Fields of Blood (65 page)

How, then, can we try to understand terrorism as a particular species of violence?

Like religion, “terrorism” is notoriously difficult to define. There are so many competing and contradictory formulations that, according to one scholar, the word is now “shrouded in terminological confusion.”
¹⁴
Part of the problem is that it is such an emotive word, one of the most powerful terms of abuse in the English language, and the most censorious way of characterizing any violent act.
¹⁵
As such, it is never used of anything we do ourselves, except perhaps in some abjectly penitential confession. Connoting more than it denotes, the word stubbornly refuses to reveal much, especially when both sides in a conflict hurl the same charge at each other with equal passion. Its effect is to accuse an opponent much more than to clarify the nature of the underlying conflict.
¹⁶

One attempt at definition describes the phenomenon as “the deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating them specifically or others into a course of action they would not otherwise take.” Yet this could also be said of some forms of conventional warfare.
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Indeed, there is a general scholarly agreement that some of the largest-scale acts of terrorizing violence against civilians have been carried out by states rather than by independent groups or individuals.
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In the national wars of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of civilians were firebombed, napalmed, or vaporized. During the Second World War, Allied scientists carefully calculated the mix of explosives and wind patterns to create devastating firestorms in densely populated residential areas in German and Japanese cities precisely to create terror in the population.
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There is, however, at least one point on which everybody is in agreement: terrorism is fundamentally and inherently political, even when
other motives—religious, economic, or social—are involved.
²⁰
Terrorism is
always
about “power—acquiring it or keeping it.”
²¹
And so, according to one of the pioneering experts in the field, “all terrorist organizations, whether their long-term political aim is revolution, national self-determination, preservation or restoration of the status quo, or reform, are engaged in a struggle for political power with a government they wish to influence and replace.”
²²
The claim that the primary motivation of a terrorist action is political may seem obvious—but not to those who seem determined to regard such atrocious acts of violence as merely “senseless.” Many of that view, not surprisingly, find religion, which they regard as a byword for irrationality, to be the ultimate cause. One of the most prominent is
Richard Dawkins, who has argued that “only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.”
²³
This dangerous oversimplification springs from a misunderstanding of both religion and terrorism. It is, of course, a familiar enough expression of the secularist bias of modernity, which has cast “religion” as a violent, unreasonable force that must be excluded from the politics of civilized nations.
²⁴
Somehow it fails to consider that all the world’s great religious traditions share as one of their most essential tenets the imperative of treating others as one would wish to be treated oneself. This, of course, is not to deny that religion has often been implicated in terrorist atrocities, but it is far too easy to make it a scapegoat rather than trying to see what is really going on in the world.

The first act of
Islamic terrorism to grab the world’s attention was the murder of President
Anwar Sadat, winner of the
Nobel Peace Prize, hero of the
Camp David Accords, and widely regarded in the West as a progressive Muslim leader. Western peoples were aghast at the ferocity of the attack. On
October 6, 1981, during a parade celebrating
Egypt’s victories in the October War of 1973, First Lieutenant
Khaled Islambouli jumped out of his truck, ran toward the presidential stand, and opened fire with a machine gun, shooting round after round into Sadat and killing seven people besides the president and injuring twenty-eight others. His political motivation was clearly regime change, but revolutionary fervor was fused with Islamic sentiment. At his trial Islambouli gave three reasons for murdering Sadat: the suffering of Egyptian Muslims under
his tyrannical rule; the
Camp David Accords; and Sadat’s imprisonment of Islamists a month earlier.

A bevy of Western princes, politicians, and celebrities attended Sadat’s funeral, but no
Arab leaders were present, and the streets of
Cairo were eerily silent—a very different scene from the tumultuous lamentations at Nasser’s funeral. Western politicians had admired Sadat’s peace initiative, but many people in Egypt regarded it as opportunistic and self-serving, especially since, three years after Camp David, the plight of the
Palestinians had not improved. Sadat had also won Western approval by switching to the “right” side of the
Cold War, dismissing the fifteen hundred
Soviet advisers installed by Nasser in 1972 and announcing an “Open Door” policy designed to bring Egypt into the
capitalist free market.
²⁵
But, as in
Iran, while a few entrepreneurs flourished, local businessmen were ruined when foreign imports flooded the markets. Only 4 percent of the young could find a decent job, and housing was so expensive that couples often had to wait years before they could marry. No longer able to afford living in their own country, thousands of Egyptians went to work in
Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states, sending money home to their families.
²⁶
The social dislocation of the abrupt Westernization of Sadat’s Egypt was also disturbing. As one observer tried to explain, it was impossible for an Egyptian peasant to maintain his dignity as “a culture bearer in his own culture” when, after a day’s toiling in the hot sun, he had to stand in line for a frozen American chicken and spend the evening in front of the television set purchased with money sent by his son from Saudi Arabia, watching the antics of J. R. Ewing and Sue Ellen on
Dallas.
²⁷

The devout element of Egyptian society felt especially betrayed by Sadat. At first, anxious to create an identity for his regime that was distinct from Nasser’s, he had courted them, releasing the
Muslim Brothers from prison, encouraging Muslim student associations to wrest the campuses away from the socialists and Nasserites, and styling himself the Pious President. There was much mosque building and plenty of airtime devoted to religion. But there was nothing Islamic about Open Door. This was blatant structural violence, which revealed the hollowness of Sadat’s devout stance, since he had created conditions of inequity explicitly condemned by the
Quran. The president discovered that his economic and political assault on the Egyptian people had inadvertently
spawned political Islamist movements that were dangerously hostile to his regime.

One of these was the
Society of Muslims, founded in 1971 by
Shukri Mustafa, a member of the
Muslim Brotherhood, after his release from prison.
²⁸
He would be one of the most misguided “free lances” that stepped into the vacuum created by the ulema’s marginalization. By 1976 the Society had about two thousand members, men and women convinced that they were divinely commissioned to build a pure ummah on the ruins of Sadat’s jahiliyyah. Taking
Qutb’s program in
Milestones
to the limit, Shukri declared not only the government but the entire Egyptian population to be apostate, and he and his followers withdrew from the mainstream, living in caves in the desert outside
Cairo or in the city’s most deprived neighborhoods. Their experiment ended in violence and lethal immorality when members killed defectors from the group and Shukri murdered a respected judge who had condemned the Society. Yet deeply misguided as it was, Shukri’s society held up a mirror image that revealed the darker side Sadat’s regime. Shukri’s excommunication of Egypt was extreme, but in
Quranic terms, Sadat’s systemic violence was indeed jahili. The hijrah to the most desperate quarters of Cairo reflected the plight of many young Egyptians who felt there was no place for them in their country; the society’s communes were supported by young men who, like so many others, were sent to work in the Gulf States. The Society condemned all secular learning as a waste of time, and there was a grain of truth in this since a lady’s maid in a foreign household could earn more than a junior lecturer.

Far more constructive than the Society of Muslims, however, were the
jamaat al-islamiyyah,
the student organizations that dominated the university campuses during Sadat’s presidency, which tried to help themselves in a society that ignored the needs of the young. By 1973 they had organized summer camps at nearly all the major universities, where students could immerse themselves in an Islamic milieu, studying the Quran, keeping night vigils, listening to sermons about the Prophet, and attending classes in sport and self-defense—creating an Islamic alternative to the inadequacies of the secular state.
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On the lamentably ill-equipped campuses, they segregated the sexes during lectures, where several students often had to share a single seat, in order to protect women from harassment and arranged study hours in the mosque, which was quieter than the overcrowded halls of residence. Those who came from rural
backgrounds and were experiencing life in a modern city for the first time were now able to make their way to modernity in a familiar Islamic setting.

Student protests became more aggressive as Sadat drew closer to the West and became more autocratic. In 1978 he issued the Law of Shame: any deviation in thought, word, or deed from the establishment was to be punished with loss of civil rights and confiscation of passports and property. Citizens were forbidden to join any group, take part in any broadcast, or publish anything that would threaten “national unity or social peace.” Even a casual remark, made in the privacy of one’s own home, would not go unpunished.
³⁰
In response to government oppression, at the
University of Mina students started vandalizing Christian churches—associated with Western
imperialism—and attacking those who wore Western dress. Sadat closed down the jamaat, but suppression nearly always makes such movements more extreme, and some students joined a clandestine movement dedicated to armed
jihad.
Khaled
Islambouli had studied at the University of Mina and joined one of these cells. Shortly before his assassination, Sadat had rounded up over fifteen hundred opposition figures in September 1981, including cabinet ministers, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and ulema as well as Islamists; one of the latter was Khaled’s brother Muhammad.
³¹

The ideology of Sadat’s murderers had been shaped by
Abd al-Salam Faraj, spiritual guide of the
Jihad Network, who was executed with Khaled in 1982. His treatise,
The
Neglected Duty,
had been circulated privately among members of the organization and was published after the assassination. This plodding, graceless, and ill-informed document also shows how misguided the secularizing reformers had been to deprive the people of adequate religious guidance. Faraj was another freelancer: he had graduated in electrical engineering and had no expertise in Islamic law. But it seems that by the 1980s, the maverick ideas that he was expressing had spread, unchecked by the sidelined ulema, until they were widely accepted in society. The “neglected duty” of the title was aggressive jihad.
Muslims, Faraj argued, had been convinced by feeble-minded apologists that fighting was permissible only in self-defense. Hence Muslims were living in subjection and humiliation and could recover their dignity only by resorting to arms. Sadat was no better than an infidel because he ruled by the “laws of unbelief” imposed on the ummah by the colonialists.
³²
Despite their apparent orthodoxy, Sadat
and his government were a pack of apostates who deserved to die. Faraj cited
Ibn Taymiyyah’s
fatwa against the
Mongol rulers, who, just like Sadat, had been Muslims only in name. In the time of
al-Shafii, Muslims had feared only an external attack; now infidels were actually ruling the ummah. In order to create a truly Islamic state, therefore, jihad was
fard ayn,
the duty of every able-bodied Muslim.