RELIGIOUS TERRORISM

To fight in defence of religion and belief is a collective duty; there is no other duty after belief than fighting the enemy who is corrupting our life and our religion.
(Ibn Taymiyya, c. 1300)

At the end of the 20th century, the world faced a revival of religious fundamentalism, a puzzling development to many who had assumed that the process of secularization was, however uneven, an irreversible one. The long-standing liberal assumption that the rise of modern society and the demise of religion were two sides of the same coin was suddenly thrown into doubt; and the shock effect of this was soon registered in writing on terrorism, where religion had been confidently consigned to the margins of terrorist motivation. The leading early studies, such as Walter Laqueur’s in 1977 or Grant Wardlaw’s a decade later, were determinedly political. (Wardlaw deliberately entitled his book Political Terrorism: it is interesting that he did not mention religious motivation even to exclude it – as he did terror for ‘criminal or personal ends’ – from the scope of his study.)

In the 1980s, terrorism was still the business of a handful of radical revolutionaries and some all-too-familiar nationalists. The next ten years, however, saw a remarkable shift. One of the leading surveys in the late 1990s asserted that ‘the religious imperative for terrorism is the most important defining characteristic of terrorism today’, while the author of an American college textbook on terrorism put ‘religious fanaticism’ top of her list of terrorist motives. Official assessments reflect this too; for instance, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service 2000 Public Report stated that ‘one of the prime motivators of contemporary terrorism is Islamic religious extremism’. Ten years later, ‘the threat from Islamist extremism’ remained the ‘priority concern’. And while the US State Department remains unshakably regional-political in orientation, and still does not isolate religion as a category in its statistical breakdown – though it hangs determinedly on to international ‘state-sponsored’ terrorism – its Patterns of Global Terrorism has noted as one of the key trends ‘a change from primarily politically motivated terrorism to terrorism that is more religiously or ideologically motivated’. Some of the most urgent concerns of security agencies now, such as the kind of suicidal commando-style attack launched by Lashkar e-Tayyiba in Mumbai in November 2008, have been overwhelmingly the work of religious groups.

In fact, the longest chapter in Bruce Hoffman’s Inside Terrorism, an authoritiative recent study by the head of the Rand Corporation’s terrorism research unit, is devoted to religion. Pointing out that none of the eleven identifiable terrorist groups that had been operating in 1968 could be classified as religious, Hoffman notes that the first ‘modern’ religious terrorist groups did not appear until around 1980. (He is using ‘modern’ here in the purely temporal sense.) By 1994, however, fully one-third (16 out of 49) of known terrorist groups ‘could be classified as religious in character and/or motivation’, and this proportion leapt again the following year to almost half (26 out of 56).

How far this reflects a change of perception as well as of reality is difficult to say; it is tempting to suggest that the phenomenon – or myth – of ‘international terrorism’, which was looking rather threadbare even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, found a replacement ‘evil empire’ as alarming, and maybe more plausibly international than the original. For it is undoubtedly Islam in particular rather than religion in general that engrosses Western attention: the fierce Binyamin Netanyahu, writing in the mid-1980s (ten years before he became a hawkish prime minister of Israel), typically focused only on ‘Islam and Terrorism’: ‘in recent years few terrorists have matched the international prominence of those backed by the more extreme proponents of Islamic fundamentalism …’. A decade later, under the impact of a stream of attacks by Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others – many of them responses to the Jewish settlement programme fostered by Netanyahu himself – and culminating in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1994, that prominence had become overwhelming. The 11 September 2001 attack, of course, virtually blanked out all other terrorist activity: the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida became the ‘war on terrorism’.

Religion and violence

Hoffman’s terminology does raise some vital questions – not least the meaning of the description ‘religious’. His definition, ‘having aims and motivations reflecting a predominant religious character or influence’, sounds like a Rand Corporation database criterion, and still leaves us wondering how we can measure the religious dimension of motivation. Hoffman gets closer to this when he goes on to propose the core characteristics of religious terrorism. First, it has a transcendental function rather than a political one: it is ‘executed in direct response to some theological demand or imperative’. Second, unlike secular terrorists, religious terrorists often seek ‘the elimination of broadly defined categories of enemies’ and are undeterred by the politically counterproductive potential of indiscriminate killing. Finally, and crucially, they are not attempting to appeal to any other constituency than themselves.

