Studies in Conict & Terrorism, 32:389405, 2009 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1057-610X print

t / 1521-0731 online DOI: 10.1080/10576100902827972

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist: Notes from the Counterterrorism Literature
MATTHEW HERBERT
United States Department of the Army
Western intelligence analysts ght an uphill battle to avoid parochial habits of thought that lump diverse Islamist identities together. The recent counterterrorism literature gives us tools for understanding a wide spectrum of Islamists, by focusing attention on what they say about themselves rather than on the intelligence labels we must ultimately assign to them. The main challenge for analysts is not the brute diversity of Islamist types, but their plasticitythe Islamists exible inhabitation of distinct, sometimes contradictory, identities. Contrary to generalizations about the duplicity of all Islamists, much plasticity is due to ordinary psychological- or ideological strain the inability to resolve divided allegiances or sustain conicted principles. Islamist preacher Yussef al-Qardawi and salast group Hizb ut-Tahrir present prime examples of ordinary Islamist plasticity. In order to understand Islamism in all its complexity, analysts should develop methods for disaggregating and evaluating key components of the Islamist persona.

An emerging body of counterterrorism literature contends that Western political leaders fundamentally misunderstand Islamism, and that, as a consequence, the Wests war on Islamic terrorism is proceeding on a wholesale mischaracterization of the enemy.1 To the extent that intelligence analysts receive their starting assumptions from the prevailing political culture, they are at risk of failing to identify, locate, and understand the enemy, their essential professional tasks.2 On one set of dening assumptions, there are, crudely speaking, potentially hundreds of millions of individuals lling the enemys ranks. Any Muslim who tolerates terrorist outrages perpetrated in the name of his religion could be construed as extremist or radical, willing to aid or abet terrorists in his midst. On a set of stricter assumptions, there are just a few thousand enemiesthe shock troops of jihad who have shouldered weapons in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and so on. The intelligence analysts job is clearly more complicated than choosing one set of black-and-white assumptions over another. There are many shades of gray to be discerned. Nonetheless, the task of locating and counting the enemy and estimating his capacity to ght will ultimately hinge on the clear formulation of denitions. These denitions, in turn, ought to take into account the actual choices, behaviors, and attitudes of Islamists in all their variety. It cannot be the case that Islamic terrorists are simply those who are designated as such. Much of the recent counterterrorism literature critiques the assumption that each Muslim in the world is either an extremist or a moderate, or, more broadly, that Islam
Received 10 June 2008; accepted 13 August 2008. Address correspondence to Matthew Herbert, CMR 456 Box 7, APO AE 09011. E-mail: mwherbert2002@yahoo.com

389

390

M. Herbert

is either a religion of war or peace. It should come as no surprise that, in reality, a thousand owers are abloom in the realm of Islamic activism: to approach such diversity with a simple with-us-or-against-us dichotomy primarily in mind is a hopeless, futile task. The cutting edge of recent counterterrorism thought challenges the with-us-or-againstus dichotomy by reference to three themes. The rst one acknowledges that the data of empirical enquiry are generally messy and do not, in principle, conform to the wishes of the enquirer. Islamic activism presents just such a variegated picture. It is a globalized, diverse movement rooted in disparate ideological instincts and formed in response to particular geographic, social, and political conditions. To believe that Islamisms complex mixture of elements will reduce neatly into extremist and moderate groupings is to believe an epistemological fairy tale. But the intelligence analyst is nonetheless obligated to draw such yes/no distinctions and apply clear labels that identify threats. A second theme of the recent literature addresses this tension. It says that crucial intelligence distinctions such as the one between friend and foe are to be drawn at the end of an intellectually responsible process of analysis and subjected to evidence-based updatesnot assumed before analysis begins and held rm for all time. Not all Islamists who adopt terrorist methods share Al Qaedas totalizing vision of an imposed worldwide caliphate. Many Islamic terrorists will turn out to be nationalists, resistance ghters, or ordinary criminals who nd an advantage in branding themselves as jihadists. A third theme of the recent literature acknowledges the voice and agency of Islamists themselves in partitioning their own groups and choosing, developing, and promoting their own ideas. Muslims are not animated by, nor do they organize around, the paired concepts that intelligence analysts are charged to impute to them, such as extreme/moderate or violent/nonviolent. Nor do Muslims make a crucial issue of Islams being a religion of peace or not. If these questions are not foremost in the minds of Islamic activists, the outside observer starts off-balance by giving them priority. It should be made clear at the outset that this article aims merely to warn of the gravitational pull that Western3 leaders (necessarily) clear-cut policy formulations and public statements are likely to exert on intelligence analysts starting assumptions. It is not the authors intention to expose analytic errors already made. After developing some critical points on which the recent counterterrorism literature converges, the article will conclude that it is the Islamic activists plasticityhis exible inhabitation of distinct, even contradictory, identitiesand not the brute diversity of Islamist ideologies that presents the greatest challenge to the Western intelligence analyst. The Muslim Brotherhood preacher Yusef al-Qaradawi and the millenarian group Hizb ut-Tahrir serve as prime examples of this challenge. The article will not shy away from controversial ndings and in fact gives pride of place to the hardest-hitting of recent critiques of the Western analytic mindset, which starts from the immodest proposition that some Western governments dont have a clue about Islamism and Islamic-world politics.4

Conicts Forum: The Cost of Not Listening

Conicts Forum, a panel of British and American policy commentators from diplomacy and intelligence backgrounds, seeks to understand Islamism by engaging its proponents in dialogue.5 The groups starting assumption is that the American (and European Union) policy of not talking to designated terrorist groups is both outdated and self-defeating.6 Many designated terrorist groups already have the legitimacy that Western governments seek to deny them by not talking to them. Hizbullah, with its weeks-long mass rallies in Beirut, and Hamas, with its January 2006 capture of 58 percent of the Palestinian vote,7 are exemplary cases. The Muslim Brotherhood, which backs Islamist parties throughout

