In FrontPage this morning I discuss the learned analysts' enthusiasm over the fact that many jihadists seem to be turning away from Al-Qaeda (links in the original):
Much is being made of “The Rebellion Within: An Al Qaeda mastermind questions terrorism,” by Lawrence Wright, in the June 2 issue of the New Yorker. In it, one of Al-Qaeda’s chief theorists rejects terrorism – leading to a cascade of both liberal and conservative voices rejoicing that the end of the war on terror is at hand.Unfortunately, reality -- as is usually the case -- is not quite so comforting. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, Dr. Fadl, the subject of Wright’s piece, is not rejecting the idea that Muslims must strive to subjugate unbelievers under the rule of Islamic law. All he is doing is advocating a change in strategy: less terrorism, more stealth jihad. This news shouldn’t make Americans go back to sleep; it should spur them to become aware of the ways in which the jihadist agenda of Islamic supremacism is advancing without guns and bombs.
In one key passage, Montasser al-Zayyat, whom Wright identifies as an “Islamist lawyer,” annoys Al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri by asserting that “jihad did not have to be restricted to an armed approach.” This is indicative of the wishful thinking that so many have brought to their reading of Wright’s article: Zayyat didn’t say that jihad did not have to waged against infidels. All he said was that it did not have to be restricted to an armed approach. But many readers seemed to assume he was saying the former.“Zawahiri,” says Wright, “became increasingly isolated. He understood that violence was the fuel that kept the radical Islamist organizations running; they had no future without terror.”
That may be so for some organizations. Others, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, get along just fine without violence. In fact, the Brotherhood is the key force behind the stealth jihad agenda, which aims at (in the words of a Brotherhood operative in 1991) “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
Oh, but they’re not blowing anything up in pursuit of this goal! And since terrorism is the only aspect of the Islamic supremacist problem that is on the radar screen of most Western analysts, most assume that any non-violent Islamic groups, even those that are working to subvert the West from within, are benign moderates.
In any case, this particular reformist group, according to Wright, “wrote a series of books and pamphlets, collectively known as ‘the revisions,’ in which they formally explained their new thinking.” Wright met with the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, to ask him about this.
Wright describes Gomaa as a “highly promoted champion of moderate Islam.” Unfortunately, he’s a highly promoted champion of moderate Islam who supports Hizballah. “Gomaa,” Wright continues, “has also become an advocate for Muslim women, who he says should have equal standing with men.” Unfortunately again, he is an advocate for Muslim women who has spoken positively of wife-beating. “His forceful condemnations of extreme forms of Islam,” says Wright, “have made him an object of hatred among Islamists and an icon among progressives, whose voices have been overpowered by the thunder of the radicals.” Yet his forceful condemnations of extreme forms of Islam have been accompanied by his denial of reports that he had rejected the traditional Islamic death sentence for apostates.
Gomaa tells Wright: “We accept the revisions conditionally, not as the true teachings of Islam but with the understanding that this process is like medicine for a particular time.”
In other words, the true teachings of Islam include the mandate to wage violent jihad against unbelievers. But jihad violence can be set aside as “medicine for a particular time.” That is, different times call for different tactics, but the overall objective remains the same.
Significantly, Gomaa also said: “We have not come across the person who can be moved all the way from terrorism to a normal life.”
Now there is an extraordinarily important admission, given the much-ballyhooed claims by Major General Douglas Stone and others to cure jihadists of their jihadism.
After outlining various reasons why, in Fadl’s new view, today’s global jihad is illegitimate, Wright informs us that “Fadl does not condemn all jihadist activity.” In fact, Fadl says that “jihad in Afghanistan will lead to the creation of an Islamic state with the triumph of the Taliban, God willing,” and that “if it were not for the jihad in Palestine, the Jews would have crept toward the neighboring countries a long time ago.” And as for 9/11, Fadl asks, “what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy’s buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?...That, in short, is my evaluation of 9/11.”
