This course will explore the forces that led to the 9/11 attacks and the policies the United States adopted in response. We will examine the phenomenon of modern terrorism, the development of the al Qai'da ideology, and the process by which individuals radicalize towards violence.
An Ideology of Grievance
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Understanding 9/11: Why 9/11 Happened & How Terrorism Affects Our World Today
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Week 4: The al Qai'da Ideology
Our topic for this week is the al Qaeda ideology. An ideology is essentially the set of beliefs that an individual, a group, or an organization has to either motivate them or to give that organization purpose. For al Qaeda, of course this is incredibly important because they're trying to motivate individuals to sacrifice their lives for what they view as a great cause.
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David SchanzerAssociate Professor of the Practice
Sanford School of Public Policy
Our topic for this week is the Al Qaeda ideology.
Now what do I mean by ideology?
an ideology is essentially the set of beliefs that an individual, a group, or an
organization has to either motivate them or to give that organization purpose.
for Al Qaeda, of course this is incredibly
important because they're trying to motivate individuals to sacrifice
their lives for a great cause, what is in their view is a great cause.
So it's important for its ideology to be exciting, for
it to be powerful for it to touch on human emotions.
I call this lecture Ideology of Grievance because much of Al
Qaeda's ideology is based on a set of grievances against the West.
And so we're going to start out by trying to lay out
what these grievances are and then we'll talk in later lectures
about how Al Qaeda argues that these
grievances can, have to be addressed through violence.
violence ultimately against the West and the leader of the West the United States.
but before I begin let me say I have a couple of cautionary notes about my
discussion throughout this weeks lectures. first of all, of course when I'm
talking about a historical narrative or about arguments about
religion, these are not necessarily things that all Muslims believe.
As Imam Abdullah Antepli discussed in our, our prior weeks'
lectures Islam comprised of a, you know, one billion to a
billion and a half followers across the world living in
different cultures with different languages
spanning from the United States to
the all the way to Indonesia, Africa, Asia.
and different cultures, different civilization, different
part of the world have had
incredibly different historical experiences different politics
they practice Islam in different ways.
For anybody to say that this, you know, something
is what Muslims believe is a very dangerous thing.
So there's a huge amount of diversity. what I'm arguing
is that that Muslims who follow the Al
Qaeda ideology that this is what is motivating them.
These sets of grievances I'm going to discuss.
The second point is that there are Muslims throughout
the world that might indeed have these grievances as well.
they might be angry at the West for colonization.
they might dislike US intervention.
They might have things that they don't like about
Western culture.
just because they hold some of these
grievances doesn't mean they agree with Al Qaeda's
ideology that they believe that these things
these grievances, have to be addressed by violence.
So let's just take care to keep that in
mind as we go through all of these lectures.
Now, the grievances I'm going to discuss fall into three categories.
and we're going to discuss
them in more depth in turn.
First of course a, grievances related on the history.
The history a narrative, historical narrative of
what has happened to the Muslim people
and a notion that there's been a
decline, that has something has happened to Muslims.
And it is because of actions of Western powers
that this situation has befallen the global community of Muslims.
second issues relating to religion and what has happened to the Islamic faith and
the Islamic practices again that they have
been in someway polluted, tainted by the West.
And by what Bin Laden argued were,
you know, true, weren't true Islam, non-Islamic practices.
And thirdly some discussion about things about
culture how Western culture was encroaching on Muslim peoples.
And so it's these three sets of grievances that help to form the
package of grievances that are a part of the Al Qaeda ideology.
So let's start with history. The history I want to
discuss begins with, of course, the creation of Islam
in the hills above Mecca where the Prophet Mohammed in 610 received the
word of God and began gained followers and, and began this religion.
And what I want to talk about here was
its incredible success in its the earliest centuries.
in a territorial sense, of course within a matter of a,
a blink of a historical eye a number of centuries this new religion
which was popularized in the same places that Judaism and
Christianity were originated had a dramatic success
in its spread throughout the entire Arabian peninsula, across
Northern Africa, all the way to Morocco, up to Europe
into, into Spain.
sweeping through the Middle East and down through
the South Asian sub continent and in subsequent
centuries spreading even further thousands of miles across,
to far places in Southeast Asia Indonesia, Malaysia.
Of course, Indonesia, now being the most populous Muslim country in the world.
So the early years of Islam being characterized by a widespread
territorial success. But second of all the, there were,
in these early years of Islam and Islamic civilizations, great achievements.
achievements in architecture, here you see
the, the beautiful mosque in Cordoba, Spain.
success
and advancement of in science, in math geometry, algebra,
building on many of the principles of Roman and Greek and Roman
civilizations but then advancing them and laying the groundwork
for additional advances. Of course,
Islamic art flourishing in this Islamic Golden Age.
As these these civilizations matured and moved through the Middle
Ages then succeeded by the Ottoman Empire a period of rapid decline.
you have a succession of Caliphates
throughout this period but the the Ottoman,
Ottoman Empire ultimately falling apart after World
War 2, and essentially the Caliphate ending.
No Caliphate after that then in the heart of Muslim civilizations in the, in
the Middle East a period of colonization, where after World War I and World
War II, these areas were carved up,
essentially with boundary lines drawn not according
to tribe, or not according to cultures,
but according to, you know, Western political imperatives.
countries being drawn up colonial rulers being imposed on people.
and to the point where in this region Muslims were not being
governed in any of the area by Muslims but rather by the West.
And Imam Antepli talked about the
corrosive effects of colonization on Muslim civilizations.