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist

391

the Muslim world, also has broad legitimacy as an enduring, inuential source of Islamist thought.8 Refusing to talk to these groups, according to Conicts Forum, has not only failed to deliver the desired diplomatic resultisolationbut has left Western governments frighteningly out of touch with the principal political currents in the Middle East,9 and, by extension, the Muslim world. Instead of talking to groups with real constituencies, according to Conicts Forum, Western interlocutors take their views from an isolated elite who pander to Western governments, telling them only what they want to hear.10 The most costly consequence of Western leaders policy decisions in this area, for intelligence analysts, is the information decit it creates in the area of terrorist decision making.11 By refusing to talk to suspect Islamist groups, Western leaders deny themselves and the agencies they serve a portal view into the internal diversity of Islamic militancy. Not all terrorist groups think the same way about violence, despite the slogan endorsed by Russian president Vladimir Putin and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar that all terrorists, everywhere, are the same, wishing ruin and destruction on the civilized order.12 While moral clarity compels one to perceive all terrorism as uniformly wrathful and murderous, strategic acuity compels one to acknowledge the role of rational choice behind terrorist actions.13 Many designated terrorist groups use the same decision-making template that state actors do in applying military force. Objectives are prioritized, means are matched to them, and the costs and benets of violence are weighed. Upon seeing this pattern in Hamass decision-making process, one Western participant in a Conicts Forum dialogue voiced the realization that his interlocutors in Hamas were not genetically encoded monsters, but hard-headedalbeit brutalpolitical actors who carefully choose their tactics and attempt to manage the effects of their actions.14 Both Hamas and Hizbullah are forced by the regional imbalance of military power in the Levant to seek unconventional means of mitigating their respective disadvantages. For Hamas this has meant suicide bombing and improvised Qasam rockets. For Hizbullah it has meant setting itself up as Irans military proxy, by way of Syria. (Conicts Forum contests this point sharply, giving ample and sympathetic hearing to Hizbullahs claim that it is fundamentally a Lebanese movement.)15 In both cases the adoption of terrorist tactics is a strategic choice based on military reasoning. Still, many Western leaders and observers are captivated by the Muslim-ness of Islamic terrorist groups, believing that they terrorize because they are following a religious script. In a March 2004 speech, thenU.K. prime minister Tony Blair judged that Islamic extremism in Chechnya, Kashmir, and Afghanistan was not driven by a set of negotiable political demands, but by religious fanaticism.16 The Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders caused a stir across Europe and much of the Muslim world in 2008 by producing a short lm suggesting, among other things, that when Muslims commit terrorist acts, they are following the Korans main directive, to subdue and eliminate indel cultures; they are not acting on a fanatical, minority interpretation of Islam. Jeffrey Imm regularly upbraids U.S. ofcials for failing to dene Islamism as the root of the Islamic terrorist threat.17 Terrorism researcher Lorenzo Vidinowho has testied on Islamic extremism before the U.S. Congress interprets Al Qaedas attacks in Europe as coextensive with the Muslim Brotherss religious aspirations to conquer Christian territory.18 While religious fanaticism often plays a role in preparing individuals for terrorist operations,19 it does not, in a signicant number of cases, suffuse the terrorist groups whole decision-making process or determine its strategic outlook. A 2008 biography of Al Qaeda strategist Abu Musab al-Suri (captured in Pakistan in 2005) shows that even leaders of his most violent of Islamic terrorist groups engaged in dispassionate operational analysis and deliberated on how to achieve optimal military

392

M. Herbert

effects, unburdened of religious considerations.20 As always, individual cases must be examined. To take the case of Hamas, Islam serves several distinct functional roles, and the Muslim directive to conduct jihad does not appear to take priority among them. First, Islam is a vote-getter for Hamas. Palestinians, like Muslims throughout the Middle East, vote for Islamists as a vibrant alternative to the secular parties that have racked up reputations for stagnation and corruption, and Hamas lls this bill. A February 2006 poll of 1,200 Palestinians indicated that most Palestinians who voted for Hamas did so based on the expectation that Hamas would curb government corruption.21 Second, Hamass Islamic principles inspire and underwrite the partys social program. For 20 years before Hamas emerged as a ghting group, its activists were engaged primarily in a religious social movement that sought to deliver public services to deprived Palestinians.22 Quality schools and health care are not just mainstays of sound public policy according to Hamas but are mandated by Islamic ethics.23 Third, Hamass prioritization of Islamic piety re-allocates political capital from the well-connected elite to the humble masses, a constituency that predominates occupied Palestine. When Hamas was maneuvering to assert control of the 1987 Intifada, according to Kepel, its leaders deliberately targeted the poor, disaffected youth as the constituency that they would ride to power. By stimulating the young to promote Muslim morality as part of the Hamas party program, Hamas turned the deprived young into a tool of Islamic authenticity . . .a zealous opposition to Arafats coterie of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) hacks.24 Fourth, Hamas cultivates and co-opts the Islamic fervor of young Palestinians to conduct suicide bombings, offsetting Israels technological advantage with a raw commitment of will.25 Fifth, Islam provides the general ideological themes and the fundamental religious justication for taking back Palestine that unite the Palestinian street behind Hamass program. Pious Palestinians who might disagree with certain of Hamass priorities or means will align themselves with the partys Islamic tenor. It is at this levelstreet politicswhere the outside observer might be forgiven for conating Hamass outlook with Al Qaedas. The standard line of reasoning goes: Hamas is rst and foremost an Islamist party, compelled by its Muslim principles to commit terrorism; it is, therefore, fundamentally a terrorist organization, differing only in degree from Al Qaeda. To be sure, the sight of Palestinians celebrating the 9/11 attacks in the streets of Gaza suggested an ideological solidarity between the two groups, but it is one that cannot be found in their respective charters. As genuinely and abidingly as a handful, or even masses, of Palestinians might hate America or reject its inuence in the Middle East, neither Hamas nor any other Palestinian Islamist group has signed on to Osama bin Ladens declarations of total war on the West. The case of Hamas is just one (complicated) exception to the PutinAznar stereotype that runs all terrorist groups together. The Conicts Forum arguments are an exhortation to policymakers and analysts to break up the spectrum of terrorist identities into manageable segments by prioritizing differences in groups goals rather than continuities in their methods. The U.S. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism implicitly promotes the PutinAznar tendency to homogenize all terrorist groups, characterizing nationalist and regional terrorists as enemies of humanity, whose morally repugnant methods put them on equal footing with global jihadists.26 Intelligence analysts will do well to eschew this moralizing generalization. In lumping all Islamic terrorist groups together at the outset of the analytic process, we prejudice the conclusion that all violent Islamists are driven by religious principles, implacably opposed to anything alien to Islam and irrationally murderous in attitude. This outlook contributes to a self-defeating counterterrorism strategy that Kilcullen labels aggregation.27 Not only does aggregation fail to distinguish signicant

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist

393

differences among groupschiey, which ones have constituencies and which ones do notbut, in so doing, it also confers a measure of prestige and legitimacy on Al Qaeda by positioning it at the vanguard of an imagined global army. But by examining Islamism in its own diverse terms, and listening to the voices of Islamists, however, we can begin to make out the outlines of a much more complex, globalized phenomenon that lacks a unied leadership or even a common set of geopolitical objectives.

