The pragmatic fanaticism of al Qaeda: an anatomy of extremism in Middle Eastern politics.

Al Qaeda's behavior presents us with something of a paradox. On the one hand, the organization stands for the principle that Islamic law is the only proper foundation for social and political life; on the other, it often disregards that law with impunity. For instance, the Islamic rules on warfare forbid attacks on women and children, but Osama bin Laden, in his smoking-gun video, expresses no remorse for having killed many innocents on September 11. On the contrary, he suggests that by doing so he showed the world the true face of Islam.

This supposition raises two central questions: What precisely is the relationship between al Qaeda's zealotry and its pragmatism? And, if not fanaticism, what did cause al Qaeda to misread the balance of power between its forces and the United States? In order to answer these, this article will examine the central doctrines of Islamic extremism, arguing that these ideas virtually compel al Qaeda to behave almost exclusively according to the principle of realpolitik. If the organization is a rational actor, then it is susceptible to the same kinds of analyses that we would apply to any other state or political movement in the Middle East. When viewed in this light, al Qaeda's defeat appears as but one in a series of Middle Eastern military miscalculations that includes, among others, the Egyptian remilitarization of the Sinai in June 1967 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. The article will argue that this kind of military disaster occurs with relative frequency in the Middle East as a consequence of the complex balance of power in the region. Fanaticism, therefore, played no role in al Qaeda's miscalculation.

September 11 was no isolated example. When it comes to matters related to politics and war, al Qaeda maneuvers around its dogmas with alacrity. Thus in the mid-1990s it "obtained specialized terrorist training" from Iranian government officials working with Hizballah in Lebanon. (1) If viewed through the cold eye of realpolitik, there is nothing surprising about the fact that these two parties found a basis for limited cooperation: Teheran and al Qaeda share the goal in the long term of ending United States hegemony in the Persian Gulf, and in the short term of ousting American troops from Saudi Arabia. However, only inveterate pragmatists on both sides could have turned a blind eye to the religious obstacles that stood in the way of even limited, covert cooperation. The Iranian hardliners are themselves Islamic radicals, but the Sunni-Shiah gulf separates them from al Qaeda, which reviles their Shiah belief as a form of polytheism.

It is important to keep in mind this example of realpolitik, because on the basis of the crushing defeat that al Qaeda has suffered in Afghanistan one might conclude that a single-minded commitment to religion translates into a simple-minded politics. One feels a temptation to interpret the entire trajectory of al Qaeda's career as a consequence of its zealotry. The fanaticism of Osama bin Laden, so the argument would go, won for him the loyalty of suicide bombers, whose willingness to martyr themselves transformed his movement into a force in world politics, At the same time, this fanaticism also compelled bin Laden to launch a war against the greatest power on earth without weighing the consequences of his actions in a fully rational manner. This view assumes that a maniacal anti-Americanism on the part of al Qaeda's rank and file dictates the organization's political strategy. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the pragmatism informing bin Laden's cooperation with Iran in the 1990s is continuing to dictate his strategic thinking in his war on America today.

THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF AL QAEDA'S REALPOLITIK

When searching for the connection between pragmatism and zealotry, a good place to start is with Ibn Taymiyya, the great Islamic thinker who, though he died in the early fourteenth century, laid the intellectual foundations for Islamic extremism in the twentieth. (2) Ibn Taymiyya was a Janus-faced intellectual, a fire breathing zealot, but he was also a pragmatic man who accepted the political world as he found it. (3) Al Qaeda's understanding of politics owes more to him than to any other source: a brief examination of his ideas against the background of his life helps us to understand why this is so.

At the age of five, Ibn Taymiyya became a refugee. In 1268 he fled his native Iraq for Syria in order to escape from the Mongols, who during the previous decade blew into the Middle East like a storm from Central Asia, destroying the Abbasid Caliphate in the process. They established a center of power in northeastern Iran around Tabriz from which they threatened Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Consequently, Ibn Taymiyya lived his adult life under the shadow of the Mongol threat, which is the key factor for understanding the two faces of his thought.

In 1300, the reigning Mongol Ilkhan, Ghazan, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, invaded Syria. (4) Since Ghazan had converted to Islam in 1295, he could project himself as a legitimate Muslim ruler, thereby capitalizing during his Syrian campaign on the strong prohibition in Islam against internecine Muslim fighting. In effect, his conversion sent a message to the Syrians: "Do not resist me; I come not to destroy Islam but to strengthen it." This line did not convince Ibn Taymiyya, who put his genius for Islamic law to work in developing anti-Mongol propaganda. He argued that, although Ghazan sported the appearance of being a Muslim, his policies as a ruler proved that he remained loyal to traditional Mongol law and belief. By having converted to Islam but then having failed to raise up Islamic law in his realm, Ghazan demonstrated that his conversion was a sham. On this basis, Ibn Taymiyya pronounced him an apostate. Because Islam takes a very dim view of apostasy (abandoning the true faith) Ibn Taymiyya h ad the material at hand to build a strong legal case both for ignoring Ghazan's claims of being a Muslim and for making total war on the partially-Islamized Mongols.

Ibn Taymiyya thus established a boundary between the truly Islamic society and its pseudo-Muslim enemies, who in his view posed a grave threat not just to the Muslims of Syria but to religion itself. The extent of the danger meant that the war against the Mongols was the first priority of the community: prosecuting it required all necessary steps, …