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Is Al-Qaeda Disintegrating?
Which way al-Qaeda? Trotsky or Che? The bitter ideological squabbles of Islamic jihadists are following in the footsteps of the philosophical arguments that fractured Communist comrades.
The organization they established, Al Jihad, played a part in the Egyptian president’s assassination, and since then, the two haven’t been able to agree on much of anything. Fadl went into seclusion as a kind of hidden private practitioner, and Zawahiri became famous in a cave in Afghanistan. But it was the latter’s meddling with The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge – not to mention his presumptuous re-titling of the book Guide to the Path of Righteousness for Jihad and Belief – that appears to have turned his erstwhile comrade against him. Apart from being amusing in itself (what price the self-sacrificing “bravery” of suicide bombing if the big bad terrorists can’t even handle being edited?) it shows that heaven-minded emirs suffer from the earthly vice of amour propre.
However, the Fadl-Zawahiri argument is noteworthy in telling historical way, too. If it carries on – and judging by Zawahiri’s defensive posture in the wake of Fadl’s latest salvo, it probably will – their debate recapitulates one of the key philosophical ruptures that occurred in the 19th century within the Russian intelligentsia, a rupture that similarly began with an arcane literary feud, but altered the course of human events in ways we are still dealing with. The victor in that dispute planted all the seeds from which the diseased saplings of Bolshevism eventually emerged, but that there was even an alternative suggests that, as with any ideological struggle, things might have turned out differently.
The name Pyort Lavrovich Lavrov is not famous in the West, much less in contemporary Russia, but in 1868, this ex-artillery officer in the Romanov army was the considered the brilliant antidote to Nihilism. He was a political gradualist who, in his Historical Letters, which came out that same year, advocated the end of “heroic activists and fanatical martyrs, of rash waste of forces and of useless sacrifices.” Lavrov was referring to the prior “Generation of the Sons,” who had held that a professional corps of revolutionaries was necessary for ending czarism and establishing an egalitarian social order in the steppes. (They stood in Oedipal contrast to the “Generation of the Fathers,” epitomized by Alexander Herzen. If you’ve seen or read Tom Stoppard’s magnificent theatrical trilogy The Coast of Utopia, you’re aware of the humane socialism for which Herzen stood, and how the failure of his ideas to catch on caused him no end of personal grief.)
The “sons” had selected Nikolai Chernyshevsky, author of What Is To Be Done? (probably the worst novel, although the simultaneously the greatest call to arms, ever written) as their mentor, and a deranged psychopath and murderous con artist called Sergei Nechaev as their idol. Lavrov set about to undo the old program of assassination and bomb throwing by advocating a softer form of agitation to be spread through propaganda. The new revolutionaries, argued Lavrov from his popular magazine Vperyod (“Forward”), should be stoic, self-educating and ascetic – an elite sect of scholar-priests or “eternal students.” The Lavrovists were by no means parliamentary democrats or what we would call “liberals” by Westerns standards. They were Populists who thought the antique peasant commune system, the obshchina, was a sufficient basis for reinventing society from the bottom up. Much in what Lavrov advocated sounds, mutatis mutandis, like what Fadl is now advocating for Islamism: “[T]he implementation of justice cannot be achieved by means either of exploitation or of the authoritative rule of personalities; victory over indolent self-gratification cannot be brought about by means of violent seizure of unearned wealth or the reversion of the right to self-indulgence from one persona to another.” And: “People who assert that the ends justifies the means should always restrict this rule with a simple truism: with the exception of means that undermine the end itself.”
Lavrov wasn’t against lying and manipulation to advance revolutionary goals. But defined in opposition to the regnant ideology of his time, Lavrov’s doctrine represented a progressive break with Russian tradition. He wanted revolutionaries to “go to the people” and convert them to the cause not by intimidation but by a gentle and sympathetic illustration of their plight. The result was the so-called Mad Summer of 1874, in which the Lavrovists attempted to preach their quiet gospel to the Russian peasantry in a manner that not a few witnesses to the event likened to a religious awakening. Easier said than done. “No thanks,” answered the peasantry, which actually professed its loyalty to the czar and found these clever student-rebels to be talking nonsense.
