Paul Keenan
Understand the enemy and you can beat him, writes Paul Keenan
Do you recall who the Muslim Ahmed Merabet was? Or perhaps who the Muslim Lassana Bathily is?
It is entirely understandable if you do not. Given the plethora of unfolding bad press around the Muslim faith in recent years, one can be forgiven for a lack of recall on individual names among so many victims and perpetrators. To assume that Merabet and Bathily are somehow bound up in one attack or another is natural, and here quite correct.
Easier to recall for readers of this newspaper today is the name of Fr Jacques Hamel, both in terms of the short time span since the frail cleric died in so horrific a manner in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in France on July 26, and the red line that was crossed (at least in a European context) by his killers who, pledging allegiance to so-called Islamic State (ISIS) defiled a place of worship in pursuit of their ends (whatever that meant to two 19-year-old terrorists).
What is clear at this point is that attacks carried out by the ‘foot soldiers’ of Islamic State will undoubtedly continue across Europe and beyond (across the Muslim holy month of Ramadan there were 75 attacks in 21 nations in the name of ISIS). And here is a prediction: the attacks will grow in ferocity and barbarism.
Slaughter
The reason for the ongoing slaughter together with the prediction of increasingly worse outrages lies in a place few in the West have till now fully acknowledged in seeking to react to the ISIS threat. Thankfully that situation is slowly changing, as it only through understanding the ‘well’ from which ISIS draws its impetus and vision can the civilised world hope to undo the group’s cancerous ideology.
Across the years from 2004 – a key date here – a growing number of commentators and scholars of the Middle East have come to know a text ominously entitled The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Ummah (Islamic community) Will Pass. Described in more than one place as the Mein Kampf of jihadists, the booklet, originally posted online in 2004, was the work of an al Qaeda member operating under the pseudonym Abu Bakr Naji.
Back then, al Qaeda was the main horror on the world stage, and seen as the greatest threat to stability in the Middle East. This in the years before the Arab Spring sundered countries and became the wellspring of al Qaeda’s wayward child, ISIS.
The text of The Management of Savagery can thus be viewed within the context of its timing, and confined to inspiring jihadists to throw off Arab despots in favour of a glorious caliphate through various means (most of them foul albeit keenly considered).
Today, however, those who have perused the pages of Naji’s treatise have come to realise that ISIS has most certainly seized upon it in furthering its own cause. Indeed, anecdotal evidence appears to confirm that, though ISIS has never openly mentioned the text, it is both well known and well regarded among ISIS members and has been studied by members to the highest level.
A rambling theological, ideological and strategic text, The Management of Savagery claims to reveal both the roadmap to and the underpinnings of a truly successful caliphate. Unsurprisingly, given that it came from the pen of a devoted jihadist, it is through bloody slaughter, the author argues, that the goal is achieved. However, for the squeamish, the text assures: “The religious practice of jihad – despite the blood, corpses, and limbs which encompass it and the killing and fighting which its practice entails – is among the most blessed acts of worship for the servants, if not the most blessed in reality.”
Violence, then, as an act of worship. How convenient.
But it is so much more.
Violence for the adherents of jihad, the text argues, enters every aspect of the caliphate, from its formation through violence, through construction through the violent handling of opponents, and to the control though violence of the inhabitants of the caliphate. Thus, as we recoil from the outrages meted out to victims in Europe, we have the horror stories too of violence in the caliphate against those accused of sorcery, of spying, of smoking, or being non-Muslim. Violence, violence, violence.
The strategy here is well stated in The Management of Savagery: the simple wearing down of people’s willingness to keep resisting the onset of the caliphate.
But here is the rub: that wearing down is just one strand in the relentless use of brutality, according to Naji.
Elsewhere in his text, the author argues for outrages to “polarise” people. Launch attacks of such savagery, he argues, and populations turn on one another, fomenting division which sees unbelievers driving Muslims into the arms of the jihadists, thereby swelling the ranks for yet more success.
“By polarisation here,” he writes, “I mean dragging the masses into the battle such that polarisation is created between all of the people.”
Suddenly the lone wolf attacks experienced by Europe in recent months are given a common thread that is otherwise absent in the apparent futility of driving a truck through revellers, of hacking at train passengers, of slaughtering a priest at prayer.
Thus the relentless campaign in France is already sowing dividends in setting the populace against its elected officials who are increasingly viewed as inept in the battle against the terrorists.
But more is required to set the people against themselves, and thus all roads converged in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy on July 26 as Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean set about elderly Fr Jacques Hamel with not just knives, but a mobile phone too with which to record the slaughter and better disseminate it to the world.
Pawns
Thankfully, against the likes of Kermiche and Petitjean, are ordinary Muslims who fully understand that they are nothing but pawns to be sacrificed in the deadly ‘game’ ISIS is now playing. These Muslims have already rejected the killers of Fr Hamel.
To forget this is to offer the fear and anger ISIS seeks. It is for this reason it is vital to recall who Ahmed Merabet was, a Muslim police officer shot outside the Charlie Hebdo offices January 7, 2015 and summarily executed as he lay on the ground.
Similarly, Lassana Bathily, the Malian Muslim immigrant who saved Jewish shoppers hiding in a kosher supermarket during a gun attack on January 9, 2015.
ISIS wants you to hate them, and to help build its caliphate.