Brookings: Topics - Islamist Movements Brookings: Topics - Islamist Movements Thu, 04 Aug 2016 21:39:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 How we all reinforce a narrative of Islam versus the West Thu, 04 Aug 2016 19:06:17 +0000       

It’s true that ISIS says it wants to destroy the West, and kill “infidels.” But let’s not forget how it acts: On July 23, it killed at least 80 Shiites protesting in Kabul. On July 2, during Ramadan, it killed nearly 300 people in Baghdad who had been out shopping and enjoying the post-Iftar hours, women and children among them. 





Until this week, when Trump stirred political and public outrage by offending Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan, we had seen only a muted response to his denigration of Muslims and Islam. But, as Peter Beinart has also argued, it shouldn’t have taken Trump’s callousness toward the parents of a slain soldier to provoke an outcry against his Islamophobia—both politicians and the public should have jumped on this sooner.

We should not lapse into complacency again. A Muslim-American need not have made the ultimate sacrifice—or any sacrifice—for America in order for us to be outraged if he or she is insulted by Donald Trump. We all need to call out Trump unequivocally—and we can do this with a clear narrative that separates ordinary Muslim Americans from terrorists. We can champion them without setting a higher bar for them, or compelling them to prove themselves worthy of their rights. Khizr Khan should not have been one of the first to articulate that case forcefully, as he did in his DNC speech. Politicians on both side of the aisle had that responsibility, as did ordinary citizens. The numbers are on our side: let’s use them.

Playing our part

We all have a subtler role to play as well, in how we respond to terror.

When terror strikes in America or Europe—with alarming frequency of late—it shocks and stuns us. The world mourned with Paris last November, for lost lives and a wounded city. We shed tears for Orlando in June. But the world shrugged for Baghdad and Kabul in July. Attacks in Peshawar and Quetta seem to blur into one another. We expect them, and we’ve lost count.

To an extent, this is natural. We know cities in the Middle East, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only as war-torn; we think that people there know the risks they face. And we are more attached to where we’ve been, to what we’ve seen.

We express our horror on social media, more for some attacks than others. There are exceptions, attacks that shock people worldwide—such as the Peshawar, Pakistan school attack in December 2014, which killed more than 130 schoolchildren—but by and large, the world reacts more strongly to an attack in France than it does to one in Pakistan. And this makes many Muslims feel that their lives matter less to the world. Our selective responses, however unintentional, create a divide between Muslims and the West, and in so doing we play into ISIS’ and other jihadi groups’ hands.

In its reporting on terrorism, the media makes things worse. It focuses more on attacks in the West, partly because of logistics. As a result, we see the human toll of terrorist attacks more clearly if they occur in Europe or America. Most Muslim victims remain invisible. There are exceptions: The New York Times recently tracked and told the stories of 247 victims of terror attacks that occurred across the globe during two weeks this March, including attacks in Lahore, Peshawar, Istanbul, and Brussels.

There is also a bias in how the media represents attacks. If the attacker is Muslim and brown, his details are revealed immediately, the label of terror applied instantly—even before any confirmation of radicalization. We still don’t fully understand why Omar Mateen attacked a gay nightclub in Orlando—was he truly radicalized, or mentally disturbed?—but the public indictment was complete before an investigation.

If the attacker is non-Muslim and white, it’s not terror; the attacker is described as a lone wolf. The media rollout of information is more careful and considered, even for right wing extremists who use attacks to send a wider message. Consider Thomas Mair, who killed the British Labor Member of Parliament Jo Cox a week before the British referendum on EU membership. The attack was never labeled terror. The media emphasized his mental illness, even as he shouted “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain” in a pre-trial hearing. Also, the language used to describe such attacks tends to be passive—“Labor MP Jo Cox dies after being shot and stabbed”—not requiring us to visualize a killer. And while there is growing recognition of the blurred lines between terrorism and lone wolf attacks, the subtleties are mostly lost in the headlines.

We can change all this. We can temper our responses to terror, and mourn for all lives lost. The media can recognize its biases, and pledge to report attacks with more fairness. In this, we can look to Germany, which reacts to attacks with remarkable maturity—from politicians and the media to ordinary citizens—carefully parsing the varying motivations for its recent attacks.

All this will give ISIS less propaganda that it can use to recruit—and it will benefit all of us.












