The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist: Notes from the Counterterrorism Literature

Abstract Western intelligence analysts fight an uphill battle to avoid parochial habits of thought that lump diverse Islamist identities together. The recent counterterrorism literature gives us tools for understanding a wide spectrum of Islamists, by focusing attention on what they say about themselves rather than on the intelligence labels we must ultimately assign to them. The main challenge for analysts is not the brute diversity of Islamist types, but their plasticity—the Islamist's flexible inhabitation of distinct, sometimes contradictory, identities. Contrary to generalizations about the duplicity of all Islamists, much plasticity is due to ordinary psychological- or ideological strain—the inability to resolve divided allegiances or sustain conflicted principles. Islamist preacher Yussef al-Qardawi and salafist group Hizb ut-Tahrir present prime examples of ordinary Islamist plasticity. In order to understand Islamism in all its complexity, analysts should develop methods for disaggregating and evaluating key components of the Islamist persona. Notes 1. Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke, “How to Lose the War on Terrorism,” Asia Times, 31 March–8 June 2007. (Originally published as a five-part series, the article is posted on the Conflicts Forum website, available at www.conflictsforum.org); International Crisis Group, “Understanding Islamism,” 2 March 2005, available at www.crisisgroup.org; Graham Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” Small War Journal, December 2004, pp. 1–72; Jeffrey Imm, “9/11 and the Inconvenient Truths about Jihad and Islamism,” Counterterrorism Blog, 11 September 2007. 2. The author is an intelligence analyst employed by the U.S. Department of the Army. This article represents his personal views only. In no way do the views expressed here reflect the policies or official opinions of the U.S. Department of the Army or the U.S. Government. 3. For the purposes of this article, the author will use the admittedly over-simple terms “West” and “Western” to refer collectively to U.S. and European countries, especially their centers of government. 4. Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke, “How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part One: Talking with the ‘Terrorists,’” Asia Times, 31 March 2006. 5. Available at www.conflictsforum.org (accessed 5 February 2008). 6. Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke, “How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part Two: Handing Victory to the Extremists,”Asia Times, 1 April 2006. 7. Scott Wilson, “Hamas Sweeps Palestinian Elections, Complicating Peace Efforts in Mideast,” Washington Post, 27 January 2006. 8. See Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood,” Foreign Affairs, 86(42) (March/April 2007), pp. 107–121, for an argument in favor of engagement. 9. Perry and Crooke, “How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part One.” 10. Ibid. 11. Conflicts Forums's arguments in support of this point are insightful and provocative but one-dimensional. Typically, Western governments base their decisions to talk or not talk to terrorist organizations on several factors, only one of which is the gain or loss of intelligence information. By ignoring terrorists, governments may indeed aim to deny them credibility or prestige, as Conflicts Forum claims, but more importantly, they wish to avoid reinforcing terrorists’ operational success, a point that Conflicts Forum neglects entirely. The current author's promotion of some of Conflicts Forums’ positions should not be construed as support for all of them. Specifically, the author takes no position on the U.S. government policy of denying terrorist organizations dialogue; he merely joins Conflicts Forum in emphasizing the intelligence cost of that policy. 12. Perry and Crooke, “How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part Two.” 13. The distinction between moral and strategic conceptions of terrorism reflects Jeffrey Record's observation, quoted in Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency” (p. 36), that the current U.S. administration, by insisting on the homogeneity of evil in terrorism, “has arguably subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it seeks in foreign policy. …” For a discussion of the rationality of suicide terrorism, see Bruce Hoffman, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 2003, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200306/hoffman (accessed 1 August 2008). 