ASL's Charity Operations

Aaron Zelin writes on how Libya's Ansar al-Shari'a (ASL) is using charity efforts to expand its reach globally.  Islamist organizations have long had charity arms which also called people to their message (dawa), and there have long been international organizations.  Zelin argues that ASL is breaking new ground in being a transnational salafi jihadi organization that also develops a charity profile:

In non-war zone contexts, ASL along with its neighbor sister organization, Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia (AST), have been able to become true social movements within each of their countries. While AST was more or less a national organization from its beginning, ASL had to build out its support from its base in Benghazi to other areas such as Tripoli, Ajdabiya, Sirte, Darna and the Gulf of Sidra, among other smaller locales. This success was a result of its dawa efforts such as providing food, medical care, religious education  and other services to the poor and others. ASL has also helped fix roads and bridges, repaired homes of the needy, provided slaughtered meats on the main Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, and mediated disputes between tribes. As part of all of these activities, it has passed out custom ASL-approved Islamic literature, highlighting the twin purpose of service and the call to Islam.

What makes ASL stand out compared to all of the other groups, though, is that it has internationalized its dawa campaign to areas that are not part of its considered traditional constituency within the borders of Libya to a few other countries. ASL has conducted a number of campaigns to help the people of “Bilad al-Sham,” Gaza, and Sudan. This illustrates that ASL is not just rhetorically talking about assisting the umma (Muslim community), but actually acting on it and trying to show that while its home base is indeed in Libya, the “imagined” umma is just as much a part of this constituency, since borders are irrelevant from its perspective. This is highlighted by the name of ASL’s overseas dawa efforts: “The Convoy Campaign of Goodness To Our People in ‘X-location.’ ”

This adds a whole new layer to the meaning of the global jihad and how the various global groups might try to engage populaces outside of their local areas of operation. Whether this softer-power approach works or is possible due to legal constraints or ability to operate abroad in a legitimate fashion remains to be seen. At the very least, ASL is showing that it has the ability to operate transnationally and that it has broader aims and concerns beyond the borders of Libya. Indeed, ASL is the first truly global jihadi dawa organization.

"Ansar al-Shari'a" has come to be a common name for salafi movements in the Arab world.  The Libyan version was formed during the 2011 civil war which ousted the Qadhafi regime, and includes elements once affiliated with al-Qaeda.  At least some parts of it were involved in the September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and it went somewhat underground following the popular anti-militia protests which followed that event, though it now appears to be back in business.  As far as whether its transnational profile is breaking new ground, I'd want to see how it compares with Tablighi Jamaat and Hizb ut-Tahrir.  The former at least is not salafi  and eschews all violence, though it does call to Islamic revival.  Hizb ut-Tahrir also claims to be a non-violent organization, and I suspect they actually are, despite attempts to link them with terrorist attacks in Central Asia.

Historicizing Jihadi Islam: Labels Revisited

In blogging about the MESA session on "The Global Spread of Saudi Islamism," I expressed frustration with the way labels were being seemingly tossed about with different and conflicting implicit meanings. This was not a problem at the AHA session "Historicizing Jihadi Islam," which came close to being all about getting at a way of talking about the various phenomena which fall within the field of Islamic political activism.

First, because it came up, a word about the use of "jihadi" in this context. The commentator, UCLA's Patrick Geary, castigated the panelists for discussing only the militant aspects of jihad. When one looks at what was actually presented, however, they very clearly dealt with the phenomenon that within the Muslim world is popularly called "jihadi," regardless of the theological precision with which the term is bring used. In fact, in the wake of the 18th and 19th century reform movements, groups which practice an aggressive military jihad are likely to oppose Sufism, the strain of Islam within which non-violent jihad has the greatest prominence.

That said, the first speaker was David Commins, whose work on Wahhabi history I blogged about here, talked about "The Changing Form of Jihad in Wahhabi Islam." His argument was much the same as in his book, that al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers from within Wahhabism owe more ideologically to the Islamic revivalism of Sayyid Qutb than to the religious teachings of Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab, though in this paper he seemed to avoid the tendency of his book to portray them as actually non-Wahhabi. The key distinction as far as military jihad goes is that for Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the goal was to expand the domain of the Wahhabi community so as to reform religious worship and practices, whereas Qutb's primary nemesis was internal non-Muslim rulers, and the goal was political sovereignty for a community in which Islam was the source of all law. He also talked about the importance of 1980's Afghanistan in bringing Qutbists and Wahhabis together. He also noted that the distinctions he was drawing often blur in practice, which I underlined in my notes even though I'm no longer 100% certain of its context.

Another interesting note is that Commins talked about someone (Nasr al-Fahad?) who is portraying Osama b. Laden as a new Ibn al-Wahhab with the Taliban as the Saudis. Like Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Bin Laden was forced to flee until he found supporters, and like the original Saudi state founded in the 18th century, the Taliban were defeated, temporarily being the implication, by an invading major power.

