The attacks of 11th September were the last gasps of a moribund Islamist movement. Terror is a sign of failure, deployed when political mobilisation has failed. This is the conclusion drawn by a masterly survey of the modern Islamist movements from Morocco to Indonesia, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (IB Tauris), by Gilles Kepel. The recurrent violence of the 1990s-the attacks on tourists in Egypt, the Taleban takeover in Afghanistan, the war in Chechnya, the violence in France, the attacks on US targets in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Africa culminating in 11th September-is "a reflection of the movement's weakness, not its strength."
The reason for this political decline, Kepel argues, resides in the failure of the Islamist movement in most countries to maintain its appeal to its two very different constituencies: the pious middle class of small businessmen and shopkeepers, which looked to the movement to uphold its petit-bourgeois values; and the urban poor, recent immigrants from the countryside, who looked to the Islamist movements to authenticate their values, redress social injustices and to supplement the failings of state welfare. Both of these groups, says Kepel, were "committed to the Shari'a and to the idea of an Islamic state, but they did not view that state in the same way. The poor imbued it with a social-revolutionary content, while the devout middle class saw it as a vehicle for wresting power for themselves from the incumbent elites, without fundamentally disturbing the existing social hierarchies... The fragile alliance between the urban poor and the devout middle classes, which was held together by intellectuals preaching the doctrines of Islamism, was ill-prepared for any kind of protracted confrontation with the state authorities. But with increasing success, governments figured out ways to pit the two camps against one another, exposing the underlying conflict between their agendas and their shared but vague desire to set up an Islamic state."
The tension between these two constituencies has been so successfully exploited by the authoritarian governments of the Muslim world that many of those intellectuals who once espoused, or even led, the Islamist cause are now insisting that the movement give priority to democracy, regardless of the risk of reversals at the polls. The Islamist luminaries of an earlier generation-Abu Ala Maududi in Indo-Pakistan and Sayyid Qutb in Egypt-argued that democracy was a western invention, incompatible with the "divine sovereignty" enjoined by Islam. Statements to this effect by Ali Benhadj of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) were invoked to justify the suppression of democracy by the Algerian military in December 1991, when the FIS seemed set to win the election. The consequence has been a cycle of violence that may have cost as many as 150,000 lives.
A sadder and wiser generation of Islamists has learned the hard way that western democracy has moral qualities that are conspicuous by their absence in Muslim societies. Kepel cites the testimony of Munawar Anees, a former Islamist firebrand and colleague of Anwar Ibrahim. Ibrahim was the Malaysian Islamist leader co-opted into government by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, before being disgraced and imprisoned on charges of sodomy when his movement became too powerful. Anees was himself released from prison and sent into exile in the US only after massive international pressure: "Like so many others in the Muslim world, all my adult life I saw western conspiracies everywhere. I thought the west's sole objective was to keep our heads under water. I now find that my western friends were the ones who saved me, whilst Mahathir, a Muslim, has done everything in his power to destroy me."
The same pattern of co-option and repression by the state is repeated in most of the major Muslim countries. In Pakistan, General Zia al-Haq, the former dictator, used the Islamist doctrines promulgated by Abu Ala Maududi and the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) party he founded in 1941 as a way of blocking the restoration of democracy. His Islamisation measures pleased the pious middle classes whose support he sought. With members of the JI rising in the public service, they had no desire to rock the boat by allying themselves with the disinherited younger generation. The long-term effects of Zia's policies, however, have been disastrous. By levying zakat-the ritual duty of charity normally paid as voluntary donations-on bank deposits, Zia antagonised the Shi'a minority, who pay zakat to their own religious leaders, setting in motion a conflict between the Sunni and Shi'a militias which persists. Zia's "Islamisation of education" did more than damage Pakistan's economy. The funds from zakat contributed directly to the growth of the madrasas (seminaries) controlled by the ultra-conservative Deobandi sect, the movement that spawned the Taleban.
Co-option and repression were also evident in Sudan. The programme of Islamisation introduced by Jaafar al-Nimeiri and General Omar al-Bashir, under the influence of the urbane Hasan al-Turabi, leader of the Islamist National Islamic Front (NIF), alienated the non-Muslim south, provoking Africa's longest-running civil war. Bashir used the NIFs programme, which included purges and executions of non-Islamists in the top ranks of the army and civil service, to smash the power of the traditional political parties, dominated by the Sufi (mystical) brotherhoods. The NIF compensated for its lack of mass support by recruiting thugs from the Fallata, a previously marginal group of west Africans. But ten years into the dictatorship, Turabi had served his purpose. In December 1999, Bashir ousted Turabi in a "palace coup."
