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The Ideological Roots

of Terror

SINCE the September 11 attacks, the United States has continued to confront the threat posed by its terrorist foes. In the summer of 2006, for example, a major plot to hijack transatlantic airliners was disrupted in London. It served as a stark reminder of how our enemies continue to target this nation and its allies.

In response to this threat, the United States and its friends must maintain their vigilance against terrorism. But they must also combat the ideas that drive the terrorists. As Jonathan Evans, director general of the British Security Service, has said, “Although the most visible manifestations of this problem are the attacks and attempted attacks we have suffered in recent years, the root of the problem is ideological.”¹ Al Qaeda and like-minded organizations are inspired by a malignant ideology, one that is characterized by contempt for human dignity and freedom and a depraved disregard for human life.

The terrorists claim that they are practicing Islam, but in the words of Bernard Lewis, one of the foremost Western scholars of Islam, “At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders.”² Indeed, an increasing number of Muslim scholars and clerics have voiced the same objection to conflating Islam with extremists who claim to act in its name.

What, then, is the ideology of the terrorists who commit acts of mass murder against non-Muslims and Muslims alike? What is it that distinguishes the violent extremism of bin Laden and his fellow travelers not only from modern, Western democracy, but from normative, historical Islam? In large measure, this ideology is influenced by twentieth-century Western totalitarianism.

Modern Parallels: Radical Islam and Western Totalitarianism

There are at least four indicators that point to a connection between today's extremists and their early and mid-twentieth-century intellectual cousins who advanced totalitarian ideologies such as communism and fascism.

The first of these is the language used by today's virulent extremist leaders. To a remarkable degree, it mimics the radical rhetoric of the last century. Words like “vanguard” and “revolution” are used for self-definition, whereas “imperialist,” “capitalist,” “colonialist,” “reactionary,” and “establishment” are hurled at enemies, from the United States to mainstream Muslim leaders. To cite a relatively recent example, in September 2007 an extremist website posted links to a video message from bin Laden to the people of the United States. In that message, Al Qaeda's leader called U.S. officials “war criminals” and labeled the U.S. media a “tool of the colonialist empires.” He also railed against “the shackles…of the capitalist system” and implied that “big corporations” agitate for war, despoil the environment, and had President John F. Kennedy killed.³

This rhetoric is, of course, familiar as that of ideological extremists of the last century. And this use of the jargon of Western radicalism is not restricted to Al Qaeda or to other Sunni extremist groups. The Shi`a-dominated movement led by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which brought down the Shah in Iran thirty years ago, remains a case in point. To this day, Iran's ruling movement calls its own efforts “the revolution” and, through bestowing names like the “Revolutionary Guards” on its institutions, it advertises itself as a radicalizing force.

This is not to deny that these groups superficially deploy the rhetoric of conventional Islam as well. They certainly do, but they utilize a decidedly ideological and political framework. A noteworthy example is their distortion of the word “jihad.” As interpreted by traditional Muslim scholars and clerics, jihad speaks of the spiritual struggle against sin. While that can include literally fighting an enemy, even when it does, it comes with rules that bar indiscriminate killing. Much of the time, however, the word refers to the believer's internal striving for self-improvement. But in the lexicon of Islamist extremists, it has come to connote acts of prodigious violence against governments that are deemed non-Muslim or insufficiently Islamic. Worse, it has come to include the launching of deliberate attacks against innocent civilians—in other words, terrorism. And it includes the most barbaric method of terrorism: suicide bombing.

Clearly, then, the rhetoric of Islamist extremists, even when it uses Muslim terminology, evokes a set of norms and tactics that depart from a traditional understanding of Islam in crucial ways. It points to a worldview that is similar to twentieth-century communism and fascism. These extremists mistreat Islam as a political ideology. In so doing, they echo the ideas of other ideologues who sought a radical reordering of society and the world, achieved through the violent overthrow of the existing order by perpetrating mass violence against civilians as well as traditional combatants.