I put the Israeli flag up a, as marking a historical point in 1948
of even deeper decline. The idea that a piece of territory again
in the middle of the Middle East carved off taken for the Jewish people.
I'm not going to get into the historical debate
about Israel-Palestine but only to make the point
that this was seen by many in the region as a
deep affront and a humiliation imposed by the rest of the world.
And that humiliation was even made more severe by the
war that followed the creation of the state of Israel
and the partition vote in the UN, in which massive
Arab armies of surrounding the countries surrounding Israel the Egyptians
Jordanians, Saudis, Iraq Lebanon and Syria were going to wipe the
Jews off the face of the earth and into the Mediterranean Sea.
But that didn't happen those armies faced a very humbling and humiliating defeat.
So, all these things adding to this notion of decline.
in, in the periods following colonization, what replaced the colonial rulers was
a set of secular dictators. some of whom were preaching
doctrine such as, you know, global Pan-Arabism socialism
not a Islamic based culture, an Islamic based leadership.
we'll talk about this when we talk about Qutb and
his rivalry with with Nasser in Egypt but the, the narrative
is that these rulers, these secular rulers who were
not acting that Al-Qaeda would argue, acting consistent with
Muslim principles, but rather were highly influenced by the West
and highly secular were being imposed upon Muslim people.
and I put the cov, cover of the Arab Human Development Report from 2002
because Al Qaeda also makes the argument that this has
had a derogatory effect on Muslim people, that the fallen behind.
This notion of decline was not just
political, not just religious, but also economic.
that development the number of scientific patents, the
number of, the education, that all of these things have lagged and Al Qaeda
feeds into the, those declining figures to fuel their notion of grievance.
The capstone of this period of decline is
the period of US interventionism in the Middle East.
beginning in the latter decades of the 20th century and moving into the 21st
with Bin Laden seeing the greatest humiliation
and the greatest level of Western interference
was the Gulf War the first Gulf War against when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
and Saudi Arabia turned to the United States and invited,
and allowed a large amounts, masses of U.S. troops to come
in to Saudi Arabia where the home of the two holiest
places of Islam ultimately to boot Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
the bases stayed for a number of years up until 9/11 and Bin Laden
saw this is a grave affront to the notion of Muslims ruling other Muslims,
the notion of the West not imposing their ways on Muslim people.
That is the, the that's the course of this historical narrative.
The second category of grievances
I want to discuss are grievances that result from religion and the idea that
the, the Muslim faith had been tainted in some ways over the course of, of history.
it's a story that I'm going to talk about a lot
in the next two lectures so I don't want to spend
a great deal of time here, but it begins with
the intellectual founder of this radical extremist ideology, Sayyid Qutb
in Egypt and then built upon and fleshed out by Osama Bin Laden.
But the core idea of Qutb is that the Islamic faith, the Islamic
practices had been corrupted over the centuries that its
expansion and exposure to other ideas, had tainted it the, that the
Western ideas had influenced the practices and diluted them.
He said the greatest Muslims were the Muslims practicing in the days of the,
the prophet, when the Prophet Muhammad was alive, and in order for Islam and
the Muslim people to recapture their former glory that there needed to be a
return, a revival and a return to the, the old ways, the traditional ways.
And we see this of course reflected in many ways in Bin Laden's ideology,
which calls for only a pure Islam.
that infidels non-believers in Islam, but also Muslims who do
not practice and did not accord to the Sunni traditions and
the traditions as they were practiced in the times of
the prophet Mohammed were infidels then had to be attacked, eliminated.
so these are grievances arising from religion that helped
to form the ideology.
The third category of grievances are ones arising
from culture and what I'm talking about here
is really the the, the advent of globalization
in the latter part of the 20th century.
where Western culture is essentially through the
means of globalization is being spread throughout
the world and indeed infiltrating not only areas of high
economic activity, but everywhere and coming into the Middle East.
And it's not only about commercialism, here represented by
McDonald's it's not only about Western economic ideas
and influence but also movies, television the
Western promiscuity in many extents encroaching and being
foisted upon traditional Muslims. This is what
Bin Laden would argue that in a way that was disrespectful of
traditional ways and I'm representing that here with the woman in the
full burka whereas globalization is spreading ideas of equality in women
empowerment and women being in important positions
whether they be in politics or business or education.
to this highly traditional and notion of women
having to be shielded from the outside. Not only
shielded with a respectful head covering but shielded through not even
being able to have her eyes being seen by outsiders.
so it's this clash, this clash between modernity and traditionalism
that is part of the Al Qaeda ideology and part of the grievances.
The grievances that the West is not only imposing ideas, it's not only
tainting religion, but it is affecting and trying to impose modern ideas on us.
So I see these grievances as three invasions.
and I like to think about it in that way.
the invasion in many ways into territory,
Muslim territory, whether first by colonialism the advent
of the state of Israel, or US interventionism,
an invasion of US Western troops into territory.
it was a, an invasion of Western ideas,
of secularism, of a division between the the holy and the secular.
That Bin Laden, at least, did not believe and,
and Qutb did not believe was the, at the essence,
at the core of Islam that secularism was a deeper
front and a threat to Muslim people and Muslim civilizations.
And the third invasion being the invasion of Western culture promiscuity
other liberal ideas through culture being imposed on
what they thought should be a more traditional society.
And these three sources of grievance, grievances of
history, grievances relating to religion, grievances relating to culture
are the, the motivating factors leading to anger
and establishing the core of this Al Qaeda ideology
ultimately calling for violence.
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