War, Terror, Jihad and Justice

War, Terror, Jihad and Justice

By
Ellis Goldberg, Associate Professor of Political
Science
University of Washington

October 11, 2001

The al-Qa’ida group is more like a cult than like

anything else and thus bears more similarity to the
radical groups of the 60s or to groups like Jim Jones
followers or the Red Brigades, the Red Army Faction
and the Weathermen but far more destructive. The
important question tonight however is how such a group
emerged but also a need to disentangle the
relationship between the rhetoric of Islam that they
employ, the actions they undertake and the reason they
have achieve popularity among sections of the
populations in the Arab and Muslim countries. In this
talk I want to explain why what occurred at the WTC
was an act of war and what it means that this act of
war was committed by private individuals rather than
by a state. I also want to explain why the people who
carried it out claim to have been engaged in jihad
even though most orthodox Muslim leaders have denied
that claim. Lastly I want to comment on what the role
of the US must be in the world if we are to achieve a

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greater measure of peace and justice in the world. To

understand what is happening today we need to
understand the pervasive character of war and
dictatorship in the Middle East, North Africa and
South Asia as well as how modern ideas about the
conduct of war emerged, the difference between war and
terror, the ways in which 20th century Muslims re-
conceptualized classical Islamic doctrines about the
conduct of war or jihad, and the meaning of justice in
the international order. To discuss the context
within which the assault on the World Trade Center
occurred and the concepts by which those who did it
justified it in their own minds requires all of us to
recall that great religious traditions are complex,
that the debates over their fundamental meanings have
gone on for hundreds if not thousands of years. It is
to realize that, as all such traditions emphasize,
human beings have free will. The mere existence of a
text or an interpretation is not sufficient to
guarantee that it will not be employed in the pursuit
of intolerance, violence, or evil. We must all
confront, as the Qur’an reminds us, the whisperings of
Satan in our own hearts.

War

The attack on the WTC and the Pentagon killed

thousands but the US government says it was an act of
war not mass murder. To understand what kind of war
is being fought and appreciate the importance of war
in our world we have to look back at the history of
war. War is conflict between states, but until the
16th century states were the property of rulers: kings,

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princes, or aristocracies and therefore when states

went to war rulers expected to get property: slaves,
subjects, land, tribute, plunder. After the 16th
century and the emergence of the modern world states
ceased to be the property of individuals. States
became the representatives of nations. During this
period the extent of war changed. Technology made war
more destructive and war was increasingly fought for
ideological reasons. Consequently civilians became
subject to warfare, and were no longer made the
objects of war (enslaved or their property taken) and
rules of war were necessarily developed.
The consequences for political and social life of the
creation of this new form of the state was that states
undertook the responsibility for any acts of war
carried out by those who resided in their territory
against other states. The emergence of the modern
state system required a prolonged conflict—fought with
military, political, and legal instruments—against
piracy, the use of mercenaries, and the private acts
of individuals against the territory of other states.
Modern wars are fought between states that employ all
the resources at their disposal but modern states
agree that not to allow conflicts between them to be
created by private individuals. Thus, despite
widespread sympathy for the Palestinians in the Arab
world, even the Arab states most unwilling to make
peace with Israel have placed very heavy restrictions
on the activity of Palestinian guerrillas. It is an
undeniable feature of international law that states,
such as Afghanistan, that allow individuals resident
on their territory to carry out acts of war against
other states bear a heavy responsibility. Their

