There's a growing consensus - to which I'm guilty of contributing - that al-Qaeda has become increasingly a media phenomenon, and the war on terror a media war. As Fareed Zakaria helpfully articulates it,
Al Qaeda Central, by which I mean the dwindling band of brothers on the Afghan-Pakistani border, appears to have turned into a communications company. It's capable of producing the occasional jihadist cassette, but not actual jihad.
I don't disagree with the first part of Zakaria's synopsis - heck, I pretty much wrote the same thing a few months ago. But I'm not sure that the latter part follows: is a "media jihad" not really a jihad? Obviously I understand the difference between horrific, mass terrorism like 9/11 on the one hand, and videotapes on the internet or al-Jazeera exhorting the jihad on the other. But if you assume that both violence and rhetoric are employed by al-Qaeda to the same ends - creating a clash of civilizations, rallying hatred and conflict between Islam and the West, asserting its leadership over the global jihad - then there's no necessary reason to assume that a media strategy is either a sign of weakness or a second-best strategy.
Zakaria reads bin Laden's latest tape, as do many others, as a sign of al-Qaeda's weakness:
Strip away the usual hot air, and bin Laden's audiotape is the sign of a seriously weakened man.....Bin Laden's most recent appeal is a mishmash of argument and detail, and seems slightly crazed.
I didn't read the speech itself that way; some Arab and Muslim commentators did, but others did not. To my ear, the bin Laden tape was structured fairly clearly around the clash of civilizations argument. Whether or not it exposed al-Qaeda's weakness remains an open question. I actually tend to agree with Zakaria that:
The danger from global Islamic terrorism is real. But it is the product of small and scattered groups, spewing hate. It has much less support in the Muslim world than people think. There is much to be distressed about in that world—oppressive regimes, reactionary social views, illiberal political parties, mindless and virulent anti-Americanism. But these trends are not the same as support for jihad or for a Taliban-like Islamic state. And it is the latter—terror and theocracy—that are Al Qaeda's basic goals. The evidence suggests that they are not gaining adherents.
I think that's right... to a point. I've always argued that Arab and Muslim opinion is diverse and contested, and that it's a major strategic mistake to accept the bin Laden framing of an essential conflict between Islam and the West. But I'm just as uneasy with the growing tendency to minimize the potential power of the al-Qaeda discourse, which strikes me as too easily susceptible to wishful thinking or blowback (believing our own spin). The Danish cartoons episode showed quite powerfully how potent these 'clash of civilizations' issues can be under the right conditions.
You could think of al-Qaeda's identity project as involving three phases: first, to heighten the salience of Islam against other competing identities and ideologies; second, to place that Islamic identity in essential contradiction with the West; and third, to assert leadership over the Islamic defensive jihad against the West. On the final front, al-Qaeda isn't doing particularly well - that's the significance of the pushback from Hamas, from the Muslim Brotherhood, from various TV Islamists - although the spate of recent tapes could be seen as an attempt to change that. But on the first two - Islamizing the identity politics of the region and pushing confrontation with the West - it's hard to say with confidence that it's doing so badly. The evidence is mixed.
I keep coming back to the cartoons crisis, for all its essential stupidity, for three reasons: for the intensity of passions it unleashed on both sides; for how much this outbreak took both sides by surprise (it came at a time when arguments about the declining support for al-Qaeda were all over the place, shortly after Zarqawi's terror attack in Amman); and for the central place it occupied in bin Laden's recent speech.
Anyway, all of this is a preface to an argument, not an actual argument. I've got an article coming out some time next week, which I'm hoping will immediately be available on-line, called "Al-Qaeda's Constructivist Turn." It sets out a research agenda for international relations theorists trying to make sense of these kinds of questions. And hopefully it will spark some useful debate and feedback.
Please let us know when it's published and in which journal. I'm engaging the constructivist literature now and have done some preliminary research into it's application to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I wish to broaden my research a bit, and this is great news to hear you've been doing the same thing. In fact, I've read some of your work and it's been useful (along with others) in confirming the direction of my thinking. You do good work, sir.
Posted by: sunship | May 06, 2006 at 06:38 PM
While Al-Qaeda may be reduced to tapes for the time being, but I agree that it's not bin Laden's, or anyone's weakness.
Given their theologic reading list, I'd not be surprised if their production values derive less from the media war , but from some of the old school jihadi stuff, like Sulami. Or, perhaps, merging Sulami with the concepts of jihad articulated elsewhere just before ibn Taymiyyah?
It seems like this is a whole cycle of greater-lesser jihad rather than a route; further, Sulami's hints about overthrowing Sultans who say and do nothing in the face of injustice against other Muslims, well, makes me think.
Cheers
L
Posted by: Luke | May 06, 2006 at 06:52 PM