International Crisis Group: Islamism in Its Own Terms

Two more fundamental mistakes reected in the assumptions of Western counterterrorism policies are the misconstrual of political Islam and misplaced emphasis on Islams attitude to war and peace. Western analysts who uncritically mirror these assumptions by orienting initially on the questions of whether Islamist groups are political or not, or violent or not, position themselves to project politically inspired categories of good and bad on to Islamic activist groups that, in many cases, do not apply. Postulating these evaluative categories ahead of analytic investigation invites all three of the analytic errors targeted in the current counterterrorism literature: it is a crude oversimplication of messy data, belies an analytic process that assumes the truth of its main conclusions, and nullies the voices of Islamists in dening themselves. An incisive analysis by International Crisis Group28 shows how any valid taxonomy of Islamist types should be based primarily on Islams self-enunciated divisions and should avoid anticipating deep analogies between Islamic values and institutions and those commonly called Western or secular. Much Western counterterrorism policy and analysis of Islam posits a relationship between faith and politics analogous to our own separation of church and state. The U.S. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (NSCT) reects this assumption in its assertion that, Our terrorist enemies exploit Islam to serve a violent political vision.29 Violence, as an obviously bad thing, can be factored out of this formulation. It goes without saying that America seeks to defeat (violent) terrorists. But it is the political dimension of Islamism that attracts suspicion as a philosophically corrupt enterprise, trespassing, as it does, into a domain entrusted strictly to secular control. The NSCT makes this suspicion clear by promoting the power of democracy to deate the authoritarian religious impulses fueling Islamic terrorism.30 By inculcating democratic habits in the Muslim world, Western armies and diplomatic corps will tame Islamism into a more progressive, less politically engaged form, replicating within the decades-long time horizon of U.S. foreign policy the same retreat from public authority that Christianity has effectedor been subjected toover the last 400 years in the West. In a 2006 paper, Martin Bright posited a distinction between pure and politicized Islam in much the same tone as the NSTC, contrasting [T]he more progressive or spiritual traditions within Islam with political Islam.31 Political Islam is, by implication, a perversion of pure religion that ought, like twenty-rst-century Christianity, to stay out of the business of governance. Many Western observers presume religious faith to be properly a private matter,32 which extends into politics only by transparently made exceptions, such as governmentendorsed religious charities in America or voluntary church taxes in Germany. We project this dichotomy, according to International Crisis Group, on to Muslims as one between on the one hand, Islam qua religion and its adherentsordinary decent Muslims for whom Islam is a matter of personal piety, not political commitmentand, on the other hand, Islamism or political Islamby implication an affair of minority agitators exploiting the faith of their fellow Muslims for political ends [and] stirring up resentment . . . .33 Many Muslimss experience of this Western tendency to compartmentalize religious and

394

M. Herbert

secular identities has produced a backlash, according to Nil fer G le. He argues that u o contemporary Muslims are re-asserting a public role for Islam precisely in reaction to the percieved imposition of this Western value.34 According to the view that religion ought to be a pristinely spiritual experience, Islamic terrorism is simply the extreme expression of an already suspect phenomenoncorrupting the sacred to serve political ends. There is one major problem with this proposition: Islam does not cede the public sphere to pure politics to begin with. It is, in conception, a public enterprise, a program for interpreting and enforcing divine law as a blueprint for social order.35 The Muslim Brotherhood, to take one Islamist example, teaches that the Wests compartmentalization of private faith and public authority does not apply prima facie to Islam. If we describe European modernity as the dividing of society, religion, politics and culture into separate elds or discourses, according to Kepels analysis, then the Brothers were opposed to it in the 1930s, just as their heirs are today.36 The austere strains of Islamic fundamentalism that promote the unaugmented scriptures as a sufcient plan of governance and denounce independent political institutions as threats to the Korans self-sufciency are not deviating from Islamic principles. They are extending them to their logical limits. The epistemological implications of accepting this paradigm are dizzying. If Islam is inherently a public phenomenon, by its own lights properly concerned with regulating the conduct of whole communitiesnot just that of individualsone is compelled to make sense of any political expression of Islam as internally legitimate. Neither policy nor intelligence analysis can simply go over the heads of minority agitators to nd pluralist values analogous to the Wests prevailing in the moderate Muslim world. Analysts, in particular, should avoid adopting the tempting assumption that Islam divides organically into political and apolitical compartments, where the former needs looking into but the latter can go unmonitored. If all Islam is political, it is all noteworthy. Analysts can also wrongfoot themselves by assuming that genuine Islam is a religion of peace and corrupt Islam a religion of war. This proposition is one of the Wests standard sound-bite messages to the Islamic world, designed to reassure the masses of ordinary Muslims that they are not under siege in the War on Terrorism. Former U.S. president George Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair have both ostentatiously praised Islam as a religion of peace, implying that Islamic terrorists are not authentic Muslims.37 These rather presumptuous generalizations are based on another fundamental misconstrual of Islam identied in the International Crisis Group analysis. Islam is fundamentally a religion of law and justice, not war and peace.38 As a religion of law, it is concerned primarily to apply scriptural principles to the regulation of interpersonal conduct. It is not essential to Islam that the proper application of scriptural principles should lead to peace with other communities, or any particular kind of external relationship, for that matter. Intramural social order is Islams ultimate desideratum, whatever its boundary interactions with outside communities might be. Obviously, Islamic societies and institutions do not neglect matters of war and peace altogether, but the pursuit or avoidance of war per se is not a pivotal question for Islamic theology, as it is for its Christian counterpart. Christianity is, at least on paper, a radically pacist ideology, which ofcially promotes unconditional forgiveness of ones enemies and therefore needs extraordinarily strong justication for war. Whether to kill and conquer or preach and pray are questions that are merely incidental to Islams central imperative to follow and propagate Gods law. The characterization of war as a substantive evil that stands in need of extraordinary instrumental justication is an artifact of Christianity, not Islam. Once analysts have shed the tendency to project their native categories on to exotic dataa logical fallacy sometimes called mirror-imagingthey are in a position to climb

