The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (16 page)

After the defeat and suppression of the assassins in the thirteenth century, the term passed out of use. It was briefly revived in the mid-nineteenth century, by a small group of Turkish conspirators who plotted to depose and perhaps assassinate the sultan. The plot was discovered and the conspirators imprisoned. The term reappeared in Iran, in the so-called Fida’i yan-i Islam, the
fid
’
s
of Islam, a political-religious terrorist group in Tehran, which between 1943, when it began its activities, and 1955, when it was suppressed, carried out a number of political assassinations. After an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the prime minister in October 1955, they were arrested, prosecuted, and their leaders executed. The term was revived again by the militant wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization and, from the 1960s onward, designated terrorist activists of the Palestinian organizations.

In two respects, in their choice of weapons and in their choice of victims, the Assassins were markedly different from their present-day successors. The victim was always an individual, a highly placed political, military, or religious leader who was seen as the source of evil. He, and he alone, was killed. This action was not terrorism in the current sense of that term but rather what is now called targeted assassination. The weapon was always the same: the dagger. The Assassins disdained poison, crossbows, and other weapons that could be used from a distance, and the Assassin did not expect—or, it would seem, even desire—to survive his act, which he believed would ensure him eternal bliss. But in no circumstance did he commit suicide. He died at the hands of his captors. The Assassins were finally defeated by military expeditions which captured their strongholds and bases in both Iran and Syria, the two countries in which they principally operated. It may well be that the present-day assassins will be similarly defeated, but it will be a long and hard road. The medieval Assassins were an extremist sect, very far from mainstream Islam. That is not true of their present-day imitators.

The twentieth century brought a renewal of such actions in the Middle East, though of different types and for different purposes, and terrorism has gone through several phases. During the last years of the British Empire, imperial Britain faced terrorist movements in its Middle Eastern dependencies that represented three different cultures: Greeks in Cyprus, Jews in Palestine, and Arabs in Aden. All three acted from nationalist, rather than religious, motives. Though very different in their backgrounds and political circumstances, the three were substantially alike in their tactics. Their purpose was to persuade the imperial power that staying in the region was not worth the cost in blood. Their method was to attack military and, to a lesser extent, administrative personnel and installations. All three operated only within their own territory and generally avoided collateral damage. All three succeeded in their endeavors.

For the new-style terrorists, the slaughter of innocent and uninvolved civilians is not “collateral damage.” It is the prime objective. Inevitably, the counterattack against the terrorists—who do not of course wear uniforms—also targets civilians. The resulting blurring of distinctions is immensely useful to the terrorists and to their sympathizers.

Thanks to the rapid development of the media, and especially of television, the more recent forms of terrorism are aimed not at specific and limited enemy objectives but at world opinion. Their primary purpose is not to defeat or even to weaken the enemy militarily but to gain publicity and to inspire fear—a psychological victory. The same kind of terrorism was practiced by a number of European groups, notably in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Ireland. Among the most successful and most enduring in this exercise has been the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The PLO was founded in 1964 but became important in 1967, after the defeat of the combined Arab armies in the Six-Day War. Regular warfare had failed; it was time to try other methods. The targets in this form of armed struggle were not military or other government establishments, which are usually too well guarded, but public places and gatherings of any kind, which are overwhelmingly civilian and in which the victims do not necessarily have a connection to the declared enemy. Examples of this tactic include, in 1970, the hijacking of three aircraft—one Swiss, one British, and one American—which were all taken to Amman; the 1972 murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; the seizure in 1973 of the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum and the murder there of two Americans and a Belgian diplomat; the takeover of the Italian cruise ship
Achille Lauro,
in 1985, and the murder of a crippled passenger. Other attacks were directed against schools, shopping malls, discotheques, and even passengers waiting in line at European airports. These and other operations by the PLO were remarkably successful in attaining their immediate objective—the capture of newspaper headlines and television screens. They also drew a great deal of support in sometimes unexpected places, and raised their perpetrators to starring roles in the drama of international relations. Small wonder that others were encouraged to follow their example. The Arab terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s made it clear that they were waging a war for an Arab or Palestinian national cause, not for Islam. Indeed, a significant proportion of the PLO leaders and activists were Christian.

