Faisal Devji
Faisal Devji argues that Al-Qaeda should be understood
as sharing many features with other international movements for social change,
largely because it operates, as they do, in a global arena that offers little
purchase for traditional politics.
Like environmentalism, pacifism and other global movements, Al-Qaeda’s jihad
is concerned with the world as a whole. Just as climatic change or nuclear
holocaust are not problems that can be dealt with regionally, but require
global attention, so too the jihad’s task of gaining justice for Muslims
cannot be accomplished piecemeal, and has meaning only at a global level.
This is why the whole world must be brought within Al-Qaeda’s purview. And
Al-Qaeda’s violence – ironically – is intimately linked to the connectedness
together of all the world’s people in a web of mutual obligation and responsibility.
It is this web of universal complicity, after all, that allows American
or British civilians to be killed in recompense for the killing of Muslims
in Iraq. The worldwide web of war spun by Al-Qaeda exists as a kind of spectre
of our global inter-relatedness, one that has as yet no specific political
form of its own.
Not unlike companies in the world economy, to which they are
often compared, participants in the global jihad have neither the ability
nor the inclination to control the territories within which they operate.
Their relationship with these territories can instead be seen as a series
of indirect and speculative investments. Just as with players in the global
economy, participants in the jihad are drawn by their investments into a
world that does not operate according to their intentions but seems to possess
a life of its own. While the attacks of 9/11, for instance, were meticulously
planned, they were at the same time completely speculative as far as their
effects were concerned, since these could neither be predicted with any
degree of certainty, nor controlled in any fashion.
This state of affairs is characteristic of social and oppositional
global movements more generally; these are also unable to predict or control
the effects of their own actions. These are all movements whose practices
are ethical rather than political in nature, because they have been transformed
into gestures of risk and duty rather than acts of instrumentality. Like
other global movements, the jihad’s spectacular demonstrations of strength
escape a politics of intentionality and control that is organised around
some common history of needs, interests or ideas; they thus create a landscape
of relations in which very little, if anything, is shared. So the worldwide
mass demonstrations of 2003 protesting the impending war in Iraq were not
only the largest global demonstrations yet seen, they also brought together
individuals and groups who possessed neither organisational nor ideological
commonality of any sort. Like many such movements – for instance Greenpeace
– the jihad brings together allies and enemies of the most heterogeneous
character, who neither know nor communicate with each other, and who share
almost nothing by way of a prior history.
But unlike other forms of global activism, Al-Qaeda’s jihad
lacks any notion of apocalypse, which is something far more characteristic
of Christian and Jewish radicalism, with their talk of the rapture and the
end of days, all of which spills over into the apocalyptic imagination of
the West’s secular movements, such as environmentalism. One could thus argue
that the holy war – martyrdom operations and all – is fundamentally about
life, while the West it fights appears to be singularly focused on death,
even on the annihilation of humanity as a whole: Euro-American cultures
are full of concern about every form and manner of disaster, from global
warming to weapons of mass destruction. The jihad, however, is worldly and
even prosaic; the end it envisioned has nothing supernatural, rapturous
or even final about it, and seems indeed to be something of an anti-climax.
It gives us no vision of an alternative universe, nor even some revolutionary
utopia, only statements about fair trade and democracy.
My argument that Al-Qaeda’s non-apocalyptic stance, and its
attention to the prosaic nature of everyday life, forces us to think about
its violence in new ways. For one thing, this violence occurs in a world
whose concerns are global in dimension and hence resistant to old-fashioned
political solutions, thus seeming to call instead for spectacular gestures
that are ethical in nature. Such gestures sometimes announce their distance
from political rationality by the self-destructive character of their violence.
Suicide bombing is the most individualistic of practices, perhaps the only
way in which individuality can be exercised in a world that seems to have
spun out of control. It is also an ethical gesture that participates only
indirectly, if at all, in a solution to the problem it advertises.
As an explicitly ethical enterprise, therefore, the holy war
is a highly unstable phenomenon, because its violence derives from the same
source as the non-violence of other global networks. Perhaps Al-Qaeda is
murderous because it is so unstable, since it is at any moment capable of
shifting its practices into those of non-violence. This suggests that violence
is not in itself the most important consequence of the jihad. In the long
run, violence is probably Al-Qaeda’s most superficial and short-lived effect,
though it is certainly one of great importance for the moment. Far greater
and almost incalculable in its effects is the jihad’s democratisation of
Islam – accomplished by its fragmentation of traditional forms of religious
authority and the dispersal of their elements into a potentially endless
series of re-combinations.
