Al-Qaeda (9 page)

Indeed, the Arabic Qur’anic word for a martyr or the martyred,
shahid
, also means witness. It comes from the same root as ‘shahadah’. This is critical for understanding the worldview and the motivations of contemporary Islamic militants. In the last paragraph of the final instructions that Mohammed Atta gave the hijackers on the eve of the 11 September attack is the injunction to ‘let [their] last words be “There is no god but God and Mohammed is His prophet” ’.
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They knew that the witnesses to the testament they verbalized with the Shahadah and demonstrated at that moment with their martyrdom would, thanks to satellite television, be counted in billions.

Such a spectacular martyrdom is thus the ultimate demonstration of jihad as a testament. The primary audience is of course God, but, in addition, martyrdom involves a demonstration of faith to various audiences for various purposes. Primarily it affirms the strength of the martyr’s own faith, courage and bravery and right to belong, to their own close community. (To those outside that community, understandably, it demonstrates cowardice and fanaticism.) It also demonstrates to the enemies of the faith that, though there may be an obvious disparity in their material strength, the combatants engaged in the ‘cosmic struggle’ are in fact fighting an equal fight. There has been no conflict yet where both sides have used suicide bombers. A suicide attack is designed to demonstrate that faith is lacking on one side and exists on the other and so to force all aware of the martyr’s action (all ‘witnesses’) to conclude that, despite the apparent imbalance of forces, when the most important quality is considered – the faith that is necessary for victory in the long run – it is the suicide bomber who has it in greatest depth. In an interview in September 2002, al-Zawahiri stated this explicitly, saying: ‘It is the love of death in the path of Allah that is the weapon that will annihilate this evil empire of America, by the permission of Allah.’
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Finally the suicide attack demonstrates faith and strength to those the bomber, and his commanders, hope to motivate. It makes it impossible to ignore what the martyr believes and suggests strongly that only something with inherent value, authenticity and power could provoke such an act. Similarly it suggests that the ‘cosmic struggle’ is also a reality. On top of all this, there is also a shaming element. A suicide attack, an incredible sacrifice carried out ‘on their behalf’, presents a challenge to a spectator’s own lack of faith or inaction.

The problem for bin Laden and others is that the vast majority of Muslims, though they may feel profound sympathy with the Palestinians, oppose the invasion and occupation of Iraq, feel humiliated by the presence of American troops elsewhere in the Middle East and are concerned by burgeoning Western cultural and political hegemony, do not sympathize with his methods and reject his extremism. Bin Laden and other extremists are aware that, of the many Muslims sympathetic to them, very, very few are going to act on those sentiments. Though
they may be pleased, sometimes secretly, that bin Laden is taking a stand and feel a profound, though complex, identification with his cause, the vast majority of Muslims do not condone his methods and are not disposed to take up arms. The extremists thus see their task, like that of all political activists, as being to mobilize and radicalize. Bin Laden outlined his aim explicitly in an interview with al-Jazeera, the Qatari TV channel, in 1999: ‘We seek to instigate the [Islamic] nation to get up and liberate its land, to fight for the sake of God and to make the Islamic law the highest law and the word of God the highest word of all.’
²⁶
Bin Laden described his 7,000-word January 2004 statement as ‘my letter to [the Islamic nation] regarding inciting and continuing to encourage the waging of jihad in order to repel the great plots against our nation’.

However, there are considerable practical problems facing modern extremists. They reject the gradualism of many Islamic thinkers, on the basis that there can be no compromise with the forces of unbelief and no divergence from the true path. Yet a gradual approach, as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has shown, is possibly the only strategy that will be successful. The alternative is hijra, the Qur’anically prescribed flight to an environment where true Islam can be practised. Two of the extremists’ problems remain unresolved by flight, however. The first is understanding why 99 per cent of Muslims still reject their radical teachings. The second is changing this situation, but from a position of exile, with all the practical problems this entails.

