The Redhunter

Don't get me wrong, there are other books that I highly recommend. Mark Steyn's America Alone, Melanie Phillips Londonistan, Bill Bennett's Why We Fight , and Richard Miniter's Disinformation are must-reads.

But if there is only one book that you read, let it be Future Jihad. Like America Alone and Londonistan, it's not a particularly encouraging book.

The bottom line to what Phares has to say is this; the enemy is much bigger, better organized and has much clearer goals than most people imagine. If you think that the only people out to get us are Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, you're only seeing a tiny part of the picture.

The point is that people we consider "terrorists" are only a part of the enemy. Many are not trying to kill us, at least not yet.

Phares relates a debate that took place on al Jazeera shortly after 9-11. The show was titled Opposed Directions, and it was set up like a Hannity and Colmes or Crossfire, where the arguments get hot and heavy. The two guests, Phares says, were almost literally at each other's throats.

The question at hand was over the "worthyness" of bin Laden's attacks, whether he had done good or bad to the Arab world. However, one was not for the attack and the other agains. They both argued in favor of the attack. The only difference was that one thought that bin Laden should have waited a few years until the time was more ripe.

This debate, Phares says, was representative of what went on across the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Jihad

Before we get to who the terrorists are, let's clear up the meaning of the word "jihad", for it is central to understanding who the terrorists are and what they want.

Put simply jihad is "a call for action" to spread the faith. Jihad is the sum of all efforts, and was declared by early Muslim leaders to be a sixth unofficial pillar of Islam. In a "normal" situation, Muslims think, their faith would spread without jihad, for people should recognize that Islam is the true faith and it would be only logical to accept it. Only when things are not going smoothly is jihad needed.

The call to jihad can only be given by a legitimate authority. It is not something that can be done unlilaterally by individuals. Under the Caliphate of old, only the Caliph or his designated local political authority could declare a jihad. Jihad, then, is a "state of effort at the service of the umma, the state, and Allah (umma meaning "community of Muslims").

Jihad can be used for defense, but is primarily to spread the faith. Jihad should lead to Fatah, or conquest. And it is the goal of jihadist thinkers to spread the faith to the entire planet, violence and forced conversions if necessary.

It is also important to note that the jihad need not be violent in it's initial stages. As will be seen in later posts, infiltration leading to violence is a key element in their strategy.

The people we call "terrorists" call themselves "men of jihad" in their videos and on their websites. So rather than call it a "war on terror", it seems to me a better term is War on Jihadism.

Phares stresses that in the Middle East among Arabs there is no debate as to the meaning of the word "jihad". Everyone there, he says, knows that it essentially means spreading the faith by violence and forced conversion if necessary.

Many in the West, however, have been hoodwinded. Shortly after 9-11, the church I was attending held an "information meeting" in which two local Muslims were going to tell us about their faith. The woman insisted that it was a total misunderstanding to think that jihad meant something violent, that rather it meant a peaceful inner struggle one had in one's mind to purify yourself before God. At the time I knew she was lying, but until I read Future Jihad I didn't know by how much.

Strangely to Westerners, Muslims regard the jihad as a defensive action. They see the world as being divided into the dar el Islam, or "house of peace", and the dar el harb, or "house of war". Historically the Caliphs justified their wars by telling infidels "you will have peace if you surrender to my rule."

Islam would spread through jihad, with the Caliphs justifying their actions by saying that the infidels had not accepted their offer of peace. It is important to note this definition of "peace" whenever we are dealing with jihadists.

The Caliphate

To make a long story very short, some time after Muhammed died in 632 AD the new Muslim world consolidated itself politically. An absolute ruler emerged called the Caliph, essentially a combination king and pope. Family dynasties emerged, each of which ruled from a particular city for a few hundred years before being supplanted by the next. The Umayyads, for example, ruled out of Damascus from 661 - 750 AD. The Abbasid's ruled from Baghdad from 750 until 1258. The whole thing ended with the Ottomans ruling from Istanbul from 1299 - 1923. The last Caliph was overthrown by Musafa Kemal in that year and a secular Turkey emerged.