These possibilities have presented themselves because the jihad
has put an end to old-fashioned fundamentalism as a movement dedicated to
the establishment of an ideological state. The jihad has replaced what used
to be called Islamic fundamentalism at the edge of Muslim militancy. Traditional
Muslim militancy had been part and parcel of Cold War politics, and was
concerned with the founding through revolution of an ideological state,
fashioned in many respects on the communist model that was so popular in
Africa and Asia following the Second World War. With the end of the Cold
War, however, and the coming into being of a global market for transactions
of all kinds, the revolutionary politics whose aim was to institute ideological
states quickly began to break down. This sort of fundamentalism, after all,
had enjoyed only one success in its many decades of struggle, with the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
In order to understand Al-Qaeda’s novelty, its jihad must be
torn out of the genealogies of political Islam within which it is generally
confined. Faced with what is new, and especially what is radically new,
the scholar’s conservative instinct is always to reach for some genealogy
within which this novelty might be anchored and neutralised. In the case
of the jihad, this instinct works to place it in the genealogy of something
called political Islam, where its ancestry is generally traced to Middle
Eastern movements of the modern period like Salafism or Wahhabism.
A curious feature of such genealogies of the jihad is that
they all originate in and remain focused specifically upon Sunni Islam and
the Middle East, despite the fact that arguably the most successful examples
of political Islam have been revolutionary Iran and the Hizbollah in Lebanon,
both Shia movements. Among other things, these have contributed to an ostensibly
Sunni jihad the language and practice of the ‘martyrdom operation’, as its
suicide attacks are known. Similarly, the fact that the jihad today happens
to be based for the most part outside the Middle East (in places like Chechnya,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and the Philippines), among populations that
have barely an inkling of Salafi or Wahhabi traditions, seems to have escaped
the notice of scholarly genealogists.
Apparently the very presence of Arab fighters or funding in
such places is evidence enough that Salafi or Wahhabi Islam has been exported
in sufficient measure to determine the nature of jihad there. That the reverse
might be true, with Arab fighters and financiers importing the jihad from
these regions to the Middle East, is not seriously considered, although
it is certainly true of Al-Qaeda and the phenomenon of the so called Arab-Afghans
– militants who returned after the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan to their
homes in the Middle East and founded new jihad movements there.
In general the importance of non-Arab Muslims and of non-Arab
Islam to the Middle East has been underestimated, as borne out by the example
of Iraq in early 2005: Ayatollah Sistani was that country’s great Shiite
authority, even though he is an Iranian whose Arabic remains heavily accented
by his native Farsi. Much of Sistani’s authority in Iraq, moreover, derives
from his control and disbursement of funds raised by Shia populations elsewhere,
a very significant portion of which comes from India and Pakistan. Sistani’s
constituency in the subcontinent, then, through his agent in Mumbai, might
well hold a key to the Ayatollah’s importance in Iraq.
This Shiite example apart, the presence of large non-Arab working
populations in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the dominance of non-Arab
Muslims in the formulation and dissemination of Islamic ideas globally,
especially in languages like English, renders nonsensical any notion that
the Arab Middle East is the original homeland of radical Islam. The Taliban
provides a perfect illustration of the kind of movement that has repeatedly
been described as a foreign import. It was supposedly influenced by Deobandi
practices from India, themselves funded and influenced by Saudi Wahhabism,
and by Wahhabi practices coming directly from Saudi Arabia – both of which
were imparted in Pakistani seminaries, and were supposedly legalistic and
scripturalist in the extreme. And yet the Taliban leader Mullah Omar chose
in Kandahar to drape himself in a mantle belonging to the Prophet and declare
himself the Commander of the Faithful, a title used for the caliphs who
were meant to be Muhammad’s successors – he was in fact flatteringly called
a caliph by no less a person than Osama bin Laden. In what way could this
coronation be understood as conforming to any Deobandi or Wahhabi teaching?
If anything the vision of Mullah Omar donning the Prophet’s mantle suggests
Sufi and especially Shia themes, since the latter believe in the apostolic
succession of those members of Muhammad’s family whom he famously covered
with his cloak. And it is precisely such charismatic forms of authority
that both the Deobandis and Wahhabis are supposed to execrate.
There is nothing more calculated to degrade the celebrated
scripturalist or legalist forms of Islam associated with these groups, tied
as they are to the authority of a class of scholarly commentators, than
the institution of a self-proclaimed Commander of the Faithful – one who
claimed, in addition, to have received divine instruction in his dreams.
