The Method of Mohmmad: The Key to Jihadist Ideology and Strategy – A Reminder from Lawrence Auster
The American attention span is short. Tired of war, tired of the putting up with restrictions on our basic freedom, tired of listening to the tiresome endless rhetoric about the war, about the election, the cabinet nominations, Americans are beginning to drift back into a state of complacency and complaint. Here is a reminder of against whom we are fighting and why they do what they do.
What Do People Believe About the War?
There is still no unified concept of why we are at war. People on the anti-war left believe that Al-Qaeda attacked us because we are imperialist, or we are racist, or because we don’t do enough for Third-World hunger. Those on the mostly pro-war right, especially President Bush, believe that Islamists hate us for our sins, and the right believes that they hate us for our virtues. Both sides “commit the same narcissistic fallacy of thinking” that the Islamist holy war against the West revolves solely around ourselves, around the moral drama of our goodness or our wickedness, rather than having something to do with Islam itself.
Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, Mary Habek, a military historian at Yale University, said that the various jihadist groups base their war against non-Moslems on the Islamic sacred writings, particularly the SIRA, which, unlike the Koran, tells the Prophet’s life in chronological sequence. Using Mohammad as their model, the jihadis live and think and act within the paradigms provided by the stages of Mohammed’s political and military career. This internally driven logic of Islam, and not any particular provocation, real or imagined, by some outside power, is the key to understanding why the jihadis do what they do.
KEY POINT: the paradigms of the Sira
1) The first stage or paradigm: Mohammad’s early life in Mecca, a non-Islamic society where Moslems are powerless and oppressed.
2) The second paradigm: the hejira, the escape from Mecca to Medina, a new place that is more pure and where a true Islamic society and state can be founded.
After this, the hejira, the Islamic state is formed:
3) The third paradigm kicks in. This is jihad, organized violence against non-Moslems for the purpose of building up the wealth and power of the Islamic community and bringing the world under a single Islamic state.
Jihadists conceive and rationalize their own activities in terms of paradigms. When Osama bin Laden left Saudi Arabia for Sudan, when he left Sudan for Afghanistan, he saw those journeys as corresponding with the hejira, leaving a corrupt land, where he was powerless, for a more pure Islamic place from which jihad could be waged.
KEY POINT: Methods to waging jihad- the Method of Mohammad
In addition to the three paradigms, there are three basic approaches to waging jihad called collectively the Method of Mohhamad. The various Islamist groups respectively use this toward the ultimate goal of establishing the world-wide rule of Islam. The jihadis’ choice of method depends on whom they see as their immediate enemy in that larger struggle; each jihadist group is defined by which of these methods it adopts.
1) Method One: fight the Near Enemy prior to fighting the Far Enemy. The Near Enemy is anyone inside Islamic lands, whether it is an occupier or someone who has taken away territory that used to be Islamic.
2) Method Two: fight the Greater Unbelief—the major enemy, which today is the United States—before the Lesser Unbelief.
3) Method Three: fight the Apostates first, and then the other Unbelievers. Apostates are false Moslems, people who call themselves Moslems but aren’t, a group that includes secularist Moslems such as Saddam Hussein as well as Shi’ites, who are considered heretics.
KEY POINT: Deeply embedded notions of the jihad’s reading of the life of Mohammad determine their major strategic directions and whom they choose to kill, not what is happening in what we think as the real world.
For example, the terrorists who murdered 190 people in Madrid in March 11, 2004, did not target Spain because of its involvement with the U.S.-led Iraqi reconstruction; the group had been planning the Madrid attack for two years, going back to before the American invasion of Iraq. They attacked Spain because it was the Near Enemy—a formerly Islamic land that they hoped to win back for Islam.
Most of Spain had been an Islamic state for about 700 years until the defeating battle with Isabella and Ferdinand in 1492.
Similarly, regarding the all-important question whether the Wahhabist Osama bin Laden would have been willing to work with the secularlist Apostate Saddam Hussein in an attack on America, Habeck says it it is entirely possible, because bin Laden believes that his primary enemy is the Greater Unbelief, the United States, and therefore in the short term he would cooperate with an Apostate such as Hussein. Then, after America had been finished off with Hussein’s help, bin Laden with the enhanced power and prestige gained from that victory could redirect the jihad back at Hussein and other Moslem Apostates.
One can look Islamic battle symbols Hussein added to the Iraqi flag to understand that he joined hands with bin Laden and the jihadis.
KEY POINT: While specific actions by the West might provoke the jihadis to greater attacks, their fundamental strategic and military decisions are not determined by anything done by the United States or Europe or by other major enemies of Islam such as the Hindus, but rather by which Method of Mohammad each jihadi faction follows, and each of these strategies has its own internal rationality, thought it is not a rationality that makes sense in non-Islamic terms.
KEY POINT: Wahhabism began in the 18th century when there was no Western colonial power in the Islamic world’ it was not set off by any Western intrusion into the Moslem lands. Similarly, the contemporary Islamist idea that America is the center of all that is evil in the world, making America the “Greater Unbelief,” was conceived by a Moslem scholar between 1948 and 1951 when he was residing in the United States. This was decades before the U.S. had any large-scale involvement with Israel, and decades before its culture spiraled downhill, though, from the point of view of that visiting Moslem, America was already quite decadent at that point and ripe for destruction.
