Imperialism as a Cause of Terrorism

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Megan Fothergill

7240817

HIS2160 A November 19

th 2014

Espionage and Terrorism:

Western Imperialism and its Influence on Modern Islamic

Extremism



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The 21st century has been extremely turbulent and security has changed significantly

since the attacks of September 11th

2001. The ISIS militant groups is making headlines not only

with their rapid spread through Iran and Syria, but also how hundreds of young women from

Europe and the Americas are traveling to Syria to marry ISIS militants. From a western

perspective this is an unprovoked and blatantly evil act against the heroes of the world.

Politicians especially seem to forget, however, that no action is entirely without cause and that

they do not have strictly „evil‟ motives. With an unbiased eye it is possible to see that western

nations are not entirely unlike the Islamic groups, and that they are only fighting for what they

believe is the best for their people. With careful examination of the past it is also possible to see

how European expansion may have played a role. Imperialism practiced by western nations and

their quest for control directly influenced the modern Islamic extremism that wishes to harm and

destroy western democratic nations.

Entering the 20th

century Britain focused more attention on the Middle East than ever

before. More and more consulates were being established in the Ottoman Empire and

surrounding areas, though not because of a large British population in the area. Most of the area

had been closed to European travel, and so the consuls served other purposes. The British

government had recently focused on the collection of information through espionage and these

closures, along with the need to not disturb the status quo, made it very difficult. The Levant

Consular service would make consuls responsible for collecting information about commerce,

geography and politics as well as their regular duties of serving the British citizens. Due to the

abundance of consulates they would become the centres of intelligence and the consuls would of

their own accord spend a great deal of time making connections and seeking information, often

putting themselves or diplomatic relations in peril. By British officials “quietly relying on



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consuls for intelligence, the Foreign Office rendered the ban on military officers in Mesopotamia

a merely formal gesture,”1 allowing them to maintain the “status quo” and still receive the

information they wanted.

In the first decade of the 20th

century J. G. Lorimer under the direction of the Indian

government would help to collect and amass this information for an encyclopedic project called

the Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia. The document would be

completed in 1913 and contained thousands pages of the history, including complete

genealogies, and the geography of the region with multiple maps for reference. This information

would play a vital role in Britain‟s understanding of the area and be a tool to help them draw new

territorial boundaries after the end of World War One.

Western powers had been taking the land of others and placing their officers in places of

power for decades, and when it came time to actually take control of the Middle East and not just

work with them to establish routes through it they would use the same method. After the end of

World War One when the Allied powers were dividing up the old Ottoman Empire they put this

practise into effect and arbitrarily carved out nations and borders that had previously never

existed. Mothers and fathers were separated from sons and daughters and from sister and

brothers, spurring anti-British and anti-French feelings that were only intensified when British

and French citizens and officials were granted positions of power. These changes would prompt

the return of political activists like Sayyid Jamal ad-Din, known as „al-Afghani‟, and

encouraging a pan-Arabism movement among the people of the Levant and surrounding areas.

Pan-Arabism was based on the idea that a large political conglomerate made up of all of the

Arabs could stop the expansion of Western ideas and politics by making a united stand against

1 Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle

East , (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25.





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comprehensive Islamic way of life”5. In this way Qutb was doing the same thing that al-Afghani

was, though Qutb would do much more than merely write about the changes that he wanted to

see. When King Faruq of Egypt was overthrown and the British expelled from Egypt in 1952 a

group called The Free Officers took power. They had long been associated with the Muslim

Brotherhood, a group dedicated to a pan-Islamism, religious and social movement, and made a

number of goodwill gestures towards the Brothers. They disagreed however in the nature of the

new leader of Egypt as the Free Officers wanted a secular leader and the Brotherhood wanted a

government based on Islam. At this point in time Qutb also had close ties with the Brotherhood,

but would only become an official member in 1953 when he became the head of the

„Propagation of the Message Section‟ of the Brotherhood.

During his time in that role Qutb would help to carefully change the tone and emphasis of

the Brotherhoods message, and he did this by continuing to publish his writings and calling for

many changes and reforms in various media outlets to “protect the conscience and ethics of the

people from the onslaught of the entertainment sector”6. He also publically called out the white

man, either European or American, as the number one enemy of all Arabs and criticized the

legacy they left in Egypt. He served as the representative of the Brotherhood in Islamic

conferences among other things in the following year until the government accused various

members of the Brotherhood of anti-government incitements and were arrested en masse.

