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Transnational Islamic networks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2011

Imtiaz Gul
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Abstract

Besides a surge in terrorist activities, events following the 11 September terrorist attack on the United States have raised a new challenge for the world: the emergence of transnational Islamic networks, predominantly influenced by organizations such as Ikhwan al Muslimeen (the Muslim Brotherhood) and Al Qaeda, which are helping to spread a particular religious ideology across the globe and are also having an impact on pre-existing groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This article gives an overview of the role of Islamist networks and their influence, drawn from Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, in South and South-west Asia and the Afghanistan–Pakistan region in particular. It also explains how local like-minded outfits have used Al Qaeda's anti-Western jargon to recruit foot soldiers and enlist support within their society, besides serving as financial conduits for the radical Wahabite/Salafi reformists.

Type
Socio-political and Humanitarian Environment
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 92 , Issue 880: Conflict in Afghanistan I , December 2010 , pp. 899 - 923
Copyright
Copyright © International Committee of the Red Cross 2011

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References

1 Cyril Glasse, The New Encyclopedia of Islam, Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 2001, p. 432.

2 Aziz Ahmad, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1964, p. 189.

3 Barelvi is a movement of Sunni Islam originating in the Indian subcontinent. The Barelvi movement was started in 1880 to defend contemporary traditionalist Islamic beliefs and practices from the criticisms of reformist movements such as the Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith. This movement in British India was shaped by the writings of Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi (1856–1921).

4 Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., London, 1994, p. 31.

5 Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949) was an Egyptian political and religious leader. He was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the pioneers of today's Islamic revival.

6 The term ‘Salafi’ is generally used to refer to the first three generations of Muslims: the Sahaba (Companions of Muhammad), the Tabi'un (Followers), and the Tabi' al-Tabi'in (Those after the Followers). Salafis view these three generations as examples of how Islam should be practised. The principal tenet of Salafism is that Islam was perfect and complete during the days of Muhammad and his Sahaba, but that undesirable innovations have been added over later centuries, owing to materialist and cultural influences. The term ‘Salafism’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘Wahhabism’.

7 Primary sources for the study of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat are: Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1963; and Kalim Bahadur, The Jamaat-i-Islami of Pakistan: Political Thought and Political Action, Chetana Publications, New Delhi, 1977. Maududi (1903–1979) was a Sunni journalist, theologian, Muslim revivalist leader, political philosopher, and major Islamist thinker. He was also a prominent political figure in Pakistan.

8 O. Roy, above note 4, p. 35. Sayyid Qutub (1906–1966) was an Egyptian writer, educator, and religious leader. His writings about Islam, and especially his call for a revolution to establish an Islamic state and society, greatly influenced the Islamic resurgence movements of the twentieth century.

9 Salman, Aneela, ‘Religious ideology and lethality: does religious sect have an effect on the lethality of a terrorist organization?’, in Criterion, Vol. 5, no. 3, July–September 2010Google Scholar, available at: http://criterionpk.com/2011/02/religious-ideology-and-lethality-does-religious-sect-have-an-effect-on-the-lethality-of-a-terrorist-organization/ (last visited 9 March 2011).

10 O. Roy, above note 4, p. 2

11 Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2004, p. 19.

12 A Deobandi is a person who follows the methodology of the Deoband Islamic movement. The movement began at Darul Uloom Deoband (a madrassa, or seminary) in Deoband, India, where its foundation was laid on 30 May 1866.

13 Imtiaz Gul, The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan's Lawless Frontier, Penguin, London, June 2010.

14 Such as SSP, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawah.

15 Including the defunct Tehrike Jafria Pakistan.

16 Ayman al-Zawahiri, as transcribed in BBC, ‘Excerpts: Al-Zawahiri video comments’, 27 July 2006, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5220204.stm (last visited 14 January 2011).

17 Ikhwanweb, the Muslim Brotherhood's official English website, available at: http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=813&ref=search.php (last visited 9 March 2011). See also Leiken, Robert S. and Brooke, Steven, ‘The moderate Muslim Brotherhood’, in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 86, No. 2.Google Scholar

18 Sharon Otterman, Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt's Parliamentary Elections, Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder, 1 December 2005, available at: http://www.cfr.org/egypt/muslim-brotherhood-egypts-parliamentary-elections/p9319 (last visited 9 March 2011).

