Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
pan-Muslim pride to the Taliban that they could not
be seen expel bin Laden due to US pressure. In yet
another of the myriad intricacies detailed in the book,
we see how different the Taliban were to Al Qaeda. The
Taliban were extremist Wahabbi offshoots themselves,
dedicated to fulfilling a similarly atavistic, repressive,
misogynistic and unworkable arcadia, yet at the same
time they were essentially parochial, rural tribalists totally
uninterested in waging a jihad against the Western
world. It was only bin Laden’s machinations and the
US response they received which saw them entrenched
into the fight against the West urged by the more sophisticated
and cosmopolitan Al Qaeda.
Burke shows with one illuminating example how the
growth in popularity of this Wahaab cult is far from
organic or inevitable. He spent time with members of
the separatist Pershmaga fighters of the Kurdish Democratic
Party in northern Iraq following the first gulf war.
“[They] were aggressively secular. They had drunk,
sworn, smoked and I had never seen them pray. Their
slogans were all about liberation and self-determination,
about rights and democracy … The idea of them
mentioning a ‘jihad’ was almost risible. Though angry
and resentful at what they felt, with some justification,
were the West`s repeated betrayals, they were still vociferously
pro-Western.”
By 2001, many of these young men were turning
from their seemingly failing secular resistance move-
BUY Jason Burke books online from and
ment towards militant Islamism. The same goes for
the growth of Hammas and Islamic Jihad in Israel at
the expense of the PLO. And also in many other areas,
not least moderate and/or secular Turkey, Indonesia,
and Checnya, not to mention the diaspora in Europe.
This growth was neither natural nor inevitable, and was
undoubtedly exacerbated not only by the dictatorship,
stagnation and corruption of the governments of Muslim
states, but also by the polarisation caused in part by
the invasions of the West (and Russia).
None of which is to say that the growth of Islamist
movements are a progressive and legitimate movement
of liberation as some on the left have come near
to disastrously maintaining. On the contrary, though
Burke never makes such an assertion himself, I find the
description of its leading figures corresponds with an
almost classically fascist movement.
They are rooted firmly in a disenchanted middleclass,
whether doctors like al-Zawarhi or rich businessmen
like bin Laden himself. They are disenchanted
chiefly due to a hurt sense of national (or pan-national/
religious) decline. They are utterly hostile to religious
tolerance, the Enlightenment, Jews, women or minority
rights, and also to socialism and the labour movement
at large. Indeed, al-Banna himself was an explicit
admirer of Nazi Germany. As Burke shows, the hardcore
of the real ‘terrorist cells’ taking action against
the West are profoundly educated and middle-class
136
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z