It is a similar story in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, was a leading force in the overthrow of the monarchy in July 1952. But Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser, who assumed full powers the following year, quickly fell out with the Brotherhood, whose leading intellectual, Sayyid Qutb, he imprisoned and executed in 1966 on trumped-up charges of plotting to overthrow the state. The "martyr" Qutb, as Kepel makes clear, is the movement's intellectual godfather, though some latter-day neo-fundamentalists influenced by Saudi Arabia consider his revolutionary interpretations of the Koran religiously suspect. Nasser's falling out with the Brotherhood drove it underground. Unlike in Pakistan, where the secular-minded leadership repeatedly clashed with the Muslim nationalism on which their country had been founded, Nasser was able to rely on the "sheer strength of the Egyptian national identity" to control both the Brotherhood and the religious establishment represented by al-Azhar, the world's foremost Sunni Muslim academy. In the course of time, however, Nasser's successor, Anwar al-Sadat, relaxed Nasser's ban on the Brotherhood, believing that its Islamist ideology would help to contain rebellious youth and act as a source of moral values. The moderate leadership of the Brotherhood, which wanted society to be transformed by preaching not political action, was supported by exiles returning from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, where many had found patronage by presenting themselves as victims of Nasser's socialism. Thus was laid the foundations of the infamous marriage between the disciples of Qutb and ultra-conservative scholars supported by Saudi Arabia (such as Sheikh Abdullah Bin Baz, notorious for his pre-Copernican cosmology).
A jihadist in the Qutb tradition, the electrical engineer Abd al-Salaam al-Farrag, masterminded the assassination of "Pharaoh" Sadat in October 1981. In The Neglected Duty, Farrag attacked the religious establishment for failing in its duty to protect society from the "apostate" Sadat, who had "fed at the tables of imperialism and Zionism" by signing the Camp David accords with Israel. In Pakistan, however, the ulama (religious scholars) have generally supported the Islamist cause, the al-Azhar religious establishment was unanimous in denouncing Sadat's killers, and strenuous efforts were made to prove that the assassination was not warranted by the scriptural sources cited in Farrag's tract.
Despite Sadat's unpopularity, the pious middle class has remained broadly attached to the regime of his successor, Hosni Mubarak. Middle-class Islamists have been allowed to take over many professional associations, including the doctors', engineers' and lawyers' syndicates. Until partly discredited by fraud, Islamic financial institutions grew and flourished, providing a rich network of business connections for the pious bourgeoisie. The Islamic resurgence in Egypt reached its high tide in the autumn of 1992, when the charities under Brotherhood control did a far better job of providing relief and shelter for poor Cairenes afflicted by the earthquake than government bureaucrats, snared in corruption and red tape.
Faced with the danger to his own position posed by the alliance between the radicals in the charities and their middle-class supporters, Mubarak was forced to act. In Imbaba, a vast urban slum with about 1m migrants from Upper Egypt, one of the radical Islamists declared the place an "Islamic Republic." The government sent in 14,000 troops, who stayed for six weeks and arrested some 5,000 people. State money was poured into the area. Faced with the prospect of social improvement, many of the former Islamists changed their tune, deciding to work within the system. Thereafter the radicals were gradually isolated: the attacks on foreign tourists (including the Luxor massacre in 1997) alienated whatever remaining support they had amongst the pious bourgeoisie, many of whom depend on tourism. A majority in the movement declared a ceasefire. A minority, led by the former surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri, kept up the jihad from exile in Afghanistan, where his faction became part of al Qaeda.
The Egyptian case fits Kepel's thesis like a glove: the terrorism that culminated in the Luxor massacre escalated in proportion to the erosion of the movement's political base after the government takeover. The violence in Algeria, on the other hand, has yet to run its course. At this time of writing, 25 nomads are reported massacred in a village west of Algiers, a few hours before the incumbent National Liberation Front (FLN) managed to get itself re-elected in a low turnout poll (46 per cent), boycotted by the key opposition parties. Kepel traces the Algerian conflict from the 1970s when the hike in oil revenues following the Yom Kippur war enabled the FLN to "buy social pacification by subsidising imported consumer goods." When oil prices collapsed in 1986, half the government's budget was wiped out. The gangs of "hittistes" (slang for unemployed youth) were ripe for recruitment by the radical wing of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), led by the populist preacher, Ali Benhadj. The bazaar merchants of the "pious middle classes" were cultivated by Benhadj's co-leader, Abassi Madani, a university professor who impressed them with his knowledge and style. Abassi reassured the traders that an investment in the FIS would be the best guarantee for future business. The alliance between the two wings of the FIS, however, was fragile, and when the army intervened to prevent it from winning an outright majority in the second round of the parliamentary elections in January 1992, the FIS had already lost 1m votes compared with its performance in the municipal elections the previous year, when it won control of a majority of Algeria's communes.
