~ S P E C I A L ~
F E A T U R E
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An Excerpt
From
The
Far Enemy: Why JIHAD Went
GLOBAL
by Fawaz A. Gerges
October 2005 -
Cambridge University
Press
In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s elements
of the Muslim Brotherhood flirted with
violence and established the so-called
al-Jihaz al-Sirri, or secret apparatus (an
underground paramilitary unit within the
political organization), which led
Egyptian authorities to brutally suppress
and persecute its rank and file. But since
the early 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood --
the most powerfully organized Islamist
movement in the world of Islam, with local
branches in the Arab Middle East and
central, South, and southeast Asia -- has
moved more and more to the political
mainstream, and now it aims to Islamize
state and society through peaceful means.
Although Muslim Brothers are often
targeted and excluded from politics by
ruling autocrats, they no longer use force
or the threat of force to attain their
goals. Mainstream Islamists represent the
overwhelming majority within the Islamist
political spectrum, whereas jihadis, the
focal point of this book, are a tiny --
but critical -- minority.
The
New Definition of
Jihad
Nowhere is jihadis' revolutionary
challenge more evident than in their
systemic effort to elevate the status of
jihad in Muslim consciousness and make it
equal with the five pillars of Islam
(profession of faith, prayer, fasting,
alms-giving, and pilgrimage). Since the
time of the Prophet there has existed a
consensus among Muslim ulema (religious
scholars) on the status of jihad as a
collective duty (fard kifaya), one that is
determined by the whole community, not by
individuals. They also agree that there
are five pillars in Islam. Pious Muslims,
and even mainstream Islamists, accept the
existing consensus and may even take it
for granted.
In contrast, jihadis of all colors
consider jihad a permanent and personal
obligation (fard 'ayn) and a vital pillar,
though now absent, of Islam. Osama bin
Laden, the chief of Al Qaeda, subscribes
to this definition of jihad as an
"individual duty" for every Muslim who is
capable of going to war. As he put it,
"jihad is part of our religion and no
Muslim may say that he does not want to do
jihad in the cause of God . . . These are
the tenets of our religion." Bin Laden
went further -- "No other priority, except
faith, could be considered before
[jihad]."
Among the five pillars, bin Laden
ranked jihad second only to iman (belief),
an astonishing judgment coming from a
nonreligious authority. But we should not
be surprised by that because the new
ideologues of jihad contest the very
foundation of the classical school, which
laid more stress on the "defensive" and
"collective" nature of jihad. The new
ideologues claim that the old rules and
regulations do not apply because Muslim
lands are "occupied," by either local
"apostates" or their American masters.
Under such conditions, jihad becomes
obligatory to all Muslims, to defend their
religion and its sanctuaries. Thus the
lines become blurred between "defensive"
and "offensive" jihad as well as between
"collective" and "individual" duty. The
new ideologues portray jihad as an
all-encompassing struggle that requires
full and permanent mobilization of Muslim
society against real and imagined enemies
at home and abroad. In this context, bin
Laden warns fellow Muslims against
complacency and dereliction of duty:
- Fighting is part of our religion
and our Shariah. Those who love God and
the prophet and this religion may not
deny a part of that religion. This is a
very serious matter. Whoever denies
even a very minor tenet of religion
would have committed the gravest sin in
Islam. Such persons must renew their
faith and rededicate themselves to
their religion.
