Tag Archives: Will McCants

LIFG and Al Qaeda: A Response to Zelin

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Posted on September 9, 2012

On Friday, I had a post at G&L questioning the field’s conventional wisdom that a) there is currently no relationship between the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and al Qaeda, and b) LIFG is almost entirely nationalist in orientation, or else regionally focused, rather than embracing an ideology of global jihad. My contention is not that there is more likely than not a relationship between LIFG and al Qaeda at present, nor that there are more likely than not large parts of LIFG that embrace an ideology of global jihad, but rather that I am unpersuaded by the assertion that neither of these are true. Aaron Zelin took issue with my post on Twitter, and Will McCants also disagreed for the same reasons that Zelin provided. I respect both Zelin and McCants enormously, but I think they are both over-interpreting the available evidence while giving insufficient weight to contradictory data — which was my critique of the field’s understanding of this issue in the first place. This entry will be devoted to answering Zelin’s objections.

But first, I would like to say a word or two about what I mean by “LIFG.” As noted in my last post, there is a serious question of what LIFG is today, and whether it even exists. Jihadi groups go in and out of existence, or adopt new names, frequently. A good example of a group that was significantly disrupted, and became defunct in name, but wasn’t truly gone, is Somalia’s Al Ittihad al Islamiya (AIAI). The noted Somalia specialist Ken Menkhaus explains in his 2004 volume Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism that after Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime collapsed in 1991, AIAI attempted to seize “targets of opportunity” throughout the country. The only location it held for a sustained period was the town of Luuq, near the border with Ethiopia and Kenya. From there, AIAI carried out a string of attacks into Ethiopia, including assassinations and bombings from 1996-97 that reached Addis Ababa. In response, Ethiopian forces intervened and smashed AIAI. Soon, Menkhaus writes, AIAI was regarded as ”a spent force, marginal if not defunct as an organization.” But, it would have been wrong to simply hold that AIAI no longer existed at that point, had become irrelevant. Indeed, the old leadership of AIAI would resurface as a critical part of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), such that analysts correctly note a continuity between those two groups. The question “what is AIAI up to today?” would have been highly relevant in 2004, and indeed could have helped analysts to anticipate significant developments in 2006, such as the ICU’s seizure of Mogadishu.

Another jihadi group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), has used different names and different banners in an effort to confuse its foes. As V.S. Subrahmanian and his co-authors write in an interesting new study about LeT, the group used this strategy just before Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf banned it in January 2002. Subrahmanian et al. note that “weeks before on December 24, 2001, LeT leader Hafez Saeed declared that LeT and MDI [the Markaz al-Dawa Irshad] were now separated and that he no longer had any affiliation with LeT. Further, MDI reverted to the name Jamaat ud-Dawa (Society for Preaching–JuD).” This was an organizational split in name only, as LeT continued to use JuD offices as its own.

So when I speak of what LIFG is doing today and what it believes, I am not referring to what an entity that calls itself LIFG is doing. Nor am I asking what a few stragglers from the organization are doing. Rather, I am interested in critical leaders from LIFG, and their followers, and LIFG’s militant apparatus. And for my money, we don’t know enough about them to say they are definitely, or even overwhelmingly likely to be, unconnected to al Qaeda and an ideology of global jihad. While one could object to my entire question on definitional grounds, and claim that there is no longer a LIFG so the question is irrelevant, the implication of this argument should be clear: if there is no longer a LIFG, there is also no longer a group that would feel itself bound by LIFG’s 2009 revisions.

So, turning to Zelin’s specific objections:

Zelin’s first objection: Ex-LIFG members that joined AQC [al Qaeda core] did so in an individual capacity. The so-called “merger” was rejected by LIFG leadership.

This response is overly focused on a single event, the merger that Abu Layth al Libi and Ayman al Zawahiri announced of LIFG and al Qaeda in 2007, and that was later repudiated by the organization’s imprisoned leadership when it issued revisions in 2009. But a relationship between LIFG and al Qaeda preceded the revisions by about two decades, as this report that Evan Kohlmann wrote for the NEFA Foundation in 2007 makes clear. To highlight a few (though by no means all) of his data points:

