The New York Review of Books

1.

In London eight men—all British nationals—are currently on trial for an alleged 2006 plot to destroy seven transatlantic aircraft in mid-air, using liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks. According to the prosecution they could have killed some 1,500 people, nearly half the number of those who died in the September 11 attacks. The airport security staff were to have their attentions distracted by “dirty” magazines in the would-be suicide bombers’ hand luggage—a neat example of jihad-by-pornography, fighting the infidel West with its own salacious habits.

In a video testament intended for posthumous transmission, one of the would-be martyrs berates the British people for their apathy toward their government’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan:

This is revenge for the actions of the USA in the Muslim lands and their accomplices such as the British and the Jews…. Most of you [are] too busy…watching Home and Away and EastEnders [two popular TV soaps], complaining about the World Cup, drinking your alcohol, to even care anything…. I know because I’ve come from that.

What are the forces that drive young men such as these to commit mass murder? The question is addressed from different perspectives in all of the books under review.

A convincing analysis is offered by Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and consultant to the US government, in his Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-first Century. After examining some five hundred individual cases using “open source” data from court proceedings, media accounts, academic writings, and selected Internet materials, Sageman sets his gaze on what he calls the “middle range.” These are the social networks and intellectual milieus through which defendants in terrorist trials are recorded as operating. Contrary to widespread assumptions, he finds that they are not to be distinguished from their nonterrorist peers by extremes of hatred for the West:

It is actually difficult to convince people to sacrifice themselves just because they hate their target…. On the contrary, it appears that it is much more common to sacrifice oneself for a positive reason such as love, reputation, or glory.

A common theme, however, was geographical displacement. A very high proportion of his sample—84 percent—belonged to the Muslim diasporas, with a majority joining global Islamist terrorist movements in a country where they did not grow up. The Hamburg cell that provided the leadership for September 11 was typical of his wider sample: they were Middle Eastern students in Germany, who traveled to Afghanistan to join the fight against America.

Sageman pays close attention to family networks, with about one fifth of his sample having close family ties with other global Islamic activists. His point is strongly reinforced by Bilveer Singh in The Talibanization of Southeast Asia, his study of jihadist groups in Southeast Asia. Singh sees kinship as being a vital element in the makeup of al-Jamaat al-Islamiyah—the organization responsible for the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002. The people who form terror groups have to know and trust one another. In most Muslim societies it is kinship, rather than shared ideological values, that generates relations of trust.

Although drawn from the professional middle classes, the terrorists and “wannabes” studied by Sageman are not pious intellectuals who may be persuaded—or dissuaded—by religious arguments. Most of them—especially those belonging to the younger generation or “third wave” of Islamist terrorists—are less well educated than earlier generations, especially in religious matters. Indeed he suggests that this very ignorance contributes to their susceptibility to extremism. Sageman writes:

The defendants in terrorism trials around the world would not have been swayed by an exegesis of the Quran. They would simply have been bored and would not have listened.¹

In Sageman’s view the appeal of jihad is not so much narrowly religious as broadly romantic and consonant with the aspirations of youth everywhere. The young Moroccans with whom he spoke outside the mosque where the Madrid bombers used to worship equated Osama bin Laden with the soccer superstars they most admired. Their utopian aspirations are inspired as much by iconography as ideology. The images of Sheikh Osama, the rich civil engineer, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, once a promising physician from an elite Cairo family—both of whom are seen to have sacrificed everything for the sake of their beliefs—send powerful messages to aspirants far removed from the grimy realities of tribal Waziristan.

As Omar Saghi, a scholar of Islam at Sciences Po, points out in his introduction to Al-Qaeda in Its Own Words, the Harvard University Press selection of al-Qaeda statements and writings, bin Laden’s first appearance after September 11 dressed in Afghan garb sitting cross-legged at the mouth of a cave sent a powerful message to the Muslim umma—or world community—by means of a “‘psycho-acoustic bubble,’…floating like gas through cyberspace”:

The challenge he posed to America as an ascetic stripped of all worldly goods and hiding out in Afghanistan’s miserable mountains was multiplied by the gaping breach that—as he delighted in emphasizing—separated him from the United States’ predatory opulence.

The cave has powerful symbolic resonances: the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation in a cave, and took refuge in one during his journey from Mecca to Medina.

None of this means, of course, that the new jihad is devoid of theological content. The collections produced by Harvard and Routledge, which has published a Sayyid Qutb Reader, usefully link the new jihad with the ideas of its founders and the anchoring of these ideas in classical sources. Bin Laden’s statements have already appeared in a more comprehensive volume in English.² Although the Harvard reader contains a much smaller selection of his utterances, it has the advantage of tying them to the works of his close associates, including his former mentor Abdallah Azzam (assassinated in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1989) and al-Zawahiri. Some eighty pages of explanatory notes usefully flesh out the political and contextual details with citations in the Koran and Hadith (sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad passed down over the centuries).

