Islamism in the Middle East The resistant, the fighter and the mujahid - by Bernard Rougier
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Islamism in the Middle East
The resistant, the fighter and the mujahid
Bernard Rougier
This chapter intends to redefine Islamism in the Middle East by exploring three ideal-type forms of political and religious engagement, which have been expressed in a sequential or cumulative manner for about 30 years. Split into many expressions, Islamism in the Middle East revolves nevertheless around three main figures: the muqatil (fighter), the muqawim (resistant) and the mujahid (jihad fighter). The rationale of specific situations explains, for the most part, the switch from one form of action to another. This chapter aims to clarify the particular characteristics of these three models of militant action, and seeks to highlight the privileged resources upon which each one relies. Through the figure of the muqawil, here defined as an entrepreneur of anger, a fourth form of action, linked to the globalisation of exchanges and the birth of new information technology, will also be explicated in turn. With the assistance of this theoretical framework one may be able to formulate hypotheses about the evolution of Islamism in the region.
It should be added that each ideal-type covers a diversity of ‘regime of engagement’. This notion, close to ‘logics of action’ or ‘pragmatic regimes’, tries to capture ‘not only the movements of an actor but also the way his environment responds to him and the way he takes into account these responses’ (Thévenot 2001: 56–73). Its heuristic use is to reveal the dynamic aspect of activities between individuals and the world that surrounds them. Each kind of pragmatic engagement valorises the very part of reality that is relevant for the accomplishment of its valued goals, involving both a conception of reality and a conception of the good. It is this dialectical interaction between ‘the engaged good’ and the ‘engaged reality’ that defines the ‘regime of engagement’. To become actors, individuals and groups constantly need interplay with a mix of different kinds of environment – local, regional, international, transnational. In doing so, they evaluate the success (or the failure) of their engagement through a ‘reality test’ which provokes revision and innovation. With this in mind, it becomes easier to capture the dynamics of a notion – Islamism – which has become too large a concept to really mean something by itself.
The three poles of Islamism
The muqawim
The figure of the muqawim (the resistant) asserted itself against Europe’s political and military influence in the East at the end of the nineteenth century. The special link between Islam and resistance is demonstrated by the choice of religion as an instrument of mobilisation comprehensible to the masses and politically effective in the face of the hegemony of non-Muslim powers. Both an intellectual and a conspirator, the scholar Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–97) was one of the first to brandish the ideal of a pan-Islamic solidarity to turn the Muslim subjects of the British Empire against the British authorities (Goldziher 2010; Keddie 1972). A pioneer of anticolonialism, al-Afghani combined a grammar of resistance against foreign invasion with liberal preoccupations regarding domestic questions, without noting a contradiction between the two forms of engagement.1 The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt at the end of the 1920s, converted action conducted in the name of Islam against the encroachment of the outside, Western world (British occupation of Egypt, Zionist implantation in Palestine) to domestic political and religious action, with a view to applying the prescriptions of religious law by an ‘Islamic State’.
In the Sunni world, this requirement, in formal line with the ‘programmatic function’ of modern European political parties, marks a considerable rupture with traditional Islam, since the latter has been stressing the need to protect the Community against the risks of self-nurtured divisions for centuries (al-Sayyid 2007). In claiming to represent the Law versus the Community, the Muslim Brotherhood runs the risk of seeing the violence once turned against imperialism transformed into an internal jihad against the rulers of the Muslim states. If the majority of the Islamist militants didn’t endorse the consequences of the contradiction, the radical intellectual Sayyid Qutb followed this logic through in assimilating the Muslim rulers who did not govern ‘in accordance with what God prescribed’ with the era of pre-Islamic ignorance (jahiliyya).
The intellectual and organisational legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood was restored in the Shi’ite religious universe with the creation in Iraq, in the city of Najaf at the end of the 1950s, of the organisation al-Da’wa (the Call) under the influence of Sayyid Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr (Jabar 2003). The use of Islam in partisan politics challenged the quietist belief that it was necessary to abstain from engaging politically as long as the hidden Imam had not yet returned on Earth. The party al-Da’wa was also accused of bypassing the authority of the traditional clergy by creating a new source of obedience. Despite these criticisms, however, the call for application of the religious law in the framework of a hypothetical Islamic State reinforced the Shi’ite community in polities where they were not in power. In sectarian countries such as Lebanon or Iraq, the spreading of radical Islamism in the 1970s, far from augmenting internal fractures, contributed on the contrary to reinforcing the denominational cohesion of the Shi’ite political minority and reduced the appeal of the communist party and the Ba’th party among the intellectuals and the poor. The encounter between the religious Law and the Community – in the form of an alliance between the principal segments of Iranian society against the power of the Shah – in turn conditioned the success of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The only one of its kind, it achieved synthesis between the Islamist utopia, primarily theorised by Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr, and the formulation of a theology of power (the doctrine of velayate faqih) reactivated by Ayatollah Khomeini.
