Bin Laden’s true beliefs

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Raymond Ibrahim, editor of The Al Qaeda Reader, demonstrates that it is Muslim theology, not any specific grievance, that drives the jihadists’ attacks on us. Bin Laden’s famous complaints of American wrongs done to the Muslim world that supposedly justify Muslim retaliation against us have only appeared in statements aimed at Westerners. In documents directed at other Muslims, many of which Ibrahim has translated into English for the first time, bin Laden and his associates make it clear that they are simply following Allah’s timeless command to wage aggressive jihad against the infidel.

Ibrahim writes:

After the events of 9/11, my increased interest in Arabic language and history led me to enroll in Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Before and during my studies at Georgetown, I avidly read any and all posted Al Qaeda messages. The group’s motivation seemed clear enough: retaliation. According to its widely disseminated statements, the West in general, and the United States in particular, had been—overtly and covertly—oppressing and exploiting the Islamic world. The accusations included: unqualified U.S. support for Israel at the expense of Palestinians; deaths of Iraqi children due to U.N. sanctions; U.S. support for dictatorial regimes in the Muslim world; and, most recently, Western occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Every single message directed to the West by Al Qaeda includes most of these core grievances, culminating with the statement that it is the Islamic world’s duty to defend itself. “After all this, does the prey not have the right, when bound and dragged to its slaughter, to escape? Does it not have the right, while being slaughtered, to lash out with its paw?” bin Laden asks….

Soon after relocating to Washington in order to attend Georgetown, I landed an internship, which later evolved into a full-time position, at the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress, where thousands of new books, serials, and microfilms arrive yearly from the Arab world.

Numerous Arabic books dealing with Al Qaeda passed through my hands in this privileged position. A good number contained not only excerpts or quotes by Al Qaeda but entire treatises written by its members. Surprisingly, I came to discover that most of these had never been translated into English. Most significantly, however, the documents struck me as markedly different from the messages directed to the West, in both tone and (especially) content.

It soon became clear why these particular documents had not been directed to the West. They were theological treatises, revolving around what Islam commands Muslims to do vis-à-vis non-Muslims. The documents rarely made mention of all those things—Zionism, Bush’s “Crusade,” malnourished Iraqi children—that formed the core of Al Qaeda’s messages to the West. Instead, they were filled with countless Koranic verses, hadiths (traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), and the consensus and verdicts of Islam’s most authoritative voices. The temporal and emotive language directed at the West was exchanged for the eternal language of Islam when directed at Muslims. Or, put another way, the language of “reciprocity” was exchanged for that of intolerant religious fanaticism. There was, in fact, scant mention of the words “West,” “U.S.,” or “Israel.” All of those were encompassed by that one Arabic-Islamic word, “kufr”—“infidelity”—the regrettable state of being non-Muslim that must always be fought through “tongue and teeth.”

Consider the following excerpt—one of many—which renders Al Qaeda’s reciprocal-treatment argument moot. Soon after 9/11, an influential group of Saudis wrote an open letter to the United States saying, “The heart of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is justice, kindness, and charity.” Bin Laden wrote in response:

As to the relationship between Muslims and infidels, this is summarized by the Most High’s Word: “We renounce you. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us—till you believe in Allah alone.” So there is an enmity, evidenced by fierce hostility from the heart. And this fierce hostility—that is, battle—ceases only if the infidel submits to the authority of Islam, or if his blood is forbidden from being shed, or if Muslims are at that point in time weak and incapable. But if the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great apostasy! Allah Almighty’s Word to his Prophet recounts in summation the true relationship: “O Prophet! Wage war against the infidels and hypocrites and be ruthless. Their abode is hell—an evil fate!” Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred—directed from the Muslim to the infidel—is the foundation of our religion. And we consider this a justice and kindness to them.

Bin Laden goes so far as to say that the West’s purported hostility toward Islam is wholly predicated on Islam’s innate hostility toward the rest of the world, contradicting his own propaganda: “The West is hostile to us on account of … offensive jihad.”

end of excerpt

The information brought forward by Ibrahim is extremely welcome, dispelling a harmful Western delusion about the motivations of our enemy, namely the delusion harbored by the left and the anti-war right that Muslims attack us in retaliation for the bad things we have supposedly done to them, not for any internal reasons of their own.

