NYT Updates the Ongoing Gilles Kepel vs Olivier Roy Feud: The Debate in France over the Nature of Islamic Radicalism

Gilles Kepel

This week The New York Times offered a piece on the increasingly bitter personal feud between France's two best-known experts on Jihadist Islam. .
It's a fight that erupted late last year after the Paris terrorist attacks and that has grown increasingly heated, with two longtime scholar-experts and onetime friends resorting to names like "ignoramus." I've started to write about this particularly Gallic intellectual feud between Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel more than once but my surgery delayed the post so I'll use the NYT article as an excuse..

While the US Presidential campaign spouts a lot of ill-informed rhetoric about the dangers of radical Islam, real or imagined, France, which has had much first-hand experience, is also witnessing a debate over the nature of Islamic radicalism. The difference is that the main proponents on each side actually know what they are talking about. In fact, they have long dominated the conversation.

Olivier Roy

When it comes to the study of political Islamic movements, radical and otherwise, Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy have dominated the field in France, and arguably in Europe, for decades. Both were once fixtures at Sciences-Po in Paris, though Roy is now at the European University Institute in Florence. And many of he best of the younger generation of specialists in political Islam and jihadism came out of Sciences-Po had studied under one or both. (Off the top of my head, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Stephane Lacroix, and Thomas Hegghammer, but there are many more.)

For those who don't read French, the NYT piece provides a short introduction, as does this Washington Post column. 
Subscribers to The Chronicle of Higher Education will find a good summary behind a paywall here.

If you read French, however, you might as well go to the source. Last November, in the wake of the Paris terror attacks, Roy published an article in Le Monde called "Olivier Roy: « Le djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste »."

His argument, oversimplified of course from its Gallic precision, is that the radicalized Muslims of the Paris suburbs are not really motivated by religion but by nihilism and anarchism, and that Islam is a rationalizing overlay, or, in Roy's aphoristic summary, "the Islamization of radicalism."

By December, Gilles Kepel was taking exception in articles such as this interview in the conservative Le Figaro: "Gilles Kepel: «L'objectif de l'État islamique ? Déclencher une guerre civile en France»." An English summary of the objections to Roy can be found in this piece by Francois Burgat. Kepel and his supporters take a more  traditional approach, seeing  European Islamists more traditionally, as radicalized Islamists.

After the Brussels attacks, Kepel emphasized his views:'"Molenbeek français': la mise au point de Gilles Kepel." Roy reiterated his views in other articles, and in March Kepel struck back with a provocatively titled article in Libération: "«Radicalisations» et «islamophobie»: le roi est nu."
"Le roi est nu," or "The king is naked," is an obvious pun (roi/Roy) on Olivier Roy's name.

And that only brings the back-and-forth up to March. The rhetoric has gotten increasingly personal.

Now, while I am generally familiar with the literature on Jihadism, I am no expert, and certainly not in a league with Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, nor have I studied radical Islam in Europe, as both men have.  As a historian rather than a political scientist, I tend to be skeptical of theory and rigid structural analysis, and I tend to be pragmatic. From that perspective, the difference between "the Islamization of radicalism" and "the radicalization of Islam" seems to be the question of which you address first. But it also seems that both Islam and a nihilistic desperation play a role. Do we really need a Manichean dichotomy, a zero-sum construct where either one formula or the other is sacrosanct? or could we learn more from reading both Kepel and Roy?

But what do I know? I'm not even French.

Egypt Says it Killed "Founder" of Ajnad Misr on Same Day Group Claimed Credit for Killing a Policeman

 On Sunday, a bomb on the may 15 Bridge in the Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek, killing a policeman. The jihadist group Ajnad Misr (Soldiers of Egypt) claimed credit. Later the same day, Security forces claimed that they had killed the "founder" of Ajnad Misr, identified as Hanan Muhammad.

Ajnad Misr  has claimed credit for numerous attacks on police and Security Forces in the capital region, mainly in Giza and Cairo Governorates. It's clearly an urban-based movement, unlike Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, which operates in Sinai. It claims to target only police and Security Forces and has issued warnings to warn civilians away from targeted areas. It claims to seek retribution for the killings at Raba‘a in 2013 which has led the government to link it with the Muslim Brotherhood, though an Interior ministry official claimed Hanan Muhammad had been a member of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis before he founded Ajnad Misr. See also here.

