Inside the Revolution

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  What is more, he is mindful and respectful of Arab history and tradition yet is also pro-Western in his outlook and approach. He is committed to protecting and advancing the human rights of the Palestinian people, but he has also developed excellent relations with Jews in general and Israelis in particular. Likewise, he is cognizant of the enormous sensitivities within the region to the notion of Muslims converting to Christianity, but he has demonstrated a sincere and consistent interest in fostering better relations with Christians in general and with evangelicals in particular.

  Understanding the Reformers of Rabat

  Most impressive to me was the fact that the king and his advisors truly understand the magnitude of the epic struggle they are facing and seem fully committed to victory.

  “This is a battle about defining the soul and spirit of Islam itself,” Abaddi told me as we sat in his spacious but modestly decorated office one afternoon, sipping tea and overlooking Rabat, with its population of 2 million. “And we dare not fail. His Majesty believes the stakes are very high. We have no right to make the mistakes of previous generations, because we should have learned from previous mistakes and because we are very efficient today. And our mistakes could be very expensive. Look at Pearl Harbor. Look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II was very expensive in terms of human life. But the next war could mean the extermination of the planet.”

  I asked him to expand on that, particularly in light of the apocalyptic talk coming out of Tehran.

  “Nowadays,” he said, “one can discern a lot of apocalyptic seeds in our thinking in the Middle East. There has been an explosion of apocalyptic literature in the Muslim world beginning in the 1980s—after 1979, actually. There have been hundreds of books about the end of the world and the coming of the Mahdi and messianic prophecies and ideologies. Ahmadinejad is preparing for the coming of the Mahdi. Osama bin Laden is preparing for the Mahdi. He is trying to use his version of Islam to recruit an army, and he is very dangerous. That’s why I say this is a battle for the soul of the Muslim world. Because there are two completely different visions. One is peaceful, and one is apocalyptic. And Morocco can be an answer to this because His Majesty is leading a reform plan that touches the forces and the understandings and renews the souls and spirits of Islam.

  “But we need to act. We need to face this. We need to be able to make intellectual and theological arguments that convince people that the Radicals are wrong. We need coordinated actions in the media, in the world of art, in the universities, in the think tanks, at the United Nations. We also need to be able to speak in a language that regular people, including those without much education, can understand and respond to. The Reformers need to engage in actions that will drag the carpets from under the Radicals’ feet.”

  “What do you see as the worst-case scenario if the Reformers don’t seize the moment, or if they do seize the moment but lose the argument with the Rank-and-File of the Muslim world?” I asked.

  “Millions of new recruits to radicalism,” he replied. “More war. More terrorism. But, Joel, the worst is not material disasters, as bad as they would be. The worst would be the missed opportunities to live as brothers in harmony and beauty. The worst would be the missed appointment with destiny.”

  Abaddi pointed again and again to passages in the Qur’an saying that God created all of humankind, men and women from every nation. Such passages prove, he said, that “we are all one family, an extended family, and we need each other to survive and succeed.” This, he argued, was the Islamic doctrine of “complementarity,” the notion that we all complement and complete each other.

  Moreover, he said, the Qur’an teaches that since we were all created as brothers and sisters, we need to perform “mutual recognition.” This goes “beyond tolerance,” he insisted. To tolerate someone is merely to put up with him. That is not good enough. “People who think they are self-sufficient with their own ideas and their own views of the world are in danger.” What we need, he said, is to recognize that other people, other religions, other races have good in them, have richness and beauty, and we need to be wise enough to find such qualities, appreciate them, and build upon them.

  “These ideas exist in the Qur’an,” he told me, speaking specifically of complementarity and mutual recognition. “But honestly, they have been on ‘pause mode’ for too long. They have not been activated enough. They have not been taught or practiced enough. It is time to push the ‘play’ button. Wisdom is like pieces of a puzzle. Did you know that Eskimos have forty-three different words for snow? Why? Because they really understand snow. They understand its shades and its nuances. They have wisdom we don’t have. And if we’re living in a snowstorm, wouldn’t it be good to draw on the wisdom of the Eskimos?

  “What if you were putting together a puzzle of Cyrano de Bergerac. What if you put together the whole puzzle, but you were missing a piece? What if you were missing the nose? You would miss the whole point, would you not? We need to see the missing pieces in the world around us to get the whole picture, to really understand how the world works. And the only way to get those missing pieces is to recognize that someone else from some other culture or religion might understand something we don’t understand today.”

  I cannot think of a better way to sum up the way Reformers see the world. Yes, they believe Islam is the answer. But no, they do not believe violent jihad is the way. Yes, they look to the Qur’an for wisdom. But no, they do not reject the outside world, even the world of the Christians and the Jews. Rather, they believe now is the time to teach Muslims to revere their own religion but also reach out to other cultures and other religions and look for wisdom they might not have.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Moroccan Model

  One nation’s twelve-step program to combat the Radicals

  It is not just talk, though. It’s not just theory.

