September 11 retrospective: Bruce Lawrence on Osama Bin Laden's strategic thinking

Quoting again today from Bruce Lawrence of Duke University from his edition of one of the English editions of Bin Laden's public pronouncements, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (2005). In his Introduction, he agrees with sociologist Michael Mann that American military presence and actions in the Middle East lay at the root of the hostility of Bin Laden and his followers to the US. In Mann's words, "As long as America seeks to control the Middle East, he and people like him will be its enemy."

But Lawrence stresses that Bin Laden framed his ideology in religious terms:

Objectively speaking, bin Laden is waging a war against what many - admirers as well as critics - now call the American empire. But it is crucial to note the he himself never uses this vocabulary. The word "imperialism" does not occur once in any of the messages he has sent out [as of the publication of the book]. He defines the enemy differently. For him jihad is is aimed not at an imperium, but at "global unbelief". Again and again, his texts return to this fundamental dichotomy. The war is a religious war. It subsumes a political war, which he can wage with terms appropriate to it, as he demonstrates in his addresses to the people of Europe or of American. Yet the battle in the end is one of faith. [my emphasis in bold]

Because of that religious vision, Lawrence argues against the view that Bin Laden's Al Qai'da was a kind of direct, lineal successor to anti-imperialist terrorist groups like Germany's Rote Armee Faktion (RAF) or Italy's Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades; BR), which were secular groups with their own brands of Marxist-Leninist ideology. (In the quote below addressing the comparison with those groups, Lawrence gives them them perhaps a bit too much credit in articulating a vision of a future society; but his point about their materialist-social focus is valid.)

Lawrence is not agreeing with the Muslim-haters who claim that Bin Laden's view of Islam is correct because Islam is a religion of violence: "It would be wrong either to dismiss these [Qur'anic] references [by Bin Laden] as imaginary, or to take them as representative of contemporary Muslim opinion." Bin Laden's "select reading of scriptural sources and extra-scriptural authority," Lawrence argues, "sits ill with the conscience of the great majority of contemporary Muslims; for all but a few, implacable warfare in the name of jihad is not the sole or the best measure of Islamic loyalty."

The jihadist ideology of Al Qa'ida had its immediate origins in the mujahidin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Lawrence argues that the confidence that Bin Laden took from the Afghan victory over the Soviets and the American withdrawal from Somalia in 1993 was what "originally launched [Bin Laden] on his hugely ambitious undertaking." Bin Laden assumed that the US could be beaten just as the Soviet superpower was in Afghanistan.

This confidence was based on "two great miscalculations," Lawrence argues. One was an overly-expansive generalization from the Afghan experience. Its particular conditions made it an especially favorable staging ground for a guerrilla war against an invading power. "Even so, it required massive amounts of US finance and weaponry, and the full backing of the Pakistani state, for the mujahidin to prevail."

The other was the American withdrawal from Somalia:

As for Somalia, the inconsequential American landings there, more a public relations than strategic operation, were no gauge of the powers of the Pentagon. The effect of both Afghanistan and Somalia seems to have been simply to lure him into illusions of US fickleness and weakness.

What Lawrence is saying here is that however clever Osama bin Laden may have been in staging dramatic terrorist attacks, he was operating from a foolish set of political and military assumptions. The magnification of Bin Laden and "Al Qa'idi" - the actual organization and the mythological bogeyman - into an existential threat to the United States served the interests of Dick Cheney's vision of war and torture. It was not founded in strategic reality.

Lawrence summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of Bin Laden's theology of jihad this way:

Connected to these miscalculations is the nature of his religious vision itself. One of its most striking features, displayed throughout the texts in this book, is the absence of any social dimension. Bin Laden was barred from the kind of analysis that would have allowed him to distinguish the different structural features of the various Muslim societies in which jihad was to be awakened, and made him hesitate in inflecting the notion of "One, Two, Three, Many Afghanistans." Morally, he does denounce a host of evils. Some of them­ - unemployment, inflation, and corruption - are social. But no alternative conception of the ideal society is ever offered. There is an almost complete lack of any social program. This alone makes it clear how distinctive al-Qaeda is as a phenomenon. The lack of any set of social proposals separates it not just from the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades, with which it has some­ times mistakenly been compared, but - more significantly - from the earlier wave of radical Islamism, whose leading thinker was the great iconoclast Sayyid Qutb [whose similar-minded brother was a professor of Osama bin Laden's]. In place of the social, there is a hypertrophy of the sacrificial. Bin Laden's messages rarely hold out radiant visions of final triumph. His emphasis falls far more on the glories of martyrdom than the spoils of victory. Rewards belong essentially to the hereafter. This is a creed of great purity and intensity, capable of inspiring its followers with a degree of passion and prin­cipled conviction that no secular movement in the Arab world has ever matched. At the same time, it is obviously also a narrow and self-limiting one: it can have little appeal for the great mass of believers, who need more than scriptural dictates, poetic transports, or binary prescriptions to chart their everyday lives, whether as individuals or as collective members of a commu­nity, local or national. Above all, there is no rush to restore a Caliphate today. Bin Laden seems at some level to recognize the futility of a quest for restitution [i.e., restoration of the Caliphate]. He sets no positive political horizon for his struggle. Instead, he vows that jihad will continue until "we meet God and get his blessing!" [my emphasis in bold]

Tags: 9/11, bruce lawrence, osama bin laden

September 11 retrospective: Bruce Lawrence on Bin Laden's predicted end and posthumous image

We'll be seeing a flood of 10th-anniversary retrospectives on the 9/11 attacks, some of them obviously more substantial than others. So I'm taking the occasion to offer a few posts of my own for the occasion.

