Subscribe...With the end of the cold war and the emergence of global networks in which goods, ideas and people circulate outside the language of citizenship, the fundamentalist fight for ideological states has lost influence... Muslim radicalism, by contrast, has moved beyond the language of citizenship to assume a global countenance, joining movements as different as environmentalism and pacifism in its pursuit of justice on a worldwide scale. Such movements are ethical rather than political in nature: they can neither predict nor control the global consequences of their actions...Spectral brothers: al-Qaida’s world wide web
The battle of Karbalaand this
Defeat and death of Hussein
Modern echoes of the battle at Karbala
The mourning month of Muharram
Ancient roots of the tale of Hussein’s martyrdom
Shi’ite, Sunni and Christian: points of contact and distance
Martyrdom in contemporary Iran: from the imposed war to President Khatami
Mossadeq the martyr?
From the murder of Hussein to suicide bombers: the missing link
The advent of suicide attacks within, and outside of, Islam
Religious martyrdom in al-Qa’ida
The nihilism of Nietzsche
Unclaimed responsibility
On the trail of the Assassins
A modern rebellion
The context of Realpolitik
The crazed killer is a modern being - and not only when he belongs to a religious organisation. When, a few days after 11 September, a Swiss citizen killed some members of the regional parliament of Zug and then himself, one was relieved that the one attack seemed to have nothing to do with the other. Yet the two events are not so entirely unrelated.We are not fighting Islam so much as we are fighting the future. Our enemies have no central command, no common ideology, plan, they are not a state so much as a brand, a meme, orelapping, related and unrelated pre-suppostions about what is true about the world, individuals motivated now by an atomized heretical send up mash up of Islam, with the emphasis on the mash up rather than Islam.
By means of a single act, the crazed killer acquires a surrogate for that which is lacking, almost by definition, in modern society: a comprehensive framework of meaning in which the individual has his allocated place. The act is preceded by a phase of withdrawal, separation, subjectively perceived rejection or conscious isolation - even when the outward forms of bourgeois existence are being maintained.
Stuck in a vacuum, the individual feels himself to be passive, anonymous, in every way forced to fend for himself. By shooting or bombing he endows himself with significance, becoming for a few seconds the total man of action, the avenger of an injustice which is overwhelmingly felt, but which neither his personality nor external circumstances have given him any chance of putting right.
From being a nobody, he raises himself to a god. However senseless his action might appear when viewed from the outside, it is from destruction itself that he wrests an ultimate meaning. His abstract antagonist - the state, humanity, the environment, evil itself - becomes briefly tangible in the form of those at whom his weapon is aimed.
One scarcely dares to imagine how much greater the injection of meaning, public attention and empowering action must be for those who, in their temporary seclusion, have been reinforced in their beliefs by political sects and have yielded to seductively coherent religious convictions. The thrill must be so much greater when the injustice which - by means of a symbolic single act - they are trying to put right, punish or at least point out, is not just individually suffered but can be portrayed as the oppression of millions whom they thereby release from passivity and from whose anonymity they emerge through self-destruction.
The State, which since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) has been the most important and most characteristic of all modern institutions, is dying. Wherever we look, existing states are either combining into larger communities or falling apart; wherever we look, organizations that are not states are taking their place. On the international level, we are moving away from a system of separate, sovereign, states toward less distinct, more hierarchical, and in many ways more complex structures. Inside their borders, it seems that many states will soon no longer be able to protect the political, military, economic, social, and cultural life of their citizens. These developments may lead to upheavals as profound as those that took humanity out of the Middle Ages and into the Modern World. Whether the direction of change is desirable, as some hope, or undesirable, as others fear, remains to be seen...Whatever the future may bring, it cannot be much worse than the past.
Meanwhile, from the White House to 10 Downing Street, the residences of presidents and prime ministers as well as entire government quarters have been transformed into fortresses. Private security has turned into a growth industry par excellence; in the United States alone it is said to employ 1.6 million people (as many as the number of active troops) and to cost $52 billion a year, far more than all US police departments combined. Feeling themselves exposed, more and more individuals and corporations are either renting protection or setting up their own. While one does not want to exaggerate the problem, unquestionably all of this is symptomatic of the state's faltering ability to hold on to its monopoly over violence--or, in plain words, to protect its citizens' lives and property.
