The first indication that al-Awlaki’s position had shifted came in December 2005, with the online publication of his “Constants on the Path of Jihad” lecture. In it he translated into English a text by Yusuf al-Uyayri—a Saudi veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s who went on to be an al-Qaeda activist in Saudi Arabia before being killed by the Saudi regime in 2003—and used the translation as an opportunity to give his own commentary. The lecture begins by noting that powerful nations are “mobilizing on various fronts (i.e. religious, political, social, economic, media, popular mass, etc.)” to fight against Islam, and many Muslims are deceived into thinking they are not obliged to fight back. Al-Awlaki no longer thinks of jihad as primarily an inner struggle; it is now an individual obligation for all able Muslims globally to fight for the sake of Allah. Jihad, says al-Awlaki, is not just about personal improvement, or even about the liberation of particular localities from foreign occupations; its real purpose is “to wipe out kufr [unbelief] from the world,” a struggle that will continue until the day of judgment. This means: “Jihad is global. It is not a local phenomenon.” The picture is one in which jihad has been redefined as a global war to defend Islam from the West, without limits in time or place. At this point in al-Awlaki’s trajectory, the precise methods to be used in this war remain unclear; what is significant is that it encompasses various kinds of force (military, cultural, ideological), is global in reach, and requires all Muslims to engage in it.59
In the summer of 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested by the Yemeni authorities. According to New York Times journalist Scott Shane, he was originally imprisoned in relation to a “tribal dispute,” but after his initial arrest, the Yemeni government was told by then US director of national intelligence John Negroponte to keep him in prison. After being held for a year and a half, and with mounting pressure in Yemen to end his imprisonment, the US government reversed its decision.60 Al-Awlaki was released without charge in December 2007, and shortly afterward gave an interview to Moazzam Begg, a British Muslim who had himself been incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay and later became a campaigner for the rights of prisoners. In a part of the conversation not published at the time, al-Awlaki told Begg he had been “abused” while in prison but did not want to go into details or make public allegations. He also said FBI agents questioned him during his detention and were aware of his treatment.61
Before his incarceration in Yemen, al-Awlaki had begun to see the world as locked in a global struggle between the West and Islam. Now, having been imprisoned and apparently tortured with the complicity of the US government, any remaining reservations about targeting civilians in the country of his citizenship were abandoned. Within months of his release he had launched a new Web site and blog. Much of his published material continued to take the form of advice on personal questions such as divorce and fasting, but he also began to announce his clear support for violence against the US. By the summer of 2009, al-Awlaki’s mass e-mails were calling any Muslim who is “fighting on behalf of America … a heartless beast, bent on evil, who sells his religion for a few dollars.”62 The following March, in an interview with Al Jazeera, he publicly endorsed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempted bombing of the US-bound plane. He added that it “would have been better if the plane was a military one, or if it was a US military target,” but US civilians, having voted for prowar candidates, were also legitimate targets.63 In a later statement, he commented: “Isn’t it ironic that the two capitals of the war against Islam, Washington, DC, and London, have also become among the centers of western jihad? Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea.”64 If there had been a propensity to terrorist violence among American Muslims, this would have been the period when significant numbers of al-Awlaki’s followers, those attracted to his earlier lectures on the lives of figures from Islamic history, would have taken up arms—taking advantage, for example, of the easy access to guns in the US—to carry out shooting sprees. What actually happened was that the widespread following he had built up dissipated as his new views became evident through documents such as “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad.”
How can the transformation of al-Awlaki’s views in the decade before his death be explained? Certainly there is no evidence to suggest that a religious awakening led to his adoption of a radically different theology. His theological understanding of jihad had always included a notion of military force as necessary to defend Islam under certain circumstances. Whereas before he had felt the necessity of military force only in specific local contexts, where Muslims were trying to liberate themselves from foreign occupations, by the end of 2005 he had begun to believe Muslims were involved in a global struggle rather than just a series of local wars, and that that struggle had both ideological and military dimensions. From a theological point of view, the key question in advocating such a position is whether it violates the belief, strongly grounded in Islamic jurisprudence, that being a citizen is a form of a contract to follow state laws, violation of which cannot be justified even when that state is at war with majority-Muslim nations or Muslim nonstate actors. But the change in al-Awlaki’s position cannot be traced to a change in his theological position on the Islamic exhortation to honor contracts. In fact, nowhere in his published material does he attempt an answer to the well-known theological objection to his position.65 He does, of course, present an Islamic discourse to legitimize his new idea of a multidimensional global war. But what is striking is how his global war concept mirrors the discourse of the war on terror itself, which also imagines no geographical limits and refers to a multidimensional conflict with physical and ideological spheres. Al-Awlaki was a keen student of this discourse, and familiar with the RAND Corporation’s calls for a “battle of ideas” to create a “moderate” pro-Western Islam—what he called “RAND Islam.”66 What was essentially new in al-Awlaki’s statements from late 2005 onward was not his theological position but a reinterpretation of the political circumstances that Muslims were in. The ultimate source of his idea of a global war to defend Islam was the militarized identity politics of the global war on terror itself.
