Slicing the verse of the Sword!!!

New Report on Islamist Narratives Poses Potential Breakthrough in Communication

By Younus Abdullah Muhammad (may Allah hasten his release-AMEEN)

 

PS:
THIS EX-BROTHER OF OURS WAS RELEASED 7YRS IN ADVANCE DUE TO HIM COMPROMISING WITH THE KUFFAR, I.E. BECOMING A MURTAD WITH HIS COMPLETE ALLIANCE WITH THEM IN ASSISTING TO PLOT, PLAN AND PUT BEHIND BARS OUR MUSLIM BROTHERS AND SISTERS UPON HAQQ !!!

THIS IS HIS NEW/CHANGED TO OLD SELF NOW VIEWS:
An extremist’s path to academia -- and fighting terrorism

FOR MORE INSHA'ALLAH ONE CAN SEARCH, READ AND WATCH NEWS ON GOOGLE. 

HOWEVER LET US BENEFIT FROM THE ARTICLE AS THIS WAS WRITTEN WHILST HE WAS A MUSLIM !

This is a response to an important new academic article "How Islamic Extremists Quote the Quran":   http://csc.asu.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdf/csc1202-quran-verses.pdf

 

Therein lies the dilemma of the world’s only superpower; how to cope with an enemy that is physically weak but endowed with a fanatical motivation.  Unless the sources of the motivation are diluted, attempts to thwart and eliminate the enemy will be to no avail.  Hatred will breed replenishment.  The foe can only be eliminated through a sensitive recognition of motives and passions that are not precisely defined but derived from a shared quest of the militant weak to destroy – at all costs – the object of their resentful zeal.

- Zbogniew Brezinski in the Choice:
Global Domination or Global Leadership, 2004  

                                                                  

A dialectical view of historical development posits that conflict and tension between contradictory aspects of society serves as the driving force of change in reality.  Societies are altered when competing and antithetical systems collide and the resultant tension either transforms or dissolves them altogether.  The model holds that ideologies are altered only as a consequence of material engagement, regardless of a tendency to hold ideological transformation as the outcome of independent and objective mental activity.  Today we usually attribute such results to specialized research occurring within society’s many institutions and thereby classify effect as cause. 

Such a sociological conception aptly describes what has occurred since the attacks of 9-11 and the subsequent, US-led global war on terror.  For more than a decade, a clash of civilizations between the West and Islamic world has altered the international order.  An expression of the ideological transformation that follows such dialectical struggle is exemplified by a new study entitled How Islamist Extremists Quote the Quran funded by the Office of Naval Research and conducted by a team of academics at Arizona State University’s Center for Strategic Communication.

It is a commendable effort that documents a desire to understand the motives and passion that drives Islamic “extremism” while posing communicative remedies to help diminish conflict.  Nevertheless it ultimately prescribes alterations that risk replicating previous mistakes.  Past conceptual alterations proved to be the products of necessity, strategic ideological adjustments derived from altering conditions on the ground. Still, the report also provides a basis for a transformation in communication that could focus practical concern on countering the actual message of Islamic extremism while helping to restore regard for American leadership in the Muslim world.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 were not America’s first contact with Islamic terrorism.  Since the Iranian revolution of 1978, terrorism has been ubiquitous and included a gamut of hostage takings, hijackings, bombings, and etcetera.   However 9-11 marked the first Islamist attack on American soil and many sought to explain those horrid events by looking at Islam itself.  The Bush Administration reinforced such a view and retaliated aggressively.  The U.S. invaded Afghanistan and then framed support for Israel’s 2002 invasion into the West Bank and its 2003 occupation of Iraq around the premise that Islam was inherently violent and sought global conquest.  Understandably many experts, pundits, politicians, and leaders of the most influential western institutions endorsed that perspective and helped formulate the Manichean paradigm of global war against Islamic fundamentalism.  That perspective, and the practices that have accompanied it however, only fueled the resentment of Muslims around the world and helped propel civilizational conflict while rendering the outcome of a war between several hundred Al-Qaedists on 9-11 and the world’s first truly global superpower indecisive.

One of the most commonly cited evidences of analysts making such claims has come to be categorized as the ‘Verse of the Sword’ – a passage from the Quran that states,

But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent and establish prayers and pay the alms, then open the way for them; for God is Forgiving, Merciful (9.5).