Indiscriminate violence is a second way that today's Islamist radicalism carries on the legacy of revolutionary Marxism and fascism. Borrowing from those extremist ideologies, it rejects on principle the distinction between combatants and noncombatants in the conduct of war. In bin Laden's own words, spoken to a U.S. reporter in 1998, “we do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets.”⁴

From the perspective of totalitarian ideologues, societies that reject the call for total revolutionary transformation are fair game. Their governments are considered thoroughly corrupt and evil, as are their ordinary citizens. Wherever the status quo persists, totalitarian extremists deem war a revolutionary necessity, and war on civilians morally justifiable. From fascists in Europe to Maoists in Cambodia, the twentieth century is filled with stark examples. Thus, a morally fanatical premise—that if “the system” is wicked, so is every participant—leads to a morally bankrupt outcome like the 9/11 atrocities. We need only recall the chilling words of Ward Churchill, the radical professor formerly at the University of Colorado, who likened the World Trade Center's doomed office workers to “little Eichmanns.”⁵

Third, besides adopting Western radicalism's distinctive patterns of thought and speech and its rationale for unrestrained violence, Islamist extremism also shares its macabre celebration of death. Comparing his own ideology with that of the United States not long after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden said, “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two.”⁶

As a number of observers have noted, the celebration of death was a particularly striking feature of early Western totalitarian movements. A famous instance occurred in 1936, at the University of Salamanca in Spain, when Jose Millan-Astray, a pro-Nazi general, shouted at an opponent, “Viva la Muerte!,” “Long Live Death.”⁷ One of the mottos of Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party was “Viva la Morte,” which means the same thing in Italian.

Totalitarianism has drawn deeply from the Jacobin notion that mass bloodletting, when unleashed by a revolutionary elite, constitutes a cathartic sacrifice, one that can usher humanity into a utopian future either by wiping away its actual past (Marxist-Leninism) or by returning it to a mythical, uncorrupted past (romantic fascism). More people perished through the totalitarian convulsions of the last century—Hitler's Holocaust, Stalin's rampages, Pol Pot's killing fields, Mao's liquidations of entire classes—than were killed in all the wars of any prior century.

The logic of this extremism and its proponents is horrifyingly clear. Transforming a largely resistant world into their own image required unprecedented measures, including the unleashing of unparalleled bloodshed and terror. But that could only happen if the revolutionary vanguard were released from accountability to all known norms and standards of behavior.

Thus, a fourth trait that radical Islamism borrowed from revolutionary Western ideology is the complete elevation of rule of the “ideologically correct” man above rule of law. This involves not just superseding the rule of law inherent in modern democracy, but also ignoring divine law as interpreted by scholars in traditional Islam. Both these systems of law serve as a check against absolute totalitarian power. That is why both have been flouted by the proponents of Islamist extremism, who reserve for themselves the role of ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.

Simply stated, to define one's enemies to include anyone who does not embrace Al Qaeda's views, including hundreds of millions of Muslims, and then treat them as legitimate military targets, is to assert that bin Laden is the ultimate authority on Islam, the Qur`an, and the divine will. This notion, along with its murderous implications, is motivating an increasing number of Muslim clerics and scholars to speak out against bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In 2007, one of Al Qaeda's intellectual architects sent a fax from Tora Prison in Egypt to the London office of the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat dramatically announcing his defection from its cause. In that letter, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (known as Dr. Fadl) rejected Al Qaeda's violence as contrary to Islam, adding that “there is a form of obedience that is greater than the obedience accorded to any leader, namely, obedience to God and His Messenger.”⁸

Tellingly, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy and Al Qaeda's chief planner and ideological theorist, responded by issuing a lengthy “rebuttal” to Dr. Fadl's clearly damaging announcement. Yet it is not only bin Laden and al-Qaeda who embraced a totalitarian vision of absolute power. After he seized control of Iran, Khomeini proceeded to advance the revolutionary doctrine that his was the single, ultimate religious and political authority in that country. In an edict released in 1988, Khomeini claimed that “the government is authorized unilaterally to abolish its lawful accords with the people and…to prevent any matter, be it spiritual or material, that poses a threat to its interests” (emphasis added). He went on to make the astonishing declaration that “for Islam, the requirements of government supersede every tenet, including even those of prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca” (emphasis added). Thus did Khomeini subordinate the traditional prescriptions of religion to the absolute dictates of the state.⁹

Like bin Laden, Khomeini was essentially declaring himself and his movement to be above the law, beyond the reach of traditional religious authority. Highlighting this fact were the enormous posters of Khomeini that hung in public places during his reign. This cult of personality is redolent of the historical totalitarian practice of elevating despots to iconic status. Stalin, Hitler, Mao—each elevated himself into the personification of the dominant ideology. Thus was the cult of the supreme, infallible leader on full display.

