I was about eight years old when I first heard the tales of the Prophet’s army, at my Qur’an school in Saudi Arabia. (Our teachers showed us dramatic video re-creations of the battles.) Make no mistake: today’s jihadist fighters have been raised with these same stories—and often the ineptitude of the jihadists’ opponents seems to make history repeat itself. In Iraq, government soldiers fled their positions when IS attacked, despite being better armed than their attackers. In Nigeria, too, despite substantial Western assistance, the authorities failed miserably to free “our girls” from Boko Haram.
After the U.S. consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the airport attack in Karachi, Pakistan, the jihadist websites gloated that Allah had weakened the enemy, allowing victory—exactly the same story I heard from Somalis back in 1994 after eighteen American military personnel were killed and mutilated in Mogadishu. Even the release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan in exchange for five Taliban leaders can be presented as another victory for Allah’s warriors over the infidel.
The jihadists, then, are not simply disaffected youths from deprived backgrounds who have surfed the wrong websites. They are men and women with a sense of sacred mission. The words of a ten-year-old Palestinian boy, speaking after his father’s own death, perfectly capture what I mean:
By Allah, oh my father, I love you more than my own soul, but that is trivial because of my religion, my cause and my Al-Aqsa [the mosque in Jerusalem]. Father, my eyes will shed no tears, but my finger will pull the trigger—this trigger that I still remember. I will never forget, beloved father, the times when you taught me the love of jihad. You taught me the love of arms, so that I would be a knight, Allah willing. I will follow in your steps and fight the enemies on the battlefield. Every drop of blood that dripped from your pure body is worth dozens of bullets directed towards the enemies’ chests. Tomorrow I will grow up, tomorrow I will avenge, and the battlefields will know who is the son of the Martyr, the commander, Ashraf Mushtaha. Finally, father, we are not saying goodbye, rather, I’ll see you as a Shahid [Martyr] in Paradise. [I am] your son, who longs to meet you, the young knight, Naim, son of Ashraf Mushtaha.7
“You taught me the love of jihad.” That is the message being heard today across the globe. And thousands are heeding it.
Global Jihad
The scale of the jihadist problem is growing much faster than most people in the West want to face. At the University of Maryland at College Park, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), part of the Global Terrorism Database, tracks terror attacks worldwide. What they are finding is that “worldwide terrorism is reaching new levels of destructiveness,” according to Gary LaFree, a START director and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Maryland. Leading this dramatic rise is an “incredible growth” in jihadist attacks perpetrated by “al-Qaeda affiliates.” In 2012, START identified the six most lethal jihad terror groups as the Taliban (more than 2,500 fatalities), Boko Haram (more than 1,200), Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (more than 960), Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (more than 950), Al-Qaeda in Iraq (more than 930), and Al-Shabaab (more than 700).
The numbers for 2013 and 2014 will likely be even higher.Places such as Iraq and Syria are of course a long way away from the United States: it is five and a half thousand miles from New York to Damascus. Even Europeans tend to regard the Middle East as distant: from London to Damascus is, after all, nearly three thousand miles.
To many of us, Syria may just seem like this decade’s Bosnia or Rwanda; we tend to assume, in a slightly cynical or fatalistic way, that the next decade will bring along a new list of distant conflict zones. On an intellectual level, we may accept that we should be concerned about jihadists abroad, but on an emotional level, most people in the West are still disengaged. But the rise of Western jihadists is changing that. Almost no one in the United States, Canada, Australia, or Europe could escape the ghastly spectacle of a British-born jihadist beheading helpless American and British captives.
A report from the AIVD, the Dutch intelligence service, describes a pattern that can be seen not only in the Netherlands but right across Western Europe: young Muslims are quickly moving from being merely “fellow traveler sympathizers” with jihadists to being fully fledged “ruthless fighters.” It is not just an apostate like me who must now live in fear; even moderate Muslims face threats. “Muslims in the Netherlands who openly oppose joining the Syrian conflict and challenge the highly intolerant and antidemocratic dogma of jihadism have found themselves increasingly subject to physical and virtual intimidation,” according to the AIVD.8 High-profile Muslims who oppose the jihadists “cannot even go out in public without protection,” while former Muslim radicals, who have turned away from the violent ideology, are severely threatened.9 And the call to jihad is transmitted through multiple channels. As the AIVD report puts it: “it is now available in multiple forms and many languages, with material ranging from the movement’s classic written works to sound recordings of lectures and films from the front line.”10
The jihadists have the upper hand in Europe—and they know it. In April 2014, a Dutch jihadist addressed the following tweet directly to the AIVD: “Greetings from Syria! Intensively monitored for years, sent back 4 times and now drinking Pepsi in Syria? Que pasa what went wrong?” The AIVD report grimly predicts attacks throughout Europe, on governments, on Jews, on moderate Muslims, both Sunnis and Shiites. The threat, it concludes, is greater than ever before.11
Why should the United States be any different, even if in relative terms the Muslim share of the population is smaller than in most Western European countries? A Pew survey from 2007 noted that American Muslims under the age of thirty were twice as likely as older Muslims to believe that suicide bombings in defense of Islam could be justified, and 7 percent of American Muslims between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine said that they had a “favorable” view of Al-Qaeda.12
While the proportion may be small, the absolute number of Americans committed to political Islam and willing to contemplate violence to advance its goals is not trivial. Another Pew survey, from 2011, found that somewhere around 180,000 American Muslims regarded suicide bombings as being justified in some way.13 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of IS, is said to have told his U.S. Army Reservist guards when he walked away from four years of detention in Camp Bucca in Iraq, “I’ll see you in New York.” I fear it is only a matter of time before IS does indeed manifest itself in Manhattan.