"When You See the Black Banners Advancing from Khurasan": Apocalyptic Imagery (Unscheduled) Part III

When I first heard that the US was bombing an al-Qa‘ida subgroup called "Khorasan," I wondered if here was some mistake, since Khorasan historically extends from northeastern Iran up into Central Asia, a long way from northwestern Syria. But as you might expect, this resonates with our recent posts on apocalyptic end times imagery in ISIS and similar movements. I had planned only Part I on Dabiq and Part II on Sufyani, etc. But here's another of them, as I gradually remembered where my onetime focus on early ‘Abbasid history overlaps with modern jihadi imagery: the black banners advancing from Khurasan (the Arabic spelling; Khorasan in Persian).

Most immediately, the name Khorasan or Khurasan seems to come from the fact that several of the leaders of the group in Syria were chosen by al-Qa‘ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri from leaders of the movement who had been inside Iran (only sometimes tolerated by the Shi‘ite regime) or in Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands. They had links to al-Qa‘ida's council for affairs in the Afghan region, the Shura of al-Qa‘ida in the land of Khurasan or the Khurasan Shura. But the choice of "Khurasan" has a deeper resonance.

There is a hadith or tradition of the Prophet Muhammad which most hadith commentators consider weak and probably fabricated,that with some variations usually is cited as something like this:

If you see the black banners coming from the direction of Khurasan, then go to them, even if you have to crawl, because among them will be Allah’s Caliph the Mahdi.

Indeed, as I said, most commentators do not accept this as a real tradition of the Prophet, and many commentators and historians assume it was created to garner support for the ‘Abbasid Revolution which overthrew the Umayyad dynasty in AH 132/AD 750, and which started in Khurasan with a revolt led by a somewhat mysterious figure named Abu Muslim, and whose emblem was indeed a black banner. Some versions of the hadith even include phrases like "they are the sons of al-‘Abbas."  The third ‘Abbasid Caliph (and the father of Harun al-Rashid) took the name al-Mahdi.

Jabhat al-Nusra Flsg

Even if the hadith was a fabrication of the ‘Abbasid propaganda machine, it is ostensibly a prophecy of the end times, and has become popular in jihadist circles. For al-Qa‘ida, jihad begins in the east, Afghanistan and Pakistan, historically part of a sort of Greater Khurasan with a bit of geographical stretching. And jihadism is now seeking to establish itself in the core Arab lands of Iraq and Syria, advancing westward, and, of course, carrying black flags.

ISIS flag

So for al-Qa‘ida Central, moving leaders from the Shura Khurasan to Syria powerfully evokes the image of the black banners advancing from Khurasan to conquer the heartland from the periphery.

And as an aside, some versions of the hadith suggest that the individual fighters in the armies advancing under those black banners will be known not by their given names but by a kunya (the "Father of" name) followed by the nisba name formed from their home town or country. Hence the standard form of the jihadi nom de guerre: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, Abu Anas al-Libi, and so on.

Wagemakers on Jihadist Criticisms of ISIS Beheadings

Joas Wagemaker at Jihadica notes that two prominent radical Jihadist thinkers are criticizing ISIS for its public beheadings of journalists and aid workers; Abu Qatada al-Filastini and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, both prominent theorists of Jihadism, have been weighing in.

Has the US Unwittingly Helped Out Jabhat al-Nusra?

The US decision to list the Syrian rebel movement Jabhat al-Nusra as a supporter of terrorism, on the grounds that it is an offshoot of Al-Qa‘ida in Iraq,appears to have backfired; in response 29 militias and coordinating committees announced a new pro-Jabhat al-Nusra front, which presumably was not rhe result the US was seeking. If they were seeking to marginalize the group, they instead won it new allies. One mystery is why, exactly, the US chose to take this action now at a time when generally the US has been expressing support (mostly verbal) for the rebels), and the rebel advances have been getting generally positive coverage in the West.

Perhaps they would have done better to follow the lead of blogger Karl ReMarks, who offers this "Secular Idiot's Giude to Syria's Jihadist Groups."  It's funny, if irreverent, and a reminder that ridicule can sometimes be effective where "terrorism" labels are not.

