speaks of the spiritual struggle against sin. While that can include literally fighting an enemy, even when it does, it comes with rules that bar indiscriminate killing. Much of the time, however, the word refers to the believer's internal striving for self-improvement. But in the lexicon of Islamist extremists, it has come to connote acts of prodigious violence against governments that are deemed non-Muslim or insufficiently Islamic. Worse, it has come to include the launching of deliberate attacks against innocent civilians—in other words, terrorism. And it includes the most barbaric method of terrorism: suicide bombing.
Clearly, then, the rhetoric of Islamist extremists, even when it uses Muslim terminology, evokes a set of norms and tactics that depart from a traditional understanding of Islam in crucial ways. It points to a worldview that is similar to twentieth-century communism and fascism. These extremists mistreat Islam as a political ideology. In so doing, they echo the ideas of other ideologues who sought a radical reordering of society and the world, achieved through the violent overthrow of the existing order by perpetrating mass violence against civilians as well as traditional combatants.
Indiscriminate violence is a second way that today's Islamist radicalism carries on the legacy of revolutionary Marxism and fascism. Borrowing from those extremist ideologies, it rejects on principle the distinction between combatants and noncombatants in the conduct of war. In bin Laden's own words, spoken to a U.S. reporter in 1998, “we do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets.”4
From the perspective of totalitarian ideologues, societies that reject the call for total revolutionary transformation are fair game. Their governments are considered thoroughly corrupt and evil, as are their ordinary citizens. Wherever the status quo persists, totalitarian extremists deem war a revolutionary necessity, and war on civilians morally justifiable. From fascists in Europe to Maoists in Cambodia, the twentieth century is filled with stark examples. Thus, a morally fanatical premise—that if “the system” is wicked, so is every participant—leads to a morally bankrupt outcome like the 9/11 atrocities. We need only recall the chilling words of Ward Churchill, the radical professor formerly at the University of Colorado, who likened the World Trade Center's doomed office workers to “little Eichmanns.”5
Third, besides adopting Western radicalism's distinctive patterns of thought and speech and its rationale for unrestrained violence, Islamist extremism also shares its macabre celebration of death. Comparing his own ideology with that of the United States not long after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden said, “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two.”6
As a number of observers have noted, the celebration of death was a particularly striking feature of early Western totalitarian movements. A famous instance occurred in 1936, at the University of Salamanca in Spain, when Jose Millan-Astray, a pro-Nazi general, shouted at an opponent, “Viva la Muerte!,” “Long Live Death.”7 One of the mottos of Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party was “Viva la Morte,” which means the same thing in Italian.
Totalitarianism has drawn deeply from the Jacobin notion that mass bloodletting, when unleashed by a revolutionary elite, constitutes a cathartic sacrifice, one that can usher humanity into a utopian future either by wiping away its actual past (Marxist-Leninism) or by returning it to a mythical, uncorrupted past (romantic fascism). More people perished through the totalitarian convulsions of the last century—Hitler's Holocaust, Stalin's rampages, Pol Pot's killing fields, Mao's liquidations of entire classes—than were killed in all the wars of any prior century.
The logic of this extremism and its proponents is horrifyingly clear. Transforming a largely resistant world into their own image required unprecedented measures, including the unleashing of unparalleled bloodshed and terror. But that could only happen if the revolutionary vanguard were released from accountability to all known norms and standards of behavior.
Thus, a fourth trait that radical Islamism borrowed from revolutionary Western ideology is the complete elevation of rule of the “ideologically correct” man above rule of law. This involves not just superseding the rule of law inherent in modern democracy, but also ignoring divine law as interpreted by scholars in traditional Islam. Both these systems of law serve as a check against absolute totalitarian power. That is why both have been flouted by the proponents of Islamist extremism, who reserve for themselves the role of ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.
Simply stated, to define one's enemies to include anyone who does not embrace Al Qaeda's views, including hundreds of millions of Muslims, and then treat them as legitimate military targets, is to assert that bin Laden is the ultimate authority on Islam, the Qur`an, and the divine will. This notion, along with its murderous implications, is motivating an increasing number of Muslim clerics and scholars to speak out against bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In 2007, one of Al Qaeda's intellectual architects sent a fax from Tora Prison in Egypt to the London office of the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat dramatically announcing his defection from its cause. In that letter, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (known as Dr. Fadl) rejected Al Qaeda's violence as contrary to Islam, adding that “there is a form of obedience that is greater than the obedience accorded to any leader, namely, obedience to God and His Messenger.”8
Tellingly, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy and Al Qaeda's chief planner and ideological theorist, responded by issuing a lengthy “rebuttal” to Dr. Fadl's clearly damaging announcement. Yet it is not only bin Laden and al-Qaeda who embraced a totalitarian vision of absolute power. After he seized control of Iran, Khomeini proceeded to advance the revolutionary doctrine that his was the single, ultimate religious and political authority in that country. In an edict released in 1988, Khomeini claimed that “the government is authorized unilaterally to abolish its lawful accords with the people and…to prevent any matter, be it spiritual or material, that poses a threat to its interests” (emphasis added). He went on to make the astonishing declaration that “for Islam, the requirements of government supersede every tenet, including even those of prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca” (emphasis added). Thus did Khomeini subordinate the traditional prescriptions of religion to the absolute dictates of the state.9
Like bin Laden, Khomeini was essentially declaring himself and his movement to be above the law, beyond the reach of traditional religious authority. Highlighting this fact were the enormous posters of Khomeini that hung in public places during his reign. This cult of personality is redolent of the historical totalitarian practice of elevating despots to iconic status. Stalin, Hitler, Mao—each elevated himself into the personification of the dominant ideology. Thus was the cult of the supreme, infallible leader on full display.
Clearly, then, the intellectual and political aspects of violent Islamist extremism mirror Western radicalism. This extreme Islamism reflects Western totalitarian ideology thinly cloaked in Muslim rhetoric. But this raises a crucial question. Is it a coincidence? If not, how and when did this foreign, ideologically driven outlook penetrate the Middle East, distort Islamic teaching, and develop into the threat we are facing today?10
History: Tracing Radical Islamism's Western Roots
The answer may be found by examining the decade that followed World War I. For a number of Muslim-reared intellectuals, it was an especially dark and painful chapter of history. The ignominious collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent assumption of mandate authority over much of the Middle East heartland by Britain and France were viewed as humiliating setbacks to the advance of Islamic civilization. The abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by the Turkish reformer Kemal Ataturk, in the land where proud Ottomans once ruled, was perhaps the crowning indignity of that period.
Post-World War I Germany provides a striking parallel. Like the Ottomans, the Germans lost the war. Many felt humiliated by the defeat and its implications, including the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. It was in the bleak postwar era that Hitler's Nazis blamed Germany's troubles on foreigners and advocated the recovery of a mythical past by empowering a pure Aryan master race that would rule not just Germany but the world. In that same era, in response to a similar sense of crisis, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher. Blaming his civilization's problems on the rise of foreign influences, Banna