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist

395

down from the epistemic vertigo just mentioned. Although there is a quasi-political dimension to all Islamic activism and, therefore, potentially a political purpose to every Islamist movement, analysts at least gain an interpretive starting point for making sense of the myriad movements by yielding priority to Islams own terms of self-reference. Starting with the sectarian divide between Shiite and Sunni Islam, the analyst can work down through ever-ner ideological or organizational dividesfor example, between missionary and political activist groups, between global jihadists and national resistance ghtersuntil she or he has reached the functional object of analysis she or he is aiming at, such as an ethnic community, named activist or terrorist group, and so on. The guiding assumption of this approach is that Islamists are who they say they are. Although, admittedly, militant Islamists have strong motives for staying anonymous to police and intelligence services, they are at the same time embedded in a milieu whose internal ideological competition requires them constantly to articulate key parts of their identities. Al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiris spring 2008 open-forum discussion of his ghters terrorizing methods was stimulated in large part by the dissenting opinions issued by former jihadi-proponent Sayyid Imam al-Sharif.39 This public split between former comrades laid bare two dramatically different Islamist identities that did not have to be discovered through assiduous intelligence analysis. The Islamists themselves told analysts who they were. Some terrorists are even bound by their operational roles to put their identities on display. One job of Islamic terrorist recruiters, according to a 2004 case study, is to exude jihadist charisma, literally advertising their linkage to a global jihad so that acolytes know where to apply for admission.40 The recruits themselves wish to attain starring roles in a global pageantry of martyrdom. Many young Muslims trying to inltrate Iraq or Afghanistan seek to stage their own heroic deaths while facing down Americas militaryand to have the spectacle presented on the Internet.41 One such jihadist, a German of Turkish origin, recorded a rambling discussion of his decision to martyr himself, several scenes of himself preparing a truck-bomb for the attack, and the attack itself, which killed two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in March 2008.42 Five of the Islamists planning the trans-Atlantic liquid-explosive attack on U.S. and British airliners disrupted in August, 2006 produced martyrdom videos, later being used as evidence for their prosecution.43 This new religious exhibitionism is not limited to terrorists and their recruiters, though. Roy points out that many ordinary born again Muslims tend to act out their re-invigorated o faith in conspicuous ways, staging their new Muslim identities for all to see.44 G le explains this extroversion, in part, as a rebellion against a European tendency to try to contain Islamic agency within the private realm.45 In Germany a virtual network of highly conspicuous converts and born-again Muslims has sprung up, which might not have been noticeable in the pre-Internet age but which now has the means (and, apparently, the desire) to force itself into the publics consciousness. Leaders and members of the network use video le-sharing platforms such as You Tube to broadcast numerous live Islamic conversion scenes and one-on-one interviews in which the young Muslims discuss their new fulllment in Islam.46 The Islamist political party Hizb ut-Tahrir broadcasts its hopes and (to a lesser extent) plans for a revived worldwide Muslim caliphate in the frankest of terms. It even goes so far as to publish the renewed caliphates draft constitution, including the politically inconvenient fact that the caliph will, upon his ascension, immediately be at war with Israel.47 The Internet has enabled Muslims of all political stripes to tell the world, at great volume, who they are. These self-descriptions, accepted as prima facie valid, provide analysts with a valuable set of heuristic lenses for refracting out psychological nuances of identity rather than forcing them to converge into familiar, static categories.

396

M. Herbert

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist

International Crisis Groups sectarian taxonomy is one of a handful of analytic perspectives on Islamism that cede interpretive primacy to what Islamists say about themselves. In the same vein, Roy develops a broadly sociological taxonomy of Islamist types featuring neofundamentalist, political, liberal, ethical, traditional, and jihadist varieties.48 Kilcullen, taking a military perspective, distinguishes the diverse components of a global Islamic insurgency, dividing militias by the geographic space they contest and the interests they articulate, then subdividing them into functional military components. The key, for Kilcullen, is to focus on each groups declared objectives. You dont play to [Al Qaeda]s global information strategy of making it all one ght, according to Kilcullen. You say, Actually there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Lets not talk about Bin Ladens objectiveslets talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem? 49 Matrices such as International Crisis Groups, Roys, and Kilcullens give the analyst incisive tools for making sense of the whole spectrum of terrorist identities, from ideological sympathizer to mass killer, without attributing an articial unity to them and without assuming that a person or group will remain in one category only. Martin Bright, in a 2006 critique of a joint U.S.U.K. diplomatic paper distinguishing three strands of Islamism, observed, What the authors [of the paper] do not deal with . . . is the criticism that the three strands they have identied are not quite as tidy and well-dened as they might like. Individuals in the Muslim world are quite capable of passing between each of the categories, or occupying two or more at the same time.50 Ultimately the main problem for analysts is not the diversity of Islamist identities, but their plasticity. If one observes a prima facie principle that Islamists are who they say they are, he or she cannot fail to notice that many Islamists appear to inhabit distinct, even contradictory, identities. The views of a single Islamic activist or movement can cross-cut the intelligence categories of violent/nonviolent, political/apolitical, and so on, repelling the application of a single label. To assign an ideological category to an Islamist becomes an exercise in averaging out the exceptions to his primary identity or monitoring seemingly minute changes in outlook, message, or actions. Change is in the nature of Islamists, and it sometimes happens outside their deliberate control. For several years before the 1987 Palestinian Intifada, the Islamic activists who would eventually make up Hamas really were primarily members of a public services agency. After the transformation forced on them by the Intifada, they really were a violent resistance group, while retaining elements of their public servant identity.51 Sageman notes of small, unafliated Islamist cliques that irt with jihadism: [C]liques do not start out as terrorist groups. They evolve in that direction as their mutual relationships deepen. . . .52 Graham Fuller adds: It is important to remember, too, that all these terms [of identity] are ideological abstractions; few t neatly into the total descriptive portrait of an individual, and an Islamists behavior can differ signicantly depending on the conditions under which he is placed.53 Roy pushes an articulation of what the present author calls plasticity even further than other scholars and observers. He contends that to be a Muslim today is to be stratied into layers of conicted identity and to manage the tensions that arise between ones different selves, ultimately constructing a complex identity out of diverse elements, and without the institutional support of established Muslim religious authorities or a unied Muslim culture.54 In some cases, the resulting dissonance can produce a stable but multifaceted personaa person (or group) who is authentically liberal on some issue but conservative, even extreme, on others. In other cases, Islamists exist in a state of perpetual turbulence,

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist

397

never bringing their conicted elements into stasis. Furthermore, identities change over time; Islamists try on and cast off various ideologies and tactics, for a variety of reasons. Two cases of pronounced Islamist plasticity suggest something of the scope of the puzzle that analysts face in trying to distinguish terrorists and their functional supporters from their innocent co-religionists and passive sympathizers.

Yussef al-Qaradawi: Is He or Is He Not?