Bruce Lawrence of Duke University edited one of the English editions of Bin Laden's public pronouncements, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (2005). In his Introduction, he makes a prediction that turned out remarkably accurate this year:

Bin Laden's own fate remains uncertain. Unless he dies a natural death in hiding, it seems inevitable that sooner or later his hunter will catch him. If captured alive, he will doubtless be killed on the spot, as Che Guevara was forty years ago. His captors will know that it would be useless to torture him for information, as they have his lieutenants; while to put him on trial would risk huge embarrassment for those attempting to judge him, given his powers of eloquence and their own record. [my emphasis]

Lawrence isn't defending or romanticizing Bin Laden. He's explaining his perspective. And, in that passage, the perspective of the US and its allies. I was surprised in retrospect to see how firmly he made this prediction about Bin Laden's summary execution.

Lawrence notes that Bin Laden adopted a martyr's pose. Though, again accurately, he predicted that his legend would have some appeal, though not his deeply flawed methods and approach:

His posthumous legend will live on, like that of Guevara, to inspire other such knights [a reference to Bin Laden's self-description as one of "a band of knights"], until such time as different, more humane heroes can attract the idealism of Muslim youth, and find a better way not only to liberate their homelands but also to forge a brighter future for those liberated.

The Arab Awakening is providing some substantial part of that "better way," though obviously it's a process with a hopeful future rather than an accomplished fact.

Tags: 9/11, bruce lawrence, osama bin laden

Bridging the religious gap

Bruce Lawrence addressed the neocons disastrously misguided notion of the "clash of civilizations" in No More Crusades: Rethinking Islam in the West Harvard International Review Winter 2004. He wrote then:

Since September 11, the "Clash of Civilizations" theory has dominated and incorporated all others. It seems to explain Muslim-Western hostility as both ancient and irreversible. It is neither. This enmity is made by humans and thus can be unmade by humans. The historical events over the past millennium can and must be retold from a broader perspective that includes multiple interpretations of the same events and their sequels. There is no single Christian view and no single Muslim counterpart; both exhibit an internal variety.

Even before Pope Benedict XVI took over the papal role, John Paul II, whose greatest positive achievement was to advance Jewish-Christian ecumenical relations managed to hit false notes in relation to Islam. Lawrence writes:

By comparison to Protestant doomsday sayers, Catholic sabre rattlers may seem almost anodyne in their view of both the last days and Arab adversaries. But are they? Consider the Vatican. It has often been suggested that the current Pope is well disposed to Muslims in general and to Palestinians in particular. But Papal pronouncements also include beatifications; one recent beatification, announced in April 2003, elevated an obscure Capuchin monk/priest named Marco d'Aviano. Brother Marco is alleged to have inspired the now famous cappuccino coffee, but he was also a seventeenth century Capuchin monk, and he helped to defend Vienna against a Turkish assault in the 1680s. The Turks were Muslims and they were allegedly defeated because Brother Marco rallied both Protestants and Catholics to oppose the Muslim invaders. The Turks, defeated in the 1683 Battle of Vienna, never again besieged Western Europe. In his April pronouncement Pope John Paul II celebrated that moment as a Christian victory. He lauded Brother Marco as a true Crusader, asserting that he had helped defend the "freedom and unity of Christian Europe," reminding today's Catholics that the continent is founded on "common Christian roots." The Holy Father's commendation had an unspoken trailer: "Muslims are not welcome; go home, to Asia or to Africa, but depart from Christian Europe!" (my emphasis)

Lawrence uses a Crusader analogy for both Islamic jihadists and Christian warriors. He observes, "Indeed, it is the internal dissenters [in a religion] who are the most dangerous." This is what Freud referred to as "the narcissism of small differences".

Lawrence cautions all believers to have a decent amount of humility about knowing divine truth:

Because Mystery is the first and last name of the divine and demanding humility rather than hubris is the litmus test of faith. The true problem is neither Islam nor Christianity; the enemies are not those who identify as Muslims or Christians. The enemies are those who claim religion as the basis for conflict, faith as the motive for violence, and Armageddon as the outcome of war. The enemies are the militant defenders of the faith, at once blinkered and blinded to divine mystery. It is not a mock war, but rather a serious, protracted war, and those on the sidelines need to move beyond their own religious labels and grapple with the militants of both camps, reclaiming a truth, which is also a truce, beyond their grasp.

He points to the tolerant, even ecumenical, tradition in Islam:

In this anti-Armageddon battle a formidable Muslim warrior is the Shi'i activist and university professor, Abdul Aziz Sachedina. For Sachedina, as for a growing number of Muslim pluralists, the Qur'an must be read as a whole book of coherent intent and not as a scrapbook of conflicting messages. The largest intent is inclusive: to marshal all humankind on the path to peace, and that message prevails despite the contexts of aggression that evoked Chapters 8 and 9. The Qur'an presents Islam as the affirmation and the summation, not the denial, of earlier religions. Even later Medinan Chapters declare that Muslims have no monopoly on divine grace, either in this world or the next (2:62, 5:69); they also invite Jews and Christians to join Muslims in emphasizing the essential similarities in their beliefs (e.g., 3:64). (my emphasis)

In this effort to build ecumenical understanding, he writes:

We do need religious voices to speak to the current fault line between East and West, Islam and America, and it is Muslim pluralists who are the philosophers and religious thinkers with whom non-Muslim others can and should make common cause.

Tags: bruce lawrence, clash of civilizations, islam