Afghanistan, Iraq and the jihadists

I was struck by the final point of this book review:  Whither Political Islam? by Mahmood Mamdani Foreign Affairs Jan/Feb 2005 .  Mamdani is reviewing two books, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (2004) by Olivier Roy and The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (2004) by Gilles Kepel.

In his review, he emphasizes a point that I've mentioned before, the centrality of the Afghan resistance war against the Soviet Union for the development of today's jihadist ideology in general, and of Al Qaeda in particular:

Yet in fact, the birth of jihadist Islam, which embraces violence as central to political action, cannot be fully explained without reference to the Afghan jihad and the Western influences that shaped it. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration declared the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and set aside the then-common secular model of national liberation in favor of an international Islamic jihad. Thanks to that approach the Afghan rebels used charities to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers and created the militarized madrassas (Islamic schools) that turned these volunteers into cadres. Without the rallying cause of the jihad, the Afghan mujahideen would have had neither the numbers, the training, the organization, nor the coherence or sense of mission that has since turned jihadist Islam into a global political force.

The influence of the Afghan jihad cannot be overstated. It is evidence that the growth of political Islam has been less linear and more hybrid than is often acknowledged and that it has been driven largely by distinct political projects, such as the "global jihad" or "the West." And properly understanding the development of political Islam is the only way to gauge its prospects.

And that is a part of the risk in the current Iraq War, which is becoming a training ground for jihadists, as Dan Murphy reported recently.  Mamdani writes:

Will political Islam follow the example of Marxism, which spread from the West to fuse with various local nationalisms and create hybrids potent enough to topple regimes?

It is too soon to tell, but anyone who wants to venture a guess should first turn to Iraq, where, more than anywhere else today, the future of political Islam is being cast. Every Middle Eastern movement that opposes the American empire--secular or religious, state or nonstate--is being drawn to Iraq, as if to a magnet, to test out its convictions. More than a year after the U.S. invasion, it has become clear that, by blowing the top off one of the region's most efficient dictatorships, the United States has created a free-for-all for fighters of every hue--Islamist and nationalist, from the homeland and the diaspora--sparking a contest that will influence the course of political Islam for years to come.