Much has been written about the perils of this so-called "clash of civilisations" since September 11. However, the moderate Muslim scholar and former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid rejects these fears. Terrorism, he says, is an anathema to Islam, and represents an incorrect "literal" interpretation of documents written for seventh- and eighth-century Arab tribal societies.
This is as much a failure of Muslim education, he argues, as a rejection of Western culture. He also says hundreds of thousands of Muslims studying in Western universities do not truly understand Western culture and thus bring home strong feelings of isolation and exclusion, fuelling anti-Western sentiments in Muslim nations. Moderate Muslims must face the daunting intellectual challenge of understanding Western liberal democracy. They must work against violent Islamic radicalism, Mr Wahid says. This is also very sound advice for the West in relating to the world's estimated 1.2 billion Muslims. A "clash of civilisations
Islamic terrorist groups are not new and have existed for decades in one form or another, and in countries from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. But it is only recently that they have moved away from conducting local campaigns against local targets. Algerian organisations like the Armed Islamic Group (G.I.A.), for example, focused their operations on the hated, secular Algerian Government. In a similar vein, terrorist organisations in Pakistan concentrated on pressing the government to adopt Islamic law and waging a guerrilla war in Kashmir.
This has all been changed by Osama bin Laden and his identifying of America as the principle foe of Islam and the urging of his followers to launch attacks against U.S. interests and civilians everywhere. As his al-Qaeda became established in the early 1990’s in something like its present day form, its message was a worldwide jihad (holy war). Al-Qaeda, says Zachary Abuza of Simmons College in Massachusetts, taught the locally based terrorist groups to “talk together and network.” Al-Qaeda members and associates, as if to make this point, have never been drawn from any one country or region. Bin Laden is a Saudi and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri is Egyptian. Other top Al-Qaeda leaders and associates of bin Laden have been Pakistani, Palestinian, Chechen, Mauritanian, North African and Southeast Asian.
Local groups were increasingly linking up by the late 1990’s under the al-Qeada umbrella in international actions, often aimed at the U.S., or its allies. Al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan, where as many as 10,000 recruits may have been trained, were vital to this mission. The camps were not only useful in plotting attacks in safety and away from the preying eyes of the police forces, but just as important, they were vital centres where men from widely different backgrounds who had once had very different causes, learned to trust and work with one another.
With the advent of the war in Afghanistan the terrorists’ strategy had to change. Al-Qaeda’s central organisation became severely degraded, with a number of its key members being either captured, on the run or killed. But many of the older, local terrorist groups are as formidable as they have ever been and now have a track record of linking up with others of like mind through out the world.
Al-Qaeda has now turned in to a more elusive organisation through the destruction of these camps in Afghanistan. Though there are al-Qaeda members still in Afghanistan – one Afghan intelligence official now keeps a map on his wall dotted with marks for places where al-Qeada is “still active and recruiting” – in all likelihood, the terrorist groups are no more than 10 strong. Local officials contradict reports that significant numbers of al-Qaeda members have returned to Afghanistan since the war. Even those members of al-Qaeda in neighbouring Pakistan are not that secure. In some relatively lawless areas that border Afghanistan, terrorists can hide, though Pakistani Army claims to be hunting them down.
The recent arrest though of Ramizi Bingalshibh in Karachi, (09/10/02), suggests that the teeming slums of both Karachi and to an extent Lahore may no longer be safe places to hide. The night before the raid on Bingalshibh’s safe house, according to a Pakistani law enforcement official, intelligence operatives picked up 15 men for questioning on terrorist activities in raids on two neighbourhoods in eastern Karachi. An unnamed Western diplomat in Islamabad now thinks it is sufficiently dangerous for al-Qaeda members to move around Pakistan and communicate with each other now that the networks strength has been affected.
Al-Qaeda is starting to feel the heat outside of the subcontinent and Central Asia to. Approximately 3000 people suspected of involvement in one form or another with al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups have been arrested. European governments, some whom were aggressively dismissive of the terrorist threat a year ago, are now actively involved in the crackdown. They have done a “fantastic job,” says Magnus Ranstrop, a terrorist analyst at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, “unearthing cells, sharing intelligence, and doing pre-emptive arrests and raids.” An American diplomat in Europe adds to this that the law enforcement authorities in Southeast Asia are co-operating with the U.S. far more than at any time before. “The effort worldwide and in Afghanistan, “ he says, “did a better job of tearing the guts out of al-Qaeda than we give ourselves credit for.
This all sounds positive until you hear Ranstorp’s estimate that for every terrorist suspect detained worldwide, nine more maybe at large. Paradoxically the destruction of the camps has in a sense made the work of the investigators harder still.
