[DEBATE] : Al-Qaeda: heirs of Mahatma Gandhi?

[Russell Grinker]

Tim Black 

Al-Qaeda: heirs of Mahatma Gandhi?

As six men are charged with murdering 3,000 on 9/11, Faisal Devji tells an
audience in London that bin Laden has a lot in common with Gandhi.


With charges finally issued against Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged third in
command of al-Qaeda and apparently mastermind of 9/11 'from A to Z', plus
five of his cohorts, the impending trial will see many aspects of al-Qaeda
come under renewed focus. What is it exactly? What was Sheikh Mohammed's
role in 9/11? What was Osama bin Laden's involvement? What will probably not
be mentioned is the extent to which al-Qaeda is indebted to the legacy of
Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian Independence Movement and a worldwide
symbol for peace. Enter Faisal Devji, assistant professor of history at New
School University in New York and author of the excellent Landscapes of the
Jihad, to explain the link between Gandhi and contemporary jihadism. 
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Speaking last night at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Devji
was joined by discussants Akmal Asghar, senior member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir,
Yahya Birt, writer and commentator on Islam, and the chair, Roger Hardy, the
BBC World Service's Middle East and Islamic affairs analyst. Devji's
ostensible focus was on the notion of the caliphate, that is, an Islamic
state under the rule of Sharia law. His purpose, much as it was with the
idea of jihad as discussed in his book, was to examine the use of the
concept of the caliphate to shed light on the nature of contemporary Islamic
militancy. In doing so, a striking affinity between Gandhi and bin Laden
presents itself. For both, the caliphate serves a similar purpose: it allows
them to posit a pan-Islamic ideal, a rallying point over and above material
interest. 
This, Devji argued, is partially due to their analogous historical
junctures. The struggle against the British Empire after the end of the
First World War demanded a concept broad enough, an ideal pluralistic enough
to unify India's disparate Muslim populations. As 'the purest form of
religious movement available at the time' its importance for Gandhi was as a
'supra-political' entity. It offered up a notion with which 'to think
plurality', 'to unite Sunni and Shia'. Central to this was its 'idealism',
that is, its refusal to offer any materialistic or pragmatic gain for
supporters. Particular interests, interests that could cause conflict, were
sacrificed to an idea - a self-denial of material concern echoed darkly in
today's language of militant sacrifice. 'The radical simplicity of Mahatma
Gandhi', Devji surmised, 'is more effective than complex theological
doctrine'. 

It is after another war, the Cold War, that Osama bin Laden inherits and
exploits the radical simplicity of Gandhi's notion of the caliphate. It
provides him with a conceptual framework for a global arena, a pan Islamism
as abstractly universal as the drab triumph of global capitalism is
concrete. But in doing so, it does something else. It completes the
transformation of politics into ethics, says Devji. 
This, Devji is suggesting, was inherent in Gandhi's original use of the
caliphate as an ideal that took precedence over the local interests of
Muslims. In the hands of bin Laden and, indeed, for those who act in the
name of al-Qaeda, the disappearance of political interests is finalised. It
is not a collective movement born of common interest, be it better pay and
conditions or national liberation. It is, rather, a global network bereft of
any local allegiances or territorial objectives. '[T]he particular sites of
the struggles', writes Devji in Landscapes of the Jihad, 'are themselves
unimportant, the territories being subordinated to a larger and even
metaphysical struggle for which they have become merely instrumental'. The
sacrifice of interest Gandhi felt central to any imagining of a plural
Islamic movement, one able to cope with tribal and racial tensions, becomes,
in bin Laden's hands, a sacrifice of all worldly interest. 
What's interesting about Devji's thoughts on al-Qaeda and its adoption and
propagation of a near worldless caliphate are the parallels that can be
drawn with similar responses to a globalised environment. In each, be it
environmentalism or variants of anti-capitalism, individual powerlessness is
transfigured as an ethics of rejection. Confronted by a world that appears
at once corrupt and impervious to an individual's will, a world of global
cash flows and rapid commodity exchange, a market so vast that it's
positively unimaginable, that is to say, a world in which rational agency
seems both absent and impossible, the individual's political act becomes
something else - it becomes a self-contained ethical gesture, a causeless
effect, a symbol. In this sense, martyrdom appears as simply the most
extreme expression of the 'ethical' act. Devji writes: 'Like other global
movements, but perhaps more clearly than them, the jihad displaces politics
by ethics as a way of engaging with its accidental universe.' 
Moreover, there's a sense that Devji is talking as much about the West as he
is the Middle East or the sub continent. In last night's debate at the ICA,
Yahya Birt argued that the post-ideological, post-political nature of
al-Qaeda is actually resisted by those, like Hamas in Palestine, who
al-Qaeda would like to solicit as symbols of its cause. With many Islamist
and jihadist groups persisting with a more traditional nationalistic
politics, al-Qaeda remains, it seems, on the fringes. And yet, as Devji's
conceptual gymnastics show us, al-Qaeda can also appear mainstream: in its
replacement of politics with 'ethics', its focus on global symbolic
'spectaculars' over local or national struggles, and its demand for
recognition of its adherents' alleged suffering and victimhood, al-Qaeda
comes across as a fairly Westernised outfit, sometimes sitting neatly
alongside community groups, environmentalist outfits and other
victim-oriented or global-focused movements of the contemporary period. 
Here, too, Devji's insights into al-Qaeda's embrace of the caliphate are
telling. Where, according to Devji, Gandhi talked up the caliphate in an
attempt to unite disparate groups and push material interests to the
background, al-Qaeda has adopted pro-caliphate arguments in a new
globalised, apparently post-national world - in a similar way that the
leaders of European countries disavow national responsibility by submerging
themselves in the EU monolith. Fundamentally, the radical jihadists' demand
for the reinstitution of the caliphate shows not their strength, but their
weakness and lack of influence, and their adherence to the new politics of
global symbolism over earthly materialism. 

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked. 

Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity by Faisal Devji, is
published by C Hurst and Co.