The Missing Martyrs

Charles Kurzman "The Missing Martyrs--Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists",Oxford University, 248 pages.

John Brennen recently discussed that the Obama Administration is now seriously considering defeating Al Qaeda. Remember the whole Long War Doctrine? It seems bin Laden spent his last days contemplating Al Qaeda's image problem and thought of re-branding the group with a new name. His counter-intelligence chief had resigned in frustration and he was having problems fund-raising. He seemed to think that Al Qaeda hurt itself by killing so many other Muslims. During this time, Al Qaeda's American spokesperson cut a YouTube video to urge all American Muslims to go to gun shows and buy weapons and use them against the Crusaders. So far that has been a bust.

But for reasons best known to ideologues, almost ten years after 9/11, Americans are supposed to be more afraid of the Muslim threat and be on the lookout for creeping sharia law and the building of mosques. Despite the rhetoric from both the Bush and Obama administrations that we are not waging war against Islam, we have a whole very vocal subculture saying we are and we want to be.

Charles Kurzman's latest book is an ideologue's worst nightmare--a well reasoned argument about why ,in fact, there are so few Muslim terrorists and why the level of terrorist acts have remained fairly consistent for over two decades. In fact, Muslim terrorist themselves ask the same questions as Kurzman. Fewer than 100,000 Muslims have been involved in terrorist acts over the last quarter of a century. Al Qaeda's number 2, the Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri frequently laments the lack of militancy among Muslims. In 2008, he declared,"Each day,the sheep in the flock hope that the wolves will stop killing them, but their prayers go unanswered. Can any rational person fail to see how they are misguided in hoping for this? This is our own state of affairs?"

And you would think that we should have numerous domestic Muslim terrorists since we are in several wars in the Middle East. But, contrary to even the warnings of our own law enforcement officials, fewer than 40 Muslim-Americans planned or carried out acts of domestic terrorism
over the period since 9/11. Since then, only a dozen people in this country were convicted for having links with Al Qaeda. Islamist terrorists have found it especially hard to recruit in the United States. In fact I can almost recall every example from the northern Virginia boys who went to Yemen and the teenagers from the Somalia community in Minnesota.

When Kurzman started the study for this book,Muslims were offended by his question, even though he was supporting their contention that few were involved or even knew anyone involved in terrorism. What sparked the book was the assumption after 9/11 that we would see Islamist violence all over the country and terrorist attacks throughout the world. In fact, despite the sensational acts that occurred abroad in Spain and London, terrorist acts actually went down throughout the world and eventually the bulk of them were contained during the war in Iraq. So naturally, the question becomes why were there not more.

Kurzman has had his share of attacks from the Right as have serious Middle East scholars, who are believed as not getting the facts straight. These same people,however, are routinely consulted by Homeland Security and the Defense Department to get a gauge on the upcoming threats. Kurzman takes a shot at Bernard Lewis, a brilliant scholar of medieval Islam, who became one of those advising the Bush Administration to invent Iraq to send a message to the Mulsim world. Kursman points out that Lewis has never factored in the appeal of modernity to modern Muslims and by the end actually reversed everything he had written about the Middle East, saying that Bush's campaign for democracy would work, despite a lifetime arguing against the idea. Kurzman is particularly good in dissecting Sam Huntington's view that we were in a clash of civilizations.

Kurzman is particularly good in summarizing all the polling data we have from Islamic states. While the Muslim world is not enthusiastic about America's foreign policy, it widely endorses our core ideals of democracy and participatory government. The same applies to our domestic Muslim-Americans. What Kurzman found was that polling in Turkey and in Indonesia shows that our ratings as a country rise and fall according to what we do. This isn't true for other Muslim countries. Muslims tend to think that all our rhetoric of democracy and human rights is just white wash for an imperialist agenda. Like our own Left, Muslims believe we are just interested in their oil and gaining power over them. Yet,even still, this does not generate the type of violent reactions that people believed would happen after 9/11.

In fact, despite Tom Friedman's lament about the lack of Muslim condemnation of 9/11, almost all the religious leaders in Saudi Arabia, radical groups like Hamas,and other religious figures around the region openly condemned both 9/11 and terrorism. Kurzman is particularly good in delineating the arguments radical Islamists have with terrorism and notes the internal and vicious debates groups like the Muslim Brotherhood had with Al Qaeda on this issue. The issue where it was seen as permissable to engage in these acts was in Iraq because thye radicals felt the United States was an occupying force. But even there, the excesses of foreign fighters soon drew stronhg condemnation from the surrounding countries.

What Kurzman shows is that the terrorists we are familiar with tend to be educated, tend not to have a deep religious background and are often alienated from their families or from their country. The Gang of Boys theory tends to support some of the findings about terrorist rings in Canada and the United States like the Lackawana Six. These efforts were blatantly amateurish, although extremely deadly if successful. The Canadian young people even wore their camouflage to the local fast food franchise, which enabled them to be detected and caught. The Times Square bomber was having his home foreclosed and he had lost his job. The underwear bomber came from a rather well-to-do Nigerian family and felt alienated from England, where he was going to school.

What is most interesting in Kurzman's analysis is the importance of family as a key component in inhibiting Muslims from becoming terrorists. This is particularly a problem for groups trying to recruit new members. Asked about this on the Jihadist internet sites, groups are forced to say that the Quran says that your responsibility to your family supercedes your duty to jihad. This is such a delicate issue that Al Qaeda would give bonuses to people who left their family and tried to support those left behind. But it remains a thorn in their side.

This book was written before the Arab Spring but it anticipates what has become obvious. The Muslim world would love to be rid of authoritarian leaders--many of whom unfortunately were backed by the United States. The Islamist terrorists have all said that democracy was a sham. But their message has been soundly rejected by Muslims when given a choice. The first instance of this was in Indonesia where the Islamists opposed the democratic transition and found themselves isolated as the entire country rejected their position. The same is now true throughout northern Africa and the Middle East. Al Qaeda has slow to comment on the Egyptian Revolution and only late in the game begrudgingly supported it rhetorically.

What Kurzman is good at is to highlight the fact that there has been a century of Muslim liberal movements--some succeeded , other failed. In fact, he produced a large anthology of liberal Muslim thought, which his colleagues doubted there existed enough material. But these movements all embrace democratic forms of government and even the full participation of women. Even the radical Islamists condemned the Taliban for its feudalist view of the world. Where there is a key difference is the distinction between mosque and state and even here there are wide differences of opinions. The most modern of the movements emphasize the need for a secular order, even if it is informed by religious teachings. How sharia law is considered is all over the map. But very few Muslims consider sharia in the same way our Islamophones do here in the United States.

This small, well-reasoned book is a welcomed antidote to the rhetoric we hear constantly about the Islamic threat and fear of our own Muslim Americans. If anything,our fellow Muslim Americans seem to believe more in the American dream than we do right now.

I think Kurzman does us a favor by suggesting we consider the terrorist groups much like we did the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigade. Lethal grouplets that share some of the same psychological profiles. As Kurzman's informants kept telling him, Al Qaeda and the like might invoke Islam but they have nothing Islamic about them.