The appearance is deceiving, and the deception is a dangerous one. The al Qaeda operatives who hijacked four airliners that day, their leaders, and their supporters represented neither Islamic civilization nor the faith of Islam, despite their claims to do so. They served instead a totalitarian ideology known as Islamism, militant Islam, or Islamic totalitarianism. Had the United States treated the attacks as part of a war of civilizations, we would have bolstered the Islamic totalitarian claim to represent and lead the Islamic world, and thus would have strengthened our enemies.
Islamic totalitarianism is a synthesis of the dissident tradition of political activism within Islam and Western totalitarian ideas. The struggle against al Qaeda and the ideology that created it is more a continuation of our parents' and grandparents' wars against fascism and communism than a revival of the Crusades, even though the Islamic totalitarians call their enemies crusaders. Osama bin Ladin is more a Muslim Himmler than a contemporary Saladin. Islamic totalitarianism has a broad appeal in the Islamic world and constitutes a serious threat, both in the Islamic world and in the West.
Islamic political activism
Islamic activism, of which totalitarianism is the contemporary form, is one of three political tempers or attitudes that developed in the early centuries of Islamic history. Because the Prophet Muhammad acted as a political leader and military commander, Islam confronted the problem of political power from its beginning.
At Muhammad's death in 632, the Muslim community had to establish new political institutions as well as codify and transmit his religious legacy. Most Muslims accepted the political structures that eventually evolved, most importantly the Abbasid caliphate, as fully legitimate, though the institutions, practices, and symbolic forms of government owed more to pre-Islamic Iran than to Muhammad's rule in Medina.
This pragmatic temper dominated the political order of the Islamic world. Some Muslims believed that no human political institution could reach the moral standard Muhammad had defined and took a quietist stance: avoiding politics, minimizing interaction with the state, and focusing on their personal spiritual concerns. Others, including Sunnis and Shias, believed that the existing political order had become so corrupt that Islam required political action, the destruction of the existing political and social order, and the creation of a new polity to permit Muslims to live in accordance with the aspirations of their faith.
In the activist vocabulary, jihad, which literally means "striving" and has a wide variety of connotations, refers to warfare as the mechanism of establishing this just society. The activists maintain that by participating in jihad, Muslims guarantee their own futures in paradise and bring about paradise on earth as well. Failing to do so constitutes shirking a fundamental Muslim duty. The most important activist theorist, Ibn Taymiyyah (1263--1328), developed this view of jihad and its corollary, takfir. The doctrine of takfir, excommunication, holds that one Muslim may define another as a kafir (infidel), if he fails to undertake the duties of a Muslim, including jihad. Political activism first emerged, in an inchoate form, in the assassinations of the third and fourth caliphs, 'Uthman and Ali, in 656 and 661. Activist movements have appeared consistently throughout Islamic history; the Nizari Isma'ilis, known in the West as the Assassins, were one. In some cases, empires were conquered by activists, most notably the Almoravids and Almohads in Spain and North Africa in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries and the Safavis in Iran in the sixteenth century. But when they did so, their governments consistently resembled the regimes that they overthrew.
Like other revolutionary movements, premodern and modern, Islamic political activism has consistently devoured its own, and inevitably so. As a utopian ideology it has an agenda it cannot fulfill, for it cannot deliver paradise on earth. The manifest imperfection of the human condition makes utopian ideologies continually tempting. Karl Popper, among the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, explains their appeal in The Open Society and Its Enemies: "They give expression to a deep-felt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideals and to our dreams of perfection." Because Islam encompasses politics, some
Muslims will always seek perfection through politics. Islamic political activism has been, and will be, a persistent force in the politics of the Islamic world, where, historically, it has been only sporadically successful.
