Wow this book Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politcs by Emmanuel Sivan is the shiznit, going to the length of actually reading all those untranslated Islamist books, newspapers, and letters from prison and summarizing and quoting them in English so you don’t have to. The book covers the movement up to the publication date of 1985--I have the enlarged 1990 edition but I don’t know how much he’s added. I’m on Qutb in prison right now.
"Resolve the Israel/Palestine problem" has always struck me as a particularly unserious answer to what to do about terrorism instead of what we are doing, because it is based on a series of false assumptions:
1) That we can suddenly just do that at will whenever we want (as if Carter and Clinton were pretty much screwing around and not really trying all those years); 2) That there is some "solution" for Israel that Islamists would accept short of a "final" one anyway; 3) That this would not look like, in fact be, a type of appeasement that would encourage more terrorism, given that Islamists have plenty of other demands on their list, including equally impossible ones, like for example the return of "Andalusia" to Islamic rule; 4) That the Palestinian cause is itself a true "root cause" of terrorism (rather than merely one of a laundry list of complaints against the West that also demonstrates for Islamists the complete illegitimacy of their own rulers as weaklings and "collaborators"), a self-serving and deeply ethnocentric outlook that theorizes Islamism as purely and unthinkingly reactive to U.S. policy alone, and places this issue front and center primarily because it was the only remotely relevant one our own intellectual elite happened already to be preoccupied with and consider itself on the right side of at the time that 9/11 occurred (thus conveniently ventriloquizing the Western left’s political agenda to the post-colonial other in a way that left its own hands sparkling clean).
And here is some confirmation of how false that last assumption really is. One chapter in the book covers in some detail the context of Qutb’s break with nationalism (there had been a loose alliance between Islamists and secular pan-Arab nationalists in opposition to colonialism) and declaration that the modern Arab world the nationalists--primarily Nasser and the Ba’ath Party--had made was jahiliyya (which had up until then been a historical term referring to the state of ignorance before the advent of Islam), which in turn facilitated the crucial ideological move of declaring all opponents of Islamism apostate. Sivan reports:
During the last decade [of the 14th Century of Islam] a spate of memoirs told the story of Nasser’s political jails. In one of them, a former inmate recounts:
In May 1967, during the crisis weeks preceding the Six-Day War, the authorities tried to enlist the support of the political prisoners to the jihad against Israel. Some [Muslim Brethren] inmates of the notorious Abu Za’bal prison camp resolved to voice their unreserved support and even published a wall newspaper to that effect.
Yet a group of young inmates, led by Sheikh ‘Ali Abduh Isma’il, argued that the State is infidel and so is whoever supports it. Israel and Nasser were both, for them, but two variations of tyranny, both totally inimical to Islam; they fight each other for worldly reasons but "in infidelity they are just one bunch." Reported to camp authorities by stool pigeons, Isma’il and his followers were thrown into solitary confinement, to live on dry bread and a little water. They refused, however, to renounce their views and were later to be remanded to ordinary cells where they kept to themselves, praying in their own group, refusing to have anything to do with Muslim Brethren who aided the anti-Israel jihad, and thereby establishing the first cell of the Takfir wa-Hijra (the major terrorist organization of the 1970’s).The frame of mind of these and other inmates is highlighted by letters sent in late May from the Military Prison by a Muslim Brother:
There is a lot of talk about war. Yet who is it who is going to fight? Those who prostrate themselves before idols, those who worship other deities than Allah? … Verily, God is not about to succor in battle people who have forsaken Him … Can He bestow victory upon people who have been fighting Him, His religion, and His true believers, massacring and torturing them, inflicting upon them imprisonment and humiliation? …
And in a letter to his wife:
It is inconceivable that those who abolished the religious courts (in 1957)--with the purpose that no legal recourse would be made to the Shari’a--that they would win this war. And do you think that those who "developed" al-Azhar into a secular type university (in 1961) in order that it deviate from its original mission and dilute the substance of its teaching, that such people could triumph? ... Can those who massacred Muslims in Yemen by napalm bombs and poison gas … and allied themselves with infidel Russia … have the upper hand?