“A Call to Jihad,” a lecture he gave in 2010, gives his own account of how his new position emerged.
We are not against Americans for just being Americans. We are against evil, and America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil. What we see from America is the invasion of [inaudible] countries; we see Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantánamo Bay; we see cruise missiles and cluster bombs; and we have just seen in Yemen the death of twenty-three children and seventeen women. We cannot stand idly in the face of such aggression, and we will fight back and incite others to do the same. I for one was born in the US. I lived in the US for twenty-one years. America was my home. I was a preacher of Islam involved in nonviolent Islamic activism. However, with the American invasion of Iraq and continued US aggression against Muslims, I could not reconcile between living in the US and being a Muslim. And I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.67
If this account of what prompted al-Awlaki’s support for terrorism against the US is correct, and there seems no reason to doubt it, then his radicalization is consistent with the historical pattern of political activists adopting a belief in terrorism when political action fails to bring about change—from the French anarchists who began bombing campaigns after the defeat of the Paris Commune, to the Algerian FLN struggling to end French colonialism, to the Weather Underground’s “Declaration of a State of War” following state repression of student campaigns against the Vietnam war.
Mainstream radicalization analysts who have looked at al-Awlaki’s evolution are confronted with a dilemma. According to their theories, it cannot have been the politics of the war on terror that drove him from political activism to supporting violence against the US; there must instead have been a significant psychological or theological process. Since no such process is evident from what is known
of his life after 9/11, they try to shift the point in time at which he became radicalized to an earlier date and assume the process occurred then, during a period we have less information on. This would imply either that the definition of radicalization has been widened so far as to include any kind of political opposition to the status quo or that when he was officially considered a moderate, his public statements were just a cover, and he was secretly already an advocate of violence against the US. In support of the latter, radicalization analysts point to the allegation that in 2000 and 2001, three of the 9/11 hijackers attended mosques where al-Awlaki was an imam.68 Yet despite repeated investigations, no evidence has ever emerged to prove that this was anything more than coincidence, which is what the FBI itself concluded.69
Official radicalization models failed to grasp how al-Awlaki had become a supporter of violence against the US. They also encouraged the idea that his online propaganda was an ideological virus that could infect young Muslims in the West and spawn an upsurge in terrorist attacks. The official reason given by the Obama administration for the extrajudicial killing of al-Awlaki is that he had an active operational role in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Department of Justice’s sixteen-page white paper outlining its claimed legal basis for targeted killings asserts that the government may lawfully kill a US citizen if “an informed, high-level official” decides that the target is a high-ranking figure in al-Qaeda or an affiliated group who poses “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States” and that capturing him is not feasible.70 The phrase “imminent threat” is used broadly enough to cover anyone who can be presented as active with al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations. A necessary condition for such killings to be considered permissible under international law is that they take place on a battlefield; but the war on terror is seen as involving, in principle, a global battlefield, and drone strikes have taken place in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all places where the US is not formally at war. Whatever the attempts to give a pseudolegal gloss to the kill list policy, it is likely the real reason Anwar al-Awlaki was killed is that he was seen as a radicalizer whose ideological activities were capable of driving Western Muslims to terrorist violence. But having this role is only plausible if models of radicalization in which a jihadist ideology mechanically causes people to be violent are accepted. There is only one case in which there is any apparent evidence that al-Awlaki’s statements worked according to this model—that of Roshonara Choudhry, who attempted to stab the British parliamentarian Stephen Timms at his constituency office in May 2010. During interviews with police officers afterward she spoke about listening to hundreds of al-Awlaki’s lectures and, as a result, coming to believe that she had an obligation to carry out acts of violence in defense of Islam. But she also talked about her anger at the Iraq war and said she targeted Timms because he had voted in support of it.71 It is difficult to know from the available material exactly how religious ideology and political beliefs combined to cause her to attempt the stabbing. But it is precisely because the relationship between ideas and actions is ambiguous that, as a matter of principle, ideas should not be criminalized. If the real reason the Obama administration decided to kill al-Awlaki was to prevent his ideological virus from reaching Western audiences, then it not only based its decision on a flawed model of radicalization, it also violated this liberal principle in the most egregious way possible. Moreover, there were other options that could have been explored. Fawaz A. Gerges, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, notes that Yemen officially charged al-Awlaki with incitement to violence in October 2010. He suggests that if a fair trial had been promised, a deal could have been struck with local leaders in southern Yemen to hand al-Awlaki over to the Yemeni authorities to face prosecution; one key leader had already said in an interview at the time that he would consider such a proposal.72