  • LIFG members were present in Afghanistan shortly after al Qaeda was founded in 1988, and were considered an early affiliate (pp. 3-4).
  • LIFG was present in Sudan from 1992-95 during Osama bin Laden’s time in that country, and about twenty LIFG members were part of the Islamic Army Shura that bin Laden formed (p. 5). This was not always a warm and friendly relationship; as is often the case within jihadi circles, it included its share of arguments and tensions.
  • After bin Laden was forced from Sudan and returned to Afghanistan, LIFG began to view that country, by 1998, as “the preferred venue for LIFG recruits seeking extremist indoctrination and military training.” During this time, “LIFG leaders managed to put aside some of their past frustrations with al Qaeda.” John Negroponte noted, during his time as the U.S.’s director of national intelligence, that during this period LIFG “expanded its goals to include anti-Western jihad alongside Al Qaeda.”
  • LIFG fought beside al Qaeda in Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded. Illustrating this, Kohlmann writes, “In 2002, Khalden training camp manager Abu Zubaydah was captured by security forces in a residence in Faisalabad, Pakistan alongside at least three LIFG operatives and a fourth individual also ‘known to have ties to the LIFG.’ Other LIFG members were captured by U.S. forces on the battlefield in Afghanistan and subsequently transferred to the U.S. prisoner camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”
  • LIFG’s alleged involvement in 2003 terrorist attacks in Morocco illustrate that at that time, ambitions outside of Libya and also a general anti-West orientation may have been prevalent within the group. Kohlmann writes, “In May 2003, senior LIFG leaders based in Europe allegedly conspired with their North African allies in the GICM to help plan and facilitate a wave of suicide bombing attacks on targets in the Moroccan city of Casablanca that killed over 40 people and caused more than 100 injuries. The attacks focused on Western and ‘Jewish’ interests, including community centers, a restaurant, and a hotel. British-based LIFG Shura Council member Abdelrahman al-Faqih—who ‘has a history of GICM-related activity’ and has served as a key liaison between the LIFG and the GICM—was convicted in absentia by the Rabat Criminal Court of Appeals in Morocco for his alleged involvement in the Casablanca bombings.”
  • LIFG commanders, including Abu Layth al Libi and Abu Yahya al Libi, held prominent positions within al Qaeda prior to the 2007 merger.
  • LIFG also strongly supported the jihad in Iraq. Kohlmann writes, ”Eager to continue its war against the West as the battlefield shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, the ‘LIFG has called on Muslims everywhere to fight the U.S. in Iraq,’ according to U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. In October 2004, al Qaeda supporters in Libya posted an open request on Arabic-language Internet chat forums to the chief of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s media wing regarding Libyan national Khalid al-Zaidi—who allegedly survived combat with U.S. forces in Iraq only to be subsequently killed back home in Libya. According to the message, ‘we think you have heard about [his martyrdom]… the most important thing we want from you, the Tawheed wal-Jihad Movement, is to name one of your upcoming operations in his name in order to show support for your brothers in the land of Libya.’”

Focusing only on Abu Layth al Libi’s merger of LIFG into al Qaeda in 2007, and its subsequent repudiation by another wing of LIFG, ignores the fact that a relationship had long existed between the two groups prior to the merger. This relationship was sometimes tense, but generally cooperative. Since a cooperative relationship had existed for such a long time, it is not impossible, nor even particularly unlikely, that it would continue in a real way even after one LIFG wing issued its revisions.

Further, neither Abu Layth al Libi nor other LIFG leaders who became part of al Qaeda can be written off as low-level individuals. They were prominent within LIFG, and when they joined al Qaeda, they brought their followers along. Nor is the fact that it took the imprisoned LIFG leadership two years to reject al Libi’s attempted merger with al Qaeda wholly irrelevant: Abu Layth al Libi purported to speak for all of LIFG in his merger announcement, so if this merger were completely out of character, and seen as outrageous by others within LIFG, shouldn’t the repudiation have come much earlier? Available evidence suggests that there might be significant LIFG factions who were both dedicated to the ideology of global jihad and also desired a working relationship with al Qaeda, even if other LIFG factions did not. It is not clear to me (though not necessarily wrong) that the imprisoned leadership that issued the revisions in 2009 should be held up as the “real” LIFG while Abu Layth al Libi’s faction is written off as marginal.

Zelin’s second objection (combining two tweets): The former LIFG leader first changed the name of the group in spring ’11 to the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change. Since then former LIFG members split into two political parties al-Watan and al-Ummah led by Belhaj and Sa’adi, respectively.

