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More reviews by Michael Hsu
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Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel
Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan by Mary Anne Weaver
For those who had not heard of Osama bin Laden before September 11, 2001, Islamic fundamentalism was no more than a vague notion of a form of religious extremism seemingly bent on violence. Post September 11, however, jihad or an ideology of holy war has become too real and alarming to be ignored. And the bombings in Bali on October 12 of this year made it clear no place, no matter how culturally and geopolitically far away from the Middle East, is immune from militant Islamic-inspired violence.
These two books serve as an excellent introduction to this shadowy world of conspiracy, sabotage and terrorism in the name of Allah. Professor GILLES KEPEL's study JIHAD: THE TRAIL OF POLITICAL ISLAM has already been hailed as a landmark, tracing the origin and evolution of the militant Islamic movement, from the founding of the Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt in 1928 to Al Qaeda (which, he informs us, is the Arabic title of a computer file that provides bin Laden's organizational structure).
MARY ANNE WEAVER, a seasoned foreign correspondent from the New Yorker, offers in PAKISTAN: IN THE SHADOW OF JIHAD AND AFGHANISTAN a close look at Pakistan in the last two decades of troubles. She begins with General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq who orchestrated the Afghan campaign against the Soviet occupation and concludes with the "brooding and melancholy" Baluchistan along Pakistan's western border, where five thousand or more Al Qaeda fighters retreated in the spring of this year after having escaped from U.S. bombings at Tora Bora in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has become the weakest link in the chain of attempts to constrain the jihad movement. In January 2001, according to Weaver, even before the war on terrorism has commenced, the country was faced with four different crises: a deteriorating economy, tension with India over Kashmir, violence among the various Muslim sects, and increasing power of Pakistan's Islamists. Nine months later, President Pervez Musharraf was nurturing another migraine: the international conflict with the Taliban.
"We do not have the resources! We're already short of arms, weapons, and equipment for ourselves," Musharraf told the American reporter. "So if the world expects me to go in and throw the Taliban out, I will not! I cannot and will not compromise the national interests of Pakistan."
Despite his protests, the Pakistani leader did provide the crucial logistics support and intelligence -- in a lucrative quid pro quo with the U.S. -- that helped to recover Afghanistan from the extremely conservative and harsh Taliban rule and significantly assisted the U.S. campaign against Al Qaeda.
But at what price? Ending her narrative in the summer of 2002, Weaver says, "when officials of Musharraf's government conceded that a limited number of American troops would be permitted to operate from Pakistani soil, popular anger against the United States had turned to rage as a result of the civilian casualties suffered in Afghanistan due to the intense U.S. bombing�."
The virulent Pakistan response to the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan was expected because the Taliban was largely a creature of Pakistan's 30,000 madrassas or religious schools. "Most of them were orphans of the jihad," Weaver writes, "with scant knowledge of Afghanistan. They were, in a sense, far more a part of Pakistan," loyal to its major fundamentalist parties, "along with their Wahhabi backers in Saudi Arabia."
The remarkable outcome of the overthrow of the Taliban was that it actually did not, or at least has not yet, resulted in the overthrow of the Musharraf administration.
Weaver is particularly helpful in her discussion of the tribal lands in Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province which are the principal hide-outs for the Al Qaeda escapees, presumably including bin Laden and his lieutenants. There is no lack of historic irony that the present theater is also where local people fought the British to a standstill in the 19th century.
Although economically bankrupt, the border provinces' famous culture, one that would have make the National Rifle Association proud, remains intact. "Here, in the North-West Frontier Province and its surrounding tribal agencies alone," she wrote, "there are thought to be roughly seven million Kalashnikovs, or one for every grown man."
I guess no one would venture to predict Musharraf's ability to survive politically under these extreme circumstances. When Weaver remarks that the Pakistan president reminded her "a bit of Argentina's military strongman Juan Peron in the early scene in Evita," I can only imaging that she was joking, for one can hardly imagine a leader less like the charismatic Peron that Pakistan's Musharraf.
More accurately, Musharraf is at the center of a storm, surrounded by rages and schemes of various contending factions -- from radical clerics to the notorious secret service known as the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) -- balancing precariously, not unlike, as Weaver aptly puts it, a man on a tightrope.
GILLES KEPEL, the eminent scholar from l'Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, also deals with the attempts of the governments of the region attempting to preserve the status quo in world turned upside down by jihad extremism, but his larger theme is the attempt of jihadists and other pan-Islamists to unite the Muslim into a single entity. Pan-Islamic movements have flourished , Kepel writes, precisely because of their opposition to the autocratic and repressive governments of the contemporary Arab world, stretching from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, to the military fiefdoms of Pakistan.
Describing the Muslim Brothers, Kepel writes, "The Islam of the Brothers raised the standard of `Islamic modernity' as an alternative to the modernity of Europe. The exact meaning of Islamic modernity has never been settled, and this ambiguity has allowed a wide variety of social groups to assemble under its umbrella."
The common objective of the movements' diverse groups -- including Algeria's Front de Liberation Nationale, Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah party, Pakistan's Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam, Servo-Croatian Islamska Zajednica, the Muslim Brotherhood's offshoot Tanzim al-Jihad under Ayman al-Zawahiri, before he joined bin Laden, and spinoffs from the Philippines and Indonesia -- was the return to a pure state that rejects nationalism but reactivates "Islam as the sole cultural, social, and political standard for behavior among Muslims."
Quite rightly, Kepel underscores that Islamic fundamentalism is particularly attractive to the young urban poor and radical activists who are alienated from the modern world. "These men and women belong to a world in which the annihilation of intellectual frontiers by modern telecommunications is threatening the fortresses of identity that Islamic ideology has sought to build."
For the middle class, "shifting from Islamism to the search for a common ground with secular groups and democratic ideologues was rather easy." But among the jihadists, any compromise with the "Westernized" groups was loathsome, Kepel writes. "The mental world they inhabited was closed, though they were perfectly aware of the tremendous possibilities for action that new technologies provided, and many activists actually boasted training a degree in applied sciences, such as engineering and information technology." Bin Laden and Mohammed Atta are prime examples.
The jihadist's violent approach to its goal of returning to the perceived utopia of a millennium previously by bombings and assassinations only triggered and aggravated high-handed responses from the authorities. "Like the Algerian government," Kepel notes, "the Egyptian regime won the war declared on it by the radical Islamist movement in 1992." The Mubarak government destroyed the Islamist fundamentalist base of popular support, blocked any move to reunify the Islamist movement, outlawed the party, and put its leaders to jail.
The story of course does not end here. But sure enough, despite the growing instability in South Asia and the Middle East, the jihad movement seemed only to have strengthened the iron-fist of the civil or military governments, expanded their social control, and ultimately, enhanced their repressive power. Perhaps regime change, unlike Toynbee's theory that rejects the influence of "external proletariats," must come from without.
Michael Hsu
10/11/2002
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Michael Hsu is a senior editor of banking laws in America.
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