[Politics] Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity by Faisal Devji

[Khan]

Jihadists

A fresh look

Nov 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition

 

"알카에다의 중요성은 장기적으로 볼때 네트웍으로 연결된 교전상태와 같은 새로운 형태를 개척하는데 있는게 아니라, 새로운 글로벌 환경내에서 이슬람의 전통적 구조가 가지는 파쇄성에 있다." 뉴욕의 사회연구소를 위한 새로운 학교의 역사학자인, Faisal Devji,은 위와 같은 말로, Osama bin Laden의 글로벌 지하드(jihad)에 대하여 급진적인 신사고방식을 제시하고 있다.

Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity
By Faisal Devji



Cornell University Press; 186 pages; $25.
Hurst; £15

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“AL-QAEDA'S importance in the long run lies not in its pioneering a new form of networked militancy, but instead in its fragmentation of traditional structures of Muslim authority within new global landscapes.” With these words, Faisal Devji, a historian at the New School for Social Research in New York, proposes a radically new way of thinking about Osama bin Laden's global jihad.

A fresh interpretation of jihad is certainly welcome. But do not approach this challenging essay, which was published in Britain in September and which comes out later this month in America, expecting a familiar narrative of al-Qaeda and its founder, or of the eponymous “war on terror”. Mr Devji dispenses with conventional analysis and with much that is regarded as received wisdom.

Mr Devji is certainly not the first writer to see al-Qaeda and its kind as products of globalisation. He owes an obvious debt to Olivier Roy, whose stimulating book, “Globalised Islam”, appeared in 2003. But Mr Devji goes much further than Mr Roy did in casting jihad as an entirely new kind of movement, one which has transcended conventional politics with its fixed (often territorial) goals, in favour of ethical demands for vague but potent abstractions such as justice and dignity.

To elaborate his thesis, Mr Devji describes how jihad has subordinated the local to the global. He plays down its Middle Eastern origins and he stresses its diverse sources (Shia and Sufi as well as Sunni) as well as its heterodox innovations. Mr bin Laden's transformation of jihad, for example, from a collective to an individual duty, is a radical departure from the classical Islamic tradition. But how else could a global movement operate in a post-modern world where Muslims are moved to applause or to action by some spectacular act of violence, which they see on a television or computer screen? Conventional forms of top-down recruitment and mobilisation are, it seems, as passé as conventional politics.

In depicting one amorphous abstraction (a “virtual” al-Qaeda) as being at war with another (“the West”) in the name of a third (an unrecoverable Islamic caliphate), Mr Devji might appear to be too concerned with smoke and mirrors. He does not excuse or downplay the violence of jihad, but it is not his main concern. Instead, he believes that the new jihadists have “stolen the radical edge from fundamentalism” (meaning the old, established state-centred groups such as Hamas and Hizbullah), and in the process are playing a far more significant role than the Islamic liberals (whom he sees as worthy but powerless) in bringing about a transformation of Islam.

This is one of several ideas that Mr Devji might profitably have developed further. He is at his weakest when he seeks merely to provoke rather than to convince. It is one thing, for example, to challenge an Arabo-centric approach to radical Islam; quite another to dismiss, wholesale, the centrality of the Arab Middle East in the broad narrative of jihad. And the book's central term—jihad—is also in the end a rather-too-convenient shorthand, one that cannot altogether bear the weight of generalisation placed upon it.

Despite its obvious weaknesses, “Landscapes of the Jihad” is, in its unconventional thinking, an oasis in the wearisome desert of al-Qaeda studies. It is, in the best possible sense, subversive.

Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity.
By Faisal Devji.
Cornell University Press; 186 pages; $25.
Hurst; £15