The Libyan Islamic Movement for Change was a shift adopted by LIFG’s European expatriate and historic Libya-based leadership, the same ones who supported the earlier revisions. They claimed to speak for the whole of LIFG — but then again, so did Abu Layth al Libi and his followers during the 2007 merger. It isn’t clear that the former should be given preeminence over the latter, other than the fact that the former was trending in a direction that the U.S. wanted it to — particularly given that Abu Layth al Libi’s contingent definitely had access to significant amount of resources and personnel. The question of who has a greater claim to legitimacy isn’t trivial, particularly given the salafist attacks that have erupted across Libya.

This wave of attacks on sufi shrines is unprecedented in Libya’s recent history, and suggests that whomever is carrying it out embraces an extreme for of takfirism. Who is responsible for the attacks is an open question, but it’s certain that they’re dangerous enough that the state is hesitant to openly confront them. The New York Times recently quoted Libya’s interior minister, Fawzi Abdel Aal: “If we deal with this using security we will be forced to use weapons, and these groups have huge amounts of weapons. We can’t be blind to this. These groups are large in power and number in Libya. I can’t enter a losing battle, to kill people over a grave.” This is a remarkable quote: Libya’s interior minister feels powerless to stop the destruction of sufi shrines and sites, in large part because these groups are “large in power and number,” and also well armed. Did the groups carrying out these attacks derive their organizational structure or leadership from LIFG? To be sure, we don’t know the answer, but can we say that it’s more likely than not that they didn’t?

Zelin references the emergence of al Watan (Hizb al Watan) and al Ummah (al Ummah al Wasat) as political parties. This splintering raises the question of whether or not there is still a coherent group. If not, as I asked before, should LIFG’s revisions still be considered operative? (Surely some in the group would still likely adhere to them, but could we consider them binding on all the factions that existed within LIFG?) But moreover, in Libya engaging in the political process is not inconsistent with maintaining a militia capable of undertaking violent actions outside of it. Abdal Hakim Bilhaj is a good example, as he continues to head the Tripoli Military Council (TMC) despite his official resignation on May 15, 2012. According to open source reports, the TMC, one of Libya’s most powerful militias, has a large number of former LIFG members. Estimates of its total size range from 5,000 to 25,000 members.

Zelin’s third objection: Indeed, there are former LIFG elements around Libya that didn’t buy into politics, see al-Qumu, but it’s not under the LIFG banner.

It is true that they aren’t operating under the LIFG banner at this point, but I assess that as less important than Zelin thinks it is. The fact is that in Libya:

  • There are a large amount of takfiri attacks being carried out against sufi targets, and we don’t know to whom those attacks should be attributed.
  • There are credible reports of an al Qaeda presence inside Libya (as detailed in my previous post), and we don’t have a great deal of granular knowledge about it.
  • We don’t have a good idea of what became of a large portion of the fighters within LIFG (although some are accounted for, such as those who are now in the TMC).

There is, in essence, a lot that we don’t know, and hence the need for a great deal of analytic humility about what might be happening. I think the banner that a group operates under is less relevant than where its structure and members came from. If I wrote a post about Somalia in 2004 arguing that AIAI might be trying to consolidate power, one could reasonably object that they weren’t doing so under the banner of AIAI. That would be true enough, but also somewhat beside the point: for practical purposes, AIAI was trying to consolidate power then, but we didn’t really know what to call them. Asking about AIAI in 2004 would not only not be wrong, but would in fact be the exact right question to ask if you wanted to understand Somalia’s future. Until we can name the specific factions that have emerged from LIFG, I think it is fair to ask what LIFG is up to now, and also to question whether its revisions in fact represent the overwhelmingly dominant view among LIFG members/former LIFG members.

So, to highlight my points of difference with Zelin:

