Islam and the Terror of Modernity

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is’’¹ said Albert Camus. It means that the being of man is a being of possibilities. Considering the gregarious nature of human beings Aristotle declared man by nature a ‘social animal’². In the proceeding centuries several philosophers expanded on his observation and deemed man as a rational, religious metaphorical, thinking, selfish, political and suicidal animal. What remains immutable in the process of adjectival accretions is the word ‘animal’. In fact, one of the characteristics that separate man from animals is his capacity to kill his own species at his volition and commit suicide. Arthur Koestler is of the view that ‘’Homo Sapiens is virtually unique in the animal kingdom in his lack of instinctive safeguards against the killing of conspecifics – members of his own species.’’³

Currently, terrorism is condemned for killing innocent human beings without any reason. But there is a method behind the apparently mad acts of terrorism. To terrorize people, terrorists employ different methods. Suicide attacks by militants have become the hall mark/ symbol of terrorism in modern times. To understand terrorism, we need to understand human beings in the broader context of society in which socio-cultural, psychological, political and economic forces exert deep influence on human actions. The question that arises here is whether terrorism is determined by socio-political forces or springs from the individual? In the case of terrorism, extra social causes do not explain much, because in extra social causes we have to examine individual psychological factors and the extra physical environment. This is the reason individual suicide has neither been termed as terrorism, nor has it forced nations of the world to make alliances against it like the war against terror.

Durkheim, in his monumental study on suicide,⁴ rejects individual psychology and environment. Instead, he finds causes of social suicide in states of various social environments which include religious confessions, familial and political society, occupational groups, etc. Terrorism is defined as ‘the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.’⁵ Therefore, it is imperative to study the social, political, religious and economic environments that cause terrorism to germinate and flourish.

Terrorism occupied the centerstage of world politics only after the devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre in 9/11. After which, both sides of the divide – the West and Islamists – analysed terrorism with the jaundiced eyes of ideology and ignored the socio-political and economic structure of the world that breeds terrorism. Therefore, the causes of terrorism could not be ascertained, and lay people relied on sages of terrorism who churned out essentialist theories that were tailored to fulfil the needs of power. The post 9/11 period spawned a new scholarly industry on terrorism in the world to understand and respond to this menace.⁶ In this industry, terrorism has become a topic of study used for political purposes. To serve the vested interests of power, the scholarship on terrorism posits Islam as antithetical to the West. Historically and culturally viewed, Islam and the West are not alien to each other. Though they have geographical and historical fault lines, they have had strong cultural and historical exchange points as well. Therefore, it can be claimed that it is not the aloofness or isolation of Islamdom from the West but the proximity and familiarity with Western civilization that results in conflicts at times and civilizational exchange at others. The followers of the concept of civilizational in-communicability and incompatibility between Islamdom and the West tend to suppress the aspects of civilisational exchange to make room for their antipodal view of civilization.

When we take the essentialist point of view, we tend to treat an entity which is discordant with our identity. This mindset is evident among the votaries – Islamists and vanguards of the Western civilization – of this thesis, who view Islam and the West as antipodes. An example of such an approach is the observations of the famous historian Bernard Lewis who presented Islam as a potential threat in his essay, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, ⁷ published in The Atlantic in 1990. Lewis claimed that there is a surge of hatred in the Muslim society that forces them to reject and wage a war against both secularism and modernism.⁸ Thus, his work was a precursor of the thesis of ‘the clash of civilisations’⁹ presented by Samuel P. Huntington later in 1993. It is the essentialist and antipodal thinking that made Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington paint the Islamicate— which is as varied as Morocco and Bosnia, Tajikistan and Bangladesh, Indonesia and Mali—with the essentialist brush. The events of 9/11 provided Bernard Lewis with further opportunity to substantiate his claims. Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Lewis wrote an article, “The Revolt of Islam”, in The New Yorker¹⁰ in which he traced the genealogy of modern terrorism of Islamists, including Usama bin Laden, to the assassins of the 11 and 12^th century. By interpreting the action of a previous generation in terms derived from the cultural ethos of his own society and age and analysing modern terrorism in terms of centuries old verities of Orientalist discourse, Bernard Lewis committed a serious anachronistic blunder.

