 |
| Volume XII, Fall 2005, Number 3 |
| |
BOOK REVIEW
|
| |
|
| |
Understanding Terror Networks, by Marc Sageman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 220 pages with appendix, glossary, bibliography. $29.95 hardcover.
Charles D. Smith
University of Arizona
Marc Sageman's study of al-Qaeda is a significant contribution to the growing literature on
that group and terrorist networks in general, influenced to a degree by his own personal experience.
He served as a foreign-service officer in Afghanistan from 1986-89, where he "worked with Islamic
fundamentalists [whom he conflates with mujahedin] on a daily basis" (p. vii). On leaving the
Foreign Service, he served a residency in psychiatry and gained a doctorate in political sociology.
This study benefits from Sageman's familiarity with the scholarly literature on mass movements
and fanaticism within the two disciplines, much of which he challenges.
Sageman summarizes the origins and evolution of what he calls the "global Salafi jihad" in the
first two chapters before moving on to the heart of the monograph. This consists of three chapters:
"The Mujahedin," "Joining the Jihad," and "Social Networks" and the Jihad." Sageman's
introductory remarks distinguish between Salafism, as a belief in strict adherence to Islamic values,
and Salafi jihad. The latter he correctly traces to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, placing the origins of
the greater jihad in the emergence of groups in Egypt, some of whose members (such as Ayman al-
Zawahiri) later emerged as Bin Ladin's close allies in Afghanistan. Here Sageman distinguishes
between the views of Abdallah Azzam and al-Zawahiri, the former not seeking to overthrow Muslim
regimes such as those in Egypt and Jordan, the latter embracing the idea of attacks on both the
"near enemy," supposedly corrupt Muslim regimes, and the "far enemy," such as the United States.
Sageman's summary is a useful recounting of what is known and has been discussed more fully in
past accounts by Peter Bergen, Rohan Gunaratna and Olivier Roy, among others.
Chapters 3-5 are the core of the book. Here Sageman defines the nature of these Salafi
terrorist organizations, the scope of their various networks, the process whereby individuals joined
jihadist groups and the social ties that led to inclusion. He limits his data base to those Muslims
who target foreign governments and populations, the "far enemy," and establishes an empirical
basis for future studies. He excludes Muslims who fought or are fighting in Chechnya, Kashmir,
Bosnia and Afghanistan as well as Algeria, and the Egyptian Islamic Group (EIG), which sought to
overthrow the Mubarak regime. These, he argues, are limited and specific jihads seeking to liberate
specific lands. He does include the EIG leadership-in-exile, which played a key role in the creation
of the Salafi jihad.
Sageman stresses that all his sources are public and accessible (there is an extensive bibliography).
Many are secondary, but he has also used transcripts of legal investigations and court
appearances. His goal is to present as accurate a portrait as possible of members of the global
jihadist movement, their backgrounds and their motives and opportunities for joining the jihadist
movement - and to correct errors in previous reports.
With these acknowledged limitations on sources, Sageman examines data on 172 jihadists
divided into separate clusters: Central Staff (32); Southeast Asian (21); Maghreb (53); and Core
Arab (66). He then considers patterns of behavior and experiences for individuals in each cluster.
Sageman stresses that extensive interaction occurred among members of each cluster but virtually
none between members of different clusters. He argues that the roots of the global jihad are
Egyptian, not Saudi or Afghani, in that 20 of the 32 members of the Central Staff were Egyptian. On
the other hand, nearly half of the Core Arab cluster are of Saudi origin.
Sageman uses his data in Chapter 3, "The Mujahedin," to challenge what he considers to be
false impressions of the origins of the global jihad, especially with respect to Afghanistan. He
vehemently rejects the idea that the CIA or any other American group had a role in the funding or
training of the mujahedin in Afghanistan. That was controlled and directed by Pakistani intelligence
(pp. 66-67). This may be true, but Sageman has already stated in his preface, as noted, that he
interacted with Islamic fundamentalists on a daily basis during his stint in Afghanistan, and he
goes on to remark that this experience gave him insights into the "mujahedin's beliefs and practices."
Presumably other Americans had similar interactions. Though these contacts may not have
reached the level of funding and training, clearly there was frequent contact between mujahedin
and U.S. officials. He also states that the global jihad was "not an Afghani phenomenon," despite
the fact that it emerged in Afghanistan, because the global jihadists "did not mix with the Afghans"
(pp. 72-73).
In his analysis of the socioeconomic backgrounds of the jihadists, Sageman finds that over 60
percent of the 172-person sample had at least one year of college education, and one-third had
graduated. Only the Maghrebi cluster was evenly divided between middle- and lower-class
backgrounds, with many of the latter coming from second-generation immigrants to France.