What rose against the late failure of radical hopes was a return to the more violent form of revolutionism, best articulated and developed by another Pytor of the era – Pytor Nikitich Tkachev, who should rightly be seen as a godfather to Leninism. The son of a petty nobleman, Tkachev spent his youth alternating between radical journalism and prison. He lacked Lavrov’s sophistication and was a Jacobin who agreed mainly with Nechaev on the need for “revolutionary prototypes” to quicken and man the coming takeover of the state, which he believed would have to be coincidental with popular backing. A coup d’etat by a handful of militants wouldn’t hold unless the people supported it. What distinguished him most from prior intelligents was that Tkachev was one of the first serious students of Marxism, albeit not a blind follower of it.
Tkachev had briefly collaborated with Lavrov, contributing one article to Vperyod, before realizing that the two were inextricably at odds with each other philosophically and morally. He viewed Lavrov as a weak and ineffectual moderate, while Lavrov viewed him as a dangerous upstart and a nasty throwback to the days of underground terrorism. By 1874, Tkachev had published a pamphlet entitled, The Tasks of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia, which effectively cleaved Russian radicalism into two opposing camps. There were three main points in the essay. The first was that the revolution must be waged by professional revolutionaries, not the untutored and ill-disciplined masses, on whose behalf, of course, the revolutionaries were acting: “A violent revolution can take place only when the minority is no longer willing to wait until the majority itself recognizes its needs, and when it decides, so to speak, to impose this consciousness upon the majority…” The second point was that the revolution should happen as soon as possible, which was sooner than most people had thought because, according to Tkachev, Russia’s notorious backwardness was over-hyped and already disappearing. The country could not afford to wait for capitalism to gain a foothold and allow its economic and social contradictions to explode into a proletarian-led revolt. “Have we the right to spend time on re-education?” Tkachev asked with all the impatience of a kill first, proselytize later missionary. The third point was an obvious correlative of the first two: Only a powerful party with its own resources, tacticians, and propaganda machines would be capable of fomenting and leading this revolution.
Lavrov immediately grasped the power of his adversary’s ideas and how they might lure the next cycle of Romantic Russian thinkers. Though his response was trenchant and prophetic – “The belief that a party, once it has seized dictatorial power, will then voluntarily renounce it, can be entertained only before the seizure” – Lavrov lost the great debate. One of those pestering ironies of history was that he was a good friend of Karl Marx and his defender and co-thinker against Tkachev was none other than Friedrich Engels, who haughtily denounced Tkachev as a “green and exceptionally immature schoolboy, a kind of Simple Simon the Russian revolutionary youth.” Indeed, Marx and Engels thought that feudal Russia was the last place socialism could take hold, much less that it would orchestrated by men proclaiming themselves Marxists. Engels may have destroyed Tkachev with his wit and his abstract logic, but half a century later, it was the latter who seemed to have intuited the true nature of how the Romanovs would terminate, and how the first “workers’ state” was to be established.
As the great Hungarian-Russian historian Tibor Szamuely has phrased it,
The Tasks of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia was an extraordinary document. Not just because of the quality and originality of its ideas—though that alone would have ensured it an important place in Russian revolutionary literature—but because its main theses were to be repeated with astonishing precision, nearly thirty yeas later, by the greatest revolutionary leader of our age. And to the question which became the title of his most important book, ‘What is to be done?’ Lenin gave practically the same answer as Tkachev.
We are now glimpsing the lineaments of the same ideological squabble within Islamism. The coarser Tkachev in this case is Zawahiri, who on his best day unencouragingly sounds like Noam Chomsky, comparing the attacks on the World Trade Center to the U.S. bombing of the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, in a desperate effort to win “hearts and minds.” The more cerebral Lavrov is Fadl, who represents a repudiation not of his Islamist predecessors but of his own former self: He is the ex-Nihilist turned “moderate,” deploring violence against innocents and advocating a softer means of spreading the teachings of the Prophet.
