A Rage for Order by Robert F. Worth

Author:Robert F. Worth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374710712
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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In the Caliph’s Shadow (Yemen, Syria)

One of the first great takeaways of the Arab Spring in 2011 was the idea that it would destroy Al Qaeda. A nonviolent movement had achieved in eighteen days what decades of jihadi violence had failed to. Arab youth had staked their claim to a democratic future in Tahrir Square, with the whole world watching and applauding. Surely this would drain the swamp of radical Islam. Liberals were not the only ones who felt this way. Some of the most prominent jihadi ideologues seemed troubled. Ayman Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two man, responded to the first Arab Spring protests by issuing a long series of defensive online tirades. He declared that the uprisings, despite their peaceful appearance, had been made possible by the September 11 terrorist attacks. He delivered shrill warnings to Arab youth to beware the false allure of secular democracy. Young people glanced at these missives and laughed. For the first time, Al Qaeda’s leaders seemed visibly anxious about losing touch with the Arab masses. The jihadi movement was sinking into the background, its spokesmen merging with Mubarak and Ben Ali and all the other old men whose time was over. You could almost hear the suicide bombers unsnapping their belts and walking away.

Or so it seemed at first. Then the wind shifted again. It didn’t take long for the protesters’ nonviolent ethos to flicker out in the battle zones of Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Under the convenient cover of street protests—where they could travel without being recognized—the jihadis were suddenly watching the collapse of the state in all three countries. This was an opportunity they’d never had before: to seize territory and govern it themselves, in accordance with the sharia principles they’d been promoting for decades.

This rallying cry was an ancient one, and had welled up during many earlier periods of turbulence in the Arab world. The idea of an Islamic state was rooted in the community founded in seventh-century Arabia by the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad embodied the fusion of politics and religion: he was both the messenger of God and a shrewd ruler. That dual role itself had origins in the culture of the desert-dwelling Arab Bedouin. They saw life as a journey through a wasteland in which one could easily go astray and die. To survive, it was essential to band together in a caravan under the leadership of a guide who knew the right paths, or roads. The Islamic words sunna (normative custom), sira (exemplary behavior), and sharia (religious law) are all derived from roots related to roads and desert travel. Muhammad’s followers saw him as nothing less than their vehicle of salvation: the man who would bind together the Umma, the Islamic community, and guide it to its destination. The first part of this equation was as important as the second, because scattering and dispersing in the desert meant going astray and perishing. “Satan is with the individual,” one eighth-century caliph is said to have remarked. Only a

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