Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi Question and Answer

The Shamukh al-Islam forums have initiated an “Open Interview” with Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. For those unfamiliar with online jihadi interviews, the usual format is for readers to post questions on the forum and then the person being interviewed posts his responses, normally all at once after many questions have been posted. To process the questions, the Shamukh administration has started a separate forum called, “You Ask and the Shaykh Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi Answers,” where members can post questions that will only be visible to al-Maqdisi, the member who posted it, and the administration. However, the administration has indicated that al-Maqdisi’s answers will be public.

Even though the period to ask questions will only be a week, it may take several weeks for al-Maqdisi to answer the questions. We will continue to monitor for when he releases his answers.

Maqdisi invokes McCants

The al-Maqdisi controversy has taken a very interesting new turn. In a statement posted his website earlier this week, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi cited several Western scholars, including Dutch al-Maqdisi specialist Joas Wagemakers and Jihadica founder Will McCants, to make the point that his enemies understand him better than his detractors in the jihadi community do.

The statement, entitled “Among the Methods Used by the Infidels to Plot Against the Call and the Preachers, and shared by many Ignorants and Fools,” represents another attempt by al-Maqdisi to rid himself of accusations that he has moderated his position on jihad. For previous attempts see here and here.

What’s distinctive about this statement is its frequent references to Western academics and liberal Arab commentators, which al-Maqdisi uses variously to discredit his critics and to boost his own credentials. Al-Maqdisi first accuses his critics of running the errand of the infidels by implementing a strategy of discrediting ideologues originally proposed by the “Crusader RAND corporation“. (I am not sure exactly which RAND study al-Maqdisi has in mind here – could it be this one?)

As evidence that this strategy is bound to fail, al-Maqdisi then references Joas Wagemakers’s Sentinel article about al-Maqdisi as a counterterrorism asset:

“The understanding of our enemies and their readings of my publications, have yielded results that differ completely from the calls of those inexperienced people and their understanding. For example, the theorists of the Combating Terrorism Center in the US Military, in the 6th issue of their magazine, studied the possibility of exploiting Al-Maqdisi to strike at jihad and the mujahidin (as they have exploited the leaderships of the Egyptian Islamic Group). The conclusion was that such an attempt will lead to failure because of [Maqdisi’s] steadfastness and the firmness of his positions. This is what the enemies said about me and distributed on the Internet.”

To underscore his jihadi credentials, al-Maqdisi then cites the Militant Ideology Atlas edited by Will McCants:

“[Then there is the] Militant Ideology Atlas by the Combating Terrorism Center at the West Point Military Academy, which trains officers in the American Army, and which is led by the retired general, Wayne Downing, who was the commander of American Special Operations. It concluded that: ‘Al-Maqdisi is the most influential living Islamic thinker in Islamic ideology amongst jihadi groups.’ [Note that it says] the jihadist groups, and not those that delay and reject. Credit is to the testimony of enemies.”

Finally al-Maqdisi cites two articles by liberal Arab commentators: The first is a 2004 article by the Saudi ex-jihadi Mishari al-Dhaydi entitled “The Sheikhs of Violence are numerous … and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi remains the most important”; The second was written by Tariq al-Humayyid (now editor of al-Sharq al-Awsat) following al-Maqdisi’s July 2005 appearance on al-Jazeera.

This is not the first time that McCants and CTC West Point are quoted by prominent jihadi ideologues. Ayman al-Zawahiri has mentioned the article “Stealing al-Qaida’s Playbook” by Will McCants and Jarret Brachman not once but twice (once in a video and once in the Exoneration). One of the article’s suggestions is that the pietist salafi current known as madkhalism represents a potential ideological counterweight to jihadi salafism. Al-Zawahiri seized upon this point to discredit his critics.

More recently, Abu Humam al-Athari cited the Militant Ideology Atlas extensively in a book entitled “The Exalted Declaration of the Justness of Our Shaykh  al-Maqdisi” which seeks to defend al-Maqdisi from the recent criticism (hat tip: Vahid). The book includes the graphic of the CTC coin, and the ideological influence map (see pp. 94-95) from the original report.

These references are above all a great compliment to the CTC in general and Will McCants in particular. It is perhaps the best possible testimony of the quality and incisiveness of their research. I would be lying if I said I am not envious of their being cited by jihadi legends.

On a deeper level there is something slightly disturbing about academic publications entering the discourse of the actors themselves and influencing inter-jihadi debates. The Internet makes such dynamics inevitable, and we have seen several entertaining examples of the “hall of mirror effect” in recent years. However, when this happens at a high level, as on that of al-Zawahiri and al-Maqdisi, it becomes more serious. The irony here is that the CTC’s publications are essentially having the unintended consequence of prolonging the political life of a leading jihadi ideologue.

Q&A in Bellum

I am travelling this week so coverage of the forums will be limited. In the meantime you can read this Q&A with yours truly in Bellum, a very interesting blog affiliated with the Stanford Review. The jihadis have been doing Q&As for ages, so it was about time we here at Jihadica did one.

Oslo Workshop Summary (part 2)

Continued from here.