The verse has been used to document Islam’s congenital calls for global jihad.  However, in researching How Islamist Extremists Quote the Quran , a quantitative analysis of over 2,000 extremist texts dating from 1998 to 2011 found “only three citations of the ‘Verse of the Sword’” (p.7) and claimed instead that its reference is “nearly absent from extremist rhetoric” (p.9).  The researchers classified this result as, “the most surprising” (p.2) and then inferred that the Quranic verses cited by extremists “do not suggest an aggressive offensive foe seeking domination and conquest of unbelievers as is commonly assumed but " that because" members of the target audience (other Muslims)… realize that extremists are not really preaching world conquest…claims to the contrary…only play into a ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative that benefits the extremist cause.”  In conclusion, the authors readily acknowledge, perhaps for the first time, that the theme of extremist quotation of the Quran deals mostly with “victimization, dishonor, and retribution,” and they pose qualitative recommendations that represent a significant shift in ideology.  Such identifications, if influential in creating true alteration, may alter the course of what has heretofore seemed destined to remain perpetual war.

The view that Muslims seek global conquest initially established an impulsion that cast a net around the global Muslim population.  Interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already produced rhetorical alterations that included rebranding the global war on terror a war on Islamic extremism and a counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizing a battle for hearts and minds.  Still, such adaptations seemed cosmetic to many Muslims because practices on the ground only confirmed the master narrative of Islamist extremists.  Whether in troop behavior, torture, or detention at Guantanamo Bay through to the burning of Qurans in Afghanistan recently, it has not been difficult for Muslims to exploit examples where political elocution failed to match reality.

Unfortunately the report fails to make any identification of how pervasive the influence of a ‘Verse of the Sword’ mentality has become on the institutional actors combating Islamic extremism.  That realization would have enhanced its conclusions, for many of the scandals marring the conflict have been perpetrated by individuals adhering closely to a ‘Verse of the Sword’, anti-Islamic ideology. From the soldiers that took pictures at Abu Ghraib to the tweets and comments of soldier Robert Bales, accused of killing seventeen Afghan civilians earlier this year, the influence of the view Muslims seek to take over the world is evident in most of the cases wrecking America’s international reputation.  It is likely that the most important effect of altering that narrative would not be so much an enhanced image in the Muslim world but an ability to counter the prevalence of that narrative within the West’s own institutions.

The effects of the ‘Verse of the Sword’ narrative are apparent domestically as well.  Earlier this year an independent audit of the curriculum for a West Point course on Islam documented a series of readings insinuating that all Islamists seek global domination.  The New York Police Department (NYPD) also drew criticism recently when an AP investigation revealed that its counterterrorism units connected to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) were viewing an anti-Islamic propagandist film as well.  The consequential practices have driven American law enforcement’s relations with the American Muslim community to all-time lows, a reality highlighted by a lawsuit brought against the NYPD by an Islamic organization that alleges extreme ethnic profiling and discrimination.  These allegations and others like them illustrate how that institutional narrative resonates at the level of individual actors and how those actions, in turn can render counter messaging ineffective.

The supplemental quantitative analysis of the report mostly confirms trivial and insignificant assumptions, but recognizing the near absence of the verse of the sword in extremist literature leads to other important identifications.  For example, the author’s state, “The most frequently cited Quranic verses identified in this study suggest that Islamic extremists favor content that falls within three core thematic categories: exhortations, battle imperatives and affirmation of faith…[Islamic Extremists] appear to invoke specific verses of the Quran that support a promise of deliverance” (p.8).  The authors then utilize that result to confirm the identification of their own earlier analysis that this master narrative concentrates on a deliverance story form, one in which “the community, people or nation of the protagonist struggles in a precarious existence and must be delivered from those conditions.” That synthesis of quantitative and qualitative deduction makes it fact that it is the careful application of a narrative claiming victimization and not one calling for coercive proselyzation that sustains the relevancy of Islamic extremism.  It is the study’s bridging of these important identifications about the extremist narrative to four practical implications that signifies a potential breakthrough in the institutional approach to counter extremism.  And expansion of those implications could transform an arena of conflict and clash into one of collaboration.

The first principle for reform documents a prevalent public espousal of the verse of the sword mentality claiming, “A search of Google reveals hundreds of pages making claims about the impending takeover of the world by Islamists.”  But after identifying the verse’s minimal usage, the authors call instead to “abandon claims that Islamist extremists seek world domination.”  Instead, they rightfully identify that such a paradigm” undermine(s) the credibility of Western voices; because the audience knows the extremist arguments are really about victimage and deliverance.”

