Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Dalrymple and the Bourgeois Terror
Comment: A largely bourgeois endeavour
by William Dalrymple
Guardian Unlimited - Wednesday July 20, 2005
Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld were not known for
their close agreement on matters of foreign policy,
but one thing that they were united upon was the
threat posed by Pakistan's madrasas. In 2002, Rumsfeld
posed the question: "Are we capturing, killing or
deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day
than the madrasas ... are recruiting, training and
deploying against us?" A year later, Powell described
madrasas as a breeding ground "for fundamentalists and
terrorists".
Since the revelation this week that no less than three
of the suicide bombers visited Pakistan in the year
preceding the attack, the British press has been quick
to follow the US line: last weekend the Sunday
Telegraph was helpfully translating the Arabic word
madrasa as terrorist "training school" (it actually
means merely "place of education"), while yesterday's
Daily Mirror confidently asserted over a double-page
spread that three of the bombers had all enrolled at
Pakistani "terror schools".
In fact, it is still uncertain whether the three
visited any madrasa in Pakistan - intelligence sources
have yet to confirm this. More important, the link
between madrasas and international terrorism is far
from clearcut, and new research has poured cold water
on the much-repeated theory of madrasas being little
more than al-Qaida training schools.
It is true that there were good reasons for people
jumping to the assumption of the madrasas'
culpability. The terrifyingly ultra-conservative
Taliban regime was unquestionably the product of
Pakistan's madrasas. Many madrasas are indeed
fundamentalist in their approach to the scriptures and
many subscribe to the most hardline strains of Islamic
thought. It is also true that some madrasas can be
directly linked to Islamist radicalism and
occasionally to outright civil violence. It is
estimated that as many as 15% of Pakistan's madrasas
preach violent jihad, while a few have even been known
to provide covert military training.
But it is now becoming very clear that producing
cannon-fodder for the Taliban and graduating local
sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing
the kind of technically literate al-Qaida terrorist
who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks
on the World Trade Centre. Indeed, there is an
important and fundamental distinction to be made
between most madrasa graduates - who tend to be pious
villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds,
possessing little technical sophistication - and the
sort of middle-class, politically literate, global
Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaida operations around the
world. Most of these turn out to have secular
scientific or technical backgrounds and very few
actually turn out to be madrasa graduates.
The men who planned and carried out the Islamist
attacks on America were confused, but highly educated,
middle-class professionals. Mohammed Atta was a town
planning expert; Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's chief
of staff, is a paediatric surgeon; Omar Sheikh, the
kidnapper of Daniel Pearl, is the product of the same
British public school that produced the film-maker
Peter Greenaway.
Peter Bergen of Johns Hopkins University recently
published the conclusions of his in-depth study of 75
Islamist terrorists who had carried out four major
anti-western attacks. According to Bergen, "53% of the
terrorists had either attended college or had received
a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52% of
Americans have been to college." Against this
background, the backgrounds of the British bombers
should not come as a surprise.
The French authority on Islamists, Gilles Kepel, has
arrived at a similar conclusion. The new breed of
global jihadis, he writes, are not the urban poor of
the third world - as Tony Blair still claims - so much
as "the privileged children of an unlikely marriage
between Wahhabism and Silicon Valley". Islamic
terrorism, like its Christian predecessor, remains a
largely bourgeois endeavour.
It is true that there are exceptions to this thesis.
There are several examples of radical madrasa
graduates who have become involved with al-Qaida.
Maulana Masood Azhar, for example, leader of the
banned Islamist group Jaish-e-Muhammad, originally
studied in the ultra-militant Binori Town madrasa in
Karachi.
By and large, however, madrasa students simply do not
have the technical expertise or conceptual imagination
necessary to carry out the sort of attacks we have
seen al-Qaida pull off in the past few years. Their
focus, in other words, is not on opposing the west -
the central concern of the Salafi jihadis - so much as
fostering what they see as proper Islamic behaviour at
home.
All this highlights how depressingly unsophisticated
the debate about the British bombers is in this
country. Again and again we are told that terrorism is
associated with poverty and the basic, Qur'anic
education provided by madrasas. We are told that the
men who carry out this work are evil madmen with whom
no debate is possible and who, according to Frank
Field on last week's Question Time, "aim to wipe us
out". All links with Iraq and Afghanistan are
vehemently denied.
In actual fact, al-Qaida operatives tend to be highly
educated and their aims clearly and explicitly
political. Bin Laden, in his numerous communiques, has
always been completely clear about this. In his first
public statement, "A declaration of war against the
Americans", issued in 1996, he announced he was
fighting US foreign policy in the Middle East and, in
particular, American support for the House of Saud and
the state of Israel. His aim, he stated, is to unleash
a clash of civilisations between Islam and the
"Zionist crusaders" of the west, and so provoke an
American backlash strong enough to radicalise the
Muslim world and topple pro-western governments.
Bush has fulfilled Bin Laden's every hope. Through the
invasion of secular Ba'athist Iraq, the abuses in Abu
Ghraib, the mass murders in Falluja, America - with
Britain's obedient assistance - has turned Iraq into a
jihadist playground while alienating all moderate
Muslim opinion in the Islamic heartlands and,
crucially, in the west. Of course, we must condemn the
horrific atrocities these men cause; but condemnation
is not enough. Unless we attempt to understand the
jihadis, read their statements and honestly analyse
what has led these men to blow themselves up, we can
never defeat them or even begin to drain the swamp of
the grievances in which they continue to flourish.