19 O. Roy, above note 4, p. 111.

20 Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story Of Radical Islam, I. B. Tauris, London, 2004, pp. 66–67.

21 Marwan Bishara, ‘Islam can not always be blamed: it appears Islam is not an appropriate scapegoat after all’, Ikhwanweb, 19 January 2010, available at: http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=22699 (last visited 14 January 2011).

22 See M. Sageman, above note 11.

23 Christopher M. Blanchard, Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology, CRS Report for Congress, 16 November 2004, p. 3, available at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL32759.pdf (last visited 9 March 2011). Besides bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, the Iraqi cleric Abu Musab al Zarqawi was the third most revered Al Qaeda figure. Praised by bin Laden as the ‘prince of al-Qaeda in Iraq’, he was later killed in a US air strike near Baghdad in 2006. See Jayshree Bajoria, ‘al-Qaeda (a.k.a. al-Qaida, al-Qa'ida)’, Council on Foreign Relations, updated on 30 December 2009, available at: http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-organizations/al-qaeda-k-al-qaida-al-qaida/p9126 (last visited 9 March 2011).

24 Fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden and others in Al Qaeda, published in al-Quds al-Arabi, 23 February 1998, as quoted in Wiktorowicz, Quintan, ‘The new global threat: transnational Salafis and jihad’, in Middle East Policy, Vol. 8, No. 4, December 2001, p. 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 A. Salman, above note 9, p. 73.

26 O. Roy, above note 4, p. 112.

27 Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator for Counterterrorism/Ambassador-at-Large, US Counterterrorism Strategy in Yemen, US Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, 8 September 2010, available at: http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/rm/2010/147296.htm (last visited 14 January 2011).

28 A. Salman, above note 9, quoting Joseph Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah's Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Program, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2006.

29 Alagha, above note 28.

30 Council on Foreign Relations, backgrounder on Hamas, 27 August 2009, available at: http://www.cfr.org/israel/hamas/p8968 (last visited 22 February 2011).

31 Maverick Report, ‘Hekmatyar advises Pakistan, Iran not to befriend US at cost of Afghan nation’, 11 September 2010, available at: http://www.maverickpakistanis.com/?p=8513 (last visited 22 February 2011).

32 Mohmmad Amir Rana, A to Z of Jihadi Organizations in Pakistan, Mashal Books, Lahore, 2004.

33 Ibid.

34 See Sikand, Yoginder, ‘Changing course of Kashmiri struggle: from national liberation to Islamist jihad?’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2001, p. 219Google Scholar.

35 Ibid.

36 Metcalf, Barbara, ‘Travelers’ tales in the Tablighi Jamaat', in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 588, July 2003, pp. 136–148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Ibid., p. 137.

38 Ibid., p. 138. One can gauge the Tablighi Jamaat's pull from the fact that, despite being a moderate and liberal Muslim, Farooq Leghari, a former president of Pakistan, attended the Tablighi Jamaat's annual congregation in the mid-1990s while he was still in office. Another extreme example was General Mehmood Ahmed, a former chief of the ISI, who joined the Tablighi Jamaat after his forced retirement in October 1999 and spends weeks every year in promoting its cause. A number of national cricketers, including the former captain Inzamul Haq, Mushtaq Ahmed, and Yousuf Yohanna, are also currently active members of Tablighi Jamaat; Yohanna, in fact, converted from Christianity to Islam because of the Tablighi Jamaat and now uses Muhammad Yousuf as his full Muslim name. The popular pop singers Junaid Jamshed, Ali Haider, and Najam Sheeraz are a few more examples of how Tablighi Jamaat can influence individuals usually considered areligious; at the height of their singing careers these three prolific artists fell under the influence of the Tablighi Jamaat and now, besides performing either recitations of religious songs and hymns or, in the case of Jamshed, pursuing other business such as branded menswear, they preach Islam. Jamshed also conducts TV programmes from the Tablighi perspective.

39 Waqar Gillani, ‘Revolution, not quite’, in News International, 1 November 2009, available at: http://jang.com.pk/thenews/nov2009-weekly/nos-01-11-2009/dia.htm#2 (last visited 27 October 2010).

40 Mayaram, Shail, ‘Hindu and Islamic transnational religious movements’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 1, 3–9 January 2004, p. 85Google Scholar.

