by Sonia Shukla
Published in Business Standard, September 2009
Terrorism: Patterns of Internationalization
Edited by Jaideep Saikia & Ekaterina Stepanova
Published by Sage
Price: 695
Pages: 266
As you go through this book, it makes you wonder what its target audience is. The publishers, or the authors, answer this question on the back cover. They say, this book is targeted at the military, the police, law enforcement agencies and government training institutes, in addition, it will also benefit political analysts and professionals such as counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism experts.
With that knowledge you begin to assess the success of this compilation of essays. On the face of it, Terrorism: Patterns of Internationalization, edited by Jaideep Saikia and Ekaterina Stepanova, appears to be a well-timed effort to compile studies on international terrorism in its various regional avatars. In its 266 pages the two editors have collected 11 chapters written by 12 experts on terrorism from different parts of the world.
Going by sheer numbers it is a laudable effort, but there is a problem: the text doesn’t go beyond being a 101, a mere introduction to the way several parts of the world have come to be threatened with menacing levels of violence. Most chapters, and we will discuss them shortly, have some interesting details but they don’t say much more than what is already available in newspapers every day and in dozens of other texts that have sprung up since 9/11.
Before going further afield, let’s examine some of the chapters on terrorism in South Asia.
Saikia, one of the editors, has a chapter that concentrates on the northeast of India. He says it is geographically distant from the centre and for decades has been facing militancy, insurgency, inter-ethnic conflicts and the strategic threat of Islamisation of the region. With painstaking research, he has documented the ISI-Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (Bangladesh)-ULFA nexus to shelter and train various terrorist outfits and plot terrorist attacks in India. But we already know this.
Subir Bhaumik’s chapter on Bangladesh details information about India’s neighbour facing the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism and how the Jamaat-e-Islami works through the democratic process to support violent Islamist groups. Some facts are interesting but they don’t break new ground.
Hariharan has a chapter on the LTTE’s role in Sri Lanka. He gives his observations on the LTTE and the support it still enjoys from the Tamil diaspora, despite their military defeat at the hands of the Sri Lankan army. He describes the international character of the LTTE and its widespread political, military and financial linkages. All this is well-known, but there is a new twist to the tale. Hariharan claims the IPKF withdrew from Sri Lanka because of the LTTE’s political links within India. If that was indeed the case, the contributor fails to explain why it went into Sri Lanka in the first place. LTTE’s political connections in India are well-documented but it is stretching the imagination to say this is why the IPKF was recalled.
Jennifer Lynn Oetken’s chapter on terrorism in Kashmir does not break limits of credulity but it does not break any new ground on analyzing the transforming nature of terrorism in the Valley either.
Bishnu Raj Upreti does a study of terrorist activity in Nepal and although Maoist violence is far from taking over the world, its linkages with India technically qualify it for a study of patterns of internationalization.
Other parts of the world also come up for study. Alonso and Iribarren’s paper focuses on two traditional Europe-based terrorist organisations, the Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatist group, ETA, and their connections beyond the border.
But it does not discuss the recent phenomenon of terrorist networks in Europe that have their connections both in Europe and South Asia, specifically in Pakistan. The threat from IRA and ETA is now diminishing in Europe, but there are new terrorist modules being discovered in Britain and in other parts that have linkages abroad, especially Pakistan and they form the real new lexicon of terrorism in that continent.
In Chapter 9, Mohamed Nawab Bin Mohamed Osman discusses how the Afghan war was instrumental in the transformation of Jemaah Islamiyah from a group with local aspirations to a trans-regional organization with linkages across South-East Asia.
The editors themselves use the book to address dilemmas facing academics, like what is the meaning of terrorism, what is international terrorism, while stressing the difficulty in drawing a strict line between international and domestic terrorism. Some of these observations are interesting but you are not convinced that they are the last word for practitioners of the anti-terrorist trade.
The final chapter by Adam Dolnik studies if the unlimited goals of the al-Qaeda and the broader transnational violent Islamist movements require or are matched by unlimited means to advance these goals. Dolnik suggests the upcoming trend of terrorist operations by Islamist cells around the world is likely to be one of decreasing, rather than increasing in technological sophistication. This is a reassuring point but I doubt if anti-terrorist squads are going to stop working overtime because of it.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Slice of history in the making
Sonia Shukla
Business Standard
August 05, 2009
FROM FATWA TO JIHAD
The Rushdie affair and its legacy
Kenan Malik
Atlantic Books, Rs 399
Several books in the last eight years have discussed the impact of either fatwa or jihad on modern society, but a book with both fatwa and jihad in the title is, to the best of my knowledge, a first.
As you move beyond the title, Kenan Malik seems really to be dealing with the issue of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the ripples that created in the United Kingdom. From there the author is making a slightly far-fetched linkage between that event and the problems created by the modern jihad.
But, according to Malik, the connection between burning The Satanic Verses in 1988-89 and the burning towers of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan in 2001 is real: it is the erosion of self-belief in the western civilisation and the impact of the immediate reality of the death threat from militant Islam facing the west. Malik’s analysis of the west’s response to the fatwa and jihad is even more interesting: “Just as many reacted to the Rushdie affair by reassessing their commitment to traditional liberal values and insisting, in the name of multiculturalism, that Islamist sentiments had to be appeased, so many responded to 9/11 with unease and self-loathing.” He goes on to give examples of these.