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obligation is clear: they must either prevent such

acts by individuals, hand over the perpetrators, or
recognize that, if they do neither, they have
themselves entered into a state of war.
More important than law, however, has been the
experience of the Middle East with war. The Middle
East has been a zone of war in the late 20th century
and the peoples of the Middle East and South Asia have
probably had more experience with war than almost any
other populations in the late 20th century: the Iran-
Iraq war with its million victims, the Arab-Israeli
wars with its tens of thousands, the Egyptian war in
Yemen (Nasser’s Vietnam) with thousands of victims,
the Lebanese civil war, the Algerian war of
independence and the Algerian civil war from 1990 to
the present which each had hundreds of thousands of
victims, the civil war in the Sudan which is
effectively a war of conquest by the north, the
Tunisian war of independence, the Libyan war in Chad.
The South Asian Islamic countries have also been a
zone of war and dictatorship whether in Pakistan,
along the Indo-Pakistani frontier, the brutal war
waged against the population of Bangladesh by the
government of Pakistan in 1971, and two decades of war
in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and then by
Afghans against Afghans that was routinely called a
jihad and that attracted support from Muslims, Arab
governments, Pakistiani intelligence and the CIA. The
Middle East and South Asia have not only suffered the
physical destruction and moral hardening that usually
accompany war but have also become zones in which
large areas of entire countries have become
effectively stateless and passed under the control of

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militias, warlords, and bandits. They have therefore

become not merely havens for those who want to inflict
harm on the larger world, but have actually become
territory under their effective control. This is
certainly the case of the Arab volunteers around Osama
Bin Ladin who form not only a global network but an
important part of the military capacity of the Taliban
government.

Terror

The US government also calls the attack on the WTC an

act of terror. What does this mean and what is the
link between war and terror? Terror is war
deliberately fought against society by the use of
random violence. With rare, strategic exceptions
(Romans and Mongols who on occasion destroyed towns
that had refused to surrender before the opening of
formal hostilities) there was no terror before the 18th
century because it was neither possible nor desirable
to wage war on society. The French revolution was the
first instance of modern terror because society’s own
political leaders waged a war against each other and
on their own society to obliterate their real and
perceived enemies and to destroy any desire even to
draw attention to oneself in politics, to obtain
political quiescence. In the succeeding two
centuries we observe two major ways of employing
terror: by political activists in society attacking
ruling classes or political leaders at random or by
states attacking their own societies. European
anarchists and the national liberation movement in

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Algeria are examples of the first kind of terror.

Stalin and Hitler are examples of the second kind,
state terror. Terror is a feature of life in the 19th
and 20th centuries and many different religious and
ideological vocabularies have been employed to justify
it. The use of random violence, especially in the
service of ideological aims, is a feature of modern
life and forces us to examine one of the most pressing
ethical and political issues of our time. Because it
is a recent feature of human society, no religious
tradition has had sufficient time to adapt fully to
its presence—whether for example any random use of
violence is forbidden or whether its use might—in some
cases—be considered acceptable. It is nevertheless
incorrect to say that one man’s terrorist is another
man’s freedom fighter (or at least anti-colonial
warrior). Some freedom fighters have, like the French
or Russian revolutionaries, claimed that they have the
right to use terror—indiscriminate violence against
society—and have often done so against their own
people as well as against the colonial powers. Others
have largely abjured the use of indiscriminate
violence.

Jihad
The men who attacked the WTC did not call what they
did either war or terror. They used the term jihad.
They used this term because they believed it would
generate popular support for them in the Arab and
Islamic world. In fact it has generated some popular
support but very little acceptance by Muslim clerics.

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To understand why we need to begin with the knowledge

that jihad is a concept in the Quran that dates to the
7th century CE. Historical context is a world of
states that were the property of rulers and of
constant tribal war in the Arabian peninsula coupled
with the emergence of a new religion. Strategic
survival and expansion of the state representing the
new religion and its expansion; consequent concern
with issues of conversion, tribute, plunder, taxation,
and enslavement in the Qur’an, the sunna and the
hadith and thus in the Islamic law that succeeded it.
The theory of jihad placed war primarily in the
context of defending existing Islamic communities from
armed assault and required the explicit warning to
those who were to be attacked. These were not the only
concerns of Muslim thinkers with jihad but it was an
important concern for a long time and from it
developed a set of rules about the conduct of war that
in many ways resembled the laws of warfare developed
in Europe and the US in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In this law war was the prerogative of the state
rather than of individuals or tribes, and legal thinks
clearly stated the need to protect non-combatants, and
even excluded of certain practices aimed primarily at
civilian populations and the sowing of terror.
Consequently the poisoning of wells and the use of
fire was prohibited. It is therefore not surprising,
generally speaking, the orthodox Muslim religious
figures (clergy) have condemned the attack on the
world trade center because it was aimed neither at
converting non-Muslims nor at defending against any
immediate threat to Muslim sovereignty and it employed
methods that are heinous in general but have been