The well-known Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Yussef al-Qaradawi presents a case in point. Widely regarded as a political activist, in line with the current direction of the Muslim Brotherhood that favors participation in elections, Qaradawi has also espoused the view, amenable to fundamentalist missionary activists, that Muslims in Europe should partition themselves off into Islamized ghettoes, eventually to conquer their European hosts by out-breeding and out-preaching them.55 Qaradawi is also starkly equivocal on the use of violence in general and suicide bombings in particular in advancement of Muslim interests. He is against suicide bombings in Europe and America but for them in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories.56 Qaradawi is culturally modernhe enjoined the Taliban not to destroy Afghanistans Buddha statues in 2001but he is capable of retrograde, even brutal, opinions as well. He has produced an infamous fatwa in favor of limited female circumcision, in which he opined that a Muslim girl should have most but not all of her external genitalia removed.57 Qaradawi has also played the conicting roles of ofcial state preacher and independent religious scholar. In 1985 the Algerian Ministry of Religious Affairs hired him as an ofcial cleric, paid to help control the bubbling forces of Islamist revolution by shoring up the governments Muslim identity.58 But he has also authored numerous independent opinions and since 1997 has headed the European Council for Fatwa and Research. Qaradawis regular appearance on Al-Jazeeras Islamic talk show Life and Religion is an intriguing blend of private and public roles: he promotes his private scholarly views but within the editorial connes of Qatars state control over Al-Jazeeras. It is instructive to look at opinions of Qaradawi within the Islamic community to see the tensions inherent in his layered identity. In 2004 a Muslim blogger sharply criticized Qaradawis hypocrisy in characterizing U.S. soldiers siege of Najaf, Iraq as genocide while refusing to apply the same term to Darfur. She closed her critique with the benediction, May Allah guide him back to the truth.59 The same year, Islam researcher Shaker alNabulsi called for a United Nations special court to try Qaradawi for clerical incitement to terrorism, based on a fatwa calling for the abduction and killing of U.S. civilians in Iraq.60 Fundamentalist Muslims, however, condemn Qaradawi for his coziness with Western interlocutors and his promotion of democracy and political integration. Hard-liners sarcastically refer to Qaradawis landmark book of Islamic jurisprudence The Permitted and the Forbidden as The Permitted and the Permitted, deriding what they perceive to be his doctrinal liberalism.61 Despite numerous attempts to unmask the true Qaradawi, there is no single identity to be found behind the mask. Qaradawi acts from a doctrinal basis in one community but produces effects in others with which he has only incidental ideological ties. He is not wholly a fundamentalist, but the fundamentalist strands in some lines of his thought have likely won converts to the salast camp. Likewise, he is not a jihadi, but his fatwas promoting resistance in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan have likely won sympathy from more globally minded jihadis. In essence, Qaradawi is not clearly a protagonist or antagonist of Islamic terrorism. He is in effect both, and he ultimately has little control over how his messages are used by terrorist supporters or liberal reformers for their divergent ends.

398

M. Herbert

Qaradawis ideological ambiguity is a lightning rod for the impulse to divide Islamists into good and bad camps. It is emerging as an article of faith among many Western observers that equivocating Islamists like Qaradawi present a false face of peace to Western audiences, while sincerely preaching hate in private (or in the relative privacy of the Arabic language) to their faithful congregations.62 There are isolated cases that support this view,63 but terrorists lies cannot account for all the doublespeak in the world of Islamic activism. Something more mundane is likely at play. Islamists with public authority must craft different messages for different audiences for the same reason that leaders of all kinds of complex organizations occasionally equivocate: they serve multiple constituencies with conicting interests to advance. This bind is precisely why politicians the world over have developed the unenviable reputation for being permanently two-faced. An honest politician cannot be, for example, relentlessly pro-labor and pro-business, but she or he must nonetheless strike a rhetorical balance that makes her or him appear to be an advocate of both sides. Presumably, there are inveterate liars in the Islamist community who wish to lull Westerners into a false sense of security with insincere messages of peace and social integration. But the propagandist labellike any label of a terrorists functional support roleis to be applied as a result of exhaustive analysis and, even then, subject to revision in light of further evidence. A wholesale generalization about the duplicity of all or even most Islamists does not t into a sound analytic process as a starting assumption.

Hizb ut-Tahrir: In the Islamist Laboratory

Although it cannot be taken for granted that all Islamists lie to their Western interlocutors, there are clearly Islamists capable of lying systematically to themselves. The neofundamentalist group Hizb ut-Tahrir provides a striking example of this phenomenon, exhibiting elements of a fractured personality deeply at odds with itself. While the present author does not presume to see directly into the minds of Hizb ut-Tahrirs members, it is submitted that there is a manifest paradox at the foundation of their doctrine, which cannot fail to stimulate delusion, cognitive dissonance, or abrupt changes of mind. The tension between the groups communitarian objective and atomized actions produces inherently unstable Islamic identities among its memberspious extremists who might choose, or drift into, any identity in the catalog when faced with their groups doctrinal failure to connect means with ends. Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (Party of Islamic Liberation) is a Sunni revivalist, neofundamentalist group established in 1953 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that seeks to establish a global Islamic state. Its founders sought to reverse what they (correctly) perceived among the Brothers as a trend toward the hybridization of Islamic values and Western politics. The Brotherhood was originally political in outlook and today stands behind Islamist parties in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco.64 Turkeys governing Justice and Development Party (AK) is modeled on the concept of Islamist politics pioneered by the Brothers. Hizb ut-Tahrirs founders rejected the Brotherss path as one that usurped Gods sovereignty by giving social authority to the fallible human institutions of democracy. To put an Islamic platform before the tribunal of the voting public would be tantamount to holding a referendum on the Koran, whose absolute truth and supreme value are xed by God, not debated by politicians and questioned by voters. Despite its tactical differences with the Brotherss, Hizb ut-Tahrir did, however, continue to share a fundamental strategic assumption with them about the relationship of individual piety and political power: achieve the former on a broad basis, and you will attain the latter. One

