As a Middle Eastern war approaches, a powerful counter force, fueled by rage, driven by long stewing frustrations and steadied by a blinding faith in its convictions, awaits the U.S., poised to uncoil at the slightest touch.
But it is neither Saddam Hussein’s lethal arsenal, nor his unblinking minions. It is the force of militant, fundamentalist Islam in the Arab world. Well-organized and influential beyond their numbers, militant Islamic leaders and their rank and file have watched the specter of war with Iraq grow, convinced it will be a war they must oppose for a number of reasons, including for their survival.
What does this mean for the U.S. as it readies itself for war in Iraq?
It could mean street rallies not seen in years in Cairo, Amman and Beirut. It could mean a cloud of anger that will descend on the Arab world from newspapers, television stations and mosques. And it may mean a killing here, and an attack there on Americans, Westerners and pro-West Arab officials. The attacks will probably come from individuals, splinter groups or underground cells connected to the Al Qaeda network.
“Obviously, the extremist groups will try to take advantage of the situation,” said Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid, an expert on militant Islam. Osama bin Laden, according to Rashid, thought his attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11 would galvanize the Arab world against America. “They failed at 9/11. They think now that this will be another thing to galvanize the Middle East.”
The militants are not against the war because they love Hussein. They despise Hussein, a secular Arab leader who has rained death and oppression upon foes and who only began acting like a righteous Muslim, building mosques in Baghdad, when his rule seemed imperiled.
The militants fear that after the U.S. conquers Iraq, it will sweep across the Arab Muslim world. And they are convinced that the U.S. and the West will try to remake their view of Islam, which has been in ascendance for the last few decades. This is an Islam that advocates a puritanical, austere view of the world with little tolerance for differences, meshes itself with right-wing politics, and has an unbending belief that the materialism and openness of the U.S. are linked to Satan.
Islamic fundamentalism comes in various degrees, something the West does not fully understand. It ranges from women who want to be veiled out of modesty to Muslim leaders who want to veil women as they plot Muslim retreat inward away from secular society. In most cases, militant Islam, like Christian, Hindu or Jewish fundamentalism, is benign.
But not when it becomes a platform for supporting violence in the name of a sacred struggle.
And as the drumbeat stirred by the militants builds, they have become more assured that theirs is the Arab world’s true voice.
Sheik Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, the militant Palestinian Islamic group, recently declared that any war on Iraq will be “a crusaders’ war” that must be repelled. Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani declared in a recent sermon in Tehran that U.S. troops’ presence in the Persian Gulf is an even worse evil than Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Moderates choose silence
But the U.S. and the West are not the only ones who will suffer from the militants’ reaction to war.
Moderate mainstream Muslims, who have been waging their own war with hard-liners over the soul of their religion, also will lose. As Kuwaiti political scientist Shafeq Ghabra explains, moderates’ losses already have been severe.
“Seeing little hope for change and frustrated by the present order’s inertia, too many activists and intellectuals have given up and have chosen silence,” Ghabra recently wrote. “The moderates and liberals lack the extremists’ organizational structure, their well-organized hierarchy, organizational secrecy and group cohesion.”
Writing recently about the anxiety he feels as war approaches, Khaled al Maaena, editor of Arab News, a prominent Saudi newspaper, also lamented Muslims’ internal squabble and the problems facing Muslim moderates.
“We have allowed the voices of intolerance and extremism to smother the gentler tones of those who prefer to work for inclusiveness and moderation,” he wrote. “Instead of searching for common goals, we have become bogged down in individual differences. This is a pity because the word `Muslim’ denotes no race, ethnicity or national origin. It only indicates the desire to submit to the will of Allah.”
So, as the U.S. plunges into the battle that Muslim moderates have been losing, it might want to consider what it is up against. Militant Islam’s roots reach deep and far. They go way beyond inflamed souls plotting terror in a Cairo basement.
Militant Islam is flourishing because disillusion, humiliation and disappointment inundate the Arab world.
Held back, humiliated
It is growing as Arabs see themselves tied down by old, oppressive and distant Arab leaders, by Western policies and attitudes that stereotype and hamper them, by collapsing economies, and by rigid governmental and other barriers that have blocked them from the fruits of a global life.
“There is a general sense of, `We don’t know what’s next,'” said Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian-born Middle East expert at Georgetown University. In such a climate, “Islamic movements are becoming stronger than the states they are in,” he added.
When Muslims talk about what went wrong, they say that everything else didn’t work, and so there is reason to wrap themselves in Islam. Nationalism, communism, liberalism, socialism–these are the Arab world’s failed dreams, they say.
Even in tiny Qatar, one of the world’s richest nations, a place where poverty is a mirage and the regime is trying to modernize a traditional society, some Qataris lean toward a more militant Islam.
Indeed, Hasan Saleh Ansari, director of the Center for Gulf Studies at Qatar University, talked recently about the causes some of his students now embrace. He sounded defeated.
Everything has failed his students and so they became more Islamic, more conservative, he said.
“We didn’t have anything to give them,” he said. “When you are under pressure you go back to your roots, and our roots are our religion.”
Today, Islamic militants offer more than black-and-white answers to life’s dilemmas, and more than an all-embracing community for those seeking security in an insecure world. They offer an emotional magnet. Their Islam is an armed Islam, an Islam of the sword, an Islam that assures followers of the righteousness of their struggle and promises a reward.
“Islam was something we Arabs didn’t have, didn’t touch, didn’t taste. And so, now that we can, we hunger for it,” said Kemal Rayan, head of the Islamic Association of Israel, a small and more moderate Islamic movement in Israel. “The problem is that only the extremists’ voices are heard and reported,” he added.
This is a moment that Islamic groups relish, said Mohammed Musfir, a professor of political science in Qatar and a former editor of al Watan, a Qatari newspaper. They find themselves in the forefront and stronger than before.
“They have a challenge–the foreign power–and that is why people are rallying to them,” he said.
