Radical Islamist Terrorism:

Reuven Paz ICT Academic Director

Introduction

The involvement of radical Islamist groups in global terrorism, and in the affairs of various Asian and Middle Eastern countries, has put the issue of Islamist terrorism on the agendas of governments, academic institutes, and all manner of private research groups all over the world. At various time over the past decade, assessments have pointed to a possible decline in violence on the part of radical Islamist violence, usually attributed to better cooperation in countering terrorism in general—and in particular, Islamic terrorism. However it now seems that these assessments were overly optimistic, and that this kind of terrorism is still developing. In fact, its possible that it has not yet reached its peak.

Furthermore, there is a danger that violent Islamist ideologies, doctrines and activities will bring about two further developments, the advance signs of which may already be seen in the present time. The first of these is the development of new bases of Islamist radicalism and political violence, including terrorism, in Muslim communities in the West, as a result of the consolidation of two relatively new Islamist doctrines: the globalization of the Islamist struggle, and the doctrine of the “non-territorial Islamist state.” The globalization of the Islamist struggle is aimed against what the Islamists perceive as the global conspiracy against Islam, both as religion and culture. The second doctrine—that of the “Non-territorial Islamic State”—revolves around the tenet that the Muslim communities in the West should be perceived as a kind of Islamic State, lacking territorial dimensions, but entailing the religious duty of establishing Islamic rule. This doctrine, which grew out of the work of Islamic scholars in the UK, emphasizes the socio-cultural, economic, and political character of the Muslim community. At the same time, the doctrine grants free rein to the principle of Islamic pluralism, allowing the activities of a variety of organizations and institutions, from every trend of modern Islamic thought. This pluralism is mostly an outgrowth of the democratic and liberal environment of Western countries, but it also reflects the fundamentalist nature of many of the Islamic movements in their homeland. These two doctrines together could result in Muslim communities in the West—particularly those in Europe—becoming havens for radical political violence

The second imminent development is the evolution of what we might call “social terrorism”—terrorism motivated primarily by social factors, such as hatred of foreigners, growing unemployment, economic circumstances, difficulties in coping with Western modernization, changing and dismantling of traditional values and of family ties, etc. Such factors may affect other groups of immigrants as well, however, the influence of these factors on the Muslim emigrant communities is particularly acute. The growing Islamic and Islamist activity among Muslim emigrant communities, in addition to Islamist doctrines of conspiracies and global struggle with the West, encourage the growing potential of radical doctrines spreading among the younger generation.
 

Sources of support for Islamist radicalism

The religious element is especially important in the case of the financing of terrorist groups. In recent years there has been a decline in the sponsoring of terrorism by states, as pointed out in the 1999 report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism” published annually by the U.S. State Department. What this means is that public support for terrorist groups has become the most essential element in fund-raising, and the main source of finances. Indeed, contrary to what many might think, public fund-raising from individuals is the most important element in the finance of many institutes, associations, and public organizations. This has been shown by researches and surveys in the U.S.

The “Islamist terrorist culture”
The public support for Islamist terrorist groups, so vital to their success and their financial prospects, is the consequence of four social and psychological factors underlying the Islamic social-political renaissance:

• Islamic and Islamist movements and groups have succeeded in the past three decades in planting in Arab and Muslim societies the notion of a kind of global cultural war, in which they confront a global conspiracy against Islam as a religion, culture, and way of life. Thus, concepts synonymous in the Western political culture with terrorism and political violence are now viewed by many in the Islamic world to be Islamic religious duties. Such concepts include Jihad, Takfir (refutation), Istishhad (Martyrdom, including by suicide), and Shahid (Martyr). The central notion, common to most of the Islamic movements and groups—those that carry out terrorism and political violence, and those that justify it and feed the atmosphere that promotes such activity—is that of being in a state of siege, which calls for self defense. To the believers in this concept, the confrontation justifies the use of all means—particularly when these means are given religious legitimacy.

• Many of the Islamist and Islamic movements and groups have succeeded in convincing people in the Muslim world that they represent the true contemporary interpretation of Islam. Moreover, most of these groups developed out of a perceived need to return to the earliest fundamental sources of Islam. Thus, they based their views on Islamic scholars like Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyyah of the Middle ages, and Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab of the 18^th Century, who were the leading fundamentalist religious scholars, as well as the most unyielding.

  
  The success of the Islamist movements lies in the basic diversity of Islam. However it also owes much to the lack of a single Islamic center that enjoys the confidence of the vast majority of the Muslim World. Added to this is the control of the modern secular regimes in the Arab and Muslim World over the religious establishments. Those establishments are viewed by large parts of the public as servants and puppets of the secular state (`Ulama’ al-Salatin), whose interpretations and rulings conform to the interests of the state. Thus, Islamic and Islamist groups and individuals have become the spiritual guides of quite a large Islamic population, and maintain a great deal of power and influence.
   