After this event, the ideal-type of the muqawim became fully redefined in a militant Islamist stance once the Gulf axis of crisis, embodied by the Iranian revolution, started to spill over the Levant axis of crisis. The Islamist resistant came to replace the fedayin, and this change went hand in hand with the new intervention of Khomeini’s Iran in the political and religious scene of the Levant. Only one month after the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the Iranian Revolutionary Guardians (Pasdaran) set up the first training camp of the ‘Islamic Resistance in Lebanon’ in the Bekaa. Those who were to become rulers of Hezbollah were enlisted there, such as Abbas al-Musâwi, the first Secretary-General of the Shi’a Islamist organisation – former student in Najaf of Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr alongside whom he had been studying religion for nine years – and Hassan Nasrallah, his close friend (Mustâfa 2003). Created in 1982, the precedence of the military wing over the political wing, revealed in 1985, leaves a clue about the organic relation between the ‘hard core’ of the Iranian regime and the military institutions of the ‘Party of God’.
Embodied by organisations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the second part of the 1980s, religious radicalism was perceived as a means to accentuate the isolation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the Muslim world. In 1988, after the Palestinian National Congress’s recognition of resolution 242, which implied an implicit recognition of Israel, the PLO and its President, Yassir Arafat, were accused by Islamists of wanting to sell off Palestine, defined as a mortmain land (waqf), inalienable as the exclusive property of God.2 The muqawim figure is thus blossoming with the takeover of the Palestinian symbolic space by Khomeini’s Iran. The regime in Iran updates for its own sake past and present anti-colonial fights in order to build a permanent mobilisation against the ‘West’, the ‘Zionist entity’, etc. As a figure, the resistant is not necessarily an Islamist – one can be against the ‘West’ on political grounds, being, for example, an heir of Arab nationalism – but Islamism gives him a much greater consistency, since resistance as a duty is bound to cultural as much as to political spheres.
While a dynamic revolutionary born in Tehran found the means to project himself to the eastern Mediterranean shores, the most radical Sunni Islamists from the Arab countries bordering Israel in Egypt, in Jordan or in Syria found themselves in a uneasy situation. They were unable to seize power in their respective states and, since those states were keen to avoid any escalation with the Israeli army, they could not try to cross the border in order to ‘free Palestine’. Even southern Lebanon was out of reach, since the Shi’a Hezbollah locked the only military front still available for its own benefit.
The mujahid
The mujahid (jihad fighter) is the product of a double frustration. Domestic jihad, such as was advocated by Sayyid Qutb, failed in Egypt (1981) and in Syria (1979–82). The muqawim exploited the void created by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to claim exclusivity (in the form of an ‘Islamic resistance’) of the battlefront against Israel – a front from which the Sunni jihadists remained absent, despite multiple attempts at contact since 2001. The impossibility of pursuing jihad in Palestine – as the Arab regimes set themselves up as ‘guardians of the Israeli borders’ – obliged the mujahid to move to the third axis of crisis – the Afghani/Pakistani zone. Prevented from acting against Israel, defeated at the hands of the Arab regimes, an active minority of Islamists went to Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to escape Middle Eastern regional politics. The Palestinian Sheikh Abdallah Azzam (1941–89) was the theoretician of this militant trajectory. Trained in a camp reserved for Islamists – the ‘camp of sheikhs’ – in the valley of Jordan at the end of the 1960s, neutral during the conflict of Black September (1970) owing to his hostility toward the ‘atheist’ factions of the PLO, he was relieved of his duties as professor of shar’ia at the University of Jordan because of his admiration for Sayyid Qutb. A lecturer at the University of the King Abd al-Aziz in Jeddah in 1981, he was passionate about the battle of the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviet army, who occupied Afghanistan in 1979. He became a tireless proponent of the cause of jihad in Afghanistan, through multiple conferences throughout the world and the direction of the journal al-jihad.
