by Robert Manne
The Americans’ media halo, first exposed by the “miracle” of September 11, would soon be utterly destroyed and the hatred of the slumbering Muslim masses finally aroused. Moreover, as the United States lurched from one crisis to another, the helplessness and vulnerability of the Muslim taghut regimes in its orbit would become increasingly obvious. When the Americans withdraw from Iraq “the terror which will be in [these traitors’] hearts … will be indescribable”. The umma must grasp this historic opportunity. If the moment were to pass, “generations of Muslims will be lost in the mire of having to submit to Taghut courts of law and will drown in televised carnal appetites”. “If not now,” Naji asks, “then when?”
The Management of Savagery is a systematic exposition of what the mujahidin must now do so as not to squander the unique opportunity offered by September 11. Naji acknowledges that the mujahidin are presently only at the very beginning of their work. Salafi jihadist research undertaken before September 11 suggested that the most promising regions for activity were Jordan, North Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Gulf States. Other opportunities might suddenly arise. Where central power exists more or less intact, the mujahidin should involve themselves in what are called “vexation and exhaustion” operations whose aim is the creation of savage chaos. Where central power is non-existent or weak – as it was in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal, and as it most likely will be in many other regions of opportunity as American power melts away – the condition of savage chaos already prevails or shortly will.
Naji’s book is principally an attempt to explain to the mujahidin how they can mount vexation and exhaustion operations to create regions of savage chaos; how they can then take control and manage the regions of savagery that have emerged; and how, from the consolidation of different regions of managed savagery, the next historic stage, the stage of the construction of Islamic states, can be accomplished. Eventually, all the lands once Muslim – “Jerusalem … Bukhara, Samarkand, Andalusia” – will be restored to Islam. Even so, the most vital ambition of the mujahidin will not yet have been realised. It is only then that the mujahidin will begin on their final task of “liberating the earth and humanity from the hegemony of unbelief and tyranny through the power of God”.
The heart of Naji’s treatise is his explanation of the military and political strategy and tactics by which the mujahidin can take the first step in this “long journey … of limbs, blood, and corpses”, to create and then manage the regions of savagery. The present era is primarily one of vexation and exhaustion operations against the taghut regimes or the Crusaders. Naji, who praises as exemplary the Bali operation that took the life of so many Australians in 2002, recommends attacks on tourist resorts, usurious banks or famous apostate authors. They will spread a more generalised fear in hundreds of similar sites or among corresponding human types.
Naji is particularly enthusiastic about attacks against the petroleum industry. Such attacks will force the enemy to concentrate its most loyal troops around oil fields and installations, leaving the remaining small numbers of soldiers isolated in peripheral regions increasingly vulnerable and therefore, through fear, forced “to choose between killing or joining us, or fleeing and abandoning their weapons”. He is very concerned that the mujahidin explain their actions and justify their consequences – the economic costs and the enemy’s counterattacks – with rational arguments and Shar’ia texts, communicated via plausible audio and video productions that appeal to the masses as well as the elites. He grasps the vital role played by mass media under contemporary conditions of war.
What is most chilling about The Management of Savagery are the very many passages advocating the infliction of extreme violence on the enemy. An explosion targeting one of their buildings must be of such ferocity that “it makes the earth completely swallow it up”. During the battles, hostages will be taken, and “if the demands are not met, the hostages should be liquidated in a terrifying manner”. On occasion, spies in the mujahidin’s ranks will be uncovered. Even the lowliest must be killed “with the utmost coarseness and ugliness”. Here the Friend of the Prophet, Abu Bakr, the most merciful of souls, is the great inspiration. Naji reminds his readers three times that Abu Bakr punished a traitor by burning him alive. One order he issued to his army “dealt only with the matter of severing the neck without clemency”.
For Naji, one of the vital methods for the conduct of the mujahidin is what he calls “paying the price”. Following each enemy action there must be retribution in at least equal measure, preferably in an unexpected region, even if it takes years. The enemy must know that every time it kills members of the mujahidin forces “vengeance for their blood will be undertaken” according to the principle “blood for blood and destruction for destruction”.
