The Sunni Jihad in the Contemporary World.

The jihadi tendency in contemporary Sunni Islamic activism has come to prominence in three distinct contexts and has been guided by three distinct strategic visions:

• internal: the jihad against nominally Muslim regimes which the jihadis hold to be "impious" and thus licit targets for subversion (Egypt, Algeria, etc.); this variant of jihad has a problematical relationship to Sunni political doctrine and has clearly proved a failure in Egypt and Algeria to date;

• irredentist: the struggle to redeem land considered to be part of Dar al-Islam from non-Muslim rule or occupation (Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao and above all Palestine). This type of struggle is sometimes the object of rivalry between nationalist forces, who may not conceive of it as a jihad at all (notably in the Palestinian case) and Islamist forces and, within the latter, between 'local' and 'international' elements, e.g. the distinction between the Afghan mujahidin and the "Arab" forces which flocked to their struggle in the 1980s; similar complexities have been discernible in other irredentist conflicts, notably Bosnia 1992-1996, Mindanao and now Iraq.

• global: the new jihad against the West, or more specifically against the United States and its allies (first among the latter, Israel) pioneered since 1998 by al-Qaeda but now also conducted by autonomous networks benefiting from al-Qaeda's endorsement.

This plurality of outlook and agenda has been somewhat obscured in jihadi discourse by certain common themes (notably the reference to Palestine) but the underlying diversity of objective, strategy and tactics -- including notably the refusal of some groups to sanction or emulate the indiscriminately terrorist methods of others matters deeply when assessing their behaviour and prospects. An important distinction here is between the resort to armed struggle that is primarily determined by the situation (such as foreign rule or military occupation) and that which arises primarily out of a radical doctrine expressing a definite preference for violent over non-violent strategies despite the possibility of engaging in the latter. Irredentist struggles are not as a rule the work of doctrinaire jihadis, whereas both internal and global jihads typically are.
The resort to jihad in the sense of the armed defence of the umma was a salient feature of the relationship between the Muslim world and the West at both the onset and close of the colonial era, as well as during the centuries that preceded it. Resistance to colonial conquest often assumed the explicit form of jihad, notably in Algeria, Libya and the Sudan. The ending of colonial rule was not always a violent affair. In so far as modernist and secular ideologies entered into and complicated Muslim nationalists' conception of their struggle, this was not necessarily conceived as a jihad in the traditional sense even where it assumed a primarily military form. Since the provisional resolution of the political conflict between Western powers and the Muslim world at the end of the colonial era in the 1950s and early 1960s, the revival of the jihadi current with Sunni Islamic activism has occurred slowly and in a complex process which has exhibited four main -- if overlapping -- stages:

• the emergence of a doctrinaire jihadi tendency in Egypt in the 1970s and 1980s based on the radical thought of Sayyid Qutb and especially the concept of takfir;

• the mobilisation of jihadi energies across the Muslim world for the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet presence and the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul (1979-1989);

• the protracted but unsuccessful insurgencies against allegedly un-Islamic regimes, notably in Algeria (since 1991) and Egypt (to 1997); and

• the jihad launched by al-Qaeda against the West since the late 1990s.