  King Mohammed VI and his team have a plan. Indeed, they have developed what amounts to a twelve-step program to battle the Radicals and spread Morocco’s message of reform throughout the region and around the world. The steps are:

  1. Know the enemy

  2. Stop the enemy

  3. Embrace the East

  4. Embrace the West

  5. Teach the theology of the Reformers

  6. Expand democracy

  7. Empower women

  8. Combat poverty

  9. Let the voiceless speak

  10. Build and maintain strong relations with the Jewish community

  11. Reach out to evangelical Christians in the West

  12. Counter the “Hollywood stigma”

  Allow me to explain.

  Step 1: Know the Enemy

  First and foremost, the king and his team believe that good intelligence is critical to identifying terrorist threats before they materialize. They are absolutely right.

  This involves building effective networks of human agents and electronic surveillance to monitor extremist groups and individuals. And it requires close cooperation with other intelligence agencies in the region and around the world to monitor subversives that may be planning to enter or traverse Moroccan territory.

  But it also involves understanding the mind-set of the enemy. And given that the main enemy today involves followers of an extreme interpretation of Islam, religious scholars like Ahmed Abaddi have emerged as key players in helping the king and his court understand more deeply and completely what they are up against.

  “When you study the extremists’ literature and you visit their Web sites and watch their DVDs and what they produce, you see that there are six repetitive items that come back all the time,” Abaddi explained.

  The first issue, he said, is that of colonialism, in which the West is demonized because, as the Radicals say, “They came in and colonized our countries and killed our people!” While it is true that Morocco was a protectorate of France for nearly a century, little violence ensued. But in Algeria, Abaddi noted, some 1.5 million Muslims were killed by
French colonialists, to say nothing of numerous other cases of violence committed throughout North Africa and the Middle East by the British, the Italians, and others. Add to this what Abaddi calls the “Afghani-Iraqi cocktail” in which the Radicals say that the Americans and the Europeans are occupying Islamic territory as colonialists, imperialists, and oppressors, and you have a highly charged emotional issue that resonates deeply within the Muslim world and helps the Radicals recruit vast numbers of new jihadists.

  The second issue is the belief that the West is “draining the wealth of the Islamic world” by exploiting the region’s natural resources, notably oil. The West, of course, is paying Muslims enormous sums of money for these resources. Each year, the U.S. alone sends hundreds of billions of dollars to Muslim countries in return for oil, in addition to what the Europeans are paying. We hardly see ourselves as “exploiting” anyone. But Abaddi notes that as one might expect, such facts are never mentioned by the Radicals; thus the exploitation issue has great populist appeal.

  The third recurring theme among extremists is the “Hollywood stigma,” a widespread and deep-rooted feeling of humiliation throughout the region due to the belief that major American motion pictures are constantly showing Arabs and Muslims as being stupid, dirty, and evil.

  Fourth, Abaddi said, is the historic “conspiracy” by the West “against the Ottoman Empire,” which was the seat of the caliphate and represented the unity of Muslims. Radicals constantly repeat facts about the 1915 attack by the British, French, and Germans to reclaim control of Istanbul. Even though the Allies actually lost the Battle of the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli campaign, the conflicts resulted in a quarter of a million Turkish casualties, and the Radicals have vowed never to forget. Moroccans, Abaddi conceded, were not as concerned with this issue because they were never a part of the Ottoman Empire. Still, he added, “this is what is being said in Radical literature,” and it has been working to recruit more jihadists.

  The fifth issue is the perceived double standard Westerners have regarding Israel versus the Arabs. The Radicals say that the Jews possess advanced major weapons systems, weapons of mass destruction, and even nuclear weapons, and the West says nothing. But when Iraq or Iran or other countries in the region seek such weapons, “then everybody tries to get rid of those nations,” say the Radicals.

  The sixth issue is the existence of Israel in the first place. Radicals insist that a great injustice was done to the Muslim people when the Jews began flooding into the Holy Land, buying up land and driving out the local population. The Jews, of course, say that the rebirth of Israel—aside from being a prophetic event—was specifically designed to correct a great injustice: the Holocaust. In response, the Radicals say, “There was no Holocaust! And even if there was, let the Jews have a state in Europe, where the alleged atrocities were committed, not in Palestine, which was not directly involved!” It is a vicious cycle, compounded by all the deaths and dislocation experienced by the Muslims of the area since 1948.

  Step 2: Stop the Enemy

  It is one thing to know the enemy. It is another thing to stop the enemy, and here having crack security services able to intercept terrorists and dismantle jihadist cells before they can strike is essential. Morocco has excelled in this arena, and to understand why, Fred Schwien, John Moser, and I took some time to visit the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior. There we met with Khalid Zerouali, a senior official in Morocco’s equivalent of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

  I took a liking to Zerouali, who was in his early forties and thus similar in age to me, right away—and not simply because he began our meeting by telling me that he had read and appreciated Epicenter. I also appreciated his passion for his job and how well he understood the nature of the evil Morocco is facing.

