Tawhid can not hold: Algeria, Pakistan, Falluja. The spectacular failure of militant Islam became bloodily obvious to the Muslim world during the mid-90s in the civil war in Algeria that cost over 100,000 lives. Having defeated the Soviet Union, the Jihadi-Salafist brand of extremist Islam that fueled the mujahadeen migrated to Algeria through Algerian “Afghan Arabs,” war veterans eager to spread jihad and impose a fierce and oppressive form of Shari’a on peoples used to a milder version of Islam. As Gilles Kepel writes in his comprehensive “Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam”:

“The scale of the Algerian Islamists’ shipwreck was not fully appreciated until
1996-97, when it became clear that the strategy of jihad had lost all popular
support and that its proponents had lapsed unto self-destructive terrorism . . .
What is certain is that by losing the war on the ground, in an orgy of
unspeakable atrocities, the GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé) drastically weakened
Islamism as a whole, not only in Algeria but in the rest of the Muslim world,
where it is now obliged to expend much time and energy distancing itself from
its more extremist elements.”

The GIA formed in opposition to the relatively more moderate Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), and its military arm, the Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS), both of which were occasionally willing to negotiate with the Algerian government in their attempts to win power from the increasingly corrupt and unpopular state. Composed of a diabolic cross section of radical Islmacists that rejected truces and compromises and dedicated to total war against the government, the GIA, in turn, proved factiously divided among its theological lines. Qutbist (of Sayyid Qutb fame) from the Islamic Brotherhood that originated in Egypt rejected Salafism; the more indigenous and intellectually inclined Djazarists (Algierianist) were despised as too Western by the Salafist; and the takfiris viewed Algerian society en toto as impious and subject to excommunication. The deluge of massacres unleashed by the GIA horrified the devout middle class of Algeria and brought the FIS and the Algerian Islamic party Hamas into negotiations with the government to protect their interests against an Islam gone mad. By 1995 the GIA imploded in internal purges so blatantly self-destructive that militants and cells broke off in droves and its media organ based in England, Al-Ansar, quit in disgust. There is a powerful lesson here, underemployed by the Western world, in how even in the midst of an insurgent campaign, Jihadism could not govern. Like any other religion or ideology, Islam has mutated with time and distance and the vanguardist priggishness found in the extreme branches of the Islamic Brotherhood and the Salafi-Jihadism of Afghanistan have much to fight over under the banners of ‘holier-than-thou’. It is revealing that few figures have been able to successfully straddle these two fault lines for long, and the most renown, the talented Osama bin-Laden, did so after the mysterious assassination of his mentor, Abdallah Azzam.

As so tragically evidenced by its failed Algerian struggles for intra-faith solidarity, extremist Islam is not a singular identity, indeed as Tariq Ali gleefully argues in his desultory, uneven, yet valuable, “The Clash of Fundamentalisms,” Islam is not really a singular religious identity capable of basing citizenship upon. Ali notes that before the Bengalese succession, Pakistan was convulsed by the Ahmadiya conflict, an attempt to purge an allegedly “heretical” school of Islam founded in the late 19th century by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. After suppressing vicious anti-Ahmadiya riots, a court of inquiry was appointed by the government and a report commissioned to investigate the disturbances. The report, written by prominent jurists, questioned a number of Muslim leaders (ulama) who instigated the riots with demands to classify the Ahmadis as heretical minorities and in doing so, raised even larger questions as to the basis of Muslim identity and Pakistani citizenship. The jurists reasoned:

The question, therefore, whether a person is or is not a Muslim will be of
fundamental importance, and it was for this reason that we asked most of the
leading ulama to give their definitions of a Muslim, the point being that if the
ulama of the various sects believed the Ahmadis to be kafirs [unbelievers], they
must have been quite clear in their minds not only about the grounds of such a
belief but also about the definition of a Muslim because the claim that a
certain person or community is not within the pale of Islam implies on the part
of the claimant an exact conception of what a Muslim is. The result of
this part of the inquiry, however, has been anything but satisfactory, and if
considerable confusion exists in the minds of our ulama on such a simple matter,
one can easily imagine what the differences on more complicated matters will
be. Below we reproduce the definition of a Muslim given by each alim in
his own words . . . Keeping in view the several definitions given by the
ulama, need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on
this fundamental. If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine
has done and that definition differs from that given by all others, we
unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition
given by any one of the ulama, we remain Muslims according to the view of that
alim but kafirs according to the definition of everyone else. (The Clash
of Fundamentalisms, pg. 179)

