A Muslim militancy born in modernity not mosques

A Muslim militancy born in modernity not mosques
By Faisal Devji
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: August 27 2006 19:27 | Last updated: August 27 2006 19:27


As the real, potential and imagined target of al-Qaeda-style attacks, London now possesses more experience of jihadi activity than any other European capital. The severe disruption to airports, airlines and travellers caused by the latest would-be attack at Heathrow demonstrates that we are all paying increasing amounts in time, money and productivity for increasingly scarce amounts of security. It also demonstrates that an attack need not even occur for it to be successful. So what has London learnt from its experience of Muslim militancy? A great deal about forensics and almost nothing of politics.

Whether or not the measures banning passengers from carrying liquids are necessary, it is telling that the authorities, who knew earlier of the threat posed by liquid explosives, should have addressed it only after exposing the alleged plot this month. They have banned liquids from aircraft, although buses, trains and public spaces in general present as likely a target. The reactive and partial nature of the measures taken tell us that securing a whole society in this way is impossible, and that security itself is as much cosmetic as it is prophylactic.

Advances made in countering terrorism have been technical; politically there has been little improvement. After each crisis there is a focus on the Muslim community not doing enough to root out militants, although the families of the terrorists have had no inkling of their doings. Statements are made about multiculturalism preventing the integration of Muslims in the west, although the terrorists are completely integrated in ways such as speaking English and participating in wider British society. Attention is concentrated on mosques and madrassas, although militancy is developed in secular spaces not religious ones. Immigration is seen as a problem, although the terrorists were born in Britain, their immigrant parents being the most law-abiding of citizens.

Immigrant Muslims who attend mosques or madrassas and are not integrated into British society are least likely to become terrorists. The Islam of the suicide bomber is the product of a global modernity, not of some traditional or cloistered society. It is clear from the British government’s account of the London bombings in July last year that the threat we face today is of a very different kind from that of the cold war, one no longer concerned with ideologies or revolutions and parties or states. It is not even a religious movement that is at issue here.

According to the official account, radicalism among the July 7 bombers was developed in gyms and clubs and on rafting expeditions. The bombers possessed no common profile, whether social, economic or psychological. Some of them, we are told, idolised al-Qaeda; others thought September 11 2001 an American conspiracy. There was no shared ideology, and thus no indoctrination either. These men came together for technical reasons, rather like partners in business or crime.

The government’s report notes the remarkable speed of the bombers’ radicalisation, which precludes indoctrination and suggests a do-it-yourself militancy spawned by watching videos of war and martyrdom. Here there is not even the rhetoric of Sharia law or an Islamic state. But this is true of militancy more generally. Whether ecological, pacifist or religious, globalisation has liberated militancy from an international order kept in place by détente, and no longer accepts models of organisation provided by the nation state.

If in the name of action the government is still looking for radicalism in all the wrong places, concentrating on groups and ideologies instead of individuals and networks, in the name of prevention it has moved even further back than the cold war. Proposals in response to the July 7 report envisage the cultivation of moderate Muslim leaders, the vetting of religious education and the inculcation of liberal values through an “Islam roadshow”. This model of prevention goes back to when Britain had to deal with religious activism in its colonies, and it promises the weakest inheritance of empire – in particular the promotion of self-appointed Muslim “leaders” who will undercut the power of the legislature by reporting directly to the executive.

In colonial times liberal institutions and education were promoted on the presumption that both were lacking. This presumption no longer holds because the London bombers were not ignorant either of the theory or the practice of liberalism. The government’s breathtaking ambitions to help reform the faith of more than 1bn adherents in Britain and abroad will be frustrated because Sunni Islam has already been reformed.

The London bombers were products of a Sunni reformation that has been fragmenting the structures of religious authority since the 19th century. It is this democratisation of Islam that allows members of the laity – such as Mohammad Sidique Khan, the suspected leader of the bombers – to claim religious authority for their actions. The comparison with Shia Islam is striking, for Shia radicalism has not yet made one attack of the al-Qaeda sort. One can talk to traditionally organised Shia militants, as in Iraq or Lebanon, but with individualised forms of Sunni militancy we are faced with an impossible task – putting Humpty-Dumpty together again.

The writer is assistant professor of history at New School University, New York, and author of Landscapes of the Jihad (Hurst/Cornell)