Tools for Making Sense of the "Syrian Jihadis On the Rise" Theme

It's an important question: is Jihadism increasingly making itself felt in the Syrian rebellion? Are arms intended for the rebels reaching Jihadi groups ahead of more moderate ones? David Sanger in The New York Times reported the latter recently, citing classified reports:

“The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” said one American official familiar with the outlines of those findings, commenting on an operation that in American eyes has increasingly gone awry.

I have no great expertise on the subject under discussion, but wanted to call attention to some detailed resources that provide background, and perhaps balance, to this report (which I have no reason to doubt accurately reflects the classified documents it cites).

One always needs to keep in the forefront of the mind that the regime is eager to persuade the world that the rebels are radical jihadis, Salafis, sectarian bigots, and terrorists. No doubt some of them are. I assume readers of this blog are here because they appreciate nuance and background, and two recent reports seem to offer both detail and nuance.

One is Aron Lund's contribution at Foreign Policy, "Holy Warriors: A Field Guide to Syria's Jihadi Groups"  Lund (who often comments on this blog, though we've never met) recently published a longer study at Sweden's Foreign Policy Institute , "Syrian Jihadism," (PDF) which provides much greater detail. A shorthand conclusion from the first link:

Jihadis still make up a minority of the Syrian rebel movement and do not represent the opposition as a whole, but they punch far above their weight in terms of both military effectiveness and ideological influence. As such, they will play a role in the battle for Syria's future, though it remains to be seen just how large of a role that will be.  

Another recent effort to address the question in nuanced detail is Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group's latest report,  "Tentative Jihad: Syria's Fundamentalist Opposition."  (Link is to the Executive Summary. The full report in PDF is here.) 

Prematurely and exaggeratedly highlighted by the regime, belatedly and reluctantly acknowledged by the opposition, the presence of a powerful Salafi strand among Syria’s rebels has become irrefutable. That is worrisome, but forms only part of a complex picture. To begin, not all Salafis are alike; the concept covers a gamut ranging from mainstream to extreme. Secondly, present-day Syria offers Salafis hospitable terrain – violence and sectarianism; disenchantment with the West, secular leaders and pragmatic Islamic figures; as well as access to Gulf Arab funding and jihadi military knowhow – but also adverse conditions, including a moderate Islamic tradition, pluralistic confessional make-up, and widespread fear of the kind of sectarian civil war that engulfed two neighbours. Thirdly, failure of the armed push this past summer caused a backlash against Salafi groups that grabbed headlines during the fighting.

This is not to dismiss the Salafis’ weight. The opposition has a responsibility: to curb their influence, stem the slide toward ever-more radical and confessional discourse and halt brutal tactics. So too do members of the international community, quick to fault the opposition for fragmentation and radical drift that their own divisions, dysfunctionality and powerlessness have done much to foster. For as long as different countries sponsor distinct armed groups, a bidding war will ensue, and any hope of coordinating the rebels, disciplining them and restraining their most extremist members will be in vain. The issue, in other words, is not so much whether to arm them – and, if so, with what – but rather to rationalise and coordinate the support provided to the opposition in order to make more likely the emergence of a more coherent, structured, representative and thus effective interlocutor in what, sooner or later, must be a negotiated outcome. Even those who side with the regime would stand to benefit from that development, if they wish to see today’s devastating military stalemate evolve toward a political solution.

The wisest course in Syria is far from clear, but those making policy need accurate and nuanced information to make it. These sorts of studies help provide that.

When Ignorant Armies Clash

There is much we do not know about the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo. Who organized them? The presence of jihadi black flags is ominous. They do not appear to have been entirely what they purport to be: purely spontaneous outrage at a video no one has seen, or seen more than a trailer for.  It may well be that this was merely a pretext for attacking US Embassies on the anniversary of September 11.

What is clear enough is that the US Embassies found themselves caught, as it were, in the crossfire of two ignorant armies: rabid Islamophobes determined to attack the Prophet of Islam on the one hand, and the most extreme Islamists on the other, determined to avenge him. As is so often the case, the two extremes have more in common with each other than they do with the vast majority of Christians and Muslims and Jews in between. Both consider that there is a war to the death between Islam and the West. There is not, yet. And it is important for people of good will on all sides to prevent their vision from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some of the scurrilous charges being made against the Prophet are ancient slanders that are older than the Crusades; antiquity does not add credibility: they are as old as, and as false as, the blood libel against the Jews.

