The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology

313 Pages·2017·1.85 MB·English

by  Ibn Warraq

T I
HE SLAM
IN
I T
SLAMIC ERRORISM
The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas,
and Ideology
I W
BN ARRAQ
Copyright © Ibn Warraq, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher except by reviewers who may quote brief
passages in their reviews.
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There was a time when scholars and other writers in communist eastern
Europe relied on writers and publishers in the free West to speak the truth about
their history, their culture, and their predicament. Today it is those who told the
truth, not those who concealed or denied it, who are respected and welcomed in
these countries. …
Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not to
shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort
of taboo; not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters
fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course,
competently. Those who enjoy freedom have a moral obligation to use that
freedom for those who do not possess it. We live in a time when great efforts
have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to
make history a tool of propaganda; when governments, religious movements,
political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as
they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe
that it was. All this is very dangerous indeed, to ourselves and to others, however
we may define otherness-dangerous to our common humanity. Because, make no
mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to
understand the present and unfit to face the future.
—Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West
To
Peter
A Civilizing Influence.
Preface and Acknowledgements
T
HE PRESENT WORK was originally 165,000 words. I have cut it down by a
third, as I was advised by many friends that a shorter book is always better than
a longer one. It seems the general, educated public no longer reads long books,
and publishers are reluctant to take on weighty, daunting tomes. I should have
liked to have included a much longer section on India. I shall perhaps post the
long version on my website in a year or two.
All my Koranic citations are given in the following manner; for example, the
citation “Q2. al-Baqara, the Cow, 256” refers to Sura 2, called al-Baqara in
Arabic, which means the Cow, and the final figure “256” is number of the verse.
However, when I have to a give a long list of suras from the Koran, my system
becomes rather clumsy. For example, I give the following Koranic references in
footnote 167 below: Q2:216; Q2:221; Q3:28; Q3:85; Q4:101; Q4:144; Q8:39;
Q9:14, 17, 23, 28, 29, 36, 39, 41, 73, 111, 123; Q25:52. Imagine how lengthy
and cumbersome that would be if here I were to insist on keeping the following
schema: “Q2. al-Baqara, The Cow, 216”; and so on.
Originally, I had planned to thank everyone who has shown me any kindness
over the last few years. But it all became rather complicated. First, the list
became absurdly long, and while awaiting permission to publish their names, I
kept remembering ever more people I had forgotten to mention. There is always
the possibility I have missed someone. Second, I am not at all sure that I am
doing the people I mention any favors, since, alas, Ibn Warraq remains “mad,
bad, and dangerous to know.” I should not like to embroil anyone not directly
involved in the book’s production in any controversy that may ensue on
publication of a work critical of Islam. Therefore, I shall only name those who
have helped me directly with the book, and whose permission I have received to
do so.
It gives me great pleasure to single out my anonymous editor, who, with her
professionalism and patience, did a remarkable job on the original, unwieldy
manuscript, and made it presentable. I am beholden to Rebecca Bynum, who
took on the onerous task of publishing my work though she was already busy
with all her political commitments. Rebecca further meticulously edited the
work, and got it ready to send to the printer in record time.
Finally, I should like to thank Nancy and Tom Klingenstein for their
friendship, kindness, and support which made all my research possible.
It is no empty formality to insist that I alone am responsible for the opinions
voiced in the present work.
1-Root Cause Fallacy
I
N THE WAKE of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, many analysts,
journalists, and pundits decided, without much thought, that the United States
was targeted because of its foreign policy. Others opined, just as dogmatically,
that we had to dig out the root causes, which were essentially socioeconomic,
with poverty as the favorite explanation. Others followed with their own
preferred explanations, which ranged from the Arab-Israeli conflict; lack of
education of the jihādists, who, it is claimed, had absolutely no knowledge of
Islam; sexual deprivation and frustration, to the Crusades and Britney Spears,
that is Western decadence; and, rather fatuously, global warming (strange how
global warming seems to goad only Muslims to acts of terrorism).
I argue below that neither poverty, nor the lack education of the terrorists, nor
the Israel-Arab conflict, nor the foreign policy of the United States, nor Western
imperialism, nor the Crusades provide an adequate explanation for Islamic
terrorism.
Islamic Terrorism: Not Caused by Poverty or Lack of Knowledge of
Islam The most common explanation for Islamic terrorism is the lack of
economic opportunities for the members of the various terrorists groups, in other
words, poverty. The second most frequent claim is that all the terrorists are
totally ignorant of the tenets of Islam and have no knowledge of, no education
in, the contents of the Koran. The thought behind the latter claim is that the
terrorists are not justified in invoking Islamic scripture—if they had any real
knowledge of Islam they would not commit these acts of terror in its name.
We begin with a study conducted between 1977 and 1979 under the
leadership of an Egyptian sociologist, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, of two militant
Egyptian Islamic groups: Al-Takfir wa-l-Hijra (incorrectly translated as
“Repentance and Holy Flight,” or RHF) and Al-Fanniya al-‘Askariya
(“Technical Military Academy,” or MA). I start with this study because Ibrahim
is a serious Egyptian scholar keenly aware of the cultural nuances of an Islamic
country not available to outsiders, which gives his conclusions more authenticity
and weight, and because his study is the first of its kind, appearing long before
Western scholars came on the scene in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Furthermore, Ibrahim addresses both the question of poverty and the level of
education of various members of the terrorist organizations in general, and the
depth of their knowledge of Islam in particular.
In 1977, “demanding the release of RHF members being detained by the
government,” RHF kidnapped a former cabinet minister “and then carried out
their threat to kill [him] when the release did not materialize. Crackdowns and
shootouts resulted in scores of dead and wounded around the country.”1 Three
years earlier MA had “attempted to stage a coup d’état.” That plot “was foiled
while in process but only after dozens had been killed and wounded.”2 Although
the two leaders of both groups had been executed, many of their second-echelon
leaders were still in prison. At first distrustful, the jailed militants ultimately
decided that Ibrahim’s team of researchers “seemed honest and credible enough
[to allow the team] to spend approximately four hundred hours interviewing
them over a two-year period,” amounting to “more than ten hours per person for
the thirty-three militants” interviewed.3
MA, RHF, and Education
I shall begin with a word about the similarities between the leaders of the
militant Egyptian Islamic groups under discussion. MA began under the
leadership of Salih Siriya, who turns out to be “a modern, educated man with a
Ph.D. in science education”: A Palestinian by birth and in his mid-thirties, he
had been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Jordan (known as the
Islamic Liberation Party, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami). After the defeat of 1967 he
intermittently joined various Palestinian organizations, tried to cooperate with
various Arab regimes that claimed to be revolutionary (Libya and Iraq, for
example), spent brief periods in jail, and finally settled in Egypt in 1971 and
joined one of the specialized agencies of the Arab League in Cairo. It was from
that vantage point that he began to attract the attention of some religious
students. Underground cells, called usar (families) by the group, began to form
in Cairo and Alexandria.”4
Also in his thirties and educated in Cairo, with a B.S. in agricultural science,
RHF founder Shukri Mustafa “had been arrested in 1965, tried, and jailed for a
few years on charges of being a member of the Brotherhood.”5
Both Siriya and Mustafa were seen by rank and file members of their groups
as “extremely eloquent, knowledgeable about religion, well-versed in the Quran
and Hadith, and highly understanding of national, regional, and international
affairs. Both were perceived as virtuous, courageous, fearless of death, and even
eager for martyrdom (istishhad).”6 Mustafa in particular was considered by RHF
members to be “an authority on matters of doctrinal theology, Islamic
jurisprudence, worship, and Islamic social transaction.”7