The writers writing about Islamdom during the twelfth century failed to diagnose the root cause of suicide attacks on eminent personalities of the age by fida’een. Instead of understanding it with reference to religious ethos and the socio-political situation of that time, they explained the attacks of the followers of Hasan Bin-e-Sabbah through widespread rumours, propaganda, and oral stories about the use of Hashish by the fida’een. With the advent of the crusaders, the myths of fida’een were taken to the West where Orientalists, artists and writers augmented the assassin myth by embellishing it with their imagination. It is inexplicable why a learned scholar like Bernard Lewis failed to diagnose the real cause of modern acts of terrorism within the context of modernity. Instead, he preferred to work within the framework of Orientalism which attributes timeless essence to the ‘Other’ and infers conclusions from it. Owing to Bernard Lewis’s essentialist approach, Edward Said included him among the Orientalists who saw Islam as a cultural synthesis that could be studied in isolation from the economics, sociology, and politics of the Islamic people. Said succinctly elaborates the approach of Lewis and his ilk in these words: ‘the impact of colonialism, of worldly circumstances, of historical development: all these were to Orientalists as flies to wanton boys, killed – or disregarded – for their sport, never taken seriously enough to complicate the essential Islam.’¹¹

Traditionally, orthodox ulama in Islam did not approve the faith and actions of batinies (Ismailies). In Urdu literature, myths about assassins have been perpetuated by Abdul Halim Sharar in Firdos-e- Bareen, Inayat Ullah in Firdos-e-Iblis and Suspense Digest in serial stories. In these writings the followers of Batinya (esoteric) sect were painted as assassins who killed eminent personalities of both Muslims and Crusaders to secure a place in the earthly paradise of Alamut. Equating batini followers of Hasan-bin-Sabbah and proponents of Usama bin Laden is a conceptual fallacy, for the latter espouses salafi ideology which has been traditionally hostile to the batini variant of Islam. Now the term fida’een is commonly employed by the proponents of fundamentalist Islam. This change was necessitated by the politically changed scenario of the post-cold war world, in general, and 9/11, in particular. Dr. Faisal Devji, in his path breaking book ‘Landscape of the Jihad’, rejects the intellectual discourse that draws a strong link between global militancy represented by Al Qaeda and Islamists who came before them because this approach ignores the impact of profound historical shifts, such as the end of the Cold War, that have changed the face of political life around the globe.¹²

Because of the essentialist approach, a certain mindset has emerged in academia and scholarship that thinks in binaries and extrapolates cosmic scales from the mundane state of affairs of this world. If the cold war between the USSR and US was a war between two hemispheres of the world in modernity, then, to them, the war on terror is a cosmic war between good and evil in the age of globalization. The very discourse of war on terror and scholarship about it tries to paint it as a fight with cosmic meaning and consequences. This essentialist approach was uncritically internalized by most of the liberal intelligentsia in the Muslim world, in general, and Pakistan, in particular. Thus, their inability to explain the root cause of terrorism. For example, Raza Aslan, in his book ‘Cosmic Wars’, explains real world events through the cosmic category of cosmic war. For him, unlike a holy war, a cosmic war is similar to a ritual drama of a script written in heavens and Islamist militants are ‘merely actors in a divine script.’¹³ That is why Aslan erroneously concludes that Islamic militants, including Usama bin Laden, want nothing. Contrary to the cosmic categories and nothingness thesis of Aslan, Dr. Faisal Devji takes everyday events into consideration for his analysis of militant Islam. Instead of tracing the causes of terrorism in the heavens, Devji situates the struggle of new forms of militancy, including Al Qaeda, within global politics. According to him, their actions are not meaningless. In his book, ‘The Terrorist in Search of Humanity’, Faisal Devji argues that global society does not possess “political institutions proper to its name, and that new forms of the militant movements, like that of Al-Qaeda, achieve meaning in this institutional vacuum representing in their own way the search for a global politics.”¹⁴

