Intelfusion posts on the Harvard study of the Persian blogosphere. Found at Jeffreycarr on Twitter.
(I figured that so long as my margin was temporarily messed up on Explorer from Cameron’s text file – why not go with a big visual? In for a penny, in for a pound! Should be ok on Firefox etc.)
Blogfriend and an expert on comparative religious studies, Charles Cameron has graciously offered a paper on comprehending the worldview of radical Islamist terrorists, which I have posted below in it’s entirety. Cameron is formerly the Principal Researcher for the Center for Millenial Studies and is currently writing a book on religious and apocalyptic violence:
A Difficulty in Translation
By Charles Cameron
It is not easy to get behind the veil that a natural hatred for those who attack and maim us draws across our ability to see OBL clearly, nor to understand what kinds of influence might lean some undecided Muslims, perhaps already prone to dislike American influence in world affairs, to move closer to a mindset that’s amenable to jihad.
Yet this in turn is something we have great need of, as Thomas Hegghammer made clear in an article on Jihadi Studies: the obstacles to understanding radical Islam and the opportunities to know it better, published in the Times Literary Supplement on April 2.
Hegghammer asks, rhetorically, “More than six years after 9/11, the study of jihadism is still in its infancy. Why has it taken so long to develop?” and answers himself, “the most important reason is no doubt that the emotional outrage at al-Qaeda’s violence has prevented us from seeing clearly.”
Understanding how the jihadist mindset works is not easily accomplished at a visceral level, without calling on some of our own most treasured memories and associations — as Michael Scheuer, ex-chief of the bin Laden desk at CIA, did in his book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, Revised Edition
The decision of bin Laden and his colleagues, I believe, deserves no less thoughtful consideration than that of the American revolutionaries we revere as heroes. Unfortunately, the West today hears the statements of bin Laden and his colleagues with precisely the same sort of ear with which the British Crown listened to the Americans … This is not to say bin Laden and his al Qaeda colleagues were correct or deserve sympathy; as I said, America will have to use military force to confront, battle, and defeat bin Laden, al Qaeda, and their allies. It is to say, however, that bin Laden has been a worthy enemy … and that those in the United States should to able to have some appreciation for his movement by reflecting on the origins of their own country.
That’s an astonishing “move” — linking bin Laden associatively with the heroes of the American Revolution — but it has the merit, if we will allow it, of helping us view bin Laden through other eyes than those of our own instinctual response to attack. I would like to attempt a similar maneuver here, correlating bon Laden’s visit to the Tora Bora caves with Martin Luther King’s final speech given some 40 years ago on April 3, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. In making this linkage, I feel it necessary to express my strong appreciation for Martin Luther King’s life, which in some respects played a similar role to that of my own mentor, Trevor Huddleston.
I quote King in this context because an insight into his self-identified following in the footsteps of Moses may be transferable into an understanding of bin Laden’s stay in the Tora Bora caves, viewed as an act of piety through pious Muslim eyes. King said
We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
King is consciously aligning himself here with Moses, presenting his own story as the story of Moses receiving the commandments of God, descending from the mountain, and dying within sight of the promised land. It is a powerful rhetorical device, and one whose power we can easily understand when Dr King uses it.
It is also a rhetorical device used, mutatis mutandis, by Osama bin Laden — and our understanding of Martin Luther King’s use of it may allows us to glimpse its force when drawn on within an Islamic context by bin Laden — in words, but even more in deeds. In a post recently at hipbone out loud, I wrote
… this level of insight then allows us to see al-Qaida to some extent as pious Muslims may see it. For though the means bin Laden uses may be critiqued from an Islamic and even a strict Wahhabi point of view – as the recent publication of a devastating book length attack by one of al-Q’s earliest major theological supporters, Sheikh Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, shows – it is still the case that his actions can have different resonance when “read” through Islamic eyes.
When bin Laden, at the lowest point of his jihadist efforts, leaves the Yemen for Afghanistan and betakes himself to the Tora Bora caves, he will inevitably remind some Muslims of the Prophet himself, who at the lowest point of his prophetic vocation left Mecca for Medina and sought sanctuary in a cave — where by the grace of his God, a spider’s web covered the entrance in such a way that his enemies could not see him.
Our natural tendency in the west is to see Tora Bora in terms of military topography, as a highly defensible, almost impregnable warren of caves deep within some of the world’s most difficult mountain territory. What we miss may be precisely what Muslim piety will in some cases see — that bin Laden’s retreat there is symbolically aligned with the “sunna” or life of the Prophet, and thus with the life of Islam itself — in much the same way that Christians, in the words of Thomas a Kempis, may practice “the Imitation of Christ”.
Gratitude where gratitude is due: Lawrence Wright makes this very point eloquently in his book, The Looming Tower. But Wright is rare in the attention he pays to religious markers of this sort, and I am also grateful that we have such scholars as Scott Atran and Michael Vlahos to inform us. Wright’s broader point about bin Laden’s “imitation” of Mohammed fits in with Vlahos’ observations as to the coalescing of contemporary jihadist narratives with those of the sunna, the life of Mohammed and his companions, in his Terror’s Mask: Insurgency within Islam:
Corbin describes the essential interpretive principle or hermeneutic of Islam: “Recite the Quran as if it had been revealed to you alone.” The Arabs and Persians created Hikayat — a “mystical epic genre” — to join “real” History – and one’s own actions within it — to a metaphysically prefigured History promised by Muhammad.