KEY POINT:What is most striking in the Method of Mohammad is the utter absence of any transcendent notion of morality. Unlike in traditional Western religion and philosophy, where God or the Good is the measure of human actions, in Islamism (which after all is simply a pure form of Islam) the measure of human actions is the shifting power tactics and military strategies of a desert brigand and war leader.
What Do People Believe About the War?
There is still no unified concept of why we are at war. People on the anti-war left believe that Al-Qaeda attacked us because we are imperialist, or we are racist, or because we don’t do enough for Third-World hunger. Those on the mostly pro-war right, especially President Bush, believe that Islamists hate us for our sins, and the right believes that they hate us for our virtues. Both sides “commit the same narcissistic fallacy of thinking” that the Islamist holy war against the West revolves solely around ourselves, around the moral drama of our goodness or our wickedness, rather than having something to do with Islam itself.
Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, Mary Habek, a military historian at Yale University, said that the various jihadist groups base their war against non-Moslems on the Islamic sacred writings, particularly the SIRA, which, unlike the Koran, tells the Prophet’s life in chronological sequence. Using Mohammad as their model, the jihadis live and think and act within the paradigms provided by the stages of Mohammed’s political and military career. This internally driven logic of Islam, and not any particular provocation, real or imagined, by some outside power, is the key to understanding why the jihadis do what they do.
KEY POINT: the paradigms of the Sira
1) The first stage or paradigm: Mohammad’s early life in Mecca, a non-Islamic society where Moslems are powerless and oppressed.
2) The second paradigm: the hejira, the escape from Mecca to Medina, a new place that is more pure and where a true Islamic society and state can be founded.
After this, the hejira, the Islamic state is formed:
3) The third paradigm kicks in. This is jihad, organized violence against non-Moslems for the purpose of building up the wealth and power of the Islamic community and bringing the world under a single Islamic state.
Jihadists conceive and rationalize their own activities in terms of paradigms. When Osama bin Laden left Saudi Arabia for Sudan, when he left Sudan for Afghanistan, he saw those journeys as corresponding with the hejira, leaving a corrupt land, where he was powerless, for a more pure Islamic place from which jihad could be waged.
KEY POINT: Methods to waging jihad- the Method of Mohammad
In addition to the three paradigms, there are three basic approaches to waging jihad called collectively the Method of Mohhamad. The various Islamist groups respectively use this toward the ultimate goal of establishing the world-wide rule of Islam. The jihadis’ choice of method depends on whom they see as their immediate enemy in that larger struggle; each jihadist group is defined by which of these methods it adopts.
1) Method One: fight the Near Enemy prior to fighting the Far Enemy. The Near Enemy is anyone inside Islamic lands, whether it is an occupier or someone who has taken away territory that used to be Islamic.
2) Method Two: fight the Greater Unbelief—the major enemy, which today is the United States—before the Lesser Unbelief.
3) Method Three: fight the Apostates first, and then the other Unbelievers. Apostates are false Moslems, people who call themselves Moslems but aren’t, a group that includes secularist Moslems such as Saddam Hussein as well as Shi’ites, who are considered heretics.
KEY POINT: Deeply embedded notions of the jihad’s reading of the life of Mohammad determine their major strategic directions and whom they choose to kill, not what is happening in what we think as the real world.
For example, the terrorists who murdered 190 people in Madrid in March 11, 2004, did not target Spain because of its involvement with the U.S.-led Iraqi reconstruction; the group had been planning the Madrid attack for two years, going back to before the American invasion of Iraq. They attacked Spain because it was the Near Enemy—a formerly Islamic land that they hoped to win back for Islam.
Most of Spain had been an Islamic state for about 700 years until the defeating battle with Isabella and Ferdinand in 1492.
Similarly, regarding the all-important question whether the Wahhabist Osama bin Laden would have been willing to work with the secularlist Apostate Saddam Hussein in an attack on America, Habeck says it it is entirely possible, because bin Laden believes that his primary enemy is the Greater Unbelief, the United States, and therefore in the short term he would cooperate with an Apostate such as Hussein. Then, after America had been finished off with Hussein’s help, bin Laden with the enhanced power and prestige gained from that victory could redirect the jihad back at Hussein and other Moslem Apostates.
One can look Islamic battle symbols Hussein added to the Iraqi flag to understand that he joined hands with bin Laden and the jihadis.
KEY POINT: While specific actions by the West might provoke the jihadis to greater attacks, their fundamental strategic and military decisions are not determined by anything done by the United States or Europe or by other major enemies of Islam such as the Hindus, but rather by which Method of Mohammad each jihadi faction follows, and each of these strategies has its own internal rationality, thought it is not a rationality that makes sense in non-Islamic terms.
KEY POINT: Wahhabism began in the 18th century when there was no Western colonial power in the Islamic world’ it was not set off by any Western intrusion into the Moslem lands. Similarly, the contemporary Islamist idea that America is the center of all that is evil in the world, making America the “Greater Unbelief,” was conceived by a Moslem scholar between 1948 and 1951 when he was residing in the United States. This was decades before the U.S. had any large-scale involvement with Israel, and decades before its culture spiraled downhill, though, from the point of view of that visiting Moslem, America was already quite decadent at that point and ripe for destruction.
KEY POINT:What is most striking in the Method of Mohammad is the utter absence of any transcendent notion of morality. Unlike in traditional Western religion and philosophy, where God or the Good is the measure of human actions, in Islamism (which after all is simply a pure form of Islam) the measure of human actions is the shifting power tactics and military strategies of a desert brigand and war leader.
posted by Eleanor © @ 12/12/2004 07:57:00 AM
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