Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

When the nation-state was an autonomous, territorially bounded entity governing a community of people who shared some measure of cultural homogeneity—as was the case throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—secular nationalism thrived. But globalization has changed everything. The rise of cosmopolitan cities such as New York, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Hong Kong; the surge in mass migration, dual nationalities, and hyphenated identities; the ceaseless flow of peoples across state borders; all of these have made achieving anything like cultural homogeneity within territorial boundaries almost impossible.

The more the world becomes deterritorialized, the more nationalism loses its place as the primary marker of collective identity.

as Edmund Burke noted a century ago, “men are not tied to one another by papers and seals [but] by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.”

Witness the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia. The forced disaggregation of a people once united by a civic identity into tiny, ethnically homogeneous states, each in conflict with the others, is perhaps the clearest example of what happens when transnational identities—in this case ethnicity—clash with national loyalties. Similar tensions led to the partitioning of Urdu-speaking West Pakistan and Bengali-speaking East Pakistan into the homogenized states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. But when it comes to the power of transnational identities to challenge nationalist ones, no force exerts a greater pull than religion.

In the Muslim world, the fusing of religion and nationalism is called “Islamism.” Developed primarily in postcolonial Egypt and India, Islamism is a political philosophy that seeks to establish an Islamic state—either through grassroots social and political activism or through violent revolution—built upon a distinctly Islamic moral framework. Some Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), and Algeria’s Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), are committed to civic, even democratic, participation in society. Others, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, Islamic Jihad in Egypt, and the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), wish to overturn their governments through armed revolt.

the real threat to global peace and security comes from the rise of religious transnationalist movements that cannot be contained within any territorial boundaries.

And the most dangerous by far of these new transnational movements is the broad-based, global ideology of militant Islamic puritanism, of which al-Qa’ida is merely the most notorious and violent manifestation: Jihadism (Global Jihadism, to be precise).

Despite its fixation on jihad, Global Jihadism is less a religious movement than it is a social movement, one that employs religious symbols to forge a collective identity across borders and boundaries (more on this later).

Jihadism traces its historical roots not to the Prophet Muhammad but to the Arab anticolonialists of the twentieth century, men like Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. It looks not to the Qur’an for its doctrinal basis but to the writings of the thirteenth-century legal scholar Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah. It has more in common with the Bolsheviks and the French revolutionaries than it does with militant Muslim nationalist groups such as Hamas and Hizballah. To talk about Jihadism as Islamofascism is to misunderstand both Jihadism and fascism. Fascism is an ideology of ultranationalism; Jihadism rejects the very concept of the nation-state as anathema to Islam. In that regard, Jihadism is the opposite of Islamism.

It is ironic that Jihadism is so often viewed as antimodern. Jihadism does not reject modernity; it is a product of modernity. It does, however, reject Westernism, and because “modernity” and “the West” have become inextricably linked (mostly in the West), anyone who rejects one is automatically assumed to reject the other. Jihadism may present itself as an alternative to the modern world, but the ideas upon which it draws are quintessentially modern. To paraphrase...

This is something else entirely. This is jihad as a form of identity—a mere metaphysical struggle stripped of all political considerations. This is jihad as cosmic war.

Salafism began as a progressive movement in colonial Egypt and India whose adherents advocated reform and liberalization of traditional Islamic doctrine. The movement was founded upon the writings of two of the century’s most renowned Muslim intellectuals, the Iranian scholar/activist Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (who began his career in India) and the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abdu.

Al-Afghani and Abdu believed that the only way for the Muslim world to throw off the yoke of colonialism and push back against Western cultural hegemony was through a revival of Islam. These “modernists,” as they were called, blamed the clerical establishment—the ’ulama—for the sorry state of Muslim society. They sought to challenge the clergy’s self-proclaimed role as the sole legitimate interpreters of Islam by advocating an individualized, unmediated, and highly personal reading of the Qur’an and the Hadith (the collected sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad).

Although far more conservative in his interpretation of Islam than either al-Afghani or Muhammad Abdu, al-Banna nevertheless agreed that the main obstacle facing an Islamic revival was the ’ulama, or, more specifically, the senior clergy of Egypt’s famed al-Azhar University, whose international prestige and longevity (it was established a thousand years ago) have made it the closest thing the Muslim world has to a Vatican.

