Scores killed in Algeria attack

At least 43 people have been killed in a suicide attack on an Algerian police school, the country's interior ministry has said.

The attack occurred in the town of Issers, in the Kabylie region of Algeria, 60km east of Algiers, the capital, on Tuesday, wounding 38 others.

The attacker drove a car packed with explosives at the main entrance to the school as candidates for an entry exam were waiting outside, witnesses said.

Civilians as well as police officers were among the victims, they said.

Carnage

The casualty figures were still provisional, the ministry said in a statement.

But it is already the deadliest attack in the country in several months, worse than the December 2007 attack in Algiers against government and UN buildings, which killed at least 41 people and injured many others.

The explosion left a crater several metres across.

"It's utter carnage," said the father of one of those killed in the attack.

"It's a catastrophe. May God punish them for the crime they have committed against these youngsters, and their country."

Another candidate survived because he went to buy cigarettes but his father, mother and brother were killed in the blast, witnesses said.

As well as devastating the entrance to the school, the blast destroyed several nearby houses and blew out windows in nearby shops.

Emergency workers gathered up the remains of the dead, wrapping them in blankets and placing them in waiting ambulances.

[More]

Comment:

It's things like this that really make me think that Apostasy must be some sort of disease. The actions of whomever is responsible for this (possibly al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, though I suspect it may have been someone acting independently) have nothing to do with tactics, or strategy, or reason. This was not a part of any jihad, holy or unholy. It was an act of hate, pure and simple, of an immense loathing and a desire to cause as much suffering as possible. They have certainly succeeded.

Radical web of Islam's Terror

A new generation of Islamist terrorists is connecting through the Internet, not al-Qaeda. Their lack of central organization makes them even more terrifying than their forebears

The world's most dangerous jihadists no longer answer to al-Qaeda. The terrorists we should fear most are self-recruited wannabes who find purpose in terror and comrades on the Web. This new generation is even more frightening and unpredictable than its predecessors, but its evolution just may reveal the key to its demise.

[snip]

WHY THEY FIGHT

Any strategy to fight these terrorists must be based on an understanding of why they believe what they believe. In other words, what transforms ordinary people into fanatics who use violence for political ends? What leads them to consider themselves special, part of a small vanguard trying to build their version of an Islamist utopia?

The explanation for their behaviour is found not in how they think, but rather in how they feel. One of the most common refrains among Islamist radicals is their sense of moral outrage. In the 1980s, the most significant source of these feelings was the killing of Muslims in Afghanistan. In the 1990s, it was the fighting in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. Then came the second Palestinian intifada beginning in 2000. And since 2003, it has been all about the war in Iraq, which has become the focal point of global moral outrage for Muslims all over the world. Along with the humiliations of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Iraq is monopolizing today's conversations about Islam and the West. On a more local level, governments that appear overly pro-American cause radicals to feel they are the victims of a larger anti-Muslim conspiracy, bridging the perceived local and global attacks against them.

In order for this moral outrage to translate into extremism, the frustrations must be interpreted in a particular way: The violations are deemed part of a unified Western strategy, namely a "war against Islam." That deliberately vague worldview, however, is just a sound bite. The new terrorists are not Islamic scholars -- jihadists volunteering for Iraq are interested not in theological debates but in living out their heroic fantasies.

How various individuals interpret this vision of a "war against Islam" differs from country to country, and it is a major reason why homegrown terrorism within the United States is far less likely than it is in Europe. To a degree, the belief that the United States is a melting pot protects the country from homegrown attacks. Whether or not America is a land of opportunity, the important point is that people believe it to be. A recent poll found that 71% of Muslim Americans believe in the "American Dream" -- that's more than the American public as a whole (64%). This is not the case in Europe, where national myths are based on degrees of Britishness, Frenchness or Germanness, and non-European Muslim immigrants do not truly feel they belong.

Feeling marginalized is, of course, no simple springboard to violence. What transforms a very small number to become terrorists is mobilization by networks. Until a few years ago, these networks were face-to-face groups. They included local gangs of young immigrants, members of student associations and study groups at radical mosques. The group acted as an echo chamber, amplifying grievances, intensifying bonds to each other and breeding values that rejected those of host societies. These natural group dynamics resulted in a spiral of mutual encouragement and escalation, transforming a few young Muslims into dedicated terrorists willing to follow the model of their heroes and sacrifice themselves for comrades and cause. Their turn to violence was a collective decision, rather than an individual one.

During the past two or three years, however, face-to-face radicalization has been replaced by online radicalization. The same support and validation that young people used to derive from their offline peer groups are now found in online forums, which promote the image of the terrorist hero, link users to the online social movement, give them guidance and instruct them in tactics. These forums have become the "invisible hand" that organizes terrorist activities worldwide. The true leader of this violent social movement is the collective discourse on half a dozen influential forums.

At present, al-Qaeda Central cannot impose discipline on these third-wave wannabes, mostly because it does not know who they are. Without this command and control, each disconnected network acts according to its own understanding and capability, but their collective actions do not amount to any unified long-term goal or strategy. These separate groups cannot coalesce into a physical movement, leaving them condemned to remain leaderless, online aspirations. Such traits make them particularly volatile and difficult to detect, but they also offer a tantalizing strategy for those who wish to defeat these dangerous individuals: The very seeds of the movement's demise are found within the movement itself.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END?

There has been talk of an al-Qaeda resurgence, but the truth is that most of the hard core members of the first and second waves have been killed or captured. The survival of the social movement they inspired relies on the continued inflow of new members. But this movement is vulnerable to whatever may diminish its appeal among young people. Its allure thrives only at the abstract fantasy level. The few times its aspirations have been translated into reality -- the Taliban in Afghanistan, parts of Algeria during its civil war and, more recently, in Iraq's Anbar province -- were particularly repulsive to most Muslims.

What's more, a leaderless social movement is permanently at the mercy of its participants. As each generation attempts to define itself in contrast to its predecessor, what appeals to the present generation of young would-be radicals may not appeal to the next. At present, the major source of appeal is the anger and moral outrage provoked by the invasion of Iraq. But as the Western footprint there fades so will the appeal of fighting it.

The U.S. strategy to counter this terrorist threat continues to be frozen by the horrors of 9/11. It relies more on wishful thinking than on a deep understanding of the enemy. The pursuit of "high-value targets" who were directly involved in the 9/11 operation was an appropriate first step to bring the perpetrators to justice. And the United States has been largely successful in degrading the capability of al-Qaeda Central. But this strategy is not only useless against the leaderless jihad, it is precisely what will help the movement flourish. The main threat to radical Islamist terrorism is the fact that its appeal is self-limiting. The key is to accelerate this process of internal decay.