This may indeed have terrifying implications: ‘a sanctioning of almost limitless violence against a virtually open-ended category of targets’. But does it make sense to call this kind of violence terrorism? If we see terrorism as in some sense instrumental, it is hard to relate it to these motives. As Hoffman makes clear, its aim is elimination rather than persuasion (however indirect). The intended consequences of these acts simply cannot be delivered by anyone now alive. The object is, rather, a kind of cosmic revolution.

The fact that a number of writers, critical of the ‘conventional wisdom’ which holds that terrorism is a recent phenomenon, have invoked the long history of religious violence may also give us pause. The Muslim Cult of Assassins of the 12th and 13th centuries, like the Jewish Zealots of the firsst, have been enrolled for this genealogical purpose. But the suggestion that religious violence is analogous to modern terrorism throws into relief some serious issues. While the exact processes of modern terrorism may often be obscure, their core principle is the modern assumption that society can be changed by human agency. The practitioners of religious violence do not appear to be working on this assumption. The Assassins, for instance, although they were concerned with social change – the lapse of society from earlier standards of religious observance – were not concerned to convert people by direct action. Rather, they were testifying before God, a bilateral relationship which actually excluded the rest of the world.

A thoughtful comparative analysis of three religious groups, the Zealots, Assassins, and Thugs, by David Rapoport, indicates at least as many differences as similarities between them, particularly in the matter of intention. The Zealots may have aimed to provoke a general Jewish uprising against Roman rule, and thus have mixed (in Laqueur’s phrase) ‘messianic hope with political terrorism’. Getting at motives is difficult here, as so often, because the available commentaries – in this case Josephus – are hostile or sceptical; but the marked element of messianism and the joyful embrace of martyrdom in the surviving accounts indicate a tangential relationship to politics. (Self-sacrifice can be a potent weapon in addressing a moral community, but is not necessarily related to earthly outcomes.) Likewise, the Assassins, whom one eminent Islamist describes as the first group to use ‘political terror’ in a ‘planned systematic fashion’, adopted a distinctly sacramental and suicidal method of killing governors, caliphs – and one Crusader king – with daggers in public on significant religious days. One study of political murder suggests that they ‘contributed to the shaping of attitudes and behaviour no longer those of antiquity’, but is cautious about what these were. Thagi (or Thuggee) – the cult of highway stranglers whom the British authorities in 19th-century India eventually suppressed – appears even further distanced from political action, in that its choice of victims was totally inscrutable to outsiders (and possibly the ‘Thugs’ themselves). Hinduism provides no scope for believing that society can be transformed, and hence for political action; at most the Thugs, in imagining themselves obligated to keep the world in balance, may be seen as defenders of the established order.

Destruction or persuasion?

Rapoport recognized that ‘virtually all modern conceptions of terrorism assume that the perpetrators only mean to harm their victims incidentally’. This conception of indirect coercion is indeed vital to any view of terrorism as a rationally comprehensible instrumental process; but religious violence, as he shows, lacks this special dimension. It leaves the business of changing things up to God. In spite of all this, Rapoport remains concerned to maintain the analogy between premodern and modern terrorism, but to do so he has to characterize terrorism in a very elementary way. In fact, he writes of ‘terror’ and ‘terror groups’ rather than terrorism, and his key criterion is ‘extranormality’: the committing of ‘atrocities, acts that go beyond the accepted norms and immunities that regulate violence’; ‘extranormal or extramoral violence’; or more recently, ‘violence which goes beyond accepted moral restraints’.

This emphasis on extranormality, as he notes, was (apparently firmly) established as a key element in the function of terror by the early analysts of terrorism, only to be reduced or removed by more recent writers. We may certainly accept that religious violence is exceptionally transgressive of social norms – particularly of modern expectations that violence will have some rationally comprehensible basis. So it may well be that religious violence can be characterized as ‘terror’; but here it may perhaps be particularly important to maintain a distinction between terror and terrorism. However alarming religious violence may be, religious objectives – as explained by Hoffman and others – may lie outside the strategic scope of the concept, since they are beyond human agency. Even where an economic calculus is invoked, as in Osama bin Laden’s assertion that ‘more than $1 trillion losses resulted from these blessed attacks on 9/11’, and that ‘we are continuing this policy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy’, the scale of the task must exceed any reasonable expectation. (But of course ‘nothing is too great for Allah’.)

