THE MAIN ENEMY: ISLAMISM

[This is the Introductory Chapter of Alex Alexiev’s masterful study on Radical Islam’s Threat to the West and the Moslem World to be published later this year by The Hudson Institute.  Subsequent chapters or chapter sections will be a weekly feature in TTP for the next several weeks.]

The Main Enemy:  Islamism
Introduction

It is the starting premise of this study that the United States government’s focus on what came to be known as the "war on terror" after 9/11 has been fundamentally wrong.

The main enemy is not "terror." Nor is it al-Qaeda, despite President Obama’s assertion in January 2010 after the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt that "we are at war against al-Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred."

No, the main enemy is radical Islamist ideology or Islamism.

A change of emphasis would allow us to see clearly that defeating this enemy cannot be accomplished by counterterror strategies and kinetic means alone, but requires a sophisticated strategy to defeat the ideology of Islamism by delegitimizing it in the eyes of its current and potential supporters in the Moslem community.

The essential prerequisite to achieving this objective is to understand the nature of the threat presented by radical Islam, its ideological underpinnings, and its strengths and weaknesses.

Here is an outline of what we’ll be discussing in the coming weeks.

After this Introduction, Chapter Two – The Nature of the Threat – looks past our current fixation on terrorism as the main threat and argues that the gradual takeover of the Moslem establishment by radical Islam and its present dominance as the main religio-political idiom in the Moslem world are by far the most intractable long-term threats faced by the West and mainstream Moslems.

This troubling phenomenon is expressed in Western countries and the United States by the increasing dominance of the same radical idiom in Moslem diaspora communities and the emergence of hostile, isolated, parallel societies that completely reject Western secular and democratic values and seek to destroy them.

The analysis in Chapter III – The Ideology of Radical Islam – shifts to an examination of the ideology of Islamism, its origins, evolution, and the key factors facilitating its unprecedented spread worldwide in the past three decades.

In particular, the analysis points out that while Islamist ideologues make a concerted effort to couch their ideology in traditional Islamic terms, so as to secure a degree of religious legitimacy among Moslem believers, their ideology has more in common with the twentieth century totalitarian doctrines of Nazism and Communism than with Islam as traditionally practiced.

In pursuing support and legitimacy among the Moslem religious establishment and the believers, the Islamists are particularly keen on establishing their bona fides as promoters of "authentic" Islam, including in particular some of the most extreme tenets of sharia law.

Indeed, understanding the relationship between Islamism and sharia is a key to the understanding of radical Islam as it exists today.

Simply stated, the militants present sharia law and some of its injunctions, such as the obligation to carry out violent offensive jihad, the goal of establishing worldwide Moslem rule (the Caliphate), or the requirement of the death penalty for apostates, as both the centerpiece of the Islamist creed and the putative panacea for all real or imagined problems of the Moslem community or ummah.

None of these injunctions, however, are to be found in the Koran, and, far from being "God’s sacred law," sharia itself is a post-Koranic, manmade doctrine designed to serve the political interests of Moslem potentates in the post-Mohammed dynastic period.

The orthodox Moslem clergy (ulema), however, has traditionally promoted it as a God-ordained, immutable, and mandatory guidance for life, which Moslems must follow in minute detail to achieve salvation.

By making sharia adherence a central part of their ideology, the Islamists have been able to attract the support of the conservative ulema, as self-appointed guardians of sharia observance, and that of a significant section of the devout community unwilling to challenge the orthodoxy.

Nonetheless, despite efforts by Islamic theoreticians to claim that their doctrine stretches to the origins of Islam, in actuality most of the Islamist doctrine is a very recent creation – clearly been borrowed by its leading ideologues, such as Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-1979) and Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), from the totalitarian movements active in the mid-twentieth century.

This debt to totalitarianism is seen in the three dominant doctrinal concepts of Islamism-the notion of the external enemy, the notion of the internal Moslem enemy, and the key role assigned to an "Islamic vanguard" in the realization of the revolutionary objectives of the Islamic movement.

One of the major failures of the American approach to radical Islam is our inability or unwillingness to identify and expose the numerous inherent vulnerabilities of modern Islamist totalitarian ideology.

While pretending to offer perfect solutions to Moslem backwardness and political oppression in the twenty-first century, sharia is actually a pre-modern worldview that has been rejected as a model of governance for most of Moslem history.

Thus Chapter IV is entitled The Limited Scope of Sharia in Past Moslem Empires.  It shows that far from being "God’s revealed law," sharia was a doctrine whose irrelevance to statecraft and administrative imperatives was realized by Moslem rulers early on.

As a result, it was seldom practiced in Moslem history despite ritual obeisance to it. The analysis documents the historical evidence that most major Islamic states like the Ottoman Empire abandoned sharia as a system of justice in favor of various more-or-less secular codes of jurisprudence, even when they continued paying lip service to it.

Chapter IV also examines evidence of the conflict between Islamist beliefs and traditional tenets of the Moslem faith, as well as that between radical Sunni Islam and traditional practitioners of Islam, such as Syncretic Moslems, Sufis, Shias and others that together make up a majority of the Moslem ummah.

Finally, the examination of Islamism’s vulnerabilities addresses several areas where the Islamists impact negatively the socioeconomic and political prospects of ordinary Moslems whenever they have been allowed to exercise influence on governance.

These include economic welfare, education, human rights, and other fields that are among the exploitable subjects of a political warfare campaign developed in the final chapter of this study.