[Note: I’ve redrafted the below passage trying to make it more understandable, but it’s still pretty difficult. Feel free to skip it.]

At the same time, however, the new information will probably not dispel the mainstream conservatives’ main delusion about Islam. Even as the mainstream conservatives correctly see that the Islamic radicals want to hurt us for internal reasons of their own, namely their ideology of jihad, the mainstream conservatives say that the jihadists have nothing to do with real Islam, but are followers of something called Islamofascism. Real Islam, they continue, is a religion of peace that is entirely compatible with Western civilization, and therefore we must continue to welcome Musim immigrants into the West, seek to democratize the Muslim lands, and look for moderate Muslims as allies, even as we fight a “war” against the Islamofascists. The mainstream conservatives have persisted in this bifurcation of good Islam and the bad Islamofascism of the jihadists, despite the fact, shown and acknowledged numerous times prior to Ibrahim’s book, that the jihadists are followers of classical Islam. For example, Victor Hanson says that our enemies are “Islamofascists,” not Muslims, even as he speaks of an “8th-century fascist caliphate.” But if even eighth century Islam was really fascism, then (a) any distinction between Islam and “Islamofascism” breaks down, (b) bin Laden the Islamofascist is simply a part of historical Islam, and (c) Islam itself is the problem, not some fictional fascist entity separate from Islam. But Hanson, in a dramatic exercise of doublethink, ignores his own concession about the Islamic nature of “Islamofascism” and continues to speak of bad Islamofascism and good Islam. Given the existence of this deep and persistent doublethink among the neoconservatives, further quotations from bin Laden’s writings showing that his actions against the West are commanded by the Koran and hadiths will probably not persaude the Bushites that bin Laden and his ilk are Muslims, and therefore they will go on believing that Islamofascism, not Islam is the problem.

To summarize: The good news is that Ibrahim’s work shatters the principal liberal lie about jihadism, which is that jihadism is only a response to our bad actions. The bad news is that Ibrahim’s work will probably leave in place the principal conservative lie about Islam, that only Islamofascism is the problem, and that Islam is good.

—end of initial entry—

Thucydides, who sent me the article, comments:

The complaint of “legitimate grievances,” etc. is an effective device of their propaganda. They know well the desperate need of liberals to sustain their own faith in the reasonableness of man, leading them to place credence in any claim of “legitimate grievance.” Accepting such claims, no matter how absurd, sustains the liberal belief that because of man’s essential goodness and rationality human conflict is always avoidable, and that there is no such thing as intractable evil that must be fought or isolated. As we saw from the behavior of Lee Bollinger at Columbia, in liberals there is this desperate search for reasonableness even in those who completely repudiate it. They believe they can talk a Hitler or and Ahmadinejad out of their deepest beliefs and commitments by repeating the cliches of liberal thought. They just won’t give up, since that would mean they would no longer be liberals, and this is so closely bound up with their sense of identity and self worth that that simply cannot be faced.

LA writes:

We should add that bin Laden’s understanding of jihad is in accordance with that of Sayyid Qutb, who argued, based on Koranic sources, that Allah commands not just defensive jihad but offensive jihad.

Terry M. writes:

I think it is William James who is usually credited with saying “there is nothing so absurd than if you repeat something often enough people will begin to believe it,” or something to that effect. I think it likewise may be stated that there is nothing so absurd than to believe that if you repeat something often enough to someone of an altogether hostile belief system to your own, they will begin to believe it.

LA replies:

Very good. In fact, this is a gloss on the last paragraph of my two-part article, “The Search for Moderate Islam”:

Which path is more promising? The path of civilizational realism, in which we recognize Islam as our eternal adversary and act accordingly, or the path of the civilizational peace process, in which we look on a billion Muslims as moderates who have somehow failed so far to realize that they are moderates, but who—we devoutly believe—will somehow discover that they are moderates if we keep trying hard enough to convince them of that fact?

Ken Hechtman writes:

You wrote:

“The information brought forward by Ibrahim is extremely welcome, dispelling a harmful Western delusion about the motivations of our enemy, namely the delusion harbored by the left and the anti-war right that Muslims attack us in retaliation for the bad things we have supposedly done to them, not for any internal reasons of their own.”