None of this violence is random or meaningless. Its simple purpose is to “fill [the enemy’s] hearts with fear” and to leave them with feelings of “hopelessness”. But there is another political end. As the war progresses, one of the most important ambitions of the mujahidin is to “polarise” society into two camps: the followers of falsity and the followers of truth. By making “this battle very violent, such that death is a heartbeat away”, people will come to see that while one kind of death leads to Paradise the other leads to Hell. More prosaically, the ambition of the mujahidin is to use extreme violence to create conditions of savage chaos. In such conditions, people yearn for security, above all else. As the mujahidin gain the upper hand against the apostate regimes or the Crusaders, people will flock to them because of their strength.
As news of their victories spreads, the best potential recruits for jihad, “exuberant” youth in whom the human instinct is still most alive, will migrate from distant regions to join the jihadist caravan. They will need to learn from their elders whom they can rightly target. On the one hand, they should avoid the zealotry that tarnished the image of the mujahidin during the Algerian civil war, those who embraced the principle “everyone who is not with us is against us”; on the other hand, they should avoid the destructive humanitarianism of “the person of exaggerated erudition” who deplores the spilling of blood. The mujahidin will need to penetrate the ranks of the army, the police and the political parties of the apostate enemy with spies. Best suited for this work are those youthful mujahidin who can “fend off intellectual doubts and [bodily] desires”.
Not all youth, however, are suited for jihad, which those already hardened in battle know “is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism … and massacring”. Naji is gravely concerned about the gentleness of his contemporaries. “The Arabs used to fight and know the nature of wars.” Many no longer do. “It is better for those who have the intention to begin a jihadi action and are also soft to sit in their homes.” The mujahidin must be able not only to inflict but also to endure extreme violence. Naji tells the story of an Afghan unmoved by a screaming child from his own family who had just witnessed an unspeakable horror. An Arab asked the Afghan, “Have you no feeling?” The Afghan replied, “This is war, and you and I will die like them some day.” This Afghan is Naji’s idea of the exemplary mujahidin, of the exemplary human being.
Naji believes the corrupt spirit of the taghut regimes renders them incapable of sustaining a long war. Instead, they will resort to mass arrests, hellish imprisonments and torture of the mujahidin. Nothing, however, better prepares young men for jihad and brutal killing than hatred for their torturers. With God’s grace, the wars of the mujahidin against the Crusaders and their taghut clients will succeed. One of the most exalted passages in The Management of Savagery concerns the progress of the mujahidin’s war against the occupiers of Iraq. The American soldiers have proven themselves to be cowardly and incompetent. Naji has even read newspaper reports of “epilepsy and madness” among them. God has shown his favour to the mujahidin by visiting upon the American troops a series of miraculous pestilences: “massive spiders … which spread terror in their hearts” and “mosquitoes which … cause the skin
to swell and collapse, for which there is no cure”. He has also sent ghostly apparitions, fighting on the side of the mujahidin, which “the advanced weaponry of the Americans could not harm”.
According to Naji, if the Muslims now wish to create the Islamic State they must recognise the fundamental lesson of history: that all states, not merely Islamic ones, “are established after oceans of blood”. This is not in the slightest a melancholy and regrettable truth. Jihad “completely refashions the personality”. It alone provides the condition in which the human spirit is tested and perfected and where “altruism becomes easy and egotism falls away”.
Even more profoundly, only by participating in the most violent struggles will an individual have their eyes opened to the beauty of Islam. As Sayyid Qutb understood, the Qur’an delivers its secrets only to those whose frame of mind has been shaped in battle. Trials and tribulations remove “the darkness from the eyes and the dust from the heart”. “Terrible events … and the steadfastness of human exemplars in the face of the horrors … firmly roots ideas … which could not be taught to people in hundreds of years of peaceful education.” Naji compares the battle-hardened mujahidin to the Muslim man of peace who “cannot imagine himself outside of his air-conditioned mosque or outside of his office under the fans”.