]]> The Islamic State threat to the Middle East Mon, 01 Aug 2016 17:17:40 +0000       
Politicians and analysts in Europe and the United States understandably focus on the threat the Islamic State poses to the West, and the debate is fierce over whether the group’s recent attacks are a desperate gasp of a declining organization or proof of its growing menace. Such a focus, however, obscures the far greater threat the Islamic State poses to the Middle East and U.S. interests in the region. This threat can be divided into three categories—conquest, expansion, and agitation—all of which have profound implications for U.S. policy and should shape the U.S. role in the Middle East even if terrorism in the West declines.

The Islamic State has long sought to increase its power by consolidating and expanding its quasi-state in Syria and Iraq. At its height in 2014, large parts of Iraq and Syria were under the group’s control. The Islamic State conquered territory directly through conventional military operations and used guerrilla war and terrorism to weaken enemy government and civilian morale and stretch their forces.  Much of the Islamic State’s day-to-day terrorism is linked to its war effort, with enemies like Iraq’s Shiite population bearing the brunt of many of the group’s attacks. The U.S.-led coalition and their local allies have reversed the Islamic State’s military expansion, shrinking the territory under its control. In so doing, they have caused massive financial problems for the group, decreased the number of foreign fighters, and weakened its appeal in general.

The Islamic State has sought to expand into “provinces” throughout the Muslim world, following al-Qaida’s use of “affiliates” in the past. This expansion spreads the risk of civil wars to new areas and increases the ferocity of existing ones. Moreover, the Islamic State governance system makes life even more miserable for already suffering communities. Some of these provinces drew on small terrorist groups that used the Islamic State brand to expand. Others, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, were powerful groups already. In some instances, local commanders broke off from an al-Qaida affiliate, using the IS name as a pretext for a power grab. In October, the Islamic State’s Sinai province downed a Russian passenger jet flying from Egypt, killing all 224 people. The Islamic State’s province in Libya carved out territory near the city of Sirte, though recent military efforts by militias tied to the Libyan “government” have pushed the group back considerably.

The Islamic State exerts tremendous influence even outside areas where it controls territory, agitating regional politics in general.

The Islamic State exerts tremendous influence even outside areas where it controls territory, agitating regional politics in general. Its terrorist attacks in nearby Lebanon, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are revenge for the policies of enemy governments (or the powerful sub-state group, Lebanese Hezbollah, which is an important ally of the Assad regime). In addition, they are attempts to foment sectarianism and otherwise shape regional politics to reflect the Islamic State’s worldview and strategy. The Islamic State’s high-profile violence also inspires extremist voices, creates fears of instability, and injects divisive issues such as sectarianism into a region already highly divided. This agitation increases the risk of civil wars and political violence and degrades politics in general.

The Islamic State’s persistence in the Middle East also keeps the risk of terrorism to the West high. The success of U.S. and allied forces in the past year have not stopped the Islamic State from using its territory—and perhaps, in the future, that of its “provinces”—to organize terrorist attacks outside the region, such as the November 2015 Paris attacks. Indeed, as the Islamic State’s territory shrinks, it has more incentives to do low-cost, high-profile terrorist attacks against its enemies outside the region.

The Islamic State’s role in the Middle East has several implications for the United States beyond the threat of terrorism against the United States and its Western allies. The strife and risk of greater chaos create a constant demand for intervention in ways both large and small. To prevent the Islamic State from expanding (and to shrink its territory), a significant USAF campaign along with efforts to train local forces is necessary. More forces are necessary to make more dramatic gains. To a lesser degree, military assistance and limited direct military strikes are necessary against Islamic State efforts to expand through its provinces.

The violence the Islamic State produces also creates refugee flows and a broader humanitarian crisis. Though refugee flows have hit regional states the hardest, the crisis has become an international one, with significant consequences for European states and U.S. allies. Most refugees fleeing Syria are fleeing the Assad regime’s abuses and hardship in general, but thousands have also left areas under Islamic State control. In addition to refugee flows, abhorrent practices such as sexual slavery and the slaughter of Muslim minorities create grave humanitarian concerns. The Islamic State also targets international aid organizations, limiting social services in the hardest-hit areas.

Finally, the Islamic State is a dictator’s dream “bogeyman” when interacting with the West. Regional dictators use the genuine risks the Islamic State poses as a pretext for delaying or reversing democratic reform, cracking down on opponents, and otherwise playing off U.S. security interests against broader U.S. concerns over democratization and good governance.

So, even if the terrorism danger to the West diminishes, the United States and its allies must recognize that the Islamic State will, and should, profoundly shape their foreign policies towards the Middle East.








