Inside the Jihadi Web

By Subia Khan

Challenging the view that peace with Pakistan will counter terror at home. Because all successful authors and publishers have an impeccable sense of timing and generate literature by reflecting on current events, you can bet that we will soon have a surfeit of books on Mumbai’s two nights of terror rolling off the presses. Most will be quickies of rather flat news stories spruced up with photographs and an analysis of what went wrong and why. It is doubtful whether these analyses would be anything more than a blow-by-blow account or substantiate what has come before on Islamic terror that the French scholar Gilles Kepel described in his book, The War for Muslim Minds, as “a vision of global rectification through violent means.” So, here’s a roundup of the classics of the last few years.

The core reading list on Islamic fundamentalism can be divided into two parts: first by Pakistani scholars, mostly writing from the relative safety of living abroad; second, by western scholars after 9/11. Of the two, the Pakistanis have done a much better job because they are insiders; they ought to be read by those in the business of countering Pakistan’s designs on India but also by the average Indian, especially those who feel that peace with Pakistan is at hand and the only way to counter terror at home.

There have been prominent Pakistanis like Tariq Ali, Husain Haqanni, Hasan Abbas, Amir Mir, Ayesha Jalal, Ahmed Rashid, Shuja Nawaz and several others who have written critically and honestly about their country, Pakistan’s politicians and military leaders, and why radical Islam has taken deep roots there.

Not all their recent works can be re-reviewed here but there are four that provide the framework for Pakistan’s structural weaknesses which breeds terror networks: Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos: How the War against extremism is being lost in Pakistan; Ayesha Siddiqa’s Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy; Husain Haqqani’s Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military and Shuja Nawaz’s Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within. This is not to detract from the excellence of the critical works of others (especially Tariq Ali’s copious writings on Pakistan, past and present) but what they have emphasized is overweening power of the military, along with its handmaiden, the ISI and their role in spreading and nurturing terror in the region.

There is a huge jihadi phalanx moving against civil society and the neighbourhood. These books together, or even by themselves, provide us with a frightening account of the nexus between Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, jihadi leaders and the terrorists masquerading as freedom fighters. The ideology of fundamentalist Islam appears at the heart of the Pakistani establishment and has penetrated wide and deep in all sections of society. With the economy and educational system in shambles, the mullah and the military have taken to canalizing the energies of disgruntled youth into terrorism that promises jannat or paradise and eternal youth in the afterlife. Clearly, the journey away from jihad will be long and arduous and merely wishing for peace is no guarantee that it will come.

Western commentators have mostly stuck to interpretations of the Koran or the historical roots for the radicalization of Islam. Bernard Lewis, writing soon after 9/11, provides a perspective on the nature of Islam. In What Went Wrong? he tells us that while in the western world, the basic unit of human organization is the nation — which is then subdivided in various ways, one of which is religion — Muslims tend to see not a nation subdivided into religious groups but a religion subdivided by nations.

Lewis provides the historical background for this outlook, but it has implications in a globalized world: What happens in one part is equally applicable to other parts of the world. Since the West is the cause of all problems, to attack it and its champions anywhere in the world was justified. It is not surprising, then, that the Mumbai’s terrorists targetted Americans, Brits and Israelis and the five-star hotels where most of them check in; if we got caught in the cross-fire it is because we were perceived to be in cahoots with the West.

The backgrounders will tell you why Islamist terrorism won’t go away easy.