The Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) has released a short monograph, De-Legitimizing al-Qaeda: A Jihad-Realist Approach, by sociologist Paul Kamolnick, a professor at Eastern Tennessee State University. Kamolnick criticizes current US efforts to counter al-Qaeda’s messaging and recruitment strategies as ineffective, and proposes an alternative two-fold solution to marginalize and defeat al-Qaeda. However, Kamolnick’s proposed strategy is problematic for several reasons.

In the first component of his proposed strategy, Kamolnick suggests that since Islam (specifically Sunni Islam) is a religion of orthopraxy and law, American policy makers and strategists should determine how Islamic jurispru­dence, specifically discourses on jihad, “may be leveraged for, and not against, vital U.S. national security interests.” It is unclear what exactly this “leveraging” entails. But he does warn that the US government must do so in secret (deferring “open association” until a later time) so as not to taint the legitimacy of potentially helpful sharia scholars and their formulations.

These formulations should ideally come from “credentialed actors of immense statue and learning.” And these jurists would reaffirm how Islam and the sacred texts prohibit things such as killing non-combatants indiscriminately. He is particularly interested in what he calls “jihadi-realist” scholars, meaning militant Islamists (such as Sayyid Imam, aka Dr. Fadl) who have rejected terrorism as a strategy to bring about change. By “leveraging” this sort of work (how remains unclear) for “vital U.S. national security interests” the US can create a narrative (my wording, not his) that portrays the US as a country “on the side of the lawful and just” against those who violate sharia (i.e., al-Qaeda).

The truth is that there is no shortage of Muslim scholars, jurists, preachers, activists, and so on, who have condemned terrorism and al-Qaeda’s violent strategies – despite the bizarre yet common refrain in America that no one in the Muslim community has done so. The traditional rules of warfare in Islam, such as prohibitions against killing civilians or women and children, are also already commonly known among Muslims. Therefore, I’m not sure how having the US secretly “leverage” these condemnations will harm al-Qaeda. When it comes to fatwas (Islamic juridical rulings) it only takes one to justify a practice or behavior. And there have been plenty of bizarre and isolated fatwas out there justifying abhorrent behavior.

It must also be said that while sharia is important to Sunni Muslims, especially Salafi and other über devout people, Kalmonick’s emphasis on the resounding mass influence of sharia on the decisions people make, especially the youth, seems exaggerated. At the end of the day, someone bent on committing an act of violence won’t stop because someone gave a ruling that it was a sinful or bad idea. Aspiring perpetrators will either find a ruling to support them, make their own ruling, or dispense with a juridical ruling altogether and act anyway. They could even invoke a dream where the Prophet Muhammad told them to act – which is not as far fetched as it sounds.

Another issue on the topic of sharia and fatwas is that even seemingly clear-cut issues can be stretched, twisted, and overturned by using a range of well-established juridical principles. That’s why most everyone knows that killing civilians is forbidden, but al-Qaeda still manages to win some people over. For example, it is a well-established belief in Islam that suicide is forbidden. Suicide is a grave sin.

There are numerous hadiths that describe the truly horrific punishments that someone will receive in Hell if they commit suicide. We can also find countless rulings by Muslim jurists that prohibit suicide. These positions are well-known. So why do we have some Muslims committing suicide by strapping bombs to their bodies or crashing airliners into buildings for al-Qaeda? It could suggest that religio-legal justifications aren’t that important when it comes to people seeking vengeance or justice for outstanding sociopolitical grievances.

But more to the point, extremists also utilize concepts like niyya (intention), darura (necessity), and reciprocity, among others, to neutralize these prohibitions against suicide or whatever else goes against their preferred strategy or plan of action. For example, al-Qaeda might claim that a terrorist who blew himself up at a military outpost in Iraq did not commit suicide because his intention was to attack and inflict harm on the enemy. After all, the Prophet once said: “All actions are judged by intentions.”

For al-Qaeda, it only counts as suicide if the person was lost in despair and their intention was to end their life. That was not the intention though, it is argued, and thus the prohibition is nullified. Instead, the terrorist is a celebrated battlefield martyr. The core of the matter is that sharia is always the product of interpretive agents; meaning people devise the divine rules according to their own subjective human interests and goals. So I wouldn’t invest too much in the restrictive powers of Islamic law as a counter-terrorism strategy.