In other words, it was tactically stupid. Not morally wrong.
This is no rejection of jihad. It is just a change in tactics. It should make us all the more aware of, and on guard against, the stealth jihad.
A very good article. Here's a related blog I did at staringattheview.blogspot.com:
Your Homework Assignment
The New Yorker and The New Republic have just published lengthy articles about the demise of Al Qaeda. The first is “The Rebellion Within” by Lawrence Wright. The second is “The Unraveling” coauthored by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank.
If I were a university professor and you were my student, I’d give you an assignment. It would be to underline every occurrence of the word “jihad” or any of its derivatives in the two articles. “Jihad” and “jihadist” would be underlined dozens of times. I would then ask you to write a 500-word paper on the meaning of jihad as understood and practiced by Muhammad. If the word is important enough to be repeated so many times, what does it mean?
The reason for asking you to define jihad as Muhammad understood it is because that is what Muslims do. We in the West have no idea how significant the person and example of the Prophet are to Muslims. The conflict between Al Qaeda and other Muslim activists is simply a disagreement about how Muhammad would practice jihad and what limits he might place on it.
Here are a few ideas that might help you with your assignment. First of all, don’t look for any assistance within the two articles themselves. It’s not there. To be honest, I’m not sure even the authors could do this assignment. Secondly, the best way to understand how Muhammad viewed jihad is to read what he said about it. You need to read enough to get a true picture, because just one example could give you an incomplete impression. As an example, the Quran tells Muslims in Sura 29:8 to resist even their parents if the parents are “struggling” (the word used is “jihad”) to prevent Muslims from worshipping Allah. From that one verse, one might conclude that “jihad” is something non-Muslims do against Muslims. But there are dozens of other verses in the Quran that define jihad as the exertion of effort to spread the influence and authority of Islam. Al Qaeda and its Muslim opponents just disagree on what those efforts should be.
I'll make the assignment really easy. All you need to do is read this analysis of jihad, where the Muslim scholar has done all the work for you. Reduce what he says to 500 words, and turn it in. You'll get an A+. And you'll possibly know more about jihad than the writers of the two articles.
Noble Qur’an 2:190 Footnote: “Jihad is holy fighting in Allah’s Cause with full force of numbers and weaponry.
It is given the utmost importance in Islam and is one of its pillars. By Jihad Islam is established, Allah’s Word is made superior (which means only Allah has the right to be worshiped), and Islam is propagated.
By abandoning Jihad Islam is destroyed and Muslims fall into an inferior position; their honor is lost, their lands are stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is an obligatory duty in Islam on every Muslim. He who tries to escape from this duty, or does not fulfill this duty, dies as a hypocrite.”
islamists's method of jihad might change, or their choice of groups they belong to, but the end result of jihad never changes, death or conversion of the infidel as they take over infidel lands. as long as the koran remains the same, nothing changes.
"The New Yorker and The New Republic have just published lengthy articles about the demise of Al Qaeda. The first is “The Rebellion Within” by Lawrence Wright. The second is “The Unraveling” coauthored by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank."
-- from a posting above
An article from August 16, 2006:
Fitzgerald: A tribute to Peter Bergen and Lawrence Wright
Peter Bergen, consistently miscomprehending Islam -- go back and check the record of rich embarrassment -- is hardly alone. All sorts of writers on Bin Laden or on Al Qaeda purvey inside dopesterism and piquant details about Bin Laden's wives (including the one who ordered lingerie and ran around in a track suit, no doubt trying to hold onto her man who jettisoned her for a 15-year-old Yemeni girl -- a full six years older than little Aisha, the favorite wife of the man Bin Laden aims to emulate). They appear to think that these details about Bin Laden as son, Bin Laden as brother, Bin Laden as would-be leader of mujahedin in Afghanistan, Bin Laden as either the great leader and inspirer, or alternatively, as the great organizer of Al Qaeda, are illuminating of the “root causes” of the Jihad. So this is all breathlessly packaged and then appears, in tantalizing bits, in GQ or The New Yorker or Vanity Fair. But the reader learns nothing, absolutely nothing, about Islam, about the texts that have consumed Bin Laden, that animate him and his fellows. It is all Reader's Digest-level stuff, though the income from being a "consultant" or an "expert" to this or that news channel certainly kicks one's economic status up several rungs.
