Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East Read Online Free PDF Page A

policy could actually make it a religious duty for true Muslims to kill their “apostate” rulers and those who support them, a proposition that he defended in his last trial and which was used to justify his death sentence. He was not directly involved in the plot to kill Nasser, but he was tortured, given a show trial, and hanged in August 1966.
    There were other prominent philosophers of the nascent Islamist movement like Rashid Rida, Hassan al-Banna and Maulana Mawdudi, but Sayyid Qutb was the most influential and the one most willing, despite his own rather meek and shy persona, to espouse and justify the use of violence in the construction of an Islamic state (or, as it is now called, “Islamic State”). After his death, his brother Muhammad Qutb moved to Saudi Arabia, where he became a professor of Islamic Studies at King Abdulaziz University and did much to publish and promote Sayyid Qutb’s work. It is reported by a college friend of Osama bin Laden’s that the founder of al Qaeda regularly attended Muhammad Qutb’s weekly public lectures and read Sayyid Qutb’s works.
    So there you have it: why it is Arabs and not Indonesians or Turks or other Muslims who carry out most of terrorist attacks; why many Arabs are so very cross—and how a few Arab intellectuals rationalized not only the turn to violence but the killing of fellow Sunni Muslims. (Sayyid Qutb and his colleagues didn’t actually work out justifications for killing Shia Muslims, because there were virtually no Shias in positions of power in Egypt and the nearby Arab countries they were mostly concerned with, but that was easily done when it became tactically desirable to start killing Shias.)

CHAPTER 2

IT’S NOT ALWAYS ABOUT YOU

 
War is merely the continuation of politics by other means .
    – Carl von Clausewitz, On War , 1832
    S o is terrorism.
    The enduring delusion that distorts and ultimately dooms Western responses to Islamist terrorism is the belief that the West is the main and most important target of Islamist attacks. Amidst such ignorance, absurd conclusions like George W. Bush’s explanation for 9/11—“they hate our values”—can sound plausible and even convincing to the general Western public. Islamist terrorists do regard Western “values” as sinful, by and large, but they are not in the business of reforming the West. Their focus is on gaining power in their own countries. A complex paramilitary operation like 9/11 is a major undertaking for an Islamist revolutionary group like al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden’s people needed a concrete return on their investment of time, money and manpower. They got it. When Western armies plunged into the Middle East to “fight terrorism,” the initial al Qaeda investment (nineteen men, some flying lessons, a few box-cutters) was repaid a thousandfold. So it wouldhelp a great deal if we could finally get it through our thick heads that it is not always about us.
    Military strategy is a means to an end, not the end itself. Terrorism has its own strategies, and they too are means to an end. In the case of terrorism, the ultimate goal is usually revolution, and those being attacked are often members or supporters of the regime the revolutionaries wish to overthrow. But not always. Sometimes, the revolutionaries will direct their terrorism at third parties, in the hope that those outside forces will react in ways that help the revolutionary cause. And sometimes, too, those third parties are completely bewildered by these attacks.
    This has been the case time after time in the response of the West to terrorist attacks by Islamist revolutionaries. It is hard enough for Westerners to recognize that their attackers actually have a coherent strategy and are not simply mad fanatics motivated by hatred. To accept that these terrorist attacks are not really about Western countries at all, but merely an attempt to use the overreaction of Western countries as a stepping-stone to the seizure of