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist

399

contemporary salast preacher sympathetic to Hizb ut-Tahrirs goals formulates this relationship in clearly geographic terms: Establish Islam in your hearts and it will, in turn, be established in your land.65 What ultimately distinguishes Hizb ut-Tahrir from the Muslim Brotherhood is the logic of the relationship between piety and power. The Brothers believe that Islamic piety can be translated into political power through an ongoing, incremental process of institution building and social reform, and they accept the legitimacy of the existing state as a framework for this transformation. Furthermore, they implicitly accept that the path of reform will meander through shifting priorities, face blind corners, and risk going wrong in placespolitics in its natural, contingent mode. The appeal of the Brotherss vision ows from its immediacy: it can be pursued by any Muslim in the here-and-now by means of political activism, even if its loftier goals remain distant. The Brotherss offshoots in Hizb ut-Tahrir reserve two objections to this vision. First, they do not share the Brotherss belief in the efcacy of translating piety into political action. Piety should not be changed into anything else or adapted for any outside end: it is sufcient as-is for guiding humans toward earning Gods riza, or approval. Piety should only be intensied, not transformed. Second, Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects the Brotherss sense of historical timing. Muslims are not yet ready to make the jump into politics because their hearts are still impure, a grim fact that explains their persistent subjugation to Jews and Westerners. Sheik al-Hilali, a Hizb ut-Tahrir sympathizer, chides the Brothers for their haste and presumptuousness: The [Muslim Brotherhood] program supposes the purity of ones [sic] soul, since it implies that we have fullled the conditions for victory to be granted to us . . . even though the indels still have the upper hand.66 Muslims must rst turn inward and purify their souls in greater numbers, then political revolution will come. Despite Hizb ut-Tahrirs deeply held commitment to individual piety and rejection of politics, it retains, at least on paper, a grand political goal: to ensconce a Muslim caliph, who will rule the worldwide community of Muslims, the ummah. But rather than slogging through a political process that risks debasing the Koran and perpetuating the ummahs subjugation to the West, Hizb ut-Tahrir aims at global, grassroots revolution, culminating in a sudden, millenarian victory. The caliphate will be delivered to humankind as a nished system, ready for immediate implementation and in need of no adjustments on the y, but it will happen only when Muslims have achieved a critical mass of Koranic rectitude. There are three stages to Hizb ut-Tahrirs program.67 The rst one is to spread their central message promoting individual return to an austere, intensely pious version of Islam, based on a literal interpretation of the Koran and aimed at the assimilation of ones everyday conduct to behavior attributed to the prophet Mohammed. The second stage is for Hizb ut-Tahrir to interact with the ummah, in order to advance its principles as the only legitimate version of Islam, stripped of all cultural accretions and purged of alien inuences. Hizb ut-Tahrir, like other neo-fundamentalist movements, despises the notion that Islam might have ethnic or artistic dimensions. Islam is a system of rule, according to the groups founders; it has no culture or ethnography. The third stage of the revolution is to establish an Islamic state on earth, with the caliph at its head. (One Hizb ut-Tahrir website, hosted in Austria, features a digital chronometer that displays in real time the number of days that have passed since Kemal Attaturk disbanded the Caliphate in 1924.)68 Hizb ut-Tahrirs pretension to install a political ruler clashes sharply with its radical rejection of the political process. The groups magical thinking leads it to articulate what Roy calls an imaginary agenda.69 Roy describes Hizb ut-Tahrir as a group with diametrically conicted principles about what it wants and how it will get it:

400

M. Herbert Is Hizb ut-Tahrir a neofundamentalist party? In a sense, no. The Hizb ut-Tahrir eschews the application of sharia as its top priority and retains many elements of its Muslim Brotherhood past, such as its use of the term ideology; its insistence on building an Islamic state in the form of a Caliphate that will rule over the whole ummah; and its organization as a political movement (especially its use of cells). But it has become an uprooted and deterritorialized movement, with no thought of taking power in a given country. The Caliphate it wants to establish has no territorial basis. Hizb ut-Tahrir uses pseudo-Koranic terminology, taken out of context, with no consideration of history and social circumstances. . . . In fact, for HIzb ut-Tahrir the Caliphate is not a real geographical entity and has no territorial or sociological roots.70

Although Hizb ut-Tahrir clearly has a political goal, Roy continues, it is far removed from concrete politics.71 International Crisis Group concludes, along the same lines as Roy, that Hizb ut-Tahrir exists in the interstices between political and apolitical identities.72 The doctrinal challenge of adapting Islam to political goals lies at the heart of any program of Islamic activism. The duality of Hizb ut-Tahrir exposes this puzzle in its most exacerbated form: how to render pure, uncompromised Islamic principles into a practicable plan of action that is achievable by fallible, compromised human agents. Al Qaeda, for its part, has solved this puzzle, seizing on violence as the way to restore Islam to power. Turkeys AK party, to take a very different example, believes standing for elections in a pluralist political system is the proper means to the chosen end. Whatever their substantive virtues and vicesand they vary widelyboth strategies are comprehensible in terms of rational choice. They each plot an intelligible trajectory from the present state to desired outcome. But Hizb ut-Tahrir languishes in a twilight zone of doctrinal non-starters. Its members focus piously on the private sphere of their own quotidian conduct and party activism73 but without a sustainable link to their desired outcome. The culminating point of Hizb ut-Tahrirs revolution is simply too far over the horizon to constitute a proper object of hope. But members of Hizb ut-Tahrir must nonetheless cast a hungry eye constantly toward the historical horizon, awaiting the delivery of the caliphate. Unable to bear the strain of their groups magical thinking, many Hizb ut-Tahrir members have apparently been stirred to other modes of action. Sheik Assad Bayyou Tamimi left Hizb ut-Tahrir in 1958 to found the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.74 Another former member, Omar Bakri Muhammad, founded the jihadist group Al-Muhajiroun.75 Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz, both ranking British members of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the late 1990s, dropped their fundamentalist zeal entirely, left the group, and became spokesmen for liberal Islam. Together, they co-founded a think tank in April 2008 dedicated to countering Hizb ut-Tahrirs ideology.76 The Hizb ut-Tahrir identity is not a self-sustaining one; it naturally bursts out of its doctrinal bind and into open channels. Zeyno Baran recently wrote that While [Hizb ut-Tahrir] as an organization does not engage in terrorist activities, it has become the vanguard of the radical Islamist ideology that encourages its followers to commit terrorist acts. . . . HT today serves as a de facto conveyor belt for terrorists.77 This analysis does not capture the breadth of the problem posed by Hizb ut-Tahrirs plasticity. Hizb ut-Tahrir is, in actuality, a conveyor belt for the whole spectrum of Islamist types, an accelerant of the Islamists core identity crisis, which poses an even greater challenge to the analyst charged to distinguish enemies from non-enemies. Hizb ut-Tahrir takes Muslims with unusually potent religious sentiments and presents them with an unworkable formula for fullling the wishes based on those

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist

401

sentiments. It is a striking factbut no surprisethat the groups alumni include gures as varied as Omar Bakri Muhammad and Ed Husain. Broadly speaking, members face four options for managing the acute disappointment that must come with realizing their punctilious piety and heated activism will not bring the caliphate crashing into history. First, one may choose, like al-Zawahiri, Lenin and other revolutionaries before them, to quicken the pace of history through armed struggle. Members making this choice become salast jihadis. Second, one may choose politics, an ungainly but nonetheless measurable process for advancing Islams march to power. This choice is essentially a reversion to the Muslim Brotherss priorities. Third, one may opt out of fundamentalist Islam altogether, as Ed Husain seems to have done, relegating religion to the background of his public persona.78 These members might choose any number of liberal Islamic identities that accord with a pluralistic outlookethical, traditional, or mystical Islam, for example. A fourth choice is to stick dogmatically with Hizb ut-Tahrirs salast doctrine in all its contradictions, essentially applying an existentialists determination to believe the impossible. Westerners can observe this mode of religious commitment in Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, for example.

