Local or global?

The Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and the attack in Copenhagen have intensified and sharpened the debate in Europe about the sources of violent jihad. Whilst some argue that violent jihad is best understood as a response to oppression and marginalisation, others believe that it is a religious phenomenon that flows from an important or even essential strand of Islamic thought.
One way of analysing these opposing views is to ask whether violent jihadists are engaged in a single global conflict – their side of George W Bush’s global war on terror – or if they are fighting in a series of local battles each with distinct histories and current characteristics.
While Taliban and IS fighters have their eye on paradise some are also looking for more earthly rewards. The few accounts to come out of Mosul, for example, say that the IS enforcers there are men with rural accents enjoying their newfound power over the urbanites. A similar thing happened in Swat where previously dispossessed Taliban fighters smashed up the homes of the local landowners.
While these class warriors will no doubt make some references to Islamic law they are not just religious ideologues. There seem to be other factors at play. Might the Pakistan Taliban’s pitch, for example, include the promise to overthrow archaic and regressive tribal leaderships?
Proponents of this kind of non-religious explanation do not always maintain that violent jihadism is about class-based resentments. In other places violent jihadists could be motivated by different ideas.
On this account the fights in Iraq, Chechnya and the occupied territories were and are about national liberation. But the cases of Al Shabab in Somali and the Afghan Taliban were different again: both came after years of civil conflict. There was at least some initial popular support for both these governments because people yearned for less lawlessness and were willing to accept rough justice in place of no justice at all. Incidentally, jihadists have found that such support soon drains away: when they govern violently, jihadists become unpopular.
That then is one side of the debate. Proponents of these views however face difficult questions. How come all the fighters in the various battles around the world all say they are motivated by religion? And is it not the case that radical Islamists try to spread precisely the ideas that fighters all over the world say they espouse?
Former British prime minister, Tony Blair, thinks those are valid questions. In a speech last year, while being careful to stress that he saw violent jihadism, and indeed contemporary Islamism more generally, as a perversion of Islam, he went on to argue that this perverted strain of the faith was the common element behind all these different war zones that exist today.
The struggle, Blair said, is between advocates of modernisation and globalisation on the one side and Islamists on the other. “Wherever you look – from Iraq to Libya to Egypt to Yemen to Lebanon to Syria and then further afield to Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan – this is the essential battle,” he said.
Blair argues that each specific contemporary battleground may have its own individual characteristics and complexities: “derived from tribe, tradition and territory”, but this is only of limited value in explaining what’s happening. It was “odd”, he said, to deny that the central element of the various struggles is about Islam. Western commentators, he complained, go to extraordinary lengths to say why, in every individual case, there are multiple reasons for understanding that this is not really about Islam, it is not really about religion and there are local or historic reasons that explain what is happening.
Blair and those who agree with him point to examples of Islamists appearing to be a global movement. Take, for example, the protests against US soldiers accused of defacing the Holy Quran. The demonstrations took place not just in Afghanistan, where the incidents are said to have happened, but all over the world. Similarly the campaign against Salman Rushdie was international in character.
It is a line of argument that itself raises questions. How come some Muslim-majority countries – Bangladesh, let’s say, or Malaysia – are less fertile ground for violent jihadists than others? Does that reflect nothing more significant than poor organisational work by the violent jihadists? Or are deeper factors – such as different historical experiences – at play? And why is violent jihad more prominent now when compared to other historical periods? Might the study of other religions help explain why perhaps for broader cultural and sociological reasons, orthodoxies sometimes take hold and are violently enforced?
There are some parallels to the cold-war debates about the nature of communism. What drove Communist Party activists such as Nelson Mandela (recently revealed as having been a Communist Party member) and Ho Chi Minh? Were they both struggling for the Communists’ global domination or just using Communist ideology – and funds – more pragmatically to achieve their local objectives? While some think that many Communist rulers and their activists were more opportunistic than idealistic, others believe that the Soviet ideologues in Moscow were only defeated because they were taken at their word and that they were indeed motivated by a desire to force their ideas onto everyone else all over the world.
So, local or global? History or religion? A struggle for power or acts of faith?
The writer is a freelance British journalist, one of the hosts of BBC’s Newshour and the author of the new political thriller, Target Britain.
Email: bennettjones@hotmail.com
Twitter: @OwenBennettJone