The fourth panel on “networks, strategy and ideology” started off with a paper by CTC’s Scott Helfstein on the dynamics of terrorist networks. Helfstein has examined six key al-Qaida plots using network analysis tools to find out why certain individuals come to play central roles in attack networks, and how attack networks change over time. He showed that people’s centrality was a function of personal attributes (skills, education) and their function in the network (weapons acquisition etc). Helfstein is one of a small but growing number of American political scientists who are applying formal methods to the theoretically starved field of terrorism studies with very interesting results (other scholars include CTC-affiliated Princeton professor Jake Shapiro).

Bill Braniff, also from CTC, presented a very interesting model for thinking about al-Qaida’s future strategic evolution. He identified five scenarios: 1) persistence (no-change), 2) horizontal escalation (concerted geographic spread), 3) vertical escalation (dedicated prioritization of mega-terrorism), 4) pursuit of loose affiliations (extending resources to Islamist groups without extending their brand-name or demanding strict adherence to their ideology), and 5) the diversification of core activities (conducting activities such as governance, da’wa, and social service provision under the al-Qa’ida banner in a addition to waging jihad).

FFI’s Petter Nesser then talked about the ideological evolution of jihadi community in Europe. He showed how the ideological and strategic dilemmas facing jihadis in the diaspora differ from those faced by militants in the Muslim world. He also argued that jihadism in Europe has undergone three distinct phases of ideological evolution. A first phase (mid- or late 1990s), different local and internationalist jihadi trends co-existed in relative harmony. In the second phase (late 1990s-2003), Europe’s jihadis were torn between “classical” and “global jihadism”. The third phase, triggered by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, saw the emergence of a new generation that increasingly adopted al-Qaida’s global jihadi identity.

The fifth panel included two Maghreb-focused papers and one on suicide bombings. Jean-Pierre Filiu analysed the formation and evolution of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and asked: how Maghribi is AQIM? Not very, he argued, because AQIM has essentially become an Algerian outfit with a a Saharan branch. This was despite a considerable potential for cooperation between the Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian and Libyan jihadi communities, and despite the fact that the non-Algerian groups have historically been more integrated into al-Qaida.

Hanna Rogan presented very interesting quantitative study of AQIM’s attack patterns (see her Sentinel piece for details). She notably showed that the frequency and geographical reach of AQIM’s attacks had decreased markedly in 2008 after a spike in 2007. This suggests to me that the initial momentum gained from GSPC’s late 2006 alliance with al-Qaida is wearing off.

The third paper was presented by yours truly and looked at patterns of suicide bombings and jihadi ideologies. I argued that jihadi groups whose primary enemy is non-Muslim (irredentist or pan-Islamist groups) use suicide bombings much more frequently than groups whose primary enemy is Muslim (revolutionary or moral vigilante groups). There are in fact extremely few cases of suicide attacks by revolutionary groups (GIA, GSPC, EIJ, GI etc), despite their being jihadi salafi and very violent. To me, this shows that Robert Pape is less wrong than most terrorism/Islamism scholars think. I don’t believe literal occupation causes suicide bombings, but I think there exists a mechanism whereby people fight harder when they are confronting outsiders. The paper predictably generated a very heated debate.

The sixth panel focused on the Gulf and began with a presentation by Stephane Lacroix on apolitical Salafism (sometimes referred to as pietist salafism or Madkhalism) and its potential role as a counterweight to jihadism. Saudi Arabia and other countries (especially Jordan, Libya and Algeria) are promoting it as such, so this is a question with deep policy implications. Lacroix highlighted a crucial dilemma: On the one hand, apolitical salafis fiercely oppose global jihadism and preach absolute loyalty to governments. (Lacroix notably argued that the absence of terrorist attacks in France in recent years is partly due to the strength of apolitical salafism in France). On the other hand, apolitical salafis are socially extremely conservative and sectarian, and tend to isolate themselves from society around them. Politics is indeed not the only way to militancy; extreme puritanism or apocalypticism may also produce violence, as illustrated by the 1979 Mecca siege.

The second paper, by Sciences Po PhD candidate Asiem El Difraoui, offered an excellent analysis of al-Qaida’s propaganda dilemmas in Saudi Arabia. El Difraoui, a leading expert on jihadi visual media, argued that al-Qaida in the Kingdom had failed to mobilise Saudis for global jihad, in large part because the Saudi state itself had considerable “jihadi legitimacy” as a former supporter of jihad in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In the last paper Norwegian Sciences Po PhD candidate Audun Wiig spoke about Jundullah, the Sunni militant group active in the south of Iran. This was in my view the best presentation of the entire conference. Jundullah is very poorly known, but Wiig has dug up a wealth of new information from Baluch blogs and regional media (though not from fieldwork, which remains impossible in Iranian Baluchistan). The discussion was even more fascinating, with Mariam Abou Zahab contributing insights on Baluch nationalism on the Pakistani side of the border.

In the final discussion the “bosses” reconvened to discuss approaches to the study of jihadi movements. There was some disagreement on the need to contextualise terrorist groups and on what “contextualization” means. This no doubt reflected differences in the purpose and focus of the three institutions; Kepel, representing a general Middle East Studies community, argued for breadth, while Sawyer, representing a more specialised institution, emphasised depth. Lia, also coming from a specialised community, leant toward the latter position, on the basis that jihadi groups are often small and not always representative of broad societal trends. However there was agreement on the value of area knowledge and primary sources, elements that have long been somewhat lacking in the terrorism literature.

I should mention that all the papers will be published in an FFI report later this spring. I will keep you posted.