Along with the rest of the country, I’ve been trying to make
some sense of the senseless terrorist murders in Orlando.
I am working on a theory that this—and a number of other
challenges to civilization—are related to a misguided search for meaning.
Going back in history, for a moment, this is from The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright,
concerning the Six-Day War in Israel:
After years of rhetorical attacks on Israel, Nasser demanded
the removal of UN peacekeepers in the Sinai and then blockaded the Strait of
Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israel responded with an overwhelming preemptive
attack that destroyed the entire Egyptian air force within two hours. When
Jordan, Iraq, and Syria joined the war against Israel, their air forces were
also wiped out that same afternoon. In the next few days Israel captured all of
the Sinai, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, while crushing the
forces of the frontline Arab states. It was a psychological turning point in
the history of the modern Middle East. The speed and decisiveness of the
Israeli victory in the Six Day War humiliated many Muslims who had believed
until then that God favored their cause. They had lost not only their armies
and their territories but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and
in themselves. The profound appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and
elsewhere was born in this shocking debacle. A newly strident voice was heard
in the mosques; the voice said that they had been defeated by a force far
larger than the tiny country of Israel. God had turned against the Muslim. The
only way back to Him was to return to the pure religion. The voice answered
despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.
There was in this equation the tacit understanding that God
sided with the Jews. Until the end of World War II, there was little precedent
in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of
the region Jews had lived safely—although submissively—under Muslim rule for
1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda
on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian
missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western
prejudice. After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the
military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with
the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into
a new carrier (p. 38).
So, there was a loss, among Muslims in these Middle Eastern
countries, of the sense that they were right, or possibly better than their
neighbors as they had supposed. The way they saw it, God no longer favored
them. So it was up to them to get back in God’s graces—by doubling down on
being more of what they had been.
Fascism is an idea of coercion. It is extreme. They see a
need to be extreme in order to assert their superiority. As with the Nazis
before them, the fascist Muslims asserted their superiority through coercion,
force, and death to the unbelieving or the different.
I wrote some months ago, after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, about the siege in Mecca. The perpetrators of that terrorist attack
were executed. During that one-month window between the end of the siege and
the executions, the Soviets attacked Afghanistan.
 |
| Abdullah Azzam, who, according to The Looming Tower (from which this photo is taken) "issued a fatwa in 1984 that called upon Muslims everywhere to 'join the caravan' of the Afghan jihad. |
It was a mythos that got Osama bin
Laden. He had a teacher at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, a Palestinian
named Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. According to Wright, Azzam
embodied in a modern fashion the warrior priest—a figure that
was as well established in Islamic tradition as the samurai in Japan. Azzam
combined piety and learning with a serene and bloody intransigence. His slogan
was “Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues”
(p. 95).
Azzam started traveling to
Peshawar to help in the Afghan resistance. His descriptions were a recruiting
tool, catching the imagination of bin Laden. As Wright explains,
The Afghans, in his tableau, represented humanity in a
pristine state—a righteous, pious, pre-industrial people—struggling against the
brutal, soulless, mechanized force of modernity….
The struggle of Islam, as Qutb had framed it, and as Azzam
deeply believed, was against jahiliyya—the
world of unbelief that had existed before Islam, which was still corrupting and
undermining the faithful with the lures of materialism, secularism and sexual
equality. Here in this primitive land, so stunted by poverty and illiteracy and
patriarchal tribal codes, the heroic and seemingly doomed Afghan jihad against
the Soviet colossus had the elements of an epochal moment in history. In the
skillful hands of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the legend of the Afghan holy warriors
would be packaged and sold all over the world (p. 96).
So bin Laden was captured by that mythos and used it to
recruit throughout his deadly career. It appealed to others like him—the wealthy
and educated,
According to research by Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist
in Cairo, most of the Islamists who had attacked the mosque in Mecca were young
men from villages who had come to the city for schooling. The majority were the
sons of middle-level government bureaucrats. They were ambitious and tended to
be drawn to the fields of science and engineering, which accept only the most
qualified students. They were not the alienated, marginalized youth that a
sociologist might have expected. Instead, Ibrahim wrote, they were “model young
Egyptians. If they were not typical, it was because they were significantly
above the average in their generation.” (p. 58) This type continued in
recruiting of Saudis to Afghanistan.