These judicious warnings went unheeded and after much mistreatment of the Eastern provinces of Bengal followed by a democratic victory that won them more power, a military coup backed by Islamists marched into Eastern Pakistan in 1971 to crush the electoral gains of the Awami League and put down a people insufficiently Islamic. The Pakistani army let loose a sick campaign of rapes and massacres and in response to the crush of refugees fleeing across their border, the Indian army invaded, defeated the Pakistani Army and was received as liberators by the nascent nation of Bangladesh. Muslim had turned on Muslim within the Muslim state and it took a foreign secular army to stop the horror. Casual attention to the back pages of the New York Times reveals bombing campaigns and sectarian religious violence throughout Pakistan to this day, much of it now aimed at the minority Shiite community.

Pakistan never saw fit to apologize for the crimes waged against their fellow Muslims and former citizens and this unacknowledged atrocity defiles and vitiates one of the central tenets of Islam, that of ummah or community. As Karen Armstrong writes in her superb “The Battle for God,” “Concern for the ummah, the Muslim community, is deeply inscribed in the “pillars” (rukn), the five essential practices of Islam, binding on every Muslim, Sunni and Shii alike.” But what is the ummah composed of if there can be no widely accepted definition of what a Muslim is, as Pakistani jurists argued in 1954? What functioning community can encompass elements dedicated to their fellow member’s expulsion and death? The worst elements of Jihadi-Salafism obsess over the kafirs that must be purged from the ummah, and the name of a terror group like Musab al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid (Unity) and Jihad aptly states their mission. Their tactic of beheading fellow Muslims (in addition to foreigners) harkens to traditional Islamic solutions for apostates, and that message is not lost on the Shi’a of Iraq. Is it any wonder then, that the same intra-faith fratricide erupts in even such Sunni strongholds as in Iraq’s Falluja? Despite being besieged by a common enemy that has clumsily incited Muslim rage across the Middle East, indigenous Sunni Arabs killed at least five of their putative allies among the foreign Arabs in Falluja, according to a fascinating article the Washington Post:

One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu
Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi's group. Suri's body
was discovered Sunday. He was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a
carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the
killing.
Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel
the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on
Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including
videotaped beheadings.
"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of
the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," Abu Abdalla Dulaimy,
military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said . . . . Among the
tensions dividing the locals and the foreigners is religion. People in Fallujah,
known as the city of mosques, have chafed at the stern brand of Islam that the
newcomers brought with them. The non-Iraqi Arabs berated women who did not cover themselves head-to-toe in black -- very rare in Iraq -- and violently opposed
local customs rooted in the town's more mystical religious tradition. One
Fallujah man killed a Kuwaiti who said he could not pray at the grave of an
ancestor.
Residents said the overwhelming majority of Fallujah's people also have been repulsed by the atrocities that Zarqawi and other extremists have made
commonplace in Iraq. The foreign militants are thought to produce the car bombs
that now explode around Iraq several times a day, and Zarqawi's organization has
asserted responsibility for the slayings of several Westerners, some of which
were shown in videos posted on the Internet.

Once more, as in Algeria and Pakistan, radical Islam has devolved into nihilism and internecine idiocy. This is not to guarantee that such divisions will ultimately cripple the Iraqi insurgencies, for there is also a nationalist strain (or three) common throughout them, but jihad is clearly an insurgent theology not a viable governing ideology, and the fight against it should ceaselessly utilize this devastating critique in an intellectual engagement with the Islamic world. Imagine the mimetic impact of a widely broadcast message that is amply supported with historical examples and present reality: the ummah is fractured, jihad can not govern, and tawhid can not hold.

- posted by Editor @ 10:04 AM

 
The previous entry is remiss in failing to mention two great accomplishments of the Afghan elections, the high voter turnout and relative lack of violence. The many Afghans who thronged to polls across the nation is heartening and remarkable . . . so too the failure of the Taliban to make good on their vile threats. The latter provokes speculation as to what degree they now lack the military capability and/or are ideologically dislocated and crippled by the democratic appeal of elections. Now that many of the opposition candidates who claimed to boycott the results are modifying their complaints barring the outcome of an investigation into alleged fraud, the results have a better chance of being accepted by all parties willing to participate in a nascent and imperiled democratic experiment. The concern with speed is premised on haste undercutting legitimacy:

Robert Kluyver, an international adviser to the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, said the problem with ink was only one of many problems that surfaced during the day, but that it was hard to gauge how significant they were. Many of the problems, he said, stemmed from inadequate training of poll workers - a situation likely to buttress the case of critics who say the election was rushed to provide a foreign policy success to the Bush administration in advance of November's elections.
"There was a widespread lack of knowledge of procedures by JEMB staff," he said, referring to the Joint Electoral Management Board, "and logistical problems," like a lack of ballot boxes in some stations.