Is Netanyahu’s remark that ‘terrorism is uniquely pervasive in the Middle East, the part of the world in which Islam is dominant’ an insinuation too far? It is also the part of the world that has produced more than one Jewish terrorist movement; while in the wake of the Oklahoma bombing – until 9/11 the most murderous ‘terrorist’ act of all time – we can hardly fail to see the destructive potential of Christian fundamentalism in the West itself. But it is not surprising that there has been an intense debate about whether Islam is a religion especially conducive to violent action. Samuel Huntington’s idea that the upsurge of Islamist terrorism was a symptom of a ‘clash of civilizations’ met with a chorus of official disapproval, but it certainly mirrored the jihadis’ own view. Their ultimate aim is a total transformation of the world.

Religion into politics

It is possible that the very idea of fixing boundaries between religious and ethnic motivation is problematic, since these boundaries are highly permeable. How, for instance, should we measure the religious symbolism evident in EOKA graffiti in Cyprus, or in the gable-end paintings of ‘mass rocks’ in republican Belfast? Indeed, the very notion of isolating the ‘religious’ element in the motivation of a group, to establish whether or not it is ‘predominant’, is rooted in Western political culture, with its sharp division between church and state, sacred and secular. It may have limited value even in the West, where the syndrome of sacral or ‘holy nationalism’ has been far more pervasive than most people have recognized. It can only be applied to other cultures with extreme caution. In the case of ‘primitive’ animist religions, the impossibility of circumscribing the spiritual sphere is well understood, maybe because peoples such as the Nuer of the Sudan have always been studied by anthropologists – nowadays a very sophisticated bunch. Islam, on the other hand, which has been the province of Western experts called ‘Orientalists’, ‘Arabists’, or ‘Islamists’, with a rather heterodox disciplinary background, has tended to bamboozle Western analysts. It has been argued that the relative neglect of Islamic studies stems from the fact that Islam does not conform to expectations raised by the idea that it followed in the footsteps of other ‘religions of the book’. Expecting it to follow a progressive sequence from Judaism and Christianity, Westerners failed to grasp the strength of the ancient Arab cultural bedrock within the structure of belief capped by the intransigent monotheism of Muhammad; God as the ultimate controlling agency is superimposed on an animist infrastructure. Studies of mainstream religious culture in Egypt and elsewhere are demonstrating a world where the natural and supernatural are inextricably interlaced.

The key point is that Islam is a religious culture which resists the separation of secular from spiritual jurisdiction – Bernard Lewis says ‘the very notion of a secular authority is seen as an impiety’. And though others suggest that in the later 20th century the standardizing pressure of state power has steadily eroded this traditional resistance, it is noticeable that over the last decade ‘fundamentalist’ critiques of ‘bad Muslim’ states – notably by the Salafiyya – have markedly intensified. The question whether such opposition should take a violent form is a complex one. The concept generally invoked in discussions of terrorism, that of jihad, is often presented as an inbuilt incitement to violence. But the standard translation, ‘holy war’, may be misleading (the tag ‘holy’ is certainly a Western addition for the reasons we have just seen), since jihad literally means ‘striving’, and might better be rendered as ‘struggle’. Some modern Muslims hold that it refers to spiritual struggle, or at most to defensive rather than aggressive war, but fundamentalist jihadis certainly do not accept this. But if it is, as they maintain, a religious obligation to maintain a state of war with those outside the community of Islam, can terrorism properly understood fulfil this function?
Messianism and millenarianism

Are there reasons why acts of extreme, norm-transgressing violence, ‘atrocities’ as Rapoport calls them, should be generated by religious conviction? Two appear particularly significant. The first is what is often called ‘fanaticism’, the capacity of religious belief to inspire commitment, and its resistance to compromise. The second is messianism, the expectation of imminent transformation of the world. Both of these have their secular parallels (or shadows); revolutionaries of all sorts have routinely been labelled fanatics (as indeed have baseball or football club supporters), and some of them at least have shown plain indications of millenarian hope that dramatic action could wreak a sudden realization or acceleration of prophecy.

