Author: Praveen Swami
Publication: The Hindu
Date: March 20, 2009
URL: http://www.hindu.com/2009/03/20/stories/2009032055260800.htm
Pakistan needs to dismantle not only the infrastructure
of terror but also the ideas that built it.
Not long before an assassin's bomb extinguished
his life in 1989, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam authored his own requiem. "The
flowing blood of innocent martyrs," Azzam wrote in The Signs of Allah,
the Most Merciful, in the Jihad in Afghanistan, "and the scattering of
corpses are all complementary to jihad. All these are the fuel of jihad and
water for its garden."
Born in Palestine, Azzam's politics was shaped
by his membership of Egypt's Islamic Jihad - an organisation devoted to overthrowing
that country's secular state. He arrived in Pakistan in 1979, and founded
the Maktab al-Khidmat (Office of Service). In time, the Maktab mentored thousands
of West Asian jihadists - among them, Osama bin Laden.
Eight years later, Azzam teamed up with Hafiz
Mohammad Saeed, a religious studies teacher in Islamabad whose family's experiences
of Partition left him with an abiding hatred of Hindus and India. Together,
the men set up the Markaz Dawat wal'Irshad, which gave birth to the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Azzam's significance, though, far transcends his role in the founding of the
Lashkar: his ideas have become the keystone of a system of ideas that today
threatens Pakistan itself.
From Azzam to Masood Azhar
For the most part, The Signs is a compendium
of miracles: stories of men whose bodies were untouched by bullets which ripped
apart their clothes and of birds that flew faster than the Soviet Union's
supersonic jets to warn the mujahideen of imminent bombardment.
But Azzam also laid out his vision of the
obligations of an Islamic state. "It is incumbent on the Islamic state,"
he stated, "to send out a group of mujahideen to their neighbouring infidel
state. They should present Islam to the leader and his nation. If they refuse
to accept Islam, jizyah [a tax] will be imposed upon them and they will become
subjects of the Islamic state. If they refuse this second option, the third
course of action is jihad to bring the infidel state under Islamic domination."
He argued that the Afghan jihad was ultimately
unsuccessful because of the mujahideen's failure to create an Islamic state
that could fulfil the jihadist imperative. "Instead of directing their
guns at the infidels of India to liberate Kashmir, and at the Russians to
liberate Tajikistan," he wrote, "they went at each other's throats
in a genocidal power struggle for the remains of Kabul. They chose carrion
over the Paradise of Kashmir, Tajikistan and Palestine."
In another book, Defence of the Muslim Lands,
Azzam elaborated the same point: "The sin upon this present generation,
for not advancing towards Afghanistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Kashmir,
Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, etc., is greater than the sin inherited from the loss
of the lands which have previously fallen into the possession of the infidels."
Lashkar ideologues, developing on Azzam's
ideas, argued that the absence of an Islamic state meant jihad had become
incumbent on individual Muslims. In an undated tract, Jihad in the Present
Times, the Lashkar's Abdul Salaam bin-Muhammad argued that Muslims were in
a "position of disgrace and slavery." It was therefore "binding
and incumbent" upon them to fight until Islam became the dominant global
order.
Azzam's influence on this world-view is evident.
His intellectual heritage included the work of the seminal Islamist ideologue
Sayyid Qutb - a member of Egypt's Society of the Muslim Brothers who was executed
for his alleged role in an attempt to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Qutb's signal work, Milestones, cast Islam
as being in implacable opposition to jahiliyyah, or ignorance. He sought to
create "not a party of preachers and missionaries but rather of divine
enforcers." In Qutb's view, this "Muslim party has no choice but
to go for and control the power centres for the simple reason that an oppressive
immoral civilisation derives its sustenance from an immoral governmental set-up."
The enemies included "hostile creeds such as communism and idolatry of
all forms, whether in Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Albania, India, Kashmir,
Ethiopia, Zanzibar, Cyprus, Kenya, South Africa or the United States."
We, the Mothers of Lashkar-e-Taiba, published
by the Markaz's Dar-ul-Andalus press in 1998, tells us how the Lashkar set
about fulfilling this obligation. It fought along with pro-Saudi Arabia Salafists
against Soviet forces in Jaji and later joined battle in Jammu and Kashmir
with fewer than "700 mujahideen ranged against 7,00,000 satanic forces."
