Readers have found Newell's essay both entertaining and amusing. For that reason we've posted it to the front page.

"Postmodern Jihad:

What Osama bin Laden Learned from the Left"

By Waller R. Newell

MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about Osama bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalism; less
about the contribution of European Marxist postmodernism to bin Laden's
thinking. In fact, the ideology by which al Qaeda justifies its acts of
terror owes as much to baleful trends in Western thought as it does to a
perversion of Muslim beliefs. Osama's doctrine of terror is partly a Western
export.

To see this, it is necessary to revisit the intellectual brew that produced
the ideology of Third World socialism in the 1960s. A key figure here is the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who not only helped shape
several generations of European leftists and founded postmodernism, but also
was a leading supporter of the Nazis. Heidegger argued for the primacy of
"peoples" in contrast with the alienating individualism of "modernity." In
order to escape the yoke of Western capitalism and the "idle chatter" of
constitutional democracy, the "people" would have to return to its
primordial destiny through an act of violent revolutionary "resolve."

Heidegger saw in the Nazis just this return to the blood-and-soil heritage
of the authentic German people. Paradoxically, the Nazis embraced technology
at its most advanced to shatter the iron cage of modernity and bring back
the purity of the distant past. And they embraced terror and violence to
push beyond the modern present--hence the term "postmodern"--and vault the
people back before modernity, with its individual liberties and market
economy, to the imagined collective austerity of the feudal age.

This vision of the postmodernist revolution went straight from Heidegger
into the French postwar Left, especially the works of Jean-Paul Sartre,
eager apologist for Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution in China. Sartre's
protege , the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon, crystallized the Third World
variant of postmodernist revolution in "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961).
From there, it entered the world of Middle Eastern radicals. Many of the
leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that deposed the modernizing shah
and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979 had studied Fanon's
brand of Marxism. Ali Shari'at, the Sorbonne-educated Iranian sociologist of
religion considered by many the intellectual father of the Shiite
revolution, translated "The Wretched of the Earth" and Sartre's "Being and
Nothingness" into Persian. The Iranian revolution was a synthesis of Islamic
fundamentalism and European Third World socialism.

In the postmodernist leftism of these revolutionaries, the "people"
supplanted Marx's proletariat as the agent of revolution. Following
Heidegger and Fanon, leaders like Lin Piao, ideologist of the Red Guards in
China, and Pol Pot, student of leftist philosophy in France before becoming
a founder of the Khmer Rouge, justified revolution as a therapeutic act by
which non-Western peoples would regain the dignity they had lost to colonial
oppressors and to American-style materialism, selfishness, and immorality. A
purifying violence would purge the people of egoism and hedonism and draw
them back into a primitive collective of self-sacrifice.

MANY ELEMENTS in the ideology of al Qaeda--set forth most clearly in Osama
bin Laden's 1996 "Declaration of War Against America"--derive from this same
mix. Indeed, in Arab intellectual circles today, bin Laden is already being
likened to an earlier icon of Third World revolution who renounced a life of
privilege to head for the mountains and fight the American oppressor, Che
Guevara. According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani, Arab leftist
intellectuals still see the world very much in 1960s terms. "They are all
ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists," he says, "who look at everything through a
postcolonial prism."

Just as Heidegger wanted the German people to return to a foggy, medieval,
blood-and-soil collectivism purged of the corruptions of modernity, and just
as Pol Pot wanted Cambodia to return to the Year Zero, so does Osama dream
of returning his world to the imagined purity of seventh-century Islam. And
just as Fanon argued that revolution can never accomplish its goals through
negotiation or peaceful reform, so does Osama regard terror as good in
itself, a therapeutic act, quite apart from any concrete aim. The
willingness to kill is proof of one's purity.

According to journalist Robert Worth, writing in the New York Times on the
intellectual roots of Islamic terror, bin Laden is poorly educated in
Islamic theology. A wealthy playboy in his youth, he fell under the
influence of radical Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who blended calls for
Marxist revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state.

Many of these men were imprisoned and executed for their attacks on Arab
regimes; Sayyid Qutb, for example, a major figure in the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism, was executed in Egypt in 1965. But their ideas lived on.
Qutb's intellectual progeny included Fathi Yakan, who likened the coming
Islamic revolution to the French and Russian revolutions, Abdullah Azzam, a
Palestinian activist killed in a car bombing in 1989, and Safar Al-Hawali, a
Saudi fundamentalist frequently jailed by the Saudi government. As such men
dreamed of a pure Islamic state, European revolutionary ideology was seldom
far from their minds. Wrote Fathi Yakan, "The groundwork for the French
Revolution was laid by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the Communist
Revolution realized plans set by Marx, Engels and Lenin....The same holds
true for us as well."

The influence of Qutb's "Signposts on the Road" (1964) is clearly traceable
in pronouncements by Islamic Jihad, the group that would justify its
assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 as a step toward
ending American domination of Egypt and ushering in a pure Islamic order. In
the 1990s, Islamic Jihad would merge with al Qaeda, and Osama's "Declaration
of War Against America" in turn would show an obvious debt to the Islamic
Jihad manifesto "The Neglected Duty."

