If ISIS can be said to have a mentor or political philosopher, it is Abu Musab al-Suri, author of a rambling, 1600-page tome entitled The Global Islamic Resistance Call. Published at the end of 2004 as American GIs were advancing on Sunni strongholds in Iraq, al-Suri’s book stresses the futility of trying to combat superior Western military forces directly. Instead, he says, the cause of Islamic resistance is best served by “gang-warfare tactics”. Last month in Paris, we saw what he meant.
As usual, there has been much political posturing over the Paris attacks, most of which has been ill-informed and transparently self-serving. It would be wise to consider al-Suri’s approach to Islamic “resistance” before jumping to any conclusions about the method or the motives for the attacks, or about the nature of the conflict that they embody. It would be wrong, for example, to see the West as the target of the Paris attacks. The target, in fact, was the Muslims of Europe.
To al-Suri, national boundaries mean nothing, especially in the Middle East; what counts is the umma, the community of the faithful. ISIS, by claiming for itself the status of a caliphate, demands the allegiance of the entire umma, and will take all necessary steps to enforce that allegiance. This involves purging the umma of impure elements; hence the atrocities committed in ISIS-controlled territory against Shi’a Muslims, Yazidis, Sufis, Christians, and anyone participating in a secular government or institution. Voting in a democratic election — even for an Islamist candidate — is considered apostasy and grounds for a beheading.
But the biggest threat to ISIS is not internal impurities in the territories it controls, but the assimilation of Islamic communities elsewhere, especially in Europe. Al-Suri criticised the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, not for their barbarity, but because the United States was the wrong target. Europe, with its large Muslim minority, its subservient foreign policy, and its dependence on Arab oil, is the West’s soft underbelly; but it is also the weakest spot in the ISIS project of Islamic purification. The worst thing that could happen to that project would be the assimilation of Europe’s Muslims into a peaceful, multicultural society.
“What ISIS wants is to trigger a [European] civil war,” says Gilles Kepel, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Paris Institute of Political Sciences. Kepel describes al-Suri’s Resistance Call as the provocation of overreaction: “Multiple random attacks will result in lynchings of Muslims, attacks on mosques, aggressions against veiled women, thus provoking a sectarian war that will put Europe to fire and blood.“
The irony here (if we can find any) is that al-Suri does not care who would win such a war, nor how many Muslims would die in it. The European civil war would be an end in itself, because it would prevent the assimilation of the Islamic faithful into a non-Islamic society.
But the worst part is that al-Suri understands very well how many politicians in the West are spoiling for just such a fight. Le Pen in France, Farage in the UK, Voigt in Germany, Trump in America, Abbott in Australia — these xenophobes may never have heard of al-Suri, but they are his disciples and his accomplices. If al-Suri gets his civil war, it will be because of them.
What al-Suri calls gang warfare tactics, others have termed stochastic terrorism. Stochastic terrorism has been defined as “the use of mass communication to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”
We saw a perfect example of stochastic terrorism two weeks after the Paris attacks, when a gunman murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. For weeks, right-wing media pundits had been making wild accusations against Planned Parenthood of selling body parts of aborted babies. No one explicitly said “Go out and shoot them,” but that, predictably, is what happened. No one except the gunman will ever be charged; in stochastic terrorism, the real perpetrators are rarely brought to justice.
In exactly the same way, ISIS propaganda agents disseminate violent and inflammatory videos in the confident expectation that they will incite small groups or lone-wolf individuals to take matters into their own hands. Bombing Syria will not disrupt the dynamics of stochastic terrorism, because there are no dynamics to disrupt. Unlike al-Qaeda or the Taliban, which have top-down command structures, ISIS operates like a social network. The only way to defeat it is to make sure its Islamic purification project fails, and this is, in fact, not difficult.
Islam, like Christianity, is not a single, monolithic religion; it exhibits a broad panoply of beliefs, rituals, and spiritual attitudes. The radical Jihadism represented by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda are only a fringe movement within Wahhabism (the state religion of Saudi Arabia), which is itself a minority current among the Salafists (who want to return to the Islam of the seventh to tenth centuries); and the Salafists are a small minority within the Sunni branch of Islam.
By embracing and supporting the diversity of the umma, especially within Western countries, we not only undercut the Jihadi purge, but we also make allies of the 99% of Muslims who hold ISIS in contempt. These are the only actors who are well-placed to observe and, if necessary, to neutralise the Jihadists among them. They are our only true defence against al-Suri’s stochastic terrorism, and we alienate them at our peril.
Waiheke Island, December 2015
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Copyright © 2015 T. Mark James
This article first
appeared in the Gulf
News,
Waiheke Island, New Zealand, on 10 December 2015.