In an undated pamphlet, Why We Are Waging Jihad, bin-Muhammad promised that
more was to follow: "Muslims ruled Andalusia for 800 years but they were
finished to the last man. Christians now rule [Spain] and we must wrest it
back from them. All of India, including Kashmir, Hyderabad, Assam, Nepal,
Burma, Bihar and Junagarh were part of the Muslim empire that was lost because
Muslims gave up jihad."
Lashkar ideologues legitimised their call
for individuals to wage a jihad using Islamist cleric Fazal Illahi Vazirabadi's
work. Vazirabadi fought along with the Pakistani irregulars who attacked Jammu
and Kashmir in 1947. In a 1949 book, The Problem of the Kashmir Jihad, he
argued that it was imperative for Muslims to wrest political control from
non-Muslims. Vazirabadi's position was a response to Jamaat-e-Islami founder
Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi's insistence that the state - not individuals - ought
to be the agent of jihad. Mawdudi, like Vazirabadi, believed that it was "impossible
for a Muslim to succeed in his aim of observing the Islamic pattern of life
under the authority of a non-Islamic system of government." However,
Mawdudi believed that it was for the Pakistani state - not individual Muslims
- to fight India's rule in Kashmir.
Battered by confrontations with the Pakistani
state, historian Ayesha Jalal has recorded, Mawdudi "watered down his
'revolutionary' agenda." While "his enthusiasm for an armed jihad
remained unabated," Mawdudi eventually "settled for a long secular
trek toward the attainment of the Islamic state."
State as an ally
Others didn't: although the Lashkar saw the
Pakistani state as a tactical ally, organisations like the Sipah-e-Sahiba,
the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and now the Taliban have engaged in murderous violence
that threatens to tear apart that country.
Significant differences exist in the theological
heritage of these groups - but a common intellectual vision unites and binds
together their project with Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Mohammad Masood Azhar,
who was released from an Indian jail in return for the safety of passengers
on board a hijacked Indian Airlines flight, and claims theological legitimacy
from the Deoband school of jurisprudence - a school at odds with the Jamiat
Ahl-e-Hadith to which Saeed and the Lashkar owe allegiance.
But Azhar's ideas - outlined in The Struggle,
The Gift of Virtue and The Virtues of Jihad - are almost indistinguishable
from those of the Lashkar. Struggle was written, Azhar tells us, in the same
mountains where Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareilly died in 1831 while waging an
unsuccessful jihad against Maharaja Ranjit Singh's empire - a martyrdom to
which the Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith traces its formation. Following Qutb, Azhar
argues that Islam faces an existential threat from modernity, much as followers
of the Prophet Mohammad found themselves endangered by militarily more powerful
pagan tribes. He reminds his audience that the Battle of Badr, where the Prophet
defeated his adversaries, was won by 313 men pitted against armies of several
thousands.
Like Azzam and his Lashkar protégés,
Azhar uses the idiom of myth and miracle to draw cadre to the Jaish. His translation
of a 13th century text by Ibn Nanhas, for example, provides a Jaish cadre
a graphic account of the sensual benefits that await the mujahideen.
Many in the jihadist movement are now being
drawn to a new generation of clerics who have been adroit in using television
and the Internet to spread their message - figures like Anwar al-Awlaki, a
Yemen-based cleric who was earlier chaplain at the George Washington University
in the U.S.
In one pamphlet, 44 Ways to Support Jihad,
al-Awlaki argues that in "times like these, when Muslim lands are occupied
by the infidels, when the jails of tyrants are full of Muslim prisoners of
war, when the rule of law of Allah is absent from this world, and when Islam
is being attacked in order to uproot it, jihad becomes obligatory on every
Muslim."
Among other things, al-Awlaki suggests that
"if arms training is not possible in your country then it is worth the
time and money to travel to another country to train."
Ever since the November 2008 Lashkar attack
on Mumbai, Pakistan has faced growing global calls to dismantle the infrastructure
of terror on its soil. It needs to do that - and also confront the ideas that
brought about its construction in the first place.
