October12 ,2012
The Historical Roots of Modern Jihad
Where did the religious violence that has wracked the Muslim world for the last couple of decades come from? How did we create this phenomenon that defines Islam to many in the West? Was it always thus, or does it have specific historical roots that can be easily traced and identified? The answer, I think, is clearly the latter.
One must begin with the basic fact that the entire Muslim world was caught in the stasis of colonialism as late as 1945, with the exception of the hypersecular Turks and the Saudis (of whom there were only about 4 million, few of any education). The Muslim world then achieved independence but there was no clear idea of what should be the political relationship of governed to government, of religion to politics, or the division between national and religious identities, all of which had to be reshaped and reborn. The history of the last 60 years is an attempt to grapple with these issues.
The rise of violent extremism in the Muslim world should also be seen in historical context. Religiously motivated violence was essentially absent prior to 1980. Before then there was violence but it was nationalist violence, such as the Palestinian movement, the Pakistani civil war, or the crushing of communism in Indonesia in 1965. The use of the word jihad in public discourse was rare, and there were no suicide bombings, Muslims understood their religion to ban suicide under any circumstance. Even the Arab-Israeli conflict was not framed as a “jihad” but as an Arab national struggle.
Three major events changed this. First was the successful overthrow of the Shah by a mass movement led by Shia clerics and using Shia religious language. Those killed by the Shah’s forces were “martyred” and there was a culture of goading the Shah’s forces to shoot and kill demonstrators who would then be rewarded with heaven. This linkage of death in a political cause with religious martyrdom was extremely important, although confined to Shia Islam at the time. It was relatively easy for Shias to make this connection, given the roots of Shiism in the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, who willingly accepted his fate instead of backing down in the face of tyranny. It is of no small significance that the Shah was in power due to a US-sponsored coup that had replaced a secular democratic government in 1953.
Second was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 in an attempt to permanently destroy the Palestinian national movement by destroying the PLO and killing Arafat. In the end the PLO escaped to Tunis, but the Israelis remained in occupation of the southern half of Lebanon, an area populated by apolitical poor Shia farmers. In the face of the occupation, the presence of the US and French forces in Beirut, and the complex Lebanese civil war, the first suicide bombers came to be, advancing the concept of martyrdom to go beyond suicidal bravery to actively killing oneself in order to harm the enemy. The attacks on the US Marine Barracks that killed over 200 US soldiers was spectacularly successful and made evident to all the power of suicide bombing (the tactic had actually been pioneered by the Hindu Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka). Over the next two decades, suicide bombings by Hezbollah took a toll on the occupying Israelis, eventually forcing their withdrawal completely from Lebanon in 2000.
The third major event in the 1980s was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979). This prompted the creation of a US/Saudi/Pakistani alliance to defeat the Soviets and force their withdrawal. For reasons that each of the allies found useful, the decision was made to turn the Afghan struggle against the Soviets from a national Afghan movement into an international Islamic Jihad against the godless communists. The creation of a wide network of religiously motivated transnational fighters, including Bin Laden, was the outgrowth of this. No Soviet Afghan war, no Bin Laden and no Al-Qaeda. Despite the importance of religion in this war, the Afghans never adopted suicide bombing as a tactic, either in the 1980s against the Soviets, or in the 1990s in the civil wars that followed.
In the 1990s Sunni Islam adopted suicide bombing and legitimized it through the actions of Hamas against Israel. Hamas did not exist till the late 1980s and grew out of religious groups in Gaza who were in fact initially encouraged by Israel as a counterweight to the PLO through classic divide and rule tactics. Sunni Islam essentially accepted suicide bombing against Israeli targets as a legitimate use of force by a very weak party that had no other choice. However, this now meant the genie was out of the bottle, and Al-Qaeda adopted suicide bombing as its signature tactic, culminating in 9/11.
Another boon to religious violence in the 1990s was the attempt of secular dictatorships to retain power by crushing religiously-based opposition, a pattern first seen by the elder Assad’s killing of 20,000 Syrians in Hama back in 1982, along with the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that resulted in a violent underground of terrorist groups that even attacked tourists in the 1990s. The peak of this phenomenon was in Algeria, where a mildly Islamist political party won a free election in 1992 only to have it blocked by the army touching off a civil war of extreme ferocity and barbarity that went on for almost a decade.
After 9/11, religiously motivated violence in the Muslim world was initially discredited, however, two political developments reversed that initial trend. The first was the second Palestinian intifada. While it began as mostly demonstrations and stone throwing, the intense violence of the Israeli response resulted in the widespread Palestinian use of suicide attacks in 2002 and 2003, attacks that were seen as justified, and relegitimized suicide bombing among some Muslim populations. The second, which had a huge impact, was the decision by Bush to turn from Al-Qaeda to invading Iraq. Before the Iraqi invasion, the US had sympathy as the injured party, but after Iraq it was seen as a bully, an aggressive invader at war not with terrorists but with Islam itself. What sympathy there was collapsed, and Muslim populations were for the most part supportive of the insurgents fighting the US. Opinion polls about Jihad, Bin Laden, or suicide bombing as a tactic showed alarmingly high levels of support across a variety of Muslim countries.
Around 2007 these trends changed as Muslims saw that the violence was leading to abject chaos and not to anything positive. Since that time, opinion polling has shown dramatic declines in support for Al-Qaeda, Jihad, and suicide attacks. At this point there are still some suicide bombings in Iraq, but they reflect internal Iraqi disputes and are not targeting the US, whose soldiers have left. A few suicide attacks are taking place in Afghanistan, but that too reflects the political context of an ongoing war. Outside of those areas, suicide bombing and religious violence are receding rapidly. They played little or no role in the Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, or Bahrain, and the very bloody conflict in Syria is remarkable for how the rebels decline to define themselves as fighting a Jihad against the Alawites, though the Assad regime has done everything it can to portray its enemies as extensions of Al-Qaeda.
There are two different challenges facing the Muslim World. The first, rather narrow one, is to discard the notions of religious violence and take up the path of democratic politics as the way to resolve conflicts. The widespread admiration for the Turkish model, and the clear desire for democracy in the Arab world and all other major Muslim countries, is encouraging to note. The second, more complex one is to create an Islam that is based on values and free will rather than enforced conformity and a self-proclaimed religious authority vested with the government. This second challenge is a generational project.
