MidEast Report

THINK AGAIN: AL QAEDA
Jason Burke has this article regarding misconceptions about al Qaeda in the current issue of Foreign Policy.

Islamic militants' main objective is not conquest, but to beat back what they perceive as an aggressive West that is supposedly trying to complete the project begun during the Crusades and colonial periods of denigrating, dividing, and humiliating Islam. The militants' secondary goal is the establishment of the caliphate, or single Islamic state, in the lands roughly corresponding to the furthest extent of the Islamic empire of the late first and early second centuries. Today, this state would encompass the Middle East, the Maghreb (North Africa bordering the Mediterranean), Andalusia in southern Spain, Central Asia, parts of the Balkans, and possibly some Islamic territories in the Far East. Precisely how this utopian caliphate would function is vague. The militants believe that if all Muslims act according to a literal interpretation of the Islamic holy texts, an almost mystical transformation to a just and perfect society will follow.

Nothing "almost" mystical about it, but even if the jihadists' goal is, as Burke claims, merely to reestablish the Caliphate of the Middle Ages, that's only slightly less realistic than Islamizing the world. So if it's not conquest, it's "reconquest," and though that is an important distinction to make in order to better understand what we're dealing with: hyper-revanchism.

In his 1998 fatwa, bin Laden specifically mentions the U.S. presence in "the lands of Islam in the holiest of places," and then states that to "kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim." To a fundamentalist Muslim like bin Laden, secularism is a blasphemy. Given that Muslims now live in significant numbers throughout the secular Western world, how does their future figure into bin Laden's goal of protecting all Muslims from Western oppression?

posted by Matt Duss @ 10:03 PM