Lesser evil?




Making the state possible



Weaknesses in the system



]]> 0 In Turkey, putsched out Fri, 22 Jul 2016 12:00:00 +0000 Whatever one thinks of Erdoğan, there is little doubt: As tenuous as Turkey’s future remains, a disaster—one that would have had ripple effects across the region—was averted last week, writes Shadi Hamid. Here, he makes sense of the coup and why it failed, drawing out a few key lessons.

On a Friday night, just a day after a horrific attack in Nice, France, that had taken the lives of more than 80, rumors of a military coup in Turkey began to spread.

It was a reminder that even the most unlikely things can happen in a Middle East that tends to follow the maxim “if it can get worse, it probably will.” Nearly everyone, including senior U.S. officials, were caught by surprise. Political scientist Jay Ulfelder had put the probability of a Turkish coup attempt in 2016 at a mere 2.5 percent.

For all of the ruling AK Party’s faults and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s intensifying paranoia and authoritarian tendencies, perhaps the most consequential victory the party could claim was the neutralization of Turkey’s powerful military, which long considered itself the guardian of Turkish secularism. The army had been responsible for a steady succession of coups. The first, in 1960, where a democratically elected prime minister was hung to death was never too far from Erdoğan’s mind, despite the passing of more than five decades. But it had seemed that after 14 years of AKP rule, Turkey had finally moved beyond its own dark history of military intervention. But it hadn’t.

Coups introduce a dynamic where there can only be one winner. Coup plotters, once they make their decision to act, have an incentive to fight (and kill) to the very end, since failure usually entails a harsh prison sentence, or worse. In countries already wracked by existential, winner-takes-all politics and deep social polarization, coups, especially if they succeed, are likely to provoke ongoing bloodshed and civil conflict. Whatever one thinks of Erdoğan, there is little doubt: As tenuous as Turkey’s future remains, a disaster—one that would have had ripple effects across the region—was averted.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the crowd following a funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, July 17, 2016. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis - RTSIENO

In making sense of the coup and why it failed, there are a few key lessons. One has to do with the importance of norms. Despite a long history of military intervention, norms against coups have entrenched themselves in recent years, including, most importantly, among secular parties; among these are groups that have a pronounced dislike of Erdoğan. This norm shift happened quickly. As recently as 2008, Turkey’s Constitutional Court was just one vote away from shuttering the AKP for “anti-secular activities.” The idea that disputes, however intense, must be resolved through legal, democratic means has spread and deepened, cutting across societal and ideological divides.

The country’s last successful coup was in 1997, when the military forced the resignation of an Islamist-led coalition government. The Islamists of the Welfare Party, an AKP predecessor, were unable or unwilling to take to the streets en masse, allowing the army to quickly impose itself. This time around, however, Erdoğan and other AKP leaders immediately called on their supporters to mobilize throughout the country and resist the army’s moves.

For me, Friday night was a frightening moment, presenting a key test for an international community that has had a checkered record of (not) opposing coups against deeply flawed but still democratically-elected Islamists. As I watched the coup attempt unfolding in real time, I was reminded of the sick feeling I had on July 3, 2013, the day the Egyptian military overthrew President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have the benefit of knowing how the coup turned out there, producing a brutal outcome responsible for the worst mass killing in modern Egyptian history, according to Human Rights Watch.

Of course, that Turkey didn’t follow in Egypt’s footsteps does not mean that the country is in the clear. In 2015, I conducted extensive interviews with current and former AKP figures for my new book on the “problem” of Islam and politics. While the coup attempt cannot be reduced a simple Islamist-secular divide, the aftermath of the coup—with Erdoğan moving aggressively to crack down on both actual and potential opponents—is likely to exacerbate ideological divisions over the role of religion in Turkish society.

With the other Islamist groups I’ve studied, including the Egyptian and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhoods, there was always at the least the pretense of sounding conciliatory. Not so much in Turkey, where some of the AKP figures I interviewed openly expressed a raw, bitterness toward their secular opponents. For them, after all, it was quite personal. Most lived through the 1997 coup and the so-called “February 28 process” which aimed to deal a decisive blow against the broader Islamic movement in every facet of public life, particularly in the educational sphere, with the shutting down of imam hatip religious schools.

A senior advisor to former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told me that Turkey’s normalization required “carrying Ataturk to his grave,” referring to the still revered founder of modern Turkey and the architect of decades of forced secularization. For this advisor, the scars hadn’t gone away. He was still furious that his wife, because she wore a headscarf, wasn’t able to work at a state hospital until 2014, despite the fact that, by then, the AKP had been in power for 12 years.