The Palestinian sheikh constructed his action on the basis of a theological grammar drawn directly from medieval Islam. By defending by arms the frontiers of the umma – the community of believers – he was giving it a territorial medieval meaning close to the Abbasid empire’s limes. The believers of all countries were thus encouraged to assure the protection of this entity by committing themselves to the Afghan cause. Describing Afghanistan as a fragment of the suffering umma – Azzam knowingly appealed to the organicist metaphor of the Islamic ‘body’ corrupted by the communist ‘cancer’ – permitted the simplification of the Afghan stakes to make them more accessible to Muslim public opinion. All the same, the use of religious vocabulary provoked a kind of equivalence and comparability between issues in Arab countries and issues in Muslim lands further afield. Theology granted its sacred stamp to geography and pronounced the lack of attention to an affair foreign to the Arab world illegitimate.
With the jihad in Afghanistan, the Islamists of the Middle East escaped domestic issues linked with the overthrow of the Muslim government. Protecting the umma’s borders took precedence over the seizing of political power. The Palestinian cause was not forgotten, but simply postponed: thanks to their expertise acquired in combat, it was believed that the militants could subsequently recover Jerusalem.
As a promoter of an ummist jihadism, Azzam essentialised in religious terms what was then an exceptional geopolitical situation. He wrongly postulated that that situation was reproducible elsewhere. For that to happen, the believers had to go back to the essence of their faith: jihad conceived as individual obligation (fard ‘ayn) and not as a collective obligation (fard kifâya) relevant to states and their armies. In his own way, he privatised one of the fundamental attributes of sovereignty according to Carl Schmitt: the capacity to declare the exception and to designate the enemy (Schmitt 1992). The Muslim states as well as Islamic religious institutions were divested of this sovereign capacity in favour of individual sincere believers. A potential entity beforehand, the umma became an actual entity thanks to the decisive action of an avant-garde speaking and acting in its name. Yet, the new ideology born in Peshawar, in viewing jihad as an end in itself, moved the militants away from access to state power and freed their religious engagement of any territorial and strategic taking-root. Sunni radicalism pursued its shift from politics, in a statist and institutional sense, at the very moment when Shi’ite Islamism realised, for its part, the advantages of the modern state.3 Thanks to the existence of a clergy, radical Islam proved to be a cohesive force among the Shi’a, whereas it had mainly divisive effects in Sunni societies.
Thereafter, the model underwent some reorientation, even some deviation under the influence of new intellectuals who had settled in the Pakistani city of Peshawar at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. In the eyes of these intellectuals, such as Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, Abu Qatada, Abu Anas al-Chami, the mujahid was obliged to do battle against the ungodly powers that directed the Muslim states as a priority, before undertaking the re-conquest of the lost territories of the umma.
Azzam saw himself as an ‘alim of jihad, speaking in the name of the people and societies of Islam, subsumed in the glorious title of the umma. Not surprisingly, he identified with ulama who had battled several centuries before him to declare jihad a prerogative of the community, one that fell entirely in their domain and not amongst those of political power. According to Radwan al-Sayyid, since the beginning of the second century of hejri (the eighth Christian century), the ulama of Sham (Greater Syria) have played a special role in this emphasis of jihad. Victorious over the Sassanid empire in the east, the soldiers of Islam were crushed at the hands of Byzantium and went on to suffer several military defeats on land and at sea. A strong military theology prevailed during the pre-battle atmosphere, with the garrison towns (riba-t) stationed at the outposts of Islam (thughr). For the ulamas of Medina and Iraq, jihad was nothing more than a charitable action, the status of which was supererogatory from a religious point of view. The ulamas of Sham (following the example of the imam al-Awza’i) shared exactly the opposite view. In order to convince the Muslim constituency abroad, they increased the testimonies attributed to the Prophet and his companions about the sacred character of military jihad as an ‘individual obligation’. Faced with the threat of a Byzantine counter-attack, it was imperative to send reinforcements. For them, leaving their homes to defend Islam was comparable to Mohammed’s hijra in 632 for the Syrian jurists. This comparison implicitly signified giving certain geographical spaces a religious value superior to others, as though their movement to the borders to preserve Islam face to face with a non-Muslim enemy augmented their degree of religiosity. In addition, this movement established an explicit equivalence between an event (hijra) that was at the very origins of the birth of Islam and a military measure supposed to assume the same character of obligation.
