The medieval roots of Islamic extremism

Even if Zionism and the State of Israel had never come into existence, 9/11 would still have happened.

By ELI KAVON
9\11 224 88 (photo credit: Courtesy)
9\11 224 88
(photo credit: Courtesy)
In the days following the man-made tragedy of September 11, 2001, academics, pundits, and news analysts searched for a reason for the terrorist attacks. The conventional wisdom held that the Islamic extremists who targeted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did so because of America's alliance with Israel. The reasoning was that the US had alienated elements of the Arab and Islamic world by supporting the Jewish state and ignoring Israel's suppression of the Palestinians, thereby inflaming public opinion on "the Islamic street." The terrorists, according to this thesis, were desperate men avenging American colonialism in the Middle East, and carried out the murder of almost 3,000 people in the name of a beleaguered Islam. Had America been more supportive of the Islamic world and not a staunch ally of Israel, the attacks would not have occurred. Conventional wisdom is usually wrong, as it was in the case of 9/11. To understand the motivation of those 19 terrorists, we need to go beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and modern European colonialism. The fact is that the call for jihad - the military struggle against infidels as well as Islamic apostates - can be traced to the earliest years of Islam. WHILE AMERICANS were searching for economic, social and political causes for the rise of Islamic extremism, they ignored the reality that the attacks were the result of a religious worldview that dates back many centuries and has always been a part of Islam. The terrorists of 9/11 were not desperate men without a future and with their backs against the wall. They were middle-class and educated. Many of the suicide bombings in Israel, Iraq and Pakistan are carried out because of Islamic theology and not because of poverty or desperation. I would argue that even if the Zionist movement and the State of Israel had never come into existence, the heinous attacks of 9/11 would still have been staged. The call for armed struggle against nonMuslims and Islamic heretics can be traced to the life and thought of Ahmed Ibn Taymiyyah, an Arab reformer and religious thinker who lived in Damascus in the 13th century. His call for holy war preceded the rise of the State of Israel and European colonialism in the Middle East by 700 years. Ibn Taymiyyah called for jihad against the ruling Mongols who dominated the Middle East. The Mongols had converted to Islam, but did not rule by Shari'a. The reformer demanded that Arabs stage a war to overthrow the apostate Mongols and reassert Islamic religious authority through a great Islamic empire. Ibn Taymiyyah's theology did not directly target infidels, but was directed toward Muslims whom he considered illegitimate and apostate. His venom was directed not toward Christians and Jews but toward Mongol converts to Islam. The theology of jihad was - and is - a reality, whether Israel would be a reality or not. Therefore to blame Israel, even indirectly, for Osama bin Laden's terrorism in 2001 is foolish. To blame Israel for the terrorism of seven years ago is to grossly misunderstand the role of extremism in the Islamic world. ALTHOUGH AHMED Ibn Taymiyyah lived many centuries ago, he remains an important figure in the world of today's Islamic fundamentalism. He affected Muhammad Ibn Abd-al Wahhab in 18th-century Arabia, and was a major influence on Sayyid Qutb, the most important Islamic extremist thinker in the 20th century. The Muslim assassins of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 carried out their deed in the name of a fatwa dictated by Ibn Taymiyyah in his attack on Mongol rule. Sadat's killers considered the Egyptian leader an apostate who did not rule his country by Islamic law and therefore deserved to be killed. Again, this was not a terrorist attack carried out against Jews or Christians but against fellow Muslims. For all of bin Laden's propaganda against the "Crusaders" of America and Zionism, most Islamic extremists carry out their attacks against other Muslims. The current civil war in Iraq is the result of a 1,300year old conflict among Arabs, and has little to do with Israel or American policy toward the Jewish state. Ahmed Ibn Taymiyyah's extremism lives on - it is at our peril that we ignore his influence on fundamentalists in the Islamic world today. We must wake up to the reality that the roots of the attacks of September 11, 2001 are in Muslim theologies of armed struggle that date back almost 1,000 years.