NOTE: I recently received an email from an individual who would like to remain anonymous since he works in the government. In it he provides his own take on my recent blog post about counter narrative strategy and al-Qā’idah. He agreed to allow me to re-post his comments here since I thought it would be fruitful to continue the conversation. The opinions expressed below are those of the guest author and they do not necessarily represent the views of this blogs administrator. That said, I hope you enjoy the post and as always comments are welcomed!
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I’m not deep into the theological arguments for or against the Al Qaeda worldview, but I’m a pragmatist and will point out a few things.
1. I really liked Jarret Brachman’s position that Al Qaeda and their associated groups should be labeled “Qutbians” to bluntly insert a human into their idealogy and see how many religious scholars can be found to argue against Qutb.
2. Brachman’s research into the mindset of the jihadist forum readers shows that:
A) Qutb is still the most widely read “theologian” by jihadists (hence calling them Qutbians) by a wide margin.
B) Al Qaeda and their supporters react immediately to threats to their worldview as seen in their responses to the rejection of their ideology by Dr. Fadl and the LIFG.
3. There is already a small counter-narrative as noted above. I don’t believe a U.S. counter-narrative will have a great effect on the current crop of committed jihadists. It may help reduce the number of available recruits but it would more likely affect their support base and erode some supporters.
4. The same philosophy professor who cited the need to agree on definitions in order to engage in constructive debate also stated that you can’t debate belief (faith) because faith has no basis in empirical fact. No matter how you couch your arguments, true believers (i.e. committed jihadists who believe that the non-Muslim world is at war with Islam and who see the world as a binary — dar ul harb or dar ul Islam) cannot be reasoned with because they cling to blind faith. So who is the counter-narrative trying counter?
5. What the U.S. and the Western world says about Al Qaeda and others not being Islamic may have a positive effect and reduce the so-called “home grown” extremists because of the volume of the message locally. What the U.S. and the Western world says about AQ will likely have no effect in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc. because of the number and volume of voices who denounce the western world.
6. These loud voices are heard from childhood in the madrassas of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and are a trusted voice compared to the voice of the Western world. Part of the challenge is getting the Muslim world to denounce violent organizations and what seems to occur more often is the Muslim world embracing the violent organizations.
7. The “rehabilitation” programs, as exemplified by the Saudi program, attempts to establish a counter-narrative and to rehabilitate those who see violence against those who do not share their beliefs as a valid program. The Saudi counter-narrative carries more weight than a U.S. counter-narrative would have and the Saudi program boasts an 80-90% success rate… of those that agreed to attend. Even if those percentages are correct, they’re likely misleading. Of the number of people who engaged in “jihad” over the past twenty years (meaning those Muslims who traveled to another country and received combat training), how many actually continued to support violent jihad cause over the long-term? That was a rhetorical question, the number is small. Of the thousands who filtered through training camps in Afghanistan over the decades, only a very small number continued to actively engage in supporting violence. So are the Saudis convincing a bunch of people who aren’t committed to violence to not be committed to violence? Good success rate to publicize with little effect of the overall levels of violence. The hard-core guys never even showed up.
As always, making simplistic blanket statements in a complex world is dangerous, but my gist is that we do need to strike up a counter-narrative, but we must understand that our narrative will have little effect globally without other, more trusted Islamic voices stating the same. Even then, a committed core will continue to decry those Islamic voices as apostates who have joined with the infidels to steal the resources of the true Muslims and to enslave the righteous.