The movement to Peshawar, some kilometres away from the Pakistani–Afghani border, was a means of reasserting the tradition of the ribat and to bring to the fore an Islam of combat. For this Islam of combat could not, by its very nature, situate itself at a state or governmental level. Significantly, the back catalogue of the al-jihad journal does not mention the least homage to an Arabic or Muslim head of state in the contemporary era. Carrying a vision sparked during his studies of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), Azzam sought to relaunch a classical, theological and controversial Islamic heritage in the modern world. After a lost opportunity in Palestine, the war in Afghanistan gave him that chance: he had found the situation and the people he had long searched for. Practising jihad was the equivalence of a new hijra: the reaffirmation of the pact linking the believer to his own faith through the voyage of the happy umma (the Arabian Peninsula) towards the suffering umma (Afghanistan at war).
The muqatil
If the figure of the fighter (muqatil) is the least sophisticated, it is without a doubt the most ancient and the most common. This figure manifests an attitude of localised defence when faced with an external aggression, whatever the identity of the aggressor. In the Palestinian case, as recalled by Rachid Khalidi, it is the vital link between peasants and their lands which triggered, at the end of the nineteenth century, a fighting dynamic ‘more driven from below than from above’ (Khalidi 1997: 7). The fighter identifies with a concrete environment which gives him his military identity and by which he defines himself to fight against an enemy considered principally as an intruder.
This character is summarised by the ‘profession of faith’ of a district chief from Tripoli in the north of Lebanon, cited by Michel Seurat: ‘I fight for my honour and my existence on this earth’ (Seurat 1985). In most cases, this character is little structured ideologically and thus corresponds with the notion of açabiyya(solidarity group) developed by Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century. The muqatil readily identifies with the values of Islam and of the homeland but connects this intimately with honour and defence of the family, so that its engagement essentially expresses itself at a local level. There is an elective affinity between the fighter, on one side, and the mere notion of political independence, on the other side, since the latter is seen as the continuation, on a larger scale, of an enjoyable local autonomy. This link explains why the Fatah movement – a blending between conservative Islam and independent outlook – was so successful in attracting a large part of the Palestinian constituency in the late 1960s until the 1990s. Conversely, it might also explain why it was so difficult to break centuries-old factionalism and to transform a network of local, entrenched organisations scattered in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into a modern Palestinian state – aside from the numerous constraints raised by different Israeli governments in its negotiations with the Palestinian Authority from 1993 to 2000.
The assertion of the resistant as an ideological compact figure in the 1980s posed an inner threat to the fighter. Aimed to enact vengeance for the Israeli assassination of one important military officer within the movement, Hamas’ campaign of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians in February and March of 1996 was in line with a religious grammar for which the Oslo Accords constituted a grave breach of the rule of Muslim solidarity. For those who identified with this grammar, solidarity with the umma was more important than obedience to a Palestinian authority born of original sin and guilty of negotiating with Israel. Denouncing the wrongdoing by means of terrorist attacks was a manner of demonstrating solidarity with an emotional image (the umma) defined against the PLO and Palestinian Authority. As soon as the political translation of the umma referred to centres of power localisable in Tehran and south Beirut, the seeds of civil war were planted in Palestinian soil.4 Once the resistant is in place, the only chance of survival given to the fighter is to rely upon the help of the international system – the United States, United Nations (UN), European Union (EU) – in order to resist against the constant pressure of the former. If the international system becomes ineffective in helping the fighter, the latter is at risk of losing its nationalist credentials.
In Iraq, local Sunni tribes fit into the fighter category. In creating the ‘awakening councils’ (majâlis al-sahwât) in the Sunni triangle of al-Anbar in 2006 (thanks to a generous policy of distribution of arms and money), the US General David Petraeus succeeded in disassociating the figure of the fighter from that of the resistant (Mouqtada al-Sadr’s ‘Mahdi Army’) and, especially, from that of the mujahid (al-Qaeda in Iraq). This policy is always risky, though, since the combatant figure may resort to armed struggle if the collective guarantees of security are no longer assured. It shows that against the backdrop of a double threat – a resistant linked to Iran’s Pasdaran/a mujahid linked to transnational al-Qaeda networks – there is no other solution for the fighter than to rely upon a Western force.
