What does a historian bring to the study and understanding of Islamism and jihadism? History provides complexity, rich narrative, comparative perspective, and a healthy degree of skepticism. Let me illustrate what I mean. Most of the books written on September 11 by commentators dealt with Al Qaeda without contextualizing its rise and evolution (or devolution) within the internal turmoil that has roiled the jihadist movement since the mid-1990as. This shortcoming is not just academic; it goes to the very heart of where Al Qaeda came from, its historical development, its social and power base, and why it brought war to the American heartland.

A central thesis advanced by my book, “Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy,” is that September 11 was a monstrous mutation within the jihadist movement. That one cannot understand why September 11 had occurred without appreciating the tensions, contradictions, and fissures that split jihadists along local and international lines. That the story of September 11 cannot be fully narrated without examining the rise and evolution of the jihadist movement. In this sense, history is critical to understanding the jihadist journey.

“Journey of the Jihadist” does just that; it closely follows the journey of three generations of jihadists, including Al Qaeda’s, and narrates their story in their own words. I intervened as little as possible. The first generation were the pioneers and founding fathers of the movement in Egypt in the 1970s - inspired by the 1966 hanging or “martyrdom” of Sayyid Qutb, a radical Islamist dissident. The second generation are the Afghan Arabs who fought Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s and were militarized by their experience in Afghanistan. In addition to Sayyid Qutb, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam played a pivotal role in influencing the journey of this second generation. The third generation is what I call the Iraq generation born after the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

My approach to understanding jihadists was not just to eavesdrop on their conversations and chatter but also to talk to them, interview them in depth, and listen to what they have to say. I let them speak for themselves and articulate their hopes, fears, grievances, and prejudices. The story of jihadists is told in their voices. Unedited.

To understand jihadism as well as its tragic repercussions—including September 11, the Madrid and London bombings, the war in Afghanistan, and the insurgency in Iraq—we need to hear from those engaged in waging it. The “Arab street” so often evoked by even the best Western journalists is in great part a myth designed for Western consumption. Beneath it lies the simplistic notion that all Muslims and all Arabs speak with one voice—a voice baying for bloodshed in the name of religion. Living in the United States but having been raised in the heart of the Arab world, Lebanon, I am keenly aware of the distortion. Growing up, I heard a wide spectrum of Muslim voices. We need—more than ever—to hear what is being said in alleyways, cafés, apartment courtyards, barbershops, classrooms, and underground bunkers throughout the Middle East.

Beginning in 1998-1999 long before “Jihadist” and “jihadism” had entered the vocabulary of ordinary Americans, I was determined to find out more about what was happening outside of most Western perspectives. I went back and conducted scores of interviews with both mainstream and militant Islamists alike in several Muslim countries . While these people normally shy away from contact with the Western media, my cultural background, educational training, and ability to speak Arabic allowed me to enter into their universe. I was able to probe their views on such subjects as the role of government, the use of force at home and abroad, and economic and foreign policies. So I asked questions and then I listened, learning to discern the diversity that lay beneath the sometimes monotonous and numbing rhetoric.

Why Jihad Went Global ?

Only by charting the jihadist journey from its inception, we fully grasp the logic behind the global jihad movement. From the late 1960s until the mid-1990s, Islamists and jihadists were pre­occupied with the fight against al­-­Adou al­-­Qareeb, Muslim rulers. The primary goal of modern jihadism is and always has been the destruction of the atheist political and social order at home and its replacement with authentic Islamic states. Al-Adou al-Baeed or the “far enemy” had not registered on jihadists’ radar screen.

But by mid-1990s Osama bin Laden and his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, launched a campaign to hijack the jihadist movement and change its direction—away from attacking al­-­Adou al­-­Qareeb, the “near enemy” (Muslim “apostates” and “renegades”) and toward attacking al­-­Adou al­-­Baeed, or the “far enemy” (Israel and the Western powers, particularly the United States). As a result, an intense internal struggle ensued between local jihadists and their international counterparts led by bin Laden and Zawahiri. Waged for the soul of the Islamist movement, this internal struggle has shaken the very foundation of Muslim ­societies and politics (the jihadist movement represents a small fraction of the Islamist movement). Its reverberations have been felt far ­beyond the region’s borders—in New York, Washington, Madrid, London, and Paris.

Although the overwhelming majority of jihadists stayed on the sidelines and did not join the fight against the far enemy, international jihadists succeeded in taking jihad global. By taking on the United States, which in the eyes of so many Muslims is most responsible for maintaining the grim status quo in the Arab world, Al Qaeda jihadists wanted to signal that the civil war for the soul of Islam would move to a different level, an international stage. From their perspective this could further two goals: rid Muslim countries of corrupting American and Western cultural and political influences, as well as military presence, partic­ularly from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Prophet Mohammed; and destabilize Muslim governments and their ruling elite by inciting the rising ­generation.

Findings

In conversations with activists, their answers reflected a broad political spectrum, from the extreme left to the extreme right. I noted five general trends in my interviews, both deeply ironic yet instructive.

First, what most surprised me was that their views tended to resemble those of their secular opponents. I have come to believe that American observers assign far too much significance to notions of “Islam” and “Islamic” when describing what motivates ­Islamists and jihadists. I do not mean to downplay the role of “Islamic” factors in Muslim societies, particularly in how they help shape moral values, self­-­identification, and fears about Westernization and Americanization. But again, both mainstream Islamists and jihadists use religion as a means to a political end, not as an end in ­itself.