The second part of Kalmonick’s strategy is a radical shift in US foreign policy and military policy in order to fundamentally alter perceptions of US intentions in the Muslim world. No specifics are given. “No amount of spin or messaging matters,” he writes, “when daily life and its common-sense interpretation contradict official pretensions and pronouncements.” I can agree with this statement, but then again he doesn’t provide any specifics. And let’s get real. Given the various special-interest groups and ideological trends currently entrenched in the US political system, this part of Kamolnick’s strategy is probably even less plausible than his problematic covert sharia ideas.

Major changes in US foreign and military policies might help alleviate some of the serious grievances among Muslims that al-Qaeda invokes in its messaging against the US. And I think most scholars would agree with that. But Kamolnick does not specifically discuss what changes should be made – maybe a compelling US push to establish a two-state solution along the 1967 borders to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Nor does Kamolnick address how the memories of past events still influence the present. For example, ending the Crusades centuries ago hasn’t stopped it from being invoked (as a narrative system) at every opportunity.

Regardless, it is extremely unlikely that the US government will ever make major changes to address Muslim grievances, such as the annexation of East Jerusalem or Russian control of Chechnya. More importantly though, the intention or meaning behind any changes to US foreign policy are still entirely subject to interpretation, despite US intentions or what Kamolnick calls “common-sense interpretation.” Those interpretations, typically conveyed as narratives, can vary widely among different audiences.

For example, if the US withdraws from a country (e.g. Iraq) under the pretense that the mission was accomplished and it has no interest in occupying the country, al-Qaeda disseminates a narrative that the US withdrawal was a “retreat” and a victory for the mujahideen over the “Crusaders.” This is the business of narrative, and human beings, regardless of religion, love and live by their stories. And do not think for a second that “leveraging” condemnations of al-Qaeda by some credentialed Muslim jurists or “jihadi-realists” won’t fall victim to al-Qaeda’s narratives either. Sayyid Imam, aka Dr. Fadl, was dismissed by Zawahiri and other extremists as a sell-out and someone who gave into torture in prison. Extremists discredit and condemn Muslim scholars and jurists who oppose them as hypocrites, apostates, heretics, Zionist agents, even as the “magicians of the Pharaoh,” every day. And this sort of rhetoric existed long before al-Qaeda ever took shape in Afghanistan.

In the final evaluation, I did not find anything that is particularly new or plausible in Professor Kamolnick’s approach to dealing with al-Qaeda’s messaging and recruitment strategies. In fact, I fear that his dismissal of the importance of narrative and counter-narrative strategies would set the US back in this ongoing struggle and make his own strategy suggestions all the more untenable.

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The CSC has an article in the current issue of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism on casualty inflation by the Taliban in the Afghanistan conflict.  The abstract follows, and the full text is available here (subscription).

Cooking the Books: Strategic Inflation of Casualty Reports by Extremists in the Afghanistan Conflict

Chris Lundry, Steven R. Corman, R. Bennett Furlow, & Kirk W. Errickson

Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere are exaggerating their successes in inflicting casualties on American and other International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) forces. This article quantifies the exaggeration for the month of November 2010, putting the claimed casualty rate at approximately one-half battalion per month. It provides an analysis of how and why this is occurring, and links this extremist strategic communication effort to dominant historical master narratives in the region that may produce sympathy among intended recipients of the messages. The authors argue that these measures undertaken by the extremists can be countered successfully through the use of similar story forms, more timely reporting, use of side-by-side comparisons, and use of similar reporting venues. These steps could challenge the credibility of the Taliban reports, reduce sympathy, and diminish potential recruitment.

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2. Public Diplomacy: Books, Articles, Websites #60 by Bruce Gregory* Morton Abramowitz and Mark Lowenthal, “Restocking the...
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CSC researchers Pauline Cheong and Jeff Halverson have just published a paper in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism that will be of interest to readers of this blog.  The paper examines al Qaeda texts from 1996-2009 to determine strategies used by the group to construct a pro-radical identity for young Muslims.  The paper abstract is reproduced below.  The full article is available here (subscription required).

This article examines the discursive strategies employed by violent Islamist extremists to build a persuasive collective youth identity in their messages. Our analysis draws from strategic communication, social movement, and membership categorization theories to analyze youth references made in texts disseminated by al-Qaeda from 1996 – 2009. In these texts, “youth” is constructed via three main discursive strategies.