Jihad
as a Permanent
Revolution
More than anyone else, Sayyid Qutb,
hanged by Egyptian authorities in 1966 for
his alleged subversive preaching and
plotting against the nationalist regime of
Gamal Abdel Nasser, inspired generations
of jihadis, including Al Qaeda's senior
leaders, Osama bin Laden and his deputies
-- the two late military commanders, Abu
Ubaidah al-Banshiri and Mohammed Atef
(known as Abu Hafs al-Masri), theoretician
Ayman al-Zawahiri, and thousands of others
-- to wage perpetual jihad to "abolish
injustice from the earth, to bring people
to the worship of God alone, and to bring
them out of servitude to others into the
servants of the Lord." Far from viewing
jihad as a collective duty governed by
strict rules and regulations (similar to
just war theory in Christianity,
international law, and classical Islamic
jurisprudence, or fiqh), jihad, for Qutb,
was a permanent revolution against
internal and external enemies who usurped
God's sovereignty. He attacked Muslim
scholars and clerics with "defeatist and
apologetic mentalities" for confining
jihad to "defensive war." There is no such
thing as a defensive, limited war in
Islam, only an offensive, total war, Qutb
asserted: "The Islamic Jihaad has no
relationship to modern warfare, either in
its causes or in the way in which it is
conducted. The cause of Islamic Jihaad
should be sought in the very nature of
Islam, and its [universal] role in
the world."
Qutb was the first contemporary radical
thinker who revolutionized the concept of
jihad and invested it with a new meaning
-- waging an "eternal" armed struggle
"against every obstacle that comes into
the way of worshipping God and the
implementation of the divine authority on
earth, hakimiya, and returning this
authority to God and taking it away from
the rebellious usurpers [rulers]."
In his legal summation in his own defense
during the trial for the assassination of
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, sheikh
Omar Abdel Rahman, former emir (prince) of
al-Jama'a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group),
indirectly utilized Qutb's idea of God's
sovereignty to rationalize Sadat's murder:
"God made hakimiya a matter of kufr
[disbelief] or iman
[belief] or kufr and Islam or
jahiliya [ignorance of divine
authority]. There is no middle way in
this command and no solh [truce].
Believers govern according to God's laws
and do not change or replace a single
letter or word of them; kufar
[infidels] are those who do not
govern according to God's laws," a direct
reference to Sadat. That is a crime
punishable by death, Abdel Rahman implied.
In his closing arguments, he challenged
the definition offered by the ruling and
religious establishment regarding the
defensive nature of jihad; Islam does not
put any limits on jihad in the cause of
God because it is a continuous struggle
against internal and external enemies.
Like Qutb, Abdel Rahman sarcastically
debunked this official heresy and asked
the judges if the imperial expansion of
the Islamic empire was
"defensive"?
In Zawahiri's memoir, which he began to
write in 2000 and which he published
immediately after September 11, he writes
that Qutb's powerful ideas, particularly
the sovereignty of God, along with his
violent death, comprised the first spark
that lit the jihadist fire. Zawahiri
credits Qutb with giving rise to the
contemporary jihadist movement and
dramatically and strategically changing
its direction and focus. According to
Zawahiri, Qutb convinced young activists
that the internal enemy is as dangerous
as, if not more dangerous than, the
external one because it serves as a tool
for the latter to wage a hidden war
against Islam and Muslims. As a result,
Zawahiri adds, the Islamic vanguard, who
used to consider the external enemy as the
enemy of Islam, began to fight local
regimes, which he said are the real enemy
of Islam. Zawahiri does not appear to be
aware of the irony and contradiction of
his position. In his memoir, he heaps
praise on Qutb for reminding jihadis of
the urgent need to attack the near enemy
as opposed to the far enemy. Yet it does
not occur to Zawahiri that by targeting
the United States, he and his Al Qaeda
associates took their jihadist movement in
a dramatically opposite direction from
that recommended by Qutb, threatening its
very existence. But he rationalized this
pronounced dichotomy between his rhetoric
and his action by saying the "battle today
cannot be fought on just a regional level
without taking into account global
hostility," a reference to America's
direct intervention against the Islamist
movement.
Adding a personal touch to his
narrative of Qutb's contribution to the
jihadist movement, Zawahiri, who was in
his teens when Qutb was executed, said
that Qutb personally inspired him to
establish the first underground cell
(composed of a few high school friends) of
Egyptian "jihad" in 1967. Indeed,
Zawahiri's radicalism is deeply influenced
by Qutb's writings, and all his
publications borrowed intellectually from
Qutb's, particularly his commentary on the
Qur'an, In the Shades of the Qur'an,
considered by some jihadis to be his best
for its accessibility and human dimension.
