Almost every day, American helicopters attack civilian areas somewhere in Iraq. “15 Iraqis killed and 50 wounded” in Baghdad, in only one attack this week! Talk is now growing about whether to try to “take back” recalcitrant cities like Fallujah and Ramadi.
But it’s all right, the White House and the Pentagon keep assuring us: After all, these people are “terrorists”–and the only way to deal with terrorists is to kill them.
Finally, after three years of mostly nonsensical “analysis” accepted in official circles here about Iraqi history and the nature of terrorism, some thought is going into who exactly these terrorists are. Some profound historical insights are emerging about what we are dealing with:
– The use of terrorism as a means of political assassination is generally traced to the famous cult of the “Assassins” in northwest Iran in the 12th Century, where the religious heretic Hasan Sabah sent hashish-drugged men all over the Middle East to eliminate his rivals.
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But suicide tactics in particular can be traced to the Indian fight against the English colonial administration in Malabar in southwestern India in the 18th Century; to the Muslim resistance in Aceh in the Indonesian archipelago against the Dutch in the 19th Century; and to the Filipino Muslim resistance against Catholic Spain in the 19th Century–not to speak of 4,000 Japanese kamikaze attacks in World War II.
– In the 1980s, the Islamic Group arose in Egypt and spread to Peshawar, Pakistan, on the Afghan border. It would come to presage most of the mentality and many of the tactics of today’s “terrorists.” Caryle Murphy, a Washington Post reporter and author of “Passion for Islam, Shaping the Modern Middle East: The Egyptian Experience,” dug deeply into the Islamic Group and brilliantly analyzed them.
“First of all,” she told a group of us here, “they wanted recognition, and they had no way to get it in the government. A loose structure of semiautonomous cells allowed them to feel useful–and part of something bigger than themselves. Then they wanted revenge against the government, especially for the state torture in the prisons. Finally, they wanted to embarrass the government of [Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak–that is why they embarked upon the strategy of attacking Christians and tourists.
“They believed deeply that God would reward them with success if they followed his commands. They spoke of justice and how the world should be ordered–they believed that all Egypt’s problems would end if only they were ruled by Islamic law.”
– It may seem a reach to compare what is happening today in the Muslim world with the Punjab of India in the 1980s, but it is not.
Professor Mark Juergensmeyer, director of global and international studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, traveled to the Punjab in those years. Before he arrived, he believed he would find the “politicization of religion.” Instead, he found, tragically, 17-year-olds engaged in the battle. They were being told by the preachers of a fanatical faction of the Sikh religion that “there is a fight between the religious and the anti-religious.” He ended up calling it instead the “religionization of politics.”
He found, too, that these boys looked at their fight, which came to be against the Indian government and led to the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, as a “deeply redemptive act for those who participated in it–they were carried on a great wave of history.”
“It was a political struggle wrapped up in religious language; it was eerily similar to the 9/11 bombing,” said Juergensmeyer, author of “Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence.”
Later, when he interviewed one of the would-be perpetrators of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center–which, if carried through as planned, could have killed up to 200,000 Americans instead of the nearly 3,000 killed on Sept. 11, 2001–Juergensmeyer realized how closely their goals approximated those of the failed rebellion in the Punjab. And when he visited Iraq several months ago, he saw the sense of “cosmic war” against the outsider being re-enacted once again–against the occupying Americans.
These fascinating case studies were presented at a remarkable conference this week, “The Spiritual and Political Motivation of the Sept. 11 Attackers,” put together here by the prominent German foundation the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
What a change it was from the conferences of two autumns ago, when the dark neo-con Scheherazades were weaving their delusional tales, predicting Periclean democracy in Iraq and GIs being greeted with rose petals.
But one question did come up: Given the fact that, throughout and across history, enraged factions within Islam have used suicidal tactics, is there an “affinity” between Islam and suicide?
Professor Tilman Seidensticker of the University of Jena in Germany indicated there could be when there is l) an individualized jihad, and 2) decentralized ulemas, or religious authorities who bypass the traditional Islamic authorities. He traced how, with Al Qaeda and related groups today, leaders and preachers far outside the traditional teachings of Islam create new “texts” telling impressionable and angry young Muslims it is right to loot, kill and destroy.
Two lessons here, I think: 1) We’ve got to stop thinking that what we are seeing is somehow outside of history. 2) We can see hope, they all agreed, but in the long run, when the search for Islamic renewal gains more adherents and when, inevitably, passions begin to ebb.
Meanwhile, every time we bomb civilians in Baghdad or Fallujah or Najaf, that sense of “cosmic warfare” as the basis of all these rebellious terrorist movements only gains more new adherents.
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