On NPR I listened to a voice that sounded as if it belonged to someone particularly naive. He was talking all about Bin Laden. I heard him, as I pulled out of the grocery store's parking lot, discussing how before Al Qaeda the various terror groups were all "nationalistic" in their desires. Yes, how true. Not the desire to eliminate the Infidel state of Israel, but rather the desire by so many Arabs and Muslims to show their solicitousness for the "legitimate rights" of the "Palestinian people" (whose actual lives are a matter of complete indifference to other Arabs and Muslims, as one can see by how they are not permitted to integrate into or become citizens of any Arab country but Jordan). And how very "nationalistic" are the declared aims of Lashkar-e-Taiba, or a hundred other groups.
Yet this group is hellbent on killing Hindus not only in Kashmir but all over India -- for the goal is not that of helping the "legitimate rights of the Kashmiri people" but of establishing, rather, rule by Islam over first Kashmir, and then over other parts of India as well. Over all of India. Nothing "nationalistic" about it. This is of course true of other conflicts also that are generally regarded as nationalistic: for example, the war of Muslim northerners against the Christian, predominately Ibo, people of what was to be the independent state of Biafra. The Muslims were conducting, as Col. Ojukwu said, a "Jihad" against the non-Muslims. The Abu Sayyaf terror group in the Philippines has not stated any "nationalistic" aims; its aim is to end Christian rule over Muslims, and eventually, to extend the area over which the Muslims dominate. And the same is true with the Muslim attacks on Christians in Sulawesi, in the Moluccas, in East Timor, and on Hindu interests in Bali.
But Lawrence Wright was convinced that it was only when Bin Laden came along that a "nationalist" impulse, found here and there, was given a unifying framework, the framework of Islam. Had Wright been more than a mere reporter, a reporter of what so-and-so did or said, he might have spent a summer reading widely in the doctrine and the history of Islam. If he had done so, the things that he cannot quite grasp would have become clear. Instead, he passes on his confusion to his readers.
Then the speaker said something about how Bin Laden was "rejecting modernity." This "rejection of modernity" stuff is all over the place. It's nonsense. Muslims do not reject any of the gewgaws produced by the modern West. Airplanes, television, the Internet, satellite television, Western medicine, the whole shebang. If by "modernity" the author means, instead, the universal civilization of the West, that is now to be found everywhere. This is reflected not in those gewgaws but in the belief in the emphasis placed on the individual and on rights guaranteed to individuals. And if by "modernity" one means the very idea that a government's legitimacy is to be located in the expressed will of citizens, rather than in the revealed desires of Allah some 1350 years ago and his unalterable law of what is to be forbidden and what is to be commanded, then yes, you could call Bin Laden and all the other perfectly orthodox Muslims engaged in terrorism as "against modernity" -- but it would distract and confuse those who need to know that what Bin Laden is against, and what he is for, is not different from what a Muslim warrior was against and for in 1804 in West Africa, in 1600 in Hindustan, in 1453 in Constantinople. He is for exactly what any of a long line of those engaged in violent Jihad have wanted: the rule of Allah upon earth.
Finally the interviewer (Terry Gross? Someone else? I can't remember) gave the title of the speaker's book -- "The Looming Tower" -- and his name, Lawrence Wright. I had heard the name, and I wondered what made Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker, think he could write a book about Bin Laden without immersing himself in the texts that Bin Laden refers to constantly, that Bin Laden has taken as the source for his entire being, and to which he makes constant appeal in everything he says or does.