Here, the thought of bin Laden and his associates owes as much to contemporary left-wing thought as to the holy texts, their exegetes and the examples of dozens of radical reformist movements before them. The lack of sympathy their radical views elicit among most Muslims is attributed to ‘false consciousness’. So al-Zawahiri describes the hordes that turned out at the funeral held for the very secular Gamal Abdel Nasser on his death in 1970 as:

only the residue of
the state of unconsciousness
that prevailed among the Egyptian masses thanks to his strong media and a kind of farewell by the Egyptians to their ruler. Soon they replaced him with another ruler, who took another turn and started to sell them
a new illusion
.

Currently, al-Zawahiri says, there is a huge ‘gap in understanding between the jihad movement and the common people’. He attributes this to ‘the media siege imposed on the message of the jihad movement as well as the campaign of deception mounted by the government media’.
²⁷

To wake the masses, a ‘vanguard’ is needed to lead by example. Here again, the thought of the modern Islamic radical fuses elements of religious tradition with modern secular revolutionary theory to create uniquely powerful, attractive and convincing ideas. Sura 2:249 of the Qur’an says: ‘God replied: “Many a small band has, by God’s grace, vanquished a mighty army. God is with those who endure with fortitude.”’ Bin Laden repeatedly uses this reference. The tradition of revolutionary vanguards in left-wing thought is well established. In the Middle East, the model of a small group of militants using violence to seize control of a state and then being greeted with grateful acclamation is a familiar one to nationalists, pan-Arabists and Islamists alike.
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Abdallah Azzam’s 1987 reference to ‘al-Qaeda’ as a vanguard was mentioned in Chapter One. Azzam returned to the theme again and again:

When the
umma
goes astray… God sends an individual or small group of people who will rescue it from perdition and restore it to the path of truth. This small elite are the ones who carry conviction and ambitions. And an even smaller group from this band are those who flee from the worldly life in order to spread and act upon these ambitions. And an even smaller group from this elite… are those who sacrifice their souls and their blood in order to bring victory to these ambitions and principles.
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It is here that the concepts of jihad and martyrdom, and of the spectacular, are so key. In his book, al-Zawahiri warns: ‘we must mobilize the nation in the battle of Islam against infidelity. We caution against the risk of… Muslim vanguards getting killed
in silence
.’ For by using modern communications the vanguard in self-imposed (and more secure) exile can reach out to the population at large without the possibly compromising, and lengthy, process of mobilization through grassroots organization and activism. In his statement of 7 October 2001, bin Laden specifically referred to the 11 September attackers as a ‘vanguard of Islam… rendered successful by Islam’.
³⁰

There have been many terrorist attacks, some involving the suicide of the attackers, before. But none has been watched live by tens if not hundreds of millions of people. This is the spectacular in its most extreme, mediatized form. This was grasped by the German contemporary composer, Karl Heinz Stockhausen, and the British artist, Damien Hirst, both of whom, to almost universal opprobrium, have described the attack on the Twin Towers as works of art. As Jean Baudrillard pointed out weeks after 11 September: ‘we are far beyond ideology and politics now… the aim is… to radicalize the world by sacrifice’.
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Bin Laden made this point explicitly in a videotaped conversation he held with supporters in November 2001 in Afghanistan. ‘Those young men [the hijackers]… said in deeds… speeches that overshadowed all other speeches made everywhere else in the world. The speeches are understood by Arabs and non-Arabs – even by Chinese.’

The aim is to solve the practical problem posed to the vanguard by hijra and the power of the security forces (or the apathy and reason of the masses) through massive spectacular theatrical violence. This is jihad, the sacrifice for God, the testament of martyrdom, the stunning, impressive horror of the power of faith for the witnesses, and the cataclysmic, millenarian violence that will, through the sheer creative power of destruction, instigate the Muslim world to rise up. It is both the alarum, the call to arms in the cosmic struggle, and the cleansing violence of the battle itself, the unleashing of apocalyptic power which will cause cataclysmic change. From the ashes will rise a new world order. Like theatre, the effect of the attack would have been lost if no one had seen it. And it has been frighteningly effective.

