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An Ideology of Grievance

Course video 25 of 55

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.

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.

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Ministrado por

David Schanzer
Associate Professor of the Practice

Transcrição

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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