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books: Reading between the lines.

Why Do They Hate Us?Strange answers lie in al-Qaida's writings.

By Reza Aslan
Posted Monday, Aug. 6, 2007, at 1:49 PM ET
The Al Qaeda Reader.

Why do they hate us?

Americans have been asking this question for nearly six years now, and for six years President Bush and his accomplices have been offering the same tired response: "They hate us for our freedoms." With every passing year, that answer becomes less convincing.

Part of the problem has to do with the question itself. Who exactly are they? Are we referring to al-Qaida and its cohorts? Are we talking about Iran, Syria, and the other nation-states whose interests in the Middle East do not properly align with America's? Or perhaps we mean Hamas, Hezbollah, or the myriad religious nationalist organizations across the Muslim world that share neither the ideology nor the aspirations of global, transnational groups like al-Qaida, but that have nevertheless been dumped into the same category: them.

But what is most surprising about this question is how little interest anyone seems to have taken in examining the answers that are already on offer in multiple languages, through various media outlets, and on the Internet, from the very they who allegedly hate us so much. A spate of books has appeared over the last year, gathering the words of America's enemies. The first and best of these is Messages to the World, a collection of Osama Bin Laden's declarations translated by Duke University professor Bruce Lawrence, in which Bin Laden himself dismisses Bush's accusation that he hates America's freedoms. "Perhaps he can tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example?"

Now comes a second, more complete collection, The Al Qaeda Reader, edited and translated by Raymond Ibrahim, a research librarian at the Library of Congress. Unlike Lawrence, Ibrahim includes writings from both Bin Laden and his right-hand man, Ayman Al-Zawahiri. And while both volumes provide readers with a startling series of religious and political tracts that, when taken together, chart the evolution of a disturbing (if intellectually murky) justification for religious violence, Ibrahim's collection is marred by his insistence that his book be viewed as al-Qaida's Mein Kampf.

The comparison between the scattered declarations of a cult leader literally dwelling in a cave and the political treatise of the commander in chief of one of the 20th century's most powerful nations may be imprecise, to say the least. But Ibrahim's point is that we can learn about al-Qaida's intentions by reading their words, that a book like this can help Americans better understand the nature of the anger directed toward them.

In the most general sense, this is certainly true. But whether a hodgepodge of interviews, declarations, and exegetical arguments can be read as a sort of jihadist manifesto is debatable. While these writings provide readers with page after page of, for example, arcane legal debates over the moral permissibility of suicide bombing, they do not really get to the heart of what it is that al-Qaida wants, if it wants anything at all. Al-Qaida's nominal aspirations—the creation of a worldwide caliphate, the destruction of Israel, the banishing of foreigners from Islamic lands—are hardly mentioned in the book. It seems the president of the United States talks more about al-Qaida's goals than al-Qaida itself does. Rarely, if ever, do Bin Laden and Zawahiri discuss any specific social or political policy.

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Remarks from the Fray:

The portrayal of the collected al Qaeda writings as a Mein Kampf may be imprecise, sure. But when Hitler's Mein Kampf was written he was in prison, a failed revolutionary, pretty much written off as a crackpot, and nobody except him and a few followers would have predicted his rise to leadership of Germany. That part of the comparison doesn't sound so absurd on the face of it. Probably, like Hitler, al Qaeda leaders are mixing together justifications of their past acts, mobilization tactics for the public at large, and self-aggrandizing predictions to bolster their own symbolic importance.

--slothrop

(To reply, click here.)

The most acute observation Reza Aslan makes, is that Al-Qaida's leaders do not formulate "any specific social or political policy" but instead they have "grievances—many, many grievances". Aslan seems surprised by this, but there is no reason to be.