Clearly, then, the intellectual and political aspects of violent Islamist extremism mirror Western radicalism. This extreme Islamism reflects Western totalitarian ideology thinly cloaked in Muslim rhetoric. But this raises a crucial question. Is it a coincidence? If not, how and when did this foreign, ideologically driven outlook penetrate the Middle East, distort Islamic teaching, and develop into the threat we are facing today?¹⁰

History: Tracing Radical Islamism's Western Roots

The answer may be found by examining the decade that followed World War I. For a number of Muslim-reared intellectuals, it was an especially dark and painful chapter of history. The ignominious collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent assumption of mandate authority over much of the Middle East heartland by Britain and France were viewed as humiliating setbacks to the advance of Islamic civilization. The abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by the Turkish reformer Kemal Ataturk, in the land where proud Ottomans once ruled, was perhaps the crowning indignity of that period.

Post-World War I Germany provides a striking parallel. Like the Ottomans, the Germans lost the war. Many felt humiliated by the defeat and its implications, including the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. It was in the bleak postwar era that Hitler's Nazis blamed Germany's troubles on foreigners and advocated the recovery of a mythical past by empowering a pure Aryan master race that would rule not just Germany but the world. In that same era, in response to a similar sense of crisis, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher. Blaming his civilization's problems on the rise of foreign influences, Banna favored a similar return to a romantic, idealized origin, so that an ideologically pure pan-Islamist movement and its leaders would arise and its leaders would take their place as masters of the Middle East and eventually the world. University of London professor Efraim Karsh noted how Banna admired Hitler and Mussolini, created a paramilitary wing patterned after Hitler's SS, and synthesized “the tactic of terror, the cult of death, and the lust for conquest.”¹¹ Banna himself stated that “death is an art, and the most exquisite of arts when practiced by the skillful artist.”

What Banna supported, in other words, was not only the rejection of liberal democracy, but the violent perversion of traditional Islam for the purpose of advancing a more radical, politically driven vision similar to today's radical Islam. Not surprisingly, Banna warned his followers to expect vehement opposition from traditional Muslim scholars and clerics.¹²

The affinity of his vision with totalitarianism, along with its hatred of Jews and Zionism, led Banna's Brotherhood to connect with Nazi Germany through the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Nazi collaborator who lived in Berlin for most of the Second World War. The intellectual commerce between Banna's Is-lamism and Hitler's Nazism helped open the Middle East to paranoid conspiracy theories alleging Jewish capitalist control of the world's financial and economic systems, as well as the notorious Czarist forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” about a supposed Jewish plot to control the world. And following the end of World War II, when Britain and the United States were seeking to apprehend Husseini as a war criminal, the Brotherhood helped ensure that he was granted asylum in Egypt.¹³

By the close of World War II, Banna's organization claimed more than 500,000 members in Egypt alone. More important, in the decades that followed, it spawned a new generation of leaders and disciples that created the extremist organizations of today, along with their totalitarian mindset and practices.

In 1949, following the assassination of Egypt's prime minister, the government responded by assassinating Banna. His successor, Sayyid Qutb, further articulated the Islamist vision, employing both Marxist and fascist critiques of democratic capitalism. Tellingly, he compared his version of Islam not to other religions, but to distinctly secular ideologies and stages. As part of this effort, Qutb explicitly embraced Marx's stages of history. Along with Marx, he believed that just as industrial capitalism had replaced agrarianism, capitalism, in turn, would yield to a superior Marxian socialism. Significantly, he added Islamism as the fourth and final stage that would follow Marxism.¹⁴

Ultimately, Qutb wanted this extremist ideology imposed from above by an elite revolutionary vanguard seizing state power in Bolshevik fashion. Building on Banna's teachings, he supported unleashing this vanguard in pursuit of a world caliphate by removing all traditional restraints on warfare. In 1966, Qutb, along with a number of other Muslim Brotherhood members, was hanged for conspiring to assassinate Egypt's nationalist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Among the many members arrested in connection with that conspiracy was a fifteen-year-old named Ayman al-Zawahiri.¹⁵ Zawahiri first met bin Laden in the mid-1980s and then joined him in Sudan in the early 1990s. He is said to have exclaimed that bin Laden was “the new Che Guevara.”¹⁶ By the early 1980s, bin Laden was in Afghanistan. Concomitantly, in Peshawar, Pakistan, fellow member Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was providing the infrastructure to fight the Soviets through his Office of Services, which would later form the basis for Al Qaeda.¹⁷

Today, the Muslim Brotherhood publicly renounces violence. Yet unquestionably its early formation and development, influenced heavily by Western totalitarianism, helped produce not only the ideology but eventually the leadership for today's violent Islamist extremism.¹⁸ That includes not only the Sunni extremism of bin Ladenism but the Shiite radicalism of Khomeini's regime in Iran. From the beginning, Banna had envisioned a pan-Islamic ideological and political network that would span the Muslim world.

