The Inevitable Failure of Radical Islam

Commemorations are about letting memory retrieve a piece of history with ceremonial solemnity. To remember is to convince ourselves, once again, that the past doesn’t fade, time doesn’t always heal. That reminders are still required in a world where justice is still a dispute. We return to 9/11, twenty-five years after that image of the towering inferno woke up humanity to a new age of fear, with a realisation of the distance we have travelled since, the change it has brought to the lives of nations, and the moral dividends of grief we were too cautious to reject.

We were all Americans then, to take the cue from a French newspaper.

It was the culmination of a rage, its origin in the scriptural fantasy of an alternative to the world dreaded by those who held the Book and the bomb with equal piety. Someone from Mount Jihad, in the arid remoteness of Afghanistan, had been, with the calm menace of a false prophet, spelling out the nature of the coming war, a purifying process, for a while. In that grainy video of bin Laden, a religion’s trainee revolutionaries saw their deliverer, their own Che with a longer beard. He was only mapping the end of the infidels’ kingdom—and creating his Caliphate in angry edicts of exclusion.

The Caliphate didn’t happen. Still, 9/11 changed for ever how nations behave when fear was added to the glossary of geopolitics. And America under George W Bush gave it a Biblical flavour by declaring war on evil. Afghanistan became the theatre of the just war, the morality of which was explained by the scale of suffering and the determination to avenge. The religion of terror was only contested by those who still preferred to generalise the threat to freedom.

Twenty-five years on, Afghanistan may not be an advertisement for post-9/11 morality. It draws its ideological legitimacy from the same god conjured to life by the authors of 9/11. And the war for the Caliphate didn’t go away as the Islamic State continued its campaign against civilisation in the sandy expanse of the Levant. The executioner in a balaclava, wielding the sword sanctioned by scripture, hovering over the representative infidel in orange hood, a nod to Guantanamo, was a reminder that hate still survived the war on terror.

Still, no viable Caliphate was built with the razed Aleppo as its monumental achievement. It was a consolation—and a confirmation that radical Islam was not made to win the war on civilisation. Bin Laden may have seen the god’s empire magnified by the flames of 9/11. And the sporadic attacks on humanity—from the Mumbai horror to Charlie Hebdo—may have convinced us about the persistence of radical Islam despite the failure of its grand project. The Islamisation of radicalism, an argument popularised by the French writer Olivier Roy, as against the radicalisation of Islam, has not lasted for long. It hasn’t won the argument, though it may still have the potential for horror dramas.

Today radical Islam, despite its sectarian divide, doesn’t have a face. Even a Shiite one: the successor to the Imam who vowed to restore god’s reign on earth has not won his war with the Great Satan. He hasn’t lost the war, but the bunker didn’t save his life. The Islamic Revolution, older than the jihad led by bin Laden and Zawahiri, is fighting against redundancy, and so are its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon. It is with terror at home and abroad that the revolution—or the military-religious complex it has built—postpones mortality. Its every war, against enemies within and without, is an existential war.

Revolutions die on their own lies. The Islamic versions, whether led from the caves of Tora Bora or the outskirts of Tehran, fell far short of their divine fantasy: replacing the wretchedness of here-and-now with an imperium of justice and joy. The transborder nihilism of the Islamic State was no different from the cult of martyrdom in the Shiite Revolution in normalising dehumanisation. They have failed as an argument as well as an alternative because faith-in-power was as untenable as ideology-in-power, though it took a longer period for the ideology to unravel itself.

Twenty five years after the fall of the twin towers in New York, radical Islam, even if it cannot conceal its hatred for long, stirs only in the debris of the alternative it fought for—and failed.