While modernisation has been wedded to secularisation in much of the world, in Muslim society it has gone hand in hand with Islamisation.It is known that the July 7, 2005 cell leader Mohammad Sadique Khan in 2003 met with an Islamic extremist in Pakistan who has since confessed to supplying military equipment to al-Qaeda. Khan also travelled to Malaysia where he was hosted by JI leader Hambali , and was taken to the Philippines to meet and train with other leaders of the group, suspected of carrying out a number of terror attacks including the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005.
In the UK there is Sunni Islam which is divided into many different sects, camps and groups. Two leading ones are “Sufi” (sometimes referred to as “Traditional Islam”) and “non-Sufi” (sometimes referred to as “Revivalist Islam”). For example the staff, publishers and supporters of Q-News are almost invariably committed Sufis, as is the American Muslim evangelist (and convert) who features prominently as a doctrinal point of reference in the magazine’s pages, Hamza Yusuf.
It can be forgotten, amidst endless talk of the rise of Islamism (or of political Islam), that possibly a majority of the world’s Muslims are inspired by (or may even be members of) Sufi orders. In practice this means they will be attached to a recognised teacher – a Sheikh (Arabic) or Pir (Urdu) – who dispenses to them lifelong guidance on faith, spiritual, personal and professional matters.
Some of the most effective Sufi teachers approximate to personal life-coaches, and advice; though providing one-to-one emotional support, counselling.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, are those who abuse the position of authority that comes with being a Sufi teacher. Britain’s Urdu-language newspapers, for example, are full of classified advertisements from Pirs who claim miracle powers from God, and promise to solve a myriad of requests, from passing exams to finding the love of your life – all for an appropriate fee. Others have a strong emotional hold on their followers, who find it difficult to take major decisions without the endorsement of their teacher.
Like many aspects of British Islam, the nature and impact of Sufism is mostly hidden from the public. It has not been studied or researched to any great depth; and no equivalent of British Sufi trade unions or professional bodies with agreed standards and codes of conduct exist to guarantee, regulate, monitor and sanction. This is a legal and professional black hole.
Such aspects of Sufism worry non-Sufi Muslims, who see them as an aberration from their interpretation of Islam. A further doctrinal difference is even more important: non-Sufis see the very idea of attachment to a Sufi teacher as an attempt to impose a clerical hierarchy on Sunni Muslims, where none can exist. Non-Sufi, Sunni Muslims tend to believe that they can learn the faith through books, lectures, seminars, workshops, or by more regular visits to the mosque. Sufis, for their part, also accept that reading books or logging onto websites can convey didactic information about Islam; but they believe that true insight in matters of faith, including anything to do with matters of the spirit and the soul, needs human contact with people who are acknowledged to be both knowledgeable and wise. They point out that Sufi authority is transmitted via an established, historically-grounded hierarchy: teachers can give advice only when they have received permission to do so from their own teachers, who belong to a lineage that traces itself from the first generations of Muslims.
Sufis also regard the other side as being austere, devoid of an appreciation of culture and enjoyment, and preoccupied to an unhealthy degree with political power and control (all well-founded judgments). For them, one of the more worrying aspects of the MCB is that its more influential affiliates all have theological roots in anti-Sufi Islamism, drawing inspiration from people – such as the Pakistani Islamist Abul A’la Maududi or Egypt’s Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood – who actively campaigned against what for their part they saw as Sufi authoritarianism. These affiliates include organisations like the Muslim Association of Britain, the UK Islamic Mission and the Islamic Society of Britain.
For all that divides them, Q-News (and British Sufis more generally) and the traditionalist affiliates have many things in common. Like literalist reading of the Qur’an committed to the idea that a single, faith-based identity is more important for Muslims than any other type of descriptive label.
Plus both are genuinely struggling to come to terms with modernity and to understand how to handle difference and pluralism within Islam, as well as between Muslims and the world around them. In Pakistan, Sufis (represented by the Fuad Nahdi of Q-News) are themselves talented and accomplished journalists, which in itself carries a lot of weight among reporters and editors. The mature understanding of many more Sufis of how the modern press in a plural society works has helped them to nurture good media relationships.