- posted by Editor @ 10:44 AM

 
Of Speed and Suspicion.
Way back in January, the world-weary Algerian diplomat Lahkdar Brahimi, after being called in by the UN and Bush administration to referee the factious Afghani loya jirga, offered up the following observation on the Bush-led efforts to introduce democracy to Afghanistan:

With a chuckle he recalled a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell at the United Nations Security Council. "Colin Powell said to me, `The message is speed, speed, speed,' and I said, `It has to be slow, slow, slow.'
"There is now a very well-meaning and welcome Western interest in supporting democracy everywhere, but they want to do it like instant coffee," he said. "It doesn't happen that way."

Democracy in Afghanistan is an ideal and goal that should be beyond the divisions of Left and Right in Europe and America; the true contentions, as Brahimi hinted at, are over speed, form, method and commitment in implementation. The CIA installed Hamid Karzai, though eloquent in his promotion of democracy, presides over a very weak government limited mostly to Kabul and composed predominantly of minority Tajiks that are only nominally Islamic. The majority Pashtuns, who’ve ruled over Afghanistan for the past 250 years in governments ranging from communist to monarchical, are dangerously under-represented in the central government to date, a clear impediment to establishing nation-wide legitimacy for the Karzai government. That Karzai is America’s favorite in this election fight is of no doubt, but does the present administration have the patience to help him carefully build the sort of institutions, services and support to convey widespread legitimacy? Divisions within the Bush administration over a deep commitment to “nation-building” are revealed in Senator Joseph Biden’s conversations with National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, as related to Josh Marshall from his Talking Points Memo interview:

Sen. Biden: And I can assure you --- my conversation with Condi Rice … was, I said, “Condi…” I meet with her once a week, we're supposed to do telephone not meeting --- it’s a long story --- remember I was the guy saying these guys are full of hubris, they don't talk to us anymore? And then Henry Hyde said it. And then they got a meeting and we got a meeting and it was agreed Joe would meet with her once a week. You know, Mikey will eat the cereal [unintelligible]. And I remember coming out and I remember telling Tony Blinken --- he might know the date or the time.
I said, “You know what she just said to me?” I said, “Condi, we may lose Afghanistan”.
She said, “What do you mean?”
And I said, “Look what's going on in Herat (Western Afghanistan) with Ismail Khan (the pro-Iranian Shiite Warlord).”
She said, “What's the matter.”
I looked at her and I said, “Well, you know …” and I started explaining and she said, “Look, al Qaida's not there. The Taliban's not there. There's security there.”
I said, “You mean turning it over to the warlords?”
She said, “Yeah, it's always been that way.”
So here's the other little piece to --- not confuse you --- but I don't know how you write it. See the other piece that came in here, is you had a split among the neoconservatives, between the nation builders and the guys who said, ‘No, we don't build nations.’

If Biden’s conversations are accurate, then the American government’s dedication to nation building is already compromised and the speed and fairness of elections in Afghanistan fall under some suspicion, especially if widely contested. The CIA has a sordid history of undermining election results (that past American Presidents didn’t care for) throughout the 20th century, in countries as diverse as Chile, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Iran, and Vietnam. Given that history, an active insurgency and the rage throughout the Muslim world of perceptions of American imperialism, shouldn’t a more cautious, thorough and gradualist approach take precedence over speed? This is not to intimate that the Afghan elections have been managed by America’s covert arm but to caution of the need to be above suspicion when burdened by a less than angelic record. Do not first elections set a democratic precedent too valuable to be cavalier with? A counter-argument in favor of speed, perhaps not without merit, would propose that the Karzai government requires a more democratic mantle before it can begin the bloody process of state consolidation and reconstruction against a grim and ugly patchwork of warlords. The problem with this line of reasoning is that his mantle could fray if the Afghani opposition parties continue to contest the first elections since the fall of the Taliban:

“Afghanistan's first direct presidential election was thrust into turmoil hours after it started Saturday when all 15 candidates challenging interim leader Hamid Karzai said they would boycott the outcome because of potential fraud in the system designed to keep voters from casting more than one ballot.”

A few recalcitrant candidates here or there wouldn't be too troublesome but when ALL of the candidates save Karzai are complaining and threatening to boycott the results, then the wages of speed may have soured the goal. Instant coffee can't afford to be bitter.

- posted by Editor @ 1:43 PM