The First Amendment guarantees any bigoted American the sovereign right to parade his ignorance in public; I treasure the freedom, but that does not lead me to defend ahistorical rhetoric.

Just as we are not sure who organized the Embassy attacks (but there is little doubt about their intentions), it is also still not clear who is behind the video that provoked the outrage. A well-known evangelical preacher whose fame exceeds his minuscule congregation has said  he was going to distribute it but didn't make it; a report that a "Sam Bacile," first identified as an Israeli, was behind it, has evaporated. Many Egyptians are blaming a well-known US Coptic activist, but I won't name him as I don't want to add further fuel to a burning fire; I hope that it isn't true.

There is only one remedy for this clash of ignorances: one of the longstanding goals of the Middle East Institute has been to educate the US about the Middle East and the Middle East about the US. This tragic intersection of Western Islamophobia and radical Jihadi murderous outrage is a sign there is still a lot to be done, on both sides. We are still with Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Jihadis and the Lord of the Rings

Sometimes stuff comes up that doesn't seem to fit in any of my categories. This one, discovered via The Arabist, is one of those.

Via a blog I hadn't seen before by a grad student at Indiana, Views from the Occident (which has quite a bit of unexpected stuff on it), an illustrated post on "Cyber Jihadis' Lord of the Rings Obsession." Yes, you read that right. Apparently online jihadi sites are fascinated by the film version of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and keep using its imagery in their websites. Sometimes they portray their side using the evil Nazgul (Arabic means "the victorious faction" or "the victorious sect"):



But more often they're the good guys. Here they're elves fighting orcs:



Watch the videos over there too, though some are just plain weird. So's the whole theme. But an intriguing if rather odd observation.

‘Awlaqi the "Infidel"

Anwar al-‘Awlaqi, the Yemeni-American Islamist preacher who has drawn a great deal of attention because of his alleged links and connections with the Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, has already publicly distanced himself from Hasan's actions, but it appears that his radical jihadi credentials may have been questioned previously. Guest posting over at Jihadica, Brian Fishman, former Director of Research at West Point's Center for Combating Terrorism (go ahead, tell me with a straight face that they're apologists for Islamist extremism), notes that ‘Awlaqi himself was once denounced by a radical London Islamist (now also deported), for being insuifficiently strict in his application of takfir (declaring a fellow Muslim an unbeliever), with the result that he was, in effect, himself declared a kafir.

It's an interesting sidelight for those who are seriously interested in following what the jihadi radicals are saying, as opposed to either 1) tarring all Muslims with the jihadi brush or 2) defending the most rabid excesses of the takfiris who have little following among most Muslims.

Readings on a Theme: Post-Jihadism

I'm going to be busy on Journal work this week, so a lot of my postings will be link dumps rather than my own writing, I suspect. This is such a links dump: lots of reading, not much commentary by me.

One theme that has turned up a lot lately is the so-called phenomenon of "post-jihadism," or the increasing number of statements/sermon/fatwas/declarations by various Islamist groups limiting the justifiable targets of jihadist violence. It's easy to by cynical; one of the earliest instances was the decision by the imprisoned leadership of al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya in Egypt to declare a truce (being in an Egyptian prison clarifies one's thinking in ways that haven't happened yet with their former colleague Ayman al-Zawahiri).

Imprisoned Moroccan scholar Muhammad Fizazi has also reportedly written a letter to Muslims in Germany saying Germany is "not a battle zone" (with a link to his letter here).

Some interesting readings linked loosely or directly to this theme: from the Hudson Institute, Jean-Pierre Filiu on The Brotherhood vs. Al-Qaeda: A Moment of Truth? A three-part post over at Jihadica has summarized popular TV preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi's book on Fiqh al-Jihad: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

One aspect of this tendency has been played up recently by CNN: the story is here, video here:



For a dissenting view on the CNN report, see The Arabist here, who feels that CNN is being manipulated by Sayf al-Qadhafi here. (He points to another piece here.)I'd agree that the Qadhafis are not the best source for Libyan Islamist thinking, but clearly whatever we make of this "Jihadi code," it fits into a broader trend sometimes called "post-jihadism."