Moreover, most Salafi mujahedin had far more education than their parents, and their education
was far more technical than humanistic, focusing on the sciences, engineering or computer
science. Only those from the Southeast Asian cluster had backgrounds in Islamic studies, as nearly
all came from two centers of Islamic education in Indonesia and Malaysia. Sageman uses this
evidence to challenge previous arguments that terrorists come from deprived backgrounds and
observes that this correlation of higher religiosity with scientific educations is consistent with
scholarship on religious beliefs of faculty engaged in the sciences in the West.
This point highlights one of the major strengths of this book. Sageman engages scholarship to
deal with patterns of belief and behavior not only for the non-Western world but also in the West.
He argues that jihadis appear to have been motivated more by rising than by lowered expectations.
Their very success in gaining access to higher education in the West, however, often led to sociointellectual
alienation and the seeking out of fellow Muslims who shared their dismay at the
societies in which they found themselves without easy access to full employment.
Sageman's hypothesis of activism motivated by rising expectations and subsequent alienation
resembles scholarly findings on revolutions: those involved are not the poor, deprived masses but
individuals whose anticipation of greater benefits or advancement had been stoked by a rise in
their status. In the same vein, he finds no evidence for a "terrorist personality," concluding that
terrorists generally are "surprisingly normal in their mental health" (p. 83). In particular, Sageman
questions the theories of Jerrold Post who hypothesized evidence of childhood trauma and rejects
scholarship arguing for a correlation of authoritarian personalities and terrorism. Indeed, as he
notes, "The leadership style in al-Qaeda is not an authoritarian one" (p. 90); global jihad is characterized
by decentralization in decision making.
Sageman is generally cautious with his evidence. Thus, while many who became global
terrorists lacked full-time jobs and appeared to fit the relative-deprivation thesis postulated
decades ago by Ted Gurr (p. 95), Sageman points out that most dissatisfied individuals do not
become terrorists. For Sageman, relative deprivation appears to be a necessary but not sufficient
condition to push people towards terrorism. Equally significant is that 70 percent of terrorists in his
sample joined the jihad in foreign lands, not in their country of birth, though that foreign land might
be Afghanistan or, for the Central Staff cluster, Sudan in the mid-1990s, not necessarily Europe.
I have spent much space on Chapter 3 to give readers an idea of Sageman's approach and the
nature of his analysis. Chapters 4 and 5 are equally rich. "Joining the Jihad" examines the case
histories of two cells and their efforts, the unsuccessful Los Angeles airport bombing plot and the
9/11 operation. Sageman traces the ties each set of collaborators had to each other and to organiz-
ers, how individuals were attracted to jihad and so forth. He stresses how friendship and prior ties
with specific individuals worked to draw others into the jihadist groups. In short, individuals were
not recruited by al-Qaeda but joined the movement via previous links to friends in specific locations,
often undergoing a transformation from an apparently secular life to an intensely religious
one. Sageman stresses the importance of social bonds in attracting members by comparing the al-
Qaeda process with scholarship on Reverend Moon's Unification Church, the German Red Army
and Italian Red Brigades and the Egyptian Islamic Group in the 1970s.
Chapter 5 considers social-network analysis with respect to each cluster, stressing also the
role of the internet and communication technology in terrorist planning and the maintaining of ties.
He remarks on the downside of internet/satellite-phone exchanges, as they can be monitored, and
notes that much key information has been discovered on captured computer hard drives.
Sageman concludes that "social bonds play a more important role in the emergence of the
global Salafai jihad than ideology" (p. 178). He stresses that he does not deny the role of intention
and religious fervor in pushing the terrorists to act as they did. Rather, he is concerned that the
focus on such factors leads to demonizing terrorists by virtue of their ideology. This undermines
the likelihood of understanding these people as individuals and as social units, far more important
in preventing further attacks, and excluding the majority of Muslims from blanket condemnation.
Sageman's approach may not please those whose political agendas include acceptance of the
clash-of-civilizations thesis. But his arguments and findings, based on comparative analysis of
scholarship in several areas, have great merit in themselves and value for future studies of the
subject. By seeking to understand who terrorists are, what motivates them and how they joined the
movement, we come to a better understanding of how to deal with them and, one hopes, counter
their efforts. Regrettably, as he remarks, our invasion of Iraq has served as a motive to "re-energize"
the global jihad, which, in Sageman's view, appeared to be losing vitality in the wake of 9/11
and the U.S. response in Afghanistan.
Though he focuses his remarks on Iraq as a gathering place for global Salafi jihadists, the recent
(July 2005) suicide attacks in London have equally ominous implications. Namely, as recent analyst
reports from Britain have suggested, reverberations from Iraq will be felt in those countries that led
the attack - the United States and Britain - with the bombers being inhabitants of these countries
infuriated by the casualties sustained by fellow Muslims at the hands of the attackers. One hopes
that these hypotheses will not be often put to the test, but Marc Sageman's data and cogent
arguments, whether fully accepted or not, provide an important source for considering the nature of
this terrorism and the motives of its practitioners in the era from the Afghan jihad to 9/11 and its
aftermath.
|
| |
|