The problem with the approach that essentializes terrorism with Islam only is that with any event of terrorism by non-religious elements, the whole edifice of discourse and discursive practices collapses. It happened recently in Pakistan when the first ever female suicide bomber from a Baloch separatist group blew herself up in Karachi University, killing three Chinese nationals, in April 2022. This incident proved to be a ‘black swan’¹⁵ for the uncritical intelligentsia and unthinking analysts in Pakistan who based their arguments on the premise of an inherent link between violence and religion. Using the same lens, some scholars have declared violence as a product of the medieval mindset of Muslims that is unable to tackle challenges of modernity. Darious Shayegan calls the modern Muslim mind schizophrenic as it is stuck in tradition while facing the external reality dominated and made by the West. This causes a failure of Muslims to negotiate modernity.¹⁶ Shayegan appears to be treating the Muslim mind as a monolithic phenomenon and ignores how diverse Muslim societies negotiate modernity at multiple locations with different cultural contexts. This multiplicity gives birth to multiple modernities¹⁷ in Islamdom. Similarly, Bernard Lewis repeats the same mantra in his book, ‘What Went Wrong’, published shortly after 9/11. In his typical vein, the author attempts to diagnose the wrongs that have been afflicting Muslims and thus contributing to their backwardness in almost every field of life. Bernard Lewis accepts that “the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement” but the current weakness of the Muslims is in contrast to the past. He implies that their decline and encounter with the West has generated a response which is characterized by growing anguish, mounting urgency, and seething anger. Lewis claims that it is through these emotions that both questions and answers are expressed.¹⁸ That is why his scholarship is taken as an important point to understand stimulants that propelled the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 by the power corridors in the US and UK. Interestingly, a colonel from Royal Netherlands Army wrote a thesis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage Revisited’,¹⁹ as a part of his Master of Strategic Studies Degree at United States Army War College in 2013. Its purpose was to understand the problem created by the widening gap between the two cultures – Islam and the West.

However, the dissonant minds of Muslim scholars of Bernard Lewis’ persuasion tend to forget that the roots of modern terrorism lie not in the medieval ages but in modern times. In fact, most of the violent and terrorist movements in early modernity were political in nature. Edmund Burke was the first person to use the word ‘terrorist’ to refer to the ‘Reign of Terror’ unleashed by the French Revolution.²⁰ It, therefore, may be claimed that it is from the womb of modernity that modern terrorism springs. We cannot separate violence from the modern state as the former is an instrument of the latter. The modern state and modernity were inaugurated with the French revolution, as was “the ‘Great Terror’ and, in particular, Maximilian Robespierre’s rhetoric regarding the necessity of ‘terror’ for the inculcation of virtue.”²¹ The German radical author, Karl Heinzen (1809–1880), can be termed as the modern ideologue of terror. He advocated terrorism and tyrannicide as necessary to place society on a progressive path and for political change. In his 1853 pamphlet, “Murder and Liberty”²², he favours violence, even mass murder, for political change. He also supported the killing of monarchs. The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of radical and anti-establishment thoughts in the writings and ideas of Proudhon, Johann Most, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin and Carlo Pisacane. Later their anti-establishment models paved the way for the emergence of the model of violence as a political tool.

Despite all evidence of the relationship between the modern order of things and modern terror and violence, most, if not all, the scholarship on terrorism has remained essentialist, as it attributes terrorism to the religion of Islam only. There is no denying the fact that most of the acts of terrorism in the post 9/11 period have been committed by Islamists, however, this does not mean that terrorism is exclusive to only one group of people. Terrorism in modern and postmodern periods appear in all hues and regions. This is evident from the emergence of as varied movements as Zionist terror groups of Irgun and Lehi, Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria, the Ku Klux Klan in the US, the Irish Republican Army, the Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, Tupamaros of Uruguay, the Red Army Faction (originally known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang) in West Germany, the Fenian Dynamiters, the Red Brigades in Italy, Weatherman/Weather Underground in the United States, etc. Though differing in all respects from each other, these movements and terror organisations are born from the same mother called modernity. In addition, white supremacist terrorism and anarchist terrorism in the United States, Europe and Russia, and Russian nihilists and revolutionary terrorism are politico-militant responses to the discontents created by the socio-economic structures of modernity. ²³