Not for nothing did Wright analogize the early Fadl to Leon Trotsky and Che Guevara. And as he further noted in his New Yorker piece, Muslim sympathies are beginning to favor the reinvented Fadl of the Rationalizing Jihad tendency. But the history of Russian radicalism is instructive because today’s “liberalism” may yet give way again to the renewed popularity of terrorism. Ideologies, be they secular or religious, undergo cycles of revision and regression all the time; humane versions are not predetermined to succeed.
If in the current split between Fadl and Zawahiri we are not seeing the “beginning of the end” of jihadism but only the “end of the beginning,” we are by no means at the point where one or the other strain can be said to represent the standard-bearer of this permanently menacing movement.
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Michael Weiss is a senior editor of Tablet Magazine and a culture blogger for The New Criterion. He also writes occasionally for Slate, The Weekly Standard, City Journal, The New York Daily News and Standpoint.
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17 Comments
1. Fran:Typical Muslim Al-Takiyya at work again, here!
“There is nothing that invokes the anger of God and His wrath like the unwarranted spilling of blood and wrecking of property.”
“There is no such thing in Islam as the ends justifying the means.”
“God permitted peace treaties and cease-fires with the infidels, either in exchange for money or without it—all of this in order to protect Muslims, in contrast with those who push them into peril.”
“There is nothing in Sharia about killing Jews and Nazarenes, referred to by some as the Crusaders.”
“You cannot decide who is a Muslim or who is an unbeliever or who should be killed based on the color of his skin or hair or the language he speaks or because he wears Western fashion.”
“I say it is not honorable to reside with people—even if they were nonbelievers and not part of a treaty, if they gave you permission to enter their homes and live with them, and if they gave you security for yourself and your money, and if they gave you the opportunity to work or study, or they granted you political asylum with a decent life and other acts of kindness—and then betray them through killing and destruction. This was not in the manners and practices of the Prophet.”
All of these edicts come from the old Koranic writings of Mohammed when he had not yet amassed a sufficient army to rape, kill and plunder under his command which he did about two years after promising to leave others in peace, a promise which he betrayed.
Also, we MUST remember that subsequent Koranic verses supercede those written previously which means the later verses command the rape, genocide and pillage of non-Muslims and their homelands.
Jun 1, 2008 - 11:26 am 2. Morton Doodslag:I’m of the opinion that Muslims, even those who don’t necessarily subscribe to the all-out Jihad which al Qaida represents, still pose a grave threat to the world. Even if the vast majority of Muslims abjure the extremest expressions of Islam, they still axiomatically embrace a supremacist war doctrine which will remain in perpetual to our own Western norms. Their gradual and deliberwte subversion of our society, when coupled with incremental birthratss and ongoing immigration means Jihad of all forms will continue to pollute and sicken the West.
In the analysis above I would quiblle with the notion that socialism so much “took hold” in feudal Russia, as the idea that serfs, long predisposed to follow the dictates of their “superiors”, simply made the most fertile medium in which the totalitarianism of Marxian dystopia would flourish. In this, the Muslims share a fundamental trait with the susceptible fodder of arussian serfdom for totalitarian and violent nightmares to take hold and flourish. Even here, however, Muslims will outdo their serfs counterparts as receptive to the worst strands of Islam. Their entire existence is founded on the mind manacles of a violent hatred based “religion” of conquest, looting, murder, and annihilation. The feudal Russian serfs was more acted upon than acting, whereas the Muslims, when they even “moderately” follow the dictates of Islam, are every one active participants in ongoing the ongoing Jihad to spread Islam and destroy all impediments to its eventual triumph on earth. Even Fadl’s seeming disavowal of al Qaida’s specific tactics preserves the protection of Muslims above all else – he only cares that Muslims have been harmed by Islamic nastiness and our retaliations. Fadl and most of his fellow Muslims clearly only worry about the wanton slaughter of infidels insomuchas we retaliate and kill Muslims in exchange. They still adhere to their Islam in any event.
