File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0111, message 229


From: "Mohammed BEN JELLOUN" <mohammed.benjelloun-AT-mail.bip.net>
Subject: Re: Postmodern Jihad
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 14:14:41 +0100


Indeed, this is the most exotic piece I ever seen on this list. I guess the footnotes could be even much more entertaining. Thank you Saeed.

Mohammed

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "saeed urrehman" <saeed.urrehman-AT-anu.edu.au>
To: <postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2001 9:11 AM
Subject: Postmodern Jihad


> Thank you, Salil, for your cogent discussion. Yes female intellectuals 
> in/from the islamic world should have been heard long time ago.
> 
> Here is another piece inviting discussion. I would love to hear the 
> opinions of listmembers on this essay below.
> 
> Thanks,
> Saeed
> ________________
> "Postmodern Jihad:
> What Osama bin Laden Learned from the Left"
> By Waller R. Newell
> 
> MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about Osama bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalism; less 
> about the contribution of European Marxist postmodernism to bin Laden's 
> thinking. In fact, the ideology by which al Qaeda justifies its acts of 
> terror owes as much to baleful trends in Western thought as it does to a 
> perversion of Muslim beliefs. Osama's doctrine of terror is partly a 
> Western export.
> 
> To see this, it is necessary to revisit the intellectual brew that produced 
> the ideology of Third World socialism in the 1960s. A key figure here is 
> the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who not only helped 
> shape several generations of European leftists and founded postmodernism, 
> but also was a leading supporter of the Nazis. Heidegger argued for the 
> primacy of "peoples" in contrast with the alienating individualism of 
> "modernity." In order to escape the yoke of Western capitalism and the 
> "idle chatter" of constitutional democracy, the "people" would have to 
> return to its primordial destiny through an act of violent revolutionary 
> "resolve."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   Heidegger saw in the Nazis just this return to the blood-and-soil 
> heritage of the authentic German people. Paradoxically, the Nazis embraced 
> technology at its most advanced to shatter the iron cage of modernity and 
> bring back the purity of the distant past. And they embraced terror and 
> violence to push beyond the modern present--hence the term 
> "postmodern"--and vault the people back before modernity, with its 
> individual liberties and market economy, to the imagined collective 
> austerity of the feudal age.
> This vision of the postmodernist revolution went straight from Heidegger 
> into the French postwar Left, especially the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, 
> eager apologist for Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution in China. 
> Sartre's protege , the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon, crystallized the Third 
> World variant of postmodernist revolution in "The Wretched of the Earth" 
> (1961). From there, it entered the world of Middle Eastern radicals. Many 
> of the leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that deposed the 
> modernizing shah and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979 had 
> studied Fanon's brand of Marxism. Ali Shari'at, the Sorbonne-educated 
> Iranian sociologist of religion considered by many the intellectual father 
> of the Shiite revolution, translated "The Wretched of the Earth" and 
> Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" into Persian. The Iranian revolution was a 
> synthesis of Islamic fundamentalism and European Third World socialism.
> 
> In the postmodernist leftism of these revolutionaries, the "people" 
> supplanted Marx's proletariat as the agent of revolution. Following 
> Heidegger and Fanon, leaders like Lin Piao, ideologist of the Red Guards in 
> China, and Pol Pot, student of leftist philosophy in France before becoming 
> a founder of the Khmer Rouge, justified revolution as a therapeutic act by 
> which non-Western peoples would regain the dignity they had lost to 
> colonial oppressors and to American-style materialism, selfishness, and 
> immorality. A purifying violence would purge the people of egoism and 
> hedonism and draw them back into a primitive collective of self-sacrifice.
> 
> MANY ELEMENTS in the ideology of al Qaeda--set forth most clearly in Osama 
> bin Laden's 1996 "Declaration of War Against America"--derive from this 
> same mix. Indeed, in Arab intellectual circles today, bin Laden is already 
