Source: Contemporary Voices

By M Afzal Upal

Abstract

This paper argues that in order to win the long-term fight against Islamic Jihadist movements, we must confront their ideological foundations and provide the majority of Muslims with an alternative narrative that satisfies their social identity needs for a positive esteem.  By analysing social identity dynamics of Western-Muslim interactions, this paper presents some novel ideas that can lead to the creation of such a narrative.

Keywords: counter-terrorism, master narratives, counter-narratives, countering violent extremism (CVE)

How to Cite: Upal, M.A., 2015. Confronting Islamic Jihadist Movements. Journal of Terrorism Research, 6(2). DOI: http://doi.org/10.15664/jtr.1155

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

This paper argues that in order to win the long-term fight against Islamic Jihadist movements, we must confront their ideological foundations and provide the majority of Muslims with an alternative narrative that satisfies their social identity needs for a positive esteem. By analysing social identity dynamics of Western-Muslim interactions, this paper presents some novel ideas that can lead to the creation of such a narrative.

Keywords: counter-terrorism, master narratives, counter-narratives, countering violent extremism (CVE)

Introduction

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, violent extremism originating from the Islamic world has been a concern for Western policy makers. Although their primary interest has been to prevent immediate attacks against the West and its allies, understanding the root causes of Islamic extremism and countering the ideological infrastructure of Jihad have become increasingly important to Western decision makers and researchers. Recent terrorist attacks by ISIS sympathizers in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and France have demonstrated the limits of a narrowly-focussed prevention strategy. Formulating an effective, broad counter-offensive that can compete against the Jihadi narrative in the war of ideas and strengthen the forces of moderate Islam has remained a challenge because of the lack of a credible alternative narrative. This article carries out a social identity theoretic analysis of Western-Islamic interactions to better understand these challenges and suggests some promising ideas for the development of an alternative narrative.

History

Islamic nations and the West have a millennia-long history of intellectual conflict and violent warfare. Crusades and colonialism are just two particularly well known milestones along this road littered with such monuments. The Muslim-Christian dialogue of conflict began within a few years after the birth of Islam—the ‘newer’ religion. In 636 CE, just a short fourteen years after Prophet Muhammad’s death, Judeo-Christian Jerusalem succumbed to Islam’s expanding influence. Within the short span of a few years all the major Christian centres of the Middle East (including Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria, and Carthage) had come under Islamic rule. There were repeated Muslim attacks against the headquarters of the Eastern Christian Church–Constantinople (which finally capitulated in 1453). Pope Gregory declared the first Crusade as a counter offensive against Muslims in 996. For the next three hundred years, the two civilizations militarily fought against each other in a broad front extending from Spain in the west to Syria in the east. As a result of the 500 year-long expansion of Islam and the resulting meteoric rise in Muslim fortunes, the Islamic myth of invincibility became widespread—especially among Muslims. “If you faithfully follow Allah and his path, Allah will make you victorious” became a firmly embedded as a part of Muslim identity (Akyol 2011).

The fatal blow against the Muslim expansion came from an unexpected quarter. The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century were so ferocious that they broke through the Islamic narrative of invincibility. This was the first time the Muslims were forced to ask the question of what went wrong (Lewis 2003). What reduced this cognitive dissonance (Festinger and Schachter 1964) for most Muslims was not a revision of the belief in God’s promise of victory. Instead, as the 13th century cleric Ibn-e-Tamiyya explained, Allah had taken victory away from Muslims because they had stopped following Islam faithfully enough. The only way to restore the glory of the golden era of Islam was to go back to faithfully following Islamic tenets, in particular Jihad, argued Ibn-e-Tamiyya and others.

While the Mongol rulers themselves eventually converted to Islam, and the Ottoman Empire had some success in reuniting Muslims under one empire and making further inroads into Eastern Europe, Islamic communities never regained the degree of cultural and material dominance over the Christian West that they enjoyed in the 11th and 12th centuries. The myriad reasons for this include the rise of science, reason, and free thinking in Europe and its relative decline in the Islamic countries. The final insult from a Muslim perspective came with the military defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the disbanding of the Caliphate, and the colonial occupation of Muslim countries throughout Middle East, North Africa, and South and East Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Faced with this degradation, Muslims once again turned inward and asked themselves “what went wrong.” And once again, by far the most dominant answer provided was to echo Ibn-e-Tamiyya’s 13th century observation. “Because we stopped following Islam faithfully enough” was the answer by the South Asian scholar Abul-ala-Moudoodi and by Egyptians Syed Qutb and Hasan Al-Banna (Akyol 2011). A recent survey reveals that there is a widely-held opinion by Muslims around the world that they should adhere to the tenets of Islam more closely (PewForum 2012).

A legacy of this long history of mutual adversity is that Western countries are seen as hostile to Islam by Muslims around the world (Figure 1). When asked to identify the greatest danger to their nation, Indonesians, Pakistanis, and Malaysians chose United States as the biggest danger to their survival (PewForum 2012). A separate 2014 Pew Global Survey found that while, “…a global median of 65% voice an affirmative opinion about America…This includes a median of 74% in Africa, 66% in Western Europe, 66% in Asia, 65% in Latin America, but just 30% in the Middle East”

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