Jihadists on the US-Iran Standoff

by Daniel Kimmage
April 3rd, 2007

The current debate raging on Sunni jihadist Internet forums about the standoff between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran highlights basic disagreements within the radical Sunni movement over how to understand contemporary political affairs. It also shows how these disagreements have prevented jihadists from forging a unified position on this issue.

One of the core tenets of jihadist ideology is the idea of a clash between the forces of faith and unbelief. The Islamic faith fields an army of holy warriors inspired, if not actually led, by Usama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda among others. Unbelief has deployed the Crusaders and Jews -- America and Israel, principally -- and their agents in the Muslim world to subjugate the lands of Islam and obliterate Islamic identity. Everything that is taking place in the world today is a reflection of this struggle, and everyone must choose sides.

An issue however arises for the Sunni jihadists when they seek to make sense of how Iran fits in to the titanic conflict between Islam and unbelief. That is because both Iran and the United States are the jihadists' declared enemies, yet the two countries are clearly different, and evidently also at conflict with each other.

For some jihadists, Iran is arrayed with the forces of unbelief. Jihadists espouse a vision of Islam that is not only fanatically rigid but rigidly ahistorical. They strive to return today's diverse Muslim world, which they see as polluted by centuries of malign influences and innovations, to the uniform purity that held sway in the early seventh century when the Prophet led the community. Jihadists consider Shiites, a group that splintered from the Muslim mainstream shortly after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, to be heretics and renegades, and they decry the Shiite theocracy of Iran as a bastion of unbelief.

Adding further confusion, some of Iran's positions come perilously close to those of the jihadists, such as official Tehran's implacable enmity for Israel. This has led jihadists to ask whether the hostility between Iran and the United States and Israel is actually real, or whether in fact it is a sham masking a conspiracy among the forces of unbelief.

The question is a natural one for the jihadists. Their worldview is deeply conspiratorial, which stems less from the much-ballyhooed fascination with conspiracies in the Middle East than from the experience of movements that have functioned for decades in a shadowy underworld. More importantly, jihadist ideology's stark division of the world into two bitterly opposed camps leads naturally to the assumption that the jihadists' enemies are in league with each other.

Jihadist ideology does not provide a ready answer to the question of whether the standoff between the United States and Iran is real, in part because the movement's cheerleaders have so thoroughly demonized the players -- America, Iran, and Israel -- that they loom primarily as centers of malevolence, and not as actors amenable to analysis. But the jihadists' analytical difficulties run deeper, as a review of their statements and debates on the U.S.-Iran issue shows.

Few jihadist luminaries have directly addressed the U.S.-Iran issue. One exception is Hamid al-Ali, a Kuwait-based scholar whose statements are increasingly popular on the jihadist internet. In a January 29 essay entitled Clash of the Devils, Battle of Myths, al-Ali portrays Shiites and "crusaders" as parallel proponents of unbelief. Shiite rituals of blood and suffering to commemorate the martyrdom of Husain mirror the Christian fascination with the crucifixion. Both sides are obsessive myth-makers, al-Ali argues, adding that "the most dangerous thing is that myth serves as the basis for the fateful political decisions that are bringing the world to the edge of the abyss."

In the current standoff, the jihadists saymillenarian delusions are driving decision-makers in Washington and Tehran. Al-Ali writes, "The myth of Armageddon has crept into the minds of the most important politicians in the White House." In Iran, President Ahmadinejad is seen as "paving the way for the appearance of the Mahdi," the hoped-for redeemer of Islam. According to al-Ali, "Bush considers Iran the army of the false Messiah, [Iranian President] Nejad considers America the army of the antichrist." He concludes, "This connection [between Iran and the United States] will bring forth a mad war between them with no noble aim, and it will cause great corruption, terrible schisms, and upheaval. The only one who knows its extent is He who has decreed it by his wisdom. After this, God willing, will follow release and mercy on the people of Islam."

Al-Ali gives no rational reason for the hostility between Iran and the United States. In a subsequent essay on March 18, he goes into great detail on the balance of forces in the Middle East in the event of a war between Iran and the United States, but sticks to his quasi-mystical view of American motivations. America, he writes, "will bring new destruction in a new war, for it is a culture that knows nothing but destruction -- the destruction of human values and morals, and the destruction of prosperity and human life."

