Reviewed Work: Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy. Morality. Modernity(London: Hurst, 2005).
Jihad-studies in academics generally tend to depict Islamic terror as a direct culmination of particular medieval Islamic schools of thought or some modern religious reform movements in the Middle East. The common practice is to reach an ideological genealogy starting from the famous Syrian Salafi scholar Ibn Thaymiyya (1263–1328), going through Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab (1703-1792) of Saudi Arabia, and ending up with political Islamists like Sayyid Mawdudi (Pakistan, 1903-1979) and Sayyid Qutub (Egypt, 1906-1966). The entire genealogy is oftenloosely termed as ‘Wahabi’, and Bin Laden is just a natural Wahabi response to the new world order, it seems form the analyses. The scholars usually take this genealogy for granted. The creed of Ibn Thaymiyya and Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab is never discussed in detail, and the fact that the political Islam, of Qutub and Mawdudi, is quite different from ‘Wahabism’ is rarely acknowledged. Faisal Devji’s book on global Islamic terrorism with a special focus on Al- Qaeda moves away in style and content from these typical Jihad-studies. Even though a historian, Faisalconsciously escapes the trap of the afore-explained historicism, and tries to address the issue differently. His work is not a historical review of Al Qaeda, and he himself is not very clear about the subtle differences between Wahabism and Sunni Political Islam. But still, since his concern is to approach Bin Laden’s movement as a modern phenomenon with its own characteristics, the book effectively challenges the widely accepted Wahabi-genealogy of terrorism.
Wahhabism is a strict form of scriptural Sunni Islam which flourished in the Middle East with the foundation of the modern Saudi-state. Those who propose Wahabi origins for Islamic terrorism therefore consider Muslim terror groups in various parts of the world as anchored to the Wahabi ideals imported from Saudi Arabia. What is not noticed is the fact that many Muslimterrorist groups are actually Sufi or Shiite in nature, and that Wahabis are ideologically reluctant to any forms of Shiite Islam and Sufism. In the book, Faisal has brought attention to this point: “[….] arguably the most successful examples of Political Islam have been revolutionary Iran and the Hezbollah in Lebanon, both Shia movements” (p. 21). Even the Sunni Jihad groups have actually borrowed the “language and practice” of suicide attacks known as “martyrdom operations” from Shiite discourses, he points out (p. 21). The Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan, which is usually described as a Wahabi outfit, had its leader Mullah Omar draped in a “mantle belonging to the Prophet”, and claiming to receive “divine instructions in his dreams.” Scholars generally downplay such Sufi themes at work in Afghanistan, and fail to realize that “it is precisely such charismatic forms of authority” that “Wahhabis are supposed to execrate” (p. 22-3). Even Osama Bin Laden advocated the Sufi custom of attributing “supernatural powers including the ability to intercede with God” to the martyrs (p. 42) which Wahabis unequivocally brand as polytheistic.
The terrorism practiced by Al Qaeda could actually never be derived from Sunni Orthodoxy which stipulates that militant Jihad can be carried out only by an Islamic state. Individuals or groups, according to the Sunni scholars, are not allowed by the Islamic scriptures to take arms in their hands. The four established traditional Sunni schools of Jurisprudence as well as the Wahabi scholars in Saudi Arabia are unanimous in stating this principle. In other words, armed Jihad in Sunni orthodoxy is a state-led war to serve the political purposes of Islam.The author is well aware of this truth. And he explains that the kind of Jihad which Al Qaeda now propagates, have, forerunners in history, if any, only in the Sufi tradition of “charismatic, mystical and heretical movements, often messianic in nature, located at the peripheries of Islamic power or authority.” He cites the examples of many Sufi fraternities which fought such wars between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries (p. 35). This shows that the Sufi colour of the Al Qaeda Jihad, which usually goes unnoticed, is not an accident. The book shows in detail how various Sufi conceptions have enriched the world view of the global Jihad (See, for instance, pp. 41-9).