Thus the key to understanding the jihadist and his journey lies mainly in politics, not in religion. Blaming terrorism on passages from the Qur’an would be like blaming the Crusades on passages from the New Testament. As is true for the Bible, Islamic doctrine can be interpreted in any number of ways, either to promote peace and tolerance or war and intolerance.

The second trend is that t he vast majority of militant Islamists whom I call local jihadists did not join Al Qaeda. In fact, September 11 showed how deep the fissures within the jihadist movement are. The internal struggle has escalated into an open civil war. Local jihadists vehemently criticized their international counterparts – Al Qaeda’s jihadists – and accused them of endangering the very existence of the Islamist movement and the ummah (the worldwide Muslim community). It is a pity that the Western media still perpetuate the myth that the attacks were widely embraced by all Islamists and even the ummah, and that the nineteen suicide bombers reflected the amorality of Muslim political culture as a whole.

The third trend is that Al Qaeda represents a tiny fringe within the jihadist movement. It does not possess a viable social base. Its long term survival is at a stake. Yes, Al Qaeda is very dangerous; it can carry out deadly operations in several countries. But it is more of a paramilitary organization than a social movement.

Fourth, while their goal is to dismantle the secular authoritarian order that succeeded British and French colonialism after World War II, Islamists and jihadists ultimately want to establish governments that would be similarly repressive. Countries that have Islamic governments, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Sudan, and, formerly, Afghanistan under the Taliban, provide cases in point. Although fully clothed in Islamic dress, they have much in common with their secular authoritarian counterparts elsewhere. There is nothing uniquely “Islamic” about their internal governing style except the rhetoric and the symbolism. They have not offered up an original model of Islamic governance. Their example casts a very dark shadow over the concept of an Islamic state.

In foreign policy, the three Islamic republics invested their meager resources in exporting revolution to neighboring states and beyond. This ambition has proved to be costly and even suicidal for the Taliban, which hosted Al Qaeda and allowed it to wage jihad worldwide. Since September 11 the two remaining Islamic regimes in Iran and Sudan have retrenched domestically and are mainly preoccupied with political survival, though the new ultraconservative Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has worked aggressively to roll the clock back to the early days of the Islamic revolution in the late ­1970s.

The fifth trend is that Islamists and jihadists are playing an active if indirect role in expanding political debate in the Muslim world. They have forced existing secular dic­tatorships—such as in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, and even Saudi Arabia—to respond to their challenge to open up the closed political system and reform government institutions. Opponents of Western­-­style democracy, jihadists are unwitting harbingers of democratic transformation. Some have even come to endorse a political process, creating further reformation within the movement.

Al­-­Jama’a al­-­Islamiya (Egyptian Islamic Group)—the largest jihadist organization in the Arab world—and the Islamic ­Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria now emphatically support democratization. The journey that led them there was far from democratic, however; it was extremely bloody. In the mid-1990s, aware that they would never be able to dislodge autocratic rulers by force, they began to alter their strategy for gaining power. They even formed ­alliances with their former sworn political opponents, including secularists and Marxists, in calling upon governments to respect human rights and the rule of ­law.

Islamists and jihadists are not born­-­again democrats and will never be. They are deeply patriarchal, seeing themselves as the guardians of faith, tradition, and authenticity. Their rhetoric remains soggy with anti­-­Western diatribe.

Nonetheless, many Islamists and a large segment of jihadists are gradually becoming initiated into the culture of political realism and the art of the possible. They are learning to make compromises with secular groups and to rethink some of their absolutist positions. Events have forced them to come to grips with the complexity and diversity of Muslim societies. More and more they recognize the primacy of politics over religion and the difficulty, even futility, of establishing Islamic states, particularly by autocratic fiat. Conservative “neo­-­fundamentalism” (which aims primarily at Islamizing society from the bottom up through what is called da’wa, “the call”) has generally replaced revolutionary jihadism, whose goal is to Islamize society by simply seizing state ­power.

But not all Islamists and jihadists have embraced these new political realities, and therein lies the internal struggle. There is a split between the ultramilitant wing, including Al Qaeda, and a nonviolent faction that commands greater numbers and political weight. This civil war has been overshadowed by the war in Iraq, which was a godsend to Al Qaeda because it diverted attention from its zero­-­sum game and lent it an air of credibility. American officials now acknowledge that the war in Iraq has proved a powerful recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and given it time to regroup.

However, the Iraq war has merely slowed an inevitable shift in the balance of power toward those who have abandoned Islamizing society from the top down. Most activists I spoke with recognize that the individual believer should be the focus in their efforts to create a moral society. Evolution, not revolution, is the dominant ­trend.

Jihadists still have a long way to go before they gain the trust of their fellow Muslims, let alone the international community, but some have taken an important first step. The terrorism perpetrated by certain cells and factions will continue over the next decade, but their movement no longer has a large base of support or a safe haven in which to plot new operations. Jihadists of all stripes know they are at a crossroads. At home and abroad they are blamed for unleashing the wrath of the United States against the ummah. Only a miracle will resuscitate jihadism. The question, of course, is whether the continued occupation of Iraq will be that ­miracle.