Knowing Your Enemy

2006-08-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

KNOWING THE ENEMY
by Mary Habeck

November 17, 2006

Mary Habeck is associate professor of strategic studies at
the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies. Her most recent book is
Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror
(Yale University Press, 2006). This essay is based on a
BookTalk she presented at FPRI on October 30, 2006; it is
also available online at www.fpri.org.

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KNOWING THE ENEMY

by Mary Habeck

Who is the enemy, and what is this thing called jihadism
that everyone has been talking about? Jihadism is a modern
word, not something from the Quran. Jihadis, or jihadists,
call themselves salafi jihadi or salafiyya jihadiyya (-iyya
in Arabic is equivalent to -ism).When I first saw the term
in early 2002, I thought it perfectly described the people
we're fighting and that the ideal name for the conflict
we're involved in might be a war on jihadis, or war on
jihadism. However, the root of jihadism is "jihad," which is
actually a good word within Islam.

IDEOLOGY
Jihadis are a small minority within the Islamist movement
that believes violence must be used in order to create the
perfect Islamic state. Within jihadism there are
disagreements about at whom this violence should be aimed,
how it should be carried out, what it will accomplish, and
what the Islamic state law will look like when it is finally
created. Here, I address those jihadis who agree with Al
Qaeda and affiliated groups on several important issues.

Only a very small minority of Muslims believe in violence
and are willing to participate in it, which--in addition to
great FBI work--explains why no attacks have been carried
out in the U.S. since 9/11, and why there have been few
attacks in Europe or other places.

Jihadist ideology can be reduced to unusual definitions of
four Islamic words (tawhid, jihad, caliphate, and da'wa) and
a few simple concepts. The jihadis believe, first, that
they're the only true Muslims in the world, the saved sect,
the victorious party; that they're the only ones going to
Paradise. Second, they believe that hostile unbelievers
control the world and have only one purpose in life, the
destruction of Islam. In fact, according to several
histories put together by jihadis, the entire purpose for
the founding of America was to destroy Islam. Thus, thirdly,
jihadis feel that war against the hostile unbelievers is
permitted, because they've been attacked and aggressed
against for at least ninety years, since the May 1916 Sykes-
Picot Agreement (which divided the Middle East into areas of
influence for France, Great Britain and others). Bin Laden
frequently references that agreement. Other jihadis have a
more expansive vision of this war, believing it began either
with the Crusades or fourteen hundred years ago or even with
the creation of man. To them, history has been a constant
fight between the believers and unbelievers, light and dark,
truth and falsehood. Thus, for jihadis, all their wars have
been defensive.

Finally, jihadis want to create an Islamic state for all the
reasons that Islamists do--so that Islam will be correctly
practiced, so that sharia law will be imposed, etc--but also
to carry on this eternal war. Eternal war is the only
foreign policy they envision for the caliphate, or Islamic
state. When the war ends, it will be Judgment Day, the end
of time. This is a dark, Manichean vision of the world.

As noted, the jihadis have very specific views of the
concepts of tawhid, jihad, the Islamic state, and da'wa.

TAWHID (ONE GOD)
Tawhid, the belief that there's only one god and only he
deserves to be worshipped, is as central a concept to Islam
as the concept of the Trinity is to Christianity. Neither
term actually appears in the sacred texts. But tawhid is
understood from everything that is contained in the sacred
text.

Most Muslims believe that--if one worships gods other than
the true God--it is up to God to judge the unbeliever after
death. God might have mercy on the unbeliever or he might
not, but it's his judgment, not something for other Muslims
to decide. The jihadis agree that one should only worship
the true God, but they also believe that tawhid includes the
idea that God is the only law giver, only he--not people,
kings, or states--has sovereignty. Therefore, if anyone
claims to have the right to make laws, he's actually making
a religious, not political, statement. He's saying "I'm God.
I know better than God. Here's my vision for how humans
should act." In fact, they have committed Shirk, the worst
sin within Islam. The jihadi believes that he has the right
to immediately judge that person and send him to hell--there
must be judgment here and now.