No wonder that the June 1967 debacle was greeting in the prison camps with a mixture of shock and gloating …
Such reactions are cast into relief when read against the long-term commitment of the Muslim Brethren (hereafter MB) to the Palestinian cause since the 1930s, culminating in their massive participation in the 1948 War and violent opposition to the 1949 Armistice Agreement (as a result of which they were driven underground for the first time). In the mid-50’s, when they were persecuted by Nasser, their erstwhile ally, one of the major accusations they hurled against him was that he had neglected the question of Palestinians and was in effect preparing the terrain for a tacit rapprochement by stages with Israel …
What is important is the state of mind of the prisoners two years after the onset of Nasser’s crackdown upon their organization. By 1967 the picture was entirely different. Nor was the Abu Za’bal case an isolated episode; it rather ushered in a brand new attitude among Muslim radicals toward the anti-Israel jihad predicated upon a reordering of priorities. The Islamic Liberation party (which tried to instigate a coup d’etat in Egypt in 1974) would even argue that the fight for liberation of Sinai cannot be considered a jihad, for its aim is not the establishment upon earth of a unified Muslim state. Well before Sadat’s peace initiative, this and other groups made desertion from the "infidel" Egyptian army one of their major slogans. Shukri Mustafa (Abduh Isma’il’s successor as leader of the Takfir group) responded thus to his judges’s question as to what his followers would do if Israel attacked Egypt: "If the Jews or others come, our movement would not take part in combat in the ranks of the Egyptian army. We would rather escape to a safe place … for by no means can the Arab-Jewish conflict be considered an Islamic warfare."
Even the Syrian MB, who miss no opportunity to remind President Assad of his responsibility for the loss of the Golan Heights and the crushing of Palestinian resistance in Lebanon, adhere to the same order of priorities. Their military commander in Aleppo, Husni ‘Abbu, had the following exchange with the tribunal in his 1979 trial:
Q. Don’t your terrorist actions serve Israel?
A. They serve Islam and the Muslims and not Israel. What we want is to rid this country of impiety.
Q. Why don’t you fight against Israel?
A. Only when we shall have finished purging our country of godlessness shall we turn against Israel.The most comprehensive exposition of the rationale for this stand can be found in the book written by ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj, ideologue of the jihad group which assassinated Sadat:
There are some who say that the jihad effort should concentrate nowadays upon the liberation of Jerusalem. It is true that the liberation of the Holy Land is a legal precept binding upon every Muslim … but let us emphasize that the fight against the enemy nearest to you has precedence over the fight against the enemy farther away. All the more so as the former is not only corrupted but a lackey of imperialism as well … In all Muslim countries the enemy has the rein of power. The enemy is the present rulers. It is hence, a most imperative obligation to fight these rulers. This Islamic jihad requires today the blood and sweat of every Muslim.
…What motivated Qutb to call for a clean slate? What made such a break with the MB past attractive for radicals in the 1960’s and 1970s? Both for him and for his followers the prison years were the crucial, formative experience. Not only did incarceration and brutal torture breed hatred, desire for revenge, and alienation, the experience forced them to face up to the realities of the new nationalist, military-controlled state: a state characterized by sincere and combative anti-imperialism--hence not to be impugned as "collaborationist" as the old upper-class rulers used to be. The elite of this state was plebeian in origin and thus able to address the masses in their own idiom; it was military in profession with all that implies in terms of relative efficiency, cult of order, and penchant for ruthlessness. Consequently, it dawned on the radicals that not only does the danger to Islam come from within, it now comes in a manner so effective, so insidious, and seemingly hard to fault.