In fact, al-Banna explicitly established the Muslim Brotherhood as an alternative source for Muslim spirituality, one whose reformist outlook and social activism created a stark contrast to the somewhat stilted theology offered by the clergy of al-Azhar.

after the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924—the symbol of the global Muslim community, or ummah—the Muslim Brotherhood was the only truly transnational Islamic movement in the world, with offshoots in Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon. When, in 1952, a group of Egyptian military officers led by Colonel Gamal Abd al-Nasser launched a coup against Egypt’s British-backed monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood helped rally the country under the new regime. At first Nasser welcomed the Brotherhood into his administration, placing its members in a number of senior government posts. But after a failed attempt on his life, allegedly by a member of the Brotherhood, Nasser outlawed the organization altogether and threw its leaders into jail.

In prison, the Brotherhood fractured into competing groups. A new breed of activists, led by the charismatic Egyptian academic Sayyid Qutb, transformed al-Banna’s social movement into a revolutionary force dedicated to “setting up the kingdom of God on earth and eliminating the kingdom of man.” Qutb argued that Nasser—and in fact every other Arab leader—could not be considered a true Muslim unless he was willing to strictly apply and abide by Islamic law (known as Shariah). And since he was unwilling to do so, he was an apostate, a kafir; his punishment was death.

Qutb went so far as to state that anyone who accepted Nasser’s leadership was also a kafir. “Those who consider themselves Muslim, but do not struggle against different kinds of oppression, or defend the rights of the oppressed, or cry out in the face of a dictator, are either wro...

Born in the vast desert wastelands of eastern Arabia, a region known as the Najd, Wahhabism (its adherents prefer the term “Muwahiddun,” meaning “Unitarians”) is a militantly puritanical movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the middle of the eighteenth century. Claiming that the purity of Islam had been defiled by “un-Islamic” beliefs and practices such as praying to saints and visiting their tombs, Abd al-Wahhab sought to strip Islam of what he considered to be its cultural, ethnic, and religious “innovations” (bida’), so as to restore the faith to its original, unadulterated, and distinctly Arab origins.

It was the hybridization of Salafism and Wahhabism—of Islamic political activism and Saudi puritanism—that would give birth to a new, ultraconservative, ultraviolent social movement of young Muslims properly termed Jihadism.

At first, Jihadism began as just another Islamist movement focused on establishing an Islamic state. As Fawaz Gerges, America’s premier scholar of Jihadism, has shown, the early Jihadists were “religious nationalists whose fundamental goal was to effect revolutionary change in their own society.” Their primary focus was on what they termed the “Near Enemy”—Arab regimes, “hypocrite” imams, apostate Muslims—as opposed to the “Far Enemy”—Israel, Europe, and the United States. “The road to Jerusalem goes through Cairo,” Ayman Zawahiri wrote in 1995, before he had joined al-Qa’ida, when he was still a fervent Islamist and the head of a religious nationalist organization known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ).

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 drew to the region a wave of Jihadists from every corner of the world, many of whom, like Zawahiri and al-Suri, felt increasingly abandoned by the collapse of the Islamist movements in their own countries. The presence on the battlefield of tens of thousands of Muslim fighters from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Algeria, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Pakistan, Jordan, Malaysia, Indonesia—all working together for a common cause—created a sense of global community among the Jihadists that they had never before experienced.

Jihadism, however, rejects the very concept of nationalism; it is as much an antinationalist movement as a transnationalist one.

Although Israeli security forces maintain legal jurisdiction over the whole of the Old City, the Temple Mount itself remains under the control of Jerusalem’s Muslim authorities (known as the Waqf).

Razing the Dome of the Rock in order to build the Third Temple on its ruins has been a goal of more than a few Jewish and Christian radical groups. In 1969, a Christian from Australia sneaked onto the Temple Mount and set fire to the silver-topped al-Aqsa mosque. In 1982, an Israeli soldier stormed into the same mosque brandishing an army-issued M-16 rifle and began shooting worshipers at random. One particularly tenacious radical, Yoel Lerner, has been convicted three times of trying to blow up the Dome of the Rock; at each of his trials, Lerner has openly called for the overthrow of Israel’s secular government and its replacement with a Jewish theocracy.

After a two-month investigation, three men were arrested, all of them from the Lifta Valley, a Mediterranean village near Jerusalem, a place of placid springs and terraced gardens. Dubbed “The Lifta Gang” by the Israeli media, the men confessed to being members of a Jewish underground group, some of whom had banded together to destroy the Dome of the Rock and seize control of the Temple Mount with the ultimate aim of rebuilding the Temple, thus preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah.