In today's New Duranty Times, there is a story about Grisha Perelman and a possible proof of Poincare's Conjecture. What, I wondered to myself, would one think of the author of that piece had he confused the mathematician Poincare with that other Poincare, the political figure. Not much. But every day "terrorism experts" and "Bin Laden experts" and "Al Qaeda experts" flogging their wares, or delivering themselves of some well-recompensed banality on some nightly news program ("Well, Al Qaeda could be behind this. It bears all the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda operation. Then again, it could be some entirely different group. Hard to tell") make a similarly glaring error. No one cares.
But these Bergens and Wrights, in getting the most obvious and most important things wrong, are akin to that writer about Perelman and Hamilton and the Poincare Conjecture, had he, that reporter, described for his audience "the very versatile Frenchman Poincare, not only a mathematician of the first rank but also the President of France just before and during the First World War, who later served as the Prime Minister as well. Amazing what politicians used to be like." Or so I could so easily imagine -- for what's in a name, Henri or Raymond, they both end in Poincare, how much attention exaggerated to detail do you require, and what does it matter?
And what does it matter if Peter Bergen tells an interviewer that if he could ask Osama Bin Laden one, just one question, that question would be "Where in the Quran can you find justification for killing innocent civilians?" -- with all the colossal ignorance that that question betrays? And what does it matter if Lawrence Wright, staff writer for The New Yorker, where once upon a time William Maxwell and Katherine White and E. B. White, and James Thurber, and Brendan Gill, and Philip Hamburger, and many others -- grown-ups all, and supported by a cast of contributing grown-ups (Niccolo Tucci, I. B. Singer, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, John Cheever, John Updike, S. N. Behrman, Joseph Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, and many others, hundreds of others), proceeds to tell us, to tell the NPR audience and his readers, that Bin Laden was at war not with Infidels, but with "modernity," and that before Bin Laden all Muslim terrorists were merely "nationalists"? What does Wright think the nation-state means in Islam? What can he conceivably think it means?
Henri, Raymond, what's the difference. Bin Laden is bad, so what's the difference if we don't quite pinpoint what it is that makes him bad, and that makes him and so many uncountable others bad? What does it matter if we don’t care to discover what makes their ranks endlessly replenishable as long as people continue to believe, and to find their entire mental universe both created and limited by the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the Sira? After all, now we know about his wife jogging in her track suit, and how he treated his kids, and how that stuff -- "modernity" -- managed to get his goat.
Oh God, I cried. Is there to truth no duty?
A George-Herbert moment.
Was I overreacting? Was I wrong? Should I simply acquiesce in having to be faced every day with evidence of shallowness, ignorance, and stupidity by those who presume to instruct us on matters that affect our physical and civilizational survival?
Or do I, just possibly, have a point?
What do you think?
[Posted by Hugh at August 16, 2006]
"rejecting terrorism, but not jihad"
But jihad is the "inner struggle". It's right for them to reject terrorism but we shouldn't force them to give up their efforts to become better people and conquer their inner demons.
Terrorism is a tactic. We want them to give up this tactic, not give up their religious beliefs.
(Or so say the appeasers)
Most people in the West knew nothing of jihad until the terrorism started and so the two became synonymous in the public mind. They remain so, to this day.
This article is Exhibit B in the case for the continued use of the term "jihad" by those in our government whose primary obligation to their fellow citizens is to protect them from threats foreign & domestic, instead of forbidding use of that & similar terms by prime directive. For if the public correctly understood the term "jihad" as encompassing struggle in all its various forms -- terrorism, money, propaganda, bribery, lawsuits, demographics -- toward the ultimate goal of conquering the Infidel until the world belongs to allah alone, then, as already noted here, this so-called "rebellion within" would be seen as nothing more than a disagreement over tactics, which in no way signals the abandonment of their ultimate goal.
Yes Mr.Fitna...That description is about as good as it gets. I especially like the parts about 'obligation', and 'dying a hypocrite'.