  • I believe that focusing only on Abu Layth al Libi’s attempted merger with al Qaeda and the subsequent 2009 revisions ignores a history between LIFG and al Qaeda that covers about two decades. There is much more to the connection between the two organizations than just the attempted merger.
  • I don’t think it’s self-evident that we should find that legitimacy lies only with the imprisoned leaders who issued revisions in 2009, and not with Abu Layth al Libi’s faction that also claimed to act in the name of LIFG when it merged with al Qaeda. I think it is reasonable to say that it seems LIFG has been somewhat fluid, possessing more than a single faction, and that both nationalist and also global jihad-oriented factions have existed within the group. Given the dearth of information we have about Libya, I don’t see how we can conclude that the overwhelming majority of LIFG members endorse the positions expressed in the revisions.
  • Further, in my previous entry, I noted that other aspects of LIFG’s revisions, such as the pledge not to fight Qaddafi’s regime, were abandoned. This calls into question, at least in a small way, how binding the totality of the revisions will be.
  • The best objection to my argument (which Zelin seems to hint at) is that LIFG simply does not exist at this point. (This entry makes clear that the question what is LIFG? does not have a straightforward answer.) But this argument begs the question: what do we call armed groups whose structure and leadership is inherited from LIFG, if we don’t have another name for them at this point? And should their history within LIFG be seen as irrelevant to their current form, function, and logic?
  • Further, to the extent that one argues that LIFG does not exist, that undermines the importance of LIFG’s revisions. If there is no LIFG, there’s also no longer a group that has endorsed the revisions.
  • I believe that the banner a group is operating under is relevant, but we cannot view it as absolutely determinative. If a group’s leadership and structure derives from a previous organization (i.e. LIFG), then that group can sometimes be functionally seen as a continuation of the previous organization rather than a wholly new thing.

The bottom line is that there is a hell of a lot that analysts don’t know about violent non-state actors operating in Libya. And the more we don’t know, the more we should be open to possibilities that defy the conventional wisdom. That is particularly the case for LIFG and al Qaeda: the two groups’ fairly long relationship should make it difficult to say with confidence that any working relationship is only a thing of the past.

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The Forgotten Secularists of Egypt’s Revolution

by TaraVassefi Posted on May 30, 2012

In late April, supporters of a hardline Islamist group camped out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to rally for their presidential candidate. I was visiting Cairothree years after I lived there, and downtown looked completely different than what I remembered. Men with full beards and women in black niqabs were rallying for shariah law and carrying the raya, the black banner often carried by Sunni fundamentalists across the region. These were rare sites a few years ago when downtown was packed with American University of Cairo students, tourists, and businesses thriving off of the capital city’s commotion. The demonstration occurred against a backdrop of street art depicting the young martyrs of the revolution, many of them clean-shaven and dressed in Western clothing. The contrast between these new protesters and those depicted on the wall illustrated the early evolution of the new Egypt.

Salafi Rally in Tahrir
Salafi Rally in Tahrir

Meanwhile, across the 6 of October Bridge, the activist band El Zabaleen headlined a concert for Earth Day. Zabaleen, which means “garbage people” in Egyptian Arabic, refers to a class of people who collect and recycle most of trash generated by Cairo’s 6 million residents. As students at American University of Cairo, the band formed as a way to bring attention to the grave environmental state of the city, and to Egypt as a whole.

Last week, Egyptians headed to the polls for their first free and fair elections. The resulting runoff between the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and the former Mubarak official Ahmed Shafiq leaves voters in the tenuous position of having to choose between an Islamist domination of the government and a remnant of the regime they revolted against.

Though an Islamist domination ofEgypt’s politics seems highly possible now, this was not necessarily the case in January 2011 when the revolution seized Egypt. At that time, the members of El Zabaleen had joined their friends and classmates in Tahrir to protest a system, and a government that was no longer tolerable even for the wealthy and employed. Youssef El Kady, the founder of El Zabaleen, describes the other early revolutionaries: “You can’t really generalize by saying it was young people or Salafis or whatever, but from my perspective, I think that it started off not by the people who are struggling economically, but rather with the people who are fed up with the corrupt system that has been there all their life.”

In January 2011, many in Egypt shared El Kady’s perspective. While the Arab Spring found its catalyst in a poor Tunisian street vendor, the impetus for the revolution in Egypt was Wael Ghonim, an educated Google executive who was raised in a middle-class family. Ghonim and other young activists used not just their presence in Tahrir but also social media to topple Mubarak. There are disagreements over the extent to which Facebook and Twitter themselves produced the revolutions, but studies such as the Dubai School of Government’s Arab Social Media Report give empirical substantiation to the unique and prominent role of these online tools.

But on Earth Day 2012, none of these educated, well-off youth could be found in Tahrir. The liberal parties have taken a backseat to Islamist and military political dominance, despite Cairo’s prodigious graffiti and artwork depicting the martyrs of the revolution – many of whom were employed young adults or current university students.