The scale and efficiency of the 1954/55 Nasserist crackdown on the MB, the dismantling of subsequent attempts to reorganize, the manipulation of public opinion against the MB--all this must have intimated to the latter that the rules of the game were being rewritten by the new powers-that-be and that these redoubtable adversaries could play hard and fast …
MB leader Hasan ‘Ashmawi, living clandestinely in various Egyptian localities during the mid-1950’s, recounts in his memoirs his feelings of almost total isolation, cut off as he was from his support base, and with the rest of the membership falling one after the other into cleverly set traps. He notes the fear the ever-present intelligence services spread among the previously sympathetic populace, and the ease with which the common people were converted to support the regime by propaganda campaigns, plebiscites, referenda, and other "distortions of democracy." Ironically, in this as in other MB writings, a measure of nostalgia creeps in for the good old days of the relatively liberal monarchy, which was more respectful of legality, less efficient in intelligence gathering and in repression. This (admittedly partial) democracy had now been converted into a blatant tyranny. "Former rulers used to maltreat their adversaries, but not until the revolutionary regime have we seen rulers who bring the wife and children of an opponent and torture them in his presence," notes a prisoner. "Democratic life which had allowed for a freedom of political activity was definitely done away with," decries another Egyptian. "The present regimes are animated by vicious hatred of Islam. No ideological dialogue with them is possible, for their sole answer is recourse to repression." …
It is the farewell to Pan-Arabism and the concentration upon the "jahiliyya within" that account for the change of attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. They well explain the gloating of the radicals in 1967 at the misfortune of the regime, the shock--for there certainly was one even among MB prisoners--related to what the defeat did to the people (still judged as capable of being redeemed) and to territories of Dar al-Islam. The struggle for their reconquest figured, however, very low on the radicals’ order of priorities.
That such attitudes could persist, as we have seen, well through the 1970s and the early 1980s is all the more remarkable as many of the young recruits who flocked to the militant Islamic student associations (Jama’at) and to terrorist groups, did so as a result of soul-searching set off by the trauma of June 1967. Though haunted by the defeat, those new disciples learned to see in it nothing but a symptom; it is the root cause of the illness they had to strike at.
Thus the virulent turn the Islamist cause took in Nasser’s prisons, the declaration of jahiliyya and apostasy against other Muslims, presupposes the belief that Israel is an artefact of the real problem, which is the Islamic illegitimacy of the various rulers of the Muslim world.
I’m aware that the Palestinian cause was Islamized in the late 1980’s, along with the rest of the Muslim world (though slightly later, in the wake of the first Intifada), but it doesn’t look as if any of that is covered in the 1990 ed. of this book. I do wonder how this change was seen by Islamist strategists. It is clear that the leaders of the Arab world cherish the Palestinian cause primarily for its political utility to them, but it’s hard to know for sure whether Islamists are trying to wrest away that method of self-legitimation from the Arab states, or merely trying to use the desire for such legitimation by "jahiliyya" rulers to their own advantage while maintaining their own agenda (it would parallel their convoluted relationship with Saudi Arabia, for example).
In any event, the more I read, the more comically reductive the "why they hate us" school of thought seems. If it were funny at all, I mean.
DC said: it seems to me that "resolve the israel/palestine problem" is a lot like the current administration's iraq/democracy venture. both presuppose that mideastern terrorism against the west is animated by a root source of unhappiness, and that dealing with that unhappiness will sap the fire from the terrorist movements. (sure, there will always be lots of people unhappy with any solution in palestine; but in some sense that doesn't matter. a real peace would show up the holdouts as crazy freaks and deprive them of whatever popular support they may have.)
focusing on the israel/palestine problem has the virtue of actually listening to what many of the people involved themselves say is the root cause.
this is also its vice
I replied: presuppose that mideastern terrorism against the west is animated by a root source of unhappiness, and that dealing with that unhappiness will sap the fire from the terrorist movements.
The democratization strategy isn't really about addressing some nebulous quality of "unhappiness" though. Without looking up quotes I'd take your word that the Bush administration or its boosters may have dumbed it down like this for public consumption from time to time; without question they've done a terrible job overall of explaining it to people. But the point of it is how the democratic process or the lack thereof affects how opposition groups actually think, plan, and function (a point which I find is vividly illustrated in the quoted passages above), and also how much we need the kind of transparency in foreign governments that a democratic structure can provide (i.e., a free press, accountability in government, elected officials that view public office as a job rather than an ongoing life or death struggle to hold onto power) in order to have enforceable treaties and agreements on issues like WMD's, policing of transnational terrorist groups, etc.
focusing on the israel/palestine problem has the virtue of actually listening to what many of the people involved themselves say is the root cause.
