5
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is not the mainstream of Islamism. Violence is not inherent in Islamism, since the core concern is the order of the state and of the world. Islamists resort to violence only in pursuit of their goal of a shari’a state. The Ameri-can debate on Islamism almost always misses this point.
In classical and traditional Islam, jihad can mean either self- exertion ( jihad al- nafs) or physical fi ghting (qital). The two defi nitions are, however, inseparable.4 Muslims fought the jihad wars of the futuhat from the seventh through the seventeenth centuries in order to extend dar al- Islam (the world of Islam) throughout their known world. These wars were in line with the Qu’ranic concept of jihad as war, not terror. Long before Carl Clausewitz formulated his theory of war, Muslims abided by rules and a code of conduct that limited targets in line with humanitarian standards. Although these rules fell far short of the practices prescribed by the Geneva Conventions, they still constituted a regulated system by which jihad would be conducted by regular armies. The practices of modern jihadism as a pattern of an irregular war waged by nonstate actors clearly do not conform to these standards.
The question is how well Western scholars and policymakers5 under-stand the difference between classical jihad and modern jihadism.6 In June 2010, while I was in Washington, D.C., in the fi nal stages of revising this manuscript, I encountered the thinking of John Brennan, the top counterter-rorism adviser to President Obama, who gave a speech at the Center for Stra-tegic and International Studies. The speech was covered by the Associated Press and is also accessible on the internet, from which I quote this passage:
As the President’s principal advisor on homeland security and counterter-rorism, I want to address how this national security strategy is guiding our efforts to secure our homeland. . . . Our enemy is not “terrorism” because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not “terror” because terror is a state of mind. . . . Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify one-self or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children. . . . Describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie— propagated by al Qaeda and its affi liates to justify terrorism— that the United States is some-how at war against Islam. . . . Our enemy is al Qaeda and its terrorist affi liates. . . . We will take the fi ght to al Qaeda and its extremist affi liates.7
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Brennan, speaking for the Obama administration, abandons altogether the terms “Islamism” and “jihadism” and reduces “al- Qaeda and its affi li-ates” to violent extremists who have nothing to do with Islam and Islamism.
This is an improvement over the previous administration’s “war on terror,”
but in reacting to that doctrine Brennan rejects too much.
This issue resembles in a way the distinction between Judeophobia and antisemitism that I discussed in Chapter 3. I began that chapter by asking whether Islamist Jew hatred might not be, rather than antisemitism, a “frus-trated expression of justifi able po liti cal grievances”— that is, something com-pletely unrelated to Islam and Islamism. In the analysis I showed that this is not the case. Similarly, we may ask here what jihadist terrorism is and how to fi ght it in a way that does not alienate the West from ordinary Muslims.
Brennan believes that “addressing the po liti cal, economic, and social forces that can make some people fall victim to the cancer of violent extremism”
would help, and he adds, “We seek to show that legitimate grievances can be resolved peacefully through demo cratic institutions and dialogue.” In line with my reasoning in Chapter 3, I consider jihadist Islamism not merely a tactic chosen to effect the redress of par tic u lar grievances, which can be abandoned once the jihadists become convinced that equally effective but less costly tactics are available. Instead, it is an interpretation of Islam in which Islamic tradition undergoes an invention that results in the religious legiti-mation of violence.
Like the scholar Daniel Varisco, Brennan not only misses the distinc-tion between Islam and Islamism, he also accepts a defi nidistinc-tion of Islamism as inherently violent. These two confusions lead him to assume that to say that one is fi ghting Islamism is tantamount to declaring all of Islam a violent enemy. Like Varisco, he would abolish all of these terms and insist that the enemy is specifi cally, and only, al- Qaeda, which is artifi cially disconnected from Islam, Islamism, and jihadism. This is far too reductive. There are other ways to exonerate Islam from violence— and to protect Muslims from prejudice— than by denying the obvious. We can understand these phenom-ena only when we dissociate not just Islam but also the contemporary phe-nomenon of Islamism from violence.
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Of course, this hardly means that all Islamist movements are nonvio-lent. One faction within Islamism is committed to violence, and this branch is identifi ed in this chapter as jihadist Islamism. To be sure, jihadism does not stand outside Islam: it bases all of its actions on religionized politics.
Islamists who are prone to violence also engage in shari’a reasoning. There is in Islam a tradition that revolves around the legitimization of just war, as shown by John Kelsay in Arguing the Just War in Islam.8 But for Islamists, these arguments take place within a wholly novel interpretation of jihad.9 One cannot repeat enough that Islamist violence is not mere terror. It is, to paraphrase Clausewitz, a pursuit of politics by other means.