Instead, Tahrir was packed with ardent supporters of Salafist leader Abu Ismail. While it is difficult to summarize the broad spectrum of Salafism with one definition, Center for Naval Analyses analyst and Johns Hopkins adjunct faculty Will McCants  describes the practice in the Brookings report Lesser of Two Evils as “the method modeling one’s thought and behavior on Muhammad on the first three generations of Muslims, called the ‘forefathers’ (salaf).” Salafists generally adhere to a strict interpretation of the Qu’ran, and many shun participation in parliamentary democracy. As such, most of Egypt’s “quietist” Salafi leaders were apprehensive of or outright resistant to the uprising against Mubarak in early 2011, and conservative religiosity was uncommon in downtown Cairo even after the early days of the revolution.

So where did the Salafis come from, and how did the Salafis manage to win a quarter of the seats in the recent parliamentary elections?

El Kady explains, “When we went into the streets on January 25, we never dreamed of what could happen in a couple weeks. After Mubarak fell, we were ready for the Muslim Brotherhood but the Salafis were very much a surprise. We didn’t even realize there were Salafis in Egypt.”

McCants contextualizes not just the little-known presence of Egyptian Salafis, but also their unprecedented political participation. He explains that Salafis not only existed before Mubarak’s fall, but were able to organize freely because they shunned involvement in politics and thereby earned Mubarak’s “benign neglect.”

While there is a distinction between the now organized Salafi party members and the illiterate, religious, conservative masses who voted for Salafi parliamentarians, McCants concedes that it is hard to quantify this distinction from publicly available reporting. Nonetheless, it is clear that “the Salafi parties are formidable, drawing their support from charitable institutions with broad geographical reach, popular satellite channels, and deep pockets that are allegedly filled with Gulf petrodollars (estimated by one analyst at $1 billion).”

As for the original protestors, it should be no surprise that the majority of Egyptians are not liberal secularists. They are a very small minority of the Egyptian population; as Hudson Institute research fellow Samuel Tadros aptly writes, “Egypt is not Cairo and Cairo is not Tahrir Square.” Too, there is a sense, even among themselves, that the secular liberals retreated too early, pulling back just as Mubarak fell.

This has engendered sour feelings among those who had supported the young revolutionaries. Salwa, an artist and mother of two living in Cairo, told me, “I feel betrayed. I feel like we all went out into the streets and supported these young people and put our lives on the line. But as soon as they thought they won, the streets were left empty. They didn’t think ahead and now you have people in Tahrir who want to mix religion and politics and to take away our freedoms.”

Other secularists seem to have a more realist approach to the events of the Arab Spring, both in recognizing their populist shortcomings as well as the incumbency of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Mariam Ali, the lead singer and eponym of another Earth Day activist band, AboMariam, explains, “SCAF kind of pulled the rug out from everyone, I think, by having Mubarak step down and having it seem like the revolution had succeeded – which it has in some ways, but it’s not even close to being over. Despondency and despair is our enemy, not people.”

As an outsider, I expected there to be more animosity between these rival groups and viewed the Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood as having hijacked the revolution. But many of the young secularists I spoke with repeated this sentiment that they are not particularly worried about who is in Tahrir. They were more optimistic that they were free of the initial grievance of the revolution, the state of emergency law. And it is abundantly clear that people, from Salafis to secularists, are finding a myriad of ways to remain politically active. Ali explains, “People are campaigning for their rights, engaging in political discussion, through music, film, theater, comedy, street art and much more. It’s like new life has been breathed into them. It’s enough for me that we feel we have a claim in our country and its future.”

—-

Tara Vassefi is a faculty member with the Naval Postgraduate School’s Leadership and Development Education for Sustained Peace program. She received her Master’s from the University of St. Andrews and lived in Syria and Egypt from 2007-2008. These views are her own and do not represent those of LDESP, CCMR or NPS.

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Review: Will McCants’ Founding Gods, Inventing Nations

by caidid Posted on February 29, 2012

Will McCants’ Founding Gods, Inventing Nations is not a simple history of rulers and conquests but something subtler, a history of the perceptions and cultural contests inside ancient conquests. Concentrating on the Greek, Roman, and Arab empires, McCants looks at the many interpretations and re-interpretations of the roots of culture – cities and medicine and tool use and philosophy and ironwork and geometry and agriculture and astronomy – touching on myths and origin stories in those cultures after outlining some of the culture myths as they existed in more ancient empires such as the Sumerian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian.

McCants uses the lens of these culture myths to try to understand the interactions between conquerors and conquered, how peoples assimilate or assert themselves. He makes the point that times of conquest and the aftermath thereof are periods of flux for all parties involved. Conquerors do not universally impose their will or their way on the conquered. Cultural influence is a negotiation: it goes both ways, and the way culture myths are told, especially at these times of flux, is instructive of the social and political needs of the day. He compares the approaches to culture myths of individuals at the times of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests in four categories – divine providence, “firsts,” founders of native civilizations, and the origins of the sciences – and discusses the contexts and motivations in each era for each category.