By acts such as these, the Taliban not only assumed an immediate superiority
over their Saudi or Pakistani teachers; they also forced from the latter
an acknowledgement of religious forms and practices that were barely dreamt
of in the Deobandi and Wahhabi schools. Suddenly it seemed as if the direction
of Islamic influence had been reversed, with teachers in the centre taking
dictation from students on the periphery.
Is a genealogical mode of explanation at all credible in a
situation where participants in the jihad come from all manner of national
and religious backgrounds? Quite apart from the hijackers in New York or
the bombers in Madrid who betrayed no obvious signs of Muslim piety, we
know that in places like Afghanistan, too, fighters came from many different
and even opposed Islamic affiliations, which are generally kept far apart
by scholarly genealogists. But the plethora of groups, often very exclusive,
participating in the jihad does not indicate their alliance for some common
cause. It may however signal the fact that a global movement like the jihad
depends upon the erosion of traditional religious and political allegiances
for its very existence. After all Al-Qaeda, like other global movements,
possesses an extraordinarily diverse membership, one that is not united
by way of any cultic or ideological commonality, to say nothing about any
common class, ethnic or personal background. Indeed it can only function
as the network it is by disrupting and disregarding old-fashioned forms
of political and religious allegiance.
If there exists any genealogy within which Al-Qaeda can be
located, it is a mystical or heretical one. For example there is a widespread
rejection by the jihad of the classical doctrine of holy war as a collective
or political obligation similar to that of choosing a ruler or administering
justice. One implication of treating holy war as an individual ethical obligation
like prayer is that it becomes spiritualised and finally puts the jihad
beyond the pragmatism of political life. So whereas liberal as well as fundamentalist
Muslims tried to instrumentalise Islam by attributing social, political
or economic functions to its beliefs or practices, the jihad does just the
opposite – its task is to de-instrumentalise Islam and make it part of everyday
ethics.
There is a tradition of holy war that does exactly this, one
that possesses all the requisite ingredients of religious fervour and popular
support, and has, in addition, nothing to do with the juridical politics
of a state. Such a tradition of jihad, while it might well have given rise
to states, was characteristic of charismatic, mystical and heretical movements,
often messianic in nature, that were located at the peripheries of Islamic
power or authority, and frequently directed against them as much as against
any infidel presence. Indeed all the great jihad movements from the eighteenth
to the twentieth centuries were Sufi ones. It is hardly accidental, therefore,
that by far the most popular examples of the ghazi or holy warrior in the
Muslim world happen to be members of Sufi or mystic fraternities, whose
tombs continue to be places of pilgrimage, healing and spiritual succour.
In many ways today’s jihad builds upon these Sufi ventures.
It, too, is located on the peripheries of the Muslim world, geographically,
politically and religiously; it operates
now in places like Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, as well as
in Thailand and the Philippines. Like its predecessors, the jihad in our
times is also peripheral as a set of practices, being charismatic, heretical
and even mystical. And like these holy wars of the past, the jihad, too,
attempts to move such populist and non-juridical elements to the centre
of the Islamic world as part of its struggle. Yet Al-Qaeda’s jihad does
not replace one sort of authority by another, for instance Salafism by Sufism,
but fragments Muslim forms of authority altogether, thus democratising Islam
itself. What emerges from this fragmentation is a new kind of individual,
or rather a new form of Muslim individualism.
The new Muslim individual brought into being by Al-Qaeda’s
jihad moves across a different kind of landscape than that with which scholars
tend to be familiar. Let us look at how that prime location of Muslim radicalism,
the Middle East, constitutes such a landscape for this individual. The Middle
East today is a truly dispersed entity, with much of its press headquartered
in London, its language used by Arab and non-Arab alike, and even its jihad
originating elsewhere. Indeed the Middle East might well be grounded in
a specific territory only by its oil wells. But even this definition disintegrates
on closer inspection. The oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, for example,
which play such a large role in the jihad, from providing it with funds
to supplying homes and constituencies, were initially created, governed
and exploited by British imperialism in the form of the Government of India.
It was this government and its Indian subjects that founded, managed and
manned the oil industries of these countries, including Iraq, till well
after the end of British rule in 1947.