The first involves ascriptions of allegiance to a common belief system whereby militant actions are directed toward establishing a new sociopolitical order. Extremists envision revolutionary violence as the principle mechanism for change and an integral part of religious salvation. They see Muslim youth as the vanguard necessary to bring about the new social reality. The second utilizes descriptions of pious youth as “true believers” apart from “apostate” state regimes. Every conflict against hypocrites, unbelievers, or apostates in the Muslim world is a shared responsibility amongst the Muslim ummah (as a single nation) and not exclusive to individuals of a particular “nationality” or holders of a particular passport. The good youth fulfills his obligations as a member of this ummah. The third is through references to hagiographies of extremist martyrs which serve as moral exemplars and the formation of a distinctly jihadist tradition. The idealization of these men as warrior-saints or heroes serves the need for alternative militant paradigms among the violent extremist ranks, especially youths.

The article concludes with research directions to facilitate counter-narrative interventions, such as utilizing stories from Islamic history and the life of the Prophet Muhammad to disrupt extremist claims.

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This morning I was forwarded an Op-Ed from the Chronicle of Higher Education written by Carlin Romano, a journalist and scholar of media theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Entitled “Of Minarets and Massacres,” the Op-Ed came across as an opportunistic diatribe against what Romano sees as the egregious hypocrisy of Muslims (and ‘self-hating’ Europeans and liberals) who have condemned the recent Swiss democratic vote (57% in favor) to ban the construction of minarets on mosques in the country.

AP Photo.

The ban will now be added to the Swiss Constitution. Only four mosques in Switzerland even have minarets, and two more were being planned prior to the ban. So the vote was not a reaction to some serious minaret problem impacting Swiss society (such as the cacophony of prayer calls one might hear in Cairo or Ankara). Rather, the vote was a manifestation of a deep-seeded irrational fear and it screams of xenophobic prejudice and paranoid fantasies that the Moslem [sic] hordes are on the march.

But Romano “does not weep,” as he put it, for the Swiss ban because he is “too busy weeping for the Armenians, the first people in their corner of the world to officially adopt Christianity, almost eliminated from history due to regular massacres by the Muslim Turks.” That’s right. Romano makes the astounding rhetorical leap from the November 2009 Swiss vote banning minarets all the way to the horrors of the Armenian genocide by Ottoman Turks one hundred years ago. There is no explicit connection between the two, save for the fact that the majority of Switzerland’s 400,000 Muslims are of Turkish and Albanian origin.

To be clear, I am not questioning the tragedy of the Armenian genocide.  But how does it justify Switzerland’s institutionalized discrimination against its Muslim citizens (and migrant workers) in the 21^st century? Doesn’t Western Europe pride itself on the righteous ideals of the Enlightenment, human rights, and international law?

Romano’s answer: “So long as Muslims anywhere keep their place in the House of Islam everywhere, they bear some responsibility for the actions of their fellow believers.” He further states:

If you steep yourself in the atrocities of the Armenian genocide, not to mention the many intolerances exhibited by majority-Muslim societies toward Christians, Jews, women, gays, and other non-Muslims, one’s conclusion is not an absolutist moral judgment, but a decision on who owes a greater apology to whom, a decision on how to allocate one’s moral energy. The day that Turkey apologizes and pays reparations for theArmenian genocide, that Saudi Arabia permits the building of churches and synagogues, that the Arab world thinks the homeland principles it applies to the Arabs of Palestine also apply to the Armenians of Turkey—on that day, I will find time to commiserate with the generally kind and hard-working Muslims of Switzerland.

I found his insistence on referring to Istanbul as “Constantinople” particularly amusing.  His dismissal of Serbian “persecution” of Bosnian Muslims was also charming.

If Romano were sincerely interested in tackling this subject, and not exploiting it as an opportunity to air his general dislike of Islam and recount the atrocities of the Young Turks and Turkish nationalists against the Armenians (not to mention the aggressive campaign to ‘Turkicize’ the Kurds – but they’re Muslims so Romano ignores them), a far more fruitful and appropriate discussion would have focused on a subject such as Egypt’s institutionalized restrictions against Church construction (as well as repairs and routine maintenance) for its Coptic Christian citizens (approx. 15% of the population).

Those restrictions are, however, rooted in medieval law and enacted in a country where the Constitution states that Islamic law (shariah) is the principle source of legislation. Deplorable yes, but has Switzerland reverted to medieval law like Egypt? Or is Romano suggesting that we in the West should regress to the Dark Ages out of spite?

