Getting in Touch with Reality.

• Author: Eytchison, Patrick
• Position: Thinking Politically - War on Terrorism, 2001- - Brief Article

If the anti-war movement is going to organize effectively it will have to deal with reality. To do this several myths widely held by the "left" need to be dispelled, especially the myth that bin Laden is a creation of the CIA. While it is true that the CIA's involvement in the Afghan-Soviet war was its biggest operation since World War II, this does not mean that all of the Islamic volunteers who came to Afghanistan to fight with the Mujahedin were CIA puppets. To believe this is the worst kind of chauvinism: the thoughtless assumption that Islamic culture is not able to generate its own resistance movements without Western inspiration, whether CIA or Marxist. The fact is that the Islamic world was characterized by many strong Koranic revitalization movements as far back as the early 19th century, for example the Caucasus war of Iman Shamyl against the Russians between 1840 and 1859 (and by the way Shamyl had derived some of his inspiration from his contact with the Algerian resistance leader Emir Abd al-Qad er when on hajj in Mecca in 1829). International "terrorism" is hardly a new thing. Even earlier West Africa was home to a continuous series of reform jihads, the most successful, that of Usman Dan Fodio, which created the Sokoto Caliphate, a state lasting from 1803 to 1903.

The principle of all such Islamic jihad movements and a principle rooted in the teaching of the prophet Mohammed himself is the subordination of economic, governmental and civil life to the Shariah, the application of the Koran and its tradition of scholarly interpretation. During the high point of Western Imperialism, this tradition of Islamic revitalization was fragmented and at the low ebb; to some extent it was replaced by various attempts to adapt socialism to the context of Muslim societies. With the break-up of the Soviet Union and the general post-1968 decline of Marxism, however, the original purification tradition has more and more returned as a factor in Islamic politics. Not only bin Laden but many of the current militant...