Qutb's Milestones targeted Zawahiri's
generation -- "this vanguard" -- who, Qutb
noted, should know the landmarks on the
road toward their destination, which is to
rid Muslim society and politics of
jahiliya and to restore hakimiya to earth.
As he said in the introduction, "I have
written Milestones for this vanguard,
which I consider to be a waiting reality
about to be materialized." Those fateful
words, written in a prison cell before he
was hanged, led thousands of young men on
a violent journey to exact revenge on
jahili rulers and jahili society in
general.
Thus Zawahiri was not the only young
jihadi to adopt Qutb's expansive
definition of jihad as a perpetual war and
a personal obligation. In the eyes of the
new ideologues, jihad ceases to be a
collective endeavor and is transformed
into an individual journey and a path to
self-realization and purification. In his
trial, Abdel Rahman, a radical cleric who
acted as the spiritual guide to Egyptian
jihadis from the 1970s until the early
1990s, publicly lectured the judges that
Sadat's killers had a duty, not just a
right, to take matters into their own
hands: "Any Muslim who observes his
society not to be governed by the Shariah
[Islamic law] must struggle hard
[pursue jihad] to apply it, and he
is not required to be a scholar."
Disputing the government's assertion,
Abdel Rahman reminded his audience that
there is no church and no hierarchy in
Islam and that believers can directly
interpret the texts with no recourse to
the established authority; jihad is very
much an individual obligation and does not
need blessing by the clerical
community.
It would not be an exaggeration to say
that jihadis look up to Qutb as a
founding, spiritual father, if not the
mufti, or theoretician, of their
contemporary movement. Qutb's Milestones
provided the religious justification for
jihadist groups, like Egyptian al-Takfeer
wal-Hijira (Excommunication and Hegira, or
the Society of Muslims, led by Shukri
Mustafa, an agronomist), Tanzim al-Jihad
and Jama'a al-Islamiya, and Algerian Armed
Islamic Group, which appropriated his
concepts of hakimiya and jahiliya and used
them as ammunition in their ideological
and political struggle against Muslim
rulers. In the eyes of Islamic activists,
Milestones is symbolically powerful
because it was the last book written by
Qutb before his execution and so is seen
as his final "will" to future generations.
Ironically, Qutb's Arab biographers agree
that of all his texts, Milestones is the
weakest and the least rigorous
intellectually, and that it includes one
old idea, jahili society, which he
rehashes in a long literary monologue
form. But that is part of the strength and
appeal of Milestones to young activists
who hunger for radical, simplistic notions
that challenge classical interpretations
of the Islamic canon and allow them to go
directly to the sacred texts without
mediation or intervention by the religious
authority. As one Arab writer said, Qutb's
importance to jihadis ties in "daring" to
neutralize the fiqh and providing jihadis
with direct access to the original texts,
which they utilized as absolute weapons
against "impious regimes."
Jihadis whom I interviewed in several
countries said they were inspired by Qutb,
who showed them the way forward and whom
they referred to as a shahid, or martyr.
They talked about the torture he endured
at the hands of the Nasserist security
apparatus and the dignity and courage he
showed under duress. Zawahiri says that
Qutb's words acquired a deeper resonance
because of his defiance and refusal to
appeal to President Nasser to spare his
life, which provided activists with an
example of steadfastness and sacrifice.
