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Article Excerpt
This paper considers the problem of defining and describing terrorism associated with contemporary "political" or "radical" Islam and the statements of Osama bin Laden that ostensibly justify global jihad. The author's moral assessment considers the task of comparative jurisprudence that includes reasoning in Islamic jurisprudence. Given bin La-den's appeal to Islamic sources, attention needs to be paid to the authority of the Hanbali school of law and the jurist Ibn Taymiyya as these relate to the justification of global jihad. The article concludes that these sources provide political Islamists "just cause" to wage a defensive global jihad on behalf of global Islamic solidarity of the ummah, defensive insofar as these actions arc taken against Western "imperialism" and American hegemony. This points to the need for American politicians to rethink the policy of waging what is called the global war on terrorism.
INTRODUCTION: DEFINING "TERRORISM"
While arguing against the possibility of justifying terrorism under any circumstances, philosopher Haig Khatchadourian observes that it is problematic to define "terrorism," though he allows that terrorism may be described, more or less adequately. (1) Definition (in the Aristotelian sense of stating the formula of the "essence" of the thing) seems inapplicable insofar as it remains unclear what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for something "to be" terrorist. A further problem with achieving a reasonably practical definition, Khatchadourian rightly notes, is that the term is almost always loaded when used; it carries with it the prejudice of referring to something condemnatory, such that acts of terrorism are on their face understood to be morally indefensible, thus morally impermissible acts, all of the time, and individuals who commit such acts are accounted morally blameworthy in every instance. (2) In this sense, as Khatchadourian observes correctly, terrorism is understood to be "morally unjustifiable by definition." Thus, on this view, if there is any ethical assessment to be had, it is completed with the very act of identification: To say, "X is a terrorist act," is to imply, "X is morally indefensible, thus morally impermissible, and agent A who commits X is morally blameworthy."
Yet, surely there is something wrong with this approach to the phenomenon "terrorism" inasmuch as this approach by way of definition assumes too much too soon. That is, this condemnatory prejudice does not give to alleged terrorists their due in fair ethical evaluation. They may claim (as they sometimes do) that they act with just cause, in which case the rationale they adduce is subject to moral assessment. Of course, unquestionably it is to be granted to those who adhere to the definitional approach that an act of terroism presents presents itself as an act of violence, even as organized violence, to be granted as well. To be granted as well such acts sometimes have the consequence of shaking the faith of ordinary citizens who are members of a targeted political collective (e.g., a nation-state) as they wonder about their government's effectiveness in securing them against such violence. However, it is arguable that adherents of such a definition of terrorism are correct in claiming that terrorist acts are "carried out senselessly or irrationally." It is arguable, moreover, that these acts are committed "with dedicated indifference to existing legal and moral codes," even as it is arguable that terrorists claim "special exemption from conventional social norms." (3) However, to claim a just cause is to assert a rational basis for those acts of violence, often with dedicated commitment to an existing legal and moral code. The analytical task then becomes one of being informed by comparative jurisprudence. This is especially so in the case of terrorism attributed to "radical" or "political" Islam. Here the comparative approach cannot merely privilege Western jurisprudence, even though some "Muslims who write on international law do so with an awareness that public international law, a product of Western culture, is universally entrenched as the normative standard and will be used to judge Islamic legal doctrines, which will be deemed defective if they violate the international norms." (4) Instead, there is a need to consider the arguments adduced as they draw upon the juridical bases of Islamic belief from within the Islamic sources as such. (5)
THE ISLAMIC CONTEXT OF GLOBAL JIHAD/GLOBAL "TERRORISM"
To construe terrorism merely by way of definition in the terms represented in the preceding section, is to misrepresent the terrorist's reasoning and, thereby, to fail to give a proper moral accounting. More to the point, however, the definitional approach discloses a moral prejudice insofar as it privileges (without argument) a legal or moral code of European/Western jurisprudence to the exclusion of another's (the terrorist's) legal or moral code--e.g., the moral code ostensibly having its source in Islamic law, in hadith and shari'ah.(6) Equally important, whenever this exclusion occurs with reference to alleged terrorists who are confessed Muslims and whose "terrorist" acts are grounded in overt appeals to Islamic injunction, there is a general tendency among Westerners to aggregate without making requisite distinctions. Thus, for example, while it is true that Islam is the "religion of the majority in the Islamic world," as Ralph Coury reminds, "this does not mean that Islamic societies are constituted by an Islamic essence that has been everywhere decisive and the same." (7)
It matters to any moral assessment of terrorism such as that associated with Al Qaeda that Muslims have varied reactions to political modernity construed as a product of Eurocentric concepts, categories, and a history of arrogant colonial administrations, even as it is clear that "political Islam is in part a defense against continuing secularization." However, when one is witness to such "defensive" postures, one cannot in fairness look upon such expressions of political Islam thereby to distinguish between "good Muslim" and "bad Muslim" and, on the face of it, assert that "bad Muslims" are responsible for terrorism whereas "good Muslims'" do no such thing. (8) As Mahmood Mamdani opines, to discriminate thus is to transmit a message: "All Muslims [are] now under obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war against 'bad Muslims'." (9) Mamdani reminds, and thereby clarifies, that "Judgments of 'good' and 'bad' refer to Muslim political identities, not to cultural or religious ones.'" Thus, "There are no readily available 'good' Muslims split off from 'bad' Muslims, which would allow for the embrace of the former and casting off of the latter, just as there are no 'good' Christians or Jews split off from 'bad' ones. The presumption that there arc such categories masks a refusal to address our own failure to make a political analysis of our times." (10) That failure manifests itself also when such Muslims are dubbed not only as radical but as suffering from "paranoid vision," as if somehow all is to be explained in terms of some psychopathology suffered by individual terrorists and as if there can be no reasonable justification for their violence. (11)
Robert D. Crane shares Mamdani's perspective, independently writing:
A guerrilla war has been raging among both Muslims and non-Muslims and between the two groups over whether liberal Muslims are the good guys and conservative Muslims arc the bad guys, or vice versa. Is there such a thing as a moderate, progressive, or liberal Islam? Or is the very concept of such a hyphenated Islam subversive of everything Islamic? Nobody should object to being defined as a moderate, unless this is a codeword for "progressive" or "liberal" by secularist standards. Similarly, no one should object to be considered a conservative as long as this is a codeword for "traditionalist" in the sense of respecting the centuries of ijtihad or critical thought by the greatest minds in the world dedicated to preserving the purity of divine revelation. (12)
Crane adds:
The most important criterion for dealing with all the loaded terminology that infects discussion by or about Muslims is whether the writers are adopting the American modernist baggage of philosophical relativism. Modernism, in all of its various disguises, is the worship of the secular world by denying the purposefulness and sacredness of what Allah has created. It is the attempt to de-sacralize reality. Such modernism is dangerous not only because it constitutes an attack on Islam but because it denies the very purpose of America's founding and the purpose of all divine revelation throughout the ages. (13)
Clearly, the tendency to identify recent "terrorism" with a "fundamentalist" Islam and to prefer the prospect of "Islamic democracy" over a more traditionalist "political" Islam contraposes modernist Eurocentric prejudices and traditional Islam as if the latter must necessarily and inevitably defer to the former in the interest of a "civilizing" reform of a long-antiquated mode of life. (14) But, it is precisely this assumption that is challenged by political Islamists, (15) and it is a challenge that merits our serious attention if contemporary terrorist acts arc to be evaluated properly relative to applicable moral criteria. Hasan al-Turabi, head of the Arab Islamic Conference, draws a relevant distinction, e.g., when he reminds: "Western democracy is based on non-religious secularist rule, although it should properly be implemented as part of religious government. Islam, on the other hand, draws no distinction between the private and the public domains, between the realm of God and that of man ... [In] Western democracies, it is the people who are sovereign, a sovereignty which is absolute. In Islam, it is God who is sovereign and who delegates his authority to the umma [the global Islamic community] through a khalifa [Caliphate]." (16) This latter point is especially telling insofar as a prominent Islamist scholar such as Sayyid Qutb identifies popular sovereignty as a "foundational transgression of human hubris"--hubris precisely insofar as it is "a rejection of Allah's sovereignty [hakimiyya]" thus a "deviation" (jahiliyya) from the Islamic way. (17) For traditionalists, "Denial of divine sovereignty is the source of moral corruption" in the contemporary world, informed as it is by modern European rationalism that serves Western hegemony against Islamic culture. (18)
The foregoing makes it clear that moral assessment of global terrorism associated with "fundamentalist" Islamic faith, if it is to be judicious in its analysis and conclusions, cannot ignore the historical basis of Islamic protest and Islamic self-assertion in the face of Western hegemony. As Bassam Tibi reminds, "the modern history of the Middle East begins with the encounter with European colonialism." (19) And, it is noteworthy that "Since the end of World War II, Islamic fundamentalism has grown throughout the fifty-three member-states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference." (20) Commenting on "resistance to foreign control in the Middle East," Rashid Khalidi stresses the importance of understanding the perspective of the colonized: "Histories of the Western subjugation of the Middle East have tended to focus mainly on how this region fit into the overall process of European global expansion, the crucial decisions about intervention that were taken in the various imperial capitals, the rivalries between the great powers, and the nature of the colonial systems they set up. Considerably less attention has been paid to the degree of resistance that this process engendered, and to the stubborn perseverance and changing forms of this resistance." (21) Yet, when one does pay attention to the history of this resistance, one understands, as Khalidi clarifies, that "Although the motivation of these Middle Eastern men and women was denigrated and demeaned in colonial accounts as 'fanaticism', rather than being seen as patriotism and a desire for freedom, it should not be hard to understand this region-wide resistance in different form over more than a century and a half in terms of a natural opposition to the imposition of alien rule." (22)
The fact is that a desire for freedom from colonial rule is wholly compatble with a genuine commitment to Islam, even as political Islamists chalenge political modernity generally and colonial rule specifically in an effort to safeguard Islamic culture. Theirs is a quarrel with European modernity with a fervent appeal to the authority of the ancients of Islam (al-salaf) who yet speak to what is essential to the achievement of moral rectitude in the present. (23) As others have reminded, despite dismissive critiques of their claims to Islamic piety, Al Qaeda terrorists affirm a Salafi perspective, according to which "centuries of syncretic cultural and popular religious rituals and interpretations [have] distorted the purity of the message of God [Allah]," in which case they claim that, "only by returning to the example of the prophet and his companions can Muslims achieve salvation." (24) In short, "the label 'Salafi' is thus used to connote 'proper (7) religious adherence and moral legitimacy, implying that alternative understandings are corrupt deviations from the straight path of Islam." On the face of it, the rejection of syncretism by Salafis is in that very moment also an affirmation of Islamic orthodoxy and orthopraxis, notwithstanding the debate internal to Islamic scholarship past and present over what counts as orthodoxy of belief and practice. Inasmuch as this debate is parallel to a similar debate within Judaism (Hasidic, Orthodox, neo-orthodox, Reconstructionist, Conservative, Reform) and Christianity (Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Anglican/Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Evangelical) over the centuries, the Salafi movement is not a perspective simply to be dismissed out of hand as "fringe extremism" within Islam. If, as Islamic law scholar Joseph Schacht instructed, "we must not think of the ancient lawyers and theologians [of Islamic faith] as fanatical persons with closed minds," then neither ought we to dismiss with prejudice those of the present who appeal to the authority of this tradition of interpretation. (25) Traditionalist accounts of Islam have their place in the ongoing clarification of Islamic self-understanding, a task which all confessant Muslims may properly engage and answer as a matter of sustained commitment to Islamic theology (kalam) and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh)--a task of self-understanding that stands against the religious and secular contestations that have long been championed by non-Muslims (specifically Christians) as part of the presumptively "civilizing" mission of European powers--cspecially in the Middle East, the Arabian...
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