Islam has always been transnational. It was founded and established and spread across the world when the nation-state and national identity were at best inchoate and more often nonexistent. People belonged to tribes, city-states, empires, or religious orders. But whereas Christianity was configured from its inception to co-exist with states and empires alike (if they would tolerate Christianity), Islam from the outset aspired to be church, state, and empire. If you are a self-respecting Islamist, you are therefore bound to be a crosser of national borders. You may need to gain local power, but your ultimate goal is to have Islam rule the world. And today you can write and talk openly about that goal on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever else you like.
Islamic State’s social media mastermind is believed to be Ahmad Abousamra, a dual American-Syrian citizen, who grew up in the comfortable Boston suburb of Stoughton, while his father worked as an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He attended the private Xaverian Brothers Catholic high school in Westwood, Massachusetts, before transferring to Stoughton High in his senior year, when he made the honor roll. He also made the dean’s list at Northeastern University.
If this sounds like a privileged upbringing, that’s because it was. Yet, according to the testimony of FBI agents, Abousamra “celebrated” the 9/11 attacks and, while in college in the early 2000s, expressed his support for murdering Americans because “they paid taxes to support the government and were kufar [nonbelievers].” Abousamra wo
rshipped at the same Cambridge mosque as the Tsarnaev brothers and five other high-profile terrorists, among them Afia Siddiqui, an MIT scientist turned Al-Qaeda agent known as “Lady Al-Qaeda,” who was sentenced to eighty-six years in prison for planning a chemical attack in New York.
An MIT scientist. A dean’s list student at Northeastern. These jihadists are hardly uneducated, unskilled, or impoverished. Some have been the beneficiaries of the best Western education that money can buy. That they have nevertheless committed themselves to holy war against the West is deeply perplexing to those of us who cannot imagine anything being more attractive than the Western way of life. That is why we cast around desperately for explanations of their behavior—any explanations, other than the obvious one.
The Roots of Jihad
In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, there was a rush to deny that the Tsarnaev brothers had been motivated by religious radicalism. President Obama went out of his way to avoid referring to Islam in his statements after the Boston bombing. When it became impossible to deny that the perpetrators had in fact been avidly reading the online tirades of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian teacher and mentor of Osama bin Laden, the Islamic Society of Boston issued a bland statement saying that “one suspect [had] disagreed with the moderate American-Islamic theology of the ISB Cambridge mosque.”
It was much the same story just over a month later, on May 22, when Lee Rigby was hacked to death in Woolwich. Within hours, a woman named Julie Siddiqi, representing the Islamic Society of Britain (and a convert to the faith), stepped before the microphones to attest that all good Muslims were “sickened” by the attack, “just like everyone else.” The Guardian ran a headline quoting a Muslim Londoner: “These poor idiots have nothing to do with Islam.” Try telling that to Lee Rigby’s murderer who killed him while yelling “Allahu akbar” (God Is Great).
Omar Bakri also claimed to speak for the true faith following the Woolwich killing. Of course, he was unavailable for the cameras in England because the Islamist group he founded, Al-Muhajiroun, was banned in 2010, so he spoke from Tripoli in northern Lebanon, where he now lives under an agreement with the Lebanese government that prevents him from leaving the country for thirty years. A decade earlier, in London, Bakri had taught Michael Adebolajo, the accused Woolwich killer who was videotaped at the scene. “A quiet man, very shy, asking lots of questions about Islam,” Bakri recalled of his student, the terrorist. The teacher was impressed to see in the grisly video of Lee Rigby’s murder how far his shy disciple had come, “standing firm, courageous, brave. Not running away. . . . The Prophet said an infidel and his killer will not meet in Hell. That’s a beautiful saying. May God reward him for his actions. . . . I don’t see it as a crime as far as Islam is concerned.”14
Omar Bakri is not making up Muhammad’s words. If the Qur’an or the hadith urges the believer to kill infidels (“slay them wherever ye catch them” [2:191]) or to behead them (“when ye meet the Unbelievers [in fight], smite at their necks; At length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly [on them]” [47:4])—or to whip adulterers and stone them to death (Sahih Muslim 17:4192), then we cannot be wholly surprised when fundamentalists do precisely those things. Those who say that the butchers of Islamic State are misinterpreting these verses have a problem. The Qur’an itself explicitly urges pitilessness.