For example, he cites the case of Salah
Sirriya, a Palestinian Islamist who in the
early 1970s assembled a group of young
Egyptian college students to carry out a
coup d'etat and kill President Sadat by
seizing control of the Military Academy in
Heliopolis in the Cairo suburbs. The coup
failed, and Sirriya and his top aide were
sentenced to death for leading what came
to be known as the "Military Academy"
group. Zawahiri heaped praise on Sirriya
for his courage and not faltering in the
face of death; when a group of political
prisoners gathered around Sirriya and
begged him to petition Sadat for leniency,
he retorted with the conviction of a
believer: "What powers does Sadat have to
prolong and control my destiny? Look at
this melancholic prison, and this awful
food, and these clogged toilets in which
we empty this food. This is the harsh
reality of prison life, so why do we hold
on to it?" For dramatic effect, Zawahiri
describes the last meeting in prison
between Sirriya and his wife and nine
children before his execution, in which he
unequivocally told her: "If you petition
for amnesty, consider yourself divorced."
The moral of the story, Zawahiri
concludes, is that although Sirriya was
killed and his group dismantled, other
jihadis have carried the banner forward,
including his own group -- the Jihad
organization -- and have brought Sadat to
justice by assassinating him.
In jihadis' eyes, Qutb appears bigger
than life, a model to live up to and an
example to be imitated. According to
Zawahiri, Sirriya was one of the first
jihadis to follow in Qutb's footsteps, and
he, too, motivated other activists to
travel the same road. Jihadism has
gradually evolved into a living
experience, not only an intellectual
discourse. Although the senior echelon of
the movement are versed with theory and
doctrine, on the whole the foot soldiers
are driven by the suffering of Muslim
communities or specific individuals. In a
strikingly revealing interview with the
Arabic-language newspaper Asharq al-Awsat,
the Moroccan widow of an Al Qaeda
operative, Abd al-Karim al-Majati, who was
killed in 2004 in a shootout with the
Saudi security forces and who is accused
of planning the Madrid train bombings,
said her husband's baptism into jihad was
purely natural and emotional, not
doctrinal and intellectual. Asked about
al-Majati's alleged disagreement with
radical clerics, she answered: "I stress
that educationally my husband was a simple
man because he did not attend university
and did not take lessons in the Shariah,
and he even had problems with the Arabic
language [more fluent with French]
. . . Sometimes we received texts from the
Internet, but my husband did not read
them, his relationship to jihad was
instinctual." Al-Majati is the norm, not
the exception.
After listening to jihadis' tales about
Qutb and other martyrs, I realize that
their movement is nourished on a diet of
political persecution and suffering and
that they are socialized into a siege
mentality and driven by a powerful force
to exact revenge against their ruling
tormentors. The bloody history of official
torture and persecution perpetuates a
culture of victimhood and a desire for
revenge and enables the movement to
mobilize young recruits and constantly
renew itself. Arab/Muslim prisons,
particularly their torture chambers, have
served as incubators for generations of
jihadis. For example, Montasser al-Zayat
-- who in the early 1980s served time with
Zawahiri in prison in the Sadat
assassination case and who has since
become the best-known attorney defending
jihadis and Islamists in Egyptian trials
-- published two memoirs in Arabic titled
Ayman al-Zawahiri as I Knew Him and
Islamic Groups: An Inside-Out View that
show that jihadis are terribly influenced
by their experience of persecution and
suffering and a deep-seated desire to seek
revenge. Qutb's Arab biographers also
wondered if his words would not have been
calmer had he not been mistreated in
prison. As long as Muslim governments
violate the human rights of their citizens
and sanction abuse, they will continue to
breed radicalism and militancy. To
summarize, Qutb popularized and
legitimized the idea of making jihad a
personal and permanent endeavor to
confront "jahili leadership" and "jahili
society" alike.