This is an extremely meaningful distinction.  Claims of deliverance from a ‘crusading’ and ‘colonialist’ West serve the purpose of justifying a reliance on violence and the even more haphazard consequence of granting ultraconservative and anti-western voices carte blanche legitimacy.  There is no need to pose practical solutions to the very serious problems of majority Muslim nations where all complications can be blamed on Western intervention and influence.  Additionally, the West’s own conspiratorial claims of Islamic conquest and barbarity deem voices on both sides calling for collaboration as illegitimate and manipulative.  Such basis makes it all the more difficult to advance a more realistic portrayal of history and the contemporary realm of interconnected globalization that rejects all demarcation between East and West and represents civilization as a product of cumulative human experience.  In seeking to eradicate the verse of the sword myth, the study prepares a way to fundamental change that can diminish conflict.  Such idyllic implications surpass the study’s scope, but these potential ramifications must not be missed by those seeking evidence to justify alternatives.

Thereafter the authors recommend a three-pronged narrative that focuses on counteracting or addressing the claims of victimage, emphasizes alternative means of deliverance and works to undermine the ‘champion’ image sought by extremists (p.9-11). But the analysis falls short where it fails to recognize that such alterations will prove unsuccessful if merely rhetorical.  That missing emphasis casts doubt on whether the report’s identifications are the result of objective inquiry or were driven by the impending end of military engagement a shift to reliance on special-ops, covert and proxy force and a post-Arab Spring reality that forces diplomacy with Islamists, perhaps not so extreme.  Relying on rhetoric runs the risk of replicating the Obama Administration’s earlier efforts at rebranding.  What is truly essential is a more complete change, not an alteration of strategic communication simply as the propaganda of war but efforts at communication matched by an actual alternation of policy and practice on the ground as well.

That intention expands beyond the scope of the report but its findings present key steps in that direction.  The authors honorably recognize that where claims of victimage are true “they should be acknowledged and addressed” but they at least partially reject the notion of factual disputation where claims are false on the grounds “attempted corrections can simply reproduce and strengthen the frame of the original argument.”  Instead they recommend emphasizing cases where the West has come to the “aid of Muslims” and thereby fail to recognize that such a call is for a continuation of the very same misinterpreted and paternalistic communication that drives resentment.

The authors cite the example of Kosovo and the various Arab Spring conflicts but Muslim majorities attribute most American engagement in the Muslim world solely to self-interest.   Intervention in Kosovo was viewed even then as the forced expansion of liberalism and the U.S.’s decades-long support for Arab authoritarianism ran well into the onset of the Arab Spring.  The Obama Administration’s delayed support for regime change in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen did not go by unrecognized and NATO-U.S. intervention in Libya coupled by passivity with regard to Syria only provides fodder for the view that U.S.  Foreign policy in the Middle East is driven primarily by its concern for oil.  The only effective way to counteract the analogies extremists draw from the Quran about deliverance from tyranny is to actually respect sovereignty while promoting democracy alongside accountability for instituting the universal norms of modernity.

Muslims will not be deceived by altered strategic communication.  They recognize the contradictions of delayed support for democracy in the hands of the Arab Spring alongside unconditional support for tyranny in Bahrain, Yemen and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  They will not easily forget the false allegations that led to war in Iraq or the atrocity that followed and that is where the report falls short.  If America wants its specialist tasked with counter-messaging to emphasize a means of deliverance alternative to violence and to undermine the ‘champion’ image sought by extremists then a first step is certainly to acknowledge their foe’s concern primarily with the Middle East and not global conquest but then to recognize post misdeeds and actually promote real alternatives to violence as the sole answer to any perceived indirect American colonialism.