Post 9/11 scholarship puts blinkers on our way of seeing because it is not based on the need for knowledge but animated by the desire for power, which tries to keep the liberal order of things in the world intact. Faisal Devji’s theoretical lens opens new vistas to situate terrorism in postmodern times and our life-world in postmodern conditions. Taking inspiration from Devji, we can say that terrorism in the contemporary age is the cumulative result of political development and shifts in the post-World War II period. Therefore, its roots lie within modernity and post-modernity, not in some mythical past or the heavens. Any attempt to comprehend it in the light of a different time and space creates more confusion than clarity. Unfortunately, both sides of the divide – the West and Muslims – are engaged in dealing with only symptoms, by confining their imagination within a framework that is informed by ideology rather than a quest for meaning and understanding. Thus, what we witness today is not a ‘clash of civilization’ but ‘clash of ignorance’. ²⁴

Walter Benjamin was the first thinker of modern times who prophetically analysed and predicted the emergence of terrorism because of the socio-political and economic structures, and media savvy ambience of modernity. Benjamin was born to a family of assimilated Jews in Berlin in 1892. He was a Marxist and mystic. He held modernity responsible for suicide and terrorism. Benjamin thought that ‘the resistance which modernity offers to the natural productive élan of a person is out of proportion to his strength.’ In the words of Richard Kearney, ‘If suicide was the extreme option of the alienated individual, terrorism was, for Benjamin, the desperate modern equivalent of the alienated community.’²⁵

If we take cue from Benjamin’s observations and apply it to study the phenomena of suicide attacks and acts of terrorism in different parts of the world, it becomes easier to comprehend the real causes of terrorism. Although terrorism appears akin to nihilism, it, unlike nihilism, attempts to convey a message/meaning which is to get even with the perceived oppressor by bringing the existential condition of the oppressor to that of the oppressed.

Modern electronic media has become an efficacious tool for dissemination of this message because terrorists leave no stone unturned to make their act a spectacle for society where the social realities and politics are mediated through images. Faisal Devji thinks that the perceived martyrdom only achieves meaning by being witnessed by the media. Seen in the context of capitalist and globalised world.²⁶

There is no gainsaying in the fact that terrorism results in destruction. Thus, we can say that it is not a creative act. Walter Benjamin thought that ‘‘the destructive character does his work, the only work he avoids is being creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witness to his efficacy. The destructive character is a signal”.

“The modern age” Walter Benjamin opined, ‘‘kills the productive élan of individual because the power of the former exceeds the strength of the latter.”²⁷ It was in comparable circumstances that Benjamin had to face the litmus test of what he thought about suicide and terrorism. In 1940 he fled towards the Spanish border while Nazis pursued him. Upon finding the border closed he found himself trapped in a desperate situation. The pressure was out of proportion to his strength. In desperation Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the border. What he thought was proved right by his final act.

Even in his death, Benjamin bequeathed us a lesson. That is, if the sense of alienation in an individual turns inwards then the extreme consequence can be suicide; in case it turns outward, it engulfs others in the shape of terrorism. To avert the dangers of terrorism we need to get rid of a system which allows certain segments to reap the benefits of global capital and alienate a majority of the people through overt and covert structural violence. By doing so, we may be able to root out the causes of terrorism and create a modus vivendi for heterogeneous communities of the global village.

