Via Mickey Craig at the always excellent No Left Turns, Daniel Pipes documents how the jihadists like bin Laden seek a worldwide global caliphate. The “war on terror,” or whatever one calls it, is not about Afghanistan, Iraq, or even reclaiming Andalusia:
In nearly all cases, the jihadi terrorists have a patently self-evident ambition: to establish a world dominated by Muslims, Islam, and Islamic law, the Shari’a. Or, again to cite the Daily Telegraph, their “real project is the extension of the Islamic territory across the globe, and the establishment of a worldwide ‘caliphate’ founded on Shari’a law.”
Terrorists openly declare this goal. The Islamists who assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 decorated their holding cages with banners proclaiming the “caliphate or death.” A biography of one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of recent times and an influence on Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam declares that his life “revolved around a single goal, namely the establishment of Allah’s Rule on earth” and restoring the caliphate.
Bin Laden himself spoke of ensuring that “the pious caliphate will start from Afghanistan.” His chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also dreamed of re-establishing the caliphate, for then, he wrote, “history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.” Another Al-Qaeda leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, publishes a magazine that has declared “Due to the blessings of jihad, America’s countdown has begun. It will declare defeat soon,” to be followed by the creation of a caliphate.
Or, as Mohammed Bouyeri wrote in the note he attached to the corpse of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker he had just assassinated, “Islam will be victorious through the blood of martyrs who spread its light in every dark corner of this earth.”
Interestingly, van Gogh’s murderer was frustrated by the mistaken motives attributed to him, insisting at his trial: “I did what I did purely out of my beliefs. I want you to know that I acted out of conviction and not that I took his life because he was Dutch or because I was Moroccan and felt insulted.”
Although terrorists state their jihadi motives loudly and clearly, Westerners and Muslims alike too often fail to hear them. Islamic organizations, Canadian author Irshad Manji observes, pretend that “Islam is an innocent bystander in today’s terrorism.”
Note bin Laden states that the caliphate begins in Afghanistan. The ecumenic ambition of the jihadists fits with Olivier Roy’s findings that they do not regard themselves as citizens of Iraq or Morrocco, but as citizens of a global umma.
Note too van Gogh’s murderer who expressed frustration that the Dutch liberals just didn’t understand, or refused to understand, his motives. The Western lack of understanding reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s examination of the ways that Westerners failed to understand, or were unable to understand, the diabolical nature of Hitler’s and Stalin’s totalitarianism. Their deeds and goals simply defied common sense. After all, it was Hitler who told his general staff that military defeat in the USSR didn’t matter because such things would be judged in terms of millennia, not in weeks and months. Such is the totalitarian mindset.
Cross posted to Civitatensis.