Terra
Incognita: A new type of Islamic militancy
Aug. 17, 2009
Seth Frantzman , THE JERUSALEM POST
The sudden and bloody fighting that broke out at a mosque in
the Gaza Strip on Friday is emblematic of a new phenomenon within the
Islamist movement. From Gaza to northern Nigeria and Pakistan, and
throughout the Islamic world, a new type of militancy has grown, one
that involves extremist preachers, their followers begging for
martyrdom, and self-destructive battles that result in their deaths,
usually at the hands of fellow Muslims.
THE PHENOMENON of extremist religious movements surrounding
inspired preachers is surely not new nor confined to Islam. Revivalist
Christian sects such as the Branch Davidians and their leader David
Koresh clashed with US police in 1993 with tragic results, and in India
the Sikh leader Bhindranwale led a militant independence movement that
resulted in thousands of deaths. The Ghost Dance which swept up Native
American communities in 1890 was led by the Paiute prophet known as
Wovoka and resulted in the Wounded Knee massacre where over 300 people
died. The practitioners believed their special religious garments would
repel bullets. A similar phenomenon occurred in China in 1900 when a
religious society known as the Boxers produced a wave of anti-Western
militancy led by men who believed their devotion could protect them
from bullets. Their movement was destroyed by the intervention of
European armies.
A minority branch of the Islamic faith known as the Isma'ilis
produced a radical sect known as the Assassins who spent the 11th and
12th centuries harassing and murdering Muslim and Christian leaders in
the Middle East before being exterminated by the Mongols in 1256. In
Israel's War of Independence in 1948, an extremist Muslim Brotherhood
unit wearing supposedly protective garments stormed Jewish Kfar Darom
in Gaza resulting in the deaths of most of its members who had
travelled from North Africa. (Kfar Darom fell to the Egyptian army soon
after.) Indonesia has been stricken by Islamist revival movements since
the 19th century, partly sparked by the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 where
thousands of people died after a volcano eruption nearly destroyed the
island, which today manifest themselves in the groups like Darul Islam
and Jemaah Islamiyah.
Islamism it seems is beginning to produce more and more
radical fringe movements that, far from being part of a unifying
umbrella as al-Qaida intended, are "linked to al-Qaida" but succeed
mostly in fighting Muslim governments and destroying themselves as well
as civilians located near their mosques. The July 2007 Siege of the Red
Mosque in Pakistan was one such example. It was led by brothers Maulana
Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi, sons of a radical preacher named
Maulana Qari Abdullah who founded the mosque in 1965. A series of
escalating incidents led to an eight-day siege of the mosque in which
11 Pakistani special forces, 84 mosque members and 14 civilians were
killed.
On July 31, following days of fighting, Muhammad Yusuf of the
Boko Haram sect was killed in northern Nigeria. His sect had launched a
series of attacks on police stations, churches and government offices
in several northern Nigerian states. More than 200 people died before
the army launched an assault on the organization's mosque, capturing
Yusuf who later died in custody.
But the most famous example of an extremist Islamist uprising
is the siege of Mecca, so well documented in a recent book, The
Siege of Mecca, by Yasoslav Trofimov. On November 20, 1979 some 500
armed followers of Juhaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Saif al-Utaibi, a member
of a leading Saudi family, layed siege to the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
The standoff lasted 14 days during which 250 militants and 130 Saudi
national guardsmen were killed. The leader of the group was later
beheaded, along with 67 of his followers.
IN THE afternoon hours of August 14, word came out of Gaza of
a gun battle between radical Islamists who had proclaimed a caliphate
and members of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Some 100 members
of Jund Ansar Allah led by Abdel-Latif Moussa, a radical preacher at
the Ibn Taymiyah mosque, were confronted by Hamas security forces that
surrounded the mosque and a shootout ensued. Initial reports claim up
to 24 people died, including six Hamas police officers and one
civilian. The leader of the group reportedly blew himself up.
All of these examples point to a new trend in Islamism. It was
once thought that Islamists primarily viewed themselves at war with
secular Muslim regimes. That later morphed into al-Qaida, which viewed
itself as being at war with the entire non-Muslim world, inspiring such
movements across the world.
Now Islamists are turning on each other. The BBC described the
situation, in a tongue in cheek manner, as one group "accusing the
Islamist group of not being Islamist enough."
The one thing that unites all of these events is
disappointment with unfulfilled Islamist government, guns, mosques and
preachers who seek to revive an Islamic past, whether the mahdi, as in
Saudi Arabia's siege, or the caliphate, as in Gaza. A secondary problem
is that it makes pernicious tyrannical governments such as Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia and Gaza's Hamas seem more benign because they are
"fighting terrorism" or "they too are threatened by extremists." In
fact their support, or in the case of Nigeria, the appeasement, of
Islamism helps breed further radicalism.
The writer is a PhD student in geography at The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem and runs the Terra Incognita Journal blog
