presse, July 31, 2008. 63. Sami Alrabaa, “Saudis Call for Interfaith Dialogue Hypocritical,” Europe News, August 18, 2008. 64. 2008 Update: Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance (Washington, D.C.: Center for Religious Freedom of the Hudson Institute, 2008), p. 5. 65. http://www.investigativeproject.org/187/osama-bin-ladens-special-operations-man. 66. Quran 8:39. 67. James Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations: A Treatise of the Jural Relations of Separate Political Communities (Clark, N.J.: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2005), p. 124.

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CH A P T E R

SI X

Debates over Just War and Jihad: Ideas, Interpretations, and Implications across Cultures Jam e s Turne r Joh n s on

Is there a clash of cultures or civilizations between the West and the world of Islam?