Such schisms as that represented between Fadl and Dr. Z don’t represent any genuine “dam break” within the camp of Islam any more than they represent any evidence of any “civil war” within their hideous “ummah”. Such schisms are simply respites in the pace and fury of Islamic Jihad, which will persist as long as Islam is allowed to persist by us. Focusing on al Qaida is proper for now, but make no mistake: Jihad will not end when the last filth of al Qaida is exterminated.
Jun 1, 2008 - 12:40 pm 3. Fat Man:I think the Russian analogy needs to be used with great caution. First. There were a couple of generations separating Herzen, Tkachev and Lenin, and a lot of events. The 1904 Russia-Japan War, was followed by the first machinery of constitutional government.
Second, the Bolshevik takeover was not a “popular revolution”, it was a coup d’etat, perfected by the Red Army in the ensuing civil war, and by the secret police and the gulags during the remainder of its 70 years of misrule and oppression. It is doubtful that the Bolsheviks ever had more than a tiny handful of true followers — as opposed to those who wanted to be on the winning side.
The supervening event, that was random with respect to Russian History, and, which few historians argue was inevitable in European History, was the Great War (World War I to Americans). It led to the collapse of the Monarchy, and created the opening for the Bolsheviks. In some alternative universe where the war did not occur, or where Russia won quickly, the Tsarist government might have continued its evolution towards constitutional monarchy.
Another thing that should be noted is that A-Q seems to be its own antidote. Their ideology and practice really piss people off. It is possible that they could pull off a coup in an autocratic state, seize control of the repressive mechanism and stay in power, but every day it grows less likely.
Jun 1, 2008 - 7:21 pm 4. thenakedemperor:There are fracture lines here that could be beneficial. See more here:
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlead/articles/20070920.aspx?comments=Y
Jun 2, 2008 - 4:22 am 5. ZEITGEIST:[...] AL QAEDA DISINTEGRATING? The bitter ideological squabbles of Islamic jihadists are following in the footsteps of the philosop… Confusion to the enemies of [...]
Jun 2, 2008 - 5:04 am 6. Michael Weiss:You’re right, Fat Man (I’ll never stop marveling at the clauses the Internet forces me to write), but I wasn’t comparing AQ to the 1917 event, only trying to show how a roughly unified radical movement — and most of the 19th c. Russian intelligents wanted the same outcome; it was strategy and tactics they debated furiously — can splinter and cleave, and very often over the same practical and ethical concerns. I wouldn’t push my analogy too far either. (There was far more to choose intellectually and morally in Lavrov than there ever will be in Dr. Fadl.) However, these internal divisions can and should be used to our own advantage in weakening Islamism, particularly if the Zawahirist strain only looks moribund and awaits another generation to take it up again.
Jun 2, 2008 - 7:36 am 7. Josh Strawn:Doodslag, chauvinism from the mouth of an idiot is a sad thing, but the one so often begets the other that mere logic makes it easier to swallow. Defeat ignorace, one imagines, and one defeats chauvinism. The same goes for the close relationship between ignorance and superstition, but you and the Christian physicist present a unique and depressing challenge to this logic, since you’re clearly not an idiot. But the more competently expressed the hatred or superstition, the more disturbing it becomes.
It seems that your flaw isn’t a lack of consumed information, but the selective assimilation of it. Michael’s piece rather clearly, and without requiring much interpretation or spin, demonstrates the power of internal schism and reform to begin the collapse of evil movements (though as Mike admits, we needn’t believe this is necessarily the beginning of the end). As in Iraq, a survey of the rest of the world shows that the primary forces fighting murderous Islamism are Muslims. With the Muslim population at over a billion people world wide (estimates range from 1.2-1.6), you’ve marked a rather large number of people out as a “grave threat.” By your logic, I suppose we should be fighting against the Kurds, most of whom are Sunni Muslims?