It can be argued, then, that the birthplace of Osama's brand of terrorism
was Paris 1968, when, amid the student riots and radical teach-ins, the
influence of Sartre, Fanon, and the new postmodernist Marxist champions of
the "people's destiny" was at its peak. By the mid '70s, according to Claire
Sterling's "The Terror Network," "practically every terrorist and guerrilla
force to speak of was represented in Paris. . . . The Palestinians
especially were there in force." This was the heyday of Yasser Arafat's
terrorist organization Al Fatah, whose 1968 tract "The Revolution and
Violence" has been called "a selective precis of 'The Wretched of the
Earth.'"

While Al Fatah occasionally still used the old-fashioned Leninist language
of class struggle, the increasingly radical groups that succeeded it
perfected the melding of Islamism and Third World socialism. Their tracts
blended Heidegger and Fanon with calls to revive a strict Islamic social
order. "We declare," says the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah in its "Open
Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World" (1985), "that we are a
nation that fears only God" and will not accept "humiliation from America
and its allies and the Zionist entity that has usurped the sacred Islamic
land." The aim of violent struggle is "giving all our people the opportunity
to determine their fate." But that fate must follow the prescribed course:
"We do not hide our commitment to the rule of Islam, . . . which alone
guarantees justice and dignity for all and prevents any new imperialist
attempt to infiltrate our country. . . . This Islamic resistance must . . .
with God's help receive from all Muslims in all parts of the world utter
support."

These 1980s calls to revolution could have been uttered last week by Osama
bin Laden. Indeed, the chief doctrinal difference between the radicals of
several decades ago and Osama only confirms the influence of postmodernist
socialism on the latter: Whereas Qutb and other early Islamists looked
mainly inward, concentrating on revolution in Muslim countries, Osama
directs his struggle primarily outward, against American hegemony. While for
the early revolutionaries, toppling their own tainted regimes was the
principal path to the purified Islamic state, for Osama, the chief goal is
bringing America to its knees.

THE RELATIONSHIP between postmodernist European leftism and Islamic
radicalism is a two-way street: Not only have Islamists drawn on the legacy
of the European Left, but European Marxists have taken heart from Islamic
terrorists who seemed close to achieving the longed-for revolution against
American hegemony. Consider Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, two leading
avatars of postmodernism. Foucault was sent by the Italian daily Corriere
della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah
Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian revolution,
Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic saint." The
Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of "political
spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals to combat capitalist
hegemony.

Heavily influenced by Heidegger and Sartre, Foucault was typical of
postmodernist socialists in having neither concrete political aims nor the
slightest interest in tangible economic grievances as motives for
revolution. To him, the appeal of revolution was aesthetic and voyeuristic:
"a violence, an intensity, an utterly remarkable passion." For Foucault as
for Fanon, Hezbollah, and the rest down to Osama, the purpose of violence is
not to relieve poverty or adjust borders. Violence is an end in itself.
Foucault exalts it as "the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility
of an absolute sacrifice." In this, he is at one with Osama's followers, who
claim to love death while the Americans "love Coca-Cola."

Derrida, meanwhile, reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union by calling
for a "new international." Whereas the old international was made up of the
economically oppressed, the new one would be a grab bag of the culturally
alienated, "the dispossessed and the marginalized": students, feminists,
environmentalists, gays, aboriginals, all uniting to combat American-led
globalization. Islamic fundamentalists were obvious candidates for
inclusion.

And so it is that in the latest leftist potboiler, "Empire," Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri depict the American-dominated global order as today's
version of the bourgeoisie. Rising up against it is Derrida's "new
international." Hardt and Negri identify Islamist terrorism as a spearhead
of "the postmodern revolution" against "the new imperial order." Why?
because of "its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony."

"Empire" is currently flavor of the month among American postmodernists. It
is almost eerily appropriate that the book should be the joint production of
an actual terrorist, currently in jail, and a professor of literature at
Duke, the university that led postmodernism's conquest of American academia.
In professorial hands, postmodernism is reduced to a parlor game in which we
"deconstruct" great works of the past and impose our own meaning on them
without regard for the authors' intentions or the truth or falsity of our
interpretations. This has damaged liberal education in America. Still, it
doesn't kill people--unlike the deadly postmodernism out there in the world.
Heirs to Heidegger and his leftist devotees, the terrorists don't limit
themselves to deconstructing texts. They want to deconstruct the West,
through acts like those we witnessed on September 11.

What the terrorists have in common with our armchair nihilists is a belief
in the primacy of the radical will, unrestrained by traditional moral
teachings such as the requirements of prudence, fairness, and reason. The
terrorists seek to put this belief into action, shattering tradition through
acts of violent revolutionary resolve. That is how al Qaeda can ignore
mainstream Islam, which prohibits the deliberate killing of noncombatants,
and slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new world, the latest in a
long line of grimly punitive collectivist utopias.

Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at
Carleton University in Ottawa.