Jehadi outlook

Fawaz Gerges is a scholar and commentator who has written extensively on West Asia and U.S. foreign policy.

IN Somalia this year, the United States made the very same mistake, in sheer opportunism, that it made two decades ago in Afghanistan with grave consequences. As The New York Times said, it threw its support to "a set of warlords with few visible merits beyond their willingness to fight their Islamist rivals. But by some accounts, Washington's support for these warlords only discredited them in the eyes of many Somalis. The parallels to Afghanistan when the Taliban took power in 1996 are uncanny, and frightening" - especially since its protgs, the warlords, lost out to the radical Islamist militias.

Fawaz Gerges is a scholar and commentator who has written extensively on West Asia and U.S. foreign policy. Since the late 1990s, he has interviewed jehadis of all colours and has formed a fairly good idea not only of their views on others, but the tensions and self-criticism that have been raging within the movement among many of its elements. He has, besides, studied primary sources carefully - their documents and unpublished manifestoes.

This makes the first volume indispensable to any study of the jehadi's outlook, especially that of Egypt's Al-Jama'a Al-Islamiya and Tanzim al-Jihad, Al Qaeda and other fringe groups. It helps to understand why 9/11 occurred; in other words, how and why local jehadis went global.

That in the process, they perverted the Islamic concept of jehad is obvious. It ceased to be defensive and moral. "Far from viewing jehad as a collective duty governed by strict rules and regulations (similar to just war theory in Christianity, international law, and classical Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh), jihad, for Saiyyid Qutb, was a permanent revolution against internal and external enemies who usurped God's sovereignty. He attacked Muslim scholars and clerics with defeatist and apologetic mentalities for confining jihad to defensive war."

Osama bin Laden asserts, equally falsely, that "fighting is part of our religion and our Shariah... whoever denies even a very minor tenet of religion would have committed the gravest sin in Islam". Like Trotsky's permanent revolution, it was a perpetual war to be waged with mindless violence and in disregard of Islamic tenets and values.

Bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of the Egyptian group which went to Afghanistan, was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, whom Gamal Abdel Nasser got executed and made a martyr. From the enemy at home, the fight was extended globally to the U.S. They were all united in Afghanistan, thanks not a little to U.S. material help. After the Gulf war in 1991, they turned on the U.S. because it backed the enemy at home.

The 9/11 report is a criminal investigation, inadequate for an understanding of the internal debate. The U.S. regards all jehadis as one and Al Qaeda as a monolith, very much as it once regarded international communism and the Communist states. "If it is an open-ended war to restructure Arab and Muslim societies and politics it could back-fire." That process has begun.

Al Qaeda has become synonymous with Bin Laden. "Al Qaeda is a skeleton of an organisation. Now it has been reduced to an ideological label, state of mind, and a mobilisational outreach programme to incite attacks worldwide. Al Qaeda operatives swore baiya (loyalty) to bin Laden - not to Al Qaeda - and developed no institutional links with the organisation itself.

As an organisation, Al Qaeda did not exist apart from its creator, and it is unlikely to survive his demise." But Iraq is a different story. The fight against Western occupation will continue even after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death.