Jihad
Against the Near Enemy
If Qutb provided an overarching
intellectual architecture for the
contemporary jihadist movement, Mohammed
Abd al-Salam Faraj (who coordinated the
1981 assassination of President Sadat and
was the ideologue of the Jihad Group,
which later evolved into Tanzim al-Jihad
(widely known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad)
translated the meanings of jihad into
operational terms. While Qutb produced an
ideological manifesto, Faraj was an
activist who preached jihad in local
mosques, recruited jihadis, and plotted
underground to overthrow the regime along
lines similar to those of the Islamic
revolution in Iran. Faraj, whose
colleagues describe him as a fiery and
charismatic orator, defined jihad in a
small booklet titled "al-Faridah
al-Ghaibah," or "Absent (or Forgotten)
Duty," which became the bible and
operational manual of all Egyptian jihadis
in the 1980s and 1990s, including the two
leading organizations -- Jihad and its
much bigger sister, al-Jama'a
al-Islamiya.
Several points are worth highlighting
about this critical document. To begin,
the title of Faraj's booklet refers to the
jihad duty, which is no longer observed
and is even contested and denied by some
ulema. He aimed at reviving jihad by
reminding Muslims of the significance of
this concept to the establishment of an
Islamic government, to which all Muslims
are obliged to strive. Here Faraj
presented a new idea: that jihad was the
way to establish an Islamic state, while
the classical conception of jihad required
the existence of an Islamic authority to
do so. Next, Faraj makes the case for
jihad as a personal, not just collective,
duty because now the near enemy (Muslim
rulers) occupies the country.
Historically, the classical view held that
jihad was a collective duty that could be
activated only if outside enemies
threatened or invaded Muslim lands. But
Faraj turned the classical view on its
head and asserted that present-day Muslim
rulers, particularly Egyptians, forsake
their religion by not applying the Shariah
and by taking unbelievers as their allies:
"The rulers of these days are apostate.
They have been brought up at the tables of
colonialism, no matter whether of the
crusading, the communist, or the Zionist
variety. They are Muslim only in name,
even if they pray, fast, and pretend that
they are Muslims." Therefore, waging jihad
against these apostates is a personal duty
of every Muslim who is capable of
fighting, until the former repent or get
killed.
The importance of Faraj's operational
dictum does not lie in defining jihad as
an individual and permanent obligation and
refuting the classical view regarding the
collective and defensive nature of jihad.
Qutb and others had already made that
argument very eloquently and powerfully.
Rather, Faraj posited a new paradigm,
assigning a much higher priority to jihad
against the near enemy than against the
far enemy. According to Faraj, a young
activist who came from a middle-class
family and who graduated from Cairo
University with a degree in electrical
engineering, not even liberating Jerusalem
(the occupied Palestinian capital and the
most important place for Muslims after
Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia) takes
precedence over the struggle against local
infidels. Why? Faraj advances three
arguments in support of his position.
First, "fighting the near enemy must take
priority over that of the far enemy."
Second, liberating Jerusalem must be waged
under the banner of Islam, not the
internal impious leadership, lest the
impious leaders be the main beneficiary of
such a victory. And finally, the colonial
presence in Muslim lands is the fault of
these Muslim rulers. Faraj concludes by
saying that jihad's first and foremost
priority must be to replace these infidel
rulers with a comprehensive Islamic
system. Any other external agenda would be
a waste of time, Faraj said.
According to an associate of Faraj, who
knew him personally and listened to his
sermons, Faraj was anxious that the
liberation of Jerusalem would strengthen
and consolidate impious Muslim rulers; he
would rather that Jerusalem remain
occupied by the Zionists than be liberated
by apostate Arab states. "This shows the
extent of flaw in Faraj's case," Zayat,
the Islamist attorney adds, "even though
this thinking resonated with us and
expressed our psychological
predicament."
Faraj's call to jihad against the near
enemy resonated with most jihadis and
informed their rhetoric and action
throughout the 1980s and 1990s. For lack
of a better term, these jihadis, whom I
will refer to as "religious nationalists,"
believed that seizing power at home by
armed struggle was the swiftest and most
effective way to Islamize state and
Society. Pursuing jihad against the far
enemy must and should await internal
liberation and emancipation. For the next
fifteen years, the bulk of the jihadist
movement accepted Faraj's definition of
the enemy as being the local regimes, and
they waged an all-out war against them.
