In Sudan, the authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian (as well as animist) minorities in the south. What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government’s sustained policy of persecution, which culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003. Even though Sudan’s Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been charged at the International Criminal Court in The Hague with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted South Sudan’s independence in 2012, the violence has not ended. In South Kordofan, for example, Christians are still subjected to aerial bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnapping of children, and other atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that there are now 1 million internally displaced persons in South Sudan.17
Both kinds of persecution—undertaken by nongovernmental groups as well as by agents of the state—have come together in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. On October 9, 2012, in the Maspero area of Cairo, Coptic Christians—who make up roughly 5 percent of Egypt’s population of 81 million18—marched in protest against a wave of attacks by Islamists, including church burnings, rapes, mutilations, and murders, that followed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship. During the protest, Egyptian security forces drove their trucks into the crowd and fired on protesters, crushing and killing at least twenty-four and wounding more than three hundred people.19 Within two months, tens of thousands of Copts had fled their homes in anticipation of more attacks.20
Nor is Egypt the only Arab country where Christian minorities have come under attack. Even before the advent of IS, it was dangerous to be a Christian in Iraq. Since 2003, more than nine hundred Iraqi Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed in Baghdad alone, and seventy churches have been burned, according to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA). Thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled as a result of violence directed specifically at them, reducing the number of Christians in the country from just over a million before 2003 to fewer than half a million today. AINA understandably describes this as an “incipient genocide or ethnic cleansing of Assyrians in Iraq.” The recent decimation by IS forces of Mosul’s two-thousand-year-old Christian population—who fled under threat of death or forced conversion, and saw their possessions stolen and looted, their homes marked with “N” (for Nazarene) and their churches desecrated—is merely the latest episode in a campaign of persecution.
One Mosul resident, Bashar Nasih Behnam, escaped with his two children. “There is not a single Christian family left in Mosul,” he said. “The last one was a disabled Christian woman. They came to her and said you have to get out and if you don’t we will cut off your head with a sword. That was the last family.” Those fleeing were also robbed: the IS fighters took their money and gold, ripped earrings from women’s ears, and confiscated mobile phones.
Then there are the states where intolerance is part and parcel of the nation’s legal code. Pakistan’s Christians are a tiny minority—only about 1.6 percent of a population of more than 180 million. But they are subject to intense segregation and discrimination: allowed to shop only at a few sparsely stocked stores, forbidden to draw water from wells earmarked for Muslims, and forced to bury their dead, stacked on top of one another, in tiny graveyards because Muslims cannot be buried near people of other faiths.
They are also subjected to Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws, which make it illegal to declare belief in the Christian Trinity. When a Christian group is suspected of transgressing the blasphemy laws, the consequences can be brutal. In the spring of 2010, the offices of the international Christian aid group World Vision were attacked by ten men armed with grenades, who left six people dead and four wounded. A militant Muslim group claimed responsibility for the attack, on the ground that World Vision was working to subvert Islam. (In fact, it was helping the survivors of a major earthquake.)
Not even Indonesia—often touted as the world’s most tolerant, democratic, and modern majority-Muslim nation—has been immune to the fever of Christophobia. Between 2010 and 2011, according to data compiled by the Christian Post, the number of violent incidents committed against religious minorities (and at 8 percent of the population, Christians are the country’s largest minority) increased by nearly 40 percent, from 198 to 276.
Despite the fact that more than a million Christians live in Saudi Arabia as foreign workers, even private acts of Christian prayer are banned. To enforce these totalitarian restrictions, the religious police regularly raid the homes of Christians and bring them up on charges of blasphemy in courts where their testimony carries less legal weight than a Muslim’s. Saudi Arabia bans the building of churches, and its textbooks enshrine anti-Christian and anti-Jewish dogma: sixth-grade students are taught that “Jews and Christians are enemies of the believers.” An eighth-grade textbook says, “The Apes are the people of the Sabbath, the Jews; and the Swine are the infidels of the communion of Jesus, the Christians.”21 Even in Ethiopia, where Christians make up a majority of the population, church burnings by members of the Muslim minority have become a problem.
Anti-Christian violence is not centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency. It is, rather, an expression of anti-Christian animus that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities. As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, pointed out in an interview with Newsweek, Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim nations have “lost the protection of their societies.”
Of course, intolerance of different faiths is not unique to Islam. The Roman Empire first persecuted Christians, then persecuted non-Christians after Christianity was adopted as the Empire’s official religion. In medieval Christendom there was no “religious freedom” as we would recognize it today; heretics were cruelly punished, Jews persecuted. When Pope Urban II called for the first crusade in 1095, he told knights willing to journey to Jerusalem that they would be forgiven all their past sins if they killed unbelievers in the Holy Land. And when European Christians set out to conquer and colonize the world, their treatment of “heathens” was often brutal to the point of genocide. Yet Patricia Crone argues that there was always something unique about the Muslim concept of jihad—“the belief that God had chosen one people over others and ordered them to go conquer the earth.” Christians today, with few exceptions, repudiate the intolerance of the past. In the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust forced Christian thinkers to confront the pernicious role of anti-Semitism in European history. The contrast with the Muslim world is stark. There, intolerance is on the rise and the remit of jihad has been extended to include all nonbelievers.