Yes, exactly. And then again maybe not. Six years ago I would have agreed in every particular. That was the reason I went to Afghanistan in 2001. The leftwing indy press was casting the Afghans and Arab-Afghans as bit players in our drama and I knew that was wrong. They were the heroes of their own story and we had a responsibility to understand them as that. Today, mostly because of Adam Gadahn (Azzam al-Amriki), this may be changing. When he first appeared a few years ago, I underestimated him as much as anybody did. I wrote him off as another John Walker Lindh, another California flake who didn’t stand for something and would consequently fall for anything. Gadahn isn’t that. He knows who he is. He’s the hyphen in the red-green alliance. He’s the guy who can explain the Koran to people who grew up on Chomsky and vice versa. He’s also a lot smarter than Lindh was and he’s taken very seriously by the inner circles of Al Qaeda. He started off running the English-language side of As Sahab (Al Qaeda’s propaganda arm). According to Pepe Escobar of Asia Times (whose information for stuff like this is usually pretty good) Bin Laden put him in charge of all of As Sahab. He now sets Al Qaeda’s message in Arabic too, and a lot of his Chomskyite anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist themes are creeping into it. It’s not the same 7th century straight-line Islam vs Kufr tone it was in 2001.

LA replies:

Mr. Hechtman’s information about Gadahn is interesting, but, far from disproving Ibrahim’s point, it confirms it. The Chomsky-style indictment of America that Gadhan has added onto the al Qaeda message is not native to that message, but is generated as part of a conscious strategy to exploit the West’s anti-American hatred and guilt, just as bin Laden’s pre-9/11 indictments were calculated to exploit the same pre-existing Western attitudes. The true al Qaeda belief system remains the internal Islamic theology of jihad that bin Laden communicates to his own people in Arabic,

Which is not to say that actions by America, such as the democratizing campaign and the occupation of Iraq, do not provide further spurs to jihad.

Ken Hechtman replies:

Listen, half the time I don’t know what my own “true beliefs” are. I’m certainly not going to speculate on Bin Laden’s.

But I do pay attention to what he says in public, both to our audience and to his own. There’s more than the simplistic Islam vs. Kufr that’s going out in Arabic to his Muslim audience, at least recently. Also, there is (and always was) a difference between what comes out of As Sahab, which is the voice of the Al Qaeda central, and what comes out of local Al Qaeda affiliated groups.

The affiliates talk almost exclusively about actual historical grievances, even in their own language and to their own people. The tone is very much “waving the bloody shirt” and it’s used as a recruiting pitch. They’ll say “These are the atrocities the infidels have committed against us. You cannot be a man and let this be done to your women and children. You cannot be a Muslim and let this be done to your fellow Muslims.” And then they’ll set it into a global context, so a Kashmiri paper will have graphics of a bleeding Chechnya pierced by Russian daggers, a bleeding Palestine pierced by Israeli daggers and so on.

Something else… If you compare Adam Gadahn to the turncoat enemy propagandists of WWII, Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw, he has it so much easier. They were these lone voices, running counter to everything being said in public in their home countries. Their audiences couldn’t take them seriously because of that. Adam Gadahn doesn’t have that problem. He can build on what Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore are already doing from the inside. He can make his case in a way that half of America is already used to hearing and believing.

LA replies:

When I speak of bin Laden’s “true beliefs” I’m not engaging in philosophical speculation. I’m going by the Voegelinian precept (further expanded on by Matt at VFR in 2002-03) that people and societies represent themselves by what they publicly express. Further, we can distinguish between different types of public expression. When bin Laden is sending communiques to the West, in English, that can be presumed to be a less genuine expression of his beliefs than what he says to his own people in Arabic.

This reminds us of the important distinction between “formal” (i.e., propagandistic) and “real” political speech which James Burnham discusses in The Machiavellians. Political actors often use language that conceals their real intent, and we need to see through that. But political actors often say exactly what they mean. We need to distinguish between formal and real speech, not deny that the latter exists.

As for the specific motives for jihad, it is a consistent fact throughout Islamic history that the eternal command to wage jihad is combined with and justified by specific pretexts in the moment.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 26, 2007 01:02 PM | Send