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specifically forbidden in Islam. Having condemned the

attack on the WTC however does not necessarily lead
these same Muslim clerics to accept a war on
Afghanistan. What they condemn is the criminal act of
individuals which cannot, in the framework within
which they operate, be repaired by attacking a state.
The technical definition of jihad, however, is not the
popular understanding of the term today. What the
hijackers really employed was one of several competing
concepts about jihad popular today among broad
sections of the Muslim world. Skipping over much of
the history of Islam and coming down to the 20th
century to explore Islam as a dynamic religion whose
practitioners constantly re-shape older concepts and
beliefs we notice two distinct patterns in the use of
jihad. One, that had clearly emerged as a very
powerful belief in the early 20th century, was the idea
that jihad was a conflict of the believer over his or
her own soul. Jihad al-nafs despite its location in a
weak tradition implies a significant transformation of
the religion toward modern introspective concerns and
it is instructive in this regard that Ayatollah
Khomeini the founder of the Islamic republic of Iran
subscribed to the notion that self-control was the
highest form of jihad. There were other patterns in
the conceptualization of jihad. One was as a response
to the emergence of secular anti-colonial movements
both liberal and Marxist. By the mid-1930s Hasan al-
Banna, a leader of the Egyptian Islamic movement,
called for Muslims to wage jihad against European
colonial rule that stretched from French control of
Morocco through the English hegemony over Egypt to
Dutch rule in Indonesia. Important to grasp: this

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was the creative response of political activists, not

traditional scholars, using Islamic concepts as a way
to find a place in the anti-colonial movements of the
day. The importance of doing this was to oppose
colonialism but also to find a way to assert their
political power. In the following twenty years there
also emerged a new way of thinking about the
relationship between the political culture of Western
Europe and that of the Islamic countries. As
intellectuals—Islamic and nationalist—became acutely
aware of the growing impact of European institutions
and concepts in their lives they developed a new way
of thinking about what we can call cultural borrowing
or assimilation. They referred to it as cultural
assault. For assault they employed a different word
for conflict that also had deep roots in Islamic
history. The word they chose was ghazw which referred
to an armed assault or raid rather than to a war
governed by rules and fought for higher purposes. The
implication was that contemporary Muslims were
threatened by a cultural assault that could lead, over
time, to their assimilation into a larger Western
liberal culture in which what was distinctively
Islamic would be destroyed. The hijackers had clearly
created for themselves a kind of deadly fantasy world
in which the murder of 1000s of people was equivalent
to an armed defense of their community which was,
clearly, under assault from much larger and more
impersonal forces, including cultural change, than any
medieval cleric would have considered justified armed
action. One interesting part of the letter ostensibly
left by the hijackers suggests this in its
recommendation that they take “plunder” even if only a

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glass or water to slake their thirst. This would

simply have been inconceivable to medieval Muslims nor
does it make much sense to contemporary Muslims.

Arguments about jihad and calls for jihad would have

had little resonance were it not been for the
prolonged and devastating wars of the late 20th century
in the countries of the Middle East, North Africa and
South Asia that I described. Further worsening the
situation are the ways in which highly dictatorial
governments limited access to information while
undertaking their own assaults on societies in the
form of extreme repression and, occasionally civil
war. True that US policy and the existence of Israel
posed significant problems for these countries but
these governments frequently distorted the importance
of the US and Israel in world affairs and instilled in
their own populations a sense of profound fear and
distrust of the rest of the world.

