The Key to Anti-American Jihad
By Lawrence Auster
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 16, 2004
Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He offers his traditionalist conservative perspective on the world at his website, View from the Right.
When trying to explain the Islamists' campaign of mass murder against the West, both liberals and conservatives make the same basic mistake. People on the antiwar Left believe that al-Qaeda attacked us because we're imperialist, or because we're racist, or because we don't do enough for Third World hunger (yes, there are people who actually believe the hunger argument; most of them are Episcopalians). By contrast, many people on the pro-war Right, most notably President Bush, believe that the Islamists hate us for our freedoms and opportunities. In other words, the Left believes that the Islamists hate us for our sins, and the Right believes that the Islamists hate us for our virtues. Both sides commit the same fallacy of thinking that the issue revolves solely around ourselves, around the moral drama of our goodness or our wickedness, rather than having something to do with Islam itself.
A very different perspective on the Islamist challenge comes from Mary Habeck, a military historian at Yale University. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation on August 13, Habeck said that the various jihadist groups base their war against non-Muslims on their reading of the Islamic sacred writings, particularly the Sira, which tells the Prophet’s life in chronological sequence. The jihadis thus live and think and act within paradigms provided by the stages of Mohammed’s political and military career. According to Habeck, this internally driven logic of Islam, and not any particular provocation (real or imagined) by some outside power, is the key to understanding why the jihadis do what they do.
The first stage or paradigm is Mohammed’s early life in Mecca, a non-Islamic society where no Islamic way of life is possible. The second paradigm is the hejira, the escape from Mecca to Medina, a new place that is more pure and where a true Islamic society and state can be founded. After this Islamic state is formed, the third paradigm kicks in. This is jihad, organized violence against non-Muslims for the purpose of building up the wealth and power of the Islamic community and bringing the world under the rule of a single Islamic state. Jihadists conceive and rationalize their own activities in terms of these paradigms. Thus when Osama bin Laden left Saudi Arabia for Sudan, and when he later left Sudan for Afghanistan, he saw those journeys as corresponding with the hejira, leaving a corrupt land, where he was powerless, for a more pure Islamic place from which jihad could be waged.
In addition to the three stages in the growth of the Islamic community culminating in jihad, there are three basic approaches to waging jihad, called the Method of Mohammed, that different Islamist groups adopt toward the ultimate goal of establishing the world-wide rule of Islam. The jihadis' choice of method depends on whom they see as their immediate enemy in that larger struggle; the respective jihadist groups, moreover, are largely defined by which of these methods they adopt. The first method is to fight the Near Enemy before the Far Enemy. The second method is to fight the Greater Unbelief before the Lesser Unbelief. And the third method is to fight the Apostates first, that is, false Muslims, a group that includes secularist Muslims such as Saddam Hussein as well as (as best I remember from the lecture) Shi’ites.
It is these notions,—deeply embedded in the jidadis’ reading of the sacred writings,—and not determined by what is happening in what we think of as the real world—that determine their major strategic directions. For example, the terrorists who killed 190 people in Madrid on March 11, 2004, did not target Spain because of its involvement with the U.S.-led Iraqi reconstruction; the group had been planning the Madrid attack for two years, going back to before the American invasion of Iraq. They attacked Spain because it was the Near Enemy—a formerly Islamic land that they hoped to win back for Islam. Similarly, to the question whether the Wahhabist Osama bin Laden might have cooperated with the secularist Apostate Saddam Hussein to attack America, Habeck says it is entirely possible, because bin Laden believes that his primary enemy is the Greater Unbelief, the United States, and therefore in the short term he could allow himself to cooperate with an Apostate such as Hussein. Then, after America was defeated with Hussein’s help, bin Laden could redirect the jihad against Hussein himself.
The key point is that, while specific events might provoke the jihadis to greater attacks, their fundamental strategic and military decisions are not determined by anything done by the United States or the West or by other major enemies such as the Hindus, but by which Method of Mohammed each jihadi faction follows, and each of these strategies has its own internal rationality, though it is not a rationality that makes sense in non-Islamic terms.
The same is true for Wahhabism itself, says Habeck. Wahhabism began in the 18th century when there was no Western colonial power in the Islamic world; it was not set off by any Western intrusion into the Muslim lands. Similarly, the contemporary Islamist idea that America is the center of all that is evil in the world (making America the “Greater Unbelief”) was conceived by a Muslim scholar between 1948 and 1951 when he was residing in the United States. This was decades before the U.S. had any large-scale involvement with Israel, and decades before its culture spiraled downhill, though, from the point of view of that visiting Muslim, America was already quite decadent at that point and ripe for destruction.
What is most striking in the Method of Mohammed is the utter absence of any transcendent notion of morality. Unlike in traditional Western religion and philosophy, where God or the Good is the measure of human actions, in Islamism, which after all is simply a pure form of Islam, the measure of human actions is the shifting power tactics and military strategies adopted by a desert brigand and war leader. |