• Most of the Islamic movements and groups, primarily those that emerged from the 1960’s and after, present the Arab and Muslim regimes—and in some cases rightfully—as symbols of arbitrary oppression and the distortion of the social justice that is rooted in orthodox Islam. Thus, they encourage their followers to sympathize with and support those who present themselves as the protectors of the weaker elements of society. In many cases, they manage to recruit elements of social, political, cultural and economic protest against various Arab and Muslim regimes. These elements also see themselves as standing against the alleged global enemies and conspirators: The United States, Israel, the Jews, Western “Crusader” heretic culture, etc.

  
  At the base of this phenomenon lies the inability of large sections of Muslim publics to cope with the technological, cultural, or economic aspects of Western modernization. This has brought about the tendency to blame the secular cultures and ideologies that have given rise to these regimes on one hand, and to find salvation in the return to Islam and its glorious past—a kind of “Messianism” that gives hope for a better future, on the other. Since orthodox Islam is identified with the Islamic establishments of the modern nationalist secular, sometimes even revolutionary and socialist states, the support was given to those who represented the opposite culture: the activist and radical alternative that opposes the state.
   

• The Islamic socio-political revival, particularly since the 1960’s, is linked both to social changes in the Arab and Muslim World, and to the formation of an educated middle class in different countries. This middle class has in part distanced itself from the Western secular modernization and the institutions of the modern state: the military, government administration, social and economic institutions controlled by the state, the public media, etc. Another part of this class—mainly respected professionals such as physicians, lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, academic scholars, or merchants—who have suffered from the tendency to nationalize the economy by the state, have found in the variety of Islam propounded by modern Islamist trends the solution to their problems. This process has created quite a large and highly educated group of individuals who view themselves as a social Avant-garde, and who adopt the ideologies of various Islamist trends as the basis for their social struggle.

• These groups and movements carry out the vast majority of Islamic political, social, cultural and educational work, both in the Muslim world and among Muslim communities in the West. Therefore, they are central to creating and preserving the “Islamic atmosphere” that is used by more extremist and violent Islamist groups. They are in many cases “greenhouses” for the emergence of violent groups and the preservation of worldviews advocating hostility towards the West or toward Western culture.

• The infrastructure of these movements, originally built to facilitate cultural, political, educational, and charity activities, make them the main venue for finance and support for Islamic projects, with the result that some them are also used to collect funds for radical groups. At the same time, they are active in consolidating Muslim communities in the West, and therefore set the grounds for massive fund-raising, political support, and in some cases recruitment, for militant Islamist groups in these communities.

The Islamist “terrorist culture” can be sketched as a pyramid; at the base is the large-scale activity of the Islamic moderate and non-violent organizations, institutes, and projects of all kinds. At the top of the pyramid is the radical and pro-terrorist activity. In the middle there are various processes that channel certain social factors into hatred, revenge, the search for power and violence. This violence is in many cases indirectly supported and financed by innocent elements as a result of cultural influences.

Muslim communities in the West

There is another very important element in the support of Islamist terrorist groups, and the resultant globalization of Islamist terrorism, that has not yet been sufficiently understood by Western countries. This is the degree of alienation of Muslim communities in the West from the surrounding Western societies. An upsurge in political activity of Islamist activists among these communities has fed on hatred of foreigners in the major countries in Europe, in addition to poverty and unemployment. Radicalism is also facilitated by the difficulty of many in coping with Western modernization and values, along with the underlying clash of values and cultures, and the disintegration of family values. Islamic social and welfare movements, which are not themselves part of the radical trend, nevertheless help in creating the Islamic atmosphere that directly and indirectly assists the radicals. This aide takes the form of fund raising, recruitment of supporters and members, establishing all kinds of institutions, and distributing different kinds of publications. Above all the Islamist activists attempt to plant in the growing Muslim societies in the West the perception of Western culture as the enemy.

An important example of the radical impact on Western Muslim communities can be seen in the movement led by Dr. Kalim Siddiqui. Born in Pakistan, Siddiqui, settled in London, where for many years he directed an Islamic cultural center. He also established a Muslim Parliament as the minority political system for Muslims in Great Britain, which was intended to be the base for the “Non-territorial Islamic State.” The key word for Siddiqui was power; the State was the instrument by which a community could exercise its collective power in action.

