Profiling Islam as terrorism : A little sting and a few ‘useful idiots'
by Ahmad Irfan

Not long ago an American Muslim businessman happened to be driving past the Washington DC home of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. A home improvement contractor, he was in the area in the normal course of his work. He noticed a car with District of Columbia licence plates which appeared to be following him. To confirm his suspicions he took several detours from his main travel route. The car followed him wherever he went, even when he reached an automobile sales lot. He stopped and the other car pulled into the lot behind him.

He got out of his van and 'politely asked the driver if he was following me', the Muslim businessman reported later to the Washington-based Islamic advocacy group CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations).

The driver told him 'that he was a Special Agent of the United States Secret Service and that he was, in fact, following me ... He then indicated that he was following me because I had driven in front of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's home. He said that I "fit the description" because I appeared to be of 'Middle Eastern origin, with a beard, driving a long white van"... He then indirectly advised me not to return to the area near Secretary Albright's home. He said something like "If I were you, I would [not return to Georgetown] you know what I mean!"'

Watchful security agent! He was only doing his work. The Muslim-American had a 'Middle Eastern' look, and a beard too. He fitted exactly the American profile of an 'Islamic terrorist', the stereotype new enemy after the fall of the Soviet Union. No dutiful security man could have taken the slightest risk with a potential 'Islamic terrorist' driving by the home of Madeleine Albright.

It used to be called Jihad, it was given the name 'Islamic terrorism'. The ideologues of colonialism had the greatest problem with two things: the Book and the Sword, the Qur'an and the Jihad; and they made little secret of their cherished design to steal or blunt these two greatest 'weapons' in a Muslim's armoury. They felt that as long as Muslims continued to hold the Qur'an as their absolute frame of reference and were willing to lay down their lives in the way of Allah, it would be very tough trying to cow and control the Islamic world. It would be a great help, suggested a German expert, if we could push the Qur'an inside and bring the Muslim woman outside. All Orientalist scholarship and colonialist engineering has since been geared towards achieving the twin objectives.

What about Jihad?

The inventive boys of the colonial dirty tricks department came up with a brilliant idea. Why not give Muslims a modern, new surrogate prophet and let him deal with the question of Jihad. And they did.

They picked a half-educated, retarded and sycophantic moonshi (petty clerk), Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiyani (1838- 1908). They made him believe that he was an inspired person and let him acquire the profile of a polemicist, who defended Islam in face of Christian missionary attacks, and then graduated him from being a religious reformer to messiah, a resurrected Jesus (Alahis-Salam) and, finally, a shadow prophet.

The shadowy prophet declared that Islam consisted of two parts: one, obedience to God and, two, obedience to the British government. He duty announced that 'there is no Jihad of the sword after my coming', and ‘should anyone raise his hands against the infidels and called himself a ghazi [an Islamic soldier], he would be regarded as an enemy of Muhammad, Sall-Allahu alayhi wa sell.' An 'enemy of God,' he said on another occasion.

Mirza and his disciples did serve the Empire to the best of their capacity, but as long as the Book was there, no- one could change or remove even a comma from the rules and teachings of Islam. The work on the Book proved a little tougher, but it has not been given up. (See box: 'Fuel for an Islamic revival of sorts'!) The problem of Jihad had, however, ceased to be threatening.

The kind of Muslim elite structure created during the colonial period as well as the mechanics of decolonisation ensured that while the hands changed, the controls did not. Most of the succeeding ‘sovereign and independent' regimes were manned by safe hands; either stooges or surrogates, and the danger of any mahdi or mad mullah challenging the neocolonialists order seemed largely contained.

However, the outbreak, very soon, of the Cold War between an 'atheistic' Communist world and the 'Christian' West brought about a strategic change in international relationships. Muslims found themselves drafted as a useful ally in the West's battle for world domination. Given whatever they had been told about the anti-religious nature of Communism, Muslims had a strong motivation to fight and oppose that Godless ideology; and although not long ago, the Empire had got it ‘abrogated', Jihad against the Communist challenge to western domination seemed perfectly noble and holy.