Romano does admittedly preface his remarks by noting the “widened spectrum of ‘context’” for intellectual debates in the era of online commentaries. But rather than rectifying what he calls the “anarchy of cybercommentary,” he fully indulges in it and perpetuates the same fruitless level of discourse by engaging in something akin to a childish airing of historical grievances. In the process, he succeeds in painting himself as an “Islamophobe” and discredits his own academic credentials (which are completely unrelated to Islamic studies, history, or related disciplines to start).

He deliberately constructs a historical narrative of the Armenian genocide as a binary Muslim slaughter of Christians, and pastes copious dates and data into his Op-Ed to dress his polemic with a facade of academic authority.  But his framework is erroneous.  He (intentionally?) overlooks the fact that while a Muslim empire ruled the region for centuries, the genocide of ethnic Armenians coincided with a wave of ethnic nationalism sweeping Europe and the broader region at the turn of the century.  The Turks were busy creating a Turkish homeland for themselves (not an “Islamic state”) as the old Ottoman Empire crumbled before them.

The Arabs were busy too, fighting and seceding from the Ottoman Turks (siding with the Christian British) to create their own ethno-nationalist nation-states (or as Romano would put it “Muslim fighting Muslim”). The Orthodox Christian Czars of the Russian Empire, long a bitter foe of the Ottoman Turks, claimed authority over the Orthodox Christian minorities (or millets) in the Ottoman Empire following the decline of its military power and submission to several humiliating treaties. The Young Turks, who were Turkish nationalists (not Islamic activists), allied the Ottoman Empire with the (Christian) Germans, but the Armenians were the natural allies of the Russians.  Some Armenian units actively fought for the Russians.

Religion, in this complex picture, was just one source of division and conflicting interests, not the motivating force for a horrific genocide. Thus, as Romano writes: “That year, 1915, saw the awful crescendo of the genocide as the CUP government forcibly deported Armenians eastward [to Syria, Iraq, and Russian territory], tortured, massacred, and starved them on death marches, confiscated their property, killed almost all of the arrested 250 leaders, and resettled Muslim [i.e. Turkish!] refugees on Armenian land.”

Also, we might note that the current Islamist-oriented government in Turkey recently established diplomatic relations with Armenia and President Abdullah Gul is the first Turkish leader to visit Armenia.

But, to get back to the point, as Romano suggests, “Let’s talk again about voting against two new minarets in Switzerland.” I paraphrase Romano’s argument as follows:

If Muslims do bad things to religious minorities, women, gays, and others in their countries, we in the Western countries, like Switzerland, should betray our own principles of justice and equality and hypocritically lower ourselves to the same level of injustice and discrimination. Then after this game of tit-for-tat, and only then, will we give equal rights to the Moslems [sic] that reside in our borders as tolerated aliens.

How was this nonsense printed in an “academic” publication like the Chronicle? This is the last sort of narrative discourse we ought to be perpetuating. It does not serve Western or global interests in the least. In fact, Islamist extremists would undoubtedly look upon these developments with delight. The “wicked Crusader West” is oppressing more Muslims in their own borders – perfect! What a wonderful recruiting opportunity for embedded terrorist cells.

Switzerland, and the rest of Europe, should remain true to their ideals and universally apply them to all those who legally reside within their borders. Hypocrisy is not an image we want to (further) project to the Muslim world, even if many in the Muslim world are guilty of the same sin themselves.

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As an American who has traveled overseas throughout my life, as well as a teacher of intercultural communication, I often wonder how it is that we don’t relate travel experiences and study abroad to the potential for loneliness and identity questions—and to the potential for association with radical groups. I remember traveling to Turkey, alone, as a woman, with no clue as to how I would be perceived, with the false security of a Lonely Planet Turkey guidebook in hand. After relentless pursuit throughout Istanbul by various men of different ages due largely, I suspected at the time, to my uncovered blond hair, I realized that I hated Turkey, and all the people in it. I was so incredibly relieved when I met a group of fellow Americans at a youth hostel in Sultanahmet that I wound up traveling with them for a week. It took me six days to realize that these fellow travelers were missionary Christians who were attempting to convert people (possibly me) to their religion.Somehow, my desperate need for cultural similarity due to my lack of preparation for the cultural differences of my destination allowed me to overlook the rather obvious recruitment tactics of this particular group—which included the fact that they wore T-shirts with bible verses on them.

When my students or other travelers I meet ask me why I love to travel and to study travel, I try to explain that I am interested in what happens to the parts of our identities that are called into question when we are faced with ideas and ideals that are different from our own. These moments of heightened uncertainty leave us more open to the influences of people and movements championing passion, belonging, and a stronger sense of group identity. Such influence has greater potential to occur when people relocate to strange countries without the resources through which to create strong support systems and coping mechanisms for identity needs called into question, creating the psychological crisis commonly known as culture shock.