In many cases Islamist activists have the greatest influence on those elements of the Muslim community whose religious knowledge is poor. These people, as a consequence of social pressures, tend to adopt motives that sometimes lack religious rules or norms, emphasizing instead the ideology of social and political confrontation. To such people, the radical perception of Jihad is therefore quite attractive. According to court papers of U.S. prosecutors, this element has been exploited by Bin Laden’s Al-Qa’idah and his allied groups, who made use of international companies and relief organizations as front organizations. Through these institutions, they acquired residences in the United States, from which they could communicate by fax, satellite phones, and coded letters.

The increasing number of Muslim immigrants to Europe and the U.S. was also a result of the political violence in Muslim countries in the 1990’s. In many cases immigrants and asylum seekers had been actively involved in violent events or had supported them, and could thus be easily influenced by extreme radical Islamist ideas.

In most cases, the long-term goals of the radical groups are vague. They tend to speak in terms of an eternal global mission, in accordance with the basics of orthodox Islam, whose victory, though assured, will be achieved only in the far future. Lacking the usual political agendas, they tend not to be pragmatic, unless confronted by force, such as happened in the second half of the 1990’s. Whenever Arab regimes fought the Islamists by force, we have witnessed the beginnings of a transformation on the part of the radical groups: from terrorist groups to legitimate political movements and parties. This happened during 1998-99 in Egypt, Algeria, the Yemen, and to some extent in the case of Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). A very important element in this regard is the significant decline in public support for these groups in their homelands, as a result of their murderous operations. We have seen such a phenomenon in Algeria and again in Egypt, following the operation at Luxor in November 1997, which shocked the Egyptian public and the Islamic establishment. But, this process has also been part of the globalization of Islamist terrorism; Islamist groups began seeking support among the growing Muslim communities in the West.

A crucial element in the 1990’s, which will probably continue into the near future, is the massive fund raising for all kinds of Islamic activity in Europe and the U.S.. Part of this is entirely legitimate; in many cases this money is spent on social and cultural projects, either for the benefit of Muslim population in the West or in the Arab countries. However, part of the revenues raised ostensibly for charity, end up in the hands of various radical Islamist groups, or of front organizations and institutions established by them. U.S. officials investigating charges of money laundering have found that a significant number of Islamic terrorists were concealing their activities and sources of funds by using charitable organizations as fronts. Many of these charities are involved in substantial community service work. Such investigations are not easy and can raise allegations of targeting religious or ethnic groups.

As a good example of the way such front organizations hide their real goals is an internal document written in the early 1990’s by activists of one of the most radical Middle Eastern Islamist groups: the pro-Iranian Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The document sets forth a comprehensive plan to establish a hostile intelligence organization in the U.S. and elsewhere. Among other things it states:

Our presence in North America gives us a unique opportunity to monitor, explore and follow-up… We are in the center that leads the conspiracy against our Islamic world. Therefore, here we can monitor and watch the American policies and the activities of those questionable organizations, and establish a center for studies, intelligence and information...

The alienation of the Western Muslim communities
There have been social changes among Muslim communities in the West over the past decade or two. The first generation of immigrants sought to merge into Western society and was much occupied with economic difficulties. The expectations of the second and third generations of immigrants were in many cases unfulfilled, reinforcing their alienation from the Western societies that surround them. Although in many countries, primarily the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and Germany, they were granted generous economic support, as well as freedom of speech and activity, organization and education, there was a flood of financial support from the wealthier Muslim countries that assisted them in building and promoting their own communities. Westerners’ resentment of foreigners in their midst, and the ongoing difficulties of coping with modernization, in addition to the traditional culture and values, allowed a wide range of Islamic infrastructure to thrive in the Western democratic system, which could serve as a greenhouse for Islamist movements and groups. An Islamist associations in London, or an Islamist study center in the United States, for example, could serve as the backbone of Islamist terrorist groups for diverse goals: recruitment, fund-raising, publications, communications and so forth. This element seems to reinforce the internationalization of Islamist terrorism in the Middle East or Asia. Thus, the growing feeling of alienation among Muslim youth is perhaps the most important factor in analyzing the prospects of future Islamist terrorism in general, and the financing of terrorist groups in particular.

To conclude, it should be noted that recent developments in Islamist radicalism in the Muslim world, as well as in Muslim communities in the West, lead to the consequence that future Islamist terrorism may come to rely heavily on these communities in the coming decade. The rapid development of global communications and the Internet have facilitated the globalization of the Islamist radical struggle, both on the operational level and in the spread of extremist doctrines. In this new situation, various groups can act today without the support of states sponsoring terrorism, necessary in the past. This means that, although the international attempts to pressure certain countries cease their support for radical groups may bring results, the real concerns may go unmet. So far, no such measures have succeeded in destroying the bridges built between radical Islamist groups and Muslim communities in the West.