  “The threat to us is real and serious,” Zerouali told us. “We were the first Arab country to stand with you after 9/11. His Majesty was in Mauritania and sent condolences to the U.S. from there. Then we began to work closely with the U.S. to stop al Qaeda. It was the right thing to do, but the fact is it made us a target. We are still a target. So far we have been successful. But we can’t rest for a moment.”542

  Zerouali noted that bin Laden and Zawahiri have established a new branch known as “Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,”543 or AQIM, a clandestine network of sleeper agents and infiltrators whose mission is to kill innocents, overthrow moderates, and ultimately establish new regimes that can create new base camps for the original al Qaeda operation, on the run since the liberation of Afghanistan. “Al Qaeda leaders are looking for new harbors,” he said matter-of-factly. “And the Sahara region historically has had all the right conditions—poor people, porous borders, states that cannot control their own territories. His Majesty recognized this right away and ordered us to take actions to safeguard our people. Our strength is intel—knowing who is in our country, what they are doing, whether they pose a threat, and stopping them in time.”

  “What keeps you up at night?” I asked him.

  “Self-radicalization,” he said. “We can find people when they are acting in a group. We can pick up their calls or intercept their e-mails or recruit an informer. But the Internet today is posing a real challenge. You can go on there and learn to build a bomb. You can find jihadist teachings. You can learn how to be a terrorist. . . . How can you stop that? How can you prevent the chemistry in the mind to prevent the fatal work of terrorism?” He calls this problem “disposable terrorism,” lone wolves who can prepare to blow up themselves and lots of other people and then be gone without a trace. “You can’t detect them. You can’t track them. You can’t infiltrate them. You can rarely stop them. This is what I worry about.”

  The good news: ever since the Casablanca bombings in 2003, the Moroccan security forces are getting a lot of tips from citizens watching for guerrillas in their midst. A few months before we arrived, for example, police raided a house to bust up a cell of suicide bombers preparing to strike. During the raid, several of the bombers blew themselves up, killing only themselves. But in the commotion, one of the terrorists slipped away, unnoticed by the police. He tried to blend into the crowd, but several people saw him. They didn’t know he was one of the terrorists. They thought he was simply a thief. But they pounced on him, captured him, and turned him over to the police. “The population is against all this extremism, all these suicide bombings,” Zerouali explained. “This is not Islam, they say; this is not human.”

  Border protection is one of Zerouali’s top priorities. “My main concern is not airports or seaports,” he said, though his department has worked hard to shore up security procedures at all such entry points, including making Morocco the first country in the region to have biometric passports that are nearly impossible to counterfeit. “My main concern is open land.” Mindful of this threat a generation ago, King Hassan II ordered a 2,700 kilometer “berm” or security wall to be built in the Sahara along Morocco’s (disputed) southern border, beginning in 1982. The goal at the time was to stop illegal immigrants, drug smugglers, and gun runners from entering the country. The security fence was completed in 1988, long before the U.S. government decided it needed to build such a fence along its southern border with Mexico. Today, the wall is the first line of defense against al Qaeda operatives and other Radicals hoping to slip across the border unnoticed.

  But it is not a perfect system. As evidenced by how many foreign-born terrorists Moroccan authorities have rounded up in recent years, much more needs to be done.

  Step 3: Embrace the East

  Judging it wiser, safer, and more effective to build strong strategic alliances with other moderate Islamic nations rather than to go it alone against the Radicals, King Mohammed VI—positioned at the farthest western edge of the Islamic world—has made it a priority to embrace the East.

  He has built strong ties with Turkey over the years. In March of 2005 he welcomed Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan to Rabat for a state visit in which the two countrie
s signed a historic free trade agreement. The king has also been very supportive of Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, believing that would be a huge step forward in healing long-standing tensions between the Islamic world and the West, particularly given Europe’s conflict with Istanbul in 1915.

  The king has also been strongly supportive of democratic reforms in Afghanistan. He sent humanitarian aid to the Afghan people immediately after the fall of the Taliban, and Morocco was one of the first Islamic countries to endorse and support the government of President Karzai from the earliest days of his administration. “Morocco . . . has been constantly following up with interest developments experienced by Afghanistan, a Muslim country . . . hails the major step [of] the agreement concluded between Afghan parties to form an interim government to manage public affairs . . . and considers this event as a major step in the path leading to restoring peace, security, and serenity for the Afghan people after the conflicts and misfortunes they underwent,” said a statement by the Moroccan Foreign Ministry on December 24, 2001. Since then, the king and President Karzai have established and maintained regular diplomatic contact.

  Morocco was also the first Arab state to condemn Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and sent troops to help liberate the moderate Gulf state in 1991 as well as to defend the Saudis. On the other hand, the king and his aides have taken a “wait and see” approach to the newly democratic government in Iraq. After the abduction and murder of two Moroccan diplomats in Baghdad in the fall of 2005 and repeated reports that al Qaeda has been recruiting Moroccans to launch terrorist attacks inside Iraq, the issue of democracy in Iraq and U.S. and European military involvement there apparently have been simply too sensitive for the Moroccan government to tackle thus far.544