As World War II drew to a close, Navab Safavi, an Iranian cleric, created a radical group that assassinated a number of Iranian intellectual and political leaders. In 1953, he visited the Brotherhood in Egypt. While Safavi was later executed for attempting to assassinate his country's prime minister, several among his group went on to play critical roles in helping Khomeini seize power a generation later.¹⁹ Khomeini's conversion from conservative cleric to radical Islamic ideologue by the early 1970s helped paved the way for the Revolution of 1978 and for Islamism to penetrate Shiite strongholds in the Middle East, including parts of Lebanon, where the terrorist group Hezbollah was created.

Far from being an exclusively Shi`a phenomenon, Khomeini's revolution made it a point to honor Sunni fellow radicals. Under the ayatollah, a postage stamp commemorating Qutb was unveiled, and under Khomeini's successor, Ali Khamenei, Qutb's voluminous works were translated into Persian.²⁰ Until 2006, streets in Tehran, such as Islambouli Street, could still be found named in honor of the Sunni assassins of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, with collages erected in their memory.

We Are at War

In short, just as totalitarian communism and fascism were the main ideological threats of the twentieth century, the totalitarian ideology of violent extremist Islamism wars against the world today. Based on the words and deeds of the terrorists themselves, we are very much at war. In 1998, Osama bin Laden made an open declaration of war that ended with the command “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military, in any country where it is possible to do it.”²¹ In the decade following, bin Laden and his cohorts have done precisely that, plotting against the entire global system of security, safety and prosperity.

Their efforts belie the scope of the current struggle. We are at war with an ideology that is every bit as fanatical and ruthless as that of fascism or communism. Spread by a sinister network of cultlike entities that spans the world, this fanatical worldview sanctifies the torture and slaughter of innocents; it denies the dignity and humanity of its opponents; and it includes among those it targets mainstream Muslims who dare to reject its pseudo-religious message of intolerance and bigotry.

These extremists have proved themselves quite capable of waging the war that they have declared. They have been helped in part by twenty-first-century technology, which has provided even small groups with enormous capability for destruction and damage. Radicals affiliated with Al Qaeda or the Taliban or other similar extremist groups—from North Africa to Iraq and South Asia—are fighting for, and sometimes achieving, control of territory that they use to train, assemble advanced weaponry, and perform experiments to develop ever deadlier ways of killing their enemies, and over which they impose their own vision of repressive law and seek to dominate local life.

And finally, through atrocities like the 9/11 bombings, the radicals have demonstrated that they are quite capable of visiting consequences upon us every bit commensurate with war. Their goal is clear; what our enemies want is “a dialogue with bullets and the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction.” These are not my words; they are from an Al Qaeda training manual.

The nature of our enemies and the ideological threat we face brings to mind Winston Churchill's famous dictum, uttered in 1946 in reference to a different threat, that of the Soviet Union, but equally applicable here: “There is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness.”²² Simply put, this is how ideological fanatics view the world. Whether it is Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin, Osama bin Laden, or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, for every fanatic, weakness is provocation. That is why we must never fool ourselves into thinking that submissiveness is a path to peace.

The United States has heeded this counsel. Following 9/11, President Bush took decisive action, striking back against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, deploying our intelligence assets across the globe, capturing or killing terrorists on nearly every continent, and partnering with our allies on shared intelligence against this common menace. Without such steps, the United States would have doubtless faced other, equally devastating attacks over the past eight years.

But there is another element in this struggle that is as important as strength: resolve. In his day, Ronald Reagan counseled that the United States should be “not warlike, not bellicose, not expansionist—but firm and principled in resisting those who would devour territory and put the soul in bondage.”²³ Today, we can heed this advice by preventing our foes from attaining two monumental goals that they seek to achieve.