Sentenced in July of 1955, Qutb would serve 9 of his 15 years of hard labour and was released

due to health problems. While he was in various hospitals he was allowed to continue his

writing, where his experiences in the prison had radicalized his views of the measures necessary

5 Adnan A. Musallum, From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islam, (Westport:

Praeger Publishers, 2005), 95.6 Ibid., 146.



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to achieve the Islamic nation he wanted, since the Islam leaders of the time did things that Qutb

decided were distinctly unIslamic and barbaric. Much of his writings were censored and screened

tat this time though he still “managed to write many works that would eventually make him the

leading ideologue of radical and jihadist Islamists”7. Qutb‟s new rhetoric was largely influenced

by the Indian radical Islamist Abu al-A‟la al-Mawdudi, who was a leader in many Islamic

awakening movements; Qutb took al-Mawdudi‟s concepts and applied them to the Islamic Arab

world and in some cases exaggerated them to an extreme.

In 1965 Qutb and his brother were arrested, signalling another mass arrest of Brotherhood

members under a total blackout of news, instigated after a leader of a study group involving a

recently freed Sayyid Qutb confessed to more instances of conspiracies to overthrow the existing

regime by a vanguard apparatus. Against protests from Amnesty International, lawyers from four

different nations and requests for clemency from prominent Arab and Muslim persons Sayyid

Qutb and two others involved in the apparatus were hung in August of 1966, turning Qutb from

merely a radical activist to a martyr for the pan-Islamist cause and his ideas would continue to

spread through the community.

Before his death Qutb wrote about jihad, rooted in an Arabic verbal noun coming from

jahada which means “to struggle with something that is disagreeable or else against something

that is wrong. While „‟holy war‟‟ is not a literal translation, it does summarize the essential idea

of jihad”8. Islamic jurists have defined four different types of jihad: jihad by heart, tongue, hand,

and sword. Jihad by heart is the concept of fighting personal evils and is also known as the

7 Ibid., 151.

8 Sean Anderson and Stephen Sloan, Historical Dictionary of Terrorism, 1

st ed., s.v. “Jihad,” (Metuchen: The

Scarecrow Press, 1995), 172.



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“greater jihad”9, and jihad by tongue and hand are the physical actions of following the rules of

right and wrong as established by the Quran. Only jihad of the sword is focused on fighting the

enemies and nonbelievers of the faith. “Qutb‟s basic ideas about jihad are found in Chapter 4 in

his controversial work Ma’alim (Milestones) […] which has become a manifesto for jihadist

Islamists,”10

some of which follow the belief that jihad is the forgotten sixth pillar of Islam and so

take up jihad of the sword.

It is important to distinguish that jihadism and the hatred of western democracy and

nations in not baseless in Islam. As a religion, Islam goes much further than Christianity or

Judaism does in that Islam does not just affect politics, it is a civilization. Islamism emphasizes

the rule of law and even the Caliph is not beneath this law since ultimate sovereignty belongs to

God. This makes it difficult for Muslims to embrace the idea of democracy, with the most

extreme going so far as to wanting to destroy it, because in Islam people themselves are not

sovereign. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a chief spokesman of the terrorist group al-Qaeda, has said that

“sovereignty is God‟s alone [… and that] legislation comes from God alone, and one refers to

him in case of conflict,”11

and that people giving people the right to legislate others is akin to

worshipping peers alongside God, which is fundamentally wrong in Islam.

Modern extremist Islam is embodied by the Taliban movement, the terrorist group al-

Qaeda, and more recently the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant/Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

(henceforth referred to as ISIS). The Taliban began as a political movement among Sunni

Muslims, though it is also used to refer to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. It is based

9 Adnan A. Musallum, From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islam, (Westport:

Praeger Publishers, 2005), 179.10

Ibid., 180.11

Ayman al-Zawahiri, “Bitter Harvest: Sixty Years of the Muslim Brotherhood (Excerpts),” in Al-Qaeda in its Own

Words ed. Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 2008),

171.