...Nobody knows the significance of the transition from a system of sovereign, territorial, legally equal states to one that takes greater cognizance of the new realities; it is likely to be eventful and, as is already the case in many places, quite possibly bloody. Still, it is worth recalling that the state's most remarkable products to date have been Hiroshima and Auschwitz; the former could never have been built by any organization but a state (and the most powerful one, at that), whereas the latter was above all an exercise in bureaucratic management. Whatever the future may bring, it cannot be much worse than the past. For those who regret and fear the passing away of the world with which we are familiar, let that be their consolation.
...Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence that bin Laden himself actually despises what he sees as the nit-picking juridical approach of the madrasa-educated ulema (clerics), regarding his own brand of violent Islamism as a wholly more appropriate answer to the problems of the Muslim world.As to his cult of martyrs and frequent talk of dream and visions, all of which derive from popular, mystical, and Shia Islamic traditions, see the Roots of Terror article linked above. It is very comprehensive and yet concise, considering the territory it covers, about the evolution of the concept of martyrdom in Islam. Creveld's The Fate of the State deserves to read as well.
...Devji points out just how deeply unorthodox bin Laden is, with his cult of martyrs and frequent talk of dream and visions, all of which derive from popular, mystical, and Shia Islamic traditions, against which the orthodox Sunni ulema have long struggled. Moreover, bin Laden and his followers "routinely attack the most venerable clerics and seminaries, accusing them of being slaves of apostate regimes.... They also issue their own legal opinions or fatwas without possessing the learning or clerical authority to do so."
All this highlights how lacking in intellectual sophistication the debate about al-Qaeda still is. Again and again, we are told that terrorism is associated with poverty and the basic, Koranic education provided by madrasas...
In reality al-Qaeda operatives tend to be highly educated and their aims explicitly political. Bin Laden, in his numerous communiqués, has always been unambiguous about this. As he laconically remarked in his broadcast timed to coincide with the last US election, if it was freedom they were against, al-Qaeda would have attacked Sweden. The men who planned the September 11 attacks were not products of the traditional Islamic educational system, even in its most radical form. Instead they are graduates of Western-style institutions. They are not at all the protégés of the mullahs...
One quibble: the article mentions "peaceful Sufis" as if that were an inherent attribute; it's too often overlooked by Western enthusiasts that some Sufi orders, like the Naqshbandi of the Caucasus, are militant (and in fact fought the Russians to a standstill in the nineteenth century).And, as the Guardian article he quotes in his comment adds,
"Rumi did not come to his theology of tolerance and inclusive spirituality by turning away from traditional Islam, but through immersion in it." He was not a "guru calmly dispensing words of wisdom capable of resolving, panacea-like, all our ontological ailments", as he is presented in the translations of Coleman Barks, so much as "a poet of overpowering longing, trying to grope through his shattering sense of loss". Likewise the poet and fellow of All Souls Andrew Harvey, who has produced some fine recreations of Rumi's verse, emphasises Rumi's "rigorous, even ferocious austerity". It is a far cry, he believes, from the New Age construct, "Rosebud Rumi, a Californian hippy-like figure of vague ecstatic sweetness and diffused warm-hearted brotherhood, a kind of medieval Jerry Garcia of the Sacred Heart".In Inside the Madrasas, we read about
......the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet of love and longing, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, who, it is often forgotten, was trained as a Muslim jurist, and throughout his life taught Sharia law in a madrasa in Konya. It is true that Rumi rejected the rigidity of thought and spirituality characteristic of the ulema of his day, but he did so as an insider, from within the system..See also The Murid Wars:
Murid is a follower of a shaykh. The two live in a khaniqah or monastry and lead a very austere existence. In the course of many years, the shaykh leads the murid on the path or tariqa of unity with Allah. The term "murid" is also used for an individual who fights voluntarily for social equality (Henze 15) and for national independence. In this latter context, Muridism is understood as a branch of Sufism in which the disciple follows the dictates of an imam who leads the ghazavat or holy war for equality and national integrity (cf., mujahid). The ghazavats were fought primarily in the Caucasus.That he was trained as a Muslim jurist, and throughout his life taught Sharia law in a madrasa is something not usually dwelt upon those who revere the hippy dippy Rumi of woo woo New Age fame.
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posted by y2karl at 12:28 AM on December 8, 2005