This implies that democracy is a foreign religion, not a
political system. The jihadis feel that attempts to impose
it are in fact efforts to convert Muslims to a different
religion. In Iraq before the elections I saw posters
proclaiming that "Anyone who votes in these elections has
declared themselves an enemy of God and is following a
foreign religion. Election booths are the places of worship
for the foreigners." If this makes little sense to us, it
didn't make much sense to most Iraqis, either. This is a
minority, Wahhabi view, not the widely accepted vision, of
tawhid.

JIHAD (STRUGGLE)
Jihad is one of the most complex terms within Islam, with
multiple definitions that seem to contradict one another.
The term began as one thing and became something different
within some hundred years of Mohammed's death, and in the
19th and 20th centuries it evolved again.

Jihad means struggle or to strive hard for something. It
doesn't mean warfare. There's a different word for war, and
when Mohammed wanted to talk about war, he used that
different word. There are two separate ways jihad is used in
the Quran. One is striving to understand the Quran itself or
to follow God more closely, the other is struggling or
fighting against the unbelievers. After Mohammed's death
there was an outburst in Islamic fervor that led to the
conquest of vast swaths of territory from Spain all the way
to India within two hundred years. At the time it was viewed
as a miracle, and therefore the term jihad began to change.

Success bred the idea that jihad was mostly about fighting.
The Hadith, which were collected 100-150 years after
Mohammed's death, are all about fighting. The notion of
internal struggle almost disappeared. One small group, the
Sufis, did keep the idea of internal struggle alive, but
none of their ideas were incorporated into the Hadith.
(Today, 80 percent of the Islamic population has some
connection to Sufism.) Over the four or five hundred years
that Islamic law was codified, the notion of jihad as
fighting dominated and turned it into just-war theory.[1]

Two separate kinds of fighting were distinguished. One was
an individual duty, that if Muslims were attacked, everyone
in the community must join in the defense. The other was a
communal duty, that if there were a certain number of
Muslims out on the frontiers carrying out offensive raids,
that was good enough for the community. So it has both
offensive and defensive aspects.

The notion of an internal struggled remained within the Sufi
community until about the 19th century, when Sufism began to
spread widely and to influence and affect just about
everybody's thinking about the subject. The notion of the
internal struggle became more and more important, and by the
20th century and certainly today, if you ask a Muslim what
jihad is about, they will say "First, it's about an internal
struggle to follow God more closely, and only second is it
an external struggle about defensive fighting if we're
attacked. Jihad as fighting is a matter for the state to
decide."

The jihadis hold that all this evolution over time is wrong,
that there was only one true definition of jihad, and it was
fighting right from the start. They attributed bad
intentions to the Sufis (claiming they were afraid to
fight), as they do to all their enemies. That's actually
purposeful, because within Islamic law, good intentions
excuse almost everything. Thus to jihadis everyone has to
have bad intentions. This is one of the reasons we may have
trouble understanding them, and also explains why they have
just as much trouble understanding us. If one has to read
bad intentions into everything one's enemy does, one will
never understand what they are about.

Jihadis also believe that eventually they will repel all the
people who have taken their lands, and that then they will
have to go on the offense, because the war cannot end until
the entire world has been conquered for their version of
Islam. This is the defining point of the ideology of
jihadism. To them, jihad is a matter for each individual
since there is no authentic Islamic state to declare war. If
you decide not to join them, you've declared yourself an
unbeliever.

ISLAMIC STATE (CALIPHATE)
There are a wide variety of views within Islamic society
about what kind of governance is Islamic. That is because
Muslims define an Islamic state as a majority Muslim state.
If a majority Muslim state decides on a given form of
governance, it must be Islamically correct. On Islamic law,
most Muslims will say "I think my laws should be Islamically
inspired." The Iraqi constitution in fact states this,
meaning moral laws, because for most Muslims the only sense
of morality comes from within Islam. So non-Islamic laws
means immoral laws. Certain specific matters like divorce or
inheritance law are generally widely understood, but other
matters are vague. There is no idea of a correct form of
governance.