Terrorist acts must be stripped of glory and reduced to common criminality. Most aspiring terrorists want nothing more than to be elevated to the status of an FBI Most Wanted poster. "[I am] one of the most wanted terrorists on the Internet," Younis Tsouli boasted online a few months before his arrest in 2005. "I have the Feds and the CIA, both would love to catch me. I have MI6 on my back." His ego fed off the respect such bragging brought him in the eyes of other chat room participants. Any policy or recognition that puts such people on a pedestal only makes them heroes in each other's eyes -- and encourages more people to follow the same path.

It is equally crucial not to place terrorists who are arrested or killed in the limelight. The temptation to hold press conferences to publicize another "major victory" in the war on terror must be resisted, for it only transforms terrorist criminals into jihadist heroes. The United States underestimates the value of prosecutions, which often can be enormously demoralizing to radical groups. There is no glory in being taken to prison in handcuffs. No jihadi Web site publishes such pictures. Arrested terrorists fade into oblivion. Only martyrs live on in popular memory.

This is very much a battle for young Muslims' hearts and minds. It is necessary to reframe the entire debate, from imagined glory to very real horror. Young people must learn that terrorism is about death and destruction, not fame. The voices of the victims must be heard over the bragging and posturing that go on in the online jihadist forums. Only then will the leaderless jihad expire, poisoned by its own toxic message.

Via the National Post. H/T Muslims Against Sharia.


Comment:

While I'm not by any means convinced of their explanation of the source of Apostasy, they do still make a number of good points.

Hirabah versus Jihad

Rescuing Jihad from The al Qaeda Blasphemy

By Jim Guirard

Over two months ago, with little or no comment or praise—either then or later—from the Bush Administration, the West Europeans, the media, the foreign policy experts or the Muslim-American community, the traditionally soft-on-terrorism Saudi Arabian government did a rather remarkable thing.

Its harsh condemnation of the May 12, 2002 suicide bombings in Riyadh contained unprecedented Islamic religious frames of reference—charging al Qaeda terrorists with not only a secular and ideological crime but with a heinous and mortal sin against Allah, as well.

According to Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz: “This is because the Saudi people, will not permit a deviant few to shed the blood of the innocent which God almighty, in his infinite wisdom and justice has sanctified.”

The Saudi chief-of-state went on to proclaim: “As revealed in the Holy Qur’an, ‘He who kills a resident living in peace among you will never breathe the air of Heaven.’ “ And he concluded: “These messages, which do not require any interpretation, provide clear evidence that the fate of these murderers is damnation on earth and the fury of Hell in the thereafter.”

By repeatedly injecting the element of Hellfire into the picture, the Saudis were at least for the moment rejecting the pseudo-religious, Wahhabi-supported language of so-called “Jihadi martyrdom.” Mindlessly parroted by all too many Westerners and Muslims alike, this is the patently false mantra which paints a highly seductive picture of so-called Jihad (Holy War) by so-called mujahiddin (holy warriors) and shuhada or shahiddin (martyrs), supposedly on their way to Paradise.

On its face, the Saudi assault on this al Qaeda scam implies that if Osama bin Laden and his suicidal killers are not waging a truly holy “Jihad,” they must be waging unholy war, instead. Indeed, according to the Crown Prince, it is warfare so unholy and so evil as to be leading its fomenters into eternal Hellfire—the Islamic term for which is Jahannam.

In this situation, three major questions need answering:

• First, will we Americans support and join in this new Saudi line of attack aV which relies not only on Western secular words but also on the language of the Qurfan to condemn al Qaeda suicide mass murderers as the Jahannam-bound evildoers and blasphemers they really are?

• Second, will Saudi Arabiafs intolerant and reactionary Wahhabi sect of Islam, which has been all too supportive of al Qaeda-style terrorism, quietly acquiesce in this new interpretation—or will it be attempting to undermine those who have spoken such religiously-powerful words? (Already, an indication of the latter seems evident in the Ministry of Information’s May 27 firing of the outspokenly anti-al Qaeda editor in chief of the provincial Al Watan daily newspaper.)

• Third, if we Americans fail to support this appropriate new Qur'anic condemnation of al Qaeda at a time when the Wahhabis are surely quite busy protesting and undercutting it, will the Saudi government be bold enough to repeat and to strengthen this message?

If Not “Jihad,” What Is It?

Only time will answer these inter-connected questions. But in order for any of us to begin changing the proper terminology for al Qaeda-style terrorism from holy to unholy and from godly to satanic, we urgently need to call it what it is—rather than carelessly calling it what it is not.

Although not in the typical Muslim's active vocabulary, this is the ancient word Hirabah—pronounced hee-RAH-bah. Not found in the Qur’an because it came later, its meaning in the Islamic Jurisprudence, the Fiqh, is that of “unholy war” and forbidden “war against society.”

Used in centuries past to condemn barbarians and brigands who would pillage, terrorize and decimate entire tribes and communities, renowned University of Michigan scholar Abdul Hakim (a.k.a. Sherman Jackson) reports that it became for a time “the most severely punished crime in Islam.”

In modern-day parlance, such wanton killing might best be called genocidal terrorism or crime against humanity. Its perpetrators are the “evildoers” (mufsidoon) of whom President George Bush speaks and the “deviants” (munharefoon) of whom Crown Prince Abdullah speaks.

In Islamic religious context, both of these words mean essentially the same thing. In effect, they are evildoers because of their willful deviancy from authentic Islam, and their deviancy consists of their ruthless and unIslamic evildoing. The words are two sides of the same coin.

Among other transgressions against the “peaceful and compassionate and just” Allah of the Qur'an, here are several of the most sinful—earning for their perpetrators what Crown Prince Abdullah calls “the wrath and curse of Allah” --

•Wanton killing of innocents and noncombatants, including many Muslims;
• Committing and encouraging others to commit suicide for the purpose of intimidation;
• Fomenting hatred and envy among communities, nations, religions and civilizations;
• Waging genocidal warfare against nations where Islam is freely practiced;
• Falsely defining all Christians and Jews (and many Muslims) as “infidels”—when authentic Islam calls them all “Children of the Book” (the Old Testament);
• Issuing unauthorized and un-Islamic fatwas (religious edicts), especially bin Laden’s illegitimate 1998 call to aggressive military “Jihad;”
• Misquoting and distorting passages of the Qur’an and the Islamic Jurisprudence, the Fiqh.

Confirming the blasphemous nature of such offenses and the Hellfire awaiting those who commit them, Executive Director Dr. Sayyid M.Syeed of the Islamic Institute of North America (ISNA) has explained in authoritative terms: “The Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet emphatically distinguish the term Jihad from Hirabah, a destructive act of rebellion committed against God and mankind. Hirabah is an act of terrorism, a subversive act inflicted by an individual or a gang of individuals, breaking the established norms of peace, civic laws, treaties, agreements, moral and ethical codes.... Individuals and groups indulging in Hirabah are condemned as criminals, subjected to severe deterrent punishments under Islamic law and warned of far more punishment and humiliation in the life after life.”

Professor Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, confirms in equally expert fashion: “Properly understood, this is a war of ideas within Islam—some of them faithful to authentic Islam, but some of them clearly un-Islamic and even blasphemous toward the peaceful and compassionate Allah of the Qur’an.... As a matter of truth-in-Islam, both the ideas and the actions they produce must be called what they actually are, beginning with the fact that al Qaeda’s brand of suicide mass murder and its fomenting of hatred among races, religions and cultures do not constitute godly or holy “Jihad”—but, in fact, constitute the heinous crime and sin of Hirabah.”

Eventual End of al Qaeda

Imagine, then, how difficult it will be for al Qaeda’s mufsidoon (evildoers) to inspire the suicidal zealotry of young Muslims—or to sustain the sympathies of their families, friends and faithful Muslims of any sort—once their forbidden Hirabah (Unholy War) and their tajdeef shaitaniyah (satanic blasphemy) against Allah and the Qur’an are widely recognized as such.

And imagine their own well-deserved terror—repeat, T-E-R-R-O-R—once they envision themselves spending eternity not in a virgin-filled Paradise but in a demon-filled Jahannam (Eternal Hellfire), instead.

At long last—but with virtually no acknowledgement or words of encouragement from us—the Saudi government, long viewed by many as part of the problem rather than part of the solution, has begun to paint this new true-to-Islam picture. Surely, it is high time that we, too, begin changing our language with reference to the al Qaeda scam of so-called “Jihadi martyrdom.”

For us to continue calling the al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other suicide mass murderers “Jihadists” (in effect, “holy warriors” and “martyrs” on their way to Paradise) makes no more sense than our pathetic decades-long mistake of calling the fascist-left Soviets, Maoists and Castroites “people’s democrats” and “liberationists” and “progressives.”

Lenin and Stalin called this American and West European practice of linguistic self-destruction “useful idiocy.” The late, great Senator Pat Moynihan complained of it as “semantic infiltration”—our tendency to use the language of our enemies in describing political reality. They were all correct.

Of equal importance to U.S. military might, the fundamental elements of truth-in-language and truth-in-Islam are best able to solve the long-term crisis—by gradually turning all faithful Muslims against the pseudo-Islamic blasphemy of bin Ladenism. Who, after all, are better able than properly motivated Muslims themselves to root out these deadly enemies of Islam from their midst?

In this context, their holy motivation in the Will of Allah would not be that of “saving America or the West” or “bringing criminals to justice” or even “promoting world peace” but of saving their own beloved religion from being perverted into nothing but a hate-filled perpetual killing machine.

Now that the Saudis have belatedly begun the process of demonizing The al Qaeda Blasphemy in Islamic religious terms, we can ill afford to stand by in ignorance and in silence—or to continue relying only on Western secular terms which mean little or nothing to “the Arab Street.”

Via The American Muslim

Defeating Wahhabism

By Stephen Schwartz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, October 25, 2002

Faculty, students, visitors, and honored guests from Central Asia, thank you for the opportunity to appear here today.

I have been invited here as the author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror (Doubleday). In this book, I discuss the origins of the Islamic sect of Wahhabism, its involvement with the royal authorities of Saudi Arabia, and the entanglement of both the sect and the kingdom with the global organization and financing of Islamic extremism and terrorism.

However, I will begin by outlining my personal experience and expertise in this area. I am Senior Policy Analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, and the director of an Islam and Democracy project now in formation there.

I do not come to this debate from an academic or government background. I have flattered myself in saying that I learned about Wahhabism the way George Orwell learned about Stalinism. Orwell did not go to Moscow; he went to Barcelona, where he witnessed the nefarious activities of the Soviet secret police. I did not go to Riyadh to study Wahhabism; I witnessed the attempt of Wahhabi-Saudi agents to take over Balkan Islam, in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania. I first heard the term Wahhabi in a Yugoslav context more than 10 years ago.

I had, in fact, originally gone to the Balkans, beginning in 1990 - that is, before the actual outbreak of fighting in the country - with the double interest of journalistic reporting and researching the remnants of Jewish life there. I then began my encounter with Balkan Islam - in an interfaith manner, by working with an Albanian Catholic institute, a uniquely useful forum for the study of Balkan religious life. Balkan Judaism has been greatly influenced by Balkan Islam - a topic on which I have another book soon to come out. But with the outbreak of the horrific aggression against Bosnia-Hercegovina, I learned that Bosnian Muslims, who were isolated and desperate, and who needed any friends they could get, were nonetheless extremely suspicious of the Saudis and Wahhabis. They view Wahhabi-Saudi Islam as a mortal threat to their own traditional, tolerant, and spiritual form of conservative Sunni Islam.

After much study, interviewing, and publishing on these topics, I went to the Balkans to live in 1999. With the end of the Kosovo intervention, I worked in that region, most notably, on the project of a permanent Kosovo interreligious council bringing together Albanian and Croatian Catholics, Serbian Orthodox, Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, and a very small Jewish remnant. In post-Dayton Bosnia, the Wahhabi-Saudis had been viewed coldly by the local Muslims, but in Kosovo the Albanian Muslims were much more hostile to them, and it was among Albanians, from 1999 to 2001 - only weeks before September 11, 2001 - that I witnessed, and had the honor of participating in, the resistance of the local Muslims to Saudi-Wahhabi efforts at control and indoctrination.

As I have come back to the United States, Balkan Muslim intellectuals with whom I am close have called on me to expose Wahhabi-Saudi religious colonialism to the Western public. This profound charge became even more serious after September 11th.

On the intellectual and professional journey that led to writing this book, I learned that hostility to Wahhabi extremism is prevalent throughout the Muslim world. In researching the my book, I drew on informants, most of them confidential, that included Saudi subjects, West Africans, Moroccans, Algerians, Egyptians, Somalis, Chechens, Ingushes, Uzbeks, Pakistanis, Indian Muslims, and Malaysians as well as Balkan and American Muslims.

I have had especially fruitful discussions with prominent Chechen and Ingush Muslims, who have described to me how Wahhabism, in the form of the Saudi adventurer who called himself Khattab, was injected into, and effectively split and undermined, the righteous struggle of the Chechen nation. I had, in fact, long been a sympathizer of the Chechens. I vividly remember how, as a high school student of the Russian language, 40 years ago, I read in a Soviet newspaper about the return of Chechens and Ingushes to their native lands. Later, I became very close to Robert Conquest, the Western scholar who deserves high honors for his exposure of Stalin's genocidal assault on small Caucasian Muslim nations, as well as on the Kalmyks, during the second world war.

I have also had extensive discussions with Uzbek intellectuals about the Wahhabi threat to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. In Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, and Chechnya, we see repetition of the pattern of Wahhabi-Saudi infiltration. The Wahhabi-Saudi agents who introduce their doctrines, financing, recruitment, and incitement to terror into these countries have the same aim in all of them: to utilize ordinary Muslims for the advancement of their fundamentalist and extremist agenda.

Wahhabi-Saudi attempts to exploit the grievances, and often the atrocious victimization, of other Muslims, have led to their interference in Afghanistan, where they seized control of the anti-Russian struggle, and then fostered the dictatorship of the Taliban; in Israel, where the Saudi regime directly funds and guides Hamas; in Kashmir, where efforts of local moderates to resolve the status of the region have been thwarted by Wahhabi aggression; and in Algeria, where political tensions between the old socialist establishment and new Islamic movements were manipulated to launch a bloody civil war; all this in addition to the countries previously mentioned. In addition, Wahhabi-Saudi agents have sought to launch entirely new fronts for their ideological war, in Somalia, in Indonesia, and in the Philippines. And finally, Wahhabi-influenced extremist movements continue to contest for authority in such countries as Nigeria and, of course, the all-important example of a state driven to permanent crisis by Wahhabi influence: Pakistan.

Condemnation of Wahhabi extremism does not mean condemnation of those who are its exploited victims, such as the Chechens. I reject the promiscuous characterization of the Chechen armed struggle we find in Western media, where all Chechens are labeled either Islamist, when they are not, or are granted status as "Chechen nationalists or separatists," when some of them should be called "Wahhabis" or "Islamists," or are written off as terrorists. Nobody can doubt that the Chechens are justified in defending themselves, as they have for more than two centuries, against Russian imperialism.

Nobody can doubt that the struggle for survival of the Bosnian Muslims was entirely necessary and righteous.

Nobody can doubt that the Albanian nation, which is Muslim in its majority, was correct in defending itself against Slav Orthodox imperialism.

But in all three of these struggles, the defenders of Islam and the Chechen, Bosnian, and Albanian peoples based their commitment on their Sufi - and, among Albanians, their Shi'a - traditions. These cultural legacies are totally opposed to the pretensions of the Wahhabi-Saudi conspiracy to unification of world Islam under their control. Chechens, Bosnians, and Albanians are all condemned by Wahhabism to death for the alleged crime of "grave-worship," i.e. honoring and praying for intercession by Islamic saints.

To return to the Orwell parallel, in the Spanish civil war the Soviet Union was the most fearsome enemy of the indigenous radical traditions represented by the anarchist movement. In the Caucasian and Balkan conflicts the Wahhabi-Saudis have proven to be the worst enemies of local Islam.

This Islam is sometimes mischaracterized by Western commentators as "folk Islam." However, it covers a mighty big "folk." Participants in so-called "folk Islam" include, by far, the majority of the world's Muslims, found in West Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as in the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In Indonesia, the adherents of so-called "folk" Islam, organized in groups like Nadhlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyya, with 70 million members, have mobilized against Wahhabi infiltration. I believe the many millions of Indonesian traditional Muslims will wipe out the extremist menace in that country. These millions were not pleased by the Bali bombing horror.

The artificial distinction between "normative" and "folk" Islam should be reversed, for it is "folk" Islam that constitutes the global Islamic mainstream, while the "normative" Islam promoted by the Wahhabi-Saudi conspiracy represents, according to many Islamic scholars, a cruel and criminal deviation.

These issues are especially troublesome in the case of Uzbekistan, because Islamist extremists in that country have been taken up by the Western human rights industry as alleged victims of post-Communist oppression. Criticism of the Uzbek authorities - as well as of anti-Wahhabi Muslims in the Caucasus - has rested on the charge that the term "Wahhabism" is misused by ex-Communist governments to hide a campaign against ordinary Muslim believers. In the case of Uzbekistan under President Islam Karimov, the government is, indeed, a new, young, transitional democracy, whose institutions remain weak. I cannot claim to provide a full endorsement of the Uzbek regime, without going there. Obviously, as in any country, there have been abuses.

However, I note that much of the discussion of Uzbekistan and the claims of Islamic figures in that country to being victims of repression, rests on extremely vague terminology. For example, the latest U.S. State Department report on human rights abuses around the world was released on March 4. It includes numerous allegations against Uzbekistan, many involving the government's struggle to suppress Hizb-ut-Tahrir - a clandestine subversive movement originating in Arab countries. This is a battle in which the United States should probably be cheering Karimov on, rather than condemning him.

Getting it right in the fight against terrorism is all about making distinctions, not blurring them. In the Uzbek case, the State Department, parroting the Western human rights profession, accuses President Karimov of seeing evil Arab subversives where there are merely pious Muslims - the classic example of the supposed misuse of the term "Wahhabi." But the rights monitors suffer from the opposite blindness. They see only innocent, faithful Muslims where there are, in fact, terrorists. The issue is not religious devotion, but radicalism. The human rights lobby refuses to recognize the difference between traditional Uzbek Muslims and Arab-subsidized infiltrators whose "piety" is a cover for terrorist recruitment. This latter group is referred to in the State Department's Uzbek country report as "independent" and "particularly devout" Muslims. And the U.S. government takes the position that they are being abused by the government of Uzbekistan for "their religious beliefs."

I have spent quite a time hashing out these issues here in Washington, and after much discussion and introspection I arrived at the following position: the Uzbek authorities claim they have only repressed Wahhabis; those arrested claim they are not Wahhabis. So the question appeared to be open, and I will admit that my sympathies were more with the Uzbek authorities than with the alleged Wahhabis.

However, this controversy was clarified for me when I read an article by a certain Abdummanob Polat, an Uzbek human rights expert, titled "Can Uzbekistan Build Democracy and Civil Society?" This article appeared in a volume published right here at CACI, titled Civil Society in Central Asia, in 1999. In this text, Mr. Polat also adopts a vague, and in my view, a devious and deceptive vocabulary, when he discusses "independent" Islam in Uzbekistan.

Mr. Polat refers to the traditional Islam of the Uzbeks, an Islam based on Sufi spirituality, the four recognized schools of Sunni jurisprudence, and various customs Wahhabis despise, as "promoting loyalty to the existing rulers." This is the same claim implied by human rights monitors who allege that certain Muslims are persecuted by the Uzbek authorities because they are "independent" of the state. Mr. Polat uses this phrase in an obvious attempt to suggest that there is something extraordinary about Muslims being exhorted to loyalty to the existing political authority, and that this must reflect a holdover from the Communist regime, which demanded such subordination.

Loyalty to the existing rulers is not a Communist invention, or an Uzbek novelty, or any other kind of innovation in Islam. It is an essential principle of Islam embodied in the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. Unfortunately, few Westerners realize this. Of course, jihad against the Soviet state, which attempted to replace Islam with atheism, was another matter. But the Uzbek government of Islam Karimov, regardless of its failings, has not and does not seek to replace Islam with unbelief. Nobody seriously claims that Karimov is an enemy of Islam - only that he is an opponent of Wahhabi and other extremists, and seeks to foster a traditional, indigenous Sufi Islam that is loyal to the government. President Karimov's administration has built many medresas and mosques, and has rehabilitated the tombs of numerous saints. Uzbekistan, as the birthplace of Imam Bukhari and other great Islamic thinkers, has every right to demand a place as a leader among the Islamic countries. To repeat, and to emphasize, loyalty to such a government is an essential principle of the Sunnah, and those who agitate against such loyalty, and who proclaim their independence, i.e. their disobedience of the legal authorities, are guilty of fitnah or subversion, the ultimate Islamic sin.

Mr. Polat also disparages Uzbek traditional Islam by referring to it as "officially permitted by the government for decades," as if Central Asian traditional Islam were a puppet of the Communists. This is absurd. The former government "permitted" this form of Islam because it was the faith of the vast majority of the population, and action to completely suppress it, such as had occurred in the early years of the Bolshevik regime, had become impossible.

Mr. Polat also states that "this form of Islam… to some extent incorporated expensive ceremonies and rites, especially regarding funerals and weddings." Here we have the suggestion that traditional funeral and wedding customs had been introduced into Islam from the environment, and were "un-Islamic." This is pure Wahhabism. Funeral observances and elaborate weddings have been part of Islam all over the world since the time of Muhammad.

In summary, Mr. Polat states "Islam in Uzbekistan has acquired certain national and local features… local accretions" that, according to Mr. Polat, "changed [the orthodox] interpretation over the centuries." Once again, here is the paradigm that falsely describes local customs as intrusions into Islam. Worst of all, Mr. Polat designates the activity of the opponents of Uzbek traditional Islam as "indigenous attempts to understand and study real Islam." This presents the situation as if a group of Uzbeks who found it hard to pay for their weddings decided one fine day that their problem was that Islam was adulterated, and that they wouldn't have to pay so much for weddings if they followed a purified Islam. This is a very popular paradigm with Westerners: they believe Muslims take to fundamentalism in response to the alleged corruption of traditional shaykhs and Islamic healers. I am very sorry, but for a universe of reasons, I do not believe this. People do not simply come up with these ideas. People believe these things because of politics and propaganda. Even Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the Saudi death cult, did not simply conclude one day that Islam was corrupted; his dispensation was based on a critique of Ottoman conditions. His attack on traditional Islam was political; that of the so-called dissident Muslims in Uzbekistan is political, and it is not based on legitimate grievances.

Any scheme that tries to set off "real Islam" or "pure Islam" or whatever they want to call it against traditional Islam - any scheme that describes traditional Muslims, whether they are Moroccan, Kosovar, Uzbek, or Indonesian - any ideology that labels existing, traditional Islam as "unbelief," "superstition," or "grave worship" - whether it emanates from the mosques of Riyadh or from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or from the acolytes of Mawdudi in Pakistan, or from Hezb-ut-Tahrir -- presents an extremist threat to the lives of ordinary Muslims.

The human rights activists and other defenders of these so-called "independent" Muslims do not grasp this. They do not comprehend that preaching against traditional Uzbek Islam as "superstition" or "grave worship" or "corruption" represents a serious breach of civility and a challenge to public order, and cannot be viewed, in American terms, as protected religious advocacy

In the U.S., when certain Christians advocate terrorism against abortion clinics, nobody views such discourse as protected religious speech. It is seen as extremist incitement and dealt with as such.

In Northern Ireland, when Protestant fanatics label Catholics non-Christian - exactly as the so-called "independent" Muslims in Uzbekistan label the adherents of traditional Islam - the result is that Protestants throw bricks at Catholic schoolchildren. Such preaching is not seen, especially in the United Kingdom, as protected religious speech. It is treated as terrorist incitement.

Even in Israel, advocacy of the physical liquidation of Arabs and Muslims by Jewish ultra-radicals is treated as terrorist incitement as punished by the state.

Uzbekistan faces the same problem. Those who claim to represent pure religion, and who denounce, demonize, and target other believers - ordinary people going about their lives - the mother keeping a home, the peasant working his land, the worker seeking betterment - cannot be seen as mere advocates of an alternative vision of Islam. They seek to subvert authority, to divide families and communities, and to incite terrorism.

Western societies have long recognized that in the field of religion, civility and order are more important than an abstract right of advocacy. When Rev. Jerry Falwell attacked the personality of the Prophet Muhammad, he was subject to serious criticism and forced to apologize to the Muslim believers, not simply because of political correctness, but because every intelligent and loyal American prizes interfaith civility, especially with those Muslims who join in defending America and democracy.

What, to summarize, is the goal of the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance? To destroy the traditional Islam present from Bosnia-Hercegovina to South Africa, and from Morocco to the Philippines, and to replace it with their extremist, ultra-rigid, and Puritanical version of Islam.

They do this through indoctrination, infiltration, and financial subsidies. Wahhabi-Saudi penetration of local Islamic communities may begin with the construction of Saudi-funded mosques, with Saudi-trained imams assigned to them. A reportage in Newsweek states that "at least 250 out of some 1,200 [recognized mosques] nationwide" - that is, in the U.S. - function under direct control of the North American Islamic Trust, a Wahhabi-Saudi body. Further reflecting Wahhabi-Saudi ideological influence over American Islam, Newsweek points out a really extraordinary fact: "An April 2001 survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that 69 percent of Muslims in America say it is 'absolutely fundamental' or 'very important' to have Salafi teachings at their mosques." "Salafi" is a cover term for Wahhabi - comparable to "socialist" for Soviet-controlled Communists.

"Wahhabization" may also begin with the distribution of literature - more properly designated as Wahhabi hate propaganda. I recently helped produce a report on the distribution of Wahhabi hate literature on the soil of the U.S., by institutions controlled by the Saudi government, online at www.defenddemocracy.org.

The Wahhabis have sought to extirpate Shi'a Islam, and to abolish the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence. They despise, to a point of homicidal rage, a number of traditional Islamic customs. More broadly, these include

• the entire body of Islamic spirituality known as Sufism or tasawwuf;
  
• intercessory prayer [Tawassul (using means), tashaffu` (using intercession), and istighatha (asking help)];
• celebration of the birthday of the Prophet (mawlid);
• recitation of two Quranic suras, Fatiha and Ya Sin, for the dead;
• honoring of saints, with erection, maintenance, and visiting of tombs for holy men;
• the establishment and preservation of grave markers and cemeteries, which are frequent targets of Wahhabi desecration.

I have recently received complaints from Kurdish Muslims in Northern Iraq, warning that Wahhabi infiltrators, aligned with al-Qaida, have begun demolishing traditional tombs in that area. Destruction of tombs and cemeteries is often, in fact, the first sign of Wahhabi activity. Early in 1998, just before the eruption of armed conflict in Kosovo, I was informed by Albanian Muslim clerics that Wahhabis had commenced a campaign of vandalizing gravemarkers in the Albanian districts of Macedonia. While attention to this problem was deflected by the Kosovo intervention, it remains a major issue for Albanian Muslims. In Kosovo, 250 mosques - half the total in the country - were seriously vandalized or destroyed by the Serbs. Representatives of relief agencies based in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states promised to rebuild these holy structures, but in numerous cases their so-called restoration begin with the uprooting of Ottoman cemeteries. These acts have outraged Albanian Muslims and led to the barring of the Saudis and other Gulf citizens from reconstruction projects in the embattled territory.

I personally observed the failure of Wahhabi-Saudi infiltrators to take control of Islam in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania. This profoundly cynical effort was motivated by the belief that the terrible martyrdom undergone by the Bosnian Muslims in particular, would induce these victims of an attempted genocide to turn away from their European roots and open, tolerant, Ottoman Islamic traditions, and to embrace Wahhabi extremism. I do not think any Islamic community in the world can be said to have suffered, in the last half century, a comparable agony to that of the Bosnians: tens of thousands of women and girls raped, a quarter of a million dead, 40 percent of mosques leveled, more than half a million people dispossessed of their homes. Yet the Bosnian believers, their eyes focused clearly and unwaveringly on their own Sunni legacy as well as their distinctive traditions, refused to submit to Saudi control.

Still, the repudiation of Saudi-Wahhabi pretensions by the Kosovar Muslims has been even more dramatic. Put simply, the entire Albanian nation is acutely conscious that it owes the survival of 2.5 million Kosovars to action by the democratic West, by the Christian leaders of the U.S., and to the noble activities of the Jewish religious and civic leaders in the West, who demanded action to stop the Serbian terror. In Kosovo, the Wahhabi-Saudi fake jihad has failed completely.

While the main immediate aim of Wahhabism is to capture and guide the global Islamic community, its doctrines are also deeply suffused with hatred of the other religions. This is something different from anti-Jewish propaganda disseminated by Arab media in their campaign against Israel. It is also something different from the claim of ultimate revelation and authority in traditional Islam. Anti-Jewish agitators among the Arabs remain chiefly motivated by political issues: their discourse expresses resentment over the Middle East crisis and a need for pretexts to divert their restive citizens from local complaints. While traditional Islam draws a firm line between itself and the earlier monotheism of the Jews and Christians, it does not command the Muslims to despise and murder Jews and Christians (notwithstanding Islamophobic polemics to the contrary.)

Wahhabism is as different from "ordinary" anti-Israeli ideology, or even from most of so-called "militant" Islam, as Nazism was from the mentality of the German military in the first world war, as different as Stalinist Communism was from the radical socialism of a generation before. It is a nihilistic, violent, Islamofascist movement that seeks not only to impose conformity on the world's Muslims, and to completely wipe out Shi'a Islam, but also to attack the world's Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and other worshippers.

The extensions of the Wahhabi conspiracy - centered in such organizations as the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, both headquartered in Saudi Arabia - are visible throughout the world, wherever Muslims are found, including on U.S. soil.

The failure of Western political and intellectual leaders to adequately understand the internal crisis in Islam, and the conflict between tradition and extremism, led to obliviousness in the face of the terror revealed on September 11th. At this point, certain measures have become imperative. One of them is for the U.S. to demand a full, transparent accounting of Saudi involvement in September 11th from the Saudi authorities. Another is to demand that the Saudi government, like the Soviet government and various right-wing dictatorships before it, entirely cut off its subsidies to the extremist Wahhabi ideological establishment. Third and most important, is to protect, support, and otherwise encourage Muslims opposed to Wahhabism to develop their own community institutions and to produce a new, articulate network of authoritative advocates who can bring the truth about traditional Islam to the Western public. The last is the mission of the Islam and Democracy program created by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Thank you for your time and attention.

(h/t avideditor)

Time to forget the Crusades

The following is an editorial written by John Tolan for Al Jazeera:

French historian Joseph Francois Michaud (1767-1839), in his Histoire des Croisades, affirmed that the Crusades had proven the superiority of Europeans over Muslims and showed the way to the conquest and civilisation of Asia.

Shortly thereafter, Louis Philippe, the King of France from 1830 to 1848, commissioned a Salle des Croisades at Versailles, replete with monumental romanticised paintings of scenes from the Crusades. It is perhaps no accident that at the same time the French were embarked upon the conquest of Algeria.

For numerous French and British of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the Crusades were a precursor to their brave new colonial adventures in the Orient.

In reaction, Turkish and Arab writers denounced the European colonial enterprise as a re-enactment of the fanaticism and violence of the Crusades.

The Crusades have long stirred emotions of admiration or revulsion, from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata (1580) to Youssef Chahine's film Saladin the Victorious (1963) and beyond.

Arguing the clash

The legacy of crusading, simplified and distorted, is evoked to argue the inevitability of a present and future "clash of civilisations".

When Osama bin Laden speaks of countering the attacks of American and European "crusaders", he taps into a 19th-century European tradition of seeing the medieval crusades as precursors to the colonial (and subsequently post-colonial) relations between Europeans and Arabs.

But, the Crusades played little part in Arab conceptions of history from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

Until that time, the Crusades were a relatively minor phenomenon in the broad sweep of Muslim history. Of course, chroniclers such as Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Al Qalanisi or al-Maqrizi, close to rulers who fought against the Faranj (rulers like Saladin, al-Kamil, Baibars), made much of the threat posed by the Europeans and the heroic exploits of the sultans who defeated them.

Ibn al-Athir explained that the attack on the Muslim Mashreq (Middle East) was part of a movement of Faranj that included the Castilian capture of Toledo (in 1085) and the Norman conquest of Sicily (1072-91).

Yet for other Arab writers of the Middle Ages, the invasions of the Faranj were a minor inconvenience: they were simply another group of Christians who, like the Byzantines or Armenians, could seize small territories and pose threats to local Muslim rulers.

The Mongol threat

Far more troubling were the invasions of the Mongols, who captured and plundered large swaths of the Muslim heartland, sacking Baghdad in 1258 and Damascus several times.

The Mamluks' victory over the Mongols at Ayn Jalut in 1260 was far more vital than their victories over the string of small and powerless crusader enclaves such as that of Acre, which the Mamluks captured in 1291, ending the Crusader presence in the region.

Ibn Khaldun, in his great works of historiography, the Muqaddima and the Kitab al-'Ibar, has little to say of Crusades and Crusaders, much more about Mongols (including Timur, whom he met) and about the Berber dynasties of the Maghreb.

Few Arab authors of the following centuries take much interest in the Crusades, which are largely seen as a footnote to the sweep of Muslim history.

In Europe, meanwhile, the Crusades, and their failure to galvanise and unify European Christendom, were an obsession to many authors. In the aftermath of the loss of Acre in 1291, various Europeans called on kings, princes and popes to organise fresh crusades against the Mamluks and increasingly against the Ottomans.

Most of the anti-Turkish "crusades", like those of Nicopolis (1396) and Varna (1443) ended in crushing defeat for the European troops. But various European Christian authors continued to use the language of the Crusades to try to fire their co-religionists into attacking the Ottomans or other enemies, including Protestants and "heathen" American Indians.

The historians and philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment, in contrast, vilified the notion of war in the name of God: for them, holy war represented the epitome of medieval fanaticism. Voltaire depicts the Crusaders as blood-thirsty fanatics, while portraying their opponents, particularly Saladin and al-Kamil, as wise and just monarchs.

European nationalism

Yet this negative vision of crusading is swept aside in 19th-century Europe by three powerful forces in European culture: Romanticism, nationalism, and colonialism.

The Romantics rehabilitated the Crusades which they portrayed as, at times, bloody and senseless, yet redeemed by a remarkable and admirable idealism. This idea is embodied in the novels of Walter Scott, such as Ivanhoe (1819) and the Talisman (1825).

Francois de Chateaubriand, in his Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem (1811), takes umbrage at those who speak ill of the Crusades.

On the contrary, for him, despite their shortcomings the Crusaders were imbued with a faith and a selfless sense of mission that pushed them to abandon wives, children, lands and material riches to wrest Christ's tomb from the grasp of the Muslims.

In Jerusalem, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Chateaubriand was dubbed into the Order of the Holy Sepulcher by a Franciscan friar wielding what was supposed to be the sword of Godfrey of Bouillon, knight and first ruler of Crusader Jerusalem.

Chateaubriand and other Europeans dreamed of a return to the heroic age of the Crusades.

European colonialism

Their dream was not long in the waiting. Beginning in 1830, French troops undertook the conquest of Algeria. French Crusader historians Francois-Joseph Michaud and Jean-Joseph Poujoulat praised kings Charles X and Louis-Philippe as new incarnations of Saint Louis.

In a preface to a school textbook on the Crusades, the authors present the feats of medieval French Crusaders as models for the youth sent off to conquer Algeria: "The narration of the great events of olden times shall serve as lessons of patriotism for our youth."

When Napoleon III addressed the troops ready to set off for Lebanon in 1860, he exhorted them to be "the worthy children of those heroes who gloriously carried Christ's banner into those countries".

The British similarly painted their victories over the Ottomans in the first world war: Richard the Lionhearted, who failed to take Jerusalem from Saladin, appears in the pages of Punch in December 1917, in the aftermath of Allenby's capture of Jerusalem, saying "At last, my dream come true!"

One could multiply the examples of British and French authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries who affirmed that their colonial empires were reviving the best traditions of medieval crusading: its idealism, its mission to bear European civilisation into the heart of the Middle East.

Independence dashed

At the Versailles peace conference at the close of the first world war, when the French and British argued over the partition of the Arab lands wrested from the Ottoman empire and the Arab envoys increasingly realised their hopes for independence would be dashed, one of the French representatives tried to ground his claims on French prominence in the Crusades.

Amir Faisal, in frustration, shot back: "Would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the Crusades?"

It is through the French and British, principally, that Arabs of the 19th and 20th centuries rediscovered the Crusades. Modern Arabic terms for the Crusades, such as harb al-salib, were coined in the 19th century as translations of European terms; there had previously been no Arabic word for "crusade".

Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) warns that "Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us".

The first book in Arabic devoted specifically to the Crusades is Sayyid Ali al-Hariri's al-Hurub al-Ṣalibiya, published in Cairo in 1899. His work is grounded in both European scholarship and in knowledge of the medieval Arabic chroniclers.

Unify the Arabs!

Al-Hariri, like subsequent Arab scholars, accepted Michaud's assertion that the Crusades were a precursor for European colonialism. Arab nationalists responded by drawing their own historical lessons from this comparison: the new crusaders can be defeated just as their predecessors had been by the unification of the Arabs under leaders who, like Saladin and Baibars in the Middle Ages, will expel the intruders from Arab soil.

Since the middle of the 20th century, if Europeans or Americans compare the Crusades to colonialism, it is in order to denounce one, the other, or both. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, Westerners tend to see the Crusades as manifestations of violent fanaticism, not as expressions of admirable idealism.

It is now principally in the circles of radical Islam that the 19th-century European paradigm equating Crusades with European colonialism lives on.

Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s affirmed that "the Crusader spirit runs in the blood of all Westerners".

Similar statements have been proffered by more recent Islamists, including bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: Crusaders and Zionists are implacable enemies with whom one neither speaks nor compromises.

The mirror term among more extreme western writers is Jihadists: Islamists (or for some, more broadly Muslims) are seen to be inordinately hostile to non-Muslims, against whom holy war is a sacred duty.

What clash?

These Manichean world views fuel pessimistic scenarios such as Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations". Yet when one looks closely at the age of Crusades, one finds that the lesson to be drawn is far less simplistic than Huntington or bin Laden would have us believe.

It is a time of trade, when Egyptian merchants bought spices in India and sold them in Spain, when Venetians and Genoese traders sold English or Flemish wool cloth in Alexandria and brought back to Europe Egyptian glass, Damascene metalwork, Indian spices.

Pilgrims - Christians, Muslims and Jews - bound for Mecca and Jerusalem, travelled together on Genoese or Pisan ships, along with merchants, mercenaries and adventurers.

It is a time when storms tossed their ships and all raised their voices to God in a multilingual supplication. Conflict, as always, was endemic, but it often crossed confessional lines.

The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (and the other Crusader principalities) did not, as some have claimed, comprise an "apartheid" regime of boorish European louts lording over cultured but abject Muslims.

Its inhabitants were in fact a cosmopolitan mix of Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Normans, Provencaux, etc.

In religion they were Shia and Sunni Muslim, Druze, Catholic, Monophysite, and Jewish.

The Latin rulers gradually "orientalised", marrying the daughters of prominent indigenous Christians, learning Arabic, eating and dressing like natives, making truces and alliances with neighbouring Muslim rulers and promoting commerce.

Yet one should not imagine an idyllic land of tolerance: social distinctions were real, and often followed lines of religion and ethnicity.

Seeking historical understanding

In this, as in the violence with which they imposed and enforced their rule, the Latins differed little from other contemporary interlopers in Syria/Palestine: Turks, Byzantines, Kurds, Egyptian Fatimids and Mameluks.