So it goes, for decades, for centuries. If a nation is a historical narrative written in the myths and memories of a united people, and the state that narrative’s cover and binding, the cosmic war between Israel and Palestine is what happens when two competing national narratives—neither of which can be fully harnessed by the state—vie for the same sacred, eternal space.

It is no accident that the rise of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Europe coincided with the rise of nationalism.

Drumont, a fuming, portly, irascible man with a wiry beard that splayed across his chest, is often regarded as the father of modern anti-Semitism in Europe. His book La France juive (Jewish France), which provided a disturbing account of the Jewish presence in France, sold a million copies and went through more than one hundred editions in French before being translated for the rest of Europe. Drumont’s bigoted argument about “the problem of the Jew in Europe” was, at the time, an outgrowth of the very idea of nationalism, which, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm writes, “by definition excludes from its purview all who do not belong to its own ‘nation,’ i.e., the vast majority of the human race.”

Half a century before that abominable event, however, a number of leading Jewish intellectuals had already come to the realization that assimilation into European culture was futile. They believed they would never share in the imaginary cultural homogeneity being constructed in the burgeoning nation-states of Europe and thus would never find a home on the continent. Drumont was right, some of them thought. The Jews were a nation within a nation. Only by extricating themselves from Europe and establishing their own nation-state could they be truly free of persecution.

The problem was that a significant population of indigenous Arabs had already been living in Palestine for centuries. A sizable number of Palestinian Jews also lived side by side with the Arabs, but the overwhelming majority of the population was Arab: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Not only was the land already settled and under the suzerainty of the Ottoman caliph, who, as one might imagine, was not receptive to the idea of turning it over to Europe’s Jews, but Palestine, and Jerusalem in particular, was as sacred to the Arabs as it was to the Jews.

When Vienna’s rabbis sent a fact-finding mission to determine the feasibility of Herzl’s idea, the mission sent back a cable reading “The Bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” For Herzl, the solution was self-evident, if a bit problematic. “We must expropriate gently the private property,” he wrote in his diary in June 1895, “[and] spirit the penniless population across the border.” As the Israeli historian Benny Morris has argued, given that “the vast majority of Palestine’s Arabs at the turn of the century were ‘poor,’ Herzl can only have meant some form of massive transfer of most of the population.”

That is precisely what Herzl meant. The calculus was inescapable. The Zionist ideal could be realized only through the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the only way the population of such a state could have a Jewish majority was to remove its non-Jewish inhabitants. The argument was made more succinctly by the true architect of the Jewish state, David Ben-Gurion. “The Arabs will have to go,” Ben-Gurion wrote to his son in 1937. The Zionists,...

As Israel’s “Iron Lady,” Golda Meir, explained, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Hence the Zionist slogan: “A land without a people for a people without a land.”

It is true that a firm national consciousness did not exist among the Arabs of Palestine, any more than it did among Palestine’s Jews—at least not before the Zionists arrived in droves. At the time nationalism was a distinctly European and secular phenomenon. Although there were upper-class Arab intellectuals and landed elites who considered themselves “Palestinian”—that is, living in a region called Palestine, distinct from a territory called Syria, inside an empire dominated by Turks—the majority of Palestine’s Arab Muslim population had, up to that point in time, considered itself subjects of the Ottoman caliph. (Palestine’s Christians, however, had a much more developed sense of themselves as Palestinian nationals, and in fact the most vigorous arguments against Zionism came from Christian Arabs.)

At first Britain was amenable to the idea of a Jewish state. The Zionist argument that, in the hands of the Jews, Palestine would be “an outpost of culture against barbarism,” to quote Herzl—and incidentally a tool with which to further British colonialism in the region—was irresistible. As Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary and the namesake of the Balfour Declaration, which promised British support for the state of Israel, claimed, “The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the … Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

When at the end of World War II Britain no longer had the will or the means to maintain control over an increasingly riotous, bitterly divided population, the problem of Palestine was handed over to the newly formed United Nations, which split the country in two. On November 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 181, calling for the creation of two separate and distinct states, each containing its own ethnically and religiously homogeneous “nation.”

The Palestinians rejected Resolution 181 outright. The geography of the partition was, according to the Arab Higher Committee representing Palestinian demands, “absurd, impracticable, and unjust.” The resolution established a serpentine border. It gave the Jews, who at the time owned 7 percent of the land and made up less than a third of the population, 56 percent of the country, seven eighths of the citrus groves, most of the arable fields, and a majority of the Mediterra...