For this is nothing but the normal behavior of any group of people who are irrational in their convictions. In this Al-Qaida is not that different from believers in astrology or homeopathy, holocaust negationists, creationists, the followers of Dan Brown, or the latest anti-scientific fad -- global warming skepticism. All aggregations of people around an irrational basis have in common, that their ideology in the end consists of a series of objections and rejections. They reject factual reality and the logical systems that describe it. They do not substitute a logical system of their own, because they don't need one, and it would be impossible to construct one anyway. Any attempt to construct a coherent theory would only produce a shambles. Objections against other ideas suffice. That they are "so heterogeneous, so mind-bogglingly unfocused" does not matter. The motto of the irrationalist is "Just say No!"

The question is, what does Al-Qaida actually reject? Every indication suggests that ultimately, they reject our form of "modern society"; the type of secularized, liberalized, gender-equal, religion-neutral, human-rights-based society that radiates out from the rich west and finds followers everywhere. It pains me to admit it, but when G.W. Bush says that "they hate our freedoms", he actually has a point. It is mind-bogglingly arrogant and unproductive to equate "freedom" with the American Way of Life, as Dubyah too often seems to do. But yes, I think it is defensible to say that Al-Qaida hates freedom, in the liberal sense of the word.

The modern usage of the term 'liberal' dates back to the early 19th century when political debate raged in the Spanish Cortes in Cadiz, in the part of Spain not occupied by the French, and the political left, those who rejected the feudalism of the old regime, were called liberales. The right-wing groups of the time were dubbed serviles, 'the slavish ones', because their political ideal was the absolutist reign of king Fernando VII. They were traditionalists who wanted to keep royal absolutism, the fiscal privileges of the nobility, the supremacy of the Catholic church, and even the inquisition.

It is probably best to think of Al-Qaidas leaders as serviles. They are traditionalist radicals. Their political dreams hark back to a golden age that never existed -- That is the irrationality of it.

The rank and file, of course, are likely to have their own very diverse motivations, and many recruits would just as likely fight under another banner, if that gave them an opportunity to take revenge for their grievances. Fighting an intellectual battle with Al-Qaida is probably rather pointless.

--Mutatis Mutandis

(To reply, click here.)

I suspect that we will have to live with terrorism from all quarters for a very long time, because it is more of a pernicious meme of it's own than the product of any particular social or political factor we can work on. Sure, it's a meme that exists more symbiotically with some hateful ideas than with others, it's not independent of ideology, but I'm afraid that no creed will ever claim a monopoly on this meme. It's a meme we are seeing now, at this point in history, because it is enabled by wealth and technology which make the instruments of large scale destruction available to even the barely-employed. For much of history, to terrorize you had to have a band of supporters...a band of thugs, a tribe,a city-state, because that was the only way for an individual to amplify their power sufficiently to terrorize more than a few people. There are only so many people you can hurt with your bare fists, and one man, no matter how strong, can't take on the crowd at a baseball stadium. No more, though. Now any broken person can take on a baseball stadium. Any broken person in almost any place on the globe can now manage to find and afford a firearm if they really want, and the globe is awash in explosives and electornics for making bombs. We live in an age that is enabling for anyone who wants to take on a crowd, who wants to make a big scene. All the moreso given that another technology, media, makes the splash an individual can make all that much bigger, since it will echo around the world. Communications further reinforce the dangerous meme by linking each crazy person with every other crazy person out there.

I don't highlight technology and wealth to demonize technology, nor do I mention media to say that The Media is to blame. Rather, I mention it as a matter of fact, a bit like saying that the invention of air travel has the unfortunate side effect that now we have such a thing as the jumbo-jet plane crash that kills 350 at a time. There were no great horse or pedestrian crashes in Roman times, so this is a new illness we have to deal with. It's a small price to pay, because of course there were a thousand other ills in Roman time. Plane travel is worth it, but it brings novel costs along with it's new benefits. I think, to a substantial degree, terrorism is one of the novel costs of the modern world. One, I hasten to add, that we should work hard to minimize, but one that will be impossible to eradicate.

--Kolmogorov

(To reply, click here.)

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