No good muslim wants to die a hypocrite. That is a guaranteed ride down the elevator to Allah's torture chamber in the cellar of Paradise. There are no hypocrites in Allah's Paradise. Muslims, if they understand Islam, spend all their time trying to please Allah to escape the fire and make it to heaven. But Allah has given no guarantee's that he will let any particular muslim into Paradise, space is limited (To 70,000 according to Mohammad), and only dead combat jihadi's get preference...
This has got to be a great fear and stress on the individual muslim, and aids in recruitment for jihad.
What is the point of Islam, for the individual muslim, if there is no reward at the end?
Or worse, the dungeon.
There was a song line that said...'I tried so hard, and in the end it really didn't matter'.
This is the case for all but 70,000, muslim and uncounted numbers of dead jihadi's...
Except for jihad, Islam is a gamble...when you get down to Allah's bottom line, only combat jihadi's need apply...
"The New Yorker and The New Republic have just published lengthy articles about the demise of Al Qaeda . . .
.....................................
There's another problem here, also. Many Westerners, especially Americans, seem to completely conflate "Al Qaeda" and "terrorism", rather than seeing Al Qaeda as only one--albeit major--Jihad terror organization.
In other words, many Americans--especially those who don't much follow news of international acts of jihad terrorism--are likely to think that this limited argument about tactics actually signals an "end to terrorism".
Add wishful thinking to ignorance--who doesn't want this nightmare of violence to end?--and you have a potentially very dangerous situation, where Westerners are likely to even further let their guard down. More than ever, those who warn about Jihadists agendas are likely to be seen as alarmists, or worse, cynical purveyors of an unwarranted "culture of fear".
and as for stealth jahad...my sister-in-law found papers in her ten year son's backpack about Islam...when questioned, her son told her that his teacher had given them to him to read. My sister-in-law went to see the school's principal, showed him the papers, and complained loudly. The principal, to his credit, told the teacher that termination would result if this happened again. BTW, this incident occured in the Atlanta Georgia area school district.
Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist who is always being interviewed on NPR, was discussing this “rethinking-within-Al-Qaeda” business on NPR, at the same time as Lawrence Wright appeared. He was very skeptical of Wright’s notion, and he had a grasp of things on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan that Wright clearly does not have, as well as an understanding of what prompts Al Qaeda, and all the other groups, named and unnamed, that are working, locally or more broadly, for the same goals.
Now Ahmad Rashid is a smooth and plausible journalist, not a fearless truth-teller but a quasi-truth-teller. His book “Taliban” is full of all kinds of defender-of-the-faith misstatements. And he never comes close to discussing, on the page, for Infidel prying eyes, the texts, tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam with which, of course, he is perfectly familiar. He is, however, someone who does not relish the spreading power of the primitive Muslim true-believers, either in his own Pakistan, or in those places in the West he likes to visit and live in. He works for a living, and is not, I think, in the same zamindar-league as the Bhuttos, Ispahanis, and such-like.
In Pakistani terms, or even Muslim terms, he might be described as a secularist, but he is still a Defender of the Faith when he feels he needs to be. Long ago he defined “Jihad” in his book of the same name, in the usual “struggling-internally-to-be-a-good-Muslim” terms that would please Karen Armstrong and John Esposito. That was shameful. He would not, I trust, do so today, for several reasons. The first is that he knows that Infidels, or the more intelligent and alert Infidels, know perfectly well what nonsense that is, and would look askance if he tried at this point to convince them otherwise. And, furthermore, he, Ahmad Rashid, is more worried, I suspect, about the powers of resurrection, or recuperation, and indeed the growing power, of the Taliban and of similar Muslim groups – to name them, and to carefully differentiate them, with all kinds of solemn parsing of their programs, would be largely silly, for even if they may sometimes have differences, or slightly different stated goals, when it comes to the Infidels (which is what we, the Infidels, care about), these groups all share the same attitudes, believe in the same tenets, read the same texts.
