The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy by Phares Walid

Author:Phares, Walid [Phares, Walid]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2007-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

THE SPREAD OF JIHADISM: INNER AND OUTER

During the Cold War, the jihadist ideologies spread in all directions, mostly under the radar of the contending superpowers, but also sometimes in the open, especially after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Deprived of state tools and favorable geopolitical conditions before World War II, the Wahabi and Muslim Brotherhood schools of thinking were confined to the Arabian Desert or urban areas in the still-colonized Arab Middle East. But with the departure of French, British, Italian, and other influences, Islamic fundamentalist networks began to develop in most Arab and neighboring countries. With the rise of oil politics and economics in the Arab peninsula, the dividends of oil began to be used for the export of ideology. The Wahabi state and clerics initiated a wide system of funding schools, the madrassas, and socioeconomic centers. Also, at the two holiest sites of Islam, Mecca and Medina, the greatest theological influence was focused on millions of pilgrims to have them carry the ideology back to their home countries around the world. The Wahabi-funded message was transported even further by Muslim Brotherhood cadres, but not always in harmony with the Saudi monarchy. On a larger scale, while the Cold War was raging between the superpowers, the Salafists were penetrating the Arab Middle East, North Africa, south Asia, central Asia, and Indonesia, powered by Wahabi support and Brotherhood, Tablighi, and Takfiri skills. Underneath ultranationalist regimes such as the Baathists and other Pan-Arabists, and while the Arab "big brothers" were busy fighting and losing wars with Israel and plotting against each other, the Islamists were extending their networks everywhere they could, from Sunni Iraq to Algeria and Morocco, in Lebanon's coastal cities, along the Nile valley into Sudan, and among the Palestinian communities of Gaza and the West Bank. Their colleagues were spreading in the subIndian continent and sub-Saharan Africa.

Ironically, these movements were portrayed by Western and American academic experts as those of "conservative Muslims" or "religious" currents, and not of jihadists penetrating Arab and Muslim societies. Such academic misreporting was certainly not surprising in view of the Wahabi preemptive strike inside Western academia. How could scholars, teachers, and experts blast the source of their grants and funding? Hence the spread of the jihadists deep inside the Greater Middle East took place without any reaction or concern by Western defense or security circles. This was not only because the U.S.-led West was focusing on the Soviet threat, but also because the expert pool serving as analysts of the region was minimizing these dramatic developments. Indeed, they even described the Salafi jihadists as potential allies in the war against the Communists. The Islamist grand propaganda scheme was working; not only weren't they checked by democracies as potential future foes, but incredibly, they were perceived as strategic allies in the confrontation with Communism. An underground alliance was growing between Western and American agencies and Islamic fundamentalists. Against Nasser of Egypt and later Assad of Syria and other Soviet client states, the CIA was said to have coordinated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

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