Through this thought-provoking shift of focus from Wahabism to Sufism in the discussion on Jihad, the author is actually taking us to more unexpected conclusions. Wahabi Islam prescribes strict compliance with the basic Islamic scriptures and encourages sticking to the theological interpretations given by the religious scholars in the first three centuries of Islam. On the other hand, Shiite and Sufi traditions allows some space for liberalism in religion. This liberalism is what allows Shiite and Sufi groups to interpret Jihad differently. So what is at the core of the Al Qaeda’s love for Sufism? It is nothing but the love for a liberal Islam. This happens because only a liberal Islam would allow Al Qaeda to propagate the state-less guerilla-Jihad which is central to its project. This shows that in contrary to the general notion that Jihadis are ardent followers of the letters of the religious law, they are the ones who try to reform the religion more earnestly. Faisal quotes Bin Laden’s statement about the 9/11 flight-hijackers in this regard: “Those youths who conducted the operations did not accept any fiqh (school of Islamic law)” (p. 13). Thus by signaling “the lack of concern with the details of correct Islamic practice”, Jihad “places itself” with the most “mystical, heretical or secular of Muslim groups” (p. 16). A letter by an Al Qaeda member to his brother is also quoted to show this: “They train us here on how to mix with the Christians and how to emulate their life style. We have to learn how to drink alcohol and to shave off our beards” (p. 18). Some of the hijackers of 9/11 were not “averse to consuming alcohol, gambling in Las Vegas or attending a lap-dancing club in the days before their final flight” (p. 17). Devji thus shows the “Jihad’s destruction of traditional forms of Islamic authority” (p. 16) which curiously results in the “democratization” of Islam (p. 51). Jihad “makes Islam into an agent as well as product of globalization by liberating it from its specific content. Islam becomes a global ‘fact’ by destroying its own traditions and recycling their fragments in novel ways” (p. xii). Thus, Devji’s skeptical mind which prompted him to explore his resources from an angle different from that of the ‘genealogists’ active in the field, further allows him to imply that Jihadis are in fact the real heirs of Muslim liberalism.
The political Islamists of the twentieth century, who were called as Muslim fundamentalists then and were mainly the followers of Qutub and Mawdudi, also had in fact advocated militant Jihad resorting to the same sort of liberalism. But their conception of Islam and Jihad was more or less modeled upon revolutionary Marxism. Qutub and Mawdudi presented Islam as a state-centric ideology. Islam could be realized only with the formation of an Islamic state on the surface of earth, it was argued. Muslims were advised to try their level best to establish Islamic states throughout the world. This – the revolutions aimed at establishing Islamic states — was the Jihad which fundamentalist movements – the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jama-at-e-Islami — demanded from the Muslim community in the last century. The “communist ideas about the party as vanguard of the revolution, the state as an explicitly ideological institution meant to produce a utopian society, and the likes were central” to these movements” (p. 27). Although many of the ideologues of Al Qaeda – including Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri – were brought up in Islamist atmospheres, the new Jihad movement is not in fact concerned with “political parties, revolutions or the founding of ideological states”, Devji points out (p. 27). The new platforms of Jihad are based upon the understanding that in the post-cold war globalized world-scenario, “revolutionary politics meant to institute” territorial states would be meaningless. The fact that Islamist fundamentalism had after all “enjoyed only one success in the many decades of struggle, with the Islamic Republic of Iran”, is also seriously taken into consideration by the new Jihadis. Jihad is now a global movement with a “fundamental indifference” to territories (p. 27). The various enterprises undertaken by the global Jihad in various territories are not aimed at the solution of any territorial grievances or at the foundation of any territorial Islamic states. “The particular sites of the struggles are themselves unimportant, their territories being subordinated into a larger and even metaphysical struggle for which they have become merely instrumental” (p. 27). Here, the new Jihad is lacking any “politics of intentionality” which marked the earlier Islamist struggles. Moreover, the global Jihad, prompted more by some ethical consciousness than by any political context, is working in such a fashion that it can neither predict nor control the effects of its own actions. The author details on this phenomenon, and compares it with the investments in the global market: “Just as with players in the global economy, participants in the jihad are drawn by their investments into a world that does not operate according to their intentions but seems to possess a life of its own. While the attacks of 9/11, for instance, were meticulously planned, they were at the same time completely speculative as far as their effects were concerned, since these could neither be predicted with any degree of certainty, nor controlled in any fashion. Practices of terror in the jihad, then, are akin to those of risk in the global economy” (p. 9). This is precisely, according to the author, what makes jihad a “global movement” (p. 11). And jihad shares these characteristic features with other global movements like “environmentalism, the anti-globalization protests, the supporters of disarmament, anti-abortion groups” (p. 12) etc.