The historical fallacy of identifying modern struggles with those of the Middle Ages continues to be an impediment to a real historical understanding of Arab-European (and more broadly Western-Muslim) relations.

The motivations for al-Qaeda's violence have more to do with internal Saudi politics and resentment of US policy in the Middle East than with a supposedly eternal clash between "crusaders" and "jihadists".

The roots of Iranian anti-Americanism can be found in decades of American alliance with the Shah, rather than in centuries of a supposed clash of civilisations.

The solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is to be found in the righting of the wrongs of the past 60 years, not in invoking the age of the Maccabees or Saladin.

It is time to put to rest simplistic notions of the clash of civilisations based on a falsified image of a long-vanished past. Our current problems are real enough to merit being understood on their own terms.

John Tolan is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes (France). He is the author of Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), and St Francis and the Sultan: An Encounter Seen Through Eight Centuries of Texts and Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; French edition published in Paris: Seuil, 2007).

And now for something slightly different

Up to this point, I've been analyzing terrorism from a fairly secular standpoint, largely because my religion doesn't really have a whole lot to say about it ("Don't"). However, I have just recently read a fascinating article in the New York Times magazine entitled "Where Boys Grow Up to be Jihadis". It's about the neighborhood of Jamaa Mezuak in the city of Tetouan, Morocco, from whence have come much of the cell responsible for the Madrid bombings, as well as several Iraqi suicide bombers. While it puzzled scholars, it provided me with valuable insight into how Apostasy spreads.

It began with Jamal "Chino" Ahmidan's fall from grace. Chino had emigrated from Jamaa Mezuak to Spain, where he became a drug dealer. He fathered a child outside of marriage, and killed a man during a visit home. It was around this time that he first came in contact with the concept of the Apostasy, apparently through "videos of the mujahedeen" in Chechnya. For some reason — probably guilt over killing the man — he became a "born-again" Muslim, and, for some reason, an Apostate. During an extended stay back in Morocco, he converted four of his friends to Apostasy. Returning to Madrid, they met up with another Apostate, and together they planned and executed the attacks. Those not killed during the attacks themselves died in a stand off with police.

The people of Jamaa Mezuak were at a loss as to how such nice neighborhood boys could have become cold-blooded killers, and some of the terrorists' friends decided to find out. They investigated Apostasy, searching for an explanation. In the end, they themselves became Apostates. They made contact with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb at a local mosque, and with its help, left for Iraq. Some were arrested en route, others became suicide bombers. Now, at least one of the family members of these bombers also appears to be in danger of falling to Apostasy.

The article is mystified by this pattern. Neither it, nor the experts, can explain why some people radicalize and some don't. According to the article: "The notion that poverty is to blame has been debunked again and again. And while religious extremism can feed militancy, many experts prefer to emphasize the anger generated by political conflicts, like the war in Iraq or the Arab-Israeli struggle." The article also discusses the "Bunch of Guys" theory, which identifies peer-pressure as a major factor.

For me, however, the article confirmed what I have long suspected: that Apostasy is a "spiritual disease." Let me explain.

In my religion, the Bahá'í Faith, there exists a curious phenomenon called "Covenant Breaking." On several occasions in Bahá'í history, someone has attempted to seize power. These attempts invariably fail, however, because unlike most religions, the Bahá'í Faith has a very clear and unambiguous line of succession. It's just not possible to assert legitimacy. Nonetheless, some people have tried, and some people have followed them, and they have caused us innumerable headaches over the years. The Bahá'í scriptures explain this odd behavior as being a spiritual disease. Like most diseases, it is contagious, so Bahá'ís are urged to avoid contact with Covenant Breakers (which isn't difficult, since there are so few of them. In my entire life I've only even seen a Covenant-Breaker once, and that's a lot more than most people).

If we look at the course of events outlined above, we can see a similarly epidemiological pattern. The first to be "infected" was Chino, who apparently picked it up on the internet. He spread it to his friends, and together they pulled off the Madrid bombings. Even after their death, though, they were still infectious, and the disease spread via social ties to family members and friends, who then became infected. They went off to Iraq. Now, someone else with ties to the second wave appears to be battling infection.

I realize that few, if any, readers of this blog are Bahá'ís, but I hope that this post has provided at least some insight. It certainly has helped me get my thoughts in order.

Giving face to the faceless

This is a foiled suicide bomber. He tried to blow up an army bus in Kabul yesterday, but spooked the soldiers and was stopped.

It's amazing to actually see the face of a suicide bomber. In our minds, terror is abstract. "The terrorist" is a masked, faceless concept, studied and discussed but not personalized, little more than a number in a set of data. Now here we have the real thing, in the flesh, armed and ready to detonate. It is somewhat startling to look at this meek, passionless, unassuming man and realize that he actively desires the violent death of everyone around him, and would kill them all if not restrained. He offers none of the expected outward signs of a mass murderer — no struggling to break free, no shouting epithets at his captors, no venomous gazes. He just stands there, observing disinterestedly, almost as though bored. He doesn't even appear nervous. He's a prop. There is nothing in his demeanor, nothing in his expression, to indicate that he feels strongly enough in a cause to not only give his own life, but to take those of others as well. There is no sign of unholy ideology, no hint at outrage at his country's occupation, no inkling of desire for independence, or repression, or anything at all. There is nothing.

And I'm not sure what to make of that.

(h/t to Konservo)

The Management of Savagery

I've finally posted a link to The Management of Savagery, a book I've referred to several times in previous posts. It's available in the Documents section.

Azzam al-Amriki

In my previous post, I speculated that Azzam al-Amriki may have written the bulk of Osama bin Laden's. Having read of his life, and having viewed his video messages, I am now fairly certain that that is the case. He is a highly disturbing individual, because he reminds me so much, in his mannerisms and speech, of those that I know, yet he has fallen into the clutches of the Apostasy. He is, as I had suspected, something of a disaffected Leftist; he was born to a pair of hippy goatherds living in seclusion in Southern California and grew up feeling and perceiving the emptiness that most of today's youth have either observed or experienced themselves. He first sought to express that emptiness through the Death Metal subculture, and later sought to fill it with religion. The religion he found, based on its true merits, was Islam, but through an unfortunate quirk of fate the mosque that he found had a strong extremist presence. He fell in with and was assimilated by these extremists, and was radicalized through them. Despite having spent many years in the Middle East, his old ties to the Grumpy Young Californian Liberal culture are still readily apparent — at one point in one of his tapes he refers to Bush as "Dubya" — and he is thus almost certainly the source of the familiar, though perverted, tone of the middle part of Osama's speech. He does seem to have laid it on pretty thick, though, in comparison with his other videos, which leads me to suspect that he may have been trying to reach out to the 71%.

An excellent article on him can be found here, and some of his videos can be found here and here (part one of six).