The encounter with the West
The Islamic world's encounter with the modern West, however, gave an enormous impetus to Islamic political activism and engendered Islamic totalitarianism. The Western totalitarianisms developed out of the political, social, economic, and cultural turbulence produced by the Industrial Revolution. The Islamic world suffered an even greater disruption. Urbanization, industrialization, global communication, and economic integration produced dramatic social and economic disruption. But Western political, military, and economic superiority, which was obvious by the beginning of the nineteenth century, challenged not only the political and economic structures of the Islamic world but the cultural assumptions of most Muslims. Muslims regarded their worldly political success, marked by continuous territorial expansion, as one of the proofs of the superiority of Islam. In the early modern era, three Muslim empires, the Ottoman, Safavi (Azerbaijan), and Mughal (North India), were among the greatest powers of the world. By 1800, the Safavi empire had disappeared entirely, the Mughals were only figureheads, and the Ottoman empire had become the "sick man" of Europe, surviving only because the European powers could not decide how to partition it. Many Muslims marveled at the power of the West and sought to explain it. Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar, the ruler of Iran, wrote of the English after he visited Britain in 1874: "One sees and comprehends that they are a great people, and that the Lord of the Universe has bestowed upon them power and might, sense and wisdom, and enlightenment. Thus it is that they have conquered a country like India, and hold important
possessions in America and elsewhere in the world." This statement shows the awe that Western power created in the minds of many Muslims. With that awe came self-doubt and resentment. How could Europeans have achieved such supremacy? How, in the face of it, could Muslims maintain the superiority of their faith? Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838--1897), the founder of modern Islamic political activism and thus the precursor of Islamic totalitarianism, asserted that the abandonment of Islamic practices weakened the Islamic world:"The times have been so cruel and life so hard and confusing that some Muslims ... have lost patience and assert ... that Islamic principles are their oppressors and then give up using religious principles of justice
in their actions. They resort, even, to the protection of a foreign power. ... Actually the schisms and divisions which have occurred in Muslim states originate only from the failure of rulers who deviate from the solid principles upon which the Islamic faith is built and stray from the road followed by their early ancestors.
Certainly, opposition to solidly based precepts and wandering away from customary ways are the very actions that are most damaging to power. When those who rule Islam return to the rules of their law and model their conduct upon that practiced by early Muslims, it will not be long before God gives them extensive power and bestows strength upon them comparable to that wielded by the orthodox caliphs, who were leaders of the faith." This passage, written in 1884, sounds strikingly contemporary. Al-Afghani's call for a return to the "solidly based precepts and customary ways" of the early Islamic empires did not represent a conservative
impulse, though he presented it as such, but a radical one. By implication al-Afghani condemned all the Muslim governments of his time for compromising with the West and attempting to develop modern institutions to compete with Western powers. Though ultimately directed against the West, his program required a radical alteration of Muslim institutions and polities. In the twentieth century, this program for radical change became Islamic totalitarianism.
Islamic totalitarian doctrines :
Three major thinkers brought about this transformation: Sayyid Abu al-'Ala' Mawdudi (1903--1979) of Pakistan, Sayyid Qutb (1906--1966) of Egypt, and Ruhollah Khomeini (1902--1989) of Iran. A brief examination of their views reveals how they combined Islamic activism with modern Western ideas, most importantly Lenin's concept of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat.Lenin conceived of a political party that would lead the working class into revolution, creating a revolutionary consciousness. Mawdudi seized upon this idea and established the Jama'at-I Islami in Pakistan to serve as such a party. Mawdudi sought not proletarian revolution but the establishment of an Islamic state. Qutb and Khomeini borrowed this concept from Mawdudi, Khomeini established the Islamic Republic Party in Iran for this purpose. The biographies of these three ideologues also show that they had a foot in each world. Only Khomeini had a traditional Islamic religious education; the title of ayatollah by which he is generally known indicates that he reached the highest rank of the hierarchy of Shia ulama (community of learned men). For all his traditional appearance, Khomeini was not a traditional thinker. He drew on the works of Mawdudi and Qutb as well as traditional Shia texts. The Iranian author and journalist Amir Taheri asserts that Khomeini learned to hate the Jews from Nazi propaganda broadcasts in Arabic. Khomeini's doctrine of the "government of the jurist," though presented in traditional terms, broke ground in several ways. Although the Shia ulama had been increasingly assertive in politics since the late seventeenth century, none had claimed the right to govern for themselves. In the 1920s, the ulama of Iran had demanded that Reza Khan take the throne as Reza Shah rather than establish a republic. A generation later, Khomeini maintained that the ulama, led by a supreme religious leader, should actually govern in its own name. None of the other leading ayatollahs accepted this doctrine; the late Elie
Kedourie labeled it "political heresy." Both Qutb and Mawdudi had modern secular educations and knew the West well. Qutb spent 1948--51 in the United States. His experience appalled him. He described the United States as a country full of churches but without religion, stained with sexual immorality, tainted by racism, materially successful but morally hollow. Qutb believed the West was so overwhelmingly materialistic that a communist triumph was inevitable. He interpreted the Prophet Muhammad as a revolutionary whose triumph ended the jahiliyah, the era of ignorance, of tribal polytheism, in Arabia. He conceived of the modern world as a new jahiliyah, "grounded in knowledge, complexity, and scorn." Western knowledge constitutes, for Qutb, ignorance because it leads the minds of humanity away from God and divine law. He calls upon Muslims to imitate Muhammad and destroy the new jahiliyah, as he did the old one.