A recent Newsweek article, "Caliwho? Why is President Bush
talking about an Islamic caliphate? And what does the word
mean?" made it sound as though President Bush had just made
the word up.[2] In fact, it has been around quite a while.
What most Muslims understand about it depends on their
country. In Iraq, they understand the Abbasid caliphate,
which was centered in Baghdad and which saw the height of
Islamic civilization, in their opinion. In Syria, they think
the height of Islamic civilization was when it was focused
in Damascus. If you ask the Turks, it was the Ottoman
caliphate. The point is that there were numerous caliphates,
and each country has their own notion therefore of what the
caliphate was. What is agreed upon is that it happened a
long time ago and can't be brought back.

The jihadis, on the other hand, have very specific and yet
maddeningly vague ideas about the caliphate, which to them
is the only correct form of governance for a Muslim. It will
have a caliph, territory, and the jihadis' version of
Islamic law. As to institutions, it needs only two: an army
and an institution to promote virtue and prevent vice. There
is no vision of economic, social or foreign policy, or a
legislature, just the caliph, territory, and Islamic law.

There are specific laws, rules, and regulations within Islam
covering on which foot one should enter a room, how to brush
your teeth, how long your beard should be, how often women
should shave, and yet they do not know what the state will
look like. That is because Mohammed didn't create a state or
institutions, just a community of believers. The jihadis
refuse to recognize that and insist they must have a state.

One gleans from the jihadis' writings that after their state
comes to control some territory and imposes its vision of
Islamic law, then somebody will rise to prominence and be
recognized by everyone as the caliph. This will turn the
state into the caliphate, the only purpose of which is to
spread the jihadist version of Islamic law so everyone is
practicing it and to then make sure within the state that
everyone is correctly practicing sharia. What the Taliban
created in Afghanistan is a good image of the kind of state
the jihadists believe they need to create in the caliphate.
In fact, Bin Laden and Mullah Omar may have been within days
of declaring Afghanistan the caliphate before 9/11, which
was supposed to expel the U.S. from all Islamic lands.

DA'WA (THE CALL)
Within Islam itself, da'wa means the call to Islam given by
Mohammed: a call to turn away from false gods and to the
worship of the one true god. Most Muslims today also think
of it as missionary work, either in other countries or
possibly in day-to-day conversations.

Jihadis have a very different view. Because they believe
that the entire Islamic community has fallen away from God,
their da'wa is aimed first and foremost at other Muslims,
not the unbelieving world. Muslims who won't answer that
call must be killed. One group in Algeria actually calls
itself the Salafist Group for Da'wa and Fighting.
Ironically, then, many Muslims are giving money to charities
the whole purpose of which is to turn them into jihadis. The
money is not going off to convert the unbelievers, but is
being aimed against them. This goes on quite a bit in the
U.S.

IDEOLOGICAL, POLITICAL, AND MILITARY COMPONENTS
It is vital to understand that the jihadis' war is first and
foremost against other Muslims, who are the majority of the
victims. This war has ideological, political, and military
components.

Ideologically, the message is aimed almost entirely at other
Muslims. In 1996, Bin Laden put out a "Declaration of war
against the U.S." that was incomprehensible to anyone who
hadn't spent several years reading Islamic theology, law,
and history. That declaration was aimed at other Muslims, to
convince them to join up. The 1998 declaration, with its
short bullet points, was aimed at the West.

Politically, the jihadis are creating a caliphate on the
backs of other Muslims, forcing them to follow their vision
of sharia. When the Taliban imposed its version of sharia,
the people of Afghanistan and Muslims generally were far
from happy with it, seeing it as counter to what they
understood Islam to be. Fallujah was a religious city even
before the Wahhabis showed up, but once that version of
Islamic law was imposed on them, and after the Americans
left in April 2004, the jihadis began cutting off people's
hands and beheading people. They haven't been able to regain
a foothold there because the citizens, having experienced
life under that version of Islamic law, do not want it
again.