14. Perry and Crooke, “How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part One.” 15. For extensive documentation of Iran's and Syria's collaborative use of Hizbollah as a proxy, see Jubin Goodarzi, Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and Power Politics in the Middle East (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), especially chapters 2 and 3. 16. “Blair Terror Speech in Full,” BBC News, 5 March 2004. 17. See, for example, “Jihad, Islamism, and Non-Interventionism,” Counterterrorism Blog, 17 March 2008. 18. Lorenzo Vidino, Al Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), p. 71. Also see Vidino, “The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe,” The Middle East Quarterly, XII(1) (Winter 2005). 19. See March Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 72–88, for one explanation of the role of religious fanaticism in radicalizing individual terrorists. 20. Brynjar Lia, Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaida Strategist Abu Musab al-Suri (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 349–351. Despite al-Suri's ability to analyze terrorist strategy dispassionately, it should also be noted that he is (or at least was) a murderous fanatic who encouraged jihadists to attack Western populations with weapons of mass destruction (p. 311). 21. Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, “Poll Results on Palestinian Attitudes towards the Results of the PLC Elections Held on January 25, 2006,” Poll No. 57, February 2006. 22. Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 20–26. Admittedly, the proposition that Hamas existed for 20 years prior to its emergence under its present name is a somewhat controversial one. The present article follows Mishal and Sela in this vein, in recognizing Hamas's description of its own institutional antecedents. According to Mishal and Sela (p. 18), “Hamas's semi-official history points to 1967 as the date of the movement's genesis.” For another treatment of Hamas that gives priority to its own descriptions of its history and doctrines, see Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestinian Studies, 2000). 23. “Hamas Has the People's Heart,” Economist, 29 November 2001. Hamas's emphasis on social services is a legacy of its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. See Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 289–291 for a discussion of the Brothers's focus on social services; see also Anthony Shadid, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), p. 113. 24. Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), pp. 154–155. 25. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 178–179, has characterized the Islamic suicide bomber as an “exacerbated self”—someone who acts grandiosely on the delusion that he represents his community's interests when in fact he represents an over-developed ego, cloaked in a narrow ideology. Hamas seems to have harnessed this pathology, sublimating it as an effective weapon that does, in fact, serve the Palestinian's interests, at least as Hamas interprets them. 26. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006), p. 5. 27. Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” p. 36. 28. International Crisis Group, “Understanding Islamism.” 29. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, p. 5. 30. Ibid., p. 9. 31. Martin Bright, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: The British State's Flirtation with Radical Islamism (London: Policy Exchange, 2006), p. 11. 32. As one of America's founding principles, the doctrine of separating church and state needs no elucidation. The social phenomenon of entrenching and promoting this doctrine, however, is worthy of recapitulation. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written extensively on the post-Enlightenment tendencies of Western societies to “compartmentalize” the sources of one's identity, especially where “natural” and “supernatural” factors come into play. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 33. International Crisis Group, “Understanding Islamism,” p. 1. 34. Nilüfer Göle, “Islam, European Public Space, and Civility,” in Krzysztof Michalski, ed., Conditions of European Solidarity, vol. II: Religion in the New Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press 2006), available at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007–05-03-gole-en.html (accessed 31 July 2008). 35. Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), in International Crisis Group, “Understanding Islamism,” p. 2. 36. Kepel, Jihad, p. 28. 