It was never about recruiting the disenfranchised, the poor,
the oppressed striking out at an unfair world. It appealed to privileged
college students, wealthy sons, the comfortable—who lacked purpose, principles,
and a sense of meaning. The mythos described for them led them to go fight in
far off Afghanistan—at least during a school break. Maybe longer if they got
the thrill they sought.
Afghan fighters, the mujahideen, tolerated the Saudis such
as bin Laden, but only barely. They were untrained, undisciplined, unworthy of
trust in times of war. Bin Laden spent the first several years with a “fear of
bodily participation,” (p. 100). Later, ashamed, he pushed for greater Saudi
participation in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was often ill, and militarily unwise. But
he eventually maintained a training camp in a strategically located mountain
overlook called the Lion’s Den.
There was a single battle, near the end, in which this
ragtag group prevailed, almost accidentally, at a critical time. It followed
their worst defeat, a three-week siege, at the end of which bin Laden ordered
the destruction of the camp so the Soviets had nothing to pillage.
The Saudi group hid within the forest and attacked
one-by-one any Soviets that approached. Sometime during this assault, bin Laden
fainted (claimed he was calm enough to fall asleep). It was confusion within
the dense forest that led the remaining Soviets to overestimate the number of
the enemy and give up the attack. As Lawrence Wright describes it,
 |
| Osama bin Laden, photo from The Looming Tower, "in a cave in Jalalabad in 1988, at about the time that he began al-Qaeda" |
From the Soviet perspective, the battle of the Lion’s Den was
a small moment in the tactical retreat from Afghanistan. In the heightened
religious atmosphere among the men following bin Laden, however, there was a
dizzying sense that they were living in a supernatural world, in which reality
knelt before faith. For them, the encounter at the Lion’s Den became the
foundation of the myth that they defeated the superpower. Within a few years
the entire Soviet empire fell to pieces—dead of the wound the Muslims inflicted
in Afghanistan, the jihadis believed. By then they had created the vanguard
that was to carry the battle forward. Al-Qaeda was conceived in the marriage of
these assumptions: Faith is stronger than weapons or nations, and the ticket to
enter the sacred zone where such miracles occur is the willingness to die (p. 120).
Bin Laden was presented a rifle taken off one of the killed
Soviets, which he brandished thereafter. He had neither shot the rifle nor
killed the Soviet. But that didn’t matter; it looked good for building the
mythos.
This is only a quarter of the way into Wright’s book. There’s
much more to the story on the way to 9/11. But I think this beginning gives us
some clues. Islamist extremists are people who:
·
Seek something to give meaning to their lives.
·
Reinterpret what they see in the world to suit
their version of reality.
·
Define an extreme version of belief as “good” and
all else as “evil.”
·
Believe they are superior and dehumanize anyone
not among them.
·
Tolerate no belief outside their orthodoxy.
·
Seek power over anyone not associated with them
in full, or annihilation of any who cannot be coerced to submit.
·
Believe that whatever they do is justified.
·
Delight in hating all who believe differently.
I do not think it is a bad thing to seek meaning in our
lives; I think we should all do that.
But seeking meaning only in the southern hemisphere of the
Spherical Model—below civilization—leads
only to savagery.
And coercion will never be the right way to persuade others
to find shared meaning. Real conversion comes only by invitation, “by
persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned,
by kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without
hypocrisy, and without guile.”[i]
It is undeniable that Islamist terrorists are the most
dangerous of the savagery-loving meaning seekers today. And we should do all in
our power to identify and defeat this enemy-of-all-that-is-good.
But they are not the only savagery-loving meaning seekers. I’m
seeing connections I hadn’t seen before, which may explain in part why our
president fails to identify the enemy, let alone protect us by defeating that
enemy. I’ll talk that about in Part II.
