Interview with Gilles Kepel at Open Democracy
opendemocracy.net
The war for Muslim minds: an interview with Gilles Kepel
Gilles Kepel
openDemocracy
11 - 11 - 2004
From Fallujah and Peshawar to Amsterdam and Paris, is radical, militant Islam winning or losing its political battle for the support of the world’s Muslims? Gilles Kepel, leading analyst of post–9/11 global fractures, talks to openDemocracy’s Rosemary Bechler.
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openDemocracy: The first section of your book The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West explores the curious convergence at the crossroads of 9/11 between two diametrically opposed ways of thinking: those of the American neo–conservatives and the jihadis of the middle east – the subject also of Adam Curtis’s documentary The Power of Nightmares, which you advised and which tracks the thinking of Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss from 1940s America onwards.
How far would you push this “fatal symmetry”?
Gilles Kepel: No absolute equivalence can be drawn between Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss, between Ayman al–Zawahiri and Paul Wolfowitz. Whatever criticisms might be made of the neocons, there is no reason to be suspicious of their stated goal – a democratic middle east. Leo Strauss was convinced that communism and Nazism, as he suffered them under the Weimar republic in his native Germany, were the main enemies of democracy, and that the ultimate struggle was for democracy – not a conviction shared by al–Zawahiri, for whom democracy is the antithesis of Islam.
The problem lies in the means that they use to achieve their aims. Both, in their sombre diagnosis of the middle east, see violence as the only way to change the present state of affairs. For the neo–conservatives, this means military intervention. The demise of the Saddam Hussein regime was already deemed desirable in the mid–1990s, as we learn from a text bearing the signature of some of the most prominent of today’s neo–conservatives in President Bush’s team and the Washington think–tanks.
In the 1990s, the jihadis meanwhile favoured the sort of guerrilla warfare which mimicked what they thought had secured their victory in the Afghan jihad. But with the failure of successive operations in Algeria, Egypt, and Bosnia, al–Zawahiri’s circle turned their attention to what they called “martyrdom operations” – in short, to terrorism.
But the defining moment, shared by what we might call the “pre–neocons” and the jihadis, was engineered in the 1980s in Afghanistan under Ronald Reagan, when Richard Perle (the “prince of darkness”) was – like Paul Wolfowitz today – under–secretary for defense. At the time, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al–Zawahiri were in training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan after their makeover turning them into freedom fighters against the Soviet army.
This, I would say – to reverse the title of Richard Perle’s book (with David Frum) An End to Evil: how to win the war on terror – was the beginning of evil: salafi jihadism born out of jihad in Afghanistan. The neocons and jihadis are equally in denial over this episode.
[Lots more at URL]
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