June 15, 2003

The rise of Islamic extremism in the late 1970s coincided with four major events which shook the Islamic world — Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel in 1978, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, all in the year 1979. These events had a far reaching impact on the Muslim Ummah and would have one common strand — the involvement of the United States. Perhaps the defining event was the Afghan war, because it brought about the involvement of many countries — both western and Islamic. More importantly, the Afghan resistance took the colour of a genuine Jihad and saw the active participation of 35,000 fighters from distant lands and caught the imagination of Muslims all over the world. The irony is that this war was led by the United States who armed, trained and financed the Islamic resistance including the now famous Osama bin Laden.

The book War Without End by Dilip Hiro, a specialist on Islam, the Middle East and South Asia, focuses primarily on the rise of Islamic activism in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. These countries are covered in great detail from the 1920s onwards. There are also chapters on early Islam, Orthodox Islam and Sufism and Islam in Modern Times. Also included are the events of September 11 and the American response.

The author states quite correctly that “revival and reform have been recurring phenomena in Islamic history” and are manifested differently according to certain circumstances. As the Muslim world became subservient to the west and exposed to western secular ideas, the situation changed substantially. Now reform acquired the twin task of releasing Islam from fossilized jurisprudence and purging it of the secular concepts under the cloak of modernism.

The credit for conceiving Islam’s “global predicament” and offering solutions must rest with Jamaluddin Afghani whom the author calls the father of the moderm Islamic reformist movement. Jamaluddin Afghani propagated pan-Islamic ideas and called for a jihad against Britain and Russia, the then leading imperialist powers.

He advocated opening up of the long shut doors of ijtehad and called the parliamentary system in line with Islamic tenets. His disciple Mohammad Abdul offered a blueprint of the modern Islamic state along with Muhammad Rashid Rida. It was later left to Hasan al Banna, the creator of the popular political party the Muslim Brotherhood, to give the slogan which included the Quran, Prophet Mohammad, God, martyrdom and constitutional government.

Since the 1970s, Muslim fundamentalists have tried to rally the alienated and under privileged on the basis of Islam which is presented as a religion of justice and equity. In stark contrast are the ruling elite who are often corrupt and un-Islamic and deserve to be overthrown or replaced non-violently, by true believers. The sad fact is that these religious groups are not allowed to function openly and often operate in small cells because of severe state persecution.

This was the case in Iran under the Shah and since the 1980s in Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia. Instead of allowing the moderate Muslim Brotherhood to participate in parliamentary politics, President Hosni Mubarak unleashed a reign of terror using military courts and summary trials. The Brotherhood’s militant offshoots, the Gamaat Islamiya and Al Jihad were so severely repressed that their activists sought refuge abroad.

While Egypt seemingly solved the problem at home, it exported it to other countries. Al Qaeda a comparative latecomer on the Islamist scene set up an international network by merging with Al Jihad in 1998. The author is extremely critical of Egypt and Saudi Arabia for not allowing multi party democracy and violently suppressing freedom of expression — thereby driving underground the disaffection that exists among their nationals.

In Afghanistan, fundamentalism did not flower as a movement but grew in reaction to an attempt by leftist military officers to transform the April 1978 coup into a Marxist revolution. As resistance to the Soviet occupation began, Islamist leaders found that they were not masters of their movement but were deeply dependent on their Muslim neighbours — Pakistan and Iran as well as America and Saudi Arabia who provided the bulk of the funding.

In the 1980s the ISI and the CIA imparted training to the jihadis which included both military skills and political education emphasizing Islam and nationalism. On their return home to Egypt Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries these non Afghan veterans, possessing heightened political consciousness, soon concluded that their countries were totally under American bondage.

It did not take them long to turn their terrorist skills against their own rulers and their real target which was American imperialism. This would culminate in the founding of the Al Qaeda network and the attack on America on September 11, 2001. The wheel had come full circle as throughout the Cold War the United States had co-opted religion and religious groups in their battle against Soviet Communism.

After the events of September 11, the world hoped that American policymakers would examine the root causes of terrorism — poverty, bad governance, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq and the presence of American forces in Saudi Arabia which had prompted Osama bin Laden to launch Al Qaeda. The world expected that the traumatic experience would lead the Bush administration to adopt a multilateralist approach and scrap its unilateralist stance on major issues.

To their horror, the hawks around President Bush started looking for fresh targets like Iraq. France and Germany discovered that the anti terror coalition they had joined was not a forum of equal voices — “more like a meeting hall where Washington assigned exact tasks to each of the coalition members”. And this is exactly what America did in the war against Iraq, bypassing the United Nations and ignoring world outrage. The author concludes that “America should stop indulging in unilateralist actions to fight terror; which would set it on an inexorable course of war without end”.

The book, War Without End, does a good job in explaining the rise of Muslim movements and the desire for reform. However it severely limits itself by largely relying on Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Inexplicably there is little reference to the Iranian Revolution, the civil war in Algeria, the role of Pakistan and no mention at all of Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world.

The book is also a straight narrative of events in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan — this goes on for 400 pages. It is only in the last chapter where an attempt is made at analysis. War Without End could have been more compelling if the narrative had been cut drastically and the analysis more detailed.

War Without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response
By Dilip Hiro
Roli Books. Available at Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi
Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk
Website: www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 81-7436-244-4
513pp. Rs750

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