The first is the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, chief among them nuclear weapons. Simply put, we cannot allow such a capability ever to pass into the hands of a global network of terror. For bin Laden and his fellow travelers are at war, not just with America or the West, but with the values and principles, the habits and institutions of modern civilization. These extremist ideologues aim to destroy the modern world by unleashing the tools of modern technology. Make no mistake: this enemy, if it ever obtains a modern nuclear weapon, has every intention of using it.

The second goal of our ideological foes is to gain possession and control of nation-states. Just like the Nazis before they seized power in Germany or the Marxists before they took over in Russia, our enemies are seeking countries to conquer because they desire platforms from which they can launch other kinds of attacks. As we know, Al Qaeda ran Afghanistan through its surrogate, the Taliban, and that malignant alliance is part of what made 9/11 possible. Today, Islamic radicals seek to recreate such a safe haven in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. And that is why we must continue to work to ensure that they never acquire those platforms.

We are fighting a battle not only of armaments but of ideas. And therein lies our greatest strength. Our enemies are animated by a fanatical ideology in which prejudice is lionized instead of condemned, and solving disputes through bombings is viewed as the preferred path to achieving consensus. We, on the other hand, believe in the power of reason, the great legacy bequeathed to us by our intellectual ancestors, including the forefathers of this country. In contrast to our enemies, many of them believed that when we look at the world through reason, we are not betraying faith in the Almighty, but are obeying a divine call to pursue knowledge and truth wherever they lead. Through the liberation and exercise of reason, humanity has achieved more in the last three centuries than in all of its history. We have birthed modern science, we have conquered ancient diseases, we have freed people from poverty and starvation, we have triggered the information age, and we have made the world a better and brighter place.

We are heirs to the age of reason, locked in a struggle for hearts and minds over this very matter, a struggle whose outcome might well determine the fate of our civilization and this globe. We dare not walk away from this battle, and we cannot allow fanatics to drag parts of the world into a dark age of ignorance and fear, degradation and servitude, disrespect for women, and prejudice and contempt for those with whom there is disagreement.

We are not in a battle against religion, because, as we have seen in the lives of some of the greatest men and women of our age, there is no necessary conflict between reason and faith. But we are indeed in a fight for our future, and it is this fight to which we must dedicate ourselves.

Combating the New Totalitarianism

How, then, should the United States combat its current ideological foes?

First, we should encourage more Muslim scholars and clerics to make clear to the world—especially the Muslim world—that extremist Islamism is not Islam, but a politicized perversion. We must also help amplify the voices of scholars and clerics that have already been raised, making sure their message is heard throughout the world

Second, we should make clear that we ourselves understand that radical Islamism is not true Islam because we recognize its poisonous roots only too well, having opposed them in World War II and throughout the Cold War. We must emphasize how these roots can be traced to the West's own backyard, to ideologies that deify the state, threatening mainstream Islam as well as Western democracy. And we must fight radical Islamist ideology as we fought its Western predecessors, with a complete array of tools, including developmental and humanitarian assistance to despairing people and nations that remain vulnerable to the terrorists' message.

Third, as an alternative to this radical tyranny, we should continue our efforts to support democracy and the rule of law throughout the Muslim world and across the globe. In this sense, we must stress that the embrace of democracy, when coupled with respect for rule of law, need not be inimical to Islam. On the contrary, the principle of rule of law squares with Islam's understanding that no reign—including that of the majority—should be absolute because no ruler is divine. Democracy makes room for precedent and tradition, holds rulers accountable, and empowers constructive reform not destructive revolution. Understood in this way, it can fit with mainstream Islam.

The experience of Muslims in the United States provides a powerful affirmation of this assertion. For generations, Muslims have flourished under democracy in our country. They have practiced their religion freely, expressed their ideas openly, pursued education and careers productively, and passed along their faith to their children successfully. This testifies to the U.S. commitment to honor and respect the adherents of all religions, including Islam, and suggests that the practice of Islam is compatible with the existence of free societies and governments.

Can stable Muslim democracies emerge? They show signs of having emerged in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. They are struggling to emerge in Iraq and Afghanistan. What we are witnessing might not be Jeffersonian democracy, but it may not have to be. Different cultures can and will produce distinct versions of democratic governance. Time will tell whether democracy will spread.

In the end, if we wish to defeat terrorism, our course is clear. We must confront and expose its demonic ideology, which sacrificed more than 100 million human beings to fascism and Marxism in the last century and demands further sacrifices today. As we do, we can offer a more hopeful vision—one that represents the best and not the worst that our civilization can offer.