The faith that makes the terrorist tick

Like millions of Americans living out the four years since 9/11, you’ve probably spent more than a few minutes in front of the television screen, watching clips of a video missive from Osama bin Laden or one of his thuggish adherents and thinking:

“Nothing this guy says makes any sense.”

Actually, it does.

In fact, everything Bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and their co-conspirators say is chillingly coherent. That isn’t apparent because the meaning of their words and their logical arrangement are not simply alien but utterly antagonistic to everything modernism and the West represent and value. As what we now can recognize as a global Sunni Muslim insurgency spreads, it’s clear that we confront not just a rhetorical curiosity but also a conceptual chasm of real consequence.

Those who want to understand what lies on the other side of that divide will find that Mary Habeck’s concise and sober “Knowing the Enemy” creates the accessible bridge they require. The author is a military historian and associate professor in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and her book is quite simply the best single volume currently available on this topic.

Two questions immediately present themselves: Is jihadism an intrinsic part of Islam or one of those heretical aberrations to which all religions are prey? And why has this tendency or aberration suddenly become so virulent?

Habeck contends that Western analysts err when they insist on attributing the rise of jihadism to secular causes -- economic deprivation of the Muslim masses, the legacy of European imperialism, American sympathy for the state of Israel. Taking the 9/11 terrorists as her examples, she convincingly argues that they did what they did because of what they believed as Muslims:

“Muhammad Atta and the other 18 men who took part in the September 11 attacks were middle-class and well-educated and had bright futures ahead of them,” she writes. “They participated in the hijackings not because they were forced to do so through sudden economic or social deprivation, but because they chose to deal with the problems of their community -- for religious/ideological reasons -- by killing as many Americans as they could.” Similarly, “If the entire purpose of jihadism is to break an imperial stranglehold on the Islamic world symbolized by U.S. support for Israel, why did the U.S. become the focus of [jihadi theorist] Sayyid Qutb’s anger in the early 1950s (more than a decade before the United States became associated with Israel)? Moreover, how do the effects of colonization account for the fact that one of the earliest jihadist thinkers, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, developed his version of radical and violent Islam long before the West colonized Islamic lands? ... The consistent need to find explanations other than religious ones for the attacks says, in fact, more about the West than it does about the jihadis. Western scholars have generally failed to take religion seriously.”

(It’s worth recalling that Wahhab’s interpretation of Islam is Saudi Arabia’s official orthodoxy and that Riyadh’s petrodollars are financing its missionary work around the world at this very moment.)

Because Habeck is deadly serious about the jihadis’ religiosity, she is scrupulous about their relationship to contemporary Islam. It would be “evil,” she argues, to contend that a billion-plus Muslims supported or desired the mass murder that occurred on 9/11. Nor is it correct to conflate jihadi ideology with Islamist politics, such as those of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party. On the other hand, she writes, it “would be just as wrong to conclude that the hijackers, Al Qaeda and the other radical groups have nothing to do with Islam.”

Nor can the jihadis’ key beliefs be dismissed as “the marginal opinions of a few fanatics. The principal dogmas that they assert ... have roots in discussions about Islamic law and theology that began soon after the death of Muhammad and that are supported by important segments of the clergy today.”

Here an American reader confronts the necessity of reaching beyond the undergraduate impulse that equates a facile acceptance with tolerance. It’s a step that requires the recognition, as the philosopher Richard Rorty once put it, that some ideas, like some people, are just “no damn good.”

Habeck does an efficient job of demonstrating how the jihadis pick and choose texts from the Koran and the hadith (traditions concerning the life of the prophet) and insist on their right to interpret them for their ideological convenience. The texts and traditions, however, are there to pick.

She locates the origins of contemporary jihadism first in the writings of Wahhab and the 13th century Koranic commentator Ahmad ibn Abd al Halim ibn Taymiyya. Then came the crucial contributions of the 20th century Egyptians Hasan Banna -- founder of the Muslim Brotherhood -- and Qutb, who lived for a time in the United States, as well as a Pakistani, Sayyid abu al-ala Mawdudi.

Banna contributed the notion that every aspect of Western thought was as much a threat to Islam as any imperial occupation. Mawdudi argued that since God’s sovereignty is absolute, no law but that of Islam is valid. Qutb held, among other things, that Muslims who do not conform to the jihadi interpretations of the Koran are unbelievers, which makes it permissible to kill them at will, and that the whole notion of separating church and state in any way was “hideous schizophrenia.”

There you have explanations for much that seems, at first blush, puzzling about the jihadis’ conduct around the world -- their categorical rejection of all things Western (except communications and military technology), their virulent hatred of democracy (it substitutes popular sovereignty for the absolute sovereignty of God) and their indifference to the deaths of other Muslims (as in the Iraqi car bombings). It’s also worth recalling that Bin Laden’s “spiritual advisor” and chief lieutenant, Zawahiri, cut his ideological teeth in the Egyptian movement Banna and Qutb founded.

You also have an explanation for the sort of chilling “nonsense” in statements like this one by the jihadi organization Hizb ut Tahrir, which openly operates in Britain: “When the reality contradicts Islam, it is not allowed to interpret Islam so as to agree with reality, because this would be a distortion of Islam, instead the duty requires changing the reality so as to conform to Islam.”

One of Habeck’s more interesting insights concerns the violent jihadis’ tendency to borrow strategies directly from the narratives contained in the Koran and hadith. For example, Bin Laden’s recent offer of a “truce” with the United States actually recapitulates a tactic Muhammad is said to have employed to conquer the tribe that controlled Mecca.

The real import of Habeck’s book is its suggestion that because the jihadis really believe what they say they do -- and act on it -- studying their texts and comments could yield the effective anti-terrorism that so far has eluded George W. Bush’s administration.