In short, Turkey has a long way to go, considering that questions over Islam, identity, and the very meaning of what it means to be both Turkish and Muslim remain unresolved. But, at least for a moment, observers can take some solace in the fact that, as bad as it still might be, it could have been worse—perhaps much worse.

]]> Europe risks repeating past mistakes on Islam Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:54:00 +0000 Today’s crisis of Islamic religious legitimacy and the spread of Salafi ideology are a direct legacy of 20th century European empires, argues Jonathan Laurence. To avoid making the same mistakes again, we need to understand both the contingency of that history and the vacuity of the term “Islamic fundamentalism.” 

Many have recently sought to understand and explain today’s crisis of legitimacy within Islam, with some analysts placing the blame for that crisis squarely on Islam itself. In my view, today’s crisis of Islamic religious legitimacy and the spread of Salafi ideology are a direct legacy of 20th century European empires. I don’t mean that as a moral cudgel, nor as a plea for political correctness. But to avoid making the same mistakes again, we need to understand both the contingency of that history and the vacuity of the term “Islamic fundamentalism,” which is used as a stand-in for everything from traditional views of gender roles and homosexuality to religiously-inspired mass murder.

Europe’s 20th century mistake

How did more rigid and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam prevail over the relatively tolerant brand of Ottoman Islam? Let’s look to history. One century ago, in summer 1916, European powers started a chain reaction that enabled and sanctioned the 1924 Saudi takeover of the Hijaz—including Mecca and Medina. In one seized territory after another, Europeans continued to interrupt traditional ties of Islamic authority and religious education between their new colonial subjects and the Sultan-Caliph in Istanbul. The new imperial rulers cut off the circular flow of judges, muftis, seminaries, and mosque projects between the Ottomans and Muslims in North Africa, the Balkans, and the Near East. Centuries-old religious endowments and religious leadership configurations were uprooted in favor of institutions that Europeans thought they could control.


Even as the Ottoman empire declined in its final century, the caliphate flourished as a global spiritual project. It had more adherents leading up to its abolition than any other time thanks to the spectacular growth of Muslim populations under British and Dutch rule.

But more than one hundred million Muslims in British India and the Dutch East Indies who prayed toward the Sultan-Caliph in Istanbul were forced to rededicate Friday prayers towards whomever the colonial powers selected. Turkish nationalists were arguably only able to abolish the religious power of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 because European powers had already undermined the institution.

Today’s greatest religious-political challenges lie at the epicenter of this fragmented world: the Mediterranean core of the old Ottoman empire, including Turkey, North Africa, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula. The caliphate’s demise sparked a century-long supernova of pretenders and Islamists spanning the Muslim crescent. The violent jolts of post-caliphate Islamic extremism travel precisely the same path through the global umma (Muslim community) that was traced by Ottoman religious diplomacy, including today’s Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria. Any Ottoman legacy has been repurposed or erased, dimming the prospect of native resistance to, and resilience against, imported religious extremism.


History’s legacy

The resulting fitna (strife) has undermined the political stability and military autonomy that Sunni Muslims in the region once enjoyed. Istanbul’s traditional role as the apex of spiritual leadership is now partitioned across more than a dozen countries—and hotly contested by transnational non-state actors, including al-Qaida and ISIS. This dissensus is mirrored in the disrupted religious lives of millions of Muslims now residing in Western Europe who can trace their origins to the same region.

How did Salafism and Wahhabism manage to inculcate entire swathes of two generations of European Muslims? The same European powers—which began to welcome large numbers of immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s—invited the Saudi-based Muslim World League to set up full-service mosques, salaried imams, and free Qurans, all part of a transactional relationship based on oil. European countries often snubbed offers by Morocco, Turkey, and Algeria to provide an alternative. By the early 2000s, more Moroccan imams in Europe were employed by the Saudi king than the Moroccan one, and Saudi Arabia still sponsors 14 imams a year in France. It’s therefore no surprise that some European Muslims find their way to Salafi-Wahhabist Islam—their governments contributed to the billions of dollars spent on the propagation of extreme ideologies.

Don’t repeat yourself

West European countries face a similar choice today about the role Ankara, Rabat, and Algiers can play in the spiritual lives of European Muslims—and several countries are on the verge of repeating the historic mistake of the early 20th century. Governments are once again seeking to decapitate the religious center at its source: Islamic propagation programs by Middle Eastern governments.