Even today this area is linked demographically, economically
and culturally more to the Indian Subcontinent, South-East Asia and East
Africa than it is to the rest of the Middle East. So apart from the large
foreign populations settled in these monarchies, sometimes forming the majority
of their inhabitants, many of the historical centres in this extended region
owe their existence to commercial links with Asia and Africa. Aden, for
instance, from whence Osama bin Laden’s family originated (his father leaving
this declining city for new opportunities in Saudi Arabia), was an important
place in its time only because it served as a link in the British route
to and from India; and it also possessed, therefore, a large Indian population.
Aden, indeed, was in some ways the Dubai of its time – a cosmopolitan city
more similar in every way to Bombay or London than to the Yemeni capital
of Sana. This is why the common description of the Bin Laden family as Yemeni
is as much correct as it is not.
But the relationship between the Persian Gulf and points south
or east of it is not all one-way. Just to take the example of India: this
small region provides that huge country with the bulk of its foreign investment,
mostly in the form of remittances from Indians settled there; it keeps its
national airline financially viable by ferrying Indians to and from various
sheikhdoms; and it acts as a major centre both for its entertainment industry
and crime syndicates. Given all this, it should come as no surprise that
a Christian migrant from the Indian state of Kerala could be far more integrated
and at home in a place like Dubai than an Arabic-speaking Muslim migrant
from Morocco. After all, one is as likely to encounter Urdu or Swahili in
public places here as to encounter Arabic.
Most important in its fragmentation as a Middle Eastern region,
however, is the fact that the Persian Gulf’s disparate populations are not
linked by any relations, whether social, political or economic, that happen
to be based on citizenship. Foreigners in the Gulf tend to have no rights
of permanent residence, let alone equal rights with those defined as indigenes
– who themselves are by no means equal citizens of nation states. All relations
among these populations therefore tend to be cosmopolitan instead of national.
The moment that citizenship rights are denied to a segment of a state’s
population, especially an enormous population such as that of foreigners
in the Gulf, citizenship itself disappears as an aspect of national uniformity,
along with many other notions of a common culture and solidarity. The end
result is perhaps a kind of market managed by rules that have nothing to
do with political representation or participation as we recognise them.
This curious world, which may function in various forms within
immigrant and other cosmopolitan enclaves elsewhere, seems to mirror rather
closely the world of the jihad itself. It is, after all, the world of the
global marketplace, and it includes within its ambit not only multinational
corporations or transnational trading networks, but also the international
students, economic migrants, illegal aliens and political refugees who form
part and parcel of these commercial enterprises. And we know that the global
transactions of the jihad, along with its incredibly mobile operators, use
and indeed emerge from such networks and enclaves, in which an old-fashioned
politics of intentionality and collective mobilisation, based on some common
need, interest or idea, has been ruled out.
One has only to consider the remarkable peregrinations of the
9/11 hijackers – which ran the gamut from German universities and Afghan
training camps to American flight schools, passing through the immigrant
enclaves of European cities in the process – to realise that such networks
and enclaves operate according to the norms of the global marketplace. And
this is regardless of whether or not they happen to be located in traditional
nation states where political and other relations are meant to be defined
in the language of citizenship. All of this makes for a whole new world
of cosmopolitan relations between people.
I want to end this essay by returning to its beginning, more
precisely to my claim that the global arena does not yet possess a political
form proper to itself. Al-Qaeda’s actions and rhetoric continuously invoke
the spectre of a global community that has as yet no formal existence of
its own. And this is what allows its jihad to draw upon the forms and even
the vocabulary of other global movements such as environmental and pacifist
ones, all of which bear a family resemblance to one another.
What Al-Qaeda does is to invoke the spectre of a global community,
not by providing an alternative to liberal democracy, but rather by universalising
– albeit in its own particular way – its ideals. Earlier movements of resistance
or terror had advanced critiques of existing conditions, for instance of
capitalism or imperialism, and offered alternatives to them. This was the
case with Marxists and Anarchists as well as with nationalists and fundamentalists.
But, like the more pacific global movements that are its peers, Al-Qaeda’s
jihad poses no real criticism of existing conditions and possesses no alternative
to take their place.
Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric has consistently voiced a desire for global equality between the Islamic world and the West. Having accused America of hypocrisy as far as its advancement of this equality is concerned, Bin Laden turns his attention to the only form in which such equality is possible: the equality of death. This is why he has repeatedly emphasised the need for an equivalence of terror between the Muslim world and America, as if this were the only form in which the two might come together and even communicate one with the other. For Al-Qaeda terror is the only form in which global equality is now available. It therefore functions as the dark side of America’s own democracy, as inseparable from it as its evil twin.
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