A third element, which may not justify violence itself but which valorizes its use, is the belief that death in a sacred cause is the proper end of life. This too has its secular echo in such ideas as (what Wilfred Owen called ‘the old lie’) dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, but in some religious belief systems it is taken much further. Much of Islam’s negative image in the West is surely due to its apparent propensity to encourage sacrificial or suicidal action by mujahideen, holy warriors – including children. Under the alarming headline ‘British Muslims take path to jihad: Kashmir terror group claims suicide bomber was from Birmingham’, for instance, a British newspaper assembled all the elements of this image, reporting that the founder of the London-based Islamic group al-Muhajiroun claimed to have sent some 1,800 young men to ‘military service’ overseas. Recruited at mosques and university campuses across the country, they went to fight against infidel ‘occupying forces’ in Kashmir, Palestine, and Chechnya. ‘People who sacrifice themselves to Almighty God as human bombs will achieve martyrdom and they will go to paradise’, the ‘Syrian-born cleric’ is quoted as saying.

The open embrace of death amplifies the culture shock inherent in the fact that the leaders of these groups – most notoriously the council, Majlis al-Shoura, of Hezbollah in Lebanon – are Anglicized as ‘clerics’, or even ‘clergymen’. Indeed, Western reporting of Hezbollah (the Party of God) most dramatically represents the heady, even disorienting impact of the fusion of Islam and terrorism. Originating in the enthusiasm generated by the Iranian revolution of 1979, Hezbollah has always mixed strident fundamentalist calls with firmly grounded local political action. It became a significant force with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which has provided its actual, as distinct from rhetorical, targets, and generated its substantial public support. Many of its operations, especially in its early phase – the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and the colossal truck-bombing of the US Marine and French forces headquarters that October (killing over 300 troops) – and its later hostage-taking period, may fit the label ‘terrorist’, which is universally applied to the organization. Even these actions, however, have a recognizable military dimension. Many others have been highly discriminate guerrilla attacks on the military positions of the Israeli army (IDF) and its ally the South Lebanon Army. (And nothing so indiscriminate as the Sabra-Chatila massacres, the IDF’s shelling of Beirut, or indeed the US Navy’s bombardment of September 1983.)

In this confrontation, which can only be described as a territorial liberation struggle (the word ‘national’ is even more problematic in Lebanon than anywhere else), Hezbollah has become increasingly effective in a military sense: in the last five years of the 20th century, its casualty ratio relative to the IDF improved from more than 5:1 to less than 2:1. Its rhetoric remains unchanged: calling for not only the total destruction of Israel, but also a larger life-and-death struggle against ‘the West’ (of which Israel is merely the agent). The violence of this struggle is aimed at exterminating rather than intimidating the enemy; in this sense it may not sensibly be called terrorism. These blood-curdling demands no doubt merit the media attention they get in the West, but some analysts point to a more pragmatic dimension. Acting as a ‘paramilitary militia’ it has steadily crushed the formerly dominant Amal grouping and established itself as a genuinely political organization – which recognizes, for instance, the impossibility of its orginal commitment to establishing Lebanon as an Islamic state.

Suicide and self-sacrifice

‘Suicide bombings’ – or ‘martyrdom operations’ – undoubtedly get under Western skin with a special acuteness. A century ago Mahatma Gandhi observed how Western humanism’s ever more strident insistence on the supreme value of life had distanced it from other religious traditions, and indeed its own Christian roots. He saw suicide action as subversive, precisely because it could not be instrumental. To defeat England it was necessary not to kill Englishmen but ‘to kill ourselves’. The declaration by the 7/7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer that ‘we love death the way you love life’ was profoundly shocking to many, including those who denounced the bombers as members of a ‘death cult’.

Suicide attacks have multiplied dramatically – there have been three times as many since 2000 as in the previous twenty years – and some have produced visible strategic results. For instance, the hugely destructive suicidal attacks on American and French installations in Lebanon contributed to the withdrawal of those countries’ forces from Lebanon, with significant medium-term political effects. But thinking about this issue is fraught with difficulty, not least because in the nature of things there is often no conclusive evidence whether the incidents were simply high-risk operations rather than deliberate sacrifices. Even the 9/11 hijackers may not all have been told of the finality of their mission. In some attempted car and truck bomb attacks in Lebanon in the 1980s, it appears that the drivers did not know that thay had been chosen to become martyrs by remote control.

