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.
Subscribe
to Soundings a journal of politics and culture
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |