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Al-Qaida, Taliban, ISIS, ISIL, IS, e.g. –
Who Are They? What Do They Want? Why?
Jihād Organizations
During the 1990s and particularly after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, jihād organizations have increasingly been recognized as fundamental actors in contemporary world politics and as major factors of disruption, threat, and instability at the local as well as the global level. They have therefore drawn much attention from the media, from decision-makers, and from academics alike. In the representation of many Westerners, they have become a kind of ultimate, new post–Cold War enemy that is said to put into jeopardy the livelihoods and values of many—whether in Europe and North America or in the Muslim world. The complexity of these groups as well as their diversity have yet been insufficiently acknowledged.
Jihād organizations can be defined in a broad way as representative of Islamist groups that consider violence as an efficient means of political action. One should keep in mind that such violence is not necessarily directly targeted at civilians and should not always be seen as random, indiscriminate, or blind because this violence often carries a specific agenda that cannot be ignored. Consequently, automatically equating jihād to terrorism or to a kind of nihilism is largely incorrect. Indeed, however similar their names might be, jihād organizations are diverse; they have different objectives, multiple strategies, and various targets, some of which can be considered as legitimate ways of resisting an oppression. Furthermore, the war they wage should not be considered as necessarily unjust simply because it is legitimized through a religious vocabulary. Their growing role and number does not say as much about Islam, as is often assumed, as it says about attempts to exploit Islam politically and to fill in an ideological and political vacuum.
Discourse
Upon their emergence in the 1970s as significant actors, prominent jihād organizations have legitimized themselves and their actions through Islamic discourse mainly because of its capacity (it is the Islamic discourse’s capacity that appears as endogenous) to appear as endogenous and as an alternative to the founding myths of the post-independence nationalist governments that were present in many parts of the Third World. Such discourse proved effective in mobilizing segments of the population and, from its main (although not exclusive) cradle in the Arab world and particularly Egypt around Sayyid Quṭb (executed in 1966) and his Maʿālim fī al-ṭarīq (Milestones) book as well as a reinterpretation of Ibn Taymīyah’s fourteenth-century teachings on jihād, spread and adapted itself to other parts of the world. More specifically, the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood by their own governments (in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, etc.), these Islamists’ incapacity to confront them efficiently through peaceful means, as well as a specific regional environment marked by the humiliating Arab defeat in 1967 against Israel, progressively led to the radicalization of certain cells.
The word jihād is often translated in the West as “holy war,” although the original Islamic concept does not have an exclusive military connotation. Jihād in Arabic simply means “struggle” or “effort” and it came to denote in Islamic history and classical jurisprudence the struggle (including against oneself) on behalf of the cause of Islam. Nevertheless, in classical and modern times, Islamic governments, or more accurately, governments that base their legitimacy on Islamic rationalization, have used the word to describe all combat efforts of their armies. This restrictive and partial representation of jihād as holy war has become dominant and is the one that will be taken into account throughout this article.
Global Versus National Organizations
In the turbulent politics of the contemporary Islamic world of the early twenty-first century, radical opposition groups have been fighting with the same weapons that have been used against them by their own governments to repress them. Over the years, jihād organizations have emerged with two types of ideals: national and global. The first, exemplified by groups or parties such as the Palestinian Hamas, struggle at the national level against foreign occupants or local rulers considered to be illegitimate. The other, amongst which al-Qaʿida and its head Osama Bin Laden were the most significant incarnations, fought at a global level against the “far enemy,” whether American, Russian, French, Israeli, or British, that was accused of being responsible for modern-day oppression and corruption. Just as the governments of Muslim countries have exploited Islam for purely political purposes, radical opposition groups that espouse Islam as an ideology now use the term to attribute their violent deeds to Islamic requirements, claiming that resorting to violence and defending oneself is a religious obligation. While many groups in the Middle East have used the phrase “Islamic Jihād” as the name for their organizations, it is important to note that those organizations are not necessarily in coordination with one another. The same has been true within al-Qaʿida, which emerged as a label to which largely autonomous groups refer without necessarily taking their orders from it. There is very little, if any, coordination between the groups, and each should be analyzed within the context of the particular country and society in which it exists. Therefore, despite its obvious transnational dimensions and the fact that it might be considered a reference and a source of inspiration, even Osama Bin Laden’s organization should not be seen as a central jihād structure and mastermind able to create organizations disbelief and manipulate other groups.
Local social and political dynamics appear to be the main determinants of the ends and means of the diverse jihād organizations. Their level of social and political inclusion as well as the level of repression (whether local or international) they experience shape their strategies. Torture, deprivation, imprisonment, domination, and humiliation are likely to increase the violence of these groups, while participation and inclusion might have the opposite effect. Violence often appears as a result of a depolarization process through which all other channels of expression (fair elections, freedom of speech, peaceful competition, existence of a representative and autonomous civil society, sustainability of traditional groups and organizations, etc.) are blocked. Indeed, the fact that theological terms such as jihād, jāhilīyah (ignorance), or takfīr (declaring the unbelief of other Muslims) are used by the leaders and militants of these organizations as ways of legitimizing their violent actions or of stigmatizing their enemies should not obscure the fact that the roots of violence are trivially political and that they convey a specific message that should not be overlooked.