However, the Hamas campaign launched in the summer of 2001, when a truck loaded with explosives drove into an Israeli army checkpoint in Gaza, produced a series of genuine and disturbing examples. The claim of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and leader of Hamas, that ‘all the Palestinians are ready to become martyrs’, may be an exaggeration, but seems to be more than merely rhetorical. Amongst the most destructive (politically and psychologically) of all Middle Eastern terrorist attacks were carried out by the ‘quiet young men’ who walked into Ben Yehuda Street, crowded with similiarly young Jews at the end of the sabbath, and detonated shrapnel bombs strapped around their waists. The astonishing footage shot by Hamas of Nafeth Enether blowing himself up in an attempt to kill Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip provided the most vivid evidence of this commitment.

The line between readiness to die and suicide is, ultimately, a very fine one. Suicide is normally, in time of peace, forbidden for Muslims just as it is for Christians (such as IRA hunger-strikers). But in war, as with the Armenian Christian celebration of ‘death knowingly embraced’, it may confirm the fidelity of the patriot or the believer. And undoubtedly the motives of individuals may differ from those of organizations; ‘movements that sponsor suicide bombings are not themselves suicidal’.

Fundamentalism

Are these religious or political motives? For all their messianic semitones, Hezbollah and Amal are very real political forces engaged in an earthly power struggle, as indeed is Hamas in Palestine. The dense fusion of territorial, ethnic, and sectarian impulses in the Lebanese civil war clearly operate in other ‘fundamentalist’ challenges to modernizing secular governments, in Algeria and Egypt as well as Iran and Afghanistan. The underlying ideology of these movements, Islamism, emerged half a century ago; only in the last decade, however, has the West begun to grasp how it differs from old-style fundamentalism. This timelag is a product in part of stereotyping (as Edward Said would argue, the rooted Western ‘orientalist’ blindness to nuance and change in the Muslim world). Deep cultural differences of this kind cannot be understood without some considerable effort, and this effort has seldom been forthcoming. This general indifference has been jolted by 9/11, and the question will be how long the new spirit of inquiry will last.

Islamism has been a significant movement in Egypt since the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood by a schoolteacher (just for once, not a ‘cleric’), Hasan al-Banna, in 1928. Banna’s aim was to counteract the subversion of Islamic values through the Westernized education system, and he was one of the first to posit in stark terms an opposition between Islam and ‘the West’ as total, incompatible value systems. In Egypt, which was subject to a protracted and demoralizing domination by Britain (the ‘veiled protectorate’), the tension was acutely felt. The Brotherhood flourished, with 500 branches established by 1940, and 5,000 by 1946 – each maintaining a mosque, a school, and a club. By that time, a small inner organization of ‘spiritual messengers’ was also engaging in sporadic terrorist attacks, aimed first at killing traitors to Islam.

In the later 1940s, the government took aggressive steps to crush the Brotherhood, banning it in 1948 and assassinating al-Banna in 1949. The establishment of an independent republic under Gamal Abdel Nasser (whom the Brotherhood tried to assassinate in 1954) brought more comprehensive repressive measures, culminating in 1965 with the full-scale suppression of the organization, and the arrest and execution of al-Banna’s most influential successor Sayyid Qutb. But Qutb’s martyrdom only confirmed the force of his argument that Islam was under merciless assault by Westernization, and must be defended by physical as well as spiritual methods.

The pervasive strength of Islamism was indicated by the decision of Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat – who made political capital of his Muslim identity – to lift the ban on the Brotherhood. In 1981, Sadat himself was assassinated in the most spectacular manner, while taking the salute during a big military parade. This action was clearly in part a reaction to Sadat’s historic accommodation with Israel, and to recent mass arrests of religious ‘extremists’ (both Muslim and Coptic Christian), but it also signalled an intensifying assault on the viability of the secular Egyptian state by two formidable offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Group (Gamat al-Islamiya) and al-Jihad. Al-Jihad completed the logic of the Islamist argument by insisting on the centrality of ‘the forgotten obligation’, armed struggle: ‘There is no doubt that the idols of this world can only be removed by the power of the sword.’ This did not yet mean terrorism: al-Jihad planned the Sadat assassination as a coup d’état, a trigger for a mass rebellion – which never materialized. The organization suffered ferocious repression by the regime of Hosni Mubarak in the following years. But recruitment to such groups tends to be stimulated rather than strangled by repression, and in this case these losses were more than made good by the return of hundreds of volunteers who had gone to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban mujahideen against the Marxist government. (Ironically, of course, these were the fighters who were funded by their greatest enemies, the USA.)