There is no mention of ‘al-Qaeda’ in a British newspaper before 1998. Now it is impossible that anywhere with an internet connection, a satellite dish or a newspaper is untouched in some way by the phenomenon and discourse that bin Laden ‘personifies’. From eastern Indonesia to western Morocco, conflicts are described as ‘jihads’, casualties as shahid, the enemy is
kufr
(unbelief), or the ‘Crusader– Zionist’ alliance. Why?

The discourse associated with al-Qaeda is very contemporary. It is accessible, demotic and needs no great erudition or literacy to understand. Like the propaganda campaigns waged during the Iran–Iraq
war, it evokes events and personalities, many dating back to the seventh century, in the knowledge that they will be understood by the target audience, a large proportion of whom are illiterate.
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The symbolism is powerful but easy to grasp. It offers instant gratification, instant empowerment. Any group or individual can find elements that are useful within it. Local groups can pick and choose from its parts like local country franchises designing their McDonald’s with a maharaja burger in New Delhi and chips with mayonnaise in Holland. Its symbols have even spread outside the Islamic context. Thai Hell’s Angels now sport portraits of bin Laden on their bikes and helmets. Bin Laden has become a counter-cultural symbol, representative of a discourse of dissent.

Before satellite TV, phones and the internet, bin Laden might have been nothing more than a Messianic
mahdi
for a thousand tribesmen. But modern communications technology has allowed exiled radicals to broadcast their views to target populations free from state interference or retribution. Bin Laden’s gripping and powerful pre-recorded video clip, delivered before the US air raids on Afghanistan and shown by al-Jazeera within hours of their inception, epitomized the inadequacy of the response the most powerful state in the world could muster in the face of basic modern telecommunications used well. Concomitants of modern communications technology have also been important. There is now a far greater sense of community among the world’s Muslims, a far more profound sense of the umma than at any time since the Western colonial powers broke up the remains of the Islamic Empire eighty years ago. That has meant a far greater audience for bin Laden’s brand of radicalism too.

The huge variety of local articulations of modern Islamic militancy will become clear over the following chapters. It poses a problem of nomenclature. One of the problems of writing about modern Islamic extremists such as bin Laden is that a vocabulary to describe their ideas has yet to be successfully constructed. Various different terms are used with varying degrees of utility and general comprehension. The label ‘fundamentalism’ was once commonly applied to describe Islamic religious radicals until its obvious limitations (all devout Muslims are in a sense ‘fundamentalists’, in that they believe in the ‘fundamentals’ of their religion and consult the holy texts, seen as authentic and revealed, for guidance) resulted in its widespread rejection. It is now returning to vogue. Islamic radicals (such as Kharijites, the Assassins, or the Wahhabis) are sometimes referred to as ‘reformist’ because they hope to promote reform,
islah
,
of their religion. However, the term can also be used to refer to those moderate Muslims who have reacted to the challenges of modernity by adapting Islam to minimize clashes with the politics and culture of the West. ‘Revivalist’ usually refers to Islamic activists who have hoped to re-create something of the Islamic world’s former glory, often through ‘reformism’ or through millenarian or Messianic movements, usually led by one charismatic individual. Wahhabis and most reformist movements are
salafis
or
salafist
, another broad term describing those Muslims who believe that society should emulate that of Mohammed and the early believers, the
salaf
, as literally described by the Qur’an and the hadith, with great precision. A useful term, often wrongly used, is Islamist, which describes those Muslims who aim to establish a pure (i.e. reformed) Islamic society by means of the appropriation through activism of modern state structures. Salafism, with its rejection of modernity, theoretically runs counter to Islamism, with its exploitation of the modern state, though the end result might be virtually indistinguishable. Some modern Salafist movements have been termed ‘neo-traditional’ as a result.