In any case, the middle classes were beginning to fear the real possibility of an FIS regime. In the municipalities controlled by the FIS, women were forcibly veiled, video stores, liquor shops and other "immoral" establishments were closed. There was abundant testimony to "the civic virtue of the elected FIS officials, in contrast to the corruption, arbitrariness and inefficiency that had formerly prevailed." But what really worried the bazaaris was Benhadj's attacks on France and Algeria's Francophone elite. The Islamist programme of Arabisation also threatened the identity of the Berbers. This allowed the army to imprison Benhadj and Abassi and to smash the moderate wing of the FIS without encountering serious resistance from the middle classes.
The Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), the military wing of the FIS, and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), led by veterans from the jihad against communism in Afghanistan, became involved in an increasingly violent war of attrition against the government. But long before 11th September this violence proved counter-productive. The fanaticism and brutality of the "Arab-Afghans" spiralled out of control, with the export of terrorism to France and racketeering and extortion by armed gangs at home. Torn by personal and ideological feuds, the GIA eventually dissolved itself, while the AIS (like most Egyptian jihadists) made a unilateral truce with the state. The pious middle classes that used to support the FIS have been appeased by the passage to a market economy.
The Afghan connection was part of the movement's undoing, not just in Algeria. With Serb aggression against Bosnia's Muslims seen throughout the Muslim world as a new crusade, the extension of the jihad from Afghanistan to Bosnia was inevitable. But unlike in Afghanistan, the rhetoric of jihad and the demand for an Islamic state cut no ice amongst Bosnia's secularised Muslims. The Dayton Accords integrated Bosnia into the European sphere and with the forced departure of the Islamist volunteers, the wider Islamic world lost any influence it might have over Bosnia's future.
The "blowback" thesis tracing the spread of Islamist terrorism to the CIA and Saudi-backed jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan has been thoroughly explored by Ahmed Rashid, John Cooley and others, and much of the ground Kepel covers here is familiar. "The international brigade of jihad veterans, being outside the control of any state, were suddenly available to serve radical Islamist causes anywhere in the world." A key figure linking the Afghan jihadis with the spread of Islamist terror is Abdullah Azam, the Palestinian preacher trained at al-Azhar who, with Osama bin Laden, founded the Peshawar-based Office of Services (MAK) which became the core of al Qaeda (the base or foundation). According to Kepel, the name which has become synonymous with international terrorism originated in the MAK's computer database. It was Azam who argued that after the defeat of the communists in Afghanistan the jihad must extend to other lands that once belonged to Islam. The struggle to expel the Soviets was a prelude for the liberation of Palestine, and other "lost" territories, including Spain.
Osama bin Laden attended Azam's lectures at university in Jedda where he also came under the influence of Muhammad Qutb, brother of the martyred Egyptian. After the Soviet takeover in Afghanistan, Bin Laden followed Azam to Peshawar, acting as a channel for Saudi money while Azam (with CIA support) enlisted jihadis throughout the world, including the US, where he visited 27 states on his recruitment drives. After Azam's assassination in 1989, probably by one of many Afghan arms of the Pakistani intelligence services (ISI), Osama took on his mantle. In line with Qutb's and Azam's philosophy, the "Afghan-Arabs" which formed the core of al Qaeda were to be the vanguard of a world Islamist movement. Azam's influence is also visible in the charter of Hamas, the Islamist movement in Israeli-occupied Palestine which used the first intifada to extend its influence. The charter states that "there will be no solution to the Palestinian problem except through jihad," while condemning the PLO's acceptance of the existence of Israel.
