The Origins of Jihadism

Gaspar Mairal Buil

(Published in Heraldo de Aragón, May 2016)

    The objectives of the jihad or 'holy war' proclaimed by Al Qaeda and Daesh are not limited to a specific place, but extend to the entire historical territory of Islam in order to remake the caliphat, which was historically the religious-political leadership of the 'Umma' or community of believers under Islam. Jihadism is addressed to all Muslim believers who are part of many nations and who speak many different languages. It is clear that the extent of Islam and that of the Arab world differ greatly. It should be noted, however, that jihadism is essentially Arab and must be understood in an Arab context. If you look closely, the leaders of Al Qaeda and Daesh are Arabs from Egypt such as Al-Zawahiri or Iraq such as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Their actions have taken place in many parts of the world, from the United States to Malaysia or Australia; But today, they have their epicenter in Arab countries like Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Egypt. The body of belief that sustains these groups is the rigorous and extreme interpretation of Islam, which is commonly referred to as Salafism. The Arabic term '' 'salaf' means ancestor and refers to the companions of the prophet Muhammad and the generations of the first three caliphs who succeeded him. It is understood that, having had occasion to listen to the prophet his knowledge of the revelation that God made to him, is the purest. In this way, Salafism is basically a return to origins in search of authenticity and purity. We can recognize this same belief in other religions, as is the case with Christianity in which over time numerous groups, movements or even sects have sought to restore the practices and beliefs of the early Christians. They then cried out for the recovery of the purity of an original doctrine close in time to the preaching of Jesus Christ.

     Salafism is not the same as jihad, but the combination of the two in a given historical context has given rise to what we now call jihadism. The prophet Muhammad was at the time a religious leader but also a political leader, even a warlord who led armies in combat. In this way and especially in Islam rigorist, purist or salafist, the political and the religious cannot be separated. This union between religion and the exercise of power has characterized the three monotheistic religions in their history, but it certainly evolved and changed much over time. In Europe, the introduction of religious tolerance cost a lot of blood in the 16th and 17th centuries; and then the recognition of freedom of conscience was the result of a persistent struggle to reach the current secularization of democratic societies.

     In the area of Islam there were similar movements as was the case in Turkey with the revolution promoted by Kemal Attaurk who in 1924 introduced the secular state in place of the Ottoman caliphate. Also the socialist-oriented regimes that were in force since the 1960s in Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Iraq promoted secularism to a greater or lesser extent. Its failure has much to do with the emergence of jihadism. Jihadism is a religious belief, but also a political movement that uses in perfect symbiosis the myth of original and pure Islam to instrumentalize it. A significant example is Daesh, because if it has in Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph, its religious leader, who carry in the shadows the military and logistical leadership of the movement are former military commanders of Saddam Hussein, a despot who pursued as long as he could all the Islamists. What is in the end the historical context that can help us understand the nature of jihadism? In my opinion, we should take into account a collective consciousness established in the Arab world and, in the first place, among its elites, since the end of the First World War with the sharing among the Western powers of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. Also as a consequence of the action of French colonialism in North Africa. 

     This collective consciousness has been manifested through a collective complex of inferiority vis-à-vis the West and hence, among certain elites, the idea that Western society should be emulated, such as Kemal Attaturk or Nasser, the FLN in Algeria or the Baas in Syria and Iraq in  a socialist version  From the failure of these last experiences comes the jihadism that no longer seeks to emulate the West, but to blame it for what these jihadists perceive as inferiority or weakness. As sometimes happens with other historical crises experienced by a society, we turn to the millenarian inspiration, that is, to the belief in the return to a mythified origin. That is why we should pay more attention to the comparison between nowadays  Jihad and German Nazism. To feed this consciousness the Wahhabi doctrine was already active in Saudi Arabia since the eighteenth century or the inspiration of the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious movement emerged in Egypt in 1928. Unlike many Arab intellectuals and politicians who have tried to understand the causes of what they consider to be the great lag of the Arab world that shone so brightly in the arts, sciences, or literature in the face of the enormous impulse of the West, today we are facing the victimism of a part of the Arab world that blames the West for this backwardness and thinks that only with the restoration of a Caliphate, the return to the purest Islam and the defeat of the West, the Arab world will shine and dominate as before. The terrorist who immolates himself is imbued with this political ideology, but what has led him to carry out his action is a religious belief which, as such, has taken a deeper hold on his conscience. This is the nature of this religious-political symbiosis that underlies jihadism today and, for this very reason, its roots also exist outside the Arab world, since its meaning is primarily Islamic, although its causality must be found in the Arab world..