Armed with an understanding of the ideological motivation driving Islamism, the narrative proceeds in Chapter V – Radical Islam Resurgent – to examine the emergence of the Islamist idea from its origins in the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s to its current state as a worldwide revolutionary Islamist movement.

After the formulation of a robust ideological framework by the leading Islamist ideologues Mawdudi and Qutb in the 1950s, other decisive milestones in the evolution of radical Islam were:

*the alliance between Moslem Brotherhood organizational capabilities and Saudi financial and ideological support beginning in the late1950s,

*the emergence of Saudi/Wahhabi front organizations for the export of Islamism with Ikhwan assistance in the 1960s and 1970s, and

*the beginning of a massive Saudi campaign of funding radical Islam worldwide, and particularly in the West, after the oil embargo in 1973.

The practical results of this concerted campaign of exporting Islamic extremism to the West are documented in Chapters VI and VII, which trace the evolution of Islamism in Europe and the United States.

Chapter VI – Islamism in Europe – details the enormous population growth of Moslems in Western Europe through birth rate expansion and various forms of legal and illegal immigration, as well as the transformation of Moslem society in Europe into radical, encapsulated, urban communities that pose a threat to the future of the liberal democratic system.

Chapter VII – Islamism in America – highlights in considerable detail the objectives and modus operandi of radical Islam in the United States.

It contains profiles of an individual and two Islamic centers that illustrate the degree of radical Islam’s penetration into American society: the jailed Islamic revolutionary Abdurachman Alamoudi, who achieved access to high levels of the U.S. government; the Islamic Center of Tucson; and the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California.

The growth of Islamism in the United States started in 1963 with the founding of the first Islamist organization in North America, the Moslem Student Association (MSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by a group of Moslem Brotherhood immigrants with the help of the Moslem World League and Saudi money.

Following this initial beachhead, some two dozen spinoff organizations from the MSA were established in the United States in the two decades that followed. As a result, virtually all currently existing Moslem political organizations in the country are the ideological progeny of the original Islamist set-up, despite claiming that they are independent.

What’s more, as the study documents, these organizations not only share an identical ideology, but also continue to maintain close operational ties and interlocking directorships. It is more appropriate, therefore, to consider the extensive network of Islamist organized groups active in America today as one and the same organization pursuing the same agenda through multiple branches and affiliates.

The specific areas of US Islamist activity analyzed include:

*proselytizing and indoctrination (dawah and tarbiyya) to convert non-Moslems to Islam, with special emphasis on populations and groups (prisoners, minorities) believed to be alienated from mainstream society;

*the attempt to radicalize moderate Moslems;

*infiltrating infidel society and its political and social institutions through political and electoral activism, outreach activities directed toward police and law-enforcement institutions, alliances with radical left and anti-establishment groups, and efforts to undermine state and federal legislation designed to defeat Islamic extremism and terrorism.

The role of the Tablighi Jamaat (Society for Spreading the Faith) and its Deobandi creed in proselytizing among prison inmate populations receives special attention in this chapter as well.

Chapter VIII – Supporting Jihad Through Sharia Finance – discusses the use of sharia finance as an instrument of Islamization-a campaign advancing the ostensibly morally superior and more profitable sharia-compliant banking.

The real objective is to legitimize sharia law in the West and gradually accomplish the isolation of Moslem communities from mainstream society, thus facilitating Islamist control over them.  Mufti Taqi Usmani, one of the best-known experts in sharia finance in Pakistan, and Bassam Osman, and American sharia banker, are profiled in this chapter.

Perhaps the greatest damage Islamic finance can do to the West in the long term has to do with the rather innocuous Koranic and sharia mandate for Moslems on almsgiving known as zakat.

Zakat committees in Gaza have been a prime transfer mechanism of funds for Hamas, for instance, and the radical jihadist madrassas in Pakistan have been partly funded from zakat for decades. What is new in the area of Islamic finance is the sheer volume of potential zakat collections and a plan to centralize both collections and distribution under one central authority that almost certainly will be controlled by committed Islamists.

Chapter IX – Political Warfare Against Radical Islam – focuses on examining the systemic weaknesses of Islamism and providing alternative strategies successfully exploit them.

The discussion in this final chapter represents an effort to formulate a new approach to the "war of ideas" by using the time-proven strategies of political warfare-a legitimate and productive instrument of state power that has fallen into nearly complete disrepair in the United States.

Indeed, it is a sad commentary on our times that the term political warfare is now used almost exclusively to describe domestic political campaigns, but avoided scrupulously with respect to foreign enemies.

This chapter contains much of what may be the main potential contribution of this study in terms of its critique of the current U.S. approach to the "war of ideas" and in its analysis of the fault lines of the Islamist enemy.

Washington has failed to see radical Islamist ideology, rather than terrorism, as the key enemy and has been singularly unsuccessful in its efforts to conduct "public diplomacy" during the two terms of the Bush administration and continuing under the present administration.

The study ends by addressing the possibility of mounting a political warfare campaign against radical Islam based on the premise that Islamism is an enemy of traditional Islam.   

It points to four specific areas-religion, economics, education, and human rights-as examples of the huge detrimental impact of radical Islam on the Moslem faith and on the socioeconomic prospects of Moslems in societies where Islamism has been allowed to dominate.

A well-crafted political warfare strategy directed at Islamism’s detrimental effects on Moslems themselves promises significant payoffs.

Alex Alexiev in a Visiting Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC.  He will be a featured speaker at the TTP Las Vegas Rendezvous May 6-8.