Jihad: A radical misunderstanding
As the Islamic State lies in ruins and scholars and policy-makers are speculating on what lies next for transnational jihad, this book is a timely warning against complacency. Edna Fernandes points out that increasing Islamophobia, with its attendant “politics of rage”, facilitates the allure of extremism. As she thoughtfully asserts: “Trump and ISIS are two sides of the same political coin.”
She gets several things right. She recognises that the “sense of political and economic impotence” among young people at the bottom of society makes them vulnerable targets for jihadi blandishments. She accepts that the US attack on Iraq in 2003 was its “biggest foreign policy mistake of recent history”, which, coupled with the abuses of Abu Ghraib and other human rights violations, created widespread anger in the Muslim world; without this invasion, Ms Fernandes notes, “ISIS might never have been born”.
However, though there has been a flood of outstanding works related to ISIS, political Islam and jihad over the past two decades, there is no evidence that the author has consulted any of the serious studies on these subjects.
Almost every page has errors of fact or understanding. On page 12, Ms Fernandes says that Saudi Arabia provided the largest number of recruits to ISIS, but on page 55 she says that the largest number came from Tunisia (6,000), with Saudi Arabia providing 2,500.
Again, it was not Abu Bakr alBaghdadi who broke away from Al- Qaeda in 2014; this had already taken place under his predecessor in 2007, when Al- Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was renamed Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). No, there was no “full-blown civil war” between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq; in fact, in 2007-09 the Sunnis, as part of the Sahwa (“Awakening”) movement, vigorously fought the ISI and decimated it.
The sectarian divide in Iraq was not the re-opening of “old historical wounds”; it was the result of deliberate US divide-and-rule policies. And, no, Jordan is not ruled by a “non-Sunni” leadership; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was not a “supplicant” of Osama bin Laden, and no, Kerala is not “Christian-dominated”. And, while the “Caliphate” was certainly a “hollow kingdom”, it is a gross exaggeration to describe it as “more violent, venal and rapacious than any dictatorship”. Surely, Hitler’s Nazi state, Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China would claim this prize.
But the deep flaw at the heart of the book is its easy conflation between Wahhabi doctrine and the Saudi state and jihadi ideology and actions. Thus, Ms Fernandes says: “The religious ideologies of ISIS and the Saudi regime have little difference between them”, and later that “Wahhabism is ISIS’s guiding light”. She then blithely moves on to a robust condemnation of the Saudi state as the progenitor of global jihad and the accompanying terror. But, she loses all credibility when in her support she quotes the rabid right-wing extremist Laurent Murawiec, who was used by the US neocons to advocate the destruction of the Saudi state after 9/11, after which he has sunk back into well-deserved obscurity.
Wahhabism is not a “sect” of Islam, it is a reform movement. Again, there is a deep divide between what its founder, Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul al-Wahhab, propounded and what the ideologues of jihad, Al- Qaeda and ISIS, assert. Contrary to what Ms Fernandes says, the Sheikh rejected blind, literal following of traditional sources, stressed the importance of looking at the context of Koranic verses and Hadith pronouncements, and favoured re-interpretation of the primary texts of Islam.
He put severe restrictions on the initiation and practice of jihad, his principal focus being on a moderate approach, non-violence and centrality of truces and treaties rather than war. While modern-day jihadis occasionally refer to Ibn Abdul al-Wahhab’s writings, their principal sources are Ibn Taymiyyah, the 13th century scholar, and 20th century intellectuals such as Sayyid Qutb and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. As scholars have noted, contemporary jihadi thought is the product of a variety of influences — Ibn Taymiyyah, Sufism, anarchism and modernism.
Again, while Saudi Arabia has from time to time sought to build religionbased support constituencies in different parts of the world, its motivations have been largely political, impelled by competition with Iran and retaining its leadership and influence in the Muslim world. Its religious tradition is complex, made up of a continuing tension between the quietist, apolitical religious discourse of the rulers and the radical activism of jihadis who are wreaking havoc across the world.
The author says, perhaps wishfully, that, “the critics of the Saudi kingdom are becoming mainstream and vocal”; with the Trump administration now deeply embedded with the kingdom, this assertion is clearly out of date.
This book is written by a journalist for the general reader, and sees no need for references, endnotes, bibliography, index or even scholarship. This has imparted to this book a rampant superficiality, gross simplifications and a shrillness of tone that hardly do justice to this important subject.
The reviewer is a former diplomat
THE HOLLOW KINGDOM
ISIS and the Cult of Jihad Edna Fernandes Speaking Tiger
254 pages; ~499