terrorists claim that they are practicing Islam, but in the words of Bernard Lewis, one of the foremost Western scholars of Islam, “At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders.”2 Indeed, an increasing number of Muslim scholars and clerics have voiced the same objection to conflating Islam with extremists who claim to act in its name.
What, then, is the ideology of the terrorists who commit acts of mass murder against non-Muslims and Muslims alike? What is it that distinguishes the violent extremism of bin Laden and his fellow travelers not only from modern, Western democracy, but from normative, historical Islam? In large measure, this ideology is influenced by twentieth-century Western totalitarianism.
Modern Parallels: Radical Islam and Western Totalitarianism
There are at least four indicators that point to a connection between today's extremists and their early and mid-twentieth-century intellectual cousins who advanced totalitarian ideologies such as communism and fascism.
The first of these is the language used by today's virulent extremist leaders. To a remarkable degree, it mimics the radical rhetoric of the last century. Words like “vanguard” and “revolution” are used for self-definition, whereas “imperialist,” “capitalist,” “colonialist,” “reactionary,” and “establishment” are hurled at enemies, from the United States to mainstream Muslim leaders. To cite a relatively recent example, in September 2007 an extremist website posted links to a video message from bin Laden to the people of the United States. In that message, Al Qaeda's leader called U.S. officials “war criminals” and labeled the U.S. media a “tool of the colonialist empires.” He also railed against “the shackles…of the capitalist system” and implied that “big corporations” agitate for war, despoil the environment, and had President John F. Kennedy killed.3
This rhetoric is, of course, familiar as that of ideological extremists of the last century. And this use of the jargon of Western radicalism is not restricted to Al Qaeda or to other Sunni extremist groups. The Shi`a-dominated movement led by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which brought down the Shah in Iran thirty years ago, remains a case in point. To this day, Iran's ruling movement calls its own efforts “the revolution” and, through bestowing names like the “Revolutionary Guards” on its institutions, it advertises itself as a radicalizing force.
This is not to deny that these groups superficially deploy the rhetoric of conventional Islam as well. They certainly do, but they utilize a decidedly ideological and political framework. A noteworthy example is their distortion of the word “jihad.” As interpreted by traditional Muslim scholars and clerics, jihad 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