Recently, there has been an upsurge in the global discourse involving moderate Muslims and moderate Islam. This issue is complicated not only by the U.S.-led West's attempts to seek out the moderates in the Islamic world but also by the diverse set of groups in Muslim states who claim to be the upholders of moderate Islam. What is curious in all of this is not the Western demand for moderation but the ample Muslim supply of moderation.
There are at least four different types of Muslims who advance themselves as the adherents of moderate Islam. They are moderate Islamists, traditional Muslims, liberal Muslims and certain moderate Islamic regimes. An intense struggle will take place over ownership of moderate and authentic Islam in the course of the next decade.
Islamic extremism and violence today are being funded particularly by people in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's first and second largest oil exporters. Both countries are now awash in money and, no matter what the controls, some of this cash is surely getting to unsavory groups and individuals.
Fouad Ajami, a prominent Arab-American scholar, referred to the "spiritual emptiness" that feeds Islamism in a recent article in U.S. News and World Report. He points out that the London bombers are the offspring of Muslim immigrants who came to the West, the land of bilad al-kufr, the land of unbelief. Their children received an education and enjoyed a general prosperity that would not have been unavailable to them in their homelands.
And yet, says Ajami, these western-born Muslims occupy a "no-man's land, on the fault line between the civilization of Islam that they did not know and the civilization of the West to which they did not fully belong."
A Short History of the Current Jihad
In the last two decades of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, the Mongols indeed blazed through Asia. Cities were razed to the ground, inhabitants tortured without mercy, sometimes enemies were buried alive - more commonly they were decapitated.
The Jihadist ‘movement’ started to take form as a reaction to the Mongol invasion and particularly , Ibn Taymiya's distinction between so called true and false Muslims.
Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) developed Ibn Taymiya's distinction between true and false Muslims to deem non-Islamists to be non-Muslims and then declare jihad on them.
The jihadist movement of radical Muslims however also has been splintered and fragmented along ideological, geographic, personality and social lines. Sunni-oriented, doctrinaire jihadis - those ideologues who have used violence against both their own governments , and more recently also US and European targets. The there also the jihadis, who struggle to redeem land considered to be part of the House of Islam from non-Muslim rule or occupation, like Palestinian Hamas and Jihad, and Lebanon's Hezbollah, or Party of God.
Following Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, jihadis started to assemble from around the world. A Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, became founder of the theorist of global jihad in the 1980s, judging each Muslim exclusively by his contribution to jihad, and making jihad the salvation of Muslims and Islam. This extremism suggests that the Muslim world is going through a phase, one that must be endured and overcome, comparable to analogously horrid periods in Germany, Russia, and China.
Al-Qaeda however differs from such groups as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, which aim to establish fundamentalist Islamic states. In fact, Devji contends, Al-Qaeda, with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action, actually has more in common with multinational corporations, antiglobalization activists, and environmentalist and social justice organizations. Bin Laden and his lieutenants view their cause as a response to the oppressive conditions faced by the Muslim world rather than an Islamist attempt to build states.
Al-Qaeda culls diverse symbols and fragments from Islam’s past in order to legitimize its global war against the "metaphysical evil" emanating from the West. The most salient example of this assemblage, Devji argues, is the concept of jihad itself, which Al-Qaeda defines as an "individual duty" incumbent on all Muslims, like prayer. Although medieval Islamic thought provides precedent for this interpretation, Al-Qaeda has deftly separated the stipulation from its institutional moorings and turned jihad into a weapon of spiritual conflict.
Historically, Salafism-Wahhabism allied itself with the ruling Saud family and Western states, including the United States. It is worth mentioning that in the 1980s the United States and the Saudi royal family assembled and financed a large army of Arab and Muslim volunteers and veterans in Afghanistan. Bin laden was Saudi Arabia's point man during the Afghan jihad.
