War, peace, and Islam today

Brian M Downing

Not all followers of Islam hate the West. Nor do even a majority of followers. Polling data in the Islamic world show no great hostility toward the US, only opposition to many US policies.

Islam is far from a religion of peace. Nor are most other major religions for that matter. Over the centuries, despite the hopes of founders, religions have become fused with nationalist cant, wartime passions, and vengeful apocalyptic visions. A notable European army had Gott mit uns (God is with us) written on each soldier’s belt buckle. In 1945 that army was crushed and its nation lay in ruins, but not before killing tens of millions of people.

Islam has a violent dimension. Smaller than some claim, but much greater than others admit. Violence is in its basic texts, schools, national ideologies, and the millenarian thinking of today.

Basic texts

The Koran was written at a time of conflict between cities on the Arabian peninsula. Merchants found the new faith a threat to their preeminence and they sought to destroy it root and branch. Koranic texts urged faith in battle, recounted miraculous victories such as at Badr (AD 624), and urged the bands to conquer new lands.

Islamic forces went on to conquer an empire stretching across N Africa and into Central Asia. They invaded Iberia, crossed the Pyrenees, but were defeated at Tours in 732 and soon fell apart. Since then, as Ibn Khaldun observed in the fourteenth century, religiously-motivated armies have gathered disparate tribes and conquered new empires, before falling apart again. The legends of conquests, empires, and lost greatness pervade the region.

Visions of an apocalyptic future pervade the Koran (the Bible too). Injustices in the world are ended in nightmarish detail as the wicked are slain and their cities burned to the ground by avenging, divinely-led armies. Such passages in the Koran have generated countless prophets and cults.

Wahhabism

The Saudi clan came to power after World War One after its tribal bands defeated rivals. Clan leaders and warriors fought in the name of Wahhabism – an eighteenth-century reform movement. Today, Wahhabist clergy form part of the state and shape outlooks toward regional and sectarian foes. They also despise western decadence and secularism.

The Saudi state builds mosques and schools in many parts of the Sunni world which teach its austere, anti-western creed. The state has successfully built a popular basis for its outlooks and policies, but it has also propagated a jihadi ideology that inspires tens of thousands of young men to wage war.

American policy makers encouraged jihadi ideology before and during the Russian-Afghan war, and even paid and armed thousands of fighters. That policy, of course, has come back to attack them.

Deobandism

The sub-continent developed a harshly anti-western form of Islam in the mid-nineteenth century, during a period of British rule. The Pakistani state, following defeat in the 1971 war with India, encouraged Deobandism and mixed into it ample amounts of the hopes and prejudices of the officer corps and intelligence service. It provides the groundwork of the country’s national ideology.

Pakistani generals have formed partnerships with al Qaeda, Lashkar-i-Taiba, the Haqqani network, Jaish-i-Mohammed, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, and similar groups. They attack Shias, support insurgency in Kashmir, oppose insurgency in Baloch lands, and supply the Taliban. The generals have built up an array of jihadi groups to compensate for their notable lack of success in war. Their magnanimity is made clear by their courteous welcome of aid from the US – a country they otherwise encourage hatred for.

Foreign powers

The Islamic world resents the meddling, invasions, and occasional occupations by outside powers, from the colonization by European powers to the more recent invasions by the Soviet Union and the United States. The latter two strengthened the sense of Islamic unity over national borders and led to well-known international jihadi movements.

In times of peace the outside world, especially the United States, is blamed for holding up authoritarian regimes such as those that rule over Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria. Fault is also found in authoritarian regimes that press for secularization to brush aside the clergy and there faith.

Apocalyptic thought

Passages from Koran seeing days of wrath and vengeance have taken on a sense of urgency in many young people from West Africa to Central Asia. Urbanization and population growth have caused bewildering and frightening changes, but little growth in opportunity for careers and families.

The collapse of certainties and longstanding governments signal the end of an epoch and the arrival of a new one. Rootless, opportunity-less youth see ISIL and al Qaeda not as murderous fanatics but as bold harbingers who are destroying old regimes and bringing a new day. Mullahs preach it, pamphlets scrutinize it, and victories prove it.

This intersection of apocalyptic verses, an immense population bulge, and a fragmenting political world indicate that violent millenarian groups such as ISIL will have an avid following for years to come.

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Islam is neither a religion of war or peace. Those clichés either stir people or calm them. But neither is helpful in understanding what is going on in the Islamic world or in dealing with the most recent effort to gather the Islamic peoples and build a new empire.

Copyright 2016 Brian M Downing

Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who has written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.