The rise of Hamas was fuelled by money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The flow increased at the expense of the PLO after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which Yasser Arafat had supported from exile in Tunis. The rise of Hamas pushed Israel into signing the Oslo accords in September 1993, under which Arafat came to be installed as president of the Palestinian Authority. Crippled by the collapse in his funding, he was a weak negotiating partner, which suited Israel: as Yitzhak Rabin explained to the Knesset, he aimed to use Arafat as Israel's policeman in those parts of the occupied territories it was finding difficult to control. "The Palestinians... will rule by their own methods, freeing, and this is most important, the Israeli army soldiers from having to do what they will do." Competition, not only between Hamas and the PLO, but also between Hamas and Islamic Jihad, helped to stoke the fires of the intifada. Only the harshness of the Israeli response kept the conflicts of interest and outlook between the Islamists and the middle-class supporters of the PLO (now the PNA) from splitting the Palestine national movement apart. In the unlikely event of the Bush administration applying real pressure on the Sharon government-instead of vacillating between appeasing its moderate Arab allies and the Jewish and fundamentalist lobbies in America-Arafat could yet take up the role intended for him by Rabin. He is too canny a politician to do so, however, until he can offer his people more than the disconnected Bantustans previously on offer.
The virtue of this excellent book-Kepel is already France's best-known authority on the subject-is the broadness of its coverage of the Islamist movements. As a political scientist, however, he is less concerned with exploring the movement's philosophical and theological roots, than with charting the social forces that drive it. Being less interested in religion than realpolitik, he underestimates the power of forces less amenable to rational scrutiny. If politics is the "art of the possible," religion is its contrary. The myth and ritual upon which religion is built belong to the realm of the impossible.
In his account of the Iranian revolution, for example, Kepel underplays the role of Shi'a eschatology. He shows how the Ayatollah Khomeini kept together the fissiparous alliance consisting of the "wretched" of the shanty towns and the pious bazaari merchants alienated by the Shah's pro-western policies and economic cronyism. This alliance is now falling apart, as a reform-minded parliament supported by the middle classes vies for power and influence with a conservative judiciary. To its credit, however, the Iranian revolution has institutionalised the conflict along constitutional lines. The glue that enabled Khomeini to hold his coalition together was partly the Iran-Iraq war, supported by the Gulf states and (surreptitiously) by the US. But it was also held together by Shi'ism, a doctrine of revolutionary legitimism that, like Christianity, involves the symbolic appropriation of the promised millennium.
The eschatological expectations of Shi'ism can be brought from mythical time into history with devastating results, as Khomeini demonstrated when he returned to Iran in an Air France jumbo jet to a tumultuous reception of 2m people in February 1979. Many ordinary Iranians saw him as the "Hidden Imam" who returns, like Christ, at the end of time to bring justice and peace to the world. But as with Christianity, the eschatological time-bomb at the heart of the tradition can be defused by arguing, like St Augustine, that the promised kingdom is a spiritual one, not to be realised on earth; alternatively it can be deferred indefinitely, while the Awaited One's representatives confine themselves to matters moral and spiritual. Since Khomeini's death in 1989, there has been an unacknowledged secularisation of Iranian society, with a growing number of clergy returning to more traditional, quietist interpretations of Islam.
Shi'ism, like Christianity, is built on political failure. The founding figures of both-Jesus and Ali ibn Abi Talib with his son Hussein-are martyrs whose failure to achieve a worldly revolution allowed an apocalyptic idea to be subsumed into an act of ritual sacrifice. The ritualisation and spiritualisation of a failed prophesy or the deferment of the apocalypse, far from leading to a religious tradition's extinction, may be the condition of its survival. Like Christianity, Shi'ism, especially in its Ismaili versions, has proved adaptable to varied historical conditions precisely because it contains within itself the hermeneutics of accommodation, a deferral of salvation. Similar resources exist within the Sunni mainstream, especially in the Sufi brotherhoods. But as Kepel shows, both Sufism and Shi'ism have been subjected to relentless harassment and suppression by the forces of "petro-Islam" exported from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, as well as by the Islamists themselves.
The apocalyptic strand in Sunnism is not institutionalised under the management of a disciplined, educated hierarchy, as in Shi'ism. Since Ottoman times the authority of the ulama has come under the progressive control of the state. But the religious leaders who issued fatwas (legal rulings) at the convenience of governments were ignored by Islamist leaders such as Shukri Mustafa, founder of the Takfir wa'l Hijra group in Egypt. As Kepel shows, the Sunni Islamists hold widely differing views about the meaning of the Shari'a and how to set about the creation of a truly Islamic state.