But Rashid has a much keener sense of things than Lawrence Wright. Wright came, just like Peter Bergen, another journalist who does not really know much about Islam, to the party late, and both of them could just as well be writing about the history of the computer industry, or the Colombian drug cartel, or something. Wright, like Bergen, was simply someone who became an “expert” on Islam based on finding out something (in Bergen’s case, having been able to interview Bin Laden, which apparently he has managed not only to dine out on, but to turn into a full-time career) about Al Qaeda.
Neither one gives evidence of having spent years, or even months, studying the texts and tenets of Islam. Neither one appears to know a thing about the history of Islamic conquest and of the subsequent treatment of conquered non-Muslims. Neither one seems to think that history, or those texts, those tenets, and the attitudes and atmospherics to which they naturally give rise in states and societies suffused with Islam, need not only to be studied, and restudied, and carefully assimilated, but understood in the context that is presented today. What, after all, were the instruments of Jihad that were available in 650 A.D. and 1000 A.D. and 1650 A.D.? And what happened to cause Jihad to fall into desuetude in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries? And why, in the last half century, has Jihad once again become possible, and what are the main instruments of that Jihad?
One has the distinct feeling that Wright and Bergen both think that Jihad is conducted only through qitaal, combat. One also has the feeling that they do not understand the centrality of Jihad, think of it almost as some kind of curious afterthought, that only those wild-eyed extremists of Al Qaeda, are likely to embrace.
Ahmad Rashid politely begged very much to differ, on NPR, with “my friend Lawrence,” and despite his occasional lapse into defender-of-the-faith apologetics, does understand Lawrence Wright’s essential, possibly incurable, misunderstanding of Islam, and the deep impression that has been made on Wright, by what the former ideologist of Al Qaeda, the man whom Lawrence Wright too-respectfully kept calling on NPR “Dr. Fadl,” Lawrence Wright apparently is under the impression that Al Qaeda is the only real terrorist group, and the others -- you know, like Laskar-Jihad, like Jund al-Islam, like Ansar al-Sunnah (not to mention, of course, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the redundantly-named Islamic Jihad, which helps maintain the ferocious "Islamic" credentials of those no-one-here-but-us-accountants leaders of the for-some-too-slow Slow Jihadists of Fatah) -- are all "nationalist" (his, Wright's, word) groups, because this group, in Wright's dreamy view, just wants - so he thinks -- the Balkans, or that group just wants all of Israel (sorry, wants "justice for the 'Palestinian people'), and this group wants all of Kashmir, and then, for their second helping (l'appetit vient en mangeant) would like all of India, and so on -- yes, "nationalist" groups all.
Wright, whose unjustifiably-ballyhooed New Yorker article about how Al Qaeda is now being undone from within because of some supposed re-thinking by its former ideological justifier and guide (think Mikhail Suslov, circa 1957), does not understand what “Jihad” is. He thinks, just like George Bush, that “Jihad” is limited to warfare of the obvious kind – either “terrorism” or other kinds of attacks, more conventional in nature and in target. It is true that for more than a millennium, based not only on the model of Muhammad, but also on the non-availability of other means, or instruments of Jihad, combat or “qitaal” was indeed the method of taking part in, or promoting Jihad. That changed, however, in the post-World War II era.
Three things happened to change the nature, and the effectiveness, and thus the allure, of Jihad. The first was the discovery of oil in the Middle East, and the uses found for that oil in the oil-consuming West, and then, the transfer of power and money that these oil deposits in Muslim lands (at one time 10 of the ll members of OPEC were Muslim-run states) permitted. Ten trillion dollars has been transferred from oil-consuming nations to the Muslim states of OPEC since 1973 alone, and at present prices, about a trillion dollars a year is still being transferred. This has permitted the development and deployment of what the Muslims themselves describe as the weapon of “gold,” that is, what we may call “the Money Weapon.” Saudi Arabia has by itself spent close to 100 billion dollars on mosques, madrasas, propaganda, armies of Western hirelings in the outside world, to help spread Islam, or to disguise the nature of Islam.