The bin Laden section includes his famous “World Islamic Front Statement,” co-signed by two qualified Islamic scholars, declaring the jihad an “individual duty” incumbent on all Muslims, because the Americans and their allies are supposedly occupying both of Islam’s holy places, Jerusalem and Mecca. Al-Zawahiri’s contribution includes excerpts from the much-quoted Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, published by the Saudi-financed daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat in London in December 2001. Knights contains this chilling threat:

It is always possible to track an American or a Jew, to kill him with a bullet or a knife, a simple explosive device, or a blow with an iron rod.

More pertinent for political analysis are the excerpts from al-Zawahiri’s Loyalty and Separation, a polemical 2002 tract whose title is borrowed from a text by the nephew of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, co-founder of the original eighteenth-century Saudi theocracy and primary source of religious legitimacy for the kingdom’s current rulers. All these writings are laced with Koranic references and citations from the Hadiths, carefully chosen to hark back to Islam’s heroic age while containing tropes culled from Western sources, such as the Nazi fantasy that Jews are ruling the world. The language is deliberately archaic and patriarchal, weaving contemporary events into the fabric of salvation history.

2.

It is now widely acknowledged that Sayyid Qutb, born in 1906 and hanged by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966 on trumped-up charges of subversion, is the intellectual godfather of modern Islamist activism and an enduring influence on Islamic radicalism. Qutb popularized the term jahil-iyya in his writings, taking it to mean a condition of contemporary arrogance, ignorance, and irreligion. Traditional mainstream scholarship viewed jahil-iyya as the condition of barbarism that prevailed among the Arabian tribes before the coming of the Prophet Muhammad. Although he had been an admirer of Western literature and especially the English Romantics, Qutb’s sojourn in America in 1949 crystallized his disdain for Western culture. His is the paradigmatic case of the “born-again” Muslim who, having adopted or absorbed many modern or foreign influences, makes a show of discarding them in his search for personal identity and cultural authenticity.

The term “fundamentalism” that Albert Bergesen applies to Qutb’s thought in his introduction to The Sayyid Qutb Reader, however, is open to question. Far from espousing received theological certainties in order to defend “Muslim society” against foreign encroachments, Qutb’s understanding of Islam is almost Kierkegaardian in its individualism. His “authentic” Muslim is one who espouses a very modern kind of revolution against the deification of men, against injustice, and against political, economic, racial, and religious prejudice.

Bergesen says that

from a civilizational perspective, Qutb doesn’t seemed to have hijacked Islam for political purposes as much as called for a return to Islam’s original religio-political compact.

Although this is true so far as it goes, he undervalues the way Qutb and other Muslim ideologues absorb values and influences derived from the Enlightenment while professing to deny them. One of Qutb’s statements that Bergesen cites should be challenged explicitly:

It is not possible to find a basis for Islamic thought in the modes and products of European thought, nor to construct Islamic thought by borrowing from Western modes of thought or its products.

This claim—which crassly denies a vast history of cultural borrowings—might have been balanced with a reference to Leonard Binder’s important 1988 book Islamic Liberalism, which teases out the Western lineages and resonances in Qutb’s thought.

A more serious omission from Bergesen’s reader is Qutb’s notorious 1950 diatribe Our Struggle with the Jews, republished in 1970 and distributed throughout the world by the government of Saudi Arabia. In Jihad and Jew-Hatred Matthias Küntzel, a political scientist and former adviser to Germany’s Green Party, argues that this text, which has been available in English since 1987, blends traditional Islamic Judeophobia with imported Nazi ideas.

In Qutb’s analysis Jews appear inherently decadent and antireligious. They are actually worse than the idolators fought by Muhammad, since they are cunningly able to undermine and destroy Islam, the only true religion, from within. During Muhammad’s struggles in Medina, they joined the “hypocrites” in resisting his divine authority and made treacherous alliances with the polytheists. Qutb wrote that

the Muslim community continues to suffer from the same Jewish machinations and double-dealing…. This is a war which has not been extinguished…for close on fourteen centuries, and it continues to this moment, its blaze raging in all the corners of the earth.

Although there are no explicit references to Nazi sources, the Saudi editor of the 1970 edition helpfully appended references to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as “proof” of the correctness of Qutb’s ideas. Imported European anti-Semitism is now embedded in the charter of Hamas, whose thirty-second article explicitly cites the Protocols as “proof” of Israeli conduct. As Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian philosopher and former PLO representative in Jerusalem, has observed, Hamas’s charter “sounds as if it were copied out from the pages of Der Stürmer.”