Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics by Jon Armajani Read Free Book Online

their opponents, members of such organizations perceive themselves as engaged in cosmic wars where the fate of their religion and the whole of humanity hang in the balance.91 As the members of al-Qaida reinterpret the narratives which legitimate their move- ment and its violent strikes against the West, they are involved in this same Juergensmeyerian cross-cultural phenomenon. They choose targets with enormous symbolic value for Americans – United States embassies, an American naval vessel and military installations, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center – and then extol the greatness of the Islamic “martyrs” who engaged in these acts, declaring “Islamic victory” against the “infidels” after the assaults.92 Yet, the scale of al-Qaida’s use of violence is global in nature and it has been argued that the scope of their goals and violent acts may be greater than those of certain other religio-political groups that use violence in attempts to achieve their goals.93
    René Girard discusses the ways in which the use of myth, ritual, and symbol decriminalizes religious persons’ acts of killing while raising those apparently murderous behaviors to the highest levels of obligation. For him, religiously-sanctioned acts of violence are not only permitted, some religious persons believe they are utterly obligatory.94 In this vein, the members of al-Qaida are not only sacralizing violence, they are making it a requirement when they declare the frequently repeated sentence, “It is better to die in honor than live in humiliation.”95 They are also declaring the obligatory nature of sacrificing themselves for their cause when they make parallels between the situation they confront as Muslims today and the circumstances which previous Muslims faced when they battled Muhammad’s enemies in Medina in the seventh century, the Crusaders beginning in the twelfth century, and the invading Mongols in the thirteenth century. According to this reasoning, Muslims were and are obliged, under certain conditions, to sacrifice their lives to protect Islamic lands.96 Muslim soldiers and contemporary activists receive rewards as a result of their sanctified sacrifices: they gain the satisfaction of working to kill the infidels and playing a role in establishing their vision of justice in the world, while eventually spending eternity in heaven.97 Thus, what non-Muslim targets of Islamist and al-Qaida aggression consider murderous, savage, and barbaric crimes of “terrorism,” the members of al-Qaida interpret as obligatory acts of sacred sacrifice.98
     
    Modern Oasis: Islamists’ Visions of the Ideal State
     
    Bin Laden did not formulate his interpretations in a vacuum. He is the heir of an intellectual legacy which has its roots in the ideas of Muslim thinkers dat- ing to the eighteenth century and stretching over majority-Muslim countries from Egypt to Pakistan. Influential progenitors of the modern Islamic intel- lectual tradition include Muhammad ibn (Abd al-Wahhab (1703–87), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97), Muhammad (Abduh (1849–1905), Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), Sayyid Abu)l-A(la Mawdudi (1903–79), and Ayman al-Zawahiri (b. 1951). While some of these figures predate the beginnings of contemporary Islamism, they defined several key themes and, in some cases, the organizational structures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Islamism. They also articulated the grievances which Islamists level against the West: its historic colonialist, political, military, and cultural assaults against Muslims.99 Concomitantly, Islamist groups (such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas) while making small variations to their messages, depending on the specific contexts where they operate, espouse visions of an ideal Islamic state that are similar to each other.
    The Islamists’ most vocal objections are directed against: (1) secular governments (such as those in Egypt,