And this is precisely the meat of the discussion which the unnamed sheikh has with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri shortly after 9-11, the videotape of which was released by the Pentagon on December 13, 2001. The sheikh tells bin Laden
And the day will come when the symbols of Islam will rise up and it will be similar to the early days of Al-Mujahadeen and Al-Ansar [lit., the helpers, referring to Muhammed’s immediate followers]. And victory to those who follow Allah. Finally said, if it is the same, like the old days, such as Abu Bakr and Othman and Ali and others [three of the first four successors to Muhammad, called “the Four Righteous or Right-Minded Caliphs“]. In these days, in our times, that it will be the greatest jihad in the history of Islam and the resistance of the wicked people.
Perhaps we can grasp, finally, that it is his walking in the footsteps of his Prophet, as Dr King walked in Moses’ footsteps, which has given bin Laden’s much of the potency of his appeal.
And it is not in munitions and troop movements that the jihadists’ morale is to be found, but in subtle cultural and yes, spiritual details such as these.
Samples from selected particpants in the “Anti-Library” Viral post:
The first is the The Supreme Court Review, 2006. Every Christmas some dear old friends give me the annual edition, published by the University of Chicago, of this series. Reading it enables me to read a little law and get some feel both for what the United States Supreme Court is up to and directions in legal scholarship. It usually takes me the whole year to get around to reading it but I’m always glad I did. And in case you were wondering I read medical books and math books for recreation, too.
So I’m going to winnow it down to books that I really want to read as whole books. And that shame me when my eye falls on them and I realize I haven’t done it. And I’m going to focus on the ones that have been there the longest.In other words, I’m fitting barbs to this innocent gift to turn into a bibliophile’s self-mortification tool.
This is kind of a haphazard tag, but here are my five:
1. Robert Dixon, The Baumgarten Corruption: From Sense to Nonsense in Art and Philosophy (1995)
Untangling the mess around aesthetics in philosophy since the 18th century. Something about which I know nothing, so always a good place to start.
2. Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991)
The evolution of man/machine interaction in warfare.
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Where action is the attraction….
Top Billing! HG’s World –The Aftermath of the “Global War on Terror”
Historyguy99 surveys and comments on the multisite blogospheric discussion of civil-military relations prompted in part, by:
Richard H. Kohn – Coming Soon: A Crisis in Civil-Military Relations at World Affairs Journal ( Hat tip SWJ Blog)
This was the “must-read” article of the week so if you have not read it, here it is.
Found this through Twitter after a few of Gillmor’s big wheel Web 2.0 compadres began “following” me as well as John Robb and others in my blogging circle. An analytical riff by Gillmor on the intersection of social media platforms, high tech business, Dave Winer’s projections for Twitter, conversation among early adapters and so on. While I think there is an underlying discourse in there of content and modalities (“medium is the message”) I gravitated to it initially because of this section:
“Sorry, but it just ain’t so. We’re living in one of the most disruptive and ongoing storms of innovation we’ve ever not fully comprehended in realtime, and you only have to watch the fear and emotion spilling all over the highway to get a sense of the power of what is going on just off-stage. Twitter may appear to be a solution in search of a problem, or an eyeball machine with no business model, or just the latest rendering of high school for the techno-elite – but the panic you can smell means something”
An OODA Loop “mismatch”.
Wilsonianism debated: H-Diplo held a roundtable discussion (PDF) on historian Robert Tucker’s Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914-1917
Right-wing Nuthouse –AMERICA’S SHAME
Rick Moran takes the administration and his fellow conservative bloggers to task on the John Yoo toture memo. I met Rick once, as he lives not all that far up the road from me and he struck me at the time as an eminently reasonable, “common sense” guy and mainstream “Reagan Republican”. His post only confirms my opinion.
Nick Carr – Follow the neurons
On neuromarketing.
In from the Cold – The Real Obstacle to Missile Defense in Europe
Former Spook on the liberal Democrats vs. NATO on missile defense.
That’s it!
John Robb posted the first part of a working paper that extends John Boyd’s Conceptual Spiral into Open Source environments. I want to draw attention to the third potential solution to catastrophic failure ( result of mismatch of rigid, hierarchical, bureaucracy with rapidly evolving, chaotic, environment) that Robb offers in his conclusion:
C) Decentralized decision making via a market mechanism or open source framework. This approach is similar to process “B” detailed above, except that a much wider degree of diversity of outlook/orientation within the contributing components is allowed/desired. The end result is a decision making process where multiple groups make contributions (new optimizations and models). As these contributions are tested against the environment, we will find that most of these contributions will fail. Those few that work are then widely copied/replicated within components. The biggest problem (opportunity?) with this approach is that its direction is emergent and it is not directed by a human being (the commander)
Some preliminary research in small worlds network theory indicates that very noisy environments will have emergent rule-sets. Human social systems are less tolerant of extended periods of chaos than are other kinds of systems because there are caloric and epidemiological “floors” for humanocentric environments that, if breached, result in massive population die-offs, emigration and radical social reordering. History’s classic example of this phenomena was the Black Death, which created a general labor shortage that fatally undermined European feudalism. Because of this, military forces whether of state orientation or irregulars would be forced to react cooperatively and adaptively, however indirectly, toward a consensus in order to maintain at least the minimal economic flows that permit their military operations to be sustained.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
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