At the time the U.S. decided to bomb the camps they were big targets, but now the American and Allied forces have to hunt down the terrorists in small numbers, sometimes one at a time. Hence the conclusion of Steven Simon, who worked on counterterrorism in the Clinton White House; “On the whole, they are better of without Afghanistan. They now have total global mobility.” Probably thousands of al-Qaeda members and sympathisers escaped the bombing in Afghanistan and made their way back to their home countries, travelling across Europe through Iran and Turkey or to Southeast Asia through Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Many French officials are convinced that many graduates of these camps were sent out of Afghanistan before the attacks on September 11th. “You have to wonder,” says a French antiterrorism official, “how many were dispatched to Europe, Africa and the U.S. before the attacks on New York and Washington.
Now back in their home territories, these terrorists could well launch attacks on American interests. This is one reason why George Tenet, Director of the C.I.A., has warned that U.S. military installations “are at risk not just in obvious places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also in East Africa, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and beyond.”
Roland Jacquard, a French terrorism analyst, says that the graduates of the camps “wont be platting attacks in the heart of America, but they now feel they can attack America in their own backyards.” The majority of the terrorist acts in 2002 fit into this pattern of attacks by local groups on international targets. For example the bombing of a mosque in Tunisia of a bus full of French contract workers and of the U.S. consulate in Karachi.
Beyond ideology, the terrorists continue to be sustained by a steady flow of funds. Although a substantial amount of money has been either seized or frozen since the attacks in the U.S., private contributors in the gulf states still make sizable contributions to terrorism, which also receives money from funds diverted from Islamic charitable purposes and, even to this day, by investments in companies and real estate made with bin Laden’s own sizable fortune.
Above all, al-Qaeda can still accumulate its most important resource, new recruits. Al-Qaeda, says a new report by the RAND Organisation, depends for its future operations on its “ability to gather new recruits. Although in some areas of northern Pakistan, where hundreds of young men followed their religious leaders into Afghanistan, there is resentment towards those involved in Jihad’s. But worldwide al-Qaeda doesn’t seem to have had trouble finding new recruits.
The main protagonists of all fundamentalism, including Muslim, fundamentalism are the youth of the population. Many Muslim countries have received a boost in the youth population over the last 30 years (See table 1). Islamic organisations and political movements rely on these members of society to boost their numbers. The Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia said in 1988 “the greatest threat to his country was the rise in Islamic fundamentalism among its youth.” (Huntington, 1996)
Table 1. Youth Bulge in Muslim Countries.
Decades in which 15-24 year olds have peaked or are expected to peak as proportion of total population (almost always greater than 20%) In some countries this proportion peaks twice.
Source: Huntington, 1996
The vision of an ethnically pure nation sharing a common way of life has always been a myth, albeit a potent one. The great migrations of the post war period have, however, openly challenged notions of unified, shared national cultures not only in Europe but across the Western world (Hall, 1992). There is a growing multiplicity of religions, languages and ways of life within and across national borders. This is a striking illustration of the globalising pressures that accompanied by the reawakening and reinvention of local identities.
An influential way to express the growing cultural diversity in societies is to talk the language of “multi-culturalism”, (Gilroy, 1993) with the dividing up societies neatly into homogeneous traditions or communities. This approach has serious limitations, not least because it shares many assumptions with the new racism about fixed, immutable differences between ethnicities.
The realities of contemporary life are more interesting than proponents of ethnic absolutism contend. What is striking are the variety of subjectivities and the complex patterns of cultural change currently emerging.
Although it represents itself as the maintenance of tradition, so called Muslim fundamentalism is very much about the here and now - a reaction to the uncertainties of globalisation and the political, economic and cultural marginalisation suffered by many Muslim migrants in Western Europe. Rather than a simple expression of an essential ethnic identity, militant Islam is a created and selected identity, part of a bid by religious leaders to construct and lead an imagined community.
This becomes clearer when considering why this identity has more appeal to some Muslims than to others: it is a more powerful idea for the young than the old, for working class rather than middle class for Pakistani rather than Bangladeshi and so (Samad, 1992).
To remark on this is in no way to explain away the demands of the Islamic militants, it simply places their claims in the wider story of diaspora. Nothing sums up the ironies and complexities of ethnicity at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, better than the resurgence of Islam in Western Europe (Anderson, 1983). This identity whose raison d’ etre appears the continuation of an ancient way of life and protection of eternal truths has been actively chosen, even ethnic absolutions have been reflexive in their rejection of reflexivity.
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