37. The political philosopher Barry Cooper has replicated this presumptuous generalization—albeit in a subtler form—in “‘Jihadists’ and the War on Terrorism,” The Intercollegiate Review (Spring 2007), pp. 27–36. In that essay, Cooper asserts that salafist Islamic terrorists “have nothing in common with the pious forefathers or, more broadly, with what, in the absence of a Muslim orthodoxy, is often referred to as Koranic Islam” (p. 28). 38. International Crisis Group, “Understanding Islamism,” p. 2. 39. Lawrence Wright, “The Rebellion Within: An Al Qaeda Mastermind Questions Terrorism,” New Yorker, 2 June 2008. 40. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 168–169. 41. Sageman, Leaderless Jihad, p. 152. 42. “Video of German Suicide Bomber in Afghanistan Cuneyt Ciftci,” NEFA Foundation, March 2008, available at www1.nefafoundation.org/multimedia-prop.html (accessed 7 August 2008). 43. “‘Martyrdom Wills’ of the Transatlantic Bomb Plotters,” NEFA Foundation, April 2008, available at www1.nefafoundation.org/multimedia-prop.html (accessed 7 August 2008). 44. Roy, Globalized Islam, p. 193. 45. Göle, “Islam, European Public Space, and Civility.” 46. See, for example, the website for one of the star preachers of this network, Pierre Vogel, available at www.einladungzumparadies.de, or the You Tube channel operated by one of the network's young converts, Hussein Lau, available at http://www.youtube.com/user/Husseinlau26?ob=1 (websites accessed 31 July 2008). 47. Hizb ut-Tahrir's draft constitution was originally published as an annex to party founder Taqqiudin an-Nabhi's The Islamic State (1953). The constitution is widely available on Hizb ut-Tahrir's websites. Article 184 identifies Israel as “a belligerent state” and stipulates that “a state of war must be taken as the basis for all dispositions with them.” 48. Roy develops these categories throughout Globalized Islam. See especially pp. 185–200 and 243–254. 49. George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy,” New Yorker, 18 December 2006. See also Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks: “[T]here can be no overall profile for global Salafi mujahedin, only local profiles” (p. 153). 50. Bright, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, p. 17. 51. This characterization of Hamas's historical plasticity is based on Kepel's (Jihad, p. 151) description of the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1987 intifada. 52. Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks, p. 155. 53. Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, p. 49. 54. Roy, Globalized Islam, pp. 121–124. 55. Ibid., pp. 42, 179; see also Magdi Abdelhadi, “Controversial preacher with ‘star status,’” BBC News International, 7 July 2004. 56. Lorenzo Vidino, “Aims and Methods of Europe's Muslim Brotherhood,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 4 (November 2006), p. 23. 57. “Islamic Ruling on Female Circumcision,” Fatwa Bank, Islam Online, available at http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?pagename=IslamOnline-English-Ask_Scholar/FatwaE/FatwaE&cid=1119503543886 (accessed 1 February 2008). 58. Kepel, Jihad, p. 165. 59. “The Two Sides of Yusuf Qaradawi,” veiled4allah, available at www.muhajab.com/islamicblog/archives/veiled4allah/009153.php (accessed 6 August 2008). 60. “Reactions to Sheik Al-Qaradhawi's Fatwa Calling for the Abduction and Killing of American Civilians in Iraq,” Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch No. 794, 6 October 2004. 61. Roy, Globalized Islam, pp. 150, 253. 62. Lorenzo Vidino, “The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe,” Middle East Policy Quarterly (Winter 2005), p. 1. See Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), for a book-length treatment of this theme, focusing on a key Muslim Brotherhood figure. 63. Vidino, Al Qaeda in Europe, p. 32. 64. Amira El Ahl, Christoph Schult, Daniel Steinvorth, Volkhard Windfuhr, and Bernhard Zand, “Dancing with the Devil: Charting the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Spiegel International, 3 July 2007. 65. Roy, Globalized Islam, p. 250. 66. Ibid., p. 249. 67. Ibid., p. 248. 68. Available at www.khalifat.com (accessed 29 January 2008). 69. Roy, Globalized Islam, p. 177. 70. Ibid., pp. 237–238. 71. Ibid., p. 177. 72. International Crisis Group, “Understanding Islamism,” p. 4. 73. Roy, Globalized Islam, p. 266. 74. Zeyno Baran, Hizb ut-Tahrir: Islam's Political Insurgency (Washington, DC: The Nixon Center, 2004), p. 53. 75. Ibid. 76. Available at www.quilliamfoundation.org. 77. Zeyno Baran, in Olivier Guitta, “The Bad Guys You Don't know: Meet Hizb ut-Tahrir,” The Weekly Standard, 1 October 2007. 78. Ed Husain, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left (London: Penguin, 2007). 79. Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks, p. 153.

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