But if Jihad against the Soviets was noble and holy, it was not, if it could turn its attention also towards the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Thus while western powers could afford to overlook the Jihadist character of their Muslim allies, the Zionists did not. The establishment of Israel had only been possible because the virus of treason and division spread into the region by the founding stooges of mutually exclusive Arabism and Turkish nationalisms. Therefore, even after the creation of the entity, the main thrust of Zionist policy was to create newer fractures while keeping alive old divisions and make sure that the region remained perpetually unstable and perpetually at war with itself.

However, the parallel rise of the Islamic trend also threatened to change the old political map of the Middle East characterised largely by dynastic and nationalist divisions. So, the greatest challenge to the Israeli occupation of Palestine came not from the score or so of sovereign and independent Arab states. Instead, It came from the popular forces, the emerging Islamic society in the Arab word; especially in Egypt which had seen the emergence of a powerful mass movement, the Society of Muslim Brethren, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimoon.

The Ikhwan had been committed to the freedom of Palestine since the days of the British Mandate and had played a brave and heroic part in the 1948 war against Israel. Therefore, the most important reason behind their split with Jamal Abd an-Nasir and their subsequent persecution and brutalisation by the Egyptian regime was that they had come to realise that contrary to his loud rhetoric, Nasir was deliberately neglecting the Palestinian cause and, indeed, moving quietly towards a gradual accommodation of Israel.

Jamal Abd an-Nasir tried to put down the lkhwan in a massive and most cruel way, and Israel was the natural beneficiary of this bloody suppression. But Nasir's need to curb the influence of the Ikhwan also led his intelligence apparatus to try to upstage the otherwise moderate Muslim Brethren by promoting the rise of what came to be known as the Takfir and Hijra movement. This movement condemned and rejected the existing order as kafir and believed in Hijra i.e. moving out of the system, at least intellectually, if not necessarily physically. The Takfir movement and its various other formations like Hizb at-Tahrir (Liberation Party), incidentally a small walk-out group from the Ikhwan in Jordan, bore a close ideological resemblance with the Khawarij in t he first century Hijra.

The Khawarij were 'exiters' who, if they ever thought the Islamic authority was not abiding by the divine law, felt free to quit their bai'yah (pledge of loyalty) to the authority. They held that the third right-guided caliph Syeddna 'Uthman, radhi-Allahu unhu, who had been martyred in a conspiracy of insurrection deserved to die because, the Khawarij said, he had violated of the divine law. And so, they said, had his successor, the fourth right-guided caliph, Syeddna 'Ali, radhi-Allahu unhu, because he had agreed to refer to arbitration his political dispute with the governor of Damascus, Mu'awiya, radhi- Allahu unhu. The Caliph was later assassinated in Kufa.

In Egypt, Hizb at-Tahrir rejected the idea of jihad for liberating Sinai, because, it argued, the aim of this Jihad was not to establish Khilafah. Every Muslim believes that the establishment of the Islamic Khilafah was an obligation (wajib) upon them, but what Hizb at-Tahrir seemed to be saying amounted to: 'No, nothing before Khilafah.' It was like putting the cart before the horse.

The leader of the Takfir group, Shukri Mustafa, told his trial judge: 'If the Jews or others come, our movement should not take part in the combat in the ranks of the Egyptian army. We would rather escape to a safe place ... For by no means can the Arab-Jewish conflict be considered an Islamic Jihad.'

Such extra 'Islam' from 1970s onward appeared to be a mixed phenomenon; part original, part work of the Egyptian mukhabarat (intelligence apparatus) and part Israeli, who were no doubt the principal beneficiaries of a situation in which whether the knife fell over the melon or the melon over the knife, the result was the same. This was until then largely a regional phenomenon. But two events which took place in the course of the same year - the revolution in Iran and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - gave a new poignancy to the old question of Jihad. The former was seen as unfriendly and the latter taken as friendly.

The Iranians were talking loudly about exporting Jihad and exporting revolution and the Afghans were fighting most heroically the Soviet superpower. While theories like those about a necessary clash between Islam and western civilisation and the Islamic peril were already there with experts and think tanks, it was during this period that the grand policy of fighting Islam with 'Islam' appears to have been honed and finalised.