Dealing with those categories helps to deconstruct ‘Islamism’ as a self-explanatory concept. Placed side by side with the fighter, Islamism is a syntagm; it is closely linked with a local context and only makes sense by referring to that context. On the contrary, for both the resistant and the mujahid, Islamism is closer to a paradigm that encapsulates singularities into a greater narrative.5 For example, only a revived peace process today could highlight the invisible fracture-line that divides Hamas between those ready to live in a viable Palestinian state restricted to Gaza and the West Bank with East Jerusalem as a capital on the one hand, and those for whom the battle must continue until the disappearance of Israel on the other hand. Nominally, the former and the latter belong to the resistance, but this resistance is understood as a syntagm by the former and as a paradigm by the latter, who strives for an Islamic Palestine freed ‘from the Sea to the river’ (Gunning 2007). For Hamas’ pragmatic wing, the political and financial link with Saudi Arabia was conceived as a means of counterbalancing the risks of a too exclusive link with Iran. Unfortunately, US pressure on the Saudi Kingdom scaled down their influence inside the movement, thus reducing the prospect of an inter-Palestinian reconciliation.
During the latent civil war that prevailed in Syria from 1979 to 1982, the muqatil appropriated the language of Islamism to defend the interests of the elite urban Sunnis excluded from power by Hafez al-Assad’s regime. The repression led to the appearance of ‘Adnan ‘Uqla’s jihad fighters, whose revolutionary goals moved away from those more conservative goals defended by the urban muqatilîn. This internal conflict explained a mad headlong rush toward violence and the final defeat of a movement which commenced by fighting against the government before becoming a game of internal battles between muqatil and mujahid.6
Islamism and ‘regimes of engagement’
Logics of action and justification
More than ideology, it is what a ‘regime of engagement’ encompasses (such as places, objects, situations) which enables us to distinguish and to specify the different forms of Islamism. Abdallah Azzam, for example, took a decisive role in reactivating the mujahid’s figure as an ideal-type, but his successive actions took place in different regimes of engagement – training camp in the Jordan Valley, teaching at the shar’ia Faculty of Law at the University of Jordan, then at the King Abdal-Aziz University in Jeddah, the setting up of guesthouses in Pakistan in the 1980s – that are not those known after him by other mujahideen such as Ayman al-Zawahiri or Osama bin Laden. The religious coding of their respective environments has been done on quite similar terms, but the means of coordination were activated in very different contexts and times, and, for that reason, could not be grounded on the same apparatus. According to that framework, explaining actors’ behaviour cannot only be grounded on their biographies, nor on their socialisations or their speeches, but must take into account, first and foremost, all the concrete forms of coordination through which they acted in a certain period of time. Put together, those heterogeneous items fit the definition of a ‘regime of engagement’.
Thus, it is not because Hezbollah and Osama bin Laden agreed to believe that ‘the United States is at the origin of all the misfortune of the Muslim world’ that there is no difference between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. It is through the study of the connections that these two forms of Islamism maintain with their religious and institutional environments that one can define their respective specificities.
Many regimes of engagement sustain, for example, the resistant’s figure. Some of them rely on a ‘hard-power’ apparatus, embodied in Iran by the guardians of the revolution (sepah-e pasdaran), the popular militia (sepah-e basij) and a network of religious and economic foundations that bypass, under the official responsibility of the Revolution’s guide, the political and administrative institution of the state (Buchta 2000). When applied to Hezbollah, Islamism must take into account clandestine paths of communication between Syria and Lebanon, arms, missiles, military reports, underground passages, caches, contacts at the highest levels in the Lebanese, Syrian and Iranian states, a parliamentary group, a religious Shi’a institute (husseinniyât), training military camps, a governmental right of veto, an effective media system, an intelligence network much more efficient than the legal ones, religious guidance and, to cut a long story short, the effective control of an Arab capital. On the other hand, one will not find military roadblocks from which to extort money from the population, as if the leaders of the party had taken lessons from the very unpopular militia’s behaviour during the Lebanese civil war. Within the resistant figure – in that case Hezbollah – there are thus many ‘regimes of action’. The thousands of fighters inside the party (during the 2006 war, their number would not have surpassed 5,000 men) have been through specialised training known only to themselves and their supervisors. On the whole, the success of the Shi’a party lies in its capacity to combine different kinds of ‘regimes of action’ within the same framework, so that inner tensions never break out in open crises.