Why Are the Jihadists Winning? Because We Are Letting Them
In July 2014, the prospect of a flag bearing the words of the Shahada being raised over Downing Street got the attention of one hundred British imams, who signed a letter urging “British Muslim communities not to fall prey to any form of sectarian divisions or social discord” but rather “to continue the generous and tireless efforts to support all of those affected by the crisis in Syria and unfolding events in Iraq . . . from the UK in a safe and responsible way.” Qari Muhammad Asim, the imam at the Makkah Mosque in Leeds and one of the authors of the letter, told BBC radio: “Imams from a cross-section of theological backgrounds have come together to give a very strong message to young British Muslims who might be inclined to go to Syria or Iraq to fight, saying to them, ‘Please don’t expose yourselves, don’t put your lives at risk and the lives of others around you.’ ” Responding to a question, he went further:
Islam itself has been hijacked and [some] people . . . have been completely brainwashed. It’s completely ridiculous to say that people, fellow human beings, are enemies and as a result they should be blown up. Obviously, social media plays a huge part, the Internet plays a huge part, in brainwashing and radicalizing people.22
According to Asim, more than on
e hundred imams were planning to launch appeals on social media and platforms like Twitter. They have even developed a website, imamsonline.com. “A lot of work needs to be done,” he acknowledged. But “it’s not just the responsibility of the Muslim community and the imams. It’s law enforcement, intelligence services. We all need to work together in partnership and make sure that young British Muslims are not preyed upon by those who want to use them for their own political gains.”
It would, of course, be deeply reassuring if we could believe that the Western jihadists are merely the victims of online brainwashing and that a few moderate websites would soon fix the problem. But the reality is very different. Those who have been recruited to the cause of jihad have not just been unlucky in their Internet browsing selections. Since the 1990s, foreign-born imams have established themselves in pockets of London and other major European cities, preaching sermons and distributing audio recordings in which they have explicitly and repeatedly called for jihad.
With the best of intentions, no doubt, the British government opened its doors to many of these imams, often recognizing them as legitimate asylum seekers and offering them the usual welfare benefits available to those fleeing persecution. To give just one example, the Finsbury Park Mosque, led by the Egyptian imam and now convicted terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri, had among its congregation the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, the 9/11 “twentieth hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be Los Angeles airport bomber Ahmed Ressam, as well as Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who stands accused by the Pakistani government of murdering the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
In response to this kind of threat, the British government developed what it calls the “Prevent strategy.” Prevent is supposed to stop Britons and residents from being drawn into terrorist activities and networks, by working with all branches of government, from education to law enforcement. For instance, Prevent is supposed to help the immigration authorities to deny visas to extremist imams. But the remit of Prevent is broad: it is supposed to cover all forms of terrorism, from right-wing extremism to something vaguely called “nonviolent extremism,” whatever that means.
The potential weaknesses of this approach can be seen in the comments of one of its regional managers, Farooq Siddiqui, who in 2014 used a Facebook chat to offer his approval to Britons who wanted to travel to Syria to fight against the regime of President Assad, saying that these men had “walked the walk.” He compared these fighting jihadists to British Jews who might join the Israel Defense Forces and could then return to the United Kingdom, arguing on that basis that jihadists returning from Syria should not face automatic arrest. “If a man describes himself as wanting to help the oppressed and dies,” Siddiqui wrote, “in that case he is a martyr.”23 It is not immediately obvious what a man like Siddiqui is going to prevent, aside from a serious discussion of the problem Britain faces.
Ghaffar Hussein, the managing director of Quilliam, a British think tank working on combatting terrorism, notes that jihad is appealing because of its “one size fits all” set of answers to complex problems. Introspection is not required, he notes, because all blame is shifted to outside enemies and “anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.” The jihad narrative has therefore become “the default anti-establishment politics of today. It is a means of expressing solidarity and asserting a bold new identity while being a vehicle for seeking the restoration of pride and self-dignity.” In response, “mainstream Muslim commentators”—not to mention non-Muslims—have failed to articulate a positive narrative that does not simply reinforce the idea that Muslims are somehow victims. In short, Hussein’s argument is that the jihadists have the more compelling narrative. To understand the power of that narrative, let’s look more closely at what motivates young Western-educated Muslims to sign up for jihad.