The rupture within Salafism-Wahhabism occurred after 1991 following the American intervention in the Arabian Peninsula to expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait. The royal family's decision to sanction the permanent stationing of U.S. troops in the kingdom enraged the religious sensibilities of many Salafis and Wahhabis like bin Laden and led them to rebel against both the House of Saud and its American "masters." American intervention in the Arabian Peninsula was the catalyst that set bin Laden and his radical Saudi cohorts on their current journey. The most visible changes in the Muslim world today include the fragmentation of traditional as well as fundamentalist forms of authority.
But many people in the Middle East condemn al Qaeda but still oppose the Americans. Earlier they saw ‘Apostate Muslim rulers’ standing in the way of their goal of establishing an Islamic government based upon Shariah, or Islamic law. It was to this end that al-Jama'a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), and Tanzim al-Jihad (Islamic Jihad), led by current Al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri, collaborated on the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. (Jama'a al-Islamiya is not associated with the Indonesian group of the same name who recently immolated Bali for a second time.) In fact the majority of jihadis have been religious nationalists whose fundamental goal was to effect change in their own society. Next the eclipse of the jihadis had to do with military defeat, but it was also the inevitable result of intellectual poverty.
Confident over their victory against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, what had become transnationalist jihadists by now, believed that the United States would flee the battlefield after two or three serious blows. However while the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has angered many Muslims, the terrorist movement remains largely unpopular for a number of reasons. One, most Muslims disagree with the use of violence to affect political and cultural change.
Thus the vocabulary left in the jihadist dictionary is paramilitary action. They try to compensate for the paucity of original ideas by marching to war.
The new generation that recently caught the attention like in England and also in the Netherlands don’t even speak the language of origin. They speak French, they speak Dutch, they speak English, studied, computing, yet have a sense of acculturedness. Neo-fundamentalism- Salafism, Wahhabism, whatever it is called, catches their attention- consider the Islam of their grandparents, not true Islam. By assaulting democratic countries, and casually murdering fellow Muslims, violent Islamism however will attract increased opposition from within at least in W.Europe.
Thus far from hammering a deadly nail in the coffin of terror, Iraq now appears to have become a recruiting tool, if not yet a recruiting ground, for militant jihadist causes and anti-American voices. And today, Iraq is starting to replace Afghanistan as the training ground for the next or second generation of “professionalized” jihadis and that it provides them with the opportunity to enhance their technical skills.
At the moment, the major powers in much of Iraq are Shiite militias like the Badr Brigade, and the Peshmerga militias of the Kurds in the North. Then there is the "Mahdi" Army (see further down on this website), the militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and while it's been out of the headlines since fighting pitched battles with US forces last year for control of Najaf, it appears as strong as ever in Sadr City, an almost completely Shiite section of Baghdad with 2 million people.
Although it is difficult to assess his real military strength, Zarqawi thus is not a figment of the American imagination. And as one of his operatives told an Arab journalist, Zarqawi aims at not just expelling the Americans from Iraq but also using the country as a way station to overthrow impious Arab regimes and reestablish the caliphate; “We are fighting in Iraq but our sights are on other places, like Jerusalem.”
Although we know that Zarqawi exists, we know little else about the structure of his organization and its operational capabilities. But we clearly know that homegrown Iraqis represent the overwhelming number of fighters and have led the resistance. The unfolding Iraqi struggle is political because many Iraqis are deeply divided over the future direction of their country and the American military presence. In the end, the future of Zarqawi and his associates will ultimately depend on the Iraqis’ willingness and ability to compromise and establish an inclusive, independent government that is capable of securing the peace, which at the moment does not seem promising.
Also UN chief Kofi Annan says Iraq has become what he calls an even greater terrorist centre than Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, as attacks attributed to al-Qaida's wing surges in Baghdad and the west of the country. Annan told the BBC on Monday that many young Muslims feel angry and Annan added: "One used to be worried about Afghanistan being the centre of terrorist activities. My sense is that Iraq has become a major problem and in fact is worse than Afghanistan."