Which people, though? I haven't yet come across any Islamists who pretend that Israel is their sole or even biggest complaint. And most articles and interviews I've seen with Arabs and Muslims living in the Middle East mention Israel as only one of a host of problems in their region and complaints against the U.S. relevant to the advent of Islamist terrorism. The hypothesis truly does seem to be the property of Western-based academics and activists (and the political organizations claiming to represent Palestinians with which they tend to connect), but maybe I'm missing something here.
DC replied: i had the impression that it tended to come up in any discussion between arab or muslim sources and western commentators. but maybe only as a rote complaint that nobody really believes is the main problem ...
i think democratization would be great if it works; it just seems at least as hard as convincing two bodies of people who complain constantly of how sick they are of killing each other all the time that maybe they should stop.
the most intriguing justification along those lines that i've heard for the iraq venture is that access to iraqi oil would relieve our dependency on saudi oil and enable us to call the saudis to task for the repressive aspects of their regime. it's an interesting argument-- and making "blood for oil!" into a virtue appeals to my sense of the perverse-- but i haven't heard many people make it.
I replied: I don't mean to trivialize how important an issue Israel is for the Arab nations; it's right at the top of the list of complaints about the West for people living in the region. But does anyone there really think it's the cause of the Islamist political agenda and terrorism? When you ask that question you hear about a lot more than Israel. The emergence of Islamism seems to be much more a response to a host of problems with post-colonial developments relating to modernization and political legitimacy in the Middle East; the West is implicated in these problems in many ways (and in the form of the response, for that matter), but for the most part these problems are embedded in internal politics there and could not be resolved by simple withdrawal by the West (assuming that were even possible). If Israel were to simply disappear off the face of the earth, in other words, or had never existed, I’m not certain anything would be very different. There would still be corrupt oil kingdoms and brutal dictatorships and economic underdevelopment and a total disconnect between partially-Westernized social and economic organization and traditional moral values and customs, etc., etc., and no way out in sight.
It sounds like I’m talking about “unhappiness” again, though doesn’t it? I think I resist looking at it that way because the way the idea that terrorism is related to poverty and so forth tends to be presented in the debate on these issues usually strikes me as counterproductive and obfuscating. Like there are these little bugs that live on my porch, and if you poke them, they roll up into little balls, but then if you leave them alone for a while they relax. And that’s the way a lot of the “root cause” talk sounds to me, as if, well if you poke an Arab, he just has to go blow himself up, doesn’t he? As if it’s a completely natural reactive kind of thing, and the people involved really are the complete simpletons or savages such a model implies. Whereas instead it’s so manipulated and ideologized, that whole movement; there’s nothing natural or automatic about it.
the most intriguing justification along those lines that i've heard for the iraq venture is that access to iraqi oil would relieve our dependency on saudi oil and enable us to call the saudis to task for the repressive aspects of their regime.
That would suit me just fine. One of the many reasons I wish we had a better Dem candidate this year is that I don’t really trust Dubya to do that part, and I think it could be done to great effect. But “Bandar Bush” and all that, he’s personal friends with some of those guys, so I don’t know. In fairness, it’s too soon to tell.
a real peace would show up the holdouts as crazy freaks and deprive them of whatever popular support they may have.
Okay, belatedly I think I see your point though; that a peace settlement would marginalize terrorist groups that have been operating there in a similar fashion as political liberalization would. I think that's true, and I think it might also force the leaders of Arab countries to actually accept responsibility for their own failures instead of blaming everything on the international Jewish conspiracy and victimization by the West, etc. Pursuing a peace process there has always been a worthwhile goal on every level I can think of, really. But these benefits are also why other Arab nations have given so much funding to terrorist organizations operating in Israel (well, that and cheap credit with Islamist organizations that might otherwise be threatening them more), and this has certainly been successful so far in preventing a peaceful resolution. I'm not sure how you get from point A to point B there.
DC replied:i agree with your assessment of the inherent barriers to any peace there. as you say, if there were an obvious or easy solution it would already have been tried.