Mirror images of unbelief, America and Iran are simply on the path to a "mad war." Al-Ali's reading of events might be termed a literal projection of the Arabic term "dar al-harb" ("house of war"), a traditional designation for the realm beyond Muslim rule. In the end, al-Ali does not explain why Iran and the United States will fight each other. He takes it as a given that they will, and hopes that God will ensure that the outcome is favorable to the believers.

An analysis in the latest issue of Sawt al-Jihad, an al-Qaeda online magazine that reappeared in February after a lengthy hiatus, takes a sharply different approach. A one-page article attributed to Abu Ali al-Shimali argues that the United States will attack Iran because they no longer have common interests in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Al-Shimali writes, "The time of mutual assistance between the two sides and the division of influence and resources has come to an end. America feels that the time has come to take sole control of influence and resources, whether in the Gulf or in Iraq." Echoing al-Ali, he closes, "The countries of the Gulf will find themselves a party in this war, which will ravage the land. We pray to God that He will ward off the schemes of the schemers, destroy the oppressors with the oppressors, and lead the Muslims out safe and sound, for this is within His power."

In theory, jihadists do not recognize any meaningful distinction between the religious and the political -- they insist that the answers to all questions, including those that secular thinkers would term "political," can be found in the Koran, recorded utterances of the Prophet, and divinely inspired actions of the Prophet and his companions. But as Hamid al-Ali's essay and the short article in Sawt al-Jihad illustrate, jihadist thought in practice picks and chooses freely between religious and political explanations in its treatment of concrete events. And this, in turn, leads quite often to some concrete differences of opinion.

For instance, al-Ali's analysis of the standoff between Iran and the United States is religious and essentialist. It treats relations between the two countries as a function of the unbelief that determines their essence. For al-Ali, the false "myths" that hold sway over the two countries' leaders are the forces driving them toward war.

Al-Baghdadi's analysis, on the other hand, is political and materialist. It treats relations between the two countries as a function of the power they can marshal in a fight over material resources. For Al-Baghdadi, the "interests" of the two countries, once in concert but now in conflict, are the forces driving them toward war.

1. Iran and America are both bastions of unbelief, and therefore they will clash;
2. Iran and America are both bastions of unbelief, and therefore they are each other's allies;
3. Iran and America have divergent material interests, and therefore they will clash;
4. Iran and America have convergent material interests, and therefore they will cooperate.
   On the first count, Hamid al-Ali's essay is representative. Yet the essentialist argument lends itself just as easily to the opposite conclusion, as the above-noted forum post citing a Koranic verse -- "The Unbelievers are protectors, one of another" (8:73) -- suggests. Another post on January 17 made the same point, arguing that America will not strike Iran because "unbelief forms a single community in its war against Islam and Muslims."
   
   A response to the previous post made the case for divergent material interests, arguing, "Striking Iran is an imperative for America because Iran's influence in the region has begun to get out of control, and America and the West will not let Iran gain control over the oil of the Persian Gulf no matter how many common interests they have." But the materialist argument can also be turned on its head, as the above-noted forum post about a secret Iranian-U.S. division of "Iraq and the Arab nation" showed. A post from an early January debate on another forum also argued that common interests are fueling Iranian-U.S. cooperation, for the two are "dividing up Iraq's oil. ...Iraq's oil is meant to belong to America and Iran."
   
   What the debate on jihadist forums clearly shows is the degree to which often opposing religious and political concerns shape the internal dynamics of jihadist ideology and influence jihadist positions on specific issues.While it is not entirely clear where this dynamic will drive radical Sunnis in their views on the United States and Shiite Iran, it is likely to prevent them from arriving at a unified stance. The tension between religious and political concerns is also likely to play an important role in the future course of jihadist thought and the development of the movement it inspires and guides.
   

   Daniel Kimmage is a regional analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The views expressed here are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer.

   To obtain citations and source information for this piece and others in the "Jihad Dispatches" series, contact Hudson's Center on Islam at islamistideology@hudson.org.

Copyright 2005 Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World