EuroIslam: The Jihad Within?

EuroIslam: The Jihad Within?

Mini Teaser: Islam in Europe is being transformed from diaspora to "universal" forms. The latter portend a rise of radicalism and terrorism within the EU.

by Author(s): Olivier Roy

Neo-fundamentalism in Europe does not target communities with ties to a culture of origin, but individuals in doubt about their faith and identity. It appeals to well-educated, but also uprooted and disgruntled, youth. For such individuals, fundamentalism offers a system for regulating behavior in any situation, from Afghan deserts to American college campuses. But this system is both a product and an agent of de-culturation. Islam, as preached by the Taliban, Saudi Wahhabis and bin Laden's radicals, is hostile even to culture that is Islamic in origin. It expresses the same rejection of all material civilization and gladly destroys it--whether it is Muhammad's tomb, the Bamiyan Buddha statues or the World Trade Center.

Yet these movements are not nihilistic. On the contrary, they are determined to restore what they imagine the purity of early Islam to have been, before it was sullied by human constructs. By championing the transnational umma, they address the universalist yearning of Muslims who cannot identify with any specific place or nation. The constructivist umma therefore must span the globe, where it battles the Western political, economic and cultural uniformity that, ironically, it requires to sustain itself. Thus McDonald's and English-as-a-second-language is fought by neo-fundamentalists wearing white robes and beards who also speak English-as-a-second-language (except in Britain, where it has become the new mother tongue) and go for hallal fast food.

The Security Dimension of EuroIslam

The fact that re-Islamization of young Muslims in Europe represents a radical disconnection between the country of origin and the new generations, constituting rather a factor of de-culturation, helps to explain why the dynamic of re-Islamization favors supranational organizations instead of "national" Islamic movements. But the various recruitment strategies of these organizations--the Muslim Brotherhood, Tablighi Jamaat, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Qaeda--are rather different, and these differences have important implications for the security threats they may pose.

The Muslim Brothers and their sympathizers approach integration on a communal basis: they try to organize Muslims into a visible and active community, with institutions for education and social services. The UOIF (Union of French Islamic Organizations) and Milli Görüs now fit this pattern precisely. They want to be recognized by the authorities and often advocate the "Jewish" model (as they see it) to mobilize the Muslim community. They are legal-minded, stressing the negotiation of their status (whether over the veil, hallal food or consultation on ethical issues). They may evolve into a sort of Muslim church in Europe, which would pose little or no security threat, and would advance a conservative agenda in terms of moral and social values. This would likely put an end to the alliance between the multiculturalist, liberal European Left and the first generation of migrants, itself an interesting and important political development in its own right.

Tablighi Jamaat, a South Asian fundamentalist organization, on the other hand, is opposed to any sort of integration and, along with many salafi or Wahhabi movements, wants to organize the Muslims as separate communities--on a kind of ghetto model--with as little interaction as possible with the non-Muslim European world. Its members look askance at educating females and strongly oppose co-education. They are a font of societal problems, but they are probably not a serious security threat so long as they are allowed to live their segregated communal lives without interference from Western authorities.

This brings us to Al-Qaeda and Hizb ut-Tahrir. If we analyze the violent Islamic militants who have operated in western Europe since the early 1990s, a distinct pattern emerges. These individuals are not linked to or used by any Middle Eastern state, intelligence service or radical movement, as had been the case in the 1980s. With a single, transitional exception, they are part of the de-territorialized, supranational Islamic networks that operate specifically in the West and at the periphery of the Middle East. Their background has nothing to do with Middle Eastern conflicts or traditional religious education (excluding only the Saudis). On the contrary, as noted above, they are Western-educated and often have scientific backgrounds. Their groups are often mixes of educated middle-class leaders and working-class dropouts, a pattern common to most of the West European radicals of the 1970s and 1980s (Germany's Rote Armee Fraktion, Italy's Brigada Rossa, France's Action Directe). Many became "born-again" Muslims or jailhouse converts, sharing a common marginal culture.