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upon Islamic law of the Sharia sect which is a very strict and intrusive interpretation of the laws

which covers topics covered by secular laws such as crime and economics, as well as personal

matters like intercourse, hygiene, diet and fasting, and prayer. The Taliban is credited with

creating a new form of Islamic radicalism that began in Afghanistan and spread to Pakistan. Near

the end of the Cold War when the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan was coming to a close, some

mujahedeen, those that struggle for Allah, “wanted to expand their operations to include Islamist

struggles in other parts of the world”12

, one of which was Osama bin Laden, who created the

group al-Qaeda in 1988. Al-Qaeda never permanently aligned themselves with any nations, but

rather fought with and protected those that they felt agreed with their cause. They did have

specific enemies however, with the United States of America being the main enemy due to their

political ideology and their almost constant military and political activity in foreign nations,

specifically in the Islamic Middle East. In 1996 al-Qaeda announced its intentions to expel all

foreign troops from what they felt were Islamic lands and issued a fatwa, a declaration of war,

against the United States and their allies. In a document signed by 5 Taliban and Islamic leaders

“[t]he ruling to kill Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for

every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate

[Islamic holy lands from foreign troops and make them] unable to threaten any Muslim”13

. This

declaration demonstrates that one of the things al-Qaeda wants most is control; control of their

holy sites and control over their enemies through fear.

At face value it is difficult to see how espionage and terrorism are the same, however H.

H. A. Cooper and Lawrence J. Redlinger argue in their book Terrorism and Espionage in the

Middle East: Deception, Displacement, and Denial that the two subjects are “similarly,

12 Suresh Garg, Taliban: A Face of Terrorism, (New Delhi: Axis Publications, 2010), 40-41.

13 Ibid., 46.



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sinisterly, inextricably intertwined”14

. Both are instruments of political action, and have both

attackers and victims. To westerners it is hard to understand how killing innocent civilians is

equal to merely collecting information however they are merely two sides of the same proverbial

coin. The massive undertaking of the Gazetteer project and the espionage that went into

collecting the information was used to exert power over the Ottoman Empire and destroy it,

however we don‟t always associate the collecting of information in foreign countries with the

possibly horrifying uses it could have because we are biased to see ourselves as good. We seem

to forget however that some espionage had to be done to engineer major attacks such as that on

the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11

th

2001, it was not just a chance

happening, and even when we do consider the espionage that must have gone into the attack only

that espionage is seen as bad. A double standard exists because we forget that espionage is used

for terrorism, and terrorism requires espionage.

There is much hatred and anger towards Muslims for acts of terrorism in the western

world. Our arrogance allows us to go about our daily lives believing that Islam is a violent and

spiteful religion and that we have done nothing to provoke them. We make sweeping

generalizations about people we have never met in places we will only see through a television

screen and forget that not only are there many more kind and peaceful Muslims than violent

ones, but that they have legitimate reasons for being angry with the western world. We also seem

to forget that they are humans just like we are, and are making the same mistakes as us. By

collecting information in the early 20th century under the guise of consuls the British started a

chain of events that would rock the world a century later; dividing the Levant and separating

families and friends, sparking the rise of pan-Arabism, then pan-Islam, Islamists sought more

14 H.H.A. Cooper and Lawrence J. Redlinger, Terrorism and Espionage in the Middle East: Deception, Displacement,

and Denial , (Queenston: The Edwin Miller Press, 2005), 37.



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and more foundation in the fundamentals of their religion, radicalizing when they were not

happy with the extent of change, and finally turning inward then outward to face the nations and

governments who had wronged them.

Bibliography

Anderson, Sean and Stephen Sloan. Historical Dictionary of Terrorism. 1st ed., s.v. “Jihad.”

Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, 1995.



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Cooper, H.H.A. and Lawrence J. Redlinger. Terrorism and Espionage in the Middle East:

Deception, Displacement, and Denial . Queenston: The Edwin Miller Press, 2005).

ad-Din, Sayyid Jamal. “The Truth about the Neicheri Sect.” In An Islamic Response to

Imperialism, Translated by Nikki R. Keddie. Los Angeles: University of California Press,

1983.

Garg, Suresh. Taliban: A Face of Terrorism. New Delhi: Axis Publications, 2010.

Kelsay, John. “Bosnia and the Muslim Critique of Modernity.” In Religion and Justice in the

War over Bosnia Edited by G. Scott Davis. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Musallum, Adnan A. From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical

Islam. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2005.

Satia, Priya. Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert

Empire in the Middle East . New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

al-Zawahiri, Ayman. “Bitter Harvest: Sixty Years of the Muslim Brotherhood (Excerpts).” In Al-

Qaeda in its Own Words Edited by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli. Cambridge: The

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 2008.

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Imperialism as a Cause of Terrorism