The concrete associations that weave the life of a jihadi militant are quite different. In order to simplify the picture, it has been organised around an underground composed of guesthouses in Iraq, Syria or Pakistan, military camps in Waziristan and Yemen, jihadist forums, clandestine studios for the fabrication of false papers and explosives, local mosques, and readings of canonical texts written by the main jihadist ulamas since 2006. More transnational than regional, the geography of the mujahid makes the link between the three axes of crises, without managing to weigh decisively on any one of them, in the absence of an environment comparable to the one built, thanks to its organic relationship with some state apparatus, by the muqawim.
Another huge difference distinguishes those two models of engagement. Should an inner conflict occur within the ranks of Hezbollah, mechanisms of ‘aggrandisement’ give the upper hand to a religious body among the ‘jihad council’ directed by the secretary-general of the organisation. Beyond the ‘jihad council’, the Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, gives the final call in his capacity as a wali al-faqih. The ‘principle of worth’ inside the Islamic Shi’a order is embodied by one and only one religious authority – the ‘worthy being’ in Boltanski and Thévenot’s vocabulary.7
Geographically split, jihadist Sunni networks cannot resort to any kind of authority comparable to the one endowed to the wali al-faqih. Resorting to the divine religious corpus – Qur’an and hadith – as a principle of worth only makes matters worse, since there is no well-respected authority that would be able to connect the disputed situation with the will of God and its Prophet. Asking Zawahiri in a written letter takes time and is not immune to interception by the enemy, as was shown by the many letters seized by the US army in Iraq. Moreover, Zawahiri is one among many in the jihadi universe, and does not hold an uncontested authority on these matters. Pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina could provide the opportunity for a kind of Islamic ‘aggrandisement’, but the Saudi sheikhs are themselves too much divided to guarantee a well-accepted interpretation. Landmarks are too loose to really help in the coordination of the others’ actions.
Variations in human and material equipment explain the changes inside the jihadist paradigm. The first generation benefited from exceptional geo-political circumstances, which combined religious meaning, military backing and international support from the United States (technology), Saudi Arabia (money) and Pakistan (logistical facilities) during a relatively short period (aboutfive years). This combination ceased with the Soviet army’s retreat in February 1989, but far from being fully taken into account, the combination was denied by the promoters of the jihadist ideology. For them, the mujahid’s faith was the true cause of the victory rather than external aid, described as a source of corruption of the purity of the cause. Pushed to the limit, the privatisation of jihad, of which Azzam was the principal theoretician, led to a situation of permanent mobilisation which no state could accept for long. Here lies the big difference in status between the two ideal-types: the muqawim is a mystic capable of signing up for politics, whereas the mujahid is a mystique of perpetual jihad, rebellious against all political affiliation, who found a Che Guevara of Islam in Abdallah Azzam.
During the second phase, only the emirate of the Taliban in 1996 offered a safe haven to mujahideen in a situation of defeat, incapable of taking power in their countries of origin (Algeria, Tajikistan) or of reproducing the Afghan success on other fronts (Bosnia, Chechnya). In 1999, three years after his arrival from Sudan, Osama bin Laden was authorised to build his own training camps in the city of Kandahar, with the best recruits sourced from the al-Faruq camp sent to the airport camp. The other camps were ‘mutualised’ between the different jihadist networks. The majority of the attacks committed during this period were conceived of and tested in the camps of Kandahar (Hegghammer 2010). Wishing to avoid clashes within the Muslim world as Abdallah Azzam did 20 years previously, it was during this period that Ayam al-Zawahiri advocated striking the ‘distant enemy’ (the United States) to better topple the ‘close enemy’ (the Arab governments). Due to the global nature of US hyper-power, and as long as the distant enemy manifested itself all over the world, jihad itself became global.
After 2003, the war in Iraq marked the start of a third phase, dominated by attacks and the cycle of clashes between Shi’a and Sunni. Designed to assemble the Sunni political and religious spectre, the anti-Shi’a attacks organised by Zarqawi had exactly the opposite effect, illustrating once again the incapability of Sunni radicalism to structure the Sunni community.
