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Brief Note on the Roots of Modern Terrorism
The debate on the
potential Islamic roots or parallels for the terrorist attacks that took place on
September 11 and before, launched and/or coordinated by groups with Islamic affiliations,
is making me wonder now, despite my having taken part in it, whether we are not putting
too much emphasis on the issue of supposed roots or parallels in Islamic history.
Modern terrorism, when you think about it, seems to have a more western origin than
anything else.
The tendency
itself seems to have begun with the French Revolution but was
launched at earnest with the
development of anarchist and fascist groups in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In my teenage
days, I remember chancing upon an book in an old bookstore that was a translation of a
manual written by an Italian anarchist discussing ways for developing and managing
underground commando cells. But then, it is not exactly a secret for many scholars in the
field of ME studies that most Arab movements for “national liberation” were
actually modeled on known European parties, and that their paramilitary wings were
actually quite western or European in style and organization.
Religion did not
play much of a role in the struggle for national liberation in the Arab World, except
perhaps in providing some personal inspiration for certain small factions, and, in some
cases, some sort of a unifying cover for the various groups involved. Thus, it played a
rather complementary role in a process that was more patriotic and national in
character.
Except for some
instances in Algeria, none of the attacks that were characterized as “terrorist”
by the European authorities in control at the time were suicidal. Suicidal attacks, on the
whole, did not play a role in the struggle for national liberation.
The first major
instances of suicide attacks in modern times that I know of are those of the Japanese
Zero-plane pilots. I know that when I was a teenager I was fascinated by what I thought of
at the time as the “bravery” of those pilots. And I know I was not the only one.
The adoption of “terror tactics” by Arabs came only in the context of the Arab
Israeli struggle and it was mostly carried out by nationalists not religionists. Again, to
my knowledge, religion as an ideology did not play much of a role here.
Suicide bombings
and attacks came into being mainly in South Lebanon. But, there too, they were not only
championed by “religionists.” The list of suicide bombers include people with
Syrian nationalist, communist and Baathist affiliations. The fact that Hizbollah became
more successful in waging this type of warfare, however, does involve an undeniable
religious element. Still, suicide attacks do indeed reflect a new development in ME
history.
The previous
example set by the Order of the Assassin seems to be irrelevant here for the following
reasons (as for the Wahhabis, they never engaged in such operations):
1) The Arabs and Muslims, regardless of their
particular sectarian affiliations, have long become disassociated from that particular
period in their history when the Order of the Assassins flourished. Centuries indeed
separate them from that period. The Medievalism observed in modern Arab and Muslim
societies these days, and all the atavistic and fundamentalist tendencies they inspire, do
not seem to reflect an enduring ideological link to the past, but a psychological one. The
Ottoman and Safavid periods in many ways brought with them a clear ideological break with
the past, the modes of thoughts that prevailed in these periods and those that had
prevailed earlier are remarkably different (But the matter is frankly much too complex to
discuss here, and I do not claim to be an authority, these are simply my observations).
2) More important in this regard is, strictly
speaking, the actual absence of any “suicide attacks” in Islamic history up
until modern times. Strictly speaking, a suicide attack involves achieving one’s own
death in order to achieve the death of others. But, that’s not what happened in
Islamic history. After all, how can you achieve the death of others by slitting your own
throat for instance? Perhaps, for argument’s sake, we can imagine someone drinking
out of a poisoned well in order to appease his would-be victims and encourage them to
follow his example, but I haven’t heard of any such incidents.
The
assassinations carried out by the followers of Hasan as-Sabbah and his successors involved
the risk of almost sure death after the deed is done. But I do not recall reading of any
assassin actually committing suicide after his mission was accomplished. If someone can
supply some accounts where indeed this did happen, this would not seem to represent a
trend, because most of the accounts I remember reading claim that the assassin was killed
by the guards of his victim while trying desperately to escape or simply to inflict as
much damage as possible before his death. We can sense here, then, a trace of the Islamic
prohibition on suicide.
Admittedly, this
is no longer the case. A certain threshold seems to have been crossed by radical Islamic
groups, and even, some Arab national groups. This “threshold” is not simply a
psychological one. From an Islamic point of view, it also represents a juridical
one. Some jurists actually managed to introduce a concept that, in essence and
letter, contravenes the teachings of Islam itself. Here, the attack comes before and is
necessary to the carrying out of the mission. Death is certainly unavoidable here and
suicide is done in a direct and straightforward manner. Still, and because the suicide
attack does provide the “leaders” involved with a certain “new” and
“effective” tool that could, in their opinion, serve their cause, it is no
longer called a suicidal attack but a “martyr operation.”
This new
development, then, is quite a modern one and is in part inspired by precedents in the West
(as far as terror tactics aimed at civilians per se) and far eastern (as far as actual
suicide attacks), and, in an other, by certain amount of “innovation” by certain
Islamic jurists.
This is not,
however, meant as some sort of an apologia for Islam (the need for self-examination and
self-criticism in Islamic culture is now more important than ever). Rather it is meant to
suggest that terrorism does not represent “a clash of civilizations,” as
some are eager to assert, with an atavistic party on the one side and a future-oriented
one on the other. It is rather an internal clash between various interest groups
taking place within the same “pluricultural” global civilization that is
still struggling to achieve a psychological sense of its unity,
having come closer than
ever towards achieving an economic, and even “suprapolitical,” one.
October 5,
2001
A contribution to an electronic forum
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