So how does culture shock relate to the ‘war on terror’?In their book, Handbook of Intercultural Training, Drs. Janet and Milton Bennett and Dr. Daniel Landis define culture shock as “…a crisis of identity characterized by feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and anxiety [that goes]…hand-and-hand with the realization that the new environment may be ‘difficult’ and requires considerable effort to negotiate” (2004, p. 187). Specifically, culture shock takes place as one of a series of stages in the cross-cultural adaptation process.The traditional stages of the culture shock model predict that the traveler will go through anywhere from three to five stages of emotional adaptation throughout his or her time abroad:

• The honeymoon stage, leading to feelings of initial euphoria
• Culture shock, resulting from feelings of disorientation
• Hostility towards the host culture, leading to feelings of resentment
• Initial adaptation, leading to a sense of autonomy within the host culture
• Assimilation into the host culture, and a sense belonging in both host and home culture

Under these kinds of circumstances, isolated and unequipped for the shock of culturally unfamiliar environments, individuals can become drawn into religious, ideological movements that they might otherwise not be drawn to, simply for a sense of identity inclusion and understanding. Witness, for example, Mark Sagemen’s picture of the terrorists involved in the al Qaeda movement. He characterizes them as highly educated, middle-to-upper middle class men in their mid-twenties or older, who are not necessarily of strong religious backgrounds, and who for a large part have been disconnected from their homelands. In The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright notes that Said Qutb, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohammed Atta and Osama bin Laden, among others, all lived outside their home cultures, all well-educated, scientifically motivated, relatively non-religious men who experienced crises of faith in a similar manner to the crisis of identity experienced in culture shock.

Sageman’s perspective is that when individuals “became homesick, they did what anyone would and tried to congregate with people like themselves…not because they were religious, but because they were seeking friends.” This elucidates an important link between research on culture shock and the very real, applied issues of the spread of dangerous fundamentalist ideologies. Through this link, we may come closer to understanding how an intelligent individual living in a strange country would gravitate to places that remind him of home, even if it is symbolic rather than realistic. Further, the embodiment of friendship/family bonds within Islamist groups creates a space of emotional as well as identity support—a family away from family, a home away from home. Under these circumstances, people who are experiencing identity vulnerability might also be more suggestible to radical ideas, particularly if following such ideas and ideologies allows them to be accepted by the group and feel a connection to their own homelands, and particularly if they are discriminated against within their host cultures. Indeed, sociologists Dr. Robert Benford and Dr. David Snow emphasize the psychology of identity as it is involved in social movement:“Participation in social movements frequently involves enlargement of personal identity for participation and offers fulfillment and realization of self” (p. 631).

I believe that those who wish to combat terrorism would be wise to examine the histories of terrorist cell recruits and founders from the culture shock perspective. An interesting notion would be for university study abroad offices and terrorism experts to coordinate in an attempt to understand culture transition processes and provide better resources for easing the pains of the transition. This could be a particularly important resource for recruitment interventions, as study abroad and international programs offices at American universities filter through hundreds of thousands of international students each year—and we should remember that such influential individuals as Qutb and Zawahiri attended such universities and indeed probably experienced such culturally shocking experiences as prejudice, alien ideas, and lack of cultural tolerance. Terrorism experts can also work with international exchange coordinators and diplomatic organizations to implement better programs to educate and assist sojourners in their transition experience, both in terms of accomplishing tasks in an unfamiliar place and in terms of emotional support. In particular, creating international, multi-ethnic, multicultural third cultures at sites of intercultural contact can ease the growing pains of culture shock while creating cultures of tolerance for diversity, rather than relegating international students to enclaves of similar cultural backgrounds.

Terrorism of the kind we are facing today is not born and bred from the proletariat, as may be widely believed (although it may recruit from there); it has in many cases arisen from the disenfranchised and educated who may be seeking some sense of understanding and cultural identity in a dizzyingly fragmented world. Culture shock models should be actively applied to circumstances outside of the classroom, probing the circumstances through which individuals living in cultures far from home are recruited to fundamentalist groups. Such knowledge can assist in discerning if and how interventions can be made at the vulnerable moment when young intelligent travelers are lonely and isolated, far from home, and experiencing the crushing vulnerability and inevitable questioning of culture shock. In this manner, this work can move the practice of intercultural understanding onto the wider world stage.

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