All monotheism in its original form, having come to into existence as it did during a time of perpetual conquest and tribal war, is a form of “war doctrine” which has never been stamped out by military force. It has been softened by a combination of rationalist critique and its own adherents’ eventual choice to force the tenets of religion to conform to peaceful, liberal society. Admittedly, this almost always too incomplete a procedure. But let us entertain for a moment what appears to be your prescription: the eradication of Islam from the Earth.
Islam is not a thing that exists like oxygen or poison ivy. Islam isn’t the sum of mosques, Qu’rans, prayer rugs, and shrines. Islam is a constellation of ideas that exists only in the minds of Muslims. That constellation, it is worth noting, takes different forms in the mind of almost every Muslim, many of whom identify with Islam primarily as a cultural ID, not a way of life. As such, the only way to eradicate Islam is to kill all Muslims whose minds house the varying incarnations if Islamic belief and thought. Is this what you prescribe? If so, your indignation means nothing and your politics differ little from our enemy. If it is not what you prescribe, then you should revisit the drawing board of ideas and come back when you’ve taken more care to comprehend your argument followed to its conclusion.
Jihad will not end with the last of Al-Qaeda, to be sure, but as your own hateful comments show, aggressive tribalism is not unique to Islam or to idiots. It can live in or outside the West, in or outside Islam, and can obviously–as many highly educated Islamists have already proven–not always be tempered by education.
The most silly and unfortunate thing about your insistence that “such schisms are simply respites in the pace and fury of Islamic Jihad” is that you insist on the robustness of the movement and the power of the enemy even as it is being shown up for the pathetic, defeatable, redneck movement that it is. If you were really interested in defeating the scourge of radicalism as opposed to Muslims themselves, then you would want to exploit the slouch in the radicals’ posture of power. Re-asserting their strength suggests that the specter of radical Islamism serves as a totemic and rather dubious rallying point for a far more sinister desire of yours.
Jun 2, 2008 - 8:46 am 8. Morton Doodslag:Dear Jack Strawn:
Your silly post barely warrants a response – I know you’re seething because I’ve dismembered one or two of your convoluted posts at this site in the past – I recognize the sting in your ad-hominem laden vitriol against me. In any event, you don’t seem to comprehend my point, and that is that expansionist Jihad will continue whether we defeat al Qaida or not. The pace and fury of Jihad hinges largely on the capacity of Muslims to wage Jihad, and opportunity. For this argument, I’m mainly concerned with Muslim insurrection within the Western edifice. Muslim presence in the West guarantees that Muslims will continue to have the critical opportunity to wage Jihad to spread Islam within our domains thereby subverting our society.
Unchecked unregulated Muslim immigration, matched with massive amounts of loot obtained through unearned oil revenues will guarantee their ability to continue Jihad. We are doing little to impede these mechanisms.
When/if we destroy al Qaida, or temporarily install weak quasi-democratic institutions in primary Islamic cesspools like Iraq or Afghanistan, their 1400 year ongoing Islamic Jihad will not be blunted. Rest assured that the full blown nightmares of what you label “Islamism”, (and I simply refer to as Islam) will eventually manifest if Islam remains intact. We see this everywhere that Islam exists today, from Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, or “Palestine”. Muslims are not fighting the strands of radicalism — everywhere across the board they are succumbing to ever more viscious and purist manifestations of Islam.
At this juncture I’m not so interested in saving Muslims from the visciousness of their disgusting creed than I am interested in protecting us from being perpetually victimized subverted and slaughtered by them in our own (as yet) non-Muslim democratic homelands. Yet you continue to adduce the most sinister motives on my part. As I stated, your rambling post barely warrants a response, but I thought it might be productive for other readers to clarify what is right about my position in juxtaposition to what is wrong in your rambling post.
Jun 2, 2008 - 10:25 am 9. Bill Bradley:The Cold War is the key analogue for the current situation.
Pursue a policy of aggressive containment against the jihadists.