Or consider the case of Boko Haram, the organization that briefly attracted the attention of the American public by kidnapping 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria last year. The translation of Boko Haram from the Hausa language is usually given in English-language media as “Western Education Is Forbidden.” But “Non-Muslim Teaching Is Forbidden” might be more accurate. Like individual terrorists, organizations such as Boko Haram do not spring from nowhere. The men who establish such groups, whether in Africa, Asia, or even Europe, are members of long-established Muslim communities, most of whose members are happy to lead peaceful lives. To understand why the jihadists are flourishing, you need to understand the dynamics within those communities.
It begins simply enough, usually with the establishment of an association of men dedicated to the practice of the sunnah (the tradition of guidance from the Prophet Muhammad). There will be a lead preacher, not unlike Boqol Sawm, the Muslim Brotherhood imam I encountered as a girl in Nairobi. Much of the young man’s preaching will address the place of women. He will recommend that girls and women be kept indoors and covered from head to toe if they are to venture outside. He will also condemn the permissiveness of Western society.
What kind of response will he encounter? In the United States and in Europe, some moderate Muslims may quietly draw him to the attention of authorities. Women may voice concerns about the attacks on their freedoms. But in other parts of the world, where law and order are lacking, such young men and their extremist messages can thrive. In particular, where governments are weak, corrupt, or nonexistent, the message of Boko Haram and its counterparts is especially compelling. Not implausibly, they can blame poverty on official corruption and offer as an antidote the pure principles of the Prophet.
But why do so many young men turn from these words to violence? At first, they can count on some admiration for this fundamentalist message from within their own communities. Some may encounter opposition from established Muslim leaders who feel threatened. But the preacher and his cohorts persevere because perseverance in the sunnah is one of the most important keys to heaven. And over time, the following grows, to the point where it is as large as that of the Muslim community’s established leaders. That is when the showdown happens—and the argument for “holy war” suddenly makes sense to leader and follower alike.
The history of Boko Haram has followed precisely this script. The group was founded in 2002 by a young Islamist called Mohammed Yusuf, who started out preaching in a Muslim community in Borno state of northern Nigeria. He set up an educational complex, including a mosque and an Islamic school. For seven years, mostly poor families flocked to hear his message. But in 2009, the Nigerian government investigated Boko Haram and ultimately arrested several members, including Yusuf himself. The crackdown sparked violence that left about seven hundred dead.
Yusuf soon died in prison—the government said he was killed while trying to escape—but the seeds had been planted. Under one of Yusuf’s lieutenants, Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram turned to jihad. In 2011, Boko Haram launched its first terror attack in Borno. Four people were killed, and from then on violence became an integral part, if not the central part, of its mission.
It is no longer plausible to argue that organizations such as Boko Haram—or, for that matter, Islamic State—have nothing to do with Islam. It is no longer credible to define “extremism” as some disembodied threat, meting out death without any ideological foundation, a problem to be dealt with by purely military methods, preferably drone strikes. We need to tackle the root problem of the violence that is plaguing our world today, and that must be the doctrine of Islam itself.
The Practice of Jihad: The Worldwide War on Christians
One of the most devastating manifestations of the modern era of jihad is the violent oppression of Christian minorities in Muslim-majority nations all over the world.
In Islamic history, the land controlled by Islam is referred to as dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam). The land controlled by non-Muslims is dar al-harb (the abode of war).15 Historically, after being conquered by Muslims, groups deemed People of the Book, including Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, were required to pay a special tax, the jizya, as a mark of their humiliation. If they did so, they were allowed to keep their religion (9:29). Yet there was always a strain of “eliminationism” in Islam, too. The Prophet himself promised to “expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and . . . not leave any but Muslims” (Sahih Muslim 19: 4363–67). The Qur’an (5:51) warns Muslims: “take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors.” Muslim men may
marry Jewish or Christian women but Muslim women may not marry non-Muslim men because under Islamic law the religious identity of children is passed through the father (5:5).
Modern Islamists go further. In some countries, governments and their agents openly sponsor anti-Christian violence, burning churches and imprisoning observant Christians. In others, rebel groups and self-proclaimed vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries. Often, local leaders and governments do little to stop them or simply turn a blind eye.
This phenomenon of Christophobia (as opposed to the far more widely discussed “Islamophobia”) receives remarkably little coverage in the Western media. Part of this reticence may be due to fear of provoking additional violence. But part is clearly a result of the very effective efforts by lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading journalists and editors in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a deep-rooted Islamophobia. This, of course, extends with an Orwellian illogic to coverage of Muslim violence against Christians. Yet any fair-minded assessment of recent events leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the Christophobia evident in Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other.
Take Nigeria, where the population is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims, who for years have lived on the edge of civil war. But the stakes have risen dramatically with the gains made by Boko Haram, which has openly stated that it will kill all of Nigeria’s Christians. And it is making good on its promise. In the first half of 2014, Boko Haram killed at least 2,053 civilians in ninety-five attacks.16 They have used machetes, guns, and gasoline bombs, shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is great) while launching their attacks, one of which—on a Christmas Day gathering—killed forty-two Catholics. They have targeted bars, beauty salons, and banks. They have murdered Christian clergymen, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers.
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