The Afghan Jihad had become a magnet attracting all kinds of ‘mujahideen' from all over the world. It was therefore easy enough to clone all kinds of 'mujahideen' who would spread out from Afghanistan and launch Into 'jihad' whenever they are required. The first success story came from Afghanistan itself. First, the person who was the true and real commander of the Afghan Jihad, General Ziaul Haq, was knocked off in a mysterious plane crash along with two dozen senior military officers; and what had started off as a noble and heroic Jihad very soon slid into anarchy and Fasaad Jihad had been defeated by the ‘mujahideen' themselves. The defeat of Afghan Jihad had been a great success, but the problem of defeating the natural growth in the people's affinity with Islam had yet to be dealt with.

With their long and original experience in terrorism, including even against Jewish targets, the idea of employing terrorism as a military and foreign policy tool must have come naturally to Israel. The principle was simple: paint Muslims as terrorists and do not allow anyone to question whatever you did in the name of fighting terrorism.

The Israelis had started 'to educate governments and public opinion In the West about the nature of terror', excluding of course, their own, as early as the late 1970s. But the practical recommendation about the imposition [by the US] of economic and military sanctions against states that sponsor terrorism was publicly issued in 1985 by an Israeli conference on international terrorism held in Israel.

The proceedings of the conference aptly titled, Terrorism: How the West can win, were edited by Benyamin Netanyahu and his publicists claimed that the recommendations of the conference had 'Influenced American policy toward combating terrorism" Many Arabs believed this claim when, about a year later on 14 April 1986, President Reagan sent F-111 bombers to drop 32 laser-guided 2,000-pound bombs over Tripoli. This was admittedly In order to punish Col Qadhafi for alleged Libyan involvement in a bomb explosion in the West Berlin La Belle nightclub on 4 April 1986. The club used to be frequented by US servicemen.

Three people were killed and 230 people injured in the explosion. The US retaliation, however, killed at least 70 Libyans and wounded a large number of civilians. There was no proof, not even reasonable evidence, of any Libyan connection, but whosoever the real terrorist, President Reagan had used the Incident to lay down a new unilateral law of aggression against another UN member state on its own and unsubstantiated allegation of terrorist activity.

Combating Islam In the name of fighting terrorism also required creating an 'Islamic terrorist' profile which is not so difficult. An explosion takes places. Some newspaper, wire agency or television station says they had received a telephone or fax from a never-heard-before 'Islamic jihad outfit', claiming 'credit' for the operation and threatening to return with more terrible punishment, if the enemy did not mend its ways. That was 'proof' enough for the media to gulp the lie and go on repeating it until it became a gospel truth in the public mind. It helped immensely when someone came forward to explain the reasons - and in a sense justify - what had happened without having the slightest clue as to who was the author of that shadowy violence and who might not necessarily be a Muslim.

The sting operation to frame the blind Egyptian Shaikh 'Umar Abdur- Rahman and a number of other angry young men in the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York went so well in terms of creating an impression on the general public mind that few cared to investigate the involvement of an Israeli woman, Josie Hadas; or question the legality of the FBI and an Egyptian agent, setting up the sting operation and even knowingly letting the explosion take place although they were the actual authors of that terrorism.

The profiling of Muslims as congenital 'terrorists' has been such a cleverly done psychological operation that although proven several times as plain lie, the Muslim terrorist image has been made the basis of American and western foreign policy. And countries seeking to pursue independent social, cultural, economic or foreign policies are dubbed terrorist countries and subjected to various sanctions, even naked aggression. Such determination of a country as terrorist was unilateral, outside international law, not open to any independent verification.

The British writer Michael Ignatieff had Identified the problem rather early in the 1990s. He had then put forward, what now deserves to be called, the Ignatieff equation. It was like this: Muslim equalled Fundamentalist equalled Terrorist. Sure, it is a lie which even its authors would not dare claim to be true, but it mattered little if the lie happened to become the defining principle in the policy of a country or countries.

Source: Impact International