References

Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Vintage Books, 1956. p 6.
Reeve, C. D. C. Politics. Indianapolis: Hackett. 1998. Section 1253a.
Koestler, Arthur. The Heels of Achilles: Essays 1968-1973. New York: Random Book. 1974. p 6.
Durkheim, Emile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology, translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. 1951. Glencoe, II: Free Press of Glencoe. 1951.
Jenkins, John Philip. “Terrorism”. Encyclopedia Britannica, June 29, 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic/terrorism . Accessed 24 May 2021.
See, Stampnitzky, Lisa. Disciplining Terror: How Experts and Others Invented Terrorism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Pres. 2014.
Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic 266, no.3 (Sep 1990).
Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic 266, no.3 (Sep 1990). p 59.
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs 72, no.3 (Summer 1993).
Lewis, Bernard. “The Revolt of Islam: When did the conflict with the West begin, and how could it end?”. New Yorker, November 11, 2001. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/11/19/the-revolt-of-islam . Accessed 20 March 2021.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. 1994. p 105.
Devji, Faisal. Landscapes of the Jihad. Militancy, Morality, Modernity. London: Hurst, 2005.
Aslan, Raza. How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalisation and the End of the War on Terror. New York: Random House. 2009. p 5.
Devji, Faisal. The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics. London: Hurst & Company. 2008. p 8.
A black swan refers to the thesis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He employs the term black swan to refer to an unpredictable event that is anomalous and has potentially d consequences. Black swan events have three characteristics; 1) extreme rarity, 2) severe impact, and 3) the widespread insistence they were obvious in after the fact situation. For further details see, Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House. 2007.
Shayegan, Darius. Cultural schizophrenia: Islamic societies confronting the West. Translation from French by John Howe. Syracuse University Press. 1997.
By Aziz Al-Azmeh takes an anti-essentialist view of the constructions like Islam and the West by both Orientalists and fundamentalist. He deconstructs the monolithic view of Islam and the West to show diversity, change and evolving reinterpretations within Islam. See, al-Azmeh, Aziz. Islams and Modernities. New York: Verso. 1993. Note plural Islams in the book. For emergence of modernity in multiple locations and contexts, including Muslims, see, Stephen Richards Graubard (ed). Multiple Modernities. Dædalus: American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The MIT Press, Vol. 129, No. 1, Winter, 2000.
Bernard Lewis. What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2002.
van der Zee, Colonel Nicolaas J.E. The Roots of Muslim Rage Revisited. MA thesis. United States Army War College. 2013. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA590272.pdf
Edmund Burke, ‘Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace 1795: to the Earl Fitzwilliam’, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 12 vols. London: Nimmo. 1887. 6:70.
Frampton, Martyn. History and the Definition of Terrorism in The Cambridge History of Terrorism. Richard English (ed). University of Cambridge Press. 2021. 39.
Karl Heinzen. Murder and Liberty. Indianapolis: H. Lieber, 1881. For the thoughts of Heinzen and modern terrorism see, Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, “From the Dagger to the Bomb: Karl Heinzen and the Evolution of Political Terror,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 1 (2004): 109. Martin A. Miller, “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Terrorism in Europe,” in Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1995.
For the emergence of violence in modern age see Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn ad Jay Winter (Eds.), The Cambridge World History of Violence: 1800 to the Present. Volume IV. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 2020. For focus see Randall D. Law. The Origins of Modern Terrorism. In Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn ad Jay Winter (Eds.), The Cambridge World History of Violence: 1800 to the Present. Volume IV. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 2020. pp. 532-55.
The phrase was coin by Edward Said in his article “The Clash of Ignorance” published in The Nation on October 22, 2001 to explain the situation created by the events of 9/11. He argues that the notion of the clash of civilisations basically feeds on ignorance to maintain the binaries in the According to Said the labels of Islam and the West are unedifying because ‘They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won’t be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that.” See, Said, Edward. The Clash of Ignorance. The Nation, October 22, 2001. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/clash-ignorance/
Kearney, Richard. Modern Movements in European Philosophy. Manchester University Press. 1988. p 154.
Devji, Faisal, Landscapes of the Jihad. Militancy, Morality, Modernity. London: Hurst, 2005, pp. 87-95.
Kearney, Richard. Modern Movements in European Philosophy. Manchester University Press. 1988. p 154.