Not everyone is post-Jihadist. See Abu Muqawama recently on the Taliban's Book of Rules.

Hegghammer on "Al-Sahab": Why the Internet is So Great

I'm pretty sure this is why the Internet was invented, even if gossip, UFOs and porn are the main trafficked sites: a truly interesting, informative, short blog by Thomas Hegghammer at Jihadica on "Why is Al-Sahab Called Al-Sahab?" Now Jihadica is the sort of specialized blog that can get away with the statement "Most readers probably know that the word sahab means 'clouds' and that it emerged as the name of al-Qaida’s media production company around 2002," because it's only read by specialists, some of whom, may actually know that. ("Every schoolboy knows..." always introduces something that very few if any schoolboys know.) This is the sort of careful, exegetic, interpretative reading of complex information that intelligence services pay dearly for, that used to be esoteric in its accessibility, and that now, if you know where to look, is free for the asking.

I couldn't have explained this without hours, or days, of research. (Actually, I never asked myself the question.) People used to pay a lot (probably still do) to consultants to tell them this esoteric stuff. Jihadica gave it to us free without our even knowing we needed it. Thanks, Thomas. Jihadica is becoming an utterly essential site. I get the RSS Feed and recommend you do the same, or at least bookmark it.

Ye Olde Weekend Reading List

Some readings to tide you over:

• For those of us not closely following the Norwegian Middle East literature — I must confess to being one of them — Thomas Hegghammer has a post at Jihadica with links to a Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) report by Einar Wigen on an Al-Qa‘ida-linked Uzbek group described as "Al-Qa‘ida's Key to the Turkic World". Don't panic at the Norwegian summary up front: the report is in English. Hegghammer also gives a link to a conference on "Understanding Jihadism: Origins, Evolution, and Future Perspectives," with the conference papers available.
  

• Over at the Saban Center, a new report, "Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran." Contributors are Ken Pollack, Daniel Byman, Martin Indyk, Suzanne Maloney, Michael O'Hanlon and Bruce Riedel. One question: other than alliteration, why use "Persia" in the title?
  

• I previously mentioned Graeme Bannerman's and Bilal Saab's postmortem on the Lebanese elections at MEI. In the end I had to miss it, but the podcast is now up. Note that on the new website the link doesn't take you to an HTML page but directly into the podcast.
  

Baghdadi Says He Wasn't Captured

I noted previously, to a comment about why I hadn't posted about the capture of the head of Al-Qa‘ida in Iraq, Abu ‘Umar al-Baghdadi, that there were a lot of questions about whether he had really been captured. Now The Islamic State in Iraq, as it is officially known, has not only denied he's been captured but says the photo being circulated is not of him, and an audio tape has been released as well. So my hesitancy about calling attention to an unproven claim seems to have been prudent.

Weekend Reading

As I've done on other Fridays, a collection of recent articles to tide you over for the weekend:

• Jihadists Studying Western Scholars Studying Jihad: It gives Thomas Hegghammer at Jihadica a chance to use the word "omphaloskeptic," which is almost worth the time reading it in itself (contemplating your navel, for the Greek-challenged), but it's an intriguing subject in its own right. As we study them, are they studying us studying them? Another take on the same subject from Arab Media Shack.

• Israel's 61st independence day had only one survivor who had been present at the signing of the declaration of independence in 1948, a 94-year old.

• Resisting the mass hamicide: Egypt's pig farmers setting up roadblocks as Egypt tries to kill 300,000 pigs.

• And, now that the UN has criticized Egypt for the pig kill despite the lack of any cases of swine flu or any proof pigs wre involved, Egypt now says it was a general health measure to end "disorderly pig rearing," especially those raised in garbage dumps by the zabbalin, mostly Christian garbage collectors.

• Ehud Barak on Avigdor Lieberman: "I think that the positions [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman is articulating behind closed doors are far more balanced and, I would say, more responsible than what some of his [public] declarations suggest." A rather diplomatic way of saying, "he's not as crazy as he sounds."? But this is your country's chief diplomat we're talking about, here, and its Defense Minister is saying it.