KARACHI
- From a new United States angle, the 9-11 Commission
report stresses two highly significant points. First,
the "war against terror" is a misconceived description
and the real enemy is religious extremism. Second,
Pakistan is both a problem and a necessary part of the
solution.
Going into the origins and history of
Islamic extremism is for scholars, but something needs
to be said about the extent and recent history of
Islamic extremism. The geography of Islamic extremism
can help determine some of the parameters of the war
against extremism that uses terror as a tactic.
Several countries have, in the current
phase, played a major role in producing Islamic extremism
that is now using terror as a weapon, and not against the
US alone, but also against such countries as Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan.
Islamic extremism as such was always
there, but the Pakistani contribution is to make it
politically oriented and spread it as an intellectual
construct. In this, Pakistan's Jamaat-i-Islami and the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood are the true architects of
the ideology of Islam with which the US government is
now gearing up for a long fight.
The new rampant
"Islamic Ideology" comprises several components. One of
them is a romanticized history mixed with an activist
view of Islamic tenets, especially extending the concept
of jihad to situations arising from the Islamic world's
domination by European colonialists.
The old
grandeur of Islam has been replaced with a feeling and
consciousness of impotence in the midst of a resurgent
West. This gave birth to an equally romantic sentiment
of pan-Islamism.
But the result was the
totalitarian set of concepts summed up by the rousing
slogan that Islam provides a complete code of life from
cradle to grave for individual Muslims, as well as for a
reunited ummah (the community of all Muslims).
The best exponents of this ideology were the
Pakistani scholar Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, though most
Arabs regard Maulana Hassan al-Banna as its main
philosopher.
This ideology was the Islamic
traditionalists' reaction to the Russian Revolution of
1917. Maududi set out to create an alternative and came
up with, in many respects, a carbon copy of communism,
especially its totalitarian methodology.
The
second pillar of "Islamic Ideology" is the idea of
pan-Islamism with a revivalist drive for gaining power.
Pan-Islamism has gone through many phases and has been
frequently used by various forces, including British
colonialists. For instance, it was used during the
Ottoman Caliphs' fatwa (ruling) during World War
I - where it was stated that rebelling against British
rule in India was not permissible for Muslims.
The third pillar that has been provided by Saudi
Arabia and the US government is the availability of
ample funds.
It is optional to regard the role
of the US as the fourth pillar with the start of the
Afghan war against the then Soviets in the 1980s. Saudi
and Western funds created a cadre of 300,000 jihadis,
well supplied with an assortment of weapons.
The
internal politics of both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have
also played a significant role.
Especially true
is the inspiration gained by al-Qaeda through the social
and political conditions in Saudi Arabia. Many Saudis
are rebelling against the hereditary monarchy that
imposes an extra-austere religiosity, known as Wahhabism
or Salafiism.
In Pakistan, religious leaders
scented power from the birth of the nation in 1947. That
conferred on them the argument: if Islam was the main
cause of Pakistan's creation, then it had to be an
Islamic state of the kind Maududi advocated. Pakistan's
secular governments have not had the courage to rebut
this.
In
the current geography of Islamic extremism,
the phenomenon is truly international. Its more
modern segments are of Arab origin, with some support
from religious extremists from across the Afro-Asian
land mass, some of whom live in the West.
Insofar as funding is concerned, there is no doubt that
the Arabs have the money and could be the only source of
funding.
But Pakistan's contribution in terms of
human resources has been massive. Its human material was
never well versed with the modern world and comprised
mainly traditionalists of a feudal society, particularly
the Afghans, though some Western-educated doctors,
engineers and scientists also fell victims to the charms
of ideology.
The real enemy of the US government
today is Islamic extremism and it is imperative to
distinguish this war from the general notions of the
so-called "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the
West or a war against Muslims.
The US has to
realize that this is a war for the hearts and minds of
Muslims and that the task of fighting ideology is a huge
one.
The US government is up against
old-fashioned Islamic scholars trapped in centuries-old
thinking. These scholars, in turn, have been assisted by
pan-Islamic sentiments and the intellectual requirements
of local and anti-colonial struggles.
In this
war, the most important theater will be Pakistan. True,
Pakistan's social structure and the complexities of its
politics - mostly for the US - present handicaps. But
while it has acted in recent decades as the world
headquarters of the coming "Islamic Revolution", it also
has human material to counter it.
For that to
happen, though, it must be suitably assisted by the
West. Help must also be sought from intellectuals in
neighboring India to bring about more modern thought
into Pakistan.