The converts from mainstream European societies (whose existence was well known in Europe but only discovered by Americans with the case of John Walker Lindh) fit the same pattern. A few are from the middle class, usually the leaders (like Christophe Caze in France, a medical doctor who was killed "in action" against the police in Roubaix in 1996). Many are working-class dropouts--José Padilla, Richard Reid and the Frenchman Lionel Dumont (who fought in Bosnia)--who joined Islam because "the Muslims are the only ones to fight the system." Twenty years ago such individuals would have joined radical leftist movements, which have now disappeared or become "bourgeois" (like the Revolutionary Communist League in France). Now only two Western movements of radical protest claim to be "internationalist": the anti-globalization movement and the radical Islamists. To convert to Islam today is a way for a European rebel to find a cause; it has little to do with theology. (More than 100,000 converts to Islam live in France, but most converted for practical reasons--to marry a Muslim woman, for example.)

It follows that the second generation of Al-Qaeda militants in Europe (recruited after 1992) is characterized precisely by the breaking of their ties with the "real" Muslim world they claim to represent. All of the September 11 terrorists and their accomplices (except the Saudi "muscle" on the planes) left their country of origin to fight or to study abroad (usually in the West). All broke with their families. They did not belong to a neighborhood or community, not even a religious one in most cases. They were cultural outcasts both in their countries of origin and in their host countries. But they were all Westernized in some way (again, except the Saudis and the Yemenis); none had attended a madrassa, all were trained in technical or scientific fields and spoke a Western language. If we include the logistical networks, some possessed Western citizenship (Zacarias Moussaoui was born in France). All of them (except, once again, the Saudis) became born-again Muslims in Europe after living "normal" lives in their countries of origin. The mosques of Hamburg (Al-Qods), London (Finsbury Park), Marseilles and even Montréal played a far bigger role than any Saudi madrassa in the process of their Islamic radicalization.

Thus, far from representing a traditional religious community or culture, these militants broke with their pasts (and some with traditional Islam altogether). They experienced an individual re-Islamization in a small cell of uprooted fellows, where they forged their own Islam--as illustrated vividly by Mohamed Atta's refusal to be buried according to Egyptian traditions, which he dubbed UN-Islamic. They did not follow any Islamic school or notable cleric, and often lived according to non-Muslim standards. Almost none made an endogamous marriage, but many (Al Mottassadek, Ahmed Ressam, Fateh Kemal, Jemal Beghal, Kamel Daoudi) married "European" wives. They are all far more a product of a Westernized Islam than of traditional Middle Eastern politics. However "old time" their theology may sound to Westerners, and whatever they may think of themselves, radical EuroIslamists are clearly more a post-modern phenomenon than a pre-modern one.

And they are a wholly European phenomenon. Except for a few Pakistanis, no Al-Qaeda member left Europe or the United States to fight for Islam in his country of origin. All the "Algerians" came from Europe (or, like Ressam, became radicalized in Europe), and not one was ever found in the GIA's Algerian strongholds. The foreigners sentenced in Yemen in January 1999 for hostage-taking included six British citizens of Pakistani descent (including the son-in-law of Sheikh Hamza, the Egyptian-born imam of Finsbury Park) and two French Algerians. Sheikh Saïd Omar, convicted in Pakistan for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, is a British-born citizen of the United Kingdom. The two young Muslims sentenced in Morocco for firing on tourists in a Marrakesh hotel in 1994 were from French Algerian families.

The peripheral character of Al-Qaeda militants is also reflected in the geography of their chosen battlefields. There is a paradox: most Al-Qaeda fighters are ethnic Arabs, the bulk of them being Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian-Palestinian. But Al-Qaeda has been conspicuously absent from Arab lands (except, probably, for the Khobar Towers attack, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and perhaps recent small-scale activity in Kuwait). Nor have these militants cared much about Arab conflicts. Bin Laden gave only faint lip service to the Palestinian cause until the end of 2001. Training for the September 11 attacks was initiated before the so-called second intifada; most of the terrorists arrived on U.S. soil in the spring of 2000 and the decision to attack was taken that January. Instead of the Middle East, Al-Qaeda and its likes have been fighting in the West (New York, Paris, London), in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Philippines, Indonesia and East Africa--but not in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria or Algeria.

Essay Types: Essay