Download Salafi Jihadist Ideology and Competing Debates on Causation

Salafi Jihadist Ideology and
Competing Debates on Causation
Four Pillars of Salafi Jihadism
• Jahiliyya
– The problem that should be resolved
• Salafism
– The solution to the problem
• Higra
– The preparation to bring the solution
• Jihad
– the action to bring the solution
Ibn Taymiyya
• Mongul Conquest of Baghdad 1258
• 1295 Mongol Khan converts to Islam
• Taymiyya critical of conversion to Islam
declaring them not true Muslims
• Supports the Salafist principle
• Revival of ijtihad
• Positions Jihad as the sixth pillar of Islamic
faith
Salafism
• Salaf: righteous predecessor
• Departure from the true Islam that has
resulted in the decline of Islamic civilisation.
• Islam was perfect at the time of the Prophet
and since strayed from the original condition.
• Ijtihad to challenge failing leadership
Jahiliyya
• Jahiliyya: Ignorance of God’s will. Originally
describing the peoples of pre-Islamic Arabia
• New Jahiliyya: materialism, human law and
values, secularism
• Qutb, “Islam is a revolutionary ideology that
seeks to alter the social order of the entire
world and rebuild it in conformity with its own
tenets and ideals.”
Higra
• 622 , Mecca to Yathrib 275 miles to the north
• Migration was necessary to escape the corrupt
condition of Meccan society
• Physical and spiritual exodus
• allowed the believers to escape their pre-existing
tribal identities and replace them with an Islamic
identity tied to the concept of the Umma
• “the super tribe of Islam.’’
• Osama bin Laden emphasizes the Hijra and
presented himself as if he were re-enacting the
Prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina.
Jihad
• Struggle
• The Qur’an contains 114 suras (chapters) which contain in
total 6,234 ayas (verses). Of these, 28 ayas make reference
to jihad, the term being mentioned specifically on 41
instances
• Lesser, outer jihad (al-jihad al-asghar); a military struggle,
i.e. a holy war
• Greater, inner jihad (al-jihad al-akbar); the struggle of
personal self-improvement against the self's base desires
• "We have returned from the lesser jihad (al-jihad al-asghar)
to the greater jihad (al-jihad al-akbar)." When asked, "What
is the greater jihad?," he replied, "It is the struggle against
oneself.“
• Ibn al- Qayyim al-Jawziya (1292) "The only
reason for inventing this tradition is to reduce the
value of fighting with the sword, so as to distract
the Muslims from fighting the infidels and the
hypocrites.“
• Abdullah Azzam "Whenever jihad is mentioned in
the holy book, it means the obligation to fight. It
does not mean to fight with the pen or to write
books or articles in the press or to fight by
holding lectures.
• The saying is in fact a false, fabricated hadith that
has no basis. It is only a saying of one of the
Successors, it contradicts textual evidence and
reality.”
Branding and Franchising
• Oliver Roy, “al Qaeda,
Brand Name Ready for
Franchise”
• Al Qaeda as Ideology
• Glocalisation
• Local National Global
Political Order
Glocalization
•
•
•
•
Franchising, The al Qaeda brand
Affiliates, Allies and Freelance Jihadists
Wedding local grievances to the global effort
“Think globally, act locally”
–
–
–
–
–
–
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
Al Qaeda in Iraq (Now ISIS)
Ansar al Sharia
Al Shabaab
Boko Haram
The Global Jihad and International
Order
• What accounts for the rise of Salafi Jihadist
movement?
• Positions the Global Jihad within International
Relations
• Individual motivations vs institutional
motivations
• Structure vs Agent
Competing Debates on the Rise of the
Jihad
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Globalisation and modernity
Clash of civilisations
Culture and values
Western foreign policy
democracy and authoritarian regimes
Economic disenfranchisement
Why not the rest?
All of these have meaning and a role to play but
do not operate in totality
Globalisation Modernity
• ‘September 11 can be traced back to the economic and social crisis
that has developed in MENA starting in the late 1970s.
• linking the appearance of the sudden rise of Islamism and the
subsequent anti-Americanism and targeting of the US by Islamist
‘terror’ groups
• Globalisation may be accelerating human interaction but it is not
new, nor inevitable.
• Cultures have been interacting, cross-fertilising, trading, integrating,
dominating and influencing each other for centuries
• post hoc ergo propter hoc
• international ‘terror’ networks have been facilitated by the very
processes they claim to reject.
