Saturday, March 01, 2008

Retraction without traction

When Sayyed Imam al-Sharif seemingly renounced violent Jihad, the NY Sun referred to him as "[o]ne of Al Qaeda's senior theologians" and quoted a number of experts on the significance of his retraction:
[...] The author of "Inside Al Qaeda," Rohan Gunaratna said in an interview this week, "There is nothing more important than a former jihadist as important as Dr. Fadl criticizing the jihadist vanguard." Mr. Gunaratna, who acts at times as a consultant for American and Western intelligence, described the reformed theologian as "both an ideologue and operational leader, but he was primarily an ideologue."

An expert on Islamic terrorism with the Jamestown Foundation, Steven Ulph, also said the defection of Mr. Sharif could hemorrhage support for Al Qaeda. "The important point to make, when you have the combination of a respected ideologue, plus someone who was in the field, say these things it is more important than having a Saudi sheik that moderates his message," he said.

The director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, Frank Cilluffo, said, "Here you have someone with the stature and credibility, who more or less wrote the book on jihadism and is oft cited by other jihadists, making the case against it. This is someone with the heft on legal and religious grounds to make the counter argument that we can't." [...]
Three months later, a current opinion essay at Al-Ahram weighs in and doubts that it will make much difference:
[...] When the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Gamaa Islamiya emerged as distinct militant groups in the 1970s and 1980s, they gelled around certain theological principles on the basis of which they held that the local ruling authority was heretical and had to be overthrown. Where Islamic Jihad proclaimed dozens of theological arguments in justification of this notion, the more populist Gamaa Islamiya produced the "Charter of Islamic Action". Both organisations mounted intensive recruitment drives, incorporating thousands of disaffected youths into their tightly guarded and controlled organisational structures . . .

Most of that generation of the Jihad were ideologically formed on the basis of these and other long, complex and extremely radical doctrinal works, as well as through hundreds of indoctrination pamphlets. They were also put through several years of rigorous physical and military training before engaging in their operations. Many of them believe that the assassination of President Anwar El-Sadat in 1981 was precipitate and put paid to their dream of an "Islamic coup" against the Egyptian regime.

Therefore, Sheikh Imam's revisions will affect those who engaged in and subscribed to violence through their membership in the large, hierarchically organised jihadist organisations that were ideologically committed to the overthrow of regimes in, for example, Egypt and Algeria. But these are not the forms of the jihadist movement that prevails today. On the one hand, their ideological indoctrination was not as rigorous and sophisticated as that of the Jihad recruits. On the other, they do not share the same goals as the large jihadist organisations in Egypt and Algeria. Whatever the aims of the terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid, London, Sharm El-Sheikh, Casablanca and downtown Cairo were, they were not to overthrow existing regimes.

There is a new order of terrorism at work, shaped by different motives. The above-mentioned incidents were carried out by small groups of individuals with no clear affiliation to a larger hierarchically structured jihadist organisation and with no intent of formulating an ideological project that clarifies a political end that the exercise of violence is aimed to accomplish. The bombing of the World Trade Center towers marks the transition from what we might term the era of "jihadist ideology" to the era of "jihadist action". Jihad now has a markedly individualistic quality: motives seem more immediate and emotional (revenge) and aims less idealistic and more personal (instant salvation through martyrdom). In addition, ideological formation/indoctrination is at once much easier (through some selective surfing on the Internet) and superficial -- a far cry from having to wade through the long, complex and scholarly argumentation of Sheikh Imam.

The chances are that the youths inspired by Al-Qaeda would have gone ahead with terrorist acts even if Sheikh Imam had issued his retractions five years ago. The members of the so-called London cell, which consisted of only five individuals, would never grasp what the Jihad leader wrote because they proceeded from an entirely different direction. Theirs was a reaction to a sorrowful political and social reality, a reaction that they dressed with a jihadist gloss that would turn their deaths into a gateway to paradise. Imagine the number of like-minded youths tragic conditions such as those in Iraq could create, youths ready to blow themselves up after barely two months of indoctrination.

Sheikh Imam's revisions are undoubtedly sincere and historic. But they will not influence the new terrorist generation, because they were written with the old style of jihad in mind. They, therefore, do not take into account the new youth, which is essentially an unknown quantity and which operates independently and who seldom read books exceeding 50 pages let alone voluminous philosophical or theological treatises.
Bloggers have also been skeptical all along, although not necessarily for the same reasons. According to Joshuapundit:
Since al-Sharif is incarcerated and may have been tortured, his latest `conversion' may very well be taken with a grain of salt by the people it was intended to reach.

And after all,let's not forget this. Even if you take what he's written as genuine and uncoerced, al-Sharif isn't saying that jihad against the west is wrong or that sharia is wrong..merely that the way Osama has waged it was a mistake in tactics.
This is probably more sensible skepticism than that of Amr Elshoubaki, the Al-Ahram editorialist. The notion of "new generation" Jihadists who "who seldom read books exceeding 50 pages" has the whiff of the sort of denial that claims Jihadists "misunderstand Islam." I'm not making claims about the essential nature of Islam (Will the real Islam please stand up!), but simply observing that it is naive to think of our enemies as having little or no intellectual guidance or ideology.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

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