This analysis sees Al Qaeda coming into growing conflict with other Muslims
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/books/18book.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1 So what is Al Qaeda’s future around the world? On one hand, Mr. Bergen writes that “many thousands of underemployed, disaffected men in the Muslim world will continue to embrace bin Laden’s doctrine of violent anti-Westernism” — he cites a 2008 survey showing that people in countries as diverse as Morocco, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey expressed more “confidence” in the Qaeda leader than in President Bush by significant margins. On the other, he says that half a decade after 9/11 there emerged powerful new critics of Al Qaeda who had jihadist credentials themselves: Abdullah Anas, who had been a friend of Mr. bin Laden during the anti-Soviet jihad, denounced the 2005 suicide bombings in London as “criminal acts,” and Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, a leading Saudi religious scholar, personally rebuked Mr. bin Laden for killing innocent children, the elderly and women “in the name of Al Qaeda.” In the end, Mr. Bergen says, Al Qaeda has four “crippling strategic weaknesses” that will affect its long-term future: 1) its killing of many Muslims civilians — acts forbidden by the Koran; 2) its failure to offer any positive vision of the future (“Afghanistan under the Taliban is not an attractive model of the future for most Muslims”); 3) the inability of jihadist militants to turn themselves “into genuine mass political movements because their ideology prevents them from making the kind of real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in normal politics”; and 4) an ever growing list of enemies, including any Muslims who don’t “exactly share their ultra-fundamentalist worldview.” “By the end of the second Bush term,” Mr. Bergen writes near the end of this valuable book, “it was clear that Al Qaeda and allied groups were losing the ‘war of ideas’ in the Islamic world, not because America was winning that war — quite the contrary: most Muslims had a quite negative attitude toward the United States — but because Muslims themselves had largely turned against the ideology of bin Ladenism.” _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