Despite its revolutionary character and the harsh repression it brings, Islamic totalitarianism has a broad appeal in the Islamic world. Estimates of the proportion of Muslims who support it vary enormously, from a tiny minority to a substantial moiety. In all probability, the percentage of actual, active participants in the totalitarian movement is small, though a small percentage of the world's billion Muslims is still a large number. A much larger proportion, however, does not accept the totalitarian ideology or want to live under a government like that of the Taliban but nonetheless sympathizes with the totalitarians to a degree. Muslims have the best of reasons for wanting change. Many live in poverty under repressive authoritarian regimes. Rapid economic and social changes have produced widespread alienation and uncertainty. Muslims naturally want the freedom, power, and prosperity they see in the West but distrust Western ideas and institutions. Islamic totalitarianism promises a way out, with empowerment and social justice on earth as well as eternity in paradise. The hope is false but enormously attractive to populations
who trust no other alternative. Islamic totalitarians portray their ideology as the only alternative to the West, and Muslims want an alternative. Many of them perceive the West as Sayyid Qutb did: materialistic, immoral, wanton, violent. The West's portrayal of itself in movies, television, music videos, and video games supports that perception. Many Muslims, seeing their recent history as a record of defeat and despair, yearn for victories to restore their pride. The September 11 attacks appeared to them as a great victory over an arrogant opponent that other Arab and Muslim powers had failed to humble. The swift victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan and now the destruction of the Baath regime in Iraq, without any effective response from al Qaeda, have significantly weakened the standing of that group but not eliminated the totalitarian temptation.
Confronting Islamic totalitarianism
Islamic totalitarianism, then, constitutes an ideological threat, as Marxism-Leninism did during the Cold War. As Eliot Cohen, James Woolsey, and others have suggested, the struggle against it constitutes a world war, as the Cold War did, and will resemble the Cold War in nature and duration. Victory will require military preparation, military action, and a whole range of nonmilitary actions over a long term, perhaps more than a generation. Marxism-Leninism and Nazism were deadly threats to the West not only because of their ideological appeal but because they controlled major industrial powers. Islamic totalitarianism has no such base. The enormous changes of the past several decades, which we refer to as globalization, have made the entire
world extremely vulnerable to asymmetric warfare, with or without weapons of mass destruction. Deterrence, the idiom of the Cold War, cannot work against the Islamic totalitarians because they lack assets for us to hold hostage to our retaliation. The destruction of al Qaeda will not end the struggle, because Islamic totalitarianism does not depend on a single head or center. The elimination of every single al Qaeda operative would be an enormous victory but would not end the war. The war will end as, gradually, the hollowness of Islamic totalitarianism becomes clear and it loses its mass appeal. As it did in the premodern era, pragmatism will triumph over activism. That process will take several dangerous decades.
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Douglas Streusand is Islamic historian and professor of military history at American Military University.
