Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (5 page)

as legitimizing the use of force either against all non-Muslims or as a means of spreading Islam:

Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is more grievous than bloodshed. But do not fight them within the precincts of the Holy Mosque unless they attack you there; if they attack you put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded: but if they mend their ways, know that God is forgiving and merciful.

In any case, one persistent belief is that war can be mounted against unbelievers only after they have been called upon to become Muslims:

Whenever the Prophet appointed a commander to an army or expedition, he would say: “When you meet your heathen enemies, summon them to three things. Accept whatsoever they agree to and refrain then from fighting them. Summon them to become Muslims. If they agree, accept their conversion. In that case summon them to move from their territory to the Abode of the Emigrants [i.e., Medina]. If they refuse that, let them know that then they are like the Muslim Bedouins and that they share only in the booty, when they fight together with the [other] Muslims. If they refuse conversion, then ask them to pay the poll-tax (jizya) …. If they agree, accept their submission. But if they refuse, then ask God for assistance and fight them.”69

Many Muslims view these passages as having justified the spread of Islam by violent means beginning as early as the seventh century. While jihad as Islamic self-defense was the primary justification for the September 11 attacks, Bin Laden also hoped that the attacks would inspire non-Muslims to take an increased interest in the religion and convert to it.70 He also believed that he provided Westerners ample warning regarding al-Qaida’s impending attacks.71

Usama bin Laden and Religious Poetics

Such religiously-based narratives of political resistance are not exclusive to Islam. Throughout the twentieth century, revolutionary groups have legitimized, strengthened, consolidated, and catalyzed their movements through religious poetics.72 Religious poetics involve an oppressed group’s reinterpreting and redeploying of classic myths, rituals, and symbols in ways that sanctify the group’s strategies and goals so that its members may pursue their objectives with a deeper sense of ultimate religious meaning. Religious poetics sacralize, reinforce, and reenergize the multi-leveled meanings of religious and political resistance.

Modern religious and political life is full of instances where groups have utilized religious poetics. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X harnessed

ideas and rituals from Christianity and Islam during the civil rights movement, while the Dalai Lama has reworked the language of Tibetan Buddhism to focus its resistance to China’s domination of Tibet.73 Some Chicanas and Chicanos have used the narratives and rituals of Roman Catholicism and the indigenous traditions of Mexico to reauthenticate their identities, reinforce their sense of community, and solidify their religio-political bonds.74 During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Zionists reconfigured and recontex- tualized ancient Israelite and Jewish symbols in order to mobilize many Jews to create and sustain the modern state of Israel.75 Desmond Tutu as well as other black and white South African Christians reinflected Christianity to serve as a potent mode of resistance against apartheid.76

Thus, as Bin Laden attempted to justify and institutionalize his religiously- based political critiques of the West, he engaged in a similar religious poetical endeavor to that of numerous other twentieth-century revolutionaries. His use of religious poetics infused his declarations with force and persuasiveness in the eyes of millions of Muslims throughout the world. Even Muslims who usually disagree with Islamists and dread the remotest possibility of living under such regimes sometimes found themselves resonating emotionally with Bin Laden’s viewpoints and anti-Western grievances.77 His use of religious poetics explains one aspect of his appeal, but that is just part of the story.

Primordial Sentiments and Islamic Totems: Islamism, al-Qaida, and Contemporary Muslims

How can one explain Usama bin Laden’s popularity among some Muslims, at least some of whom do not formally identify with Islamism and are often at odds with its objectives? Primordial sentiments provide one answer. These thoughts and feelings are the givens of social existence involving immediate contiguity and sometimes even the feelings of familial connection. They stem from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a common language, or even a dialect of a language, and/or following shared social practices.78 These similarities in speech, custom, religion, and/or related matters carry tremendous persuasiveness in and of themselves. Individuals are bound to their family members and neighbors, for example, “ipso facto – as the result not merely of personal affection, practical necessity, common interest, or incurred obligation, but by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attributed to the very tie itself.”79

Primordial sentiments are relevant to contemporary Islam (and other forms of religion and even nationalism), generally, and some Muslims’ positive responses to Bin Laden more specifically. Muslims’ understandings of Bin Laden’s courageous opposition to the United States and their perceptions of his heroic stances in defense of Islam appeal to some of the

deepest Muslim beliefs pertaining to their dignity, pride, honor, and overall worth as individuals and as a transnational community. To the extent that Muslims believe the United States virulently assaulted Islam during the latter half of the twentieth century, Bin Laden represented a tow- ering figure who bravely stood up for Islam as a religion, a civilization, and a culture.80

He also commanded a totemic appeal. A totem is a person or object that embodies the most sacred ideals of a clan, society, or religion. While for some classic social theorists totems were animals or objects to which “primitive” peoples attached their most potent yearnings, today some political, religious, and even artistic and athletic figures possess totemic qualities.81 Admirers have revered such individuals as Mao Tse-tung, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jordan. Marketers and supporters have either commodified their images in ways that reflected their ideals or have found other ways to sacralize their lives. The likenesses of some of these leaders have appeared on posters, coffee mugs, t-shirts, and bumper stickers. The lives and ideals of others have been sanctified through routinized festivals, holidays, pilgrimages, and public speeches.

