- Phares, Walid.
Future Jihad.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, [2005] 2006.
ISBN 1-4039-7511-6.
-
It seems to me that at the root of the divisive and
rancorous dispute over the war on terrorism (or whatever
you choose to call it), is an individual's belief in
one of the following two mutually exclusive propositions.
- There is a broad-based, highly aggressive,
well-funded, and effective jihadist movement
which poses a dire threat not just to
secular and pluralist societies in the
Muslim world, but to civil societies in
Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
- There isn't.
In this book, Walid Phares makes the case for the first of these two
statements. Born in Lebanon, after immigrating to the United States
in 1990, he taught Middle East studies at several universities, and is
currently a professor at Florida Atlantic University. He is the
author of a number of books on Middle East history, and appears as a
commentator on media outlets ranging from Fox News to Al Jazeera.
Ever since the early 1990s, the author has been warning of
what he argued was a constantly growing jihadist threat,
which was being overlooked and minimised by the academic
experts to whom policy makers turn for advice, largely due
to Saudi-funded and -indoctrinated Middle East Studies
programmes at major universities. Meanwhile, Saudi funding
also financed the radicalisation of Muslim communities around
the world, particularly the large immigrant populations in
many Western European countries. In parallel to this top-down
approach by the Wahabi Saudis, the Muslim Brotherhood and its
affiliated groups, including Hamas and the
Front Islamique du Salut
in Algeria, pursued a bottom-up strategy of radicalising
the population and building a political movement seeking
to take power and impose an Islamic state. Since the Iranian
revolution of 1979, a third stream of jihadism has arisen,
principally within Shiite communities, promoted and funded
by Iran, including groups such as Hezbollah.
The present-day situation is placed in historical content
dating back to the original conquests of Mohammed and the
spread of Islam from the Arabian peninsula across three
continents, and subsequent disasters at the hands of the
Mongols and Crusaders, the
reconquista of
the Iberian peninsula, and the ultimate collapse of
the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate following World War I.
This allows the reader to grasp the world-view of the
modern jihadist which, while seemingly bizarre from a
Western standpoint, is entirely self-consistent from the
premises whence the believers proceed.
Phares stresses that modern jihadism (which he dates from
the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1923, an
event which permitted free-lance, non-state actors to
launch jihad unconstrained by the central
authority of a caliph), is a political ideology
with imperial ambitions: the establishment of a new
caliphate and its expansion around the globe. He argues
that this is only incidentally a religious conflict: although
the jihadists are Islamic, their goals and methods are much
the same as believers in atheistic ideologies such as
communism. And just as one could be an ardent Marxist
without supporting Soviet imperialism, one can be a devout
Muslim and oppose the jihadists and intolerant fundamentalists.
Conversely, this may explain the curious convergence of the
extreme collectivist left and puritanical jihadists:
red diaper baby and notorious terrorist Carlos “the Jackal”
now styles himself an
Islamic
revolutionary, and the
corpulent
caudillo of Caracas has
been buddying up with the
squinty
dwarf of Tehran.
The author believes that since the terrorist strikes against
the United States in September 2001, the West has begun to wake
up to the threat and begin to act against it, but that far
more, both in realising the scope of the problem and acting
to avert it, remains to be done. He argues, and documents
from post-2001 events, that the perpetrators of future jihadist strikes
against the West are likely to be home-grown second generation
jihadists radicalised and recruited among Muslim communities
within their own countries, aided by Saudi financed
networks. He worries that the emergence of a nuclear armed
jihadist state (most likely due to an Islamist takeover of Pakistan
or Iran developing its own bomb) would create a base of
operations for jihad against the West which could deter
reprisal against it.
Chapter thirteen presents a chilling scenario of what might
have happened had the West not had the wake-up call of
the 2001 attacks and begun to mobilise against the threat.
The scary thing is that events could still go this way
should the threat be real and the West, through fatigue,
ignorance, or fear, cease to counter it. While
defensive measures at home and direct action against
terrorist groups are required, the author believes that
only the promotion of democratic and pluralistic civil
societies in the Muslim world can ultimately put an end
to the jihadist threat. Toward this end, a good first step
would be, he argues, for the societies at risk to recognise
that they are not at war with “terrorism”
or with Islam, but rather with an expansionist ideology
with a political agenda which attacks targets of opportunity
and adapts quickly to countermeasures.
In all, I found the arguments somewhat over the top, but
then, unlike the author, I haven't spent most of my career
studying the jihadists, nor read their publications and
Web sites in the original Arabic as he has. His warnings
of cultural penetration of the West, misdirection by artful
propaganda, and infiltration of policy making, security,
and military institutions by jihadist covert agents read
something like J. Edgar Hoover's
Masters of Deceit,
but then history, in particular the
Venona
decrypts, has borne out many of Hoover's claims which
were scoffed at when the book was published in 1958. But
still, one wonders how a “movement” composed
of disparate threads many of whom hate one another
(for example, while the Saudis fund propaganda
promoting the jihadists, most of the latter seek to eventually
depose the Saudi royal family and replace it with a Taliban-like
regime; Sunni and Shiite extremists view each other as
heretics) can effectively co-ordinate complex operations
against their enemies.
A thirty page afterword in this paperback edition provides
updates on events through mid-2006. There are some curious
things: while transliteration
of Arabic and Farsi into English involves a degree of
discretion, the author seems very fond of the letter
“u”. He writes the name of the leader of
the Iranian revolution as “Khumeini”, for example,
which I've never seen elsewhere. The book is not well-edited:
occasionally he used “Khomeini”, spells
Sayid Qutb's last name as “Kutb” on p. 64,
and on p. 287 refers to “Hezbollah”
and “Hizbollah” in the same sentence.
The author maintains a
Web site
devoted to the book, as well as a
personal Web site
which links to all of his work.
September 2007 