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The World on Fire

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Loretta Napoleoni

On 14 November, BBC radio four reported that in 2005 there have been 55 terrorist attacks against transportation facilities in the world, the bulk of which have been carried out by Islamist armed organizations; in France, during the previous two weeks, more than 5 thousands cars were burned by Muslim teenagers who felt ‘invisible’ to the State; on 9 November, in Amman, Abu Musab al Zarqawi succeeded in bringing the atrocities of Iraq to the crowed streets of the Jordanian capital, killing 57 people; days later, a middle aged Iraqi woman unveiled to an already traumatised world how, together with her husband, she was meant to blow herself up during the wedding reception of an unknown, but equally unlucky, couple. This is the world we live in and it is on fire.

Far from destroying al Qaeda, the war on terror has increased terrorist activity in the world. Exporting democracy to Iraq, using George W. Bush’s words, has radicalised Iraqis, some of whom are now used as suicide bombers to destabilise neighbouring countries. Plagued by unemployment and silent discrimination, French Muslim youths have taken to the streets of France to vandalise their own environment. Desperate situations call for desperate measures and it is despair that is the invisible thread which links the London and Amman suicide bombers with French rioters. Violence has replaced politics as a mean to an end and through its many shades is eroding our environment, reducing our civil liberties, and forcing us to come to terms with an increasingly hostile world.

Though the French rioters claim that their violent protest has nothing to do with religion, that their actions are motivated by the desire to be heard, seen and considered, their methodology is reminiscent of al Zarqawi’s and his supporters’, the radical Salafists, actions. Their violence is aimed at burning down the environment they live in, as if from its ashes a new and better society might be built. Radical Salafists call for the total destruction of the Arab state in order to cleanse it of Western contamination and build the ‘right’ society. This comparison stretches further. At the root of the French riots and of radical Salafism there is a deep sense of betrayal: the duplicity of the French government which, in the eyes of the French Muslim youth, considers them second class citizens, and the treachery of Europe and the West vis-à-vis the 19th century Arab world.

At its outset, in the second half of the 19th century, Salafism was not an anti-Western ideology. On the contrary, it was the Arab admiration for the modernized West that prompted the movement. Fascinated by European development, Arab countries began to compare their socio-economic and political conditions with those of Europe. This evaluation triggered deep reflection on the crisis of the Ottoman Empire, the political power which at the time controlled the Arab world, and stimulated great interest in Western civilization. In the Arab world this process is known as al Nahda, literally the ‘awakening’ or ‘renaissance’. Produced by the interaction of Arab thinkers with Western revolutionary ideals, al Nahda marked the beginning of Arab modernization, or, rather, of the will to modernize. In essence, the Arab world acknowledged the socio-economic and political superiority of the parliamentary European states. Imitating the achievements of the Old Continent, Arabs wanted to create a Muslim ‘modernity’ in the new Arab states emerging from the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

Salafism identified the Ottoman Empire as the primary cause of the Arab failure to modernize. To overcome this obstacle, the doctrine called for all Muslims to return to the purity of religion, to the origins of Islam and the teachings of the Prophet. Reconnecting with their roots would provide them with the necessary strength to gain independence from the Ottoman Empire and with a way to create an Arab identity. This was essentially a process of spiritual purification, of cleaning away centuries of political and economic domination.

Thus, Salafism envisaged the regeneration of Islam along lines compatible with the political, economic and technological conquests of the West. Properly understood, Islam is perfectly in synch with the liberal, democratic and scientific values of the modern world. To achieve this symbiosis, the core principles of the Sharia law had to be adapted to the process of Western modernization.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘betrayal’ by Europe -- which far from freeing the Arab world, colonized it -- contributed to the transformation of Salafism into the current xenophobic, conservative and puritanical revivalist movement. The central idea of radical Salafism is still the purification of Islam, but this time from the contamination of corruption and stagnation produced by Western colonization. Foreign European powers, not the Ottoman Empire, are blamed for the decadence of the Arab world.

‘The [radical] Salafist ideology is primarily a movement of violent rupture with the environment,’ explains Nadine Picaudou, professor at Inalco, the National Institute for Oriental Language and Civilization, in Paris. While the Muslim Brotherhood exists within the political space (its members participated in the elections in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait), radical Salafism rejects such a space and seeks its destruction. The former are associative and legitimate, the latter are disruptive and illegal. What appeals to al Zarqawi and his followers are precisely these characteristics of modern Salafism: its uncompromising, destructive nature. In the United Kingdom, the London bombers were drowned to their final tragic destination by the same violent ideology.

Betrayal is what young French Muslims feel, the humiliation of being born French without the privileges of their secular non-Muslim peers. In a country where unemployment is as high as 10%, in Muslim ‘ghettos’, wastelands in the outskirts of the cities, where the ‘blue collars’ live, unemployment reaches 35%. The rioters are the children of airport baggage handlers, train stations cleaners, hotel chambermaids, taxi drivers, waiters in cheap restaurants, Muslim immigrants who have worked hard to give their own French-born children the education they never had. Their dream is to allow them to move up the social ladder, a dream which has been realized by the post World War II European blue collar workers. Somehow, this dream has been shattered by France’s high unemployment, reduction of social welfare and, after 9/11, a growing sense of discrimination among young Muslims. “We do not have the American dream,’ said a rioter to a New York Times correspondent, ‘we do not even have a dream.”

Radical Salafists are equally focused on the destructive phase of their revolt, dreaming about what will come next is a luxury they cannot afford. The danger is that radical Salafism, a readily-available violent doctrine, can fill the emotional void in which French and European born Muslim youths have been plunged into. Radical Salafism could give the spontaneous riots the militant structure they lack and young European born Muslims the violent ideology which will allow them to cross the fatal threshold to terrorism. As thousands of confused kids are locked inside French prisons thanks to a 1955 colonial law, the Jihadists could reach and indoctrinate them. They could manipulate their anger. If this happens, then a new generation of European suicide bombers could be created almost overnight. Repression, therefore, may well backfire; dialogue, radical social reforms and a glimpse of hope might save many kids from becoming terrorists and our Europe for keep on burning.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Loretta Napoleoni is a international terrorism expert and author of "Insurgent Iraq: al-Zarqawi and the new generation" and "Terror Inc: Tracing the dollars behind the terror network." She was a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics. She has worked as an economist and foreign correspondent for Italy’s financial papers. As chairwoman of the countering terrorism financing group for the Club de Madrid, Loretta Napoleoni brought heads of state from around the world together to create a new strategy for combating the financing of terror networks. She was one of the few people to interview the Red Brigades in Italy after three decades of silence.