But despite its media successes, the Palestine Libera-tion Organization achieved no significant results where it mattered—in Palestine. In every Arab land but Palestine, the nationalists achieved their purposes—the defeat and departure of foreign rulers and the establishment of national sovereignty under national leaders.

For a while, freedom and independence were used as more or less synonymous and interchangeable terms. The early experience of independence, however, revealed that this was a sad error. Independence and freedom are very different, and all too often the attainment of one meant the end of the other, and the replacement of foreign overlords by domestic tyrants, more adept, more intimate, and less constrained in their tyranny.

There was an urgent, growing need for a new explanation of what was wrong, and a new strategy for putting it right. Both were found, in religious feeling and identity. This choice was not new. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when the European empires were advancing on many of the lands of Islam, the most significant resistance to their advance was religiously inspired and defined. The French in Algeria, the Russians in the Caucasus, the British in India all faced major religious uprisings, which they overcame only after long and bitter fights.

A new phase in religious mobilization began with the movement known in Western languages as pan-Islamism. Launched in the 1860s and ’70s, it probably owed something to the examples of the Germans and the Italians in their successful struggles for national unification in those years. Their Muslim contemporaries and imitators inevitably identified themselves and defined their objectives in religious and communal rather than nationalist or patriotic terms, which at that time were still alien and unfamiliar. But with the spread of European influence and education, these ideas took root and for a while dominated both discourse and struggle in the Muslim lands. Yet the religious identity and loyalty were still deeply felt, and they found expression in several religious movements, notably the Muslim Brothers. With the resounding failure of secular ideologies, they acquired a new importance, and these movements took over the fight—and many of the fighters—from the failed nationalists.

For the fundamentalists as for the nationalists, the various territorial issues are important but in a different, more intractable form. For example, for the fundamentalists in general, no peace or compromise with Israel is possible, and any concession is only a step toward the true final solution—the dissolution of the State of Israel, the return of the land of Palestine to its true owners, the Muslim Palestinians, and the departure of the intruders. Yet this would by no means satisfy the fundamentalists’ demands, which extend to all the other disputed territories—and even their acquisition would only be a step toward the longer, final struggle.

Much of the old tactic was retained, but in a significantly more vigorous form. Both in defeat and in victory, the religious terrorists adopted and improved on the methods pioneered by the nationalists of the twentieth century, in particular the lack of concern at the slaughter of innocent bystanders. This unconcern reached new proportions in the terror campaign launched by Usama bin Ladin in the early 1990s. The first major example was the bombing of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998. In order to kill twelve American diplomats, the terrorists were willing to slaughter more than two hundred Africans, many of them Muslims, who happened to be in the vicinity. In its issue immediately after these attacks, an Arabic-language fundamentalist magazine called
Al-Sir
t al-Mustaq
m,
published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, expressed its mourning for the “martyrs” who gave their lives in these operations and listed their names, as supplied by the office of Al-Qa‘ida in Peshawar, Pakistan. The writer added an expression of hope “that God would . . . reunite us with them in paradise.” The same disregard for human life, on a vastly greater scale, underlay the actions in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

A significant figure in these operations was the suicide terrorist. In one sense, this was a new development. The nationalist terrorists of the 1960s and ’70s generally took care not to die along with their victims but arranged to carry out their attacks from a safe distance. If they had the misfortune to be captured, their organizations usually tried, sometimes successfully, to obtain their release by seizing hostages and threatening to harm or kill them. Earlier religiously inspired murderers, notably the Assassins, disdained to survive their operations but did not actually kill themselves. The same may be said of the Iranian boy soldiers in the 1980–1988 war against Iraq, who walked through minefields, armed only with a passport to paradise, to clear the way for the regular troops.

The new type of suicide mission in the strict sense of the word seems to have been pioneered by religious organizations like Hamas and Hizbullah, who from 1982 onward carried out a number of such missions in Lebanon and in Israel. They continued through the 1980s and ’90s, with echoes in other areas, for example in eastern Turkey, in Egypt, in India, and in Sri Lanka. From the information available, it would seem that the candidates chosen for these missions were, with occasional exceptions, male, young, and poor, often from refugee camps. They were offered a double reward—in the afterlife, the minutely described delights of paradise; in this world, bounties and stipends for their families. A remarkable innovation was the use of female suicide bombers—by Kurdish terrorists in Turkey in 1996–1999, and by Palestinians from January 2002.