The second new instrument of Jihad comes from the fact that in the last 40 years, every Western country has allowed within its borders, without any thought, any discussion, any understanding of the possible perils, very large numbers – hundreds of thousands or, as in the case of France, millions of Muslims. These Muslims have not stopped regarding the Lands of the Infidels, the Bilad Al-Kufr, as places that must be conquered for Islam. For the whole world rightly belongs to Allah, and to the Muslims, the “Best of Peoples.” And they have brought as many fellow Muslims, legally or illegally, into these countries, and also had enormous families, for with the generous welfare benefits that the states of Western Europe provide – with free education and free medical care greatly superior to anything they could have had in a Muslim lands, and with free or subsidized housing, and with, in a frantic attempt to “integrate” these Muslims, free courses in language and national history and culture (as if that would do the trick, that would create Muslims loyal to Infidels and to the Infidel nation-state) – the Muslim families tend to be two, three, four, times larger than the families of the natives. And every year the percentage of the population that is Muslim inexorably increases. And these Muslims, now numbering in the many millions, make incessant demands for changes, changes in the social arrangements, changes in the school curricula, changes in the laws, changes in the political institutions, changes in everything, so that everything may better conform to what Muslims want, what Islam demands. They sometimes win, and sometimes lose, in the battles that ensue over such requests and such pressures and such threats, sometimes, of violence. But the requests, or demands, or agitation, even if they do not work at this point, or at this, continue and will not stop, for Islam does not change, its demands do not change. And what may be called “demographic conquest” continues.
Furthermore, every Muslim is a missionary for Islam. And there are efforts by Muslim groups, as well as by Muslim individuals, to target Infidels for conversion – or “reversion” – to Islam, by seeking out the economically or psychically marginal and playing upon that marginality.
And along with the oil-revenue trillions, and the effect of those Muslim-migrant millions, the new technology, developed entirely by Infidels but appropriated for their own uses by Muslims, which is available to disseminate the message of Islam, and the worldview of Islam, both to Muslims, and to non-Muslims.
Ahmad Rashid, as a Muslim still keenly interested in avoiding discussion of the instruments of Jihad besides terrorism, will not discuss all this. And that is understandable. He is still wedded to, deeply protective of, Islam. As long as one understands that about him, what he writes can still be of some value. But Lawrence Wright is another matter. He is not a defender of Islam, out of fear or filial piety. He’s a misunderstander of Islam, who just can’t get it right.
He thinks, for example, and on NPR said several times, that aside from Al Qaeda, the smaller terrorist groups had different, specific, local aims. Perhaps he thinks Hamas is only interested in destroying Israel, or Hezbollah in destroying Israel and, perhaps, Lebanon. Perhaps he thinks that Lasker-Jihad or Sipah-e-Sahaba or Jund al-Islam only have this or that desire, to win Indian-held Kashmir or kick the Hindus (and Western tourists) out of Bali. He does not understand that the same texts, and the same tenets, and the same attitudes, and the same atmospherics, are what prompt the members of all of these groups, and their size, or their immediate goals, do not matter. In the end they must help one another. They must be loyal to all other members of the Umma conducting Jihad, wherever those members may be, or their chosen cause. Wright keeps talking about these smaller groups being “nationalist.” This testifies to his incomprehension. If he thinks, for example, that Hamas is a “nationalist” group, then he should take a look at the charter of Hamas, and ask himself what is “nationalist” about it, and what is, so obviously, simply “Islamic” – that is, rooted in Islam?
Lawrence Wright’s understanding of Jihad, and of these smaller groups that he thinks are “nationalist” in their goals and impulses, could be tested by asking him to examine the goals of those Muslims – the Uighurs – in western China, in Xinjiang. They would seem to be a perfect example of people simply out for their “liberation” from Chinese rule, in other words, people trying to establish their own nation-state, exhibiting that “nationalism” that Lawrence Wright claims is a feature of all these smaller groups that others, he thinks, so wrongly link to Al Qaeda.