"There is only one place on earth which can be called the house of Islam, and it is that place where an Islamic state is established and the Sharia is the authority and God’s laws are observed … The rest of the world is the house of war. God has established only one cause for killing – when there is no other recourse – and that is jihad. He has defined the aim of the believer and the aim of the disbeliever in the most clear and decisive manner: ‘Those who believe fight for the sake of God. And those who disbelieve fight for the sake of idols. Fight, then, the followers of Satan; surely the guild of Satan is but feeble.’"
Sayyid Qutb, This Religion of Islam (1967)

These holy warriors, frequently labelled fundamentalists, represent a direct engagement with the modern world rather than a simple repudiation. One historian of Islam suggests that although the Islamist message draws on ‘premodern’ readings of the Koran and other religious texts, it ‘is wholly modern in its revolutionary existentialism’ – the first Islamist group to emerge in Egypt after Sayyid Qutb’s execution was inspired not just by Islamic writings but by the ‘propaganda of the deed’ advocated by ultra-leftist radicals such as the Baader-Meinhof gang. In the late 1980s, these groups shifted to a wholly terrorist campaign, aimed at the tourist industry – a target that was particularly shocking in the West (which was only slowly beginning to grasp that tourism might not always be wholly ‘innocent’), and that combined assault on the West itself with economic subversion of the Egyptian state. A series of shootings at tourist buses and Nile cruises in late 1992 was followed by large-scale machine-gun and hand-grenade attacks of such visible targets as the Europe Hotel in Cairo in 1996, and the massacre of 58 tourists at the temple at Luxor in 1997. The economic damage was significant – approaching 2 billion US dollars in lost revenue at the turn of the century. So although the ultimate mechanism invoked by these groups is God – the Islamic Group announced in 1996 that it would ‘pursue its battle’ faithfully ‘until such time as God would grant victory’ – there is also a materially measurable scale of effectiveness in play. And it is clear that where they have sufficient military strength, as in Afghanistan, Islamist movements do not limit their use of violence to a demonstrative or symbolic dialogue with God, but carry the ideal of jihad into the sphere of open warfare.

The struggle in Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention in 1979 formed a conduit for the emergence of perhaps the most problematic of all terrorist movements, al-Qaida. Originating simply as a contact group for the Arab volunteers who joined the Afghan resistance, al-Qaida eventually served as a framework to extend the inspirational leadership of Osama bin Laden across the world as its members left Afghanistan after the withdrawal and collapse of the USSR in 1989. Its structure remained a mystery – certainly to the US intelligence services – at least until the 9/11 attacks. It was bound by a core idea rather than a formal organization, and its method of defending Islam was transformed by the events of the Gulf War in 1991. Until his offer to raise a military force to defend Saudi Arabia against the threat of Iraqi invasion was rebuffed by the Saudi government, bin Laden seems to have envisaged conventional military action as paramount. The Saudi acceptance of US intervention dramatically magnified, for bin Laden, the Western danger long predicted by al-Banna and Qutb. The ‘crusaders’ had returned, and had to be resisted by any possible means: the kinds of action could range from the bombing of US embassies, through the almost-successful bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1994, to the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbour on 12 October 2000.

The ascending destructiveness of these actions may be a product of luck as much as of strategy, though they surely signalled that bin Laden’s declaration of war on the USA in August 1996 was more than a rhetorical gesture. After the New York bomb in particular, which might have caused stupendous destruction but for a minor error of placement, the fact that the September 2001 attack came as an almost total surprise indicates how easy it remained to underestimate both the perseverence and the technical sophistication of Islamist groups. Yet Ramzi Yousef, the bomb’s designer, had projected the collapse of both towers. He clearly announced that his object was to make America realize that it was ‘at war’ by suffering casualties on the scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: ‘this is the way you invented … the only language in which someone can deal with you.’

