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News, documents and analysis on violent extremismMonday, May 5, 2014
On Ideology: Some Extended Thoughts
In the first years of the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Diocletian
launched a massive campaign of persecution against Christians, razing churches,
burning scriptures and killing any Christian leaders who resisted these
actions. Many Christian priests and bishops handed over their sacred books
rather than face certain death. In the years that followed, Christianity
eventually gained the upper hand.
A sect known as the Donatists emerged to
condemn those who handed over their books as traitors and apostates who were
unworthy. They declared that these apostates could not perform valid sacraments
like baptism or marriages, and that any such sacraments performed by the
apostates were retroactively void.
This controversy continued for
some time until, finally, Saint Augustine articulated a religious doctrine that
is still in effect today, ex opere operato, which argues that the merit of a sacrament
such as baptism emanates from the act itself and was not dependent on the
virtue of the person who dispensed the sacrament. Over the course of centuries,
this document was used by the Church to dismiss various critics and sects who
splintered from the church on the basis of clerical corruption. 12th
century Pope Innocent III wrote “Nothing more is accomplished by a good priest
and nothing less by a wicked priest, because it is accomplished by the word of
the Creator and not the merit of the priest. Thus the wickedness of the priest
does not nullify the effect of the sacrament.”
Most recently, this doctrine came into play in the Catholic
Church’s pedophilia scandal, in which priests who were known to religious
authorities to have molested children were permitted to continue their
ministries for years and (until very recently) almost never defrocked.
It is true that the Donatist heresy had a huge influence on
modern Catholic Church doctrine. It is accurate to say that the doctrinal
response to the Donatists is
relevant to the pedophilia scandal. It is indisputable that Saint Augustine
played a critical role in shaping this doctrine. It is useful to understand
this history when examining, in depth, how the church could allow evil people
to continue in their ministries.
But does that mean all this history must be considered when
devising practical responses to the scandal? Should news coverage and academic
research use the Donatists as an essential touchstone for understanding the
scandal? Do Catholics who left the church over the scandal consider Saint
Augustine when making their decisions? Do prosecutors pursuing criminal cases
against pedophile priests need to cite Augustine and his theological successors
in their indictments?
Or is it enough to understand what happened as a failure of
leadership and a desire to avoid accountability by individual bad actors within
an insular system that ultimately focused on protecting itself rather than
victims of pedophilia?
Today, we face similar questions in the war on terror. After
September 11, a large contingent of experts, pundits and scholars understandably
spent a lot of energy on explaining the nuances of the schools of Islamic religious
jurisprudence in general and al Qaeda’s ideology in particular to an unknowing
public and often clueless government. It was a given that we had to understand
the ideology in order to be effective in our battle against al Qaeda the
organization.
Over some years and with some experience, the consensus in
the field has become more mixed, with a growing movement to look at more
fundamental drivers of participation in al Qaeda, such as political grievances
and personal predispositions. It’s important that we have people who understand
and can explain key points of ideology – for example, the Sunni-Shia divide –
but that understanding needs to take place in context, particularly as we
discuss approaches to countering radicalization.
It is true that the fine points of Islamist ideology are
relevant to al Qaeda. It is accurate to say that historical Islamic scholars
contribute to al Qaeda’s ideological bent. It is indisputable that figures like
14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah helped shape al Qaeda’s
understanding of Islam and the role of jihad. It is useful to understand how
these threads come together in the modern movement.
But is it practical to focus on these ideological
underpinnings as a vital component in our strategy to combat terrorism and
violent extremism? Should ideology provide a
singular and indispensable lens for our understanding of the movement?
It is the world’s worst-kept secret that al Qaeda’s
“scholars” operate from a simplistic and often simply incorrect understanding
of historical religious arguments. Al Qaeda adherents refer reverentially to
the scholarship of Osama bin Laden, an engineer, and Ayman al Zawahiri, a
medical doctor, often misunderstanding the arguments of non-theologians who
themselves misunderstand the arguments of actual theologians.
Instead, the people who do the work of al Qaeda most often
trade in archetypes and political incitements. They pick and choose from among
theological arguments that serve their commitment to war, often without
context. A growing number of jihadists take their guidance from anonymous
interlocutors who post on extremist forums and on social media outlets with
pseudo-scholarly messages far diluted from the classical sources of Islamic
jurisprudence.
For many, a conclusion justifying violent action is forgone,
and theology is only useful when it provides a veneer of intellectual
justification. For others, the theological justifications are barely an
afterthought. Consider the theological depth of this Jabhat al Nusra enthusiast
on Twitter:
While it’s possible that a nuanced argument on how Ibn
Qudama’s scholarship undercuts the concept of Dar al Harb might reach this guy,
this process is much like lecturing an anti-government militia member on the relative
merits of Alexander Hamilton’s positions in the Federalist Papers and Patrick
Henry’s anti-Federalist speeches of 1788.
You might get through to one in one
hundred extremists with this approach, but the most likely outcome is that he or
she will dismiss you out of hand due to your inferior knowledge of his or her mythologized,
archetypical view of what the Founding Fathers (or whomever) intended.
We need to speak the language of ideology so that we can
engage extremists, but the route of ideological dispute is not likely to
provide an efficient approach to changing how extremists think or act.
So where does that leave us? For better or worse, the West
approach has shifted a significant part of its focus from defeating al Qaeda’s
organization to defeating al Qaeda’s ideas. Should we be fighting this war at
the highest intellectual levels? Does the side with the best footnotes win in
such a battle? Or does victory go to the side that speaks most effectively to
modern day concerns?
Theology and religious ideologies are faith-based, and for
many adherents, the superior ideology is the one articulated by the more
charismatic or compelling messenger. This isn’t a predictable field of battle,
nor is it a field where outsiders – non-Muslims and Muslims perceived to be
aligned with non-Muslim interests – can be effective.
For academics, the merits of an argument can be weighed by
the quality of its footnotes. For most extremists, such as Anders Breivik whose
1,518-page anti-Muslim manifesto included hundreds of references, footnotes are
merely links in a suit of chainmail designed to rebuff arguments that move away
from violence.
An argument can be elaborate without being complex. One fundamental
characteristic of extremism is that it sets out to simplify an adherent’s view
of the world, to boil it down into a highly refined, black-and-white,
us-versus-them dichotomy. You don’t win that battle by using complex arguments
that undercut extremists’ historical or theological views. But you might be
able to make gains by forcing extremists simply to admit to the necessity of
complexity, by forcing them to confront the fact that the
real world is more complicated than their ideology permits.
The current fitna in al Qaeda represents a golden
opportunity in this respect, because members of the movement must concede that
something has gone wrong inside their ideology, and some (but by no means all)
will be forced to think about their beliefs more deeply as a result.
True believers, fanatical believers, are nearly impossible to reach, but as in all things, there are degrees. While some extremists have entirely replaced their
perceptions of the real world with a narrative fed to them by ideologues,
others are using ideology as a crutch to explain what they perceive in the real
world around them. Those are the people who can be reached, when their ideology
fails to meet expectations in the real world, but it’s a mistake to hope you
can pull one ideological rug out from under them and simply replace it with a rug
more to your liking.
The enemy of ideology is not a different ideology. The enemy
of ideology is pragmatism. If we feel we must attack the ideology of al Qaeda
with the same fervor that we attack its organization, we need to ground that
approach in the real world instead of dwelling too deeply on the dusty archives
of religious history. For the sake of learning, it’s important to understand
where al Qaeda comes from, but we not should mistake that understanding for a
strategy.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.
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