Militarily, most of the people who have been killed by the
jihadis have been Muslims. In Iraq, a few thousand Americans
have been killed and tens of thousands of Muslim Iraqis. The
jihadis don't care if 50 Muslims are killed in a bombing
that kills one American because to them, those Muslims
aren't Muslims. If you're not supporting the Americans,
you're collaborators and nonbelievers. The jihadis have been
fighting a war with us, however. That's the one we tend to
take interest in.

JUSTIFICATIONS
Most of the ideas I've been discussing have to do with the
jihadists that have signed up or began with Bin Laden and Al
Qaeda. The main difference between them and the rest of the
jihadis is this first point on prioritizing who the enemies
are going to be. Ninety percent of jihadis believe, based on
a Quranic verse, in taking on the local enemies before any
far enemy. In the early 1990s,when Bin Laden began to change
his mind about who he should be focusing his attack on and
became convinced that it was the U.S., he had no Quranic
justification. So he had to go back to a 13th-century
theologian named Ibn Tamiyya who argued for taking on the
greater unbelief first. With Ibn Tamiyya as the
justification, Bin Laden called the U.S. the greater
unbelief, the bigger enemy. Without U.S. support, all those
lesser enemies or near enemies, whether it's Israel or the
Saudi government, would collapse. Bin Laden did not win this
argument with the rest of jihadis: hardly anyone signed up
with him in his global jihad against the U.S., only four
small groups. Otherwise, he was marginalized and still is
today within the jihadi community.

As to war plans, to the jihadis, the only correct way of war
is to follow the method of Mohammed, who had a specific,
God-given plan. Within Islamic history there was one perfect
moment of time and all of the rest of history is an attempt
to recreate that. So this God-given plan is eternal and must
always be followed. The jihadist version of Mohammed's plan
goes something like this: Mohammed started off in Mecca,
gave da'wa to the residents there, and was rejected. He
attracted a tiny vanguard of believers, but mostly was
rejected and reviled, forced to migrate to Medina. There he
found welcomers (ansar) who took him in, sheltered him, and
were convinced through his initially peaceful preaching that
Islam was a good idea. Then he was permitted to carry out
attacks to begin an external jihad against his enemies.
Defensive attacks became offensive raids, winning over more
and more territory and more and more supporters, and
eventually Mecca fell almost without a fight.

This explains much about Bin Laden's life. He began life in
Mecca, where he had notions that people should follow him
but no one did. He won a small group around him, but then
was persecuted and forced to migrate first to Sudan and then
to Afghanistan. Once there he tried to attract people and
began carrying out attacks on those people in other places
that had been oppressing him. He believes that eventually
he'll be able to return to Mecca, which will fall without a
fight.

The basic ideas of jihadism come from three main sources.
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th-century preacher, revived the
definition of tawhid discussed earlier. He also believed
that there were no believers left except for him.
Accordingly, he would try to win people over by preaching,
and if they wouldn't listen, he was allowed to kill them.
This encompasses most of what you need to know about
jihadism. Notice that his jihad was not against unbelievers,
but against other Muslims. One of the first things he did
when he had enough followers was to gather them together and
head off to Najaf, in what would become Iraq, and burn the
shrines there. Hatred of the Shi'a is built into this
ideology right from the start.

Hassan al-Banna (1906-49) had a very different notion of
where this jihad should be focused. He agreed that one has
to practice Islam correctly in order to truly worship God
and that most of the world had fallen away from true Islam.
But he believed in preaching to win over other Muslims,
reserving violence for the occupiers. He founded the Muslim
Brotherhood, which immediately began to take on the British
occupation of Egypt. Unfortunately or fortunately, the
British left peacefully before al-Banna could carry out his
violence. But they put in place rulers who to the jihadis
were agent rulers for the British empire. Al-Banna turned to
violence against these agent rulers. They assassinated him,
but not before this notion had caught on. Off and on
throughout the 1950s and 1960s Gamel Abdul Nasser and others
had to suppress these militants, who would flee to other
countries like Syria, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia and start
new organizations. Maintaining this notion of fighting the
occupation is their main purpose in life.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt maintained this until 1966,
when some thousand of their leaders were rounded up and
executed and the group renounced violence. But every such
movement has its splinter groups, and the Muslim
Brotherhood's disagreed with this renunciation of violence.