Most, if not all these movements, however, do share a common theological position which may be described as the Argument from Manifest Success (AMS). The Prophet Muhammad, according to this argument, triumphed over his enemies through battle as well as by preaching. Building on his victories and his faith in God, his successors, the guided caliphs, conquered most of west Asia and north Africa as well as Spain. In this view, the truth of Islam was vindicated through its historical achievement in creating what would become a great world civilisation. The AMS is consonant with the doctrine according to which Islam supersedes the previous revelations of Judaism and Christianity. The problem with the AMS, when held in its most strident Saudi-sponsored versions, is what to do when history starts going wrong. In the late middle ages, the loss of Spain to Islam could be offset against the gains in the Levant, with the collapse of the Latin kingdoms founded by the Crusaders. By 1920, however, almost all the Islamic world had come under direct or indirect European rule. Muslims, as Bernard Lewis details in his fascinating essay, began to ask themselves What went wrong? (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
Unfortunately, the answer did not include a critical revaluation of the religious tradition, as occurred in the west after the Reformation with the gradual emergence of theological liberalism. The sacred text of the Koran and the Traditions of the Holy Prophet were too embedded in the culture to allow for a fundamental reappraisal that would trace the roots of failure to the religion of Islam itself. Rather, it was insisted in numerous discourses to the sultans that the rebellions in Greece and the Balkans and the losses to Russia were the result of Muslims being punished for straying from the path ordained by God-a diagnosis and prescription, Lewis notes, that still finds wide acceptance. Like other Muslim sovereigns the Ottomans thought they could acquire the technical knowledge that would enable them to defend their society without tampering with the eternal word of God. The necessary accommodations with the knowledge of the infidels was difficult enough. First to appear was the "previously unthinkable doctrine that true believers must follow infidels in military organisation and the conduct of warfare." Then, even more painfully, the ulama had to accept infidel teachers for Muslim pupils, "an innovation of staggering magnitude in a civilisation that for more than a millennium had been accustomed to despise the outer infidels and barbarians as having nothing of any value to contribute." They also had to accept infidel allies in wars against other infidels.
By the mid-19th century, the classic disdain for the non-Muslim world had eroded to the point where Turkish newspapers were covering foreign events such as the American civil war. Lewis shows how ideas of political freedom began to make headway in the 19th century, along with systems of law imported from Europe. Once the colonial powers had trained up a class of clerics to work in their offices and counting houses in European languages, imperialism was doomed. Lewis ascribes the failures of most post- colonial governments in the western part of the Muslim world to the wrong economic priorities: "In the west, one makes money in the market, and uses it to buy or influence power. In the east one seizes power, and uses it to make money. Morally there is no difference between the two, but their impact on the economy and the polity is very different."
Despite its wit and pungency, Lewis's analysis is somewhat limited. The failure of European-style polities in west Asia, whether Soviet one-party states or western style democracies, is best explained by reference to the persistence of networks of kinship and patronage allied to the vastly increased police apparatus available to modern states. Lewis's invocation of past attitudes of cultural supremacy, the "wrong" economic priorities or differences in the status of women are only part of the story, however important. The "string of shabby tyrannies, from traditional autocracies to new style dictatorships" which govern most Muslim countries depend on factors-such as personality cults disseminated through visual media and the ubiquity of the security services-which were not available to rulers in the past. Surprisingly, Lewis pays more attention to Muslim resistance to western music than to the impact of photography and visual representation in a traditionally aniconic culture. In contrast to Islam, Christianity externalised its mythologies by giving them visual form, fostering the process whereby the image came to be separated from its content. The brilliant, abstract, geometric patternings of Islamic art may have opened a window into the mind of God, but they did not encourage visual scepticism: every Baghdad store has its picture of "Brother Saddam," who is indeed watching, like Big Brother, because in a culture conditioned by centuries of aniconism, the portrait still conveys an element of the person.
Lewis's conclusion is bleaker than Kepel's. "Compared with its millennial rival, Christendom, the world of Islam has become poor, weak and ignorant." The failures of Islam are compounded by the successes of non-western countries such as Japan, India and South Korea. "Following is bad enough. Limping in the rear is far worse. By all the standards that matter in the modern world-economic development and job creation, literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights-what was once a mighty civilisation has indeed fallen low." Western imperialism is inevitably held to blame. Now that the French and British have departed, the "Americans" and "the Jews" are the scapegoats. "If the peoples of the middle east continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination."
The gloomy prognosis may be applied, a fortiori, to Pakistan, an economic and social disaster zone, when compared with its rival, the "polytheist" or "pagan" India. More ominously even than in Israel-Palestine, the apocalyptic mood in Pakistan centres on the "Islamic bomb," to which there are now flower-decked shrines in all their major cities. Like the attacks on New York and Washington, Pakistani bomb-worship is a demonstration of nihilistic theological despair. Since the God of Manifest Success has so signally failed to deliver, we must kill ourselves-taking with us as many of our enemies as we can.
