[MannoFr]

http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CADD4.htm

From news article:

In his book, Devji describes al-Qaeda as a group that has dispensed with 'an old-fashioned politics tied to states and citizenship' (4). At the most basic level this can be glimpsed in al-Qaeda's make-up: its members and associates come from all over the place, and often never even meet. They do not have a shared history or geography, as nationally-inspired movements like the Palestine Liberation Organisation or the Irish Republican Army did in the past; nor do they share a clear political outlook or 'vision for the future', in Devji's words, in the same way that the old internationalist movements that also were made up of different nationalities did, such as the International Brigades who fought on the side of the communists in the Spanish Civil War.

Rather, al-Qaeda is a new and peculiarly globalised movement. Its people can hail from Riyadh, Paris or Huddersfield, and can claim to be acting on behalf of Muslims in Iraq, Chechnya or Palestine - or even across historic periods as well as borders, as in the case of bin Laden's claim that he wanted vengeance for the Moors who were booted out of Spain over 500 years ago. They blow up civilians in London or Madrid as payback for the killing of civilians in Grozny or Ramallah, and profess to represent Muslims in nations they have never visited, and which they might have difficulty pointing to on a map (a bit like their arch enemy, George W Bush, perhaps), but which they once saw on an evening news bulletin. 'Take Mohammed Siddique Khan', says Devji, referring to the Leeds-born former supply teacher who blew up himself and six others at Edgware Road in London on 7 July. 'He said he was motivated by Iraq. When did he ever go to Iraq? What does he truly know about Iraq?'

This is not a movement tied by territory, history or politics; it looks more like an outfit with a chaos-theory reading of international affairs. The idea that a Yorkshireman can kill people in London as revenge for the bombing of 'my people' in Baghdad or Bethlehem brings to mind the old saying about a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world and causing a hurricane in another.

In Landscapes of the Jihad, Devji argues that al-Qaeda's relations are 'not the kind of relations that had characterised national struggles in the past, which brought together people who shared a history and a geography into a political arena defined by processes of intentionality and control'. The jihad, he writes, 'unlike the politics of national movements…is grounded not in the propagation of ideas or similarity of interests and conditions, so much as in the contingent relations of a global marketplace' (5). In short, the disparate individuals who are part of al-Qaeda, or who claim to be part of al-Qaeda, are not bonded by any common experience of oppression (many of them are well-to-do and Western-educated) or by shared political visions, but rather by fleeting and fluid relationships, often forged in the planning and execution of a one-off spectacular event rather in the pursuit of a future-oriented programme of ideas and tactics.

So al-Qaeda's fanciful war is not for something tangible; it is not about making a state or an Islamic territory. Where the Islamic radicals of the past - from the Iranian revolutionaries of 1979 to that last gasp of Islamic fundamentalism in the shape of the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 1996 - were motivated by the desire to create an ideological state, al-Qaeda's actions are better understood as a pose, Devji tells me, as 'ethical gestures'. 'Their acts function as exclamation marks', he says.