> being likened to an earlier icon of Third World revolution who renounced a 
> life of privilege to head for the mountains and fight the American 
> oppressor, Che Guevara. According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani, 
> Arab leftist intellectuals still see the world very much in 1960s terms. 
> "They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists," he says, "who look at everything 
> through a postcolonial prism."
> 
> Just as Heidegger wanted the German people to return to a foggy, medieval, 
> blood-and-soil collectivism purged of the corruptions of modernity, and 
> just as Pol Pot wanted Cambodia to return to the Year Zero, so does Osama 
> dream of returning his world to the imagined purity of seventh-century 
> Islam. And just as Fanon argued that revolution can never accomplish its 
> goals through negotiation or peaceful reform, so does Osama regard terror 
> as good in itself, a therapeutic act, quite apart from any concrete aim. 
> The willingness to kill is proof of one's purity.
> 
> According to journalist Robert Worth, writing in the New York Times on the 
> intellectual roots of Islamic terror, bin Laden is poorly educated in 
> Islamic theology. A wealthy playboy in his youth, he fell under the 
> influence of radical Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who blended calls for 
> Marxist revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state.
> 
> Many of these men were imprisoned and executed for their attacks on Arab 
> regimes; Sayyid Qutb, for example, a major figure in the rise of Islamic 
> fundamentalism, was executed in Egypt in 1965. But their ideas lived on. 
> Qutb's intellectual progeny included Fathi Yakan, who likened the coming 
> Islamic revolution to the French and Russian revolutions, Abdullah Azzam, a 
> Palestinian activist killed in a car bombing in 1989, and Safar Al-Hawali, 
> a Saudi fundamentalist frequently jailed by the Saudi government. As such 
> men dreamed of a pure Islamic state, European revolutionary ideology was 
> seldom far from their minds. Wrote Fathi Yakan, "The groundwork for the 
> French Revolution was laid by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the 
> Communist Revolution realized plans set by Marx, Engels and Lenin....The 
> same holds true for us as well."
> 
> The influence of Qutb's "Signposts on the Road" (1964) is clearly traceable 
> in pronouncements by Islamic Jihad, the group that would justify its 
> assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 as a step toward 
> ending American domination of Egypt and ushering in a pure Islamic order. 
> In the 1990s, Islamic Jihad would merge with al Qaeda, and Osama's 
> "Declaration of War Against America" in turn would show an obvious debt to 
> the Islamic Jihad manifesto "The Neglected Duty."
> 
> It can be argued, then, that the birthplace of Osama's brand of terrorism 
> was Paris 1968, when, amid the student riots and radical teach-ins, the 
> influence of Sartre, Fanon, and the new postmodernist Marxist champions of 
> the "people's destiny" was at its peak. By the mid '70s, according to 
> Claire Sterling's "The Terror Network," "practically every terrorist and 
> guerrilla force to speak of was represented in Paris. . . . The 
> Palestinians especially were there in force." This was the heyday of Yasser 
> Arafat's terrorist organization Al Fatah, whose 1968 tract "The Revolution 
> and Violence" has been called "a selective precis of 'The Wretched of the 
> Earth.'"
> 
> While Al Fatah occasionally still used the old-fashioned Leninist language 
> of class struggle, the increasingly radical groups that succeeded it 
> perfected the melding of Islamism and Third World socialism. Their tracts 
> blended Heidegger and Fanon with calls to revive a strict Islamic social 
> order. "We declare," says the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah in its "Open 
> Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World" (1985), "that we are a 
> nation that fears only God" and will not accept "humiliation from America 
> and its allies and the Zionist entity that has usurped the sacred Islamic 
> land." The aim of violent struggle is "giving all our people the 
> opportunity to determine their fate." But that fate must follow the 
> prescribed course: "We do not hide our commitment to the rule of Islam, . . 
> . which alone guarantees justice and dignity for all and prevents any new 
> imperialist attempt to infiltrate our country. . . . This Islamic 
> resistance must . . . with God's help receive from all Muslims in all parts 
> of the world utter support."
> 
> These 1980s calls to revolution could have been uttered last week by Osama 
> bin Laden. Indeed, the chief doctrinal difference between the radicals of 