In cases where American Muslims have carried out acts of violence, or attempted such acts, the same picture emerges. The perpetrators speak about political circumstances leading them to their actions rather than religious ideology. In February 2006, Faisal Shahzad, then a Pakistani immigrant living in New York, was wrestling with the question of how Muslims should respond to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the plight of the Palestinians, and anti-Muslim racism in the West. He wrote in an e-mail message to a group of friends that Islam forbids the killing of innocent civilians. But equally he could not see how peaceful protest would bring about change: “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?” After millions-strong demonstrations failed to prevent the Iraq war, there were no easy answers to those questions. Three years later the questions had become more personal. In 2009, President Obama expanded the drone strikes campaign in Pakistan. While the US media dreamed of the new technology’s possibilities for risk-free killing without geographical constraint, in Pakistan the death toll mounted, particularly in Shahzad’s Pashtun homeland. US drones killed ninety-eight innocent civilians in Pakistan in 2009, according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.73 In April, Shahzad sent another e-mail to friends, attacking Pakistani politicians for failing to defend the country from such attacks.74 By this time Shahzad seems to have resolved his earlier questions and come to believe that the killing of civilians could be justified as part of a supposed defensive war against the West. A couple of months later he traveled to Pakistan to seek out the Taliban, and the following May he tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. At his arraignment he told the court that his attempted attack was in response to the US’s occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and its drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. He said he considered himself “a mujahid, a Muslim soldier.” The judge replied that his intended victims were not combatants invading other countries, but civilians. “Well, the people select the government,” replied Shahzad, grasping at whatever arguments he could muster. “Including the children?” the judge asked. There was a long pause before Shahzad finally said: “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody.”75 Again, it was the war on terror’s own actions that a terrorist was mimicking.
In the case of Nidal Hasan, the army psychiatrist who carried out the Fort Hood attack, it appears that he had been struggling with his role in the US military since the launch of the 2003 Iraq war. On the one hand, his loyalty to the US military required that he might one day be asked to fight Muslims in other parts of the world in wars he considered unjust; on the other hand, did his loyalty to Muslims in other parts of the world require that he leave the US military—or even fight against it? The militarized identity politics of the war on terror were playing out on the deepest levels of his being. From 2003 to 2007, while he was a resident in the psychiatric program at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, he openly questioned whether he could engage in combat against other Muslims, and asked whether he would qualify for conscientious objector status. He did not. In an academic presentation that he was required to give, he chose to discuss Islamic interpretations of the legitimacy of violence. He confided to a colleague that he applied for his next posting, at the nearby Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, to avoid being deployed to fight in a majority-Muslim country. In another presentation he asked whether the war on terror was actually a war on Islam, and he proposed a research study on whether Muslims in military service had conflicts between their loyalty to the US and their loyalty to fellow Muslims in other parts of the world.76 At the end of December 2008 Hasan e-mailed Anwar al-Awlaki asking for “some general comments about Muslims in the US military.” In total he sent eighteen e-mails and received two replies, neither of which answered his original question or suggested any course of action. Hasan was assigned to the Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, Texas, in July 2009, and he conducted psychiatric sessions with soldiers traumatized by their participation
in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Based on his patients’ accounts, he requested that his military superiors investigate possible war crimes. The request was declined.77 In August Hasan’s car was vandalized: after the perpetrator was arrested, it emerged that he had noticed Hasan’s Muslim bumper sticker and was motivated by Islamophobia. Two months later the US Army told Hasan he would be deployed to Afghanistan shortly; his long-standing dilemma was now a matter of practical urgency rather than academic discussion. He could no longer contain within himself the split between his two antagonistic identities.78 The following month he entered the Fort Hood deployment center and opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol fitted with laser sights, killing twelve US soldiers and one Department of Defense employee and injuring forty-two others.79
CHAPTER 5
Hearts and Minds
But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label.
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 18