41 Interviews with Tablighi activists, Islamabad, July 2010.

42 M. A. Rana, above note 32, p. 371.

43 Sufism is a mystical-ascetic approach to Islam that seeks to find divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God. Sufism and Islamic law are usually considered to be complementary, although Sufism has been criticized by Salafi for what they see as an unjustified religious innovation. Another name for a Sufi is Dervish.

44 The primary source for this section is Imtiaz Gul, The Unholy Nexus: Pakistan–Afghan Relations under the Taliban, Vanguard, Lahore, 2002, p. 128; and Imtiaz Gul, The Most Dangerous Place, Penguin, London, 2010.

45 The organization's headquarters in Muridke, a small town about 30 km away from Lahore, is a sprawling complex spread over 160 acres with a residential colony, two model schools – one each for girls and boys – and a university, Al-Dawat-al-Irshad. The students attending the university also learn horse-riding. Hundreds of them graduate every year, and hundreds more are swelling their ranks, essentially those driven by the Lashkar-e-Taiba's ideology of ‘leaving and living for God’.

46 Author's meeting with anonymous official in Islamabad, August 2010.

47 Particularly since the late 1990s, Jamaat-ud-Dawah (and formerly Lashkar-e-Taiba) has been a major irritant in India's relations with Pakistan. India dubs the Wahabi outfit as the ‘Pakistan army's first line of defence’, which it says has carried out terrorist attacks not only in Kashmir but elsewhere in India. As far back as 1998, Lashkar-e-Taiba had launched and eventually executed the concept of fedayeen (suicide squad) attacks. Several such strikes, including one on the Indian Parliament in December 2001 and the almost simultaneous multiple bloody acts of violence in Mumbai on 26 November 2008, bore the hallmarks of such fedayeen attacks. In fact, the November 2008 strikes, including those on the Taj and Oberoi Trident hotels in Mumbai – eleven in all – once again shook the entire region. The three-day carnage was allegedly the work of several attackers who had travelled from the port city of Karachi in Pakistan. These acts of terror provided Indian officials and the media with another opportunity to point a finger at the ISI. The electronic media in India whipped up a frenzy that aroused fears of yet another war between the two now nuclear-armed nations. On 10 December 2008, India formally requested the United Nations Security Council to designate Jamaat-ud-Dawah as a terrorist organization. The following day, the Security Council imposed sanctions on Jamaat-ud-Dawah, declaring it a global terrorist group. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the chief of Jamaat-ud-Dawah, announced that his group would challenge the sanctions imposed on it in all forums. Pakistan's government also banned Jamaat-ud-Dawah on the same day and issued an order to seal the Jamaat-ud-Dawah offices in all four provinces, as well as in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The United States likewise designated Jamaat-ud-Dawah as a foreign terrorist group posing a threat to its security. In January 2009, the Jamaat-ud-Dawah spokesperson, Abdullah Muntazir, stressed that the group did not have global jihadist aspirations and would welcome a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir issue. He also publicly disowned the Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and Zarrar Shah, who have both been accused of being the masterminds behind the November 2008 Mumbai attacks.

48 Proof of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan – and of the close association between the Afghan Taliban and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan – came in early June 2008, when eighteen militants belonging to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan fell to air strikes by Coalition forces on militant positions in Afghanistan's Helmand province. All eighteen were from Makeen village in the Waziristan Agency. Ruthless attacks on Pakistani military and government targets offer ample evidence that, while publicly Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan wants to counter US hegemony, it also wants to keep Pakistani forces on tenterhooks. It has furthermore joined hands with Al Qaeda to stage devastating suicide bombings since mid-2007 – killing government, military and intelligence officials, and women and children across the board – which has turned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan into a major source of instability, besides the anti-Shia radical Lashkare Jhangvi. Pakistan's security establishment treats Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan as its public enemy no. 1 for its string of vicious attacks all over Pakistan. The United States also formally designated it as a foreign terrorist organization. Daniel Benjamin, the Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism, formally announced this at a press briefing, thereby making Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan the latest addition to a list of forty-seven such organizations banned under Executive Order 13224. See Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator for Counterterrorism/Ambassador-at-Large, Briefing on U.S. Government's Continued Efforts to Disrupt and Dismantle Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, Washington, DC, 1 September 2010, available at: http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/rm/2010/146597.htm (last visited 3 January 2011).

