The Mind of Jihad

by Laurent Murawiec

Cambridge, 350 pp., $80

For some time now there has been a raging debate regarding what fuels Islamic terrorism--whether grievances against the West have caused frustrated Muslims to articulate their rage through an Islamist paradigm, or whether (all grievances aside) Islam itself leads to aggression toward non-Muslims, or "infidels."

Laurent Murawiec's The Mind of Jihad offers a different perspective. Discounting both the grievance and Islam-as-innately-violent models, Murawiec explores certain untapped areas of research in order to show correlations between radical Islam and any number of uniquely Western concepts and patterns, both philosophical and historical.

While this approach is admirable, it also proves to be overly ambitious, and thus problematic, specifically in its insistence that radical Islam is merely the latest manifestation of phenomena rooted in the Western experience. Murawiec is no apologist; neither, however, is he interested in examining Islam's own peculiar Weltanschauung--as outlined by the Koran and hadith, articulated by the ulema (theologian-scholars), and codified in sharia law--in order to better understand the jihad.

Instead, according to Murawiec, radical Islam is an ideological heir to Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Nazism, Marxism, and nihilism; jihadists are duplicates of otherwise arcane characters from Christian history, such as the Millenarians. Indeed, any number of European concepts and personages permeate The Mind of Jihad, often presented as prominent factors contributing to the rise of radical Islam--betraying, perhaps, the author's vast erudition concerning Western, not Islamic, paradigms.

Again, while these are interesting observations and worthy of exploration, Murawiec goes too far: The words "Gnosticism" and "Millenarianism" appear prefixed to Islamic terminology and figures repeatedly; this does not help and can distract--especially the lay reader who is trying to understand jihad within a strictly Islamic milieu.

Consider Murawiec's millenarian thesis. He argues that jihadists are Islamic versions of heretical Christians who, driven by "superman"/Gnostic impulses, wrought havoc in Europe at the turn of the first millennium, often murdering and pillaging indiscriminately. Yet the dissimilarities would appear greater. The Millenarians were a product of an already lawless age. Modern-day jihadists are not; they live in the modern era which, while managing to appease violent "millenarian" tendencies in Christians, has evidently not managed to sate Muslim impulses.

If all things are equal, why aren't modern Christians behaving like their predecessors, whereas modern Muslims are? The response cannot be that the modern Muslim world is in a state of dislocation and disarray: Today's Islamic world is much more prosperous and structured than the Dark Ages in Europe, which directly influenced the savagery of the Millenarians.
Moreover, whereas the Millenarians were anathematized as heretics, often persecuted by the Church, modern jihadists have yet to be condemned by any serious Islamic authority. Indeed, they are often validated by them.

After describing the jihadists' "bloodlust" and disregard for innocents as representative of a chaotic and heretical millenarian spirit, Murawiec reveals that Sheikh Al Azhar, the equivalent of the pope in Sunni Islam, "demanded that the Palestinian people, of all factions, intensify the martyrdom operations [i.e., suicide attacks] against the Zionist enemy. .  .  . [H]e emphasized that every martyrdom operation against any Israelis, including children, women, and teenagers, is a legitimate act according to [Islamic] religious law, and an Islamic commandment." This alone is enough to dismantle the millenarian thesis since, unlike millenarian violence, which had no scriptural/church support, modern day jihadist violence (including "suicidal bloodlust") is backed by Islamic law and is a commandment.