The initial target of renascent jihadi activism was a Muslim regime, that of President Anwar al-Sadat in Egypt. The doctrinal basis, as we have seen, was Sayyid Qutb's innovation, which cancelled the traditional Sunni injunction on Muslims to obey Muslim governments. It argued that nationalism, in supplanting the sovereignty of God with that of the people, is inherently anti-Islamic (jahili) and that the nationalist regime established by the Free Officers in 1952 was not a form of Muslim rule, but infidel (kufr), such that rebellion against it was not fitna (illicit sedition) but jihad, that is licit, if not obligatory.
Qutb was executed in 1966 before he could specify precisely how this jihad was to be conducted, much less organise and lead it himself, but a violent jihadi tendency began to manifest itself on the radical fringe of Egyptian Islamic activism in the mid-1970s. One striking feature of its outlook was the centrality of the Palestinian question. The failure of successive Egyptian governments to secure a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the latter's favour -- notably the military débacle under Nasser in June 1967 but also Sadat's choice of a separate peace in 1978 -- was attributed to their un-Islamic character. The jihadis argued that in order to defeat "the further enemy" (Israel) it was first necessary to deal with "the nearer enemy", the infidel Egyptian state.
A second key feature was the doctrinal innovation that posited jihad as an individual obligation (fard 'ayn) incumbent on each Muslim, in opposition to the traditional conception of it as a collective duty (fard kifaya). It is likely these two features were historically linked, that the doctrinal innovation authorising individual Muslims to take jihad into their own hands arose, in part, precisely because the Egyptian state had signalled that it was no longer in the business of conducting jihad as a collective duty. This was the outlook of Tanzim al-Jihad ("the Jihad Organisation"), the group which assassinated Sadat in October 1981 and waged a campaign of killings and bombings in Egypt between 1981 and 1997. The same outlook was broadly shared by a separate organization, al-Jama'a al-islamiyya ("the Islamic Group"), which conducted a parallel campaign between 1992 and 1997.
Between the crystallisation of Egyptian jihadi ideology around 1980 and the dramatic intensification of the insurgency in the 1990s, however, the second stage of the development of jihadi activism had occurred with the war in Afghanistan. In doctrinal terms, this was a simpler and arguably quite traditional affair, in that the Soviet invasion in December 1979 was naturally perceived as the conquest of a Muslim country by a non-Muslim (indeed atheistic) power. As such it was possible for the least radical, most conservative, tendencies in Sunni Islam to be mobilised by the call to jihad. It was in fact Sunni Muslims from the Arabian peninsular, most if not all of a Salafi outlook, who furnished the main element of the Arab fighters who flocked to Peshawar throughout the 1980s, although North Africans (especially Egyptians and Algerians) were also well represented. While the Afghan jihad did not involve any radicalisation in doctrine, it had a radicalising effect, in three respects:

• its intoxicating success in precipitating the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 laid the basis for belief in the efficacy of jihad, even against a superpower;

• it was a life-changing experience for participants, presenting surviving veterans with major problems of social reinsertion in their countries of origin; and

• it facilitated the formation of an international network of jihadis from Morocco to the Philippines, and thus established the nucleus of what has since become known as al-Salafiyya al-jihadiyya, the jihadi wing of the Salafiyya movement.

All three of these factors, and especially the second and third, fed into the local insurgencies in Egypt and Algeria in the 1990s, as returning Afghan veterans swelled the ranks of the native Islamist movements and oriented them in the most intransigent directions. With the failure of these local jihads to achieve their object (the overthrow of "impious" regimes), a reorientation occurred which culminated in the emergence of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network as the pace-setter of the latest, fourth, stage -- jihad at the global level.
The ideology of al-Qaeda is not a simple affair, and it is a serious mistake to reduce it to Wahhabism. To do so is to ignore the extent to which al-Qaeda broke with the traditional geo-political outlook of Wahhabism, which had never entered into politico-military opposition to the West and was indeed in alliance with the U.S. from 1945 onwards. Far from being a straightforward product of the Wahhabi tradition, al-Qaeda's jihad is in part rather the product of the crisis and fracturing of Wahhabism and of its relationships both to the Saudi royal family and to the U.S. since the early 1990s. To focus exclusively on the Wahhabi roots of al-Qaeda is also to ignore the crucial role of Egyptian radicalism, mediated by bin Laden's lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the eventual leader of Tanzim al-Jihad, in determining the movement's vision and strategy. These exhibit the following key features:

• the reorientation of the traditionalist, Salafi, conception of jihad from an alliance with the West (notably against Soviet Communism but also against secular Arab nationalism) to a frontal antagonism with its former Western sponsors;

• the reorientation of takfiri jihadi energies from "the nearer enemy" (local, insufficiently Muslim, regimes) to "the further enemy" (Israel and especially the U.S. as Israel's principal sponsor, but also other Western states allied to the U.S.);

• the recycling of the traditional Wahhabi (and latter-day Salafi) vision of Christians and Jews as infidels to be combated, as opposed to earlier (notably Ottoman) conceptions of them as "People of the Book" -- Ahl al-Kitab -- to be tolerated and protected;

• the strategic reorientation of jihad from a single, geographically limited, terrain to the global level; and

• the tactical reorientation from popular-based guerrilla warfare (as practiced notably by the mujahidin in Afghanistan) to highly elitist urban terrorism (the hallmark of Tanzim al-Jihad's insurgency in Egypt between 1981 and 1997).