Bin Laden’s totemic appeal was similar. Contemporary Muslim children have said they want to be like Bin Laden when they become adults, while his image appeared on souvenirs and various household items.82 As the very figure of Bin Laden constituted a contemporary Islamic totem, he drew on pre-existing totems within Muslims’ collective unconscious to both convey his message and legitimate his status as their spokesperson. For instance, many media images of Bin Laden portrayed him with a long beard, turban, and flowing Islamic garb – all of which resound keenly for Muslims. For the more than 20 years Bin Laden lived in and shuttled into and out of Afghanistan, he consistently projected himself as living in full accord with the Prophet Muhammad’s example. Before Bin Laden was killed, photographs and television images often showed him residing in simple dwellings, surrounded by calligraphic quotations from the Quran, while sitting on the floor (true to traditional Islamic and Middle Eastern custom), eating modest amounts of apparently halal food. After Bin Laden’s death, however, it became apparent that the surroundings in which he lived, for at least the last seven years of his life, were more comfortable than the image he had attempted to convey.83 Bin Laden’s frequent references to Islamic sacred texts, to the profaning of Islamic sacred spaces by the United States’ military, and to the denigration of Muslims’ pride resulting from the West’s aggression also carried a totemic appeal.84 At the same time, since approximately 2003, Muslims’ attitudes toward Bin Laden became increasingly mixed, with apparent decreases in his popularity since that year, while, in contrast, there were vocal demonstra- tions supporting him after he was killed.85

Members of al-Qaida make use of other totems too. They embed their own contemporary life histories within Islam’s sacred myths. Weaving Bin Laden’s and al-Qaida’s narratives into the patterns of Islam’s sacred history has enabled al-Qaida and its sympathizers to see the movement as having greater legitimacy and meaning. For instance, the Meccans forced Muhammad and his early community to emigrate from Mecca in 622 (i.e., engage in the hijra) and to live in Medina for eight years, leading raids against those who attacked his burgeoning Islamic community there. Muhammad returned triumphantly to Mecca in 630. According to mem- bers of al-Qaida and their sympathizers, like the seventh-century prophet, Bin Laden left a “hypocritical and idolatrous” location – in his case it was Saudi Arabia – as he engaged in a modern-day hijra to Afghanistan, where he engaged in acts of Islamic self-defense against the invading Soviet infidels there.86

The members of al-Qaida elaborated this sacred narrative. Much as the small armies of the seventh- and eighth-century Muslim Arabians defeated the mammoth military of the Persian Empire (whose state religion was Zoroastrianism) to the northeast of the Arabian peninsula, so the members of al-Qaida, as they viewed it, defeated the “atheistic” Soviet military in Afghanistan, liberating that nation and placing it (or restoring it) under Islam’s banner. Much as Islam’s early caliphs (Muhammad’s successors) conquered much of the Byzantine Empire (whose state religion was Christianity) in Islam’s early years, acquiring that Empire’s provinces from Syria through all of North Africa, so too the members of al-Qaida hope that their efforts will overturn what they perceive to be the American Crusader empire.87 Bin Laden drew upon a panoply of totemic and sacred imagery in composing his religious poetics. This highly textured discourse legiti- mated his ideas in the eyes of many Muslims and appealed to their most profound emotions and frustrations. At the same time, his perspectives were grounded within and constituted one logical extension of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Islamic thought.

Theorizing Religious Violence

Mark Juergensmeyer and René Girard are two of many scholars whose works examine the relationship between myths, rituals, symbols and legiti- mizations of religious violence. Juergensmeyer examines religious violence among contemporary Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and Buddhists. As militants from these religions, the members of al-Qaida included, justify and perpetrate their acts of religious violence, the sacred narratives they construct and the targets they choose are imbued with multivalent religious meanings. These activists seek precedents from violent aspects of their religions’

histories.88 They consistently believe that “their communities are already under attack – are being violated – and that their acts are therefore simply responses to the violence they have experienced.”89 These militant groups’ violent attacks are “performance events,” in that they attempt to make sym- bolic statements, and “performative acts” in that they attempt to change policy, as they choose targets with symbolic potency which can reach intended audiences with the messages the attackers hope to convey.90 By martyrizing themselves and demonizing their opponents, members of such organizations perceive themselves as engaged in cosmic wars where the fate of their religion and the whole of humanity hang in the balance.91 As the members of al-Qaida reinterpret the narratives which legitimate their move- ment and its violent strikes against the West, they are involved in this same Juergensmeyerian cross-cultural phenomenon. They choose targets with enormous symbolic value for Americans – United States embassies, an American naval vessel and military installations, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center – and then extol the greatness of the Islamic “martyrs” who engaged in these acts, declaring “Islamic victory” against the “infidels” after the assaults.92 Yet, the scale of al-Qaida’s use of violence is global in nature and it has been argued that the scope of their goals and violent acts may be greater than those of certain other religio-political groups that use violence in attempts to achieve their goals.93

René Girard discusses the ways in which the use of myth, ritual, and symbol decriminalizes religious persons’ acts of killing while raising those apparently murderous behaviors to the highest levels of obligation. For him, religiously-sanctioned acts of violence are not only permitted, some religious persons believe they are utterly obligatory.94 In this vein, the members of al-Qaida are not only sacralizing violence, they are making it a requirement when they declare the frequently repeated sentence, “It is better to die in honor than live in humiliation.”95 They are also declaring the obligatory nature of sacrificing themselves for their cause when they make parallels between the situation they confront as Muslims today and the circumstances which previous Muslims faced when they battled Muhammad’s enemies in Medina in the seventh century, the Crusaders beginning in the twelfth century, and the invading Mongols in the thirteenth century. According to this reasoning, Muslims were and are obliged, under certain conditions, to sacrifice their lives to protect Islamic lands.96 Muslim soldiers and contemporary activists receive rewards as a result of their sanctified sacrifices: they gain the satisfaction of working to kill the infidels and playing a role in establishing their vision of justice in the world, while eventually spending eternity in heaven.97 Thus, what non-Muslim targets of Islamist and al-Qaida aggression consider murderous, savage, and barbaric crimes of “terrorism,” the members of al-Qaida interpret as obligatory acts of sacred sacrifice.98