The most startling section of The Management of Savagery comes at its conclusion, in the section entitled “Our Method Is a Mercy to All Beings”. It argues that at the time of Noah’s flood God destroyed all unbelievers. In the early days of Islam, the sword of God smote Arab polytheists, unconverted Jews and Christians, Muslims who sinned against the faith, apostates who abandoned their religion. Through jihad, God “does not give free rein to … people to corrupt the earth”. Jihad provides “a salvation from the fire for coming generations” by ensuring “that people come on the Day of Resurrection, dragged to Paradise in chains”. Jihad is, however, not merely an expression of God’s stern justice. “Despite the blood, corpses, and limbs which encompass it and the killing and fighting which its practice entails”, jihad, Naji tells us, is God’s “greatest mercy to man”. In George Orwell’s imagined totalitarian state, “War Is Peace” and “Slavery Is Freedom”. In Abu Bakr Naji’s blood-soaked Management of Savagery, “Slaughter Is Mercy”.
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Someone, perhaps Talleyrand, once wrote of a political event, “It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” This aphorism might have been coined for the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The disintegration of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime provided the opportunity for the Salafi jihadist movement to mount its greatest vexation and exhaustion operation thus far in history. Eventually it came to be led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the spiritual father of the Islamic State. With Naji in theory and Zarqawi in practice, Salafi jihadism entered a new, even more brutal, phase. There is some evidence of a direct connection. Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, the authors of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, learned that The Management of Savagery circulated widely among the Islamic State’s “commanders” and its “rank-and-file fighters”.
Zarqawi, a Jordanian from a poor Bedouin family, graduated from a life of violent petty crime to jihadist Islam in his early twenties. In 1989 he travelled to Afghanistan, too late to participate in the anti-Soviet war. In 1992 he became a student of one of the influential and doctrinally extreme Salafi jihadists, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Zarqawi and Maqdisi returned to Jordan and shortly after were imprisoned together. The gentle, scholarly Maqdisi ceded leadership of their prison followers to his far tougher and more charismatic pupil. Zarqawi suffered prolonged torture. It appears to have had the kind of effect Naji described.
As soon as he was released from prison under the royal amnesty of 1999, Zarqawi quit Jordan for Afghanistan. Having met Osama bin Laden there briefly, he established his own jihadist training camp at Herat, close to the Iranian border, with no connection to al-Qaeda. Following September 11 and the US attack on Afghanistan, Zarqawi fled first to Pakistan and then to Iran before entering the Kurdish areas of Iraq shortly before the generally anticipated American invasion. Kurdish intelligence alerted the Americans to his presence. In his pre-invasion address to the United Nations of 5 February 2003, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, argued that Zarqawi had links to Saddam Hussein and was an agent of al-Qaeda. Both claims were entirely false.
When Zarqawi entered Iraq he called his group of some thirty mujahidin Tawhid and Jihad. In The Management of Savagery, perhaps coincidentally, the phrase “the people of tawhid and jihad” occurs repeatedly. Within two years or so, Zarqawi’s fighters numbered in the thousands. According to him, by January 2004 Tawhid and Jihad had conducted twenty-five operations, and was responsible for some of Iraq’s most notorious acts of terror, beginning in August 2003 with the bombings in Baghdad of the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations headquarters. In April 2004, the American Nick Berg was beheaded, probably by Zarqawi himself. A film of the killing was distributed widely. In February 2006, Zarqawi’s men destroyed the dome of the al-Askari mosque, one of the Shi’a Muslims’ most holy sites, in the central Iraqi city of Samarra.
Zarqawi was a man of action, not of words. There exists, however, one fascinating lengthy letter from him to the leaders of al-Qaeda, dated January 2004. In it, the future character of the Islamic State can be glimpsed. Zarqawi begins within an apocalyptic frame. In al-Sham (the ancient name for the region covering present-day Iraq and Syria) “the true decisive battle between the infidels and Islam is taking place”. As al-Qaeda no doubt already grasps, he continues, the Zionist-led American administration of George W. Bush entered Iraq under “a contract to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates”. Their purpose was “to hasten the arrival of the Messiah”.