Well, MEMRI put up yesterday a statement, by Muslim Uighurs, of what Muslim Uighurs, want. Here it is:
MEMRI: The Islamic Party of Turkestan" is a jihadist group operating in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (also known as Chinese Turkestan or Uyghuristan), a region in northwestern China inhabited mostly by Muslims.
The following are excerpts from the platform document:
"We are a group that promotes jihad for the sake of Allah... Its members, [united in] monotheism, devoutness, piety, and jihad for the sake of Allah, aim to liberate Muslim East Turkestan from the apostate Communist Chinese occupation... and impose shari'a [law] in [this region]. By cooperating with the Muslim mujahideen throughout the Islamic world [we aim to] restore the Islamic Caliphate and impose shari'a throughout the world."
"Our Goals Are:
"To train the Muslim Turkestani youth to wage jihad..."
"To prepare the Muslim Turkestani masses [for jihad] and to bring them back to the right path [i.e. to the Salafi creed]..."
"To cooperate with all the groups waging jihad for the sake of Allah throughout the world, in order to repel the attacks of the apostates... and drive the Crusaders, Zionists and apostates from our Islamic world..."
"Principles:
"We believe that, like most Muslim countries, East Turkestan is under the direct and indirect occupation of apostates... and is governed by secular and democratic constitutions and laws...
"We believe that if Muslim countries are under direct or indirect occupation... waging jihad against those who rule them and subject them to apostate laws becomes a mandatory [duty].
"We believe that, since the apostate attacker has invaded our lands, jihad in the path of Allah has become a personal duty incumbent upon every Muslim in Turkestan..."
"We deem it necessary to impose shari'a in East Turkestan and in all [other] Muslim countries after they are liberated from the imperialists and apostates...
"We believe that any presence of the apostate Chinese occupiers - be it military, governmental, political or economic - is a legitimate target for jihad... This statement is a declaration of war upon them, and they must therefore leave East Turkestan immediately."
"We consider the presence of Chinese immigrants in Muslim East Turkestan illegitimate. They represent the most tangible form of Chinese occupation... They must leave Turkestan and return to their places of origin. This statement is [our] first and last warning [to them]...
"We reject... all symbols of Jahili [i.e. non-Islamic] nationalism, as well as the deviant [ideology of] democracy in all its forms, and [declare] our opposition to them...
"We are an independent, organized Islamic group, under the command of an Emir and a leadership... in accordance with the Islamic principles of shura [consultation]."
Perhaps someone can send this article to Lawrence Wright and ask if he could tease out of it the “nationalist” demands that he apparently think describe the various Muslim groups conducting Jihad around the world. Be sure to ask him to discuss, in particular, this sentence, and to compare its significance with, say, Article 7 in the Hamas Charter:
"We deem it necessary to impose shari'a in East Turkestan and in all [other] Muslim countries after they are liberated from the imperialists and apostates...
And no further questions, Your Honor, of Lawrence Wright.
1. I recently saw, on YouTube(?), an interview Lawrence Wright did of Raymond Ibrahim who edited the Al Qaeda Reader. This was the first time I, really, saw Wright in conversation on the topics of offensive jihad, etc., outside of his book The Looming Tower. The impression I had of Wright, from that interview, was that he is a "wuss", if I can put it that way, on when it comes to Islam, which is another way, I think, of saying a person, for one reason or another, puts political correctness above the truth when it comes to Islam.
2. Hugh, your 9:47 AM post was cogent. Why not consider sending some form of it to, ie., the New Yorker as a letter to the editor?
3. Why, also, don't you and Robert not try to publish more articles in the mainstream press to continue broadening the reach of your message? If you are trying, or have tried, to do so, already, I would enourage your continuing effort, year in year out (the books and articles Robert has published, as well as the interviews on radio and TV, not withstanding).