From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Aftermath by Malik Kenan

Author:Malik, Kenan [Malik, Kenan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2010-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

What jumps out of the video is not Khan’s righteous anger, still less any sense of religious piety. Rather it is the narcissism that oozes out of every line. ‘I’m going to keep this short and to the point … I’m going to talk to you in a language that you understand … I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe.’ And so on. In a two-minute rant, Khan says ‘I’ nine times – about once every fifteen seconds.

Terrorists have always sought publicity for their causes and have never been shy of issuing public justifications of their actions. After virtually every bombing or shooting the Provisional IRA would put out a statement claiming responsibility and demanding political change – the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland. Occasionally the Provos taunted their victims. ‘You were lucky today,’ the IRA told Margaret Thatcher after the Brighton bomb in 1984, when it attacked the hotel in which Conservative leaders were staying during a party conference, killing five people, but leaving the prime minister herself unharmed. ‘We only have to be lucky once.’ Yet even when terror was recast as a personal grudge, there was little doubting the concrete political cause that was held to justify the bombing. The contrast with the Islamic terrorists is striking. For Mohammad Sidique Khan, the actor is clearly more important than the action. His farewell video is a justification not so much of his bombing as of himself. It craves publicity not for the deed but for the man.

‘I’m sure by now the media’s painted a suitable picture of me,’ Khan moans. The IRA often accused the media of bias, but it was angered less by the demonization of individual volunteers than by the portrayal of its collective struggle. For Khan there is no collective struggle, just individual gestures. What seems to dismay him is the thought that journalists might impugn his personal integrity.

‘I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe,’ Khan tells us. For IRA members, any personal sacrifice they might have had to make was something to be accepted, not boasted about. For Khan, the sacrifice appears to be the struggle. The jihad has, for him, become an individual journey rather than something that is part of a collective movement. Unlike political activists of the past, today’s jihadist does not submit himself to the will of the collective; each decides for himself what that will is. Common among radical militants who claim to fight for the umma, Olivier Roy observes, ‘is the belief that jihad is a compulsory individual duty (fard al-ayn) while traditionally it has always been considered a collective duty (fard al-kifaya)’. Only through death do jihadists join their imagined community.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.