Who are far weaker than the Soviets.
And move forward.
Jun 2, 2008 - 12:15 pm 10. Bill Bradley:… By the way, in Lawrence Wright’s great book on the rise of Al Qaeda, he pointed up the striking incompetence of the Islamic jihadist movement.
Jun 2, 2008 - 12:17 pm 11. Don Meaker:Moshe Dayan on how to be a military genius:
Jun 2, 2008 - 7:15 pm 12. tanstaafl:“First, always fight Arabs.”
Linked above, it should be Required Reading
The Q/A section towards the end where al Zawahiri tries to justify violent jihad (he equates Clinton’s attack on the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan (one death) with 911) is just one example of the asinine depths to which al Z will go to justify himself.
Jun 3, 2008 - 6:05 am 13. Josh Strawn:Dood,
A tip: nobody responds to people unworthy of response or arguments that don’t merit being taken seriously. With that, I leave your “work” to speak for itself. It requires no further comment from me.
Jun 3, 2008 - 7:25 am 14. Josh Strawn:Dood,
You can learn a lot from people who respond to people that are supposedly unworthy of response or to arguments that supposedly don’t merit being taken seriously. I’ve only one reply to yours, and that is that it is uncontroversially erroneous to speak of Islam as a singular bounded entity and even more erroneous to speak, like a true Bolshevik, as if “Islam” is on a single, inevitable, chartable course in history. With that, I leave the rest of your “work” to speak for itself. It requires no further comment from me.
Jun 3, 2008 - 7:33 am 15. Dan:“arguments that supposedly don’t merit being taken seriously”
“even as it is being shown up for the pathetic, defeatable, redneck movement that it is”
Really??? this pathetic movement simultaneously hijacked 3 planes one day, and they coordinated that around the world from a shack in a goat village in Afghanistan of all places. They have a propaganda machine, al-jazerra, and websites and tech way beyond what I would call redneck.
Jun 4, 2008 - 7:31 am 16. Dan R.:And although this may be the end of just the beginning there are too few of these types of internal struggles within Islam being unearthed to make Westerners believe that some sort of change or revolution is coming. If these are the type of positive results that the US goverment is looking for within Islam as a whole, then this has been gained by going to fight them in Afghanistan and Iraq. So do not expect that to stop until Islam is more inline with the rest of the world religions, fine as beliefs but utterly ridiculous in practice. When the Arab street understands that then the world will be at peace until then the West is smart to be wary.
Well, well …. I guess maybe Bush isn’t such a total idiot after all. For all his shortcomigs, which are many, and for all of the things he and his people have screwed up, he’s kicked the ever-lovin’ s**t out of Al-Qaeda! Not only have their senior leaders been mostly killed or captured and their organization thoroughly demoralized, but muslims the world over are now turning away from them in droves.
Like Ronald Reagan against the Soviets, Bush saw clearly what the threat was, knew what needed to be done to defeat it, and set about doing it with the pedal to the metal.
Furthermore, he didn’t give a rat’s a$$ if the namby-pamby, limp-wristed liberals or their fawning allies in the media liked it or not.
Thank you, President Bush.
Jun 4, 2008 - 7:00 pm 17. Titanus:Philadelphia Inquirer: “Former Al Qaeda Say Saudis Financed Al Qaeda in Bosnia”
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/breaking/news_breaking/19425204.html
Wait but CNN said their was no Al-Qaeda in Bosnia. I have been telling folks in this forum for years that there always was a connection. In fact, I still think there is no such thing as Al-Qaeda as an organization. The fact is this is all an Islamic Jihad for conquest in Bosnia and in Afghanistan. Many came from all over the Islamic nations to fight against the Serbs in Bosnia. In fact, Clinton and Blair fought side by side with the Nazi Muslims. He dealt with Iran to send in arms to Bosnia.
The Clinton Legacy, feeling safer yet?
Talk about an unjust war, one to expand Islamic imperialism.
Jun 5, 2008 - 3:01 pm