What is the political situation following the invasion? The Kurds, in whom faith has died, “have given themselves over heart and soul to the Americans” and have “opened their land to the Jews”. The Sunni Muslim masses are in a desperate state. “More helpless than orphans at the table of the depraved … they have lost [their] leader” and are wandering in the desert, “divided and dispersed”. One of their political parties, the Muslim Brotherhood, “trade[s] in the blood of martyrs” and changes sides “according to the way the political wind is blowing”. One source of their religious leadership, the Sufi sheikhs, “sing and dance under the leadership of a camel driver”. Even the timid Iraqi mujahidin are a grave disappointment. “Uneducated and inexperienced”, they have no political “vision” and do not grasp the central truth, that “safety and victory are incompatible”, that power cannot be attained “without dipping into blood and facing death”.
The treachery of the Kurds and the weakness of the Sunnis do not, however, constitute what Zarqawi regards as the greatest internal problem the mujahidin face during the American occupation. Their overwhelming problem is the evil enemy of the Sunnis, the Shi’a, or Shi’ites. It is difficult to convey the depth of hatred for the Shi’a, Zarqawi’s letter reveals. They are “the most vile people in the human race”, “the insurmountable obstacle, the prowling serpent, the crafty, evil scorpion, the enemy lying in wait”. Throughout history, Zarqawi argues, the Shi’a have stabbed the Muslims in the back. As the medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyyah understood, they served the Mongols when they subjugated Islam. When Islam stood at the gates of Vienna, Shi’a treachery at home forced the Muslim armies to retreat. Now they have allied with the Americans in their grasp for power. Their ultimate ambition is to create a great Shi’a state that includes Iraq, Iran, Syria and Lebanon. They cunningly hide their true nature with “honeyed” words, “exploiting the naiveté and goodness of many Sunnis”. Their religion “has nothing in common with Islam”. Perhaps worst of all, throughout history they have served the interests of the Jews.
What then is to be done? Zarqawi is convinced that the Americans are not the chief problem. “The battle we are waging [against the Americans] is an easy matter. We consider it a certainty that the Crusader
will disappear in short order.” The key, according to Zarqawi, is to provoke a Sunni–Shi’a civil war. “We will trigger [Shi’a] rage against the Sunnis … [forcing them] to bare their fangs … If we manage to draw them onto the terrain of partisan war … soon the [Sunni] sleepers will awaken from their leaden slumber.” Prospects in this struggle are bright. “The Shi’ites are a nation of traitors and cowards.” Once aroused, the Sunnis will fight. Zarqawi concludes his letter by asking the leaders of al-Qaeda whether they accept his plan. If they do, he promises, they will have his allegiance.
Bin Laden and his second-in-command, Zawahiri, must have faced a difficult decision in pondering future relations with Zarqawi. On the one hand, the ferocious battle Zarqawi was leading in Iraq was the most promising ever mounted by the Salafi jihadist movement. On the other, it represented a radical break in the history of the mujahidin. As the pre-eminent scholar of Islamism, Bernard Haykel, has argued, there was nothing in the previous writings of either bin Laden or Zawahiri to suggest Shi’a hatred. Clearly, however, admiration for Zarqawi overcame concern. In October 2004, al-Qaeda accepted the formal allegiance (bay’at) Zarqawi offered. Tawhid and Jihad became al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers. Even though the movement was not yet the largest among the Iraqi Salafi jihadists, Osama bin Laden requested all groups of Iraqi mujahidin recognise Zarqawi as their leader.
In July 2005 another long letter between al-Qaeda and Zarqawi was intercepted, this one to a member of the Zarqawi group from Zawahiri. It documents al-Qaeda’s ambivalence about their new supporter. Zawahiri begins by offering Zarqawi his congratulations, his regret that because he is hiding in Waziristan he is unable to travel to Iraq to join the jihad, and his acknowledgement that those in the heat of battle are better placed to judge military realities than those watching from afar. Despite this, it is not long before Zawahiri, in a rather condescending tone, begins to favour Zarqawi with his instructions. He must strive to expel the Americans from Iraq, establish an Iraqi emirate, extend the field of battle to neighbouring regions, and prepare for war with Israel.