Conclusion: Only Disaggregate

There is, to repeat Sageman, no predominant, global prole of an Islamic terrorist. There are only local proles,79 and even these are prone to shift with time and circumstances. The shifting identities of Islamic terrorist supporters and sympathizers are murkier still. If Western analysts are to cope with the multiplicity and uidity of Islamist identities, they must cultivate habits of disaggregation that are not currently reinforced in their political cultures moralistic conception of terrorism. The entry points into the universe of Islamist identities will present themselves in a free-owing Islamist discourse; they will not be pried open along imaginary seams such as the one between moderates and extremists. Analysts need to give priority to what Islamists themselves say in the websites they design, sermons they preach, pamphlets they distribute, blog comments they post, interviews they give, and books they publish, without presuming that this internal discourse will yield individual types susceptible to be sorted into xed intelligence categories. Disaggregation in its usual, psychological sense may prove to be the key to understanding Islamist plasticity. Rather than approaching each Islamist persona as a psychological whole, whose values, beliefs, and attitudes are self-harmonizing, Western analysts should follow the standard methodological assumptions of the behavioral sciences in recognizing diverse personality components. If the interplay among Freuds id, ego, and superego can usefully describe intrapersonal conicthowever metaphoricallyor if the Briggs-Meyers personality inventory can render the broad range of personality types it does by reference to only four independent traits, certainly Western analysts can see value in disaggregating the main elements of Islamistss identities using analogous schemes. Articulating such a framework would be a topic unto itself, worthy of more attention than can be given here. Sufce it to say for the moment that many of the Islamists operant personality components are suggested in the literature just reviewed. Ecumenism would be one such element: Is Islam a truly global project, in which the sectarian divide is irrelevant, or must one or the other sect be subdued for Islam to pursue its proper place? Political outlook would be another key element: Is political development within the given system of nation-states and multiple ideologies acceptable, or must the system rst be recongured to preclude the viability of Islams ideological competitors? These crucial diagnostic questions will multiply as analysts leave the clearly dened realm of committed terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and consider gateway groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and other agships of Islamist

402

M. Herbert

ambiguity. Such groups are laboratories for unstable combinations of Islamist elements, capable of turning out the Wests next committed enemies, such as Omar Bakri Muhammad, or passionate allies, such as Ed Husain. It is in such nexus areas that analysts must develop and apply disaggregating methods with the greatest assiduousness and imagination.

Notes
1. Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke, How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Asia Times, 31 March8 June 2007. (Originally published as a ve-part series, the article is posted on the Conicts Forum website, available at www.conictsforum.org); International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, 2 March 2005, available at www.crisisgroup.org; Graham Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David Kilcullen, Countering Global Insurgency, Small War Journal, December 2004, pp. 172; Jeffrey Imm, 9/11 and the Inconvenient Truths about Jihad and Islamism, Counterterrorism Blog, 11 September 2007. 2. The author is an intelligence analyst employed by the U.S. Department of the Army. This article represents his personal views only. In no way do the views expressed here reect the policies or ofcial opinions of the U.S. Department of the Army or the U.S. Government. 3. For the purposes of this article, the author will use the admittedly over-simple terms West and Western to refer collectively to U.S. and European countries, especially their centers of government. 4. Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke, How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part One: Talking with the Terrorists, Asia Times, 31 March 2006. 5. Available at www.conictsforum.org (accessed 5 February 2008). 6. Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke, How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part Two: Handing Victory to the Extremists,Asia Times, 1 April 2006. 7. Scott Wilson, Hamas Sweeps Palestinian Elections, Complicating Peace Efforts in Mideast, Washington Post, 27 January 2006. 8. See Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke, The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood, Foreign Affairs, 86(42) (March/April 2007), pp. 107121, for an argument in favor of engagement. 9. Perry and Crooke, How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part One. 10. Ibid. 11. Conicts Forumss arguments in support of this point are insightful and provocative but one-dimensional. Typically, Western governments base their decisions to talk or not talk to terrorist organizations on several factors, only one of which is the gain or loss of intelligence information. By ignoring terrorists, governments may indeed aim to deny them credibility or prestige, as Conicts Forum claims, but more importantly, they wish to avoid reinforcing terrorists operational success, a point that Conicts Forum neglects entirely. The current authors promotion of some of Conicts Forums positions should not be construed as support for all of them. Specically, the author takes no position on the U.S. government policy of denying terrorist organizations dialogue; he merely joins Conicts Forum in emphasizing the intelligence cost of that policy. 12. Perry and Crooke, How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part Two. 13. The distinction between moral and strategic conceptions of terrorism reects Jeffrey Records observation, quoted in Kilcullen, Countering Global Insurgency (p. 36), that the current U.S. administration, by insisting on the homogeneity of evil in terrorism, has arguably subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it seeks in foreign policy. . . . For a discussion of the rationality of suicide terrorism, see Bruce Hoffman, The Logic of Suicide Terrorism, The Atlantic Monthly, June 2003, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200306/hoffman (accessed 1 August 2008). 14. Perry and Crooke, How to Lose the War on Terrorism, Part One. 15. For extensive documentation of Irans and Syrias collaborative use of Hizbollah as a proxy, see Jubin Goodarzi, Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and Power Politics in the Middle East (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), especially chapters 2 and 3. 16. Blair Terror Speech in Full, BBC News, 5 March 2004.