Justice
In the wake of the attacks on the WTC the American
public demanded justice and the Bush administration
promised to provide it. What kind of justice can we
week? Absolute justice is not to be found in human
society and consequently any society is guilty of
failing to uphold absolute justice. It has never been
the claim of liberal societies that they are perfect
or that they maintain absolute justice. To the
contrary, their brightest achievement has been to
balance competing claims of justice while constantly
keeping an eye on their practical implications for
real human beings. Such justice as we can find lies

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between complacency and anger, between doing nothing

and hitting too hard at the wrong targets.
As we think about what the US can do, we must be aware
both of the great resources that our country can bring
to bear and the profound limits on what it can
accomplish. The US is neither the Great Satan of the
world nor the great savior. It is simply a country
that has been thrust, by the accident of history, into
a crucial role in the 21st century. Despite the fears
and hopes of many around the world, we cannot re-shape
other societies or cultures at will. We can, as we
have done for the Egyptians and Israelis, offer
inducements to those who would end war but we cannot
thereby make them friends. Our ability to make
positive change in the world is limited. Far greater
is our ability to attack our enemies although even
here we will face limits. And here it is clear that
we must choose our enemies as carefully as we choose
our friends and that those who have bombed American
embassies in Africa or our buildings have chosen, by
acts of war, to be our enemies. To treat them merely
as common criminals would be a mistake because they
pose a continuing danger to Americans regardless of
our race, religion, or ethnicity and to others as
well. They, like the pirates of an earlier day who
committed acts of war and preyed on global commerce,
must be repressed. I shall return to this theme in
conclusion but it is also clear that to pursue the war
against ideological piracy so to include a larger
number of states would be a mistake. To create larger
areas of global lawlessness and to collapse even more
governments in the ME, NA and SA is not in our
interest.

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Before concluding however I want to review the common

wisdom about the policy considerations that have
driven people in Muslim countries to understand and,
in parts of the Middle East and South Asia, to applaud
the attacks on New York and Washington.

What about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the

Palestinians and OBL suddenly claimed a week ago was
his core concern. An act of atrocious horror is not a
policy argument and the crucial policy questions that
still confront the peoples of the region require our
attention. Reasonable people can continue to disagree
about whether Israeli policy toward the Palestinians
over the last several years has been wise and about
whether the Palestinian Authority has been any
wiser. If you believed as I did that the Israeli
occupation was shortsighted, wrong, and often
counterproductive it has not become less so in the
last month. A full discussion of the Arab-Israeli
peace process would be a topic for another night, but
one crucial lesson of the past two weeks is that
Americans need to listen more carefully to both sides
of the argument and that the demonization of
Palestinians in much of the Western media and the
corresponding demonization of Israel in much of the
Arabic and Islamic media, and of which Israelis are
certainly only too aware, must end. The tragic events
of the last year of the intifada including the deaths
of many children are a terrible reminder of how far we
are from justice, but they are equally (and equally
tragically) the common currency of states dealing with
insurrection. Death does not have to be genocidal to

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be wrong nor does it become right because it is not in

fact part of a policy of genocide. Further, it is
clear that only an American president has the capacity
to intervene effectively on behalf of peace—a peace
that will ultimately not be fully satisfying to
everyone—in the world we live in. This is a burden
that, for the moment, the US has taken up and one that
we cannot, as this administration attempted, lightly
lay down.

What about US involvement in maintaining the

monarchies of the Gulf? This is in fact a far more
important issue for Bin Ladin himself for many of his
followers because it has been a constant concern of
his since 1994. There are two things Americans need
to recall. There is no doubt that in the monarchies
of the Gulf there is much corruption, much cruelty,
and laws that are, for most of us, terribly
restrictive of human freedom. There is also no doubt
these rulers have maintained themselves in power by
their own political astuteness and not by the force of
American arms which they more usually buy to assure
themselves of our markets than to employ themselves.
It is also certainly the case that those who wish to
see these monarchies destroyed would prefer to see
them replaced either by far more repressive regimes
whether of the kind established in Afghanistan by the
Taliban or of the kind that presently exist in Iraq or
Syria.
What about the children of Iraq and UN sanctions? Here
we face a real dilemma. Sanctions are supposed, as in
the case of South Africa, to be a substitute for
violence and to bring the Iraqi government to

