Last week, three Libyan youths were casually and brutally murdered, their throats slit, in Libya’s western interior. The killers form part of a group of jihadists that had earlier slaughtered a score of soldiers and bystanders. The jihadists murdered the youths after asking them for some fuel for their vehicles.
The murders occurred more or less at the same time that Europe was demonstrating against the Charlie Hebdo atrocities; that some commentators were demanding a million-man march by Muslims to prove that they reject this kind of violence; and, in particular, around the same time that US-based right-wing commentators were ratcheting up, in inflammatory language, the threat posed to Europe by mainstream Islam and Muslim immigrants in general.
The Libyan youths were not the first innocent bystanders to be targeted by jihadists in Libya nor will they be the last. The killers are a motley group in terms of nationality: some are Libyan but there are also known to be Algerian, Tunisian and Sudanese among them.
They have no popular roots in the society they are terrorising, just as, with few readily explainable exceptions, they have no social roots in any other Muslim society in which they are based.
If we are to defeat these terrorists, we should fight them intelligently. The brunt of the struggle naturally falls on European security and counter-terrorism forces. But society and the media have a role to play, too. Social polarisation and Islamophobia is something that such groups thrive on when recruiting.
Quite a bit is known, in fact, about terrorism in general and jihadist groups in particular. Not nearly as much as our counter-terrorism experts would like but certainly enough to dismiss as nonsense, even blatant untruths, a lot of what is paraded as tough-minded knowledge about terrorism and Islam.
The diatribes against Islam, in our current public discourse, is afflicted by a major irony. The people who pose as eagled-eyed, no-nonsense, Islam-denouncers are among the most naïve.
They readily quote US self-styled experts on Islam – sometimes people raised in a Muslim society who have turned their backs on the religion of their birth – without noticing that such people may indeed have had horrendous experiences but that their linkage of those experiences to Islam, per se, is not based on expertise. Personal experience does not give you that; it is systemic study of the data that provides you with such knowledge.
And expert knowledge does not confirm what such speakers say. In fact, they tend to flourish not in centres of scholarship and analysis but in partisan think-tanks. They are professional anti-Islamists, with a strong vested interest in denying any counter-evidence.
Their job is to push specific kinds of foreign policy initiatives. After 9/11, it was that stroke of genius, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, whose consequence was to increase exponentially Al-Qaeda’s recruitment. Right now, the agenda is to hijack the foreign policy discussion of the US in the run-up to the presidential elections of 2016. The aim is both to control what the Republican nominee commits himself to but also to create a political climate that favours the Republicans over the Democrats.
That’s one irony: the people repeating such claims in the name of freedom of expression, freedom of thought and moderation are actually the propaganda dupes of an extremist faction of US politics. And the last time the US actually followed this faction’s foreign policy prescriptions, we actually sowed the seeds for the jihadist trouble the world is currently seeing. ISIS would not have the hold it does without the territory and energy resources it currently controls in chaotic Iraq (and Syria).
Another irony is that many of the claims made about Islam and Muslims are actually false.
There’s a lot more to fighting terrorism than handy slogans and conspiracy theories
Do jihadists have social roots in Muslim societies? I myself vividly remember attending funerals in western Libya and witnessing the tension in the room when a group of Islamists came to pay their respects. They rarely remained for long. However, my testimony isn’t as important as that of others.
Khaled al-Berry was a youth leader (in high school and medical school) for the terrorist-linked Gamaa Islamiyya in Egypt; he recanted in prison and later wrote an autobiography on his experience. His parents became worried sick when he grew a beard and became, visibly, an Islamist.
He says how it was fear that made his fellow students obey him – an early example was a student-cartoonist who was beaten up for poking fun at Islamists.
Mohamed Sifaoui is an Algerian journalist who penetrated Al-Qaeda. His published diary is essentially a series of secret meetings, in basements and other shadowy places, with cell members who barely knew the members of other cells.
Intelligence experts, in fact, know that terrorist recruitment is generally based on personal contact through established networks. It’s not every Muslim who is vulnerable. It tends to be someone alienated from his or her parents and community, including their Imam.
Al-Berry was himself recruited, over 30 years ago, because, despite being a talented student, he saw himself as physically weak and cowardly. Membership in the Gamaa gave him self confidence and training in the overcoming of fear. His self-image changed as he began to see himself as a vigilante on the side of true order against tyranny.
Not only do such groups not have roots in Muslim societies, which they tend to denounce as corrupt and decadent, in need of purification and revolution. They also have very tendentious roots to mainstream Islam.
Osama bin Laden denounced much of mainstream Islam, including the Islamic scholars who are guardians of (conservative) orthodoxy, as heretics. His reading of Islam was fuelled by his making a 13th-century figure, Ibn Taymiyya, into the defining authority on Islam. Even so, he needed to exert considerable flexibility to reinterpret Ibn Taymiyya as authorising the killing of bystanders.
One could say the same about many of the key ideas of the jihadists. Usually they operate with Islamic concepts turned on their head (at least as defined by tradition). So removed from mainstream orthodoxy are they, that a lot of jihadists’ energy, when not plotting an attack, is actually arguing over what Islam really permits (particularly in the execution of jihad).
If such groups are not rooted in Muslim societies or mainstream Islam, then why don’t we see protests against them in the Islamic world?
In fact, there have been protests, some of them of considerable strength. In Egypt, two decades ago, the groundswell of opinion had so much turned against jihadism (in the wake of one particularly gory attack on tourists in Luxor) that it was believed that Islamism had been eradicated for good from Egypt.
But in many Muslim states there are also practical difficulties in organising protests: they might not be permitted by the regimes themselves. The regime might itself be anti-Islamist but it’s still wary of any large gathering whose protests might also be directed against the injustices of the regime itself.
There’s a lot more to fighting terrorism than handy slogans and conspiracy theories. This especially when those slogans and theories mirror those of the formidable enemy and play into his hands by misdirecting our attention from where it should be.
ranierfsadni@europe.com