49 Ibid. Benjamin also described the duo of Hakimullah Mehsud and Waliur Rehman – the two top leaders of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan – as ‘dedicated terrorists who are attempting to extend their bloody reach into the American homeland’.

50 About a week after the deadly 30 December suicide attack on the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan, a video showed Hakimullah Mehsud sitting to the left of Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian doctor who ended up killing seven CIA officials, including the base chief, a mother of three young children, five men, and young woman. The emergence of the video instantly turned Hakimullah Mehsud into the CIA's prime target – if he was not already – because his group had apparently first hosted al-Balawi and then facilitated his onward journey into Afghanistan to hook up with the CIA.

51 Mariam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy, Islamist Networks: The Afghan–Pakistan Connection, Hurst & Co, London, 2004, p. 9.

52 Karagiannis, Emmanuel, ‘Political Islam in Uzbekistan: Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami’, in Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 2, 2006, p. 266CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Following the 7 July 2005 London bombings, for instance, the British government announced its intention to ban the organization but gave up the idea. According to The Independent, Tony Blair put the ban on hold ‘after warnings from police, intelligence chiefs and civil liberties groups’ that it is a non-violent group, and that driving it underground could backfire. See Morris, Nigel, ‘PM forced to shelve Islamist group ban’, in The Independent, 18 July 2006Google Scholar.

54 E. Karagiannis, above note 52, p. 264.

55 Kohlmann provides an excellent overview of how charities grew in the shadow of the Afghan jihad and became critical links for funnelling funds to jihadist networks in the region. Evan F. Kohlmann, The role of Islamic charities in international terrorist recruitment and financing, Working Paper No. 2006/7, Danish Institute for International Studies, available at: http://www.wepapers.com/Papers/109824/The_Role_of_Islamic_Charities_in_International_Terrorist_Recruitment_and_Financing (last visited 9 March 2011).

56 See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (The 9/11 Commission), The 9/11 Commission Report, 22 July 2004, p. 170, available at: http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/index.htm (last visited 9 March 2011). According to a US Justice Department brief on the subject, Al-Fadl ‘understood from conversations with Bin Laden and others in al Qaeda that the charities would receive funds that could be withdrawn in cash and a portion of the money used for legitimate relief purposes and another portion diverted for al Qaeda operations. The money for al Qaeda operations would nevertheless be listed in the charities’ books as expenses for building mosques or schools or feeding the poor or the needy'. United States District Court Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, United States of America v. Enaam M. Arnaout, Government's Evidentiary Proffer Supporting the Admissibility of Co-Conspirator Statements, Case No. 02 CR 892, 31 January 2003 p. 25. Standing orders were left by bin Laden to keep all transactions involving the charitable groups in cash only; by this method, these NGOs were manipulated as a secret laundry to make Al Qaeda's financial network virtually invisible. The charities would then create false documentation for the benefit of unwary donors, purportedly showing that the money had actually been spent on orphans or starving refugees. According to some former employees of these organizations, more than 50% of their total funding was secretly diverted directly to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 171.

57 United States of America v. Enaam M. Arnaout, above note 56, pp. 28–29.

58 ‘La formation des volontaires pour le djihad en camps d'entrainement’, confidential memorandum issued by UCLAT (French Central Anti-Terrorism Unit), 27 December 1996.

59 January 1996 CIA report on ‘International Islamic NGOs and links to terrorism’, p. 13. See also United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, United States of America v. Soliman S. Biheiri, Affidavit by Senior Special Agent David Kane (Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Homeland Security), Case No. 03-365-A, 14 August 2003, p. 2.

60 Coll, Steve and LeVine, Steve, ‘Global network provides money, haven’, in Washington Post, 3 August 1993, p. A1Google Scholar.

61 Pasternak, Judy and Braun, Stephen, ‘Emirates looked other way while al Qaeda funds flowed’, in Los Angeles Times, 20 January 2002Google Scholar.

62 Most of this information comes from Gul, Unholy Nexus, above note 44, chapter on ‘Financial conduits for al Qaeda’.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

66 CIA Report on ‘International Islamic NGOs and links to terrorism’, January 1996, p. 4. See also United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, above note 59, p. 2.