The Jordanian militant and leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been given the task of exporting the Jihad, or holy war, to the Middle East and Europe, as has been revealed based on a letter last year from by Al Qaida nr.2. In fact Al-Zarqawi arrived in Afghanistan in 1989, after the Soviet army had abandoned the country, where he met al-Maqdisi, a well known intellectual, who introduced him to radical Salafism. In 1993 al-Maqdisi and al-Zarqawi went to Zarqa where they planned to overthrow the Jordanian regime. They were arrested and imprisoned for five years. In 1999 when he was released from prison, al-Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan. In 2000 he met Osama bin Laden who offered him and his followers the opportunity to join Al Qaida. Al-Zarqawi was able to convince the Taliban to fund a small camp in Herat near the border with Iran. The camp was frequented by Palestinians, Jordanians and Syrians. It forged suicide bombers. The fall of the Taliban regime shattered Al Qaida. In January 2002 the Kurdish secret service told the US that al-Zarqawi was Al Qaida’s man in Iraqi Kurdistan. With Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri trapped in Pakistan’s tribal belt, al-Zarqawi became the new icon of anti-Western struggle. All jihadists scattered around the world wanted to be related to al-Zarqawi. Funds and future suicide bombers flocked to Iraq to join his group. He waited until August 2003 to enter the fighting, after the end of the official war, when the Shia insurgency was already in full swing and the population had turned against the occupation. From August 2003 until December 2004, when Osama bin Laden nominated him leader of Al Qaida in Iraq, he sought recognition from bin Laden because he lacked the legitimacy to rally the Sunni population. Right from the beginning he was determined to drive a wedge between Sunnis and Shias to prevent them from uniting in a national front. At the same time he became fully committed to the fight against the US.
The tactics of suicide attacks, kidnappings and beheadings of Western hostages strengthened and confirmed his status. Many young Arabs today say they would welcome an opportunity to go to Iraq and resist the Americans. Far from being al-Qaida–type fanatics, these young men had not been politicized before the American-led invasion and had not joined any Islamist, let alone paramilitary, organization. They viewed the American war and military presence in Iraq as an alien encroachment on the ummah…
Although the majority of foreign fighters in Iraq today, come from countries in the Persian Gulf, mainly Saudi Arabia and Yemen, many others are from North African countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, and Jordan. Moreover, scores of young Muslims from European countries, mainly France and Britain, have already fought in Iraq, with a larger pool of potential recruits searching for ways to get there. There exists a broad representative sample of recruits from many countries, including both militant Islamists and zealous young men. The problem, however, is that the latter will most likely be ideologically transformed by their experience in Iraq, as their counterparts were in Afghanistan. The baptism of blood and fire, coupled with socialization with hard-core jihadis, will make them vulnerable to militancy. According to emerging evidence, fighters returning from Iraq have already been implicated in violent actions in their native countries.
Will the tragic phenomenon of the Afghan Arabs be replaced by that of the “Iraqi Arabs?” This possibility cannot be disregarded because although the number of Arab fighters is reported to be in the low thousands, it could quadruple if Iraq descends into full sectarian strife or if neighboring countries open a wider crack in their vast porous border with Iraq. A recent assessment by the CIA concluded that since the American invasion, Iraq had in many ways assumed the role played by Afghanistan during the rise of al-Qaida during the 1980s and 1990s for militants from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries.
Despite all this overwhelming official evidence, there is little recognition, let alone acknowledgment, among Bush administration officials that the expansion of the war against al-Qaida has damaged America’s image, reputation, and standing in the Muslim world as well as threatened international peace. This is well documented with hundreds of surveys, polls, and reports, and it has given militancy a new lease on life. One of my book’s major findings is that contrary to the received wisdom, the dominant response to al-Qaida in the Muslim world was very hostile, and few activists, let alone ordinary Muslims, embraced its global jihad. Al-Qaida faced a two-front war, internally and externally, with the interior front threatening its very existence.