The terms of the 1996 declaration – ‘the Jihad on the Americans occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places’ – were directly related to US foreign policy (it included an historical account of US policy since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time, as well as detailing the corruption and un-Islamic policies of the Saudi state). But there is more at stake for the jihadis than particular American policies. The USA – the ‘Great Satan’ – takes its place in a grand narrative of Muslim victimhood in which the West’s consistent efforts to dominate and destroy Islam have led to the humiliating political fragmentation and social impoverishment of the Arab-Muslim world. The only solution is the establishment of a truly Islamic state in which the disjunction between religion and politics would be terminated. This might seem to require a miraculous transformation of the world, but it is clear that the jihadis can find an actual model for such a ‘miracle’ in the early expansion of Islam under Muhammad himself.

Notwithstanding its historicizing rhetoric, al-Qaida powerfully fuses Islamist ideology with exploitation of modern technology to demonstrate that modernization does not (as most modernizers since Ataturk have assumed) require ‘Westernization’; it can be turned against the West in the struggle to restore true Islam. Western analysts have gradually come to see that it is not permanent organizations but transient ‘networks’ that are now likely to generate Islamist attacks. Factors like locality and friendship, rather than religious faith, are at the core, or ‘hub’, of these networks. The Internet as much as religious institutions provides their medium. What impels the attackers is the desire to avenge perceived injustices against Muslims anywhere in the world. As Mohammed Sidique Khan, one of the London bombers of 2005, declared, ‘I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters’. The only real strategic debate amongst jihadis seems to be over whether priority should be accorded to targeting the ‘far enemy’ – the USA and Western Europe – or the ‘near enemy’ – the pseudo-Muslim regimes such as those in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Finally, we need to recall that ‘fundamentalism’ is not the exclusive preserve of Islam. Consider, for instance, the Jewish group Gush Emunim, which, with dizzying recklessness of the political consequences, planned in 1984 to destroy the sacred enclosure of the Haram ash-Sharif in Jerusalem. In doing this, they gave real life to a fear had impelled Arab resistance to Zionism from the start, but which Zionists had always laboured to dismiss as a Muslim fantasy. Kahane stands normal political logic on its head: ‘it is our refusal to deal with the Arabs according to halakhic obligation that will bring down on our heads terrible sufferings’. (In other words, the thing to be feared is not the enmity of the Arabs, or even the whole world, but the displeasure of God.) As Rapoport notes, fundamentalist Jews stress the genocidal violence of the original Jewish conquest of Israel – when God accompanied them in person – and maintain that the exterminatory concept of herem remains not merely justified but obligatory to preserve the Jewish state.

The aim of extermination rather than intimidation may seem to stretch the concept of terrorism too far. Activism might be a more accurate, but too tame, a term here, while genocide in this context describes an aspiration rather than an action. But the ultimate objective – securing the land – remains firmly political. We are presented with a political logic that is alien and perhaps incomprehensible to the Western tradition, but can be seen to be very different from the apparently total detachment from political logic manifested by the most purely ‘religious’ activist groups.

In this perspective, the most completely ‘religious’ activists are those of the fringe cults which, like the Aum Shinrikyo and the other (by one count) 183,000 in Japan alone, rest on millenarian visions that cannot conceivably be realized by any human agency. (Even assuming they can be grasped in the first place.) These cults are perhaps not uniquely a product of advanced technological communities, but their proliferation in the fin-de-siécle period seems to owe something to frustration with the complacent materialism of ‘the end of ideology’. As with the small-group terrorism of the 1970s, they touch a raw nerve in societies that are sometimes conscious of overdevelopment, and mildly neurotic about the possible abuse of high technology. The Aum’s release of sarin gas on the Tokyo underground on 20 March 1995 opened a genuinely terrifying prospect of mass murder (subsequent police raids found enough sarin in Aum’s possession to kill over 4 million people). With such violence we reach what may be seen either as the purest, or the most absurd, reduction of terrorism to symbolic gesture.

Written by Charles Townshend in "Terrorism - A Very Short Introduction", Oxford University Press, UK,2011, chapter 6. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.