Thomas Hegghammer's paper was an attempt to define the terms everyone keeps using for Islamic activists, as well as propose a new schema based off the rationales for the activities of various Islamist groups around the world. He began by discussing the four terms which come from within debates within the Islamic world and the meanings they seem to have. "Jihadi" conveys a general sense of militancy, and is usually applied to Sunnis whose goals aren't limited to a particular nation. "Takfiri" is always derogatory, and used to denote extremism. "Salafi," meanwhile is the opposite of "takfiri," and used by people to claim a "primal purity" for their agenda. As I've noted in previous posts, even though it can be and is used by a number of actors, it has come be strongly favored by more literalist and puritanical groups. Finally, there is the "jihadi salafi," which generally refers to transnational militants.

In place of this Hegghammer proposed a fivefold division into groups which had as their primary area of activity the state, nation, umma, moral reform, or the interests of a particular sect. He also drew a cross-cutting division between violent and non-violent groups. This does seem like an analytic advance that could lead to better thinking about these issues among social scientists, of which Hegghammer is one.

Because of the make-up of the crowd, I felt that this was one session where I could learn more from asking my own question than listening to those of others, and so raised the point of whether the fact all three panelists were doing their work in Arabic sources was creating distortions given the diversity of the Muslim world. Hegghammer gave a solid answer than pan-Islamism aspires to Arabness and that the major transnational conversations take place in Arabic. There is perhaps a slight hole here in that it doesn't take into account recruitment conversations, in which a member of Abu Sayyaf tries to get people from a Philippine village to sign on, but its defensible. When you look at the web site of an international group like Hizb ut-Tahrir, Arabic has pride of place.

At the same time, however, the more I think about it the more it seems like trying to label something like "Islamic activism" is too broad. Take, for example, the Gulen Movement. This is one of the largest Islamic movements in the world today, and its leadership deliberately avoids the Arab world. What about Sisters in Islam, the Malaysian Muslim feminist group? Among transnational conservative groups, Hegghammer's typology may work, but the range to which it applies needs itself a clear statement of definition lest we wind up with simply a modified form of the monolithic Islam that the media often seems to talk about.

I haven't mentioned the third panelist, James Gelvin. He mostly talked about his anarchism thing, which is, I gather, not that popular, and seems to be part of a misguided attempt to find what he calls "rules of history." He did, however, call upon scholars to abandon the framework of "terrorology" in looking at militant Islamist movements. This is a call we would do well to heed.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Palestinian Hizb ut-Tahrir

Omran Risheq has an article in this month's Arab Reform Bulletin on the growing influence of Hizb ut-Tahrir among Palestinians. HUT was founded in Jerusalem, but is most associated with Central Asia, where it is the primary Islamist opposition in most countries. However, in contrast to the impression given by Risheq's article, their focus is on establishing a caliphate through peaceful persuasion, rather than a military coup followed by world conquest. I'm not sure what accounts for this discrepancy between Risheq's reporting and everything else I've read about the organization.

Hizb ut-Tahrir in Kyrgyzstan

IWPR reports that Hizb ut-Tahrir is quietly gaining support in southern Kyrgyzstan. Here's an example of what's been happening:

"The group’s role in this event (Eid al-Fitr celebrations in a town called Nookat), and the response of local government, provide an object lesson in how the authorities struggle to find an adequate response – they do not want to allow Hizb-ut-Tahrir free rein, but using tough tactics to stop it can prove counterproductive...

"He (government official) said the trouble began on October 12, when about 300 party supporters turned up on the main square in Nookat along with ordinary Muslims keen to mark the end of the fasting period with a traditional feast.

"'At first, we welcomed the initiative to hold a big celebration of the Muslim feast,' said Aliev. 'But Hizb-ut-Tahrir activists started using this event for their own ends.'

"Before the Eid festival, about 1,000 people signed a petition calling on the government to fund the celebrations, and also to pay for a new state school for girls who want to follow the Muslim dress code.

"Hizb-ut-Tahrir members told IWPR they helped with logistical arrangements for the party.

"'When we announced the holiday, ordinary Muslims responded, with some giving rice and others [cooking] equipment,' said one of the organisers, 66-year old Jibek Asanova from the village of Kara-Oy...

"However, police stepped on and blocked the street celebrations. 'The police wouldn’t let the tightrope perform do their act, and made us cook the pilaf at home and bring it to the square.'

"Aliev confirmed that police stepped in but said they only did what was necessary and acted 'within the bounds of the law'.

"Hizb-ut-Tahrir says the authorities’ actions caused widespread discontent among Nookat residents, and the event transformed into a demonstration involving some 15,000 people...

"Activists say that having lost control, the local officials had to call in a different kind of authority – known Hizb-ut-Tahrir members – to pacify the crowd."

My read on this is that Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group dedicated to the peaceful promotion of often fundamentalist Islam, saw supporting local Eid celebrations as a chance to connect with religious villagers in the south. This is what the state feared. This kind of subtle mixture of religious observance with political goals is common, especially in Islam, but undoubtedly new in the formerly repressive environment of post-Soviet Central Asia, where governments are used to controlling a formal religious establishment and not having to deal with these sorts of popular movements.