Among the “national” contemporary jihād organizations, the most notorious are probably the Palestinian Ḥamas, the Lebanese Ḥizbullāh, and the Algerian Groupes Islamiques Armées (GIA). Others, like the Kashmiri Lashkar-i-Tayyibah, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan, have drawn less media attention but are nevertheless active. All these groups have their doctrinal specificities and specific objectives. In very different contexts, they have chosen the option of violence to contest a given political order: dictatorship, injustice, or foreign occupation. At times, some governments, such as in Algeria during the 1990s civil war, seem to have been eager to instrumentalise their radicalization further or even to plan violence against civilian targets in order to discredit their competitors and label them as terrorists.
While these groups might resort to an Islamic vocabulary to legitimize their actions, the ideology of many of these organizations can also be described as nationalist. Indeed, within their specific frame of mind, violence is perceived as the ultimate way of preserving (or restoring) the national Islamic cultural identity against foreign influence and control or against a corrupt government. Their area of action is therefore generally limited to a specific territory, country, or region, and few if any foreigners are active among its militants. Consequently, they do not appear to be specific, and they can be compared to many other radical violent opposition groups in other regions of the world such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Such “nationalist” jihād organizations have been present in many parts of the Muslim world: the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and South Asia. They were first active (but only as marginal groups) in Palestine as early as the 1930s, around the figure of the Syrian activist ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām (d. 1935). In 1948, the first Palestinian organization to use the word jihād was the Usra al-Jihād (Family of Jihad), founded in 1948 by ʿAbd Allāh ʿIzz Darwīsh.
Jihād Organizations In The Middle East
Throughout the 1950s up until the 1980s, Arab leftist and nationalist groups were the most prominent and active to use the term jihād. In the Middle East, the term jihād later re-emerged within groups such as the Islamic Jihād Organization, who planned the attacks in Lebanon against French and American troops in October 1983, or the Detachment of the Islamic Jihād, which claimed responsibility for killing Israeli soldiers in October 1986. This organization was believed to be tied to the faction within Fatah that was under the control of the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader Abū Jihad. The Palestinian Islamic Jihād Movement emerged in 1979 and is linked to Syria.
Created in 1987 by Aḥmad Yāsīn, Ḥamas is the Palestinian antenna of the Muslim Brotherhood. Owing to its numerous activities in the social field, it quickly emerged as a popular grass-roots movement which has claimed responsibility for many attacks against soldiers as well as Israeli civilians, particularly during the mid-1990s, when it violently opposed the Oslo agreements. Following the assassination of its leader Aḥmad Yāsīn in March 2004 by an Israeli missile, Ḥamas changed its strategy, participated in the various elections, and tried to emerge as a respectable movement. It won the January 2006 general elections, and Ismail Haniyeh (b. 1963) was named prime minister of Palestine. Tensions with the Fatah led to a severe internal crisis and the demise of the Ḥamas government.
The Lebanese Shīʿī Ḥizbullāh, despite its strong institutional links to the Islamic Republic of Iran, can also be labeled as a “nationalist” jihād organization. It was created in 1982 to confront the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. During the Lebanese civil war, it participated in different attacks and took foreign hostages, some of whom, like French researcher Michel Seurat in 1986, died. Like Ḥamas, it is very active in charity organizations and, building on its various political successes (withdrawal of Israeli troops in 2000 and direct confrontation with the Israeli army during the summer of 2006), is increasingly trying to normalize its position as a prominent political party in Lebanon, actively participating in elections and seeking to become a legitimate international actor.
From the end of the 1970s onward, the internal doctrinal evolutions inside the various Egyptian jihād organizations have influenced many of the contemporary violent Islamist groups, characterized by their global outreach as well as their refusal to compromise. The assassination of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat in October 1981 by Khālid al-Islambūlī, which had links to the Organization of Jihad headed by Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Salām Faraj, was indeed a radical way of protesting against the government, highlighting its incapacity to implement and respect Islamic law. In that sense, it appeared to be an example of the “national” type of jihād that was fighting against a “corrupt” ruler. Yet it also had international repercussions, becoming a central feat of arms and a reference for many militants. The territory of action of this group was neither explicitly Egyptian nor national because it rejected the political system as a whole and the artificial borders between nations. Following the assassination, many militants were jailed, and arduous debates occurred within the movement, which eventually split. Egyptian jihādīshaykhs like ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (b. 1938) of the Jamāʿat al-Islāmīyah influenced other groups by asserting the need to restore the Islamic caliphate at the regional level and by linking what they believed to be the unjust and un-Islamic government they were fighting to the Western enemies of Islam that were supporting it politically and financially.
Jihād Organizations In Afghanistan
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was also a crucial step that helped forge contemporary jihād organizations, stressing their transnational scope and legitimizing the shift from the “close enemy” to the “far enemy.” By the mid-1980s, many groups coming! from all over the Islamic world were actively waging war against the Red Army and benefiting from the support of many governments, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. At the time, the mujāhidīn were portrayed in the Western media as “freedom fighters;” tours were even organized in the United States to collect money for “holy war” against the U.S.S.R. In Afghanistan, connections were made between militants and jihād organizations; vigorous doctrinal debates were occurring, and acquaintances were created between personalities such as Osama Bin Laden, āyman al-Ẓawāhirī or Abū Musʿāb al-Sūrī. New theories and doctrines were forged, and handbooks of jihād were published by leading figures such as the Palestinian ʿAbd Allāh ʿAzzām (d. 1989), author of Ḥaq bil-qāfila (Join the Caravan) and founder of the Maktāb al-Khidmāt in Peshawar which helped foreign fighters reach the Afghan battlefields. This led to a rationalization of jihād which sought to answer the question of who the real powers behind the oppression of Muslims in the contemporary world are. Upon their return to their homeland, militants who had participated in the jihād in Afghanistan shaped a new ideology that was at least partially put into practice during the violent struggle between militants of the Islamic Salvation Front and of the GIA and the Algerian government after the cancelled elections of December 1991. The internationalization of the jihād organizations then became a fundamental feature and militants, including Osama Bin Laden, were eager to export their jihād to other corners of the Muslim world. London also became a refuge for many militants like Abū Qatāda al-Filisṭīnī (b. 1960) and Abu Ḥamza al-Masri (b. 1958), who pursued their activities and collected money there. From then on, militants and organizations traveled to fight their enemies abroad, be it in Bosnia, in Chechnya, in Somalia, in Indonesia, in Lebanon, or in Iraq, creating new battlefields.
At times, such foreign intervention created misunderstanding and tension between groups because local combatants (some of which developed a nationalist point of view) did not always share the same objectives as the transnational jihādīs. Consequently, certain organizations such as Ḥamas rejected such a trend. In the early 1990s, Muqbil al-Wādiʿī’s Salafī groups in Yemen refused Osama Bin Laden’s proposal to help them wage war against the Socialists of former South Yemen and criticized many of the outcomes of the jihād in Afghanistan. The idea of a globalized jihād did not seem relevant to all.
Nevertheless, doctrinal shifts inside jihād organizations and socialization in Afghanistan had important repercussions and led to the emergence of a then, new group, al-Qaʿida, whose scope was explicitly international. In the 1990s, al-Qaʿida managed to merge different groups, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihād headed by Āyman Muḥammad Rabiʿ al-Ẓawāhirī (b. 1951). It was said to have planned attacks against targets in Yemen, Egypt, the United States, Afghanistan, Kenya, and Tanzania. In 1998, Osama Bin Laden and al-Zawāhirī published a text they called The World Islamic Front for Jihād Against Jews and Crusaders, in which they declared the killing of Americans and their allies to be a legitimate duty in order to liberate Palestine and the holy lands of Mecca and Medina from foreign occupation. Settled in Afghanistan after having left Sudan in 1996, the leaders of al-Qaʿida then planned the September 11, 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For its partisans as well as its enemies, al-Qaʿida represented the paragon of transnational jihād organizations. It therefore immediately became the main target of the “global war against terror” waged by the United States and its allies. Local groups claiming identification with al-Qaʿida spawned all over the Islamic world and beyond, and carried out attacks against civilian targets in Bali, Riyadh, Madrid, London, Marib, Baghdad, and many other places. For these groups, with names such as al-Qaʿida in the Arabian Peninsula or the Salafī Group for Call and Combat (changed to al-Qaʿida in the Islamic Maghreb in 2007), Bin Laden’s organization emerged as an inspiration or a label rather than as a true network of leadership that would designate targets, plan attacks, and give orders. While links may exist among the different organizations, these are not automatically hierarchical, and the various groups remain largely autonomous, defining their agenda and the means they use depending on the local context. These “global” jihād organizations are characterized by their evasiveness and their lack of institutionalization. They often emerge around a small number of militants with few resources and are therefore hard to grasp.
In March, 2003 the American-led war against Iraq and the subsequent occupation of the country created another battlefield for the different jihād organizations. In that context, new techniques of violent warfare were implemented, and the Internet became a fundamental tool of communication for the jihādīs: videos of attacks and assassinations were broadcast around the world, giving a sense of chaos and of strictly indiscriminate violence. While a large number of national jihād organizations emerged, such as the Shīʿī Army of the Mahdī or the Sunnī Association of Muslim Scholars, transnational groups (most of whom were Sunni) also became prominent and, more explicitly than before, contributed to the violent stigmatization of the Shīʿa. Western media attention focused on the role of foreign fighters, especially on the figure of Abū Mūsʿab al-Zarqāwī, a Jordanian who claimed to head al-Qaʿida in the “Land of the Two Rivers” (Iraq), but most probably overestimated their importance in the insurgency.
This brief account highlights the many different trends and debates within the broad spectrum of jihād organizations in the contemporary Islamic world. These groups, whether structured as formal parties or as underground cells, have indeed emerged as major disruptors of world politics, yet they have often been misunderstood because their actions have been over-ideologized and linked to a specific essence of Islam. Their common vocabulary, similar names, and shared intellectual roots should not overshadow the importance of their local context in defining the political means they use. Indeed, jihād organizations, despite their apparently rigid doctrine, adapt to their environment. Their violence, however despicable, only becomes intelligible when it is confronted with other forms of violence or to a violent context that pre-exists it.
Islamic Movements
Mass mobilization in the name of Islam is a recurrent feature of Muslim history. Since the first generations of Islam, Islamic movements have periodically sought to expand and defend the Muslim community, or to enforce or renew Islamic piety. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—before European colonization—were particularly marked by Islamic movements claiming to revive the spirit and glory of the early years of Islam, led by such influential figures as Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb in Arabia, Haji Miskin in Sumatra, and Usuman Dan Fodio in West Africa. A distinct set of Islamic movements, organized around traditional Ṣūfī brotherhoods, were prominent in various anti-colonial campaigns of the nineteenth century, led by figures such as ʿAbd al-Qādir in Algeria, Shāmil in the Caucasus, and al-Mahdī in the Sudan.
The First Half Of The Twentieth Century
These goals—the revival of early Islamic practices and resistance to Western influence—continued to motivate many Islamic movements in the twentieth century. During this period, however, the often violent transition to modernity undermined the social and political organizations that had spawned earlier Islamic movements. A new form of Islamic movement emerged in the twentieth century, drawing on such modern phenomena as print and electronic media. A forerunner of these movements was led by Derviş Vahdeti in the Ottoman Empire in 1908–1909. Vahdeti’s newspaper, Volkan (The Volcano), criticized the pro-Western orientation of the Young Turks who had come to power in 1908; he did so by using a Western technology to promote a return to the Islamic values that he felt were under siege. Vahdeti led a mutiny in Istanbul in the spring of 1909 and was executed.
Large-scale Islamic movements arose in the following decades, most famously in Egypt, where Ḥasan al-Bannā founded the Muslim Brothers (Ikhwā al-Muslimūn) in 1928. This group formed part of a global trend toward militant mass-membership organizations in the early twentieth century, including the Boy Scouts in Britain (founded in 1907), fascist youth movements in Europe, and the National Volunteers’ Union (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS) in India (founded in 1925). These movements used modern bureaucratic structures to promote a revival of allegedly authentic cultural traditions, including, for the Muslim Brothers, patriarchal gender relations, sober probity, and commitment to Islamic activism. Other Islamic movements of this era adopted similarly novel forms of mass mobilization, including Muslim Brother offshoots around the Arab world, the Muhammadiyah social welfare association in Southeast Asia (founded in 1912), the Jamāʿat-i Islāmī party in India and later Pakistan (founded by Sayyid Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī in 1941), and the Nurcu educational movement in Turkey that grew up around Bediüzzaman Said Nursî in the 1940s and 1950s.
The Last Half Of The Twentieth Century
None of these mass movements came to power in the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, they were actively suppressed by secularizing autocrats who saw them as a threat to the state and its official ideology of Westernization. Islamic movements splintered in response to this hostile environment. One faction sought to capture state power through revolution. Ideologists such as Sayyid Quṭb in Egypt, who was executed in 1966, urged devout Muslims to overthrow rulers who had lapsed into what he termed pre-Islamic ignorance (jāhilīyah). Supporters of this movement assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 but were unable to bring down the military government. Descendants of this movement include Ḥamās and other Palestinian groups that have used violence against civilians as a strategy against the Israeli state, and the transnational al-Qaʿida organization, which sought to undermine U.S. and European support for the Saudi dynasty and other regimes that al-Qaʿida considers to be un-Islamic.
The only revolutionary Islamic movements to come to power were Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran, which was established after the overthrow of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979, the Taliban movement, which ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, and the Council of Islamic Courts, which took control of much of Somalia for a time in 2006. Both the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, while controversial among Muslims, served briefly as encouraging models for Islamic movements around the world, before disillusionment set in.
A contrary trend within the Islamic movement was alliance with military dictators, rather than overt resistance. Islamic movements in Pakistan allied themselves with General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq in 1977, when he executed the elected president and implemented selected Islamic legal traditions. Islamic movements in the Sudan allied themselves with Jaʿfar Nimeiri in 1983 and ʿUmar al-Bashīr in 1991, when they sought to Islamicize the state. Within several years, the military subsequently marginalized the Islamic movements politically, although many of the Islamic regulations that the movements had favored remained in force.
Another trend among Islamic movements was to seek state power through democratic means. Electoral competition in Muslim societies has long included political parties that identify themselves as Islamic, but these parties have rarely been successful at the polls. The largest exception was the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, which served as an umbrella organization for opposition to the ruling socialist party. The Front won 81 percent of the seats in the first round of parliamentary elections in 1991, whereupon the Algerian military cancelled the elections and arrested the Front’s leaders, spurring a particularly bloody civil war with radical fragments of the Islamic movement. Since that time, Islamic parties have won pluralities—though never an outright majority of votes—in parliamentary elections in Turkey (1995, 2002, and 2007) and Palestine (2006). The democratic route to political incorporation has attracted a variety of Islamic movements that were previously committed to revolutionary means. Most famously, the Muslim Brothers in Egypt have increasingly stressed the importance of democratic political procedures, while maintaining their substantive goal of Islamizing state and society.
The most popular Islamic movements, however, have focused on transformation at the individual and institutional level, rather than on state power. These groups are among the largest and most widely diffused Islamic organizations in the world, such as the Tablīghī Jamāʿat, founded in India, Fethullah Gülen’s movement, founded in Turkey, and the network of groups— called “Wahhābī” by their opponents — that are supported by the Saudi kingdom in Arabia. These movements play little or no active role in politics, but seek instead to promote personal piety — as they understand it — and to create social, educational, and business institutions that adhere to their religious principles.
In the early twenty-first century, Islamic movements encompass a huge and contradictory array of ideologies and strategies, some of them congruent with Western ideals—parallel in many ways to Christian democratic movements in the West—and some of them hostile to Western norms. Islamic movements have in common a symbolic identification with cherished elements of Islamic heritage, most often the person of the Prophet Muḥammad and the precedent of the early years of Islam. Most of the leaders and members of Islamic movements today are secular-educated Muslims, plugged in to global media, for whom Islamic activism, whether political or pietistic, is a marker of self-identification in a world that is crowded with identities.
Terrorism
Terrorism is a deliberate, unjustifiable, and random use of violence for political ends against protected persons. Obviously, there is no inextricable connection between Islam, or any other religion, and terrorism. In fact, there is often a great confusion between the phenomenon of political violence and terrorism. The term terrorism applies to a special category of disparaging acts rather than to all acts of politically inspired violence. Muslims have engaged in terrorism in the modern era, and just as Jews and Christians engaging in terrorism, they have sometimes claimed a justification based in religion. In point of fact, however, the sharīʿa (the divine, Islamic law) does not condone the use of violence except to combat injustice, and noncombatant immunity is a prominent feature of Islamic literature on jihād (religiously sanctioned warfare). In warfare, necessity might justify putting noncombatants at risk, but harm to innocents should neither be intentional nor excessive. Thus, phrases such as “Islamic terrorism” significantly misrepresent the religious roots of violence committed by Muslims, except to encourage Islamophobia.
Nationalist Rationales For Terrorist Acts
Since World War II, the Middle East has become infamous as a cockpit for terrorism, although many of the perpetrators have not purported to act in the name of Islam. Arguably, the first modern act of political terrorism in the region was the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1947, an act carried out by Jewish terrorists led by Menachem Begin, then leader of the Irgun. Following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Begin became leader of the political opposition, and in 1977, acceded to the prime ministership of Israel. In the 1960s and 1970s, Palestinian guerrillas (fidāʿyūn) launched dozens of horrendous acts of violence against innocent bystanders, all in the name of gaining recognition for Palestinian nationalism. These acts included the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, a long series of hijackings, including four in 1970 that helped precipitate the civil war in Jordan, and several bloody attacks on air travelers both inside Israel and in Europe. Significantly, the Palestinian perpetrators were inspired by a secular irredentist ideology, not by religion. The same can be said for Kurdish guerrillas who, in the 1980s and early 1990s, committed a number of vicious acts of violence in Turkey as part of their quest to win an independent Kurdistan.
Political Violence With Islamic Rationales
Muslims, claiming a religious rationale for their violence, are also noteworthy. In Egypt, in 1954, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimīn) allegedly attempted to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser, who then accelerated his suppression of the organization. In 1981, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated by extremist Muslim conspirators serving in the army. Muslim revolutionaries, intent on toppling the regime of Hosni Mubarak have, since the late 1980s, engaged in escalating acts of violence, including terrorism, to destabilize the Egyptian government. Many of these acts have been egregiously indiscriminate, targeting innocent foreign tourists, in[{ addition to state officials, soldiers, and police officers. These acts illustrate the scope of activities that constitute contemporary political violence; whether they all constitute acts of terrorism is another question.
Thus, terrorism is notoriously difficult to define, since the term is often used to refer to generic acts of violence committed by political adversaries. Nevertheless, it is a useful epithet with which to bludgeon one ’s adversaries, even if the moral indictment is often debased, because there is a tendency to apply the label selectively to foes while turning a blind eye to equally contemptible acts carried out by friends or allies pursuing congenial goals.
The quest for a definition of terrorism has bedeviled diplomats and international lawyers, and there is no internationally accepted definition. Although terrorism is frequently decried, the standard practice in international law has been to proceed inductively, criminalizing specific acts such as air piracy, attacks on diplomats, or the theft of nuclear materials. Nonetheless, there is general agreement that hijacking of commercial aircraft or vessels constitutes a form of terrorism when carried out by non-state perpetrators.
Acts of violence carried out within the borders of a state are more problematic to characterize, since illegal acts of violence might be legitimate, especially when the state authorities harshly repress dissent and when the illegal acts do not target protected persons. To argue that an act of political violence is unlawful (a factual statement) is not the same as arguing that it is illegitimate (a normative conclusion). It is important to distinguish between those political systems in which citizens can effectively voice their demands and those in which whole categories of citizens are disenfranchised. In the second category of states, that is deaf to its citizens and residents, violence might be justifiable and legitimate even though it is deemed illegal by the authorities. In contrast, in the first category of states, political violence is both illegal and illegitimate, because the enfranchised citizen need not resort to violence to be heard or to enjoy the protection of the state.
Legality And Legitimacy
Of course, legality and legitimacy are not always easy to disentangle, as the case of Algeria illustrates. The Islamic Salvation Front, often referred to by its French acronym, FIS, was on the verge of attaining an overwhelming parliamentary majority following its impressive victory in the first stage of a two-stage set of elections. Instead of allowing FIS its electoral victory, the Algerian army, fearful of Islamist intentions that were supported by approximately half of the Algerian population, seized power in January 1992. Understandably, the membership of FIS reacted with fury to the army ’s action, and a civil war ensued, with thousands of FIS adherents arrested and detained under martial law conditions. Moderate leaders in FIS were thoroughly discredited, and the Islamists launched a campaign of insurrection and violence that respected few moral boundaries and targeted not only government officials but also intellectuals deemed unsympathetic to the Islamists, and individuals who favored western dress or styles of behavior. Some have accused government forces of instigating, or at least condoning, violence that was then blamed on the Islamists. In a striking throwback to the Algerian revolution of the 1950s and early 1960s, when French rule was overthrown, terrorism again became the coin of the realm for both sides in Algeria, thoroughly polarizing Algerian society.
The right of a people to resist foreign occupation is widely, if somewhat erratically, upheld. A clear majority of world governments—including Egypt, France, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States—supported Afghan Muslims struggling violently against Soviet occupation. Relatively few observers outside the Soviet Union described the Afghani mujāhidīn as terrorists, even though their attacks were often condemned as terrorism by the Soviet Union. As long as the mujāhidīn directed their efforts against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, right was literally on their side. By the same token, though agreement is less general, the resistance by Lebanese Muslims and Christians to the Israeli occupation of a portion of southern Lebanon, which it had occupied between 1978 and 2000, was similarly sanctioned, despite Israel ’s description of those who attacked its soldiers and client-militiamen as terrorists.
A sounder test addresses the moral legitimacy of the means rather than the technical legality of the ends. If the Afghan or the Lebanese resistance forces broaden their campaigns to encompass protected categories of noncombatants, their actions tend to lose privileged status. Whatever the politics of the observer, it is significant to distinguish between attacks on soldiers occupying foreign lands and attacks on persons in universally accepted protected categories, such as children, or more broadly, noncombatants. As long as a resistance force is discriminate in its methods and targets, it is not objectively justified to affix the terrorist label.
A Definition Of Terrorism
Deliberate and random uses of violence for political ends against protected groups constitutes terrorism. This is a functional and non-polemical definition that has the merit of parsimony and universality. The perpetrators can be states, agents of states, or individuals acting independently. Indeed, the Iraqi government ’s al-Anfal Campaign in the 1980s to intimidate and exterminate major segments of its Kurdish population, or the actions taken by the Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemeni, and Syrian governments against civilians during the Spring 2011 uprisings in those countries, clearly constituted acts of state terrorism. The record shows, sadly, that states have often been able to commit murderous feats with impunity—acts that dwarf the deeds of horror committed by non-state terrorists. There are many examples, including Indonesia ’s bloody suppression of East Timor in the early 1960s; Syria ’s annihilation of more than twenty thousand people in Hama in 1982; and Sudan ’s savage campaign in the south to squash resistance to Islamization in the 1990s.
In general, militant opposition movements of Muslims have focused their violence domestically on the authoritarian state, which is typically characterized as thwarting the imposition of the sharīʿa as the sole legitimate source of law. The writings of Sayyid Quṭb (executed in 1966 by the Egyptian government) and his rejuvenation of the terminology of jāhilīyah (literally, a state of ignorance of the truths of Islam) as a description of contemporary Muslim societies have provided some contemporary groups with a rationale for acts of violence as part of a jihād to reestablish Islamic society.
Although most militant movements of Muslims have concentrated on domestic goals, the revolution in Iran spawned an ideology that has been used to justify the use of violence on the international stage in the late 1980s. Not only has the Iranian government been implicated in widespread assassinations and plots against political and intellectual opponents, but it has also lent material support to militant Islamist groups. This can be observed in the case of the Lebanese Shīʿī group Ḥizbullāh (Party of Allah).
Martyrdom
Islam accords a special status to those who sacrifice their lives in the service of their religion. This is clear from A. J. Wensinck’s pioneering study (1941) observed a close relationship between Islam and Christianity that centered on this meaning; the Christian technical term “martyr” also means “witness.” This correspondence led Wensinck to conclude that the two traditions share a similar development involving ancient Semitic and Hellenistic religious motifs. Whatever led to the choice of the word “witness” for a believer who has made the ultimate gesture, it is clear that the idea of martyrdom in Islam was thoroughly at home in the early religion.
The Qurʿān does not use the word shahīd unambiguously, at least in the singular form, although there is one instance of the use of the plural which has readily lent itself to the martyrdom interpretation. But apart from the direct reference to the plural shuhadāʿ, the Qurʿānic valorization of sabr (endurance in times of difficulty) and the related theme of the suffering of all the prophets at the hands of persecutors, to name only two motifs, supports admiration of martyrdom, long suffering, self-sacrifice, and patience. This theme reaches its high-point in the poetic expressions of the mystics of Islam who saw as their starting point in this regard such ḥadīth qudsī (holy ḥadīth) as: “Who My beauty kills, I am his blood-money,” or Ḥallāj’s “Happiness is from Him, but suffering is He Himself” (Chelkowski, p. 217).
Sacred Texts On Martyrdom
Ayoub (1978) has pointed out that even in the earliest portion of the Qurʿān, that is, in those revelations that came even before the duty of jihād was made incumbent on Muslims, there is a divine confirmation of the ideal of martyrdom, namely, Qurʿān 85:3–8, which many commentators say refers to the famous Christian martyrs of Najrān. But regardless of the actual identities of the persons and events being alluded to, the reference to martyrdom is unambiguous.
The most important verse dealing with martyrdom is one in which the word shuhadāʿ (witnesses) is interpreted by many exegetes to mean “martyrs.” Qurʿān 4:69 says “Whosoever obeys Allah, and the Messenger—they are with those whom Allah has blessed. Prophets, just men, martyrs [shuhadāʿ], the righteous; good companions they!” (A. J. Arberry’s translation). Arberry (d. 1969), faithful to the exegetical tradition, unhesitatingly uses “martyrs” to translate shuhadāʿ, whereas other translators, such as Yusuf ʿAlī (d. 1953), more cautiously use the English word “witnesses” instead. This verse is the “locus classicus” for later exegetical and theological discussions about the hierarchy of the inhabitants of Paradise. About the rank of “witness” (shahīd), Yusuf ʿAlī offers the following comment: “[These] are the noble army of Witnesses, who testify to the truth. The testimony may be by martyrdom, as in the case of the Imams Ḥasan and Ḥusayn. Or it may be by the tongue of the true Preacher or the pen of the devoted scholar, or the life of a man devoted to service.” Thus shahādah, while translated as “martyrdom” in some contexts, strictly encompasses much more than the sacrificing of life in the path of Allah (fī sabīl Allāh); indeed it is also the word for the act of confessing adherence to Islam by uttering, “There is no god but Allah and Muḥammad is the messenger of Allah.” Nonetheless, shahādah as martyrdom is regarded as highly praiseworthy.
The Qurʿān has many passages which indicate an authentic appreciation for and inchoate theory of martyrdom: “Say not of those who die in the path of Allah that they are dead. Nay rather they live” (2:154); “Count not those who were slain unty from Allah, and observer of the contemporary scene and its example falling into ruins is a martyr; the woman who dies in childbed is a martyr.
Such scriptural raw material would eventually produce doctrine like the following statement from the preeminent Sunnī theologian, Muḥammad Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111):
Every one who gives himself wholly to Allah [tajarrada illāhī] in the war against his own desires, is a martyr when he meets death going forward without turning back. So the holy warrior is he who makes war against his own desires, as it has been explained by the apostle of Allah. And the “greater war” is the war against one’s own desires, as the Companions said: We have returned from the lesser war unto the greater one, meaning thereby the war against their own desires. (Wensinck, p. 95.)
It is indicative of this transition that none of the “Rightly Guided” Caliphs, the first four caliphs of Sunnī tradition, is typically given the rank or title of martyr. This is interesting because Abū Bakr, the first caliph, is the only one of the four not to have been killed in an open act of violence. In keeping with Islam’s communal ethos, martyrdom is treated by the fuqahāʿ as not necessarily or most importantly a means for achieving individual salvation or felicity in the next world. Rather, it has the pragmatic value of ensuring the continued existence of the group through communal defense.
Shīʿī Islam, however, is often identified by the way in which the ideal of martyrdom has been kept a vital element of belief. The potency of the ideal here can be seen by referring to the only Islamic movement of the modern period to have acquired a universally recognized distinct or non-Islamic identity—the Bahāʿī faith. In this religion, which began in a Shīʿī milieu, the ideal of martyrdom is retained as an important element of contemporary religious belief (Bethel). Shiism, especially since the establishment of the Ṣafavid dynasty at the beginning of the sixteenth century, elaborated the motif of cultivated martyrdom as a religious and cultural ideal to an unprecedented degree. The Twelver Shīʿī list of martyrs begins with Abel (Qābīl) and acontinues through history to include the prophet Muḥammad and eleven of the twelve imams, the exception being the still-expected Twelfth Imam. Within Shiism the visiting of the graves of the martyrs—preeminently but not exclusively the imams—has special religious significance, a;s do weeping for them (or even pretending to weep), and suffering distresses similar to those of Ḥusayn and his companions, such as thirst. Indeed, according to some contemporary Shīʿī authorities, the true meaning of the mystical term fanāʿ (annihilation, selflessness) is none other than the sacrifice of the physical life in the path of Islam (as related in a speech by Ayatollah SayyidMaḥmud Ṭāleqāni [d. 1979], p. 68).
The theme of martyrdom is also very important in Sufism. The Islamic world is adorned with thousands of shrines to pious Muslims who have been regarded as martyrs, though not all places known as mashhad claim to hold the remains of a bona fide martyr. (In Turkish, for example, meshed is a word for “cemetery” in general.) These tombs are the objects of special veneration and pilgrimage, the practice of which is traced to the Prophet himself, who is said to have visited the graves of the martyrs of the Battle of Uḥud interred in al-Baqīʿ cemetery in Mecca to pay special homage to them. In Sufism, however, martyrdom acquires many of the same features associated with the type of the martyr-hero exemplified by Jesus in the Gospel accounts of the Passion, the most important example here being that of Ḥusayn ibn Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj—whose act of martyrdom is frequently conflated with that of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (Chelkowski, p. 21)—who was crucified in Baghdad in the early tenth century and has been “kept alive” as an ideal of piety and spiritual valor not only in the Ṣūfī tradition but in aspects of wider Islamic culture as well (Massignon). But there have been many others, including his son Manṣūr ibn Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj, Suhrawardīal-Maqtūl of Aleppo (d. 1191), ʿAyn al-Quzāt Hamadānī, ʿImād al-Dī Nesîmî in Turkey, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Ibn Sabʿīn in Spain, and Sarmad in Mughal India, to name only a few of the most famous. Even at the time of Ḥallāj’s crucifixion, visitation to the tombs of martyrs was such a firmly established practice that Ḥallāj’s remains were cremated and the ashes scattered on the Euphrates so that no tomb to him could be erected which might then become the object of a cult. The recent study of the fourteenth-century Indian Ṣūfī martyr Masʿūd Beg (Ernst) shows the literary process involved in the acknowledgment of a saint as also a martyr.
Martyrdom Today
Islam is based on bearing witness to the truth of Allah’s most recent revelation through his final prophet Muḥammad. Insofar as the most dramatic—and according to some the most meaningful—form of bearing witness has to do so with one’s nafs (self, soul, life), then Islam is also based on martyrdom. But, as we have seen, the act of bearing witness is accomplished in Islam in a number of ways, ranging from the uttering of the words “lā ilāha illā Allāh wa Muḥammad rasūl Allāh” (there is no god but Allah, and Muḥammad is the messenger of Allah) to the ultimate act of witnessing, the sacrificing of one’s own life for the establishment or defense of Islamic ideals. Between these two possibilities are a number of other acts and gestures that have been recognized by fuqahāʿ as constituting shahādah under the Islamic holy law, sharīʿah. These other acts include dying during pilgrimage, dying from various particularly virulent and painful diseases, for women dying during childbirth, and so forth.
Today, Islam is distinguished among the world religions by the intensity with which the motif or ideal of martyrdom, in the sense of relinquishing one’s life for faith, is consciously kept alive and cultivated. The motif within Sunnī Islam has been seen to reside—obviously quite erroneously, especially in light of recent history—chiefly in the veneration of the struggles of the early Islamic community with the Meccan Arabs and their jāhilī culture. With the severe dislocations experienced by a large part of the Muslim world since the eighteenth century, a new era of the understanding of martyrdom has arrived. In some ways, the importance of the theme in the contemporary world transcends the divisions of Sunnī, Shīʿī, and Ṣūfī.
Martyrdom was a prominent theme in the recent Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988); both sides relied heavily on the ideal to motivate military troops. Since 1994 the theme has achieved even more prominence with the rise of terrorist groups describing themselves as Islamic. The most prominent and dramatic example has been the destruction of the World Trade Center. There can be no doubt that the ethos motivating those responsible for September 11 was deeply connected to the power and endurance of some interpretation of an Islamic view of martyrdom. But the prize of martyrdom continues to inspire those involved in the Palestinian opposition to Israel and the American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A clear result of these historical developments suggests that scholars must readjust their assessment that martyrdom in Islam is chiefly a feature of Shiism.
In sum, while martyrdom does not figure prominently in the Qurʿān, tradition holds that one who has died in the service of Islam is distinguished from other Muslims in the life after death in a number of ways:
- A martyr is spared the postmortem interrogation by the two angels Munkar and Nakīr;
- A martyr bypasses purgatory (barzakh) and on death proceeds directly to the highest station in Paradise, those locations nearest the divine throne;
- This station is called in a ḥadīth the most beautiful abode and the dār al-shuhadāʿ (abode of martyrs);
- Martyrs’ wounds will glow red and smell of musk on the Day of
Judgment; - Of all the inhabitants of Paradise, only the martyrs wish for, and are
theoretically allowed, a return to earth for the purpose of suffering
martyrdom (again); - Through meritorious acts, a martyr is rendered free of sin and theredore
does not require the Prophet’s intercession (shafāʿah); - Some traditions even portray notable martyars as intercessors for others;
- As a result of their purity, martyrs are buried in the clothe in which they
died and are not washed before burial; - According to Ghazālī, a martyr enjoys the third highest position in the
afterlife, just below the prophets and the ʿulamāʿ (religious scholars); according to an earlier authority (Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī, d. 996), the martyrs rank second as intercessors after the prophets.
These traditions appear to gain popularity during times of extreme sociopolitical turmoil.
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