The effective next step would be to make clear that Muslim majorities reject extremism and prefer interpretations of Islam almost completely compatible with America’s professed values, to work in collaboration with those that espouse them – especially Islamists that do so – and to realize that communication and collaboration along these lines is what would truly diminish the frequency and threat of global terrorism.  To put it succinctly, the best prospect for peace and prosperity on American soil and in the Middle East would be to push the generals and Secretary of Defense to the periphery and pave diplomatic inroads with the secretaries of commerce, agriculture, transportation and health and human services.  The result would help craft a new constructivist American foreign policy that could transform the zero sum calculations of dialectical conflict into mutually beneficial engagement.  This would most definitely be embraced by Muslim majorities and serve to revive a flat international economy.  Were it to include a comprehensive and pragmatic blueprint for development (the entire exports minus oil and gas in Arab countries are equal to Finlands) – something like a Marshal Plan for a New Middle East – any analogy that sought to correlate a Great American Satan to the Prophet Muhammad’s struggle against tyranny chronicled in the Quran would be obsolete.

Both the War on Terror and its continuation under the war on Islamic extremism have been abysmal failures when viewed in totality.  On September 11, 2001 an Al-Qaeda organization numbering in the hundreds capped off a decade of attacks against American interests abroad by attacking America at home .  Retaliation for that attack was justified by claims that Islamic terrorists sought world domination and to abolish the core values of western civilization.   However, the terrorists were always concerned primarily with “liberating” the lands of the Middle East.  Today it is recognizable that the resultant actions of a counterterrorism strategy derived principally from a ‘verse of the sword’ conceptualization have done much more to destroy the influence of the core values that facilitate soft power projection then extremists could have ever imagined.

As a result, the American superpower is in relative decline, and in the vacuum of multipolarity becoming more visible, many variants of authoritarianism are seeking to fill the void, fundamentalist Islam being only one of them.  More than a decade after the war on terror’s onset, American’s shores have not been attacked, but its position in the world has been altered.  The U.S. State Department’s recent annual terrorism assessment called 2011 “a landmark year in counterterrorism,” claiming that the killing of Osama Bin Laden and several of Al’ Qaeda’s top lieutenants “puts the network on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse.”  But the report highlights an expanding terrorist threat based on retaliation for killings by unmanned drones, new sanctuaries left behind by the Arab Spring and impending conflict with Iran.  The recent suicide bombing of Israelis in Bulgaria by an alleged Iranian operative, the rising role of Islamists in Syria’s civil war and the resurrection of the Islamic State of Iraq who recently threatened attacks on U.S. soil saying, “Our war with you has just begun,” all point to a shifting but persistent threat to the U.S. homeland.

Stalemate seems to be the outcome of America’s dialectical clash with the world of Islam, but such an outcome is unnecessary.  The dialectical conflict of America’s war with colonialism produced the American system.  Its clash with facism and communism in the 20th century propelled it to a position of unprecedented power, and at the conclusion of the Cold War it was imagined the U.S. waged wars only in defense of itself or others with no territorial ambitions.  Its reputation for rebuilding its enemies after their defeat was unprecedented.

Today that reputation has been diminished and the confrontation of liberal democracy as thesis against an antithetical Islamofascism generated a synthesis where authoritarianism reigns.  How Islamist Extremists Quote the Quran identifies the faulty underpinnings that originally justified and help to sustain that conflict.  The report includes important mechanisms for change but its implications must be realized in essence if the objectives are to succeed.  Nevertheless it is testimony to the potential for American power to correct mistakes.  In the past that ideological flexibility helped legitimize its position as the world’s leading agent of change.

It is encouraging to see clear-headed analysis with regard to the narratives of the Muslim world which will remain rooted in the Quran.  Perhaps the authors could have mentioned verses extremists never include.  The Quran also states,

If they (non-Muslims) incline towards peace, you incline towards peace and put your trust in God who is the All-Hearer, the All-Knower.  And if they intend to deceive you, then verily God Is All-Sufficient for you (8.61-62).

Here is to hoping such an alternative message will resonate with all those working for peace.

By Younus Abdullah Muhammad

PS:
THIS EX-BROTHER OF OURS WAS RELEASED 7YRS IN ADVANCE DUE TO HIM COMPROMISING WITH THE KUFFAR, I.E. BECOMING A MURTAD WITH HIS COMPLETE ALLIANCE WITH THEM IN ASSISTING TO PLOT, PLAN AND PUT BEHIND BARS OUR MUSLIM BROTHERS AND SISTERS UPON HAQQ !!!

THIS IS HIS NEW/CHANGED TO OLD SELF NOW VIEWS:
An extremist’s path to academia -- and fighting terrorism

FOR MORE INSHA'ALLAH ONE CAN SEARCH, READ AND WATCH NEWS ON GOOGLE.