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist

403

17. See, for example, Jihad, Islamism, and Non-Interventionism, Counterterrorism Blog, 17 March 2008. 18. Lorenzo Vidino, Al Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), p. 71. Also see Vidino, The Muslim Brotherhoods Conquest of Europe, The Middle East Quarterly, XII(1) (Winter 2005). 19. See March Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 7288, for one explanation of the role of religious fanaticism in radicalizing individual terrorists. 20. Brynjar Lia, Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaida Strategist Abu Musab al-Suri (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 349351. Despite al-Suris ability to analyze terrorist strategy dispassionately, it should also be noted that he is (or at least was) a murderous fanatic who encouraged jihadists to attack Western populations with weapons of mass destruction (p. 311). 21. Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, Poll Results on Palestinian Attitudes towards the Results of the PLC Elections Held on January 25, 2006, Poll No. 57, February 2006. 22. Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 2026. Admittedly, the proposition that Hamas existed for 20 years prior to its emergence under its present name is a somewhat controversial one. The present article follows Mishal and Sela in this vein, in recognizing Hamass description of its own institutional antecedents. According to Mishal and Sela (p. 18), Hamass semi-ofcial history points to 1967 as the date of the movements genesis. For another treatment of Hamas that gives priority to its own descriptions of its history and doctrines, see Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestinian Studies, 2000). 23. Hamas Has the Peoples Heart, Economist, 29 November 2001. Hamass emphasis on social services is a legacy of its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. See Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 289291 for a discussion of the Brotherss focus on social services; see also Anthony Shadid, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), p. 113. 24. Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), pp. 154155. 25. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 178179, has characterized the Islamic suicide bomber as an exacerbated selfsomeone who acts grandiosely on the delusion that he represents his communitys interests when in fact he represents an over-developed ego, cloaked in a narrow ideology. Hamas seems to have harnessed this pathology, sublimating it as an effective weapon that does, in fact, serve the Palestinians interests, at least as Hamas interprets them. 26. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (Washington, DC: Government Printing Ofce, 2006), p. 5. 27. Kilcullen, Countering Global Insurgency, p. 36. 28. International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism. 29. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, p. 5. 30. Ibid., p. 9. 31. Martin Bright, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: The British States Flirtation with Radical Islamism (London: Policy Exchange, 2006), p. 11. 32. As one of Americas founding principles, the doctrine of separating church and state needs no elucidation. The social phenomenon of entrenching and promoting this doctrine, however, is worthy of recapitulation. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written extensively on the post-Enlightenment tendencies of Western societies to compartmentalize the sources of ones identity, especially where natural and supernatural factors come into play. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 33. International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, p. 1. 34. Nil fer G le, Islam, European Public Space, and Civility, in Krzysztof Michalski, u o ed., Conditions of European Solidarity, vol. II: Religion in the New Europe (Budapest: Central

404

M. Herbert

European University Press 2006), available at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/200705-03-goleen.html (accessed 31 July 2008). 35. Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), in International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, p. 2. 36. Kepel, Jihad, p. 28. 37. The political philosopher Barry Cooper has replicated this presumptuous generalizationalbeit in a subtler formin Jihadists and the War on Terrorism, The Intercollegiate Review (Spring 2007), pp. 2736. In that essay, Cooper asserts that salast Islamic terrorists have nothing in common with the pious forefathers or, more broadly, with what, in the absence of a Muslim orthodoxy, is often referred to as Koranic Islam (p. 28). 38. International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, p. 2. 39. Lawrence Wright, The Rebellion Within: An Al Qaeda Mastermind Questions Terrorism, New Yorker, 2 June 2008. 40. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 168169. 41. Sageman, Leaderless Jihad, p. 152. 42. Video of German Suicide Bomber in Afghanistan Cuneyt Ciftci, NEFA Foundation, March 2008, available at www1.nefafoundation.org/multimedia-prop.html (accessed 7 August 2008). 43. Martyrdom Wills of the Transatlantic Bomb Plotters, NEFA Foundation, April 2008, available at www1.nefafoundation.org/multimedia-prop.html (accessed 7 August 2008). 44. Roy, Globalized Islam, p. 193. 45. G le, Islam, European Public Space, and Civility. o 46. See, for example, the website for one of the star preachers of this network, Pierre Vogel, available at www.einladungzumparadies.de, or the You Tube channel operated by one of the networks young converts, Hussein Lau, available at http://www.youtube.com/user/Husseinlau26?ob=1 (websites accessed 31 July 2008). 47. Hizb ut-Tahrirs draft constitution was originally published as an annex to party founder Taqqiudin an-Nabhis The Islamic State (1953). The constitution is widely available on Hizb utTahrirs websites. Article 184 identies Israel as a belligerent state and stipulates that a state of war must be taken as the basis for all dispositions with them. 48. Roy develops these categories throughout Globalized Islam. See especially pp. 185200 and 243254. 49. George Packer, Knowing the Enemy, New Yorker, 18 December 2006. See also Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks: [T]here can be no overall prole for global Sala mujahedin, only local proles (p. 153). 50. Bright, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, p. 17. 51. This characterization of Hamass historical plasticity is based on Kepels (Jihad, p. 151) description of the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1987 intifada. 52. Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks, p. 155. 53. Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, p. 49. 54. Roy, Globalized Islam, pp. 121124. 55. Ibid., pp. 42, 179; see also Magdi Abdelhadi, Controversial preacher with star status, BBC News International, 7 July 2004. 56. Lorenzo Vidino, Aims and Methods of Europes Muslim Brotherhood, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 4 (November 2006), p. 23. 57. Islamic Ruling on Female Circumcision, Fatwa Bank, Islam Online, available at http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?pagename=IslamOnline-English-Ask Scholar/FatwaE/ FatwaE&cid=1119503543886 (accessed 1 February 2008). 58. Kepel, Jihad, p. 165. 59. The Two Sides of Yusuf Qaradawi, veiled4allah, available at www.muhajab.com/ islamicblog/archives/veiled4allah/009153.php (accessed 6 August 2008). 60. Reactions to Sheik Al-Qaradhawis Fatwa Calling for the Abduction and Killing of American Civilians in Iraq, Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch No. 794, 6 October 2004.

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist

405

61. Roy, Globalized Islam, pp. 150, 253. 62. Lorenzo Vidino, The Muslim Brotherhoods Conquest of Europe, Middle East Policy Quarterly (Winter 2005), p. 1. See Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), for a book-length treatment of this theme, focusing on a key Muslim Brotherhood gure. 63. Vidino, Al Qaeda in Europe, p. 32. 64. Amira El Ahl, Christoph Schult, Daniel Steinvorth, Volkhard Windfuhr, and Bernhard Zand, Dancing with the Devil: Charting the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, Spiegel International, 3 July 2007. 65. Roy, Globalized Islam, p. 250. 66. Ibid., p. 249. 67. Ibid., p. 248. 68. Available at www.khalifat.com (accessed 29 January 2008). 69. Roy, Globalized Islam, p. 177. 70. Ibid., pp. 237238. 71. Ibid., p. 177. 72. International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, p. 4. 73. Roy, Globalized Islam, p. 266. 74. Zeyno Baran, Hizb ut-Tahrir: Islams Political Insurgency (Washington, DC: The Nixon Center, 2004), p. 53. 75. Ibid. 76. Available at www.quilliamfoundation.org. 77. Zeyno Baran, in Olivier Guitta, The Bad Guys You Dont know: Meet Hizb ut-Tahrir, The Weekly Standard, 1 October 2007. 78. Ed Husain, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left (London: Penguin, 2007). 79. Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks, p. 153.