In the decade following 9/11, many countries sought to formalize the state-Islam relationship in an attempt to shield European Muslims from religious ideologies emanating from the Gulf. Real progress was made on public religious education in Germany, for example, and French officials cultivated meaningful relationships with the country’s Muslim intellectuals and religious leaders. But European countries have been hesitant to facilitate Muslims’ religious lives or to fully integrate them into existing state-church structures. The European approaches have been shaped by their deep suspicion of official religious services offered by Muslim-majority countries. The end result has deprived young Muslims of legitimate Islamic arguments they could wield against extremist ideas.


This has recently come to a head. In 2014, the Austrian parliament voted to end Turkish funding for religious activities and evict Turkish religious personnel. The move echoed the Austro-Hungarian empire’s decision one hundred years earlier to replace the caliphate in Bosnia and Herzegovina with a Vienna-approved religious leader. Belgium recently passed a similar decree regarding the nomination of imams, and German politicians have for months called for an end to Turkey’s influence in European Islam. The EU recently funded a journalism project dedicated to exposing “Turkish puppets” who promote the religious ideology of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and AKP within Europe.

In fact, Turkey—and other countries like Algeria and Morocco—has improved its export-grade Islam to Europe. This includes special linguistic and cultural courses pre-departure, and degree-granting programs for European Muslims to be trained for their specific context. Germany currently hosts the largest number of Turkish imams and teachers who help tend to the spiritual care and religious education of German Muslims, and German authorities are grateful for these programs, even as they make entirely rational plans to also cultivate other networks of Islamic knowledge and institutions.

But the current debate about Islamic fundamentalism—and the accumulating scorn towards the Turkish government—now threaten to politicize what should be more thoughtful decisions about the kinds of religious organizations that should be encouraged. This is even more urgent as more than one million new Muslim refugees arrive in Germany. Turkish Islam should retain a prominent place alongside the expansion of other religious offerings. This will require convincing the German public that however difficult, the religious affairs relationship with the Turkish government remains vital.

It is right to expect that all religious organizations register and comply with local laws and regulations, but it is self-defeating to cut off links to personnel, prayer, and education. Anyone who doubts that should look to the rise of Wahhabism in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. In the 21st century, it’s not Saudi Arabia lurking beyond the vacuum, but ISIS and a vast online community that can propagate radical messages quickly. Last century’s European empires arguably could not anticipate the impact of their interference on global Islam today, but today’s European countries should know better. Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.

Note: This post is translated and adapted from an article published on July 16 in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

]]> Podcast: “Islam is a really complicated religion” Tue, 19 Jul 2016 20:30:00 +0000       
In a recent episode of the Brookings Cafeteria podcast, Senior Fellow Shadi Hamid spoke candidly about growing up Muslim-American and his research on political Islam. In a wide-ranging conversation, Hamid, author of the new book, “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World,” said that “One thing I’ve really come to appreciate more is that Islam is a really complicated religion, when you dive into the theology, history, and culture-it’s not the easiest religion to understand. I don’t think it’s conducive to sound bites.” Continuing, he shared that:

I have Muslim friends who will insist that Islam is a religion of peace … but what does it really even mean to say that Islam is a religion of peace? It also doesn’t make sense to say Islam is a religion of violence. Like most things, it’s somewhere in between. It depends on what interpretations we are talking about. Muslims are different. They have different views. So we can’t say that Islam is entirely one thing or entirely something else. And that’s why I think that we have to appreciate complexity. And those of us who don’t know as much about Islam, I think it’s important for Americans to learn more, to read more, and to resist the temptation to pigeonhole Islam as one thing or another.

Listen to the entire episode here, and find out what Hamid had to say about being Muslim-American; Donald Trump’s rhetoric about Islam and Muslims; and what he sees as the most misunderstood thing about Islam today.

Follow Shadi Hamid on Twitter: @ShadiHamid

See also, by Shadi Hamid:
Islamism, Salafism, and jihadism: A primer

What’s different about Islam in Malaysia and Indonesia?

Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims

Is Islam “exceptional”?

In 2004, Hamid was on the Brookings Cafeteria podcast to talk about Islamists, Democracy, and the Roots of Middle East Violence.

]]> The difference between ISIS and ISIS-ish Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 After the terrorist attack in Nice, France, Will McCants examines the tragic pattern of irreligious criminals and social misfits committing murder in the name of the Islamic State.
