I picked up a remaindered copy of Sacred Rage: the Wrath of Militant Islam by Robin Wright last weekend; it's one of those insta-books that appeared shortly after 9/11. I've gradually realized that avoiding this particular publishing category in the assumption that it was likely to be hysterical and unhelpful was probably a mistake, for one thing because it has meant that I don't know what everybody else believes about Islamism based on that type of publication, and am continually flummoxed and irritated by what seems to me to be the extremely weird and beside-the-point sort of things people say about it in the media and in conversation. But it turns out this is actually a book originally published in 1985 by a journalist who had spent a lot of time in Iran, with a couple of new chapters about Al Qaeda slapped on at the end.
It's from the era people are talking about in publications from the 1990s when they say "Everybody expected the Islamic revolution in Iran and Khomeinism to have huge influence and impact throughout the Muslim world, but then it didn't so much." Not least, it appears, because the Sunni version of Islamism draws heavily on the theology of medieval-era Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyya, who considered Shiism a form of apostasy. So it is that a 1981 conference Wright is warming up to do a chapter on, between Khomeinists and Sunni Islamists from several nations, which he describes as having been unjustly neglected by journalists at the time who only now are beginning to realize how important it was, has apparently been forgotten again, or at least hasn't been mentioned in any of the other more recent books and articles I've read.
The book begins by carefully noting that, even though Khomeini and the Iran-sponsored Shia Islamist group Hizbollah in Lebanon are at the top of the news right now for all of their attacks on Americans, Islamism doesn't really "come from" Iran or Shiism, then goes on to obsess about them anyway, much in the same way a current book might duly note that Islamism isn't merely an emanation of Saudi Arabia or Wahhabism before going on to talk about nothing else. (Incidentally, Wright does not use the term Islamism, which possibly had not yet been coined at the time. Instead he refers to "the Crusade," the nearest English language equivalent to jihad. The question of what effect different linguistic approaches to translating Islamic concepts has on how outsiders understand them would be an interesting one for somebody with a lot more time on their hands than myself). I wonder if the average person picking up this book would notice how it illustrates the contingent and ultimately self-preoccupied way Westerners tend to approach this subject, or simply conclude that Islamism "really" came mostly from Iran. (A book has recently been published on just that theory, actually, tracing it a little further back to mid-20th Century U.S. foreign policy there; it passed across my desk at the library a few weeks ago but I haven't read it).
In any case, we seem to have a persistent not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees problem in grappling with Islamism. It's a little dispiriting to me that, three full years past the point when this ideology finally captured the rapt attention of the Western public, many intelligent and educated people still consider "capturing Osama" and "destroying Al Qaeda" to be the alpha and omega of the war on Islamism and Islamist terrorism. It would of course be beneficial to capture Osama in particular; he is a very charismatic leader and therefore quite useful to the cause. But the primary contribution of Al Qaeda to the movement--that of bumping everything up one organizational tech level in terms of finally figuring out how to make the movement as transnational operationally as it has always been ideologically, in a way that greatly multiplies its effectiveness--is a permanent one that cannot be undone by capturing any number of Al Qaeda members, or even all of them.
There's a default sort of way of thinking about this, which tends to treat Al Qaeda as some kind of extremely insane and evil mafia or James-Bond-style supervillain organization, instead of as merely the latest iteration of a broad political movement that's been forming up for at least 100 years, and a major player in Middle Eastern politics since the late 1960s. I liked this quote Robin Wright uses from Marvin Zonis:
The message from Iran--no matter how bizarre or trivial it sounds on first, second, fourth, or thirty-ninth hearing--is in my opinion the single most impressive political ideology which has been proposed in the 20th Century since the Bolshevik Revolution … If we accept that Bolshevism is a remnant of the 19th Century, then I want to argue that we've only had one good one in the 20th Century--and it's this one … This powerful message will be with us for a very long time--no matter what happens to Ayatollah Khomeini.
… mostly because it partly illustrates why it's hard to talk honestly about how powerful Islamism really is. Clearly there's a bit of a danger that one's abstract admiration for it as an ideological construct--the way it answers every question, and ties up every loose end of Islamic history into a very neat and attractive package, and twists the lens on Islam itself, bringing the background suddenly into the foreground, in an oddly compelling way that makes many say "Ah, yes, this is what is always has been and was supposed to be all along," the way it neatly enlists the logic and rhetoric of secularist revolutionary movements and re-deploys it to denounce their perfidy and failure in the Muslim world--can turn into real approval. Zonis of course was not alone in seeing Khomeinism at the time as an "authentic" Muslim liberatory politics. (Events have largely overtaken that interpretation in the West, but not so much in the East). To me the really interesting question is not why any Muslims in the Middle East have embraced Islamism to the extent of being willing to kill and die for it, but instead, why haven't they all?
I don't really know the answer to that question, but I suspect part of it might lie in how extensively Westernized the Arab and Muslim world already is. And it turns out we're in pretty deep denial about that as well. A friend sent me a link a while back to an essay by Ian Baruma, in which the author, in discussing the civilizational aspects of the Western-Islamist conflict, simply puts Nazism in the "non-Western" category, which allows a fairly interesting discussion of Eastern perceptions of the West to end up a nonsense. What has the Middle Eastern experience with Western secularism actually been? How much does this experience account for Eastern "ignorance" of Western virtues? Because of course Nazism and Communism are no less iterations of Western thought and history for having been ultimately defeated within it. We are accustomed to thinking of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as "ours" because that's the way the Cold War sorted them, when the "other" was the Westernized Soviet Union rather than the East, but in any intellectual honest notion of a "clash of civilizations," Assad and Saddam and Nasser have been "ours" as well, along with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. I do understand the ideological need to define 20th Century Western totalitarianisms as "not us" for the purpose of preserving the gains we've made by defeating them, but it makes for one hell of a big blind spot (and perhaps a crucially enabling one) when discussing Middle Eastern politics in terms of "us" and "them." It also, I think, helps to obscure the obvious influence of the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th Century on Islamist thought; the eerily familiar tone and vocabulary of Islamist rhetoric jumps so clearly off the page when you read unvarnished quotations that you would think this would be impossible to conceal. Yet we still seem to prefer to see Islamists as "medieval" or "savage." I once answered a person who said to me "The terrorists are just not like us, you know," with "No, they're pretty much like us, it's just that they're like the Nazis of us," which certainly ended the conversation. I think we like to think of Nazis as almost supernatural devils too, or the outcome of some unaccountable episode of German mass hysteria, or something local and containable like that, rather than as part of our collective history as Westerners, emanating in a logical way from risks posed by our secular and rationalist world view. Perhaps our habitual trivialization of the Islamist enemy (whether as confined to a single shadowy group, or as consisting of a purely reactive phenomenon that we can somehow control with our own behavior) ultimately serves as a similar type of false comfort.