For Devji, violence is not “the most important thing about Al Qaeda’s jihad” (p. xv) although it is “certainly the most visible aspect” (p. xvi). His project is therefore to research the “whole world of beliefs and practices” to which jihad is linked, but “remains invisible in much scholarly writing on the subject” (p. xvi). Devji points out that Jihad, as a global movement, is producing “new patterns of belief and practice” which should be discussed. The “landscapes” in the title of the book refers precisely to these new patterns emerging as the “global consequences of Al Qaeda’s actions” (p. xvi). These new landscapes of Islam are constituted by the liberal space formed through the fragmentation of the traditional structures of Muslim authority, which I have discussed earlier. But what makes such a fragmentation possible? Devji brings in the role of media to explain this point: “Perhaps the most important way in which jihad assumes its universality, however, is through mass media. As a series of global effects the jihad is more a product of the media than it is of any local tradition or situation and school or lineage of Muslim authority” (p. 87). As pointed out earlier, no established schools of Sunni jurisprudence endorse Al Qaeda’s ideas of Jihad. But still the movement could instill its standpoint in many Muslims through media communication. Here, a new kind of Muslim is being produced who is not tied to any local authority which could stipulate the dos and don’ts for him/her. Faisal is analyzing this in detail and developing many interesting points about the “spectacle of martyrdom” (p. 92) media is providing to the Muslim youth. The martyrdoms of the new Jihadis are not simply individual attempts to achieve paradise but messages to the community (to repeat such incidents) as the “various attempts by would be martyrs to film their deaths or at least to leave behind videotaped testaments” clearly illustrates (p. 95). In the new Islamic landscape created by the media, apart from Makkah and Madina, “Sarajevo, Grozny, Kabul, Baghdad, Srinagar and even New York” could also “call forth” in a way the “practices of pilgrimage, donation, tourism and death” (p. 92). Muslims and non-Muslims alike are united in a “common visual practice” in which such sites of jihad are viewed as the sites of global Islam (p. 93).
Faisal’s book, in the concluding chapter ‘New World Order’, is bringing in Derrida to deal with the global war on terror which the US has already declared. After the cold war, America as super power has in fact turned out to be a “political dinosaur” because the “enemy it was made to fight no longer exists, and because global politics is no longer defined in hemispheric or even properly geographic terms” (p. 137). The new enemy America has found, the jihad, “is non geographical in nature, using the most disparate territories as temporary bases for its action.” This makes jihad into an “impossible enemy” for the US because “it exists beyond America’s “war making potential” (p. 137). Faisal then invokes Derrida, who had in the wake of 9/11, clearly identified that jihad as a global movement, “is a problem internal to the United States in every sense; not only does it necessarily work inside the West (or democracy, or capitalism) as a new global category, it does so with the geographical, financial and technological mobility that defines globalization itself” (p. 137). So in a sense it could be argued that, Faisal shows, the jihad’s struggle would be one “between a major but outmoded territorial power and a minor but futuristic global one” (p. 154). And that would be a “struggle between politics and ethics”, he opines (p. 154). The most important thing evolving out of this observation is that as all global movements share these basic features of jihad, any of them could pose similar challenges in the future. Faisal put this in these words: “the jihad only inaugurates this new world of dangers by providing an example of what else may come to pass. Jacques Derrida, in his astute reflections on the event that was 9/11, notes that the unknown future it opened was what made this event radically new: ‘The ordeal of the event has its tragic correlate not what is presently happening or what has happened in the past but the precursory signs of what threatens to happen. It is the future that determines the unappropriability of the event, not the present or the past.’ And it is precisely this future that Osama bin Laden invokes. In his interview with Ummat, [….], he seems to be evading responsibility for the attacks of 9/11 by suggesting that other [non-Islamic] groups and other [non-Islamic] aims might have been involved. What his words actually tell us is that any group or any aim could participate in such attacks, especially in the future that Al Qaeda so skillfully inaugurated on that eleventh of September” (p. 157).
Faisal Devji’s monograph thus shows the courage to problematize the existing academic canon on Jihad, ask new questions, enter new areas and brings into light new dimensions of the issue at hand. The book is distributed in India by Foundation Books, New Delhi.