Malik may not have created the most lucid linkage between the Rushdie affair and the current troubles of the western world that began with the fall of the twin towers, but his book is an engaging history of the politics of contemporary Britain and the changes that have taken place there over the last 30 years. Born in India, Malik grew up within immigrant communities in Britain and acquired an enriching detachment to his subject as he covered the Rushdie affair as a young journalist in Bradford.
This put Malik in a unique position to cover the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Britain. He traces the transition of Muslim identity in the west from being defined in terms of race to religion through the change in his friend Hassan: “His metamorphosis from left-wing wide boy to Islamic militant… In that metamorphosis lies the story of the wider changes that were taking place both in Britain and in other western nations.” And one of the factors at the root of this was the British policy of multiculturalism.
One of the most deplorable effects of the rise of terrorism in the last 20 years has been the culture of fear it has created, and Malik carefully patches together how this has led to an era of curtailment of the freedom of expression. He tells us how Rushdie’s publishers may have stood by him in those difficult times but the publishers today are not willing to bet on work that may cause offence. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Malik seems to suggest so.
This last thought is linked to his study of how multiculturalism has given rise to political correctness that condemns people to a life of rarely saying what they mean. This curtailed freedom of expression in the world stems from a misguided state policy.
According to his critics, Malik’s chief grouse is against the state. He believes it is all-powerful but impotent. So Britain supported Rushdie in the face of the worldwide ban of his book but fell short by not severing ties with Iran. In the book, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, one of the founders of the Muslim Institute in the UK, says “the conflict over Rushdie was never about religion. It was about politics, specifically between Saudi Arabia and Iran over winning the hearts and minds of Muslims.” It was politics again which was responsible for the policy of multiculturalism in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. But most people already know all this; Malik just says it again in a well-researched study.
So don’t go to this book looking for anything new, Malik is not attempting to break new ground on the nature of Islam and terrorism. But his book has merit in chronicling a sequence of events that have left an indelible mark on the world.
Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fatwa issued by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, the book tells for the first time the full story of this defining episode. It’s a slice of Malik’s life but From Fatwa to Jihad interests us because it is also a slice of history.
Business Standard
August 05, 2009
FROM FATWA TO JIHAD
The Rushdie affair and its legacy
Kenan Malik
Atlantic Books, Rs 399
Several books in the last eight years have discussed the impact of either fatwa or jihad on modern society, but a book with both fatwa and jihad in the title is, to the best of my knowledge, a first.
As you move beyond the title, Kenan Malik seems really to be dealing with the issue of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the ripples that created in the United Kingdom. From there the author is making a slightly far-fetched linkage between that event and the problems created by the modern jihad.
But, according to Malik, the connection between burning The Satanic Verses in 1988-89 and the burning towers of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan in 2001 is real: it is the erosion of self-belief in the western civilisation and the impact of the immediate reality of the death threat from militant Islam facing the west. Malik’s analysis of the west’s response to the fatwa and jihad is even more interesting: “Just as many reacted to the Rushdie affair by reassessing their commitment to traditional liberal values and insisting, in the name of multiculturalism, that Islamist sentiments had to be appeased, so many responded to 9/11 with unease and self-loathing.” He goes on to give examples of these.
Malik may not have created the most lucid linkage between the Rushdie affair and the current troubles of the western world that began with the fall of the twin towers, but his book is an engaging history of the politics of contemporary Britain and the changes that have taken place there over the last 30 years. Born in India, Malik grew up within immigrant communities in Britain and acquired an enriching detachment to his subject as he covered the Rushdie affair as a young journalist in Bradford.
This put Malik in a unique position to cover the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Britain. He traces the transition of Muslim identity in the west from being defined in terms of race to religion through the change in his friend Hassan: “His metamorphosis from left-wing wide boy to Islamic militant… In that metamorphosis lies the story of the wider changes that were taking place both in Britain and in other western nations.” And one of the factors at the root of this was the British policy of multiculturalism.
One of the most deplorable effects of the rise of terrorism in the last 20 years has been the culture of fear it has created, and Malik carefully patches together how this has led to an era of curtailment of the freedom of expression. He tells us how Rushdie’s publishers may have stood by him in those difficult times but the publishers today are not willing to bet on work that may cause offence. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Malik seems to suggest so.
This last thought is linked to his study of how multiculturalism has given rise to political correctness that condemns people to a life of rarely saying what they mean. This curtailed freedom of expression in the world stems from a misguided state policy.
According to his critics, Malik’s chief grouse is against the state. He believes it is all-powerful but impotent. So Britain supported Rushdie in the face of the worldwide ban of his book but fell short by not severing ties with Iran. In the book, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, one of the founders of the Muslim Institute in the UK, says “the conflict over Rushdie was never about religion. It was about politics, specifically between Saudi Arabia and Iran over winning the hearts and minds of Muslims.” It was politics again which was responsible for the policy of multiculturalism in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. But most people already know all this; Malik just says it again in a well-researched study.
So don’t go to this book looking for anything new, Malik is not attempting to break new ground on the nature of Islam and terrorism. But his book has merit in chronicling a sequence of events that have left an indelible mark on the world.
Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fatwa issued by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, the book tells for the first time the full story of this defining episode. It’s a slice of Malik’s life but From Fatwa to Jihad interests us because it is also a slice of history.
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