The ending of the Caliphate threw the Muslim world into confusion. Without a central leader, many of their tenants seemed irrelevant. How would they spread the faith? Who could declare jihad? Who was the leader?

One effect was the jihad was privatized. Whereby during the days of the Caliphate only the legitimate political ruler could declare a jihad against the infidels, now it seemed that any Muslim could. Once freed from state control, it was only a matter of time before organizations under or guided by religious leaders developed which declared that they now had the authority to declare jihad.

And the goal of those who believe in a "fundamentalist" version of Islam is that the faith must be spread thoughout the world, by violence and forced conversion if necessary.

al Qaeda, then, was an inevitability once the Caliphate fell.

The Logic of the Jihadists

Phares puts it best

Put simply, in the mind of the jihadists, there is no rupture in the evolution of the Islamic state since its inception in Medina. No refoem has taken place, and therefore the jihadists are in line to fulfill a mission launched centures ago.

Modern Jews and Christians acknowledge their history, but most of us don't base our world view on Talmudic or Biblical passages (though some do). To us the crusades are ancient history. But to the jihadists it may as well have happened yesterday. Phares again

In essence, the Islamists movements, from which the doctrine of jihadism flourished, see themselves as a direct continuation of the Islamic state and strive for its reestablishment - including its past expansionist drive.

Phares relates stories of jihadist websites in which the posters discuss ancient battles as if they occured last week and are relevant to todays newspaper headlines. bin Laden himself calls the West al Rum, or "the Byzantines"

Frozen in the Middle Ages

During the early Abbasid dynasty, the Muslim world was truely the center of learning, science, and literature. While Europe was stuck in the Dark Ages, Baghdad was experiencing what we would later call the Enlightenment.

The Abbasid's ruled the largest empire the earth has ever seen before or since. Since it was all due to the will of Allah, and expansion (fatah) had been successful so far, it only seemed natural that it would continue forever.

Then it all came to a sudden halt.

The Muslim world was invaded first by crusaders and then by Mongols. The first were bad enough, but the slaugher by the Mongols under Genghis Khan exceeded even that of the crusaders. Worse, Muslim armies seemed incapable of stopping either. The Mongols even sacked Baghdad itself and ended the Abbasid dynasty in 1258.

The full story is obviously complicated, but essentially a movement developed which concluded that the reason the Muslim world was defeated was improper adherence to the teachings of Muhammed. The leading scholar of this movement was one Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328). He developed the doctrine of takfir, essentially the Muslim equivalent of the inquisition. This would later develop into the Salafi movement which would in turn spawn Wahabism, both important concepts that we will take up in some detail in later reviews of Phares' book.

What is important is that Taymiya led a "back to the Dark Ages" movement. Gone was enlightened or "progressive" thought. While Europe would go from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance and Enlightment a few centuries later, the Muslim world did just the opposite.

And it has remained frozen in time ever since.

Phares stresses that this is not all ancient history to those who are our enemies

The literature of the modern jihadists, their speeches, their texts, and their web sites lead directly back to Ibn Taymiya's thought. ...

The complex ideology of the Salafi jihadist movement could be defined in simplest terms this way: It is a movement that wants to return the Muslim world to the times of its earliest conquests and move forward from there. This movement wants to being back Muslim society to a strict applicatiion of Sharia laws despite all the intervening evolution accomplished by Muslims through history. Finally, it is a movement that wants to resume fatah and conquests desite all norms of internationl relations and laws.

As Phares says, it sounds like something out of a Hollywood move, but unfortunately it's true.

Next up: Who are the Jihadists?

In the next part of this book review I'll reveal the three branches of the jihad as identified by Walid Phares. Stay tuned, because it's not just a small band of al Qaeda that are out to get us.