A Dilemma Always Has Two Horns

Once again the schizoid view of Islam is on display.  Over the past week two diametrically opposing understandings of the relation of Islam the religion and terrorist acts have been advanced by men skilled in the use of the written word for purposes of convincing.

One view, the benevolent one, is offered by Time, Online in the person of Romash Ratnesar.  Mr Ratnesar is an editor-at-large who contributes a weekly column on national security and foreign affairs.  In this piece he takes the view that homegrown terrorism of the violent political Islamic sort is a myth conveniently manufactured and exploited by assorted political and media figures in order to advance an agenda.

In the course of the essay Mr Ratnesar deprecates the assorted homegrown actors as insignificant people who generated plots doomed to fail even had the FBI not used undercover assets to gain control of the plotters and abort their efforts.  In Mr Ratnesar's view the wannabe martyrdom seekers were all pathetic members of the gang that couldn't shoot straight and barely deserved the attention they received.

In the course of marginalizing the homegrowns, Mr Ratnesar blithely discounted the Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal, as having motivations which were "not strictly ideological" and by asserting that in any event his targets were not exclusively civilians.  This animadversion is breath taking in its scope and baseless nature to say the least.

The opposite viewpoint was adopted by Barry Rubin in the Jerusalem Post.  Rubin is well known as an advocate of Israel and a well-informed attacker of all things relating to political Islam both violent and peaceful.  In this commentary he considers the nature, scope, and probable impact of a fatwa issued recently by Dr Imad Mustafa of Cairo's very prestigious al-Azar university, the leading theological institution of Sunni Islam in the world.

Dr Mustafa, in his fatwa, not only rehearses the traditional understanding of defensive jihad, but defines defensive with such breadth that nearly any act can be construed as an attack upon Islam which invokes defensive jihad as an absolute obligation upon every believer.  But Dr Mustafa goes far beyond defense.

In his fatwa this al-Azar professor invokes a basis for offensive jihad.  One of the acceptable causes of offensive jihad against a non-Muslim majority state is any action by that state which in any way restricts the absolute freedom of Muslims to use and observe every stricture or requirement of the religion--including such cultural additions as the burqa, polygamy, or child brides.  Other causes of offensive jihad include the purging of all religions other than Islam from all the states of the Arabian Peninsula and--most sweeping of all--"to extend God's religion."

Guacamole!  The good professor in this fatwa has made a mighty step back to the future--bringing back the imperatives of the Seventh and Eighth centuries for use in the Twenty-first!

While the Mustafa Fatwa may be utterly irrelevant to the majority of Muslims abroad and here in the US as they pursue the challenges and opportunities of daily life, the fact remains that the most extreme of the advocates of violent political Islam have received the blessings as it were of the most important school of Islamic religious studies in the world.  The Mustafa Fatwa empowers every cleric, every loud mouthed exponent of the Triumph of the Will of Allah (as I see it) to exhort violence against any and all non-Muslims wherever they might live.  It is all that an Osama bin Ladin could have hoped and prayed for--and more.

Stripped to its essentials, the Mustafa Fatwa is a universal declaration of religious war against any and all infidels everywhere.  Compared to this fatwa the call for the First Crusade preached by Pope Urban over a thousand years ago was an invitation to an interfaith love feast.

Professor Mustafa's fatwa must come as an embarrassment to President Obama, the WaPo, and the legions of Islamophiles littering the American and Western European elites.  The Mustafa Fatwa puts the lie to all the assertions these past years that terror acts are the product of an insignificant number of individuals who have hijacked Islam for their own narrow and perverse purposes.  At least in the mind of Professor Mustafa and others of al-Azar university, the concepts of defensive (construed broadly) jihad and, now, offensive jihad reside in the mainstream of Islamic jurisprudence.  Rather than being a perversion of the religion, jihad is an obligation upon each and every believer.  In short, it is the religion.

Still one must be cautious in responding to the broadened challenge represented in the Mustafa Fatwa.  It is not the final word.  It is subject to debate within the community of religious scholars.  It can be repudiated by others even in the al-Azar faculty.  And, it most assuredly can be ignored by believers generally as are most fatwas.

The best basis for policy still remains a careful distinction between Islam qua Islam and political Islam which is an ideology predicated on Islam as a religion.  It is even more critical to distinguish between violent and non-violent political Islam as each requires a different approach to combat successfully.  It is better policy to accept even the conceit advanced by Mr Ratnesar to the effect that homegrown terrorists are few, far between, and relatively inconsequential in their acts.

Policy must focus upon the most pressing threats while never totally ignoring the context which now includes the expansive but well historically rooted Mustafa Fatwa.  The most critical threats are those emanating from overseas, from the FATA or from Yemen.  This implies that a posture of close and careful monitoring of those within the US most susceptible to the messages from abroad must be maintained and even enhanced as new intelligence and new methods allow.

Longer term policy should focus upon ways in which the appeals of jihad might be lessened.  These include the usual suspects of moving to enhance democracy and responsible, responsive government in majority Muslim states and actions oriented toward economic development, particularly the empowerment of women.  But longer term policy must also consider ways in which the splits endemic to Islam can be used to benefit peace, tolerance, and a reduction of the appeal of violent political Islam.  High on this list of it-takes-a-Muslim approaches is that of reinvigorating the unfortunately moribund Sufi school of Islam.

It is also important that policy be based on a more accurate understanding of the ways in which fear, insecurity, and a sense of marginalization have factored into the rise of violent political Islam.  Many of the psychological preconditions for violent political Islam are inherent to certain but not all of the different schools of Islam.  Others are the inevitable consequences of living in authoritarian and repressive environments.  Still others are the results of effective propaganda delivered by clerics with an agenda.

None of these factors exist outside the competence of the relevant agencies of government to comprehend, and act upon.  The problem has come from an unwillingness of these agencies and their superiors to think outside of narrow, ideologically determined lines.  One use for the Mustafa Fatwa and its slap in the face of all Islamophiles is that of thinking the previously unthinkable.  By doing that, and only by doing that can the US move beyond purely military responses or the reflexive view that economic improvement and education cures all of the jihadist syndrome.

The US has been facing the challenge of violent political Islam for thirty plus years now.  It is about time that someone look beyond the horizons of the conventional wisdom.  Professor Mustafa has given a very good motive to do just that.