Faraj left a deep imprint on leading
contemporary jihadis, including familiar
names like Karam Zuhdi of the Islamic
Group and Zawahiri of Jihad. Zawahiri, who
knew Faraj well and befriended him, bought
into his notion that confronting the
Egyptian regime superseded everything
else, including confronting Israel and the
United States. Until the late 1990s, when
he joined bin Laden's World Islamic Front
for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,
Zawahiri faithfully adhered to the
strategic principle of making jihad
against the near enemy and kept his focus
on the big prize -- overthrowing the
Egyptian government. His former associates
well remember Zawahiri's famous dictum
that the road to Jerusalem goes first
through Cairo.
One of the distinctive characteristics
of the contemporary jihadist movement is
its stress on the centrality of jihad
against internal enemies. The new
ideologues of jihad, including Qutb,
Sirriya, Shukri Mustafa, Abdel Rahman,
Faraj, Zawahiri, and Zuhdi, were first and
foremost religious nationalists whose key
priority was to dismantle the secular
social and political order at home and
Islamize it. From the 1970s until the
mid-1990s the jihadist movement, with few
exceptions, did not pay much attention to
the far enemy and kept the heat on the
near enemy. The war in Afghanistan was not
an exception to this rule.
Jihad
Against the Far Enemy?
Although the Afghan jihad against
Russian military occupation ultimately
bred a new generation of what I call
transnationalist jihadis (who were
emboldened by the Russian defeat and who
decided to fully internationalize jihad
and export the Islamist revolution
worldwide), it did not constitute a shift
by jihadis away from localism to
globalism. The latter went to Afghanistan
to find a "secure base" to train and
conduct military operations against
renegade rulers back at home, not to wage
jihad globally. The fight against the
foreign enemy was not as important as the
existential struggle against "the corrupt,
apostatic regime" in Kabul, Afghanistan,
and elsewhere. Zawahiri (a leader of Jihad
Group in Egypt, who arrived in Afghanistan
in the 1980s and who organized and
transformed a collection of desperate
cells into a formidable organization --
Tanzim al-Jihad) expressed the sentiments
of many jihadis by saying he went to
Afghanistan to establish a safe haven for
"jihadist action" from which to launch
attacks against the Egyptian regime: "A
jihadist movement needs an arena that
would act like an incubator where its
seeds would grow and where it can acquire
practical experience in combat, politics,
and organizational matters."
Similarly, throughout the 1980s jihadis
from Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen,
Jordan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, and central
and East Asia joined the Afghan jihad to
acquire military skills that would assist
them in their struggle against infidel
regimes back at home. In the eyes of many
jihadis, Afghanistan served as a military
training camp and a fertile ground for new
young recruits. It prepared them for the
coming wars on their home fronts. My
critical point here is that localism, not
globalism, informed the thinking and
action of jihadis who had initially fought
in Afghanistan. The extent of their
international ambition was to assist in
expelling the Russian invaders from
Afghanistan and in bringing about an
Islamic government there. Well after the
end of the Afghan war, jihadis developed
no expansive vision or paradigm to
internationalize jihad and "Islamize the
world," notwithstanding spurious claims to
the contrary.
For example, in his memoir released
after the September 11 attacks on the
United States, Zawahiri superimposed the
present on the past to rationalize and
justify his dramatically radical shift
away from targeting the near enemy to
targeting the far enemy. He makes it
appear that the change in the definition
of the enemy was natural and logical and
that all along he and his associates had
been training in Afghanistan for the final
battle against the United States: "The
jihad was a training course of the utmost
importance to prepare Muslim mujahedeen to
wage their awaited battle against the
superpower that now has sole dominance
over the globe, namely, the United
States."