> several decades ago and Osama only confirms the influence of postmodernist 
> socialism on the latter: Whereas Qutb and other early Islamists looked 
> mainly inward, concentrating on revolution in Muslim countries, Osama 
> directs his struggle primarily outward, against American hegemony. While 
> for the early revolutionaries, toppling their own tainted regimes was the 
> principal path to the purified Islamic state, for Osama, the chief goal is 
> bringing America to its knees.
> 
> THE RELATIONSHIP between postmodernist European leftism and Islamic 
> radicalism is a two-way street: Not only have Islamists drawn on the legacy 
> of the European Left, but European Marxists have taken heart from Islamic 
> terrorists who seemed close to achieving the longed-for revolution against 
> American hegemony. Consider Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, two 
> leading avatars of postmodernism. Foucault was sent by the Italian daily 
> Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the 
> Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian 
> revolution, Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic 
> saint." The Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of 
> "political spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals to combat 
> capitalist hegemony.
> 
> Heavily influenced by Heidegger and Sartre, Foucault was typical of 
> postmodernist socialists in having neither concrete political aims nor the 
> slightest interest in tangible economic grievances as motives for 
> revolution. To him, the appeal of revolution was aesthetic and voyeuristic: 
> "a violence, an intensity, an utterly remarkable passion." For Foucault as 
> for Fanon, Hezbollah, and the rest down to Osama, the purpose of violence 
> is not to relieve poverty or adjust borders. Violence is an end in itself. 
> Foucault exalts it as "the craving, the taste, the capacity, the 
> possibility of an absolute sacrifice." In this, he is at one with Osama's 
> followers, who claim to love death while the Americans "love Coca-Cola."
> 
> Derrida, meanwhile, reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union by calling 
> for a "new international." Whereas the old international was made up of the 
> economically oppressed, the new one would be a grab bag of the culturally 
> alienated, "the dispossessed and the marginalized": students, feminists, 
> environmentalists, gays, aboriginals, all uniting to combat American-led 
> globalization. Islamic fundamentalists were obvious candidates for inclusion.
> 
> And so it is that in the latest leftist potboiler, "Empire," Michael Hardt 
> and Antonio Negri depict the American-dominated global order as today's 
> version of the bourgeoisie. Rising up against it is Derrida's "new 
> international." Hardt and Negri identify Islamist terrorism as a spearhead 
> of "the postmodern revolution" against "the new imperial order." Why? 
> because of "its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony."
> 
> "Empire" is currently flavor of the month among American postmodernists. It 
> is almost eerily appropriate that the book should be the joint production 
> of an actual terrorist, currently in jail, and a professor of literature at 
> Duke, the university that led postmodernism's conquest of American 
> academia. In professorial hands, postmodernism is reduced to a parlor game 
> in which we "deconstruct" great works of the past and impose our own 
> meaning on them without regard for the authors' intentions or the truth or 
> falsity of our interpretations. This has damaged liberal education in 
> America. Still, it doesn't kill people--unlike the deadly postmodernism out 
> there in the world. Heirs to Heidegger and his leftist devotees, the 
> terrorists don't limit themselves to deconstructing texts. They want to 
> deconstruct the West, through acts like those we witnessed on September 11.
> 
> What the terrorists have in common with our armchair nihilists is a belief 
> in the primacy of the radical will, unrestrained by traditional moral 
> teachings such as the requirements of prudence, fairness, and reason. The 
> terrorists seek to put this belief into action, shattering tradition 
> through acts of violent revolutionary resolve. That is how al Qaeda can 
> ignore mainstream Islam, which prohibits the deliberate killing of 
> noncombatants, and slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new world, 
> the latest in a long line of grimly punitive collectivist utopias.
> 
> Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at 
> Carleton University in Ottawa.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 



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