Turbulent Empires by Mike Mason

Author:Mike Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

7

Middle East Islamisms

In the late 1980s two Muslim men, both Sunnis, one an Egyptian and the other a Saudi, established a secret militant network that was called in Arabic, al-Qaeda, a word meaning, simply, “the base.” The Egyptian was the physician, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who became the network’s leading ideologue and the Saudi, Osama bin Laden, son of a fabulously wealthy contractor who was, himself, a Yemeni but who operated in Saudi Arabia. In December 2001, three months after 9/11, al-Zawahiri posted online a text called Knights under the Prophet’s Banner in which he rationalized the attacks on New York and Washington. He called the US, “the faraway enemy” (to distinguish Americans from “the nearby enemy,” the corrupt apostates who ruled the Middle East and the Maghreb). He signed the text, and extracts were published in a London-based Saudi newspaper. In it he proclaimed that the struggle between Islam and the West was universal and that the former was bound to prevail.1 This struggle was considered a jihad and those who undertook it, mujahideen. They also came to be known as Salafists, jihadists, jihadis, and, in French, intégrists.2 Their essential doctrine was a puritanical form of Islam known as Wahhabism, which had been established in Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century and came to be the governing ideology there.3

The time was ripe. With the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in early 1989, the polyglot army of foreign jihadis that had aligned themselves with the Afghani Taliban and made Peshawar in Pakistan their headquarters, began to disperse to new homes and new struggles in Bosnia, Algeria, Egypt, Tajikistan, and Chechnya. The jihad intensified in 1992. In February 1993, the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Centre (WTC) in New York was made. Thereafter jihadi activity was marked in Egypt, Bosnia, Algeria, West Africa, and in Western Europe.4

The war of the jihadis was guided by the writings of a succession of Muslim thinkers including the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb whose prominence had threatened the secular nationalist Colonel Abdul Gamal Nasser (1951–70). These writings were but an element in a long line of struggles against Western powers that went back to the nineteenth century. In the postwar period – before the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2002 – the most violent of these was the guerre sale of the Algerians who sought independence from France. Smoldering at the end of the war in Europe, the Algerian war had burst into open flame in 1954 and lasted until 1962 when Algeria became independent. Fought in France as well as Algeria, this war was essentially secular. It installed a dictatorship that was broadly progressive and “Third Worldist” but by the 1980s had come to have much in common with the secular dictatorships elsewhere in the Arab world – for instance in Egypt, Tunisia, and Iraq. Those dictatorships, avowedly anticommunist, were normally backed by the West.

From independence, Algeria had been ruled by the Front de la Libération Nationale (FLN), which led the struggle against French colonialism.

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