In 2013 Umm Haritha, a twenty-year-old Canadian, traveled to Syria via Turkey to join Islamic State. Within a week, she had married an IS fighter, a Palestinian national who had been living in Sweden. He was killed five months later and Umm, a widow, turned to blogging, offering advice to others who wished to move to Syria, marry jihadists, and create families inside the IS caliphate.
Her words make for interesting reading. In an interview with Canada’s CBC via text messages, Umm described herself as “middle class,” adding that her decision to join jihad was made by a desire to “live a life of honor” under Islamic law rather than the laws of the “kufar,” or unbelievers. She had begun her journey to jihad in Canada, where she donned the niqab, a veil that exposes nothing more than the wearer’s eyes. She told her interviewer that she felt “mocked” and harassed by her fellow Canadians, adding, “Life was degrading and an embarrassment and nothing like the multicultural freedom of expression and religion they make it out to be, and when I heard that the Islamic State had sharia in some cities in Syria, it became an automatic obligation upon me since I was able to come here.”24
Umm’s online postings describe life in Manbij, an IS-controlled city of 200,000 close to the Turkish border, and show images such as the white loudspeaker van that patrols the city streets to remind residents of their daily prayers. She notes approvingly that a man was recently crucified and beheaded for the crime of robbing and raping a woman. And she adds that many of those who have moved to the caliphate have “ripped up their passports.” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the IS leader, who has renamed himself “Caliph Ibrahim,” has called on Muslims worldwide to move to the caliphate, saying, “Those who can immigrate to the Islamic State should immigrate, as immigration to the house of Islam is a duty.” As the stepbrother of a radicalized British man explained, the purveyors of jihad know what their recruits “are craving—identity, respect, empowerment. They push all the right buttons—make them feel special. And once you’re in the door, it’s like family. They look after each other.”
Consider, too, a 2014 BBC 5 Live interview with a man calling himself Abu Osama, who claimed to be from the north of England and said that he was training with the Al-Nusra Front in Syria with the ultimate goal of establishing a caliphate (Khilafah in Arabic) across the Islamic world. Osama told the BBC: “I have no intention of coming back to Britain, because I have come to revive the Islamic Khilafah. I don’t want to come back to what I have left behind. There is nothing in Britain—it is just pure evil.” And for emphasis he added: “If and when I come back to Britain it will be when this Khilafah—this Islamic state—comes to conquer Britain and I come to raise the black flag of Islam over Downing Street, over Buckingham Palace, over Tower Bridge and over Big Ben.”25 (Anjem Choudary has promised the same, predicting that the black flag of IS will fly over both 10 Downing Street and the White House after the conclusion of the great global battle that is now under way.)
Such seemingly wild narratives are not out of the mainstream; rather, they present jihad just in the way it has always been taught. “If you look at the history of Islam,” as the young jihadist Osama put it, “you will see that the Prophet fought against those who fought against him. He never fought those that never fought against the Islamic state. Where I am, the people love us, the people love the mujahideen, the warriors.” As for Osama’s family, at first they had found it “hard to accept,” but he had won them over to his “good cause.” As he put it: “They are a bit scared but I tell them we will meet in the afterlife. This is just a temporary separation. They said, ‘We understand now what you are doing,’ and my mother said, ‘I have sold you to Allah. I don’t want to see you again in this world.’ ”26
Is Jihadism Curable?
The Harvard Kennedy School scholar Jessica Stern has spent years studying counterterrorism and, in particular, efforts to prevent the spread of jihad. Indeed, she was consulted on the development of an anti-jihad effort in the Netherlands after the brutal murder of Theo van Gogh ten years ago. In a recent article, she describes in detail a Saudi Arabian jihadist rehabilitation program that has “treated” thousands of militants, and claims that the graduates have
been “reintegrated into mainstream society much more successfully than ordinary criminals.”27
The Saudi approach, Stern notes, is inspired by the efforts of other governments in other regions of the world to “deprogram” everyone from neo-Nazis to drug lords. The goal is to get them “to abandon their radical ideology or renounce their violent means or both.” The method is a full-time residential program that includes “psychological counseling, vocational training, art therapy, sports, and religious reeducation,” along with “career placement” services for themselves and their families, if needed. Upon completion, the program’s graduates—some of whom have been previously incarcerated in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay—receive housing, a car, and even funds to pay for a wedding. The Saudis will even assist them with finding a wife.
But the program doesn’t end there. There is what Stern describes as “an extensive post-release program as well, which involve[s] extensive surveillance.” Rather like convicted sex offenders in the West, ex-jihadists will be monitored for most if not all of the rest of their lives. Stern goes on to explain that the “guiding philosophy” behind the program is that “jihadists are victims, not villains, and they need tailored assistance.” Accordingly, the Saudis have a very specific term for the program’s participants. They are “beneficiaries.”