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The civil war at the heart of Islam

Islamic radicals such as Osama bin Laden are primarily interested in fighting their political rivals in Muslim countries, not in confronting the West. The terror attacks on Western targets since the late 1990s are, in fact, part of a new strategy adopted by the radicals to regain the initiative in this internal Muslim struggle.

This is the opinion of prominent French Islamologist Gilles Kepel, who wrote the book Fitna: the war at the heart of Islam. “Fitna” is the Arabic word for civil war and internal division and it has been the nightmare of Muslim rulers and scholars for centuries. Gilles Kepel’s message is that the present epidemic of Muslim terrorism is not so much jihad as it is fitna.


Mobilising the Muslim masses
According to Mr Kepel, the contemporary version of jihad ideology was born in the 1980s, when Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri - with massive American support - recruited young radicals from all over the Muslim world to fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For the ideologues of the radical movement, the battle against the Soviet Union was not an end in itself, but a means to mobilise the Muslim masses against their oppressive governments.

The Soviet pullout from Afghanistan in 1989, and the subsequent collapse of the USSR were perceived as a victory for the radicals and indeed constituted an enormous boost for their charisma in the Muslim world.


New causes for jihad
After Afghanistan, however, the radicals never paralleled their initial success. In the 1990s, the radical movement swarmed out all over the world looking for new causes for jihad; they engaged in violent struggles against Muslim governments in countries such as Egypt and Algeria and in Afghan-style guerrilla wars in Bosnia, Kashmir and Chechnya. But instead of mobilising Muslims with their jihad efforts, they found themselves increasingly isolated, especially since, in various Muslim countries, a large part of the Islamist movement took a more moderate path and let itself be co-opted into the ruling establishment.


Prime targets
When Osama bin Laden reunited with Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan in 1996, a process of reevaluation began. A pamphlet, published by Ayman al-Zawahiri on the Internet gives some insight into their reasoning. The jihad efforts since Afghanistan had obviously failed to bring about the expected Islamic uprising, and so a new strategy was needed to enlist the support of the Muslim masses. This new strategy should consist of “burning the hands that set fire to our countries.” Western countries, including Israel, were now the prime targets.

The second Palestinian Intifada had meanwhile proven the effectiveness of suicide attacks to mobilise popular support for the Palestinian cause. The pamphlet argued that an organisation is necessary for fighting jihad: all that’s required is small groups of activists who are ready to sacrifice themselves. Spectacular suicide attacks against Western targets would enable the radicals to regain the initiative and win over the Muslim masses to their side.


Red Army
In many respects, the Muslim radicals’ turn towards terror is similar to that of the radical leftist Red Army Brigades in Italy and Germany in the 1970s: these radicals also took to terrorism after they had become isolated by the absorption of the mainstream left movement into the political establishment. They also saw their terrorist attacks as the effort of a small vanguard to ‘awaken the masses’.

Gilles Kepel, however, points out one important difference: the present wave of Muslim terrorism takes place in the Internet age. The radicals have ‘hijacked’ the Internet, which enables them to create a virtual radical community across national boundaries and to recruit young people all over the world for their jihad.


Suburban terrorism
In the 1970s, radical leftist terrorism soon dwindled away after it became clear that public opinion had turned against the terrorists. Will this also be the fate of Muslim terrorism? According to Mr Kepel, it all depends on the outcome of the internal struggle within the Muslim community and, more particularly, on the response of the Muslim majority to the challenge posed by the radicals. A crucial part in this struggle is played by Muslim immigrant communities in Europe: the war on terror is decided in the outskirts of European cities.

Since the 11 September attacks on New York, the radicals secured themselves a new mobilising cause: the jihad in Iraq. The US, says Kepel, is hardly aware of the exemplary function of the Iraqi jihad, which today plays the same catalysing role as the jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s. Online jihadists are jubilant in their certainty that the US will eventually collapse as a result of its inevitable defeat in Iraq, just as the Soviet Union fell apart after its Afghanistan fiasco.

Michel Hoebink 2005
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