A great many Zionists also rejected the partition plan, according to the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, “as it fell short of the full-blown Zionist aspiration for a state comprising the whole of Palestine and Jerusalem”—what was being referred to as Eretz Yisrael, or “biblical Israel.” Menachem Begin—at the time the head of an underground paramilitary organization called the Irgun, later to become prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner—summed up the sentiments of many Jewish nationalists when he proclaimed, “The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will nev...

Cooler heads among the Zionists prevailed. Ben-Gurion, ever the pragmatist, recognized the historic opportunity for international legitimacy and accepted U.N. Resolution 181 as, if nothing else, a good start. A decade earlier, when partition had first been discussed among the Zionist leaders, Ben-Gurion had argued, “I am certain we will be able to settle in all the other parts of the country, whether through agreement and mutual understanding with our Arab neighbors or in another w...

With the impasse seemingly irresolvable, Europe ravaged by two wars, the United States cocksure and concentrating on the Soviet Union, and the Arab states bungling toward independence, the Zionists unilaterally declared statehood. On May 14, 1948, t...

Yet the great irony is that today, Israel’s most profound existential threat comes not from Arab armies or Palestinian militants but from this very wall, or at least from what it represents, not just to Palestinians but to Muslims, Christians, and Jews around the world for whom a territorial conflict between two nation-states has become a contest over the favor of God—a cosmic war that no wall, no matter how long or how high, can contain.

Mohammed Siddique Khan was not an Arab. He had not traveled extensively through the Arab world, nor, according to his friends, had he shown much interest in doing so. He had never expressed excessive solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians; this was his first visit to the region. Before this trip, he had not even been considered especially devout. But in that fateful moment, his identity was altered. He was no longer British. He was no longer Pakistani. His sense of self could not be contained by either nationalist designation. He was simply a Muslim: a member of a fractured, imaginary “nation” locked in an eternal cosmic war with a Jewish “nation” just as imaginary and just as fractured.

As a transnational social movement, one of Jihadism’s greatest challenges is to link together all the disparate identities of its members—regardless of their race, culture, ethnicity, or nationality—under a single collective identity. The easiest way to do this is through what the sociologist William Gamson calls “injustice framing”: identify a situation as unjust; assign blame for the injustice; propose a solution for dealing with the injustice and those responsible for it; and then, most important, connect that injustice to a larger frame of meaning so as to communicate a uniform message that will resonate with as much of the population as possible.

Successful framing has the power to translate vague feelings of anger and resentment into tangible, easy-to-define grievances. It can also connect local and global grievances that may have little or nothing to do with one another under a “master frame” that allows a movement’s leaders to encompass the wider interests and diverse aspirations of their members. These so-called “frame alignment techniques” allow social movements like Jihadism to more easily create in-groups and out-groups. They help identify and, more important, vilify the enemy. They can even assist movement leaders in marking neutral bystanders as either sympathetic or antagonistic to the movement’s cause, all with the aim of compelling people to join the movement and do something about their grievances. In short, framing helps members of a social movement make the difficult transition from collective identity to collective action. And by far the easiest form of collective action is violence, especially organized and ritualized violence, which can transform complex, multipronged conflicts for which blame may be difficult to apportion into simple, black-and-white ones for which blame is easy to assign: them.

There remains today no more potent symbol of injustice in the Muslim imagination than the suffering of Palest...

the Crusades were not just a series of military campaigns, they were the defining event that shaped “a cohesive western identity precisely in opposition to Islam, an opposition that survives to this day.”

“Bush said, ‘Either you are with us, or you are with terrorism,’” bin Laden exclaimed. “[I say] either you are with the Crusade, or you are with Islam.”

But with the merging of Rome and Christianity, the Church’s spiritual enemies became indistinguishable from Rome’s political enemies. By the time the first Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, four years after Urban had dispatched them to liberate the Holy Land, Christianity was no longer the secret Jewish sect whose members, along with the rest of the Jews, had been forced out of the Holy Land by Rome a thousand years before. It was Rome: rich, mighty, thirsty for blood.

It may be difficult to reconcile the unrestrained bloodlust of these Medieval Christian soldiers with Jesus’s commandments to “love one’s enemies” and “turn the other cheek.” But that is because Christianity’s conception of cosmic war is derived not from the New Testament but from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). The knights who raped and pillaged their way to the Holy Land, who, in the words of the Christian chronicler Radulph of Caen, “boiled pagan adults whole in cooking pots, impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled,” were cosmic warriors walking in the path of the Lion of Judah, not the Lamb of God.