Islam on screen
New Arab broadcasting news in the 1990s created a never before seen transnational environment and played a considerable role in the legitimisation of both the muqawim and the mujahid. Evoking the Western cultural razzia via preaching and televised debates gave a strong incentive to those who decided to react by engaging in a regime of violence. Speaking of Islam as a mere victim of the West was tantamount to considering the latter as a uniform and hostile bloc, every dimension of which – political, cultural, military, technological, media – in relation to the others drives the battle in its own field, while ultimately serving a common goal. Set up in 1996, the Al-Jazeera satellite television channel was among the first to stage the ‘Muslim predicament’ in the Balkans and Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Since 2003, Al-Jazeera has been tightly controlled by its new chief, Waddah Khanfar. Born in Jordan in 1968 and of Palestinian descent, Khanfar is ideologically close to Hamas’ most hardline rulers. Under his strong editorial influence, Al-Jazeera is prone to portray a victimised umma always under attack, whose Palestine embodies the metonymical form. Insisting on military issues against foreign powers (Israel in Palestine/the United States in Iraq) gives back to Islamism the credentials it lost during the civil wars in Machrek (in the 1980s) or in Algeria (in the 1990s). Thanks to the broadcasting power of Al-Jazeera, Sayyid Qutb’s admirer is in the position of making sense of events in the Middle East, by giving them an eschatological meaning between good and evil.
These Arab broadcasters – Al-Jazeera, Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Al-Majd or Iqra’ for salafist channels – have given strong leeway to another figure, the muqawil (entrepreneur in Arabic), who can exist independently of the other three figures, or can merge with them according to the context.8 The muqawil is an entrepreneur of anger whose self-proclaimed mission is to defend the symbols of Islam against systematic attacks from multiple enemies. The entrepreneurs of anger most often prefer to stay removed from political issues in their institutional dimension to better seize, through emphasis on symbolic questions (veil, niqab, caricatures of the prophet, Pope Benedict’s discourse at Ratisbonne, etc.), the power to define Muslim identity and thus the ways of being and acting in the public sphere in both Western and Muslim countries. According to the muqawil, by passing a law in March 2004 that banned the Islamic headscarf in schools, the French legislative body was persecuting Islam.
Even when claiming to represent a non-violent, salafist Islam, the Islamist preacher shares similar values with the mujahid with regard to religious morals. He condemns with a comparable vehemence the impiety of Western societies – always being careful not to draw the same practical conclusions. This kind of indignation revives abstract references (defence of Islam, of the umma) identical to those which the mujahid claims to defend in recalling the obligation of solidarity which must unite all believers. The muqawil needs scandal, as such occurrences give him the opportunity to redefine Muslim identity according to his own beliefs, especially in Western societies. Those Muslims by birth who do not react along the same lines are deemed guilty of betraying their own faith. This entrepreneur of anger can nowadays rely on many technologies in order to take over as many issues as possible.
If the figure of the muqawil thus completes that of the mujahid, it also blends largely with that of the muqawim; everywhere the latter occupies positions of power (in Iran and at least partially in Gaza and Lebanon). As was illustrated in 1988 by the Salman Rushdie affair, the muqawil’s conception of resistance supports a mission of control over the Muslim cultural space, inside as well as outside its borders. In August 2009 the decision of the president of the supreme judicial council (majlis al-’adal al-’alâ) to impose the wearing of the veil on female Palestinian advocates in the tribunals of Gaza shows once again the confusion between the two figures. The polemic surrounding the question of the obligatory veil in the schools of Gaza and the separation of girls and boys in secondary school was not resolved by the ambiguous communiqué from the Minister of Education, which stated that ‘the girls of the Gaza Strip do not need a decision obliging them, under threat, to wear the hijab and the jilbab, for Palestinian society, in its entirety, is a pious society based on religion, and this piety is an integral part of its faith’. All the same, the decision of the Hamas government to exempt students from wearing an obligatory uniform opened the path to an Islamisation of ways of dressing of the girls and aimed in particular to deprive female students from the more well-offareas west of Gaza City of the benefit of an ‘exaggerated liberty’ (al-Nahar 2009).9
Conclusion
The muqatil appears to have been the vanquished figure in the Arab Machrek since the beginning of the twenty-first century. If the international system ceases to back up its aspiration to independence (as in Palestine) or to democracy (Syria, Lebanon or Iraq), the fighter will be left with a tragic alternative: to disappear or to convert to one of the two other forms of action. The stakes for democratic potentials of Islam are considerable. From the moment that an opposing Islamist negotiates rallying with other forces to combat an authoritative regime (the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s choice in the Declaration of Damascus of 16 October 2005), this type of actor will prioritise the search for an internal consensus upon his original ambition to apply the religious law, and move away, de jure, from the criteria established by the founding father of Islamism. However, an international environment in retreat combined with a growing regionalisation between Israel and Iran block this type of evolution. Today, it is the figure of the muqawim that is progressively tending to prevail, although that of the mujahid has everything to gain both from maintaining a regional state of war and from the festering domestic situation.