Contemporary Western analysis, as reflected in official discourse at least, does not appear to have taken the measure of this development. Two tendencies of that discourse are especially wide of the mark.
The first lumps all forms of violent Islamic activism together as a single phenomenon, problem, threat and target: "terrorism". Quite apart from the problem of establishing a definition of terrorism on which all potential supporters of the "war against terrorism" might agree, and the difficulty (for example) of situating the Palestinian movement Hamas in this category, the main drawback is the failure to take account of the single most important feature differentiating the global jihad from both the internal and irredentist jihads -- the fact that it has no clear-cut, intelligible and in principle attainable objective.
The internal jihad has posited objectives -- the revolutionary overthrow of impious regimes and the constitution of properly Islamic states -- which the Iranian experience demonstrated to be, at least under certain conditions, theoretically attainable. Equally, irredentist jihads by their very nature posit what are in principle specific, measurable and attainable ends: the liberation from non-Muslim rule of the territories in question. The global jihad instigated by al-Qaeda is another matter. While its discourse intermittently invokes the desirability of re-establishing the political unity of the Muslim world under a restored Caliphate, little or no thought has been given to how this might actually be done or to defining other, more easily realisable, political objectives at the global level. As a result, it tends to feed on local, primarily irredentist but also occasionally internal, struggles in the Muslim world and on the emergence of identity politics among disaffected elements of the Muslim populations in the West, in Europe above all. Likewise, it tends to retreat from or at least qualify its global political objectives and ambitions.
The second declares respect for Islam as a religion of peace and suggests by implication that Islamic activism in general is un-Islamic, a perverse exploitation of religion for political ends, and that jihadi activism in particular -- conceived as merely the extremist end of the Islamist spectrum -- is simply evil. But while it is rooted in the understandable concern of Western governments to make clear that "the war against terrorism" is not a war of religion, this approach renders jihadi activism inexplicable in terms of cause and effect. However reassuring to certain (mainly Western) audiences, this discourse is wholly inappropriate to prosecuting, let alone winning, the battle of ideas in the Muslim world, for two reasons.
First, since Islam is above all a religion of law, all forms of Islamic activism -- including the government-sponsored activism of "official Islam" -- are naturally political to a degree. Secondly, to suggest that Islam is a religion of peace that has been "hijacked" by jihadis is in effect to imply that jihad has no place in the Islamic tradition, whereas it has a very clear and time-honoured -- but also rule-bound -- place. For the U.S. president or the British prime minister to deny this is for them to claim to be the arbiters of what true Islam is, a remarkable claim by any standard, and one which ensures that official Western discourse can have little or no purchase on the reflexes of the populations of the Muslim world.
What is at issue in key debates in the Muslim world since the rise of al-Qaeda is whether particular conceptions of jihad are licit in terms of Islamic law. By suggesting that all jihadis are inexplicably evil, by equating all forms of armed struggle with "terrorism" and by denying that any jihad can be licit, Western policy-makers send the clear message that such discussions are futile and can have no effect whatsoever on their policies, thereby undermining a crucial debate. The danger is that, in doing so, the West may convert "the war against terrorism" into precisely what it claims it is not, a war against Islam -- that is, to make a gift of the defence of Islam to the extreme, global variety of jihadism exemplified by al-Qaeda, at the expense of all non-jihadi varieties of Islamic activism, including those of friendly Muslim governments and modernist and democratically inclined Islamic political movements.
To brand all armed struggle by Muslims -- even that arising out of opposition to foreign occupation -- as terrorism is to strengthen the arguments of al-Qaeda that the problem is "the further enemy", i.e., the U.S. and its allies, with whom it is useless to argue or try to negotiate and who only understand the language of brute force.