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eliminate weapons of mass destruction. This they have

not done. Lifting the sanctions will lessen the
misery of Iraqis but lifting the sanctions will
probably also allow the Iraqi government to rebuild
its capacity to make war on its neighbors. Yet, we
must ask ourselves why our government did not consider
Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government to be war
criminals long ago. In 1980 after Saddam Hussein
initiated an unprovoked war. In 1984 he employed
chemical weapons forbidden by international law and
was specifically condemned by the UN security council,
undertook the deliberate bombing of cities without
regard to military targets and created his own
economic blockade against a neighboring state. Why
did the US do nothing? Because the US didn’t want the
Islamic Republic of Iran to emerge as the dominant
power of the Gulf. I wish the peace activists who are
now so concerned about Iraq had been equally concerned
at the time with the children of Iran.

Third what about places where the US has directly

helped the Muslims as in Kosovo where the US undertook
to fight an air war against a state led by nominal
Christians to protect a terrorized Muslim minority?
There seems to be very little awareness in the Middle
East or North Africa of US policy.

There are other areas of US policy that do require

change especially in regard to the role of human
rights. One is human rights at home and this includes
freedom of speech, worship, and personal security for
citizens and residents who are Arab or Muslim. There
appears to be a sense in the ME and NA that pogroms or

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unrestrained mass violence is occurring here and it is

important both for us as a country and for our
policies to succeed that this perception not be
validated.
Human rights is not going to became the only focus of
US policy nor probably even the central focus, but it
must assume a higher priority and we must encourage
wider contacts between at all levels between our
society and those of the region. Some of these
meetings will be filled with disagreement and even
with acrimony but it is important not simply that we
hear what happens in the Middle East and South Asia
but that ordinary citizens and members of cultural and
religious elites hear from their counterparts here.
The meeting two weeks ago between Catholic prelates
and Muslim ulama was a good example of this but it is
also important to continue to insist on safeguarding
those in the area who have a commitment to expanding
freedom of speech and insisting on the role of
constitutional safeguards. The decision by the
Egyptian government to try a sociology professor, Saad
el-Din Ibrahim, in front a security court for exposing
voter fraud is an example of something that should be
far higher on the US agenda. Because Ibrahim holds a
Ph.D. from the University of Washington it should also
be higher on our own agenda just as the safety of
researchers in China or Latin America have concerned
the university community and the society more
generally.
If many people in the region believe nonsensical
stories that Israeli intelligence planned the attacks
on the World Trade Center or that they fit into a
larger American conspiracy or that Americans are

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indulging in an orgy of violence against Arab and

Muslim citizens here, it is because—in highly
repressive countries—they have very little access to a
free press, objective reporting, or even a sense of
how this society functions in the 21st century as
opposed, for example, to the 19th.
Because the assault on September 11 was on the WTC and
the Pentagon there appears to be a sense that it was
America under attack and that the murder of
secretaries, bond traders, janitors, construction
workers, and firefighters from the United States,
Israel, Pakistan, the Arab countries, Britain and the
entire globe is itself of little import. I do not
think medieval Muslims would have taken quite so
permissive an attitude to these events because they
were not merely the murder of thousands of human
beings itself but because those who did so perverted
the transportation network of the US and clearly
sought to affect global trade. As Ibn Khaldun, 14th
century sociologist steeped in Islamic law put it in
the Introduction to his great work on human history,
human beings cannot live on their own and trade is
therefore an essential feature if human society is to
survive. As all Muslims know, before the Prophet
Muhammad was a warrior he was a merchant and the
Qur’an is at least as concerned to set down the rules
governing trade as it is to set down the rules
governing war. To attack global trade, in so brutal
if ultimately futile a way, was therefore an attack on
human society and on the foundations that make human
society possible as all classical Muslim thinkers
recognized.

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