The Swamp In Which They Flourish

Michael Gove’s little thinktank nexus, itself heavily dependent on public funding, has had a feud with MEND, CAGE and the Muslim Association of Britain since before the Hijrah. Gove will soon leave active politics, so today was the loading of the gun for his parting shot. 18 years ago, he tried to have William Dalrymple’s review of Celsius 7/7 spiked, but the literary editor of the Sunday Times threatened to resign, although it does now appear online as if it were purely a review of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower:

In 1817, James Mill wrote a history of India several hundred pages long in which he confidently dismissed the country’s culture as primitive, superstitious, fanatical and degenerate. The fact that Mill had never visited India, knew no Indians and spoke no Indian language gave him no pause for hesitation over his conclusions.

These days it is generally agreed that it is better to be familiar with a subject before proclaiming yourself an authority: plumbers have usually looked at a number of sinks before trying to fix blocked pipes; lawyers have to have a degree in law before entering a court. The exception to this rule appears to be the study of Islam. Since 9/11, hundreds of self-proclaimed experts have held forth on the errors of the Muslim world, and produced instant solutions to its problems, many of them lacking even a passing acquaintance with the subject.

This level of ignorance has been reflected in the catastrophe of Anglo-American foreign policy during the past five years, with the wrong countries invaded for the wrong reasons, secular Ba’athists confused with fundamentalist Islamists, a clueless intelligence community producing serially worthless information, all led on by a president who long after invading Iraq (according to Peter Galbraith’s recent memoir) was still unaware that there was a distinction between Sunnis and Shi’ites. According to the 9/11 report, only 17 students graduated in Arabic from American universities in 2002, a statistic that does much to illuminate the failings of US policy.

A prominent example of the sort of pundit who has spoon-fed neocon mythologies to the British public for the past few years is Michael Gove. Gove has never lived in the Middle East, indeed has barely set foot in a Muslim country. He has little knowledge of Islamic history, theology or culture — in Celsius 7/7, he just takes the line of Bernard Lewis on these matters; nor does he speak any Islamic language. None of this, however, has prevented his being billed, on his book’s dust-jacket, “one of Britain’s leading writers and thinkers on terrorism”.

Gove’s book is a confused epic of simplistic incomprehension, riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any other text I have come across in two decades of reviewing books on this subject. Thus we are solemnly told, for example, that during the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, the Palestinian population from Jenin to Hebron was “herded into, and kept penned up inside, refugee camps”, an idea as novel as it is comically ridiculous and ahistorical. During this period, towns such as Ramallah became sleepy backwaters, quite free from the land seizures and apartheid policies of Arab-free Israeli settlements and Arab-free road networks that followed the Israeli occupation — realities entirely at odds with what Gove calls Israel’s “culture of equality”.

Gove also rewrites history when he alleges it was the “appeasement” of the Palestinians represented by the Oslo peace process that encouraged Al-Qaeda to launch the 9/11 attacks. In fact it was the violent repression that followed Israel’s unilateral ending of peace talks that formed the backdrop to the attacks. Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has written that the repressive campaign waged against the second intifada by Sharon in autumn 2000 provided Al-Qaeda’s opportunity: as the corpses of dead children piled up, al-Zawahiri realised that here was the rallying cry that could unify the Muslim world. All that was needed was a huge strike and the US system in the Middle East would begin to unravel. And so it has indeed proved, to the peril of us all.

Gove is also quite wrong that few Muslims or Islamists really mind what Israel does to the Palestinians and the Lebanese, and that “it is what Israel is, rather than what Israel does” that really provokes resistance. Instead, Israeli violence is the principal cause of anti-American anger — Bin Laden has written that it was the sight of US support for the Israeli bombing of Beirut in 1982 that initially radicalised him: “I still remember the blood-torn limbs, the women and children massacred. Houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing . . . As I looked on those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America.”

Throughout Gove’s book, neocon myths are reheated and served up, despite being long discredited, most recently by the 2005 CIA report just released by the Senate Committee on Intelligence. Saddam, believes Gove, “invited Islamists into Iraq”; was “determined to pursue his WMD programme” and “dreamt of emulating” 9/11, strongly suggesting the central lie of Saddam’s non-existent links with 9/11. Gove also repeats the canard that the spread of democracy will exclude the Islamists from Middle East power, despite the evidence from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt and Algeria that, given the option, the newly radicalised Muslim peoples are much more likely to choose fundamentalist candidates over secularists.

At the heart of Celsius 7/7 lies the idea that the Islamists are motivated by a deep hatred of freedom: as Bin Laden noted in his 2004 broadcast, if that was so, “Why did we not attack Sweden?” Instead, it is specifically to fight for freedom from US interference in the Islamic world that Al-Qaeda was formed: “We have been fighting you because we are free men,” said Bin Laden in the same speech. “Just as you violate our security, so we violate yours.” This was echoed by Mohammad Siddique Khan before 7/7: “Your governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world . . . Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight.”

All terrorist violence is contemptible. But just because we condemn does not mean we should not strive to analyse accurately. It is exactly the sort of woolly elisions and linkages that Gove indulges in that have got us into the trouble we are now in. None of this would matter if Gove were still ring-fenced within his op-ed-page padded cell; horrifyingly, however, he now sits in the Conservative shadow cabinet and is credited with having influence on Conservative policy in the region. Worse still, this book was named as the one most taken by British MPs on their summer holidays. Blair was bad enough, the blind leading the blind; now it seems the madmen are taking over the asylum.

Anyone who wishes to learn what is actually happening in the Middle East should consult a genuine expert such as Lawrence Wright, whose The Looming Tower is possibly the best book yet written on the rise of Al-Qaeda. If Gove is an ill-informed pundit tailoring information to fit pre-existing prejudices, then Wright represents the opposite approach: diligent and painstaking research on the ground in Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq and the Gulf, and the rigorous crosschecking of facts, as one would expect of a New Yorker staff writer.

The result is by far the most rounded biographical portrait of the central figures of Al-Qaeda, and the most reliable and confidently authoritative book yet written on their rise; it is also a beautifully written and wonderfully compelling narrative. The backgrounds of the leading players are meticulously explored, as are the factors that led to their radicalisation. Wright is especially perceptive on the role that torture in Egyptian prisons played in transforming both the principal Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb, and his pupil al-Zawahiri, into “violent and implacable extremists”. Wright is also revealing about Bin Laden’s own personality: his naivety, egalitarianism and surprising austerity — a rare example of a Saudi billionaire prepared to undertake hard manual labour and to live in comfortless, rigorous poverty.

The book ends with a list of more than 600 interviewees, most of whom have had personal encounters with Bin Laden or other leading Al-Qaeda players. It is a measure of Wright’s persistence that, refused a journalist visa to enter Saudi Arabia, he took a job “mentoring” young reporters at The Saudi Gazette, which “permitted me an understanding of Saudi society that I could never have gained from the journalist’s lofty vantage”.

It is only through books such as this, which dispel the many myths and try accurately to understand what radicalises the jihadis, that we can begin the slow process of countering their influence, and working out how to drain the swamp in which they flourish.