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Charles Cameron has been guest blogging here in a series on radical Islamism and terrorism. A former researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, his most recent essay, an analysis of the powerpoint presentation of Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, appeared in the Small Wars Journal.

This post is a follow up to the previous Guest Post: On al-Awlaki: Constants on the Path of Jihad:

RAND Islam, and CIA Islam too…

by Charles Cameron

i

I came across a phrase today that al-Awlaki originated, and it intrigued me. The phrase was “RAND Islam” and it has a sibling, “RAND Muslims”. My source for the first term is an interview al-Awlaki gave to a California Muslim news journal, InFocus, from which I’ve extracted the following:

IF: One of your most recent lectures is titled “Battle of the Hearts & Minds,” in which you talk about lies and propaganda. Would you briefly summarize the point of this lecture for our readers?IA: There has been a plethora of reports from governmental and non-governmental sources on how to defeat what they perceive as the Islamic danger. For example RAND Corporation, which is a think tank affiliated to the Pentagon, has issued a couple of reports on this. They have openly stated that they are unhappy with the way Islam is and want to change it. They then proceed to delineate the characteristics of their version of Islam and how to promote it. They also describe the type of Muslims that they think might be willing to prescribe to this “Rand Islam.” Because they understand that the masses in the Muslim world have lost trust in the US, they state that the US hand in this effort should be hidden and that their Muslim stooges should be in the forefront.

IF: What tips would you give to Muslims living in the U.S. to win this battle of the hearts and minds?

IA: Muslims need to be able to tell the difference between the real Islam and the RAND Islam and they need to know who their enemy is. Living in the West, they also have a responsibility of refuting such attempts of changing the religion of Allah.

The second can be found in the lecture series titled “Battle of the Hearts and Minds” about which al-Awlaki was questioned in the IA
interview excerpted above, eg on p. 19:

We talked about some of the recommendations that were in the Rand report and how to deal with this issue of separating between the modernists or the Rand Muslims, and the extremists or the real Muslims, true Muslims.

and p. 25:

So it is our duty just as they are intending to change our religion and promote falsehood and to turn us to Rand Muslims, we need
to promote Al Haq.

And the phrase “RAND Islam” has a cousin,”CIA Islam” — which was applied, curiously enough, to al-Awlaki himself by a one-time rival,
Al-Faisal, as Brian Fishman noted in a post on Jihadica yesterday.

Al-Faisal’s lecture on al-Awlaki is listed as “CIA Islam – Sheikh Faisal’s Takfeer of Anwar Awlaki” on www.archive.org. On the recording, Faisal explains that his lecture is about a preacher named “Anwar” from the Masjid al-Rabat in San Diego. He then proceeds to play sections of Awlaki’s lecture for his audience before refuting its points. The voice on the tape seems to be that of Anwar al-Awlaki.

ii

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.

iii

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:

 So they are failing, and Miss Bernard and her cronies at Rand and Pentagon should know that their plan would fail because Allah is the best of planners! And that the fundamentalists and extremists, whom they despise, are not only going to win in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they will continue their march, until they drag your people, the Jews, out of the Holy Land and plant their black banners on the roof tops of Jerusalem.

iv

The most serious issue raised by this first, hasty skimming of al-Awlaki’s “Battle of the Hearts and Minds” is that of the impact of US (“kufr”) attempts to turn Islam away from the jihadist path (to use a shortcut phrase for now) on the sort of da’wa (preaching :: da’wa or “call” :: recruitment) that al-Awlaki is doing.

If he had read the rest of the paragraph he quoted from US News, he’d have found the words “U.S. officials say they are wary of being drawn into a theological battle” — and so they should be — imagine for a moment the response if the Saudis poured “tens of millions of dollars” into an attempt to remake Christianity or the US Constitution in a manner more to their liking… by means both overt and covert.

The analogy is not exact by any means — the US is attempting to bring acts of horrific violence to a close, the Saudis have no comparable need to change Christianity or the Constitution — but it may give one a sense of the emotion that a well-placed description of US attempts to support “RAND” — ie “moderate” — Islam might draw forth from impressionable young believer…

v

Given time, I could go on. In effect, this post is either a note to myself that further research would be profitable, or a plea for further
research on the part of others, perhaps at RAND — or CIA?

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 4:55 pm and is filed under academia, al qaida, America, analytic, arab world, Charles Cameron, cultural intelligence, extremists, ideas, intellectuals, IO, islamic world, islamist, national security, non-state actors, politics, primary loyalties, propaganda, psychology, Religion, social science, terrorism, Theology, theory, totalitarianism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.