Zawahiri does not seem to be aware of
the flagrant contradictions in his
position given in his memoir. On the one
hand, he says he went to Afghanistan to
find "a secure base for jihad activity in
Egypt." Yet later in the same chapter, he
claims that Afghanistan was no more than a
training exercise for the "awaited battle"
against America and Americans. Surely,
Zawahiri could not take on the Egyptian
"apostate" regime and the "leader of the
criminals," the United States,
simultaneously. A closer look at his
rhetoric and action from the 1970s through
the late 1990s shows clearly that the
overthrow of the Egyptian government was
his first strategic priority. More than
any of his cohorts, Zawahiri was emphatic
about the need to keep the fight focused
on the near enemy and to avoid being
distracted by external adventures,
including helping the Palestinians. Like
most jihadis, Zawahiri was bred on
anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism,
although the latter were not on his radar
screen until the late 1990s. His words and
deeds speak louder than his postmortem
rationalization.
Likewise, neither bin Laden nor his
spiritual guru, Abdullah Azzam, who
initiated him into the jihad business and
influenced his fateful decision to fully
dedicate himself to the Afghan war, saw
the struggle against the Russian occupiers
as a way station to wage a total war
against the West, particularly the United
States. At that stage jihadis possessed no
such ambitious international agenda. In
retrospect, it is easy to forget that
throughout the 1980s the United States was
not very high on jihadis lists of targets.
Jihadis found themselves in the same
trenches with American foreign policy, a
policy that was bent on turning
Afghanistan into Russia's Vietnam. Despite
subsequent denials by both jihadis and
American officials, the two camps were in
a marriage of convenience, united in
opposition to godless Communism. They had
a common enemy and a vested interest in
joint coordination and collaboration, at
least until the Russians folded their
military tents and hurried back home in
disgrace.
I do not mean to imply that jihadis
were not intrinsically opposed to the
American military, political, and cultural
presence in Muslim lands. Their rhetoric
and discourse were highly inflammatory and
hostile. But from the early 1970s until
the mid-1990s, the far enemy, as
represented by America and Israel, was not
an operational priority for Sunni-oriented
jihadis. The shift to globalism occurred
much later, long after the end of the
Afghan war around the mid-1990s, and
reflected monstrous mutations within the
jihadist movement itself. However, since
the mid-1990s, a small minority of
jihadis, transnationalists led by Al
Qaeda, a network composed of several tiny
militant groups, launched a systemic
onslaught to hijack the whole jihadist
movement and strategically change its
direction and destination.
Now the very same jihadis, who had made
the fight against the near enemy a key
operational priority, shifted gears and
called for a new "jihad" against the far
enemy, particularly the United States and
its Western allies. The road to Jerusalem
no longer passed directly through Cairo,
Algiers, Amman, or Riyadh but rather
through a double-lane highway, including
stops in Washington, New York, Madrid,
London, and other Western capitals. The
same arguments marshalled in support of
jihad against the near enemy were dusted
off and remade to fit that against the far
enemy. In other words, the definition of
jihad did not change; what did change was
the definition of the enemy. The jihadist
caravan took a new sharp and dangerous
turn that would bring it into a total
confrontation with the world community.
Although transnationalist jihadis, like Al
Qaeda, were a tiny minority within the
jihadist movement, their actions plunged
the whole movement into an existential
crisis.
Copyright © 2005 Fawaz A. Gerges:
Excerpt reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Fawaz
A. Gerges holds the Christian A. Johnson
Chair in International Affairs and Middle
Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College.
He was educated at Oxford University and
the London School of Economics and has
previously been a Research Fellow at
Harvard and Princeton universities. He is
also a senior analyst and regular
commentator for ABC television news. His
books include America and Political Islam:
Clash of Interests or Clash of Cultures?
(Cambridge, 1999) and The Journey of the
Jihadis: A Biography of a State of Mind
(Harcourt Press, 2006). He has written
extensively on Arab and Muslim politics,
Islamist movements, American foreign
policy, and relations between the world of
Islam and the West. His articles have
appeared in several of the most
prestigious journals and newspapers in the
United States, Europe, and the Middle
East.
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