Notes
1 Impregnated with an Iranian Shiism of rationalist inspiration, himself probably a Freemason, politically opportunist despite a fiercely anti-colonialist political line, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani hardly resembled those who, among the Muslim Brotherhood, claimed to represent his heritage 20 or 30 years after his death.
2 Invited to Sudan just after the signing of the Oslo accords, Yasser Arafat was accused by the youth of Hamas of having transgressed a religious taboo in negotiating the future of an ‘Islamic waqf’ inalienable by nature, i.e. Mandatory Palestinian Territory. According to a former counsellor of the PLO president, Marwan Kanafani, who relates the scene in his memoirs, it was the first time that Yasser Arafat was brought face to face with the young militants of Hamas. Heckled and interrupted several times with cries of ‘Allah Akbar’ and ‘there is no God but God’, the historical head of the Palestinian National Movement was ‘surprised by the unshakeable convictions and the aggressive and violent style manifested by the youth of Hamas’, especially concerning their assessment of the PLO over the past years, accusing it ‘of paralysis, of corruption and of weakness’ (Kanafâni 2007: 304–6).
3 The final reflections of Abdallah Azzam on the negotiations driven by the United Nations (UN) after the pull-out of the Soviet troops in February 1989 illustrate, moreover, a refusal of the politic conceived as space of institutional negotiation. The internationalisation of the Afghan question meant, according to him, a will to take the fruits of their military victory away from the mujahideen. The communist impiety is thus taken over by the Western impiety. It is still by the yardstick of the body of medieval texts that he evaluated the legitimacy of the political, diplomatic and military relations between Muslim and non-Muslim powers. According to Abdullah Azzam, the Afghan question had to serve to stimulate a new religious practice in Muslim societies, in which jihad would be transformed from a highly theoretical state (close to the Christian ‘just war’ in medieval theory) into an absolute religious duty.
4 Just after the signing of the Wye Plantation accords (October 1998), conceived to relaunch a peace process at a dead-end after the election of Netanyahu in Israel (1996), the Hezbollah press accused Yasser Arafat of having ‘placed Palestinians at risk of civil war with unknown effects’ in responding to ‘the demands of the Zionist entity’. See journal al-’ahad, 30 October 1998.
5 For an analysis of the jihadist ‘grand narrative’, see Kepel 2008.
6 For a leading actor’s narrative of this period, see the fourth volume of the memoirs of the former secretary-general of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Adnan Saad al-Dîn (2009), in particular the political leadership of the Brotherhood’s condemnation of the massacre of the youth of Alouite faith committed in June 1979 at Alep (pp. 66–82).
7 According to Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, the ‘higher common principle’ is the highest value among a ‘general principle of justice’ – election in the ‘Civic Polity’, efficiency in the ‘Industrial Polity’, grace in the ‘Inspired Polity’, etc. The process of attributing states of worth requires mechanisms of arbitration linking a given situation with a general principle of legitimacy. The ‘worthy beings’ are those who enjoy such proximity. See Boltanski and Thévenot 2006.
8 One can seen moral entrepreneurs transform into jihad fighters: ten years before becoming one of the principal jihad figures in Falouja in 2004, the electrician Omar Hadid sparked an ‘Islamic campaign’ against the music stores and blew up the only cinema in the city. In Morocco, the group that commissioned the terrorist attacks of 16 May 2003 had set up an Islamic squad for the punishment of ‘vice’ in the shanty town of Thomas in Casablanca, taking unmarried couples guilty of transgressive behaviour.
9 The polemic was activated by an article from the France-Presse news agency announcing Hamas’ imposition of the hijab in the Gaza Strip. Hamas’ Minister of Education detected in this accusation a game of combined interests ‘which coincided with those of an occupation concerned with reinforcing the ignorance of our sons and with leading the minister to minor quarrels’. Cited in the Lebanese daily paper, al-Nahar (2009).
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