• Salafi Jihadists challenge globalisation with an alluring antihegemonic discourse to gain support from those who are
marginalised and do not benefit from the contemporary world
order
Clash of Civilizations
• Huntington ‘it is my hypothesis that the
fundamental source of conflict in this new world
will not be primarily ideological or primarily
economic. The great divisions among humankind
and the dominating source of conflict will be
cultural.
• Reduces the primacy of ideas (ideology)
• despite historical conflict between civilisations
these conflicts are not, as Huntington suggests,
inevitable but rather subject to particular political
realities.
Osama bin Laden
• Interviewer: What is your comment on what
Samuel Huntington and others say about the
inevitability of the clash of civilisations?
– Bin Laden: I say there is no doubt about that. It is
clearly established in the book and the Sunnah.
• Continually reified by both Orientalists and
Occidentalists to serve particular political
interests in a given period of time
• The US and the West are not ideologically
monolithic and neither is Islam.
Culture and Values
• Bush “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our
freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree
with each other.”
• rejection of Western Culture
• The decadence of the West, that Jihadists speak of, is linked to
homosexuality, pornography, sexual freedom and individuality
which are common themes in most religions and not specific to
Islam.
• SJ is not a reaction to Western culture, but an attempt at deculturalisation.
• The divide is between believers and nonbelievers is a mechanism of
re-universalising a religion disentangling it from cultural identity
and recasting the religion into a universal code of norms.
• The SJ determine what constitutes this religion and use it as an
ideology for taking power free from the challenges of culture itself
Western Support for Regional Regimes
• Stability and interests vs democratic values
• Hafez “extremism is a reaction to iron-fisted, predatory
state aggression.”
• Crosston, ‘hypocrisy of our own (American) professed
foreign policy creates new generations of terrorists’.
• Ramadan ‘the intrinsic dynamics and the trends within
political Islam are not known, so we put all the people
in the same box. It’s just to justify the rhetoric of the
dictators for years and accepted by the West that if it’s
not us the dictators, then it is going to be them, the
violent extremists’.
• Any regime, democratic or not, which is not in line with
the AQ ideology is an obstacle.
Arab Spring 2010 - 2011
• Y. Ibrahim ‘now that the friends of America are
being mopped out one after the other, our
aspirations are great that the path between us
and al-Aqsa is clearing up’
• Al Awlaki, ‘The West believes that the revolts are
bad for al-Qaeda. This is not the case.”
• Ridel, “the victory of the masses and civil
disobedience strikes at the very heart of the al
Qaeda narrative that proclaims change can only
come to the Islamic world through violence and
terror, through the Global Jihad’.
Economics
• Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Guinea and Ethiopia
have the lowest GDP per individual in the
world
• 67% of those who claim to be radicalized have
secondary or higher education
• no direct correlation between poverty and
‘terrorism’ in general
Consolidation of the International
System
• Nation-state has become the preferred model
of political organisation
• In practice this limits the possibility of
establishing a trans-Islamic state that be
understood as legitimate in Salafi Jihadist
ideological terms
• The US, and other great powers, act as
hegemonic guarantors of the International
System that must be overturned.
Imperial International Order
•
•
•
•
•
•
Power dispersed
Dominance of Empire
Nation-state sovereignty not yet established
No agreed upon norms
Borders often porous and undefined
Less constraining than the modern system
Unity (umma) Legitimacy (religious governance)
• The SJ problem
• (1) A unified Islamic community ruled by
religiously sanctioned governance is the
solution to all grievances
• (2) The US and the international system are
major obstacles to that realisation.
Hegemony
• dominant power limits self-determination and
forces states to act within the principles of the
emerging world order.
• The problem is less the hegemon and more the
constraints of hegemony
• Whichever power acts in this capacity is a target
of the Salafi Jihadist project
• al-Qaeda poses a challenge to the sovereignty of
specific states but it also challenges the
international society as a whole
Post-hegemonic challenges to world
order
• Japan 2010 terror attack
• ‘weaken the international blasphemous system
that plundered the wealth of the Muslims’.
• ‘Our strikes will reach the heart of Tokyo. If they
want to destroy their economic power and be
trampled under the feet of the combatants of
Allah, let them come to Iraq.
• China Xinxiang, Quighar Muslims
• UBL : “I would suggest the Chinese government
be careful of the US and the West”