Sayyid Qutb, the most famous Muslim Brotherhood member, came
to the U.S. in 1948 to study in Greeley, Colorado, where he
was so disgusted by the decadence and repulsed by the lives
of Americans that he became a radical.[3] Returning to
Egypt, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and was imprisoned.
While in prison he wrote a 30-volume commentary on the
Quran, later condensed to a short manifesto called
Milestones Along the Way, in which he reiterates that the
main enemy is liberalism. Liberalism and democracy, he
argued are a direct challenge to Islam as a way of life and
the belief that God should be the only law-giver. Qutb was
among those executed in 1966, but his brother Mohammed Qutb
fled to Saudi Arabia and became a teacher; among his pupils
was Bin Laden.

Let's look briefly at some of the jihadist groups that
evolved from these concepts. Today, Hamas is just a new name
for the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. Notice how these
groups evolve over time. They begin by attacking soldiers,
government officials, and when that doesn't achieve any
results, they find justification to begin killing men,
women, and children. Likewise, the late Shamil Basayev's
people who carried out the 2004 Beslan school siege started
off attacking Russian soldiers and government officials,
then teachers, ordinary citizens, and finally any Christians
in Russia.

Al-Jihad was one of these splinter groups that didn't agree
with the Muslim Brotherhood's renunciation of violence. They
killed Anwar Sadat in 1981, and nothing changed. Who next--
what about the tourists, who, they reasoned, were supporting
the apostate ruler? So Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and Jihad
Talaat al-Fath carried out a spectacular attack in Luxor in
1997, after which ten thousand members were rounded up and
imprisoned. But seven years later they renounce violence,
are let out of prison, and splinter groups immediately
carried out attacks in Sharm el-Sheikh and the Sinai. One
part of Gama'a al-Islamiyya argued that killing tourists
doesn't work, however, and they need to wipe out the real
support for the Egyptian government: the U.S. This explains
the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

Al Qaeda really began with this notion of the U.S. as
occupiers. Although they didn't carry out the 1996 Khobar
Towers attack, they obviously supported it. They began
changing their minds about the right methodology in the mid-
nineties looking to strike repeated blows at the US, who
they now saw as the "greater unbelief." After all, the U.S.
had left Beirut, Aden, and Somalia. They thought that
jihadis everywhere and the Islamic community would join
them, and with an energized community, nobody would be able
to stand in their way. But none of those things transpired.
It took them about two years to adjust to that and try to
devise another plan, which was to recreate Afghanistan in
northern Pakistan and start over. They've now recreated
their Islamic state in northern Pakistan, where they have 22
camps at last count. They're turning out jihadis just like
they did during the 1990s, and they've gotten a peace treaty
signed with the Musharraf government, the likely duration of
which may be measurable in months. Destroying this new
Islamic proto-state will be a problem, since no one wants to
invade the difficult terrain of ungoverned northern
Pakistan. Al Qaeda has been trying to take over chaotic
places like Somalia, Darfur, and al-Anbar province, and this
is a very frightening proposition.

There is one ray of hope. Atlanta writer Lee Harris has
written about what he calls fantasy ideologies,[4] such as
Nazism, fascism, and communism. These are ideas and even
states in some cases that are based on fantasies. When
people try to put these fantasies into action, to create
states based on them, those states may last for a while--I
see the current conflict as a two-hundred year war--but
eventually they will collapse under their own
contradictions, or when they are challenged. They're based
on a false reading of human nature, of how the world works.
The Taliban state could only survive as long as nobody took
it on. So while in the short term I'm pessimistic about some
of these issues, in the very long term I'm very optimistic
about our chances for victory.

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