Guest Post: RAND Islam and CIA Islam too…

I am going to concentrate on “RAND Islam” here, because al-Awlaki’s lecture series titled “The Battle of Hearts and Minds” takes off from a RAND corporation publication, “Building moderate Muslim networks”, quoting its two opening sentences run together as one, “The struggle under way throughout much of the Muslim world is essentially a war of ideas, its outcome will determine the future direction of the Muslim world” — and references another, “Civil Democratic Islam” (RAND monographs MG574 and MR1716 respectively).

To give his readers a sense of what he’s talking about, he quotes a 2005 piece from US News & World Report:

Today Washington is fighting back after repeated missteps since the 911 attacks, the US government has embarked on a campaign of political warfare unmatched, since the height of the cold war. From military psychological operations teams and CIA covert operatives to openly funded media and think tanks, Washington is plowing tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to influence not only Muslim societies but Islam itself.

That’s the overview, that’s what concerns him in this lecture –that’s his evidence that the US is attacking Islam itself, and not just two

nations that happen to be majority Islamic.

A couple of notes: Al-Awlaki seems at times to confuse the two RAND reports he’s reading, since he references RAND author, Sheryl Benard (five times mentioned and five times mis-spelled “Bernard” by al-Awlaki’s transcriber), and her report, “Civil Democratic Islam”

immediately before quoting from another RAND report (unnamed at that point) which he quotes to show the kind of Muslim that Benard herself, and presumably the RAND corporation, Department of Defense and US Government likewise, wish to encourage: “RAND Islam” in short.

And Sheryl Benard really annoys al-Awlaki — he says she’s “a Jew married to an apostate, it can’t get any worse!” And he’s prepared to

mis-quote her, as when he suggests that one of her recommendations is “We should publish and distribute the works of Rand Muslims at subsidized costs” (p. 14) — when Benard had written (under the heading “Support the modernists first”) “Publish and distribute their works at subsidized cost”. But I don’t think there was an intent to deceive there, just a quiet in-joke for his readers — he had quoted the same bullet-point correctly earlier (p. 9) .

Here’s one specific thrust in al-Awlaki’s lecture that I think would merit detailed study on its own:

From that second RAND monograph, “Building Moderate Muslim Networks” (of which Sheryl Benard is second of four co-authors) al-Awlaki extracts what is effectively a catechism for the mode of Islam he opposes. Indeed, he manages to turn the RAND listing of “Characteristics of moderate Muslims” into both a “RAND Muslim” catechism and, via his responses to the questions she posts, into a counter–catechism for his own version of Islam (RAND MG574 pp. 66 – 70).

I believe this double catechism deserves serious consideration.

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I would be failing in my self-imposed duty to ferret signs of end times thinking in jihadist literature if I didn’t mention that there’s at

least one passage in “Battle of the Hearts and Minds” (p. 20) where al-Awlaki not only makes use of the Qur’anic citation I’ve noted before to the effect that while those who oppose him may scheme, Allah is “the best of schemers” (Qur’an 3.54) — he also makes a quiet reference to the (Khorasan and Mahdi-related) tradition of the march of the black flags on Jerusalem:

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