We can see some parallels in all the periods discussed. All three conquering empires – Greek, Roman, and Arab – soon saw native elites writing histories of their (the natives’) forefathers’ contributions to civilization in their own languages, and for a similar range of reasons: to instill or boost local pride, to show the conquerors what they owed the conquered, to persuade the conquerors to behave like native rulers, to discredit local rivals, or to elevate themselves above other conquered peoples.

However, similar paths could lead to different places in each period. For example, there are lists of ‘firsts’ surviving from all three periods, but the type of activities and inventions on the lists, and the attributions for them, differed greatly. Writers in all three periods dealt with some of the same questions, including whether the Greeks had originated anything or borrowed from other cultures, and whether humans could develop complex sciences on their own or if divine inspiration of some kind was required, but the conclusions they reached depended on the cultural context and requirements of the time.

Perhaps the area of most divergence was on the origin of the sciences, as even within each culture there existed debate on whether the sciences were given to man by divine intercession or earned through his own ingenuity, as well as contention over which civilizations were the first to use certain sciences, regardless of whether the initial providence was human or divine.

I won’t get into his specific conclusions about each conquest, because you should read it yourself, but McCants tells us in his introduction:

In recounting these culture myths, authors worked out their place in post-conquest society. By describing the origin and transmission of science, they tell us where they stand in relation to that tradition, to their contemporaries who practice it, and to those who detract from it. By writing histories of the cultural exploits of ancient heroes, they tell us how they think of their ethnic origins and how others can join or be excluded from their group. By making lists of beneficial arts and sciences, they encode the ideal cultural genealogy of their societies and provide the knowledge needed to navigate it. By demonstrating how God works in the world, they explain how society should be ordered and who should maintain it. These scholarly activities were at no time more important than after conquest, when the place of the conqueror and the conquered were both unstable and in need of mooring to the ancient past.

Though the book’s focus is on ancient times, its insights into power, perception, and persuasion are relevant down to the present day. The early Islamic empires saw both conquerors and conquered grappling with the establishment of an Islamic culture in negotiation with the Qur’anic values of the conquerors, and the established high cultures of the Greeks, Iranians, and others whom they conquered. In the modern post-colonial period, populations are still defining and re-defining Islamic culture, no longer in relation to conquered elites, but to liberalism, democracy, and the legacy of colonial powers. The solutions thus far have included forms of government from Iranian velayat-e faqih to the Turkish secular parliamentary system to the religiously-backed monarchy of Saudi Arabia, with many nations currently in flux; and intellectual approaches that run the whole gamut from salafi movements such as that of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab which seek to return Islam to a perceived pure original state, to the work of intellectuals such as Khaled Abou El Fadl who seek to derive an Islamic context for democracy. Living within borders drawn and re-drawn by the Ottomans, then the French and British, and living with the legacy of colonial occupiers, as well as contemporary resource issues and the long shadow of American interests, it is again a time of renewal and redefinition.

And it is not just relevant to Islamic culture. This book is not about one single culture, nor does it speak only to the concerns of empires; it is about negotiations between cultures, the projection of power, and the exercise of influence. As an American, I can’t help but consider things in terms of American power. There is food for thought here in how our sway shows in the world at large, and how we in turn can be impacted by the cultures with which we interact, and the culture of those we occupy or influence.

The author has stated that if you (the reasonably educated reader) can’t understand this book, then he has failed. The book is clearly written, structured in a way that makes sense, and quite digestible in terms of both format and length. McCants does a creditable job of providing enough context that a reader who is not familiar with all of his sources can understand it but not so much that it bogs the book down. You don’t have to be a scholar of antiquity, or religion, or any other particular field in order to benefit from this book.

That being said, my own familiarity with the at least the rudiments of a lot of the material provided me with a good measure of my personal enjoyment of it. For me, the fun of reading diversely is in the connections your mind makes between things, especially things that seem disparate at first glance. It was a pleasure seeing the connections made by McCants – known to many for his expertise in counterterrorism and modern jihadi movements – among many disciplines including ancient history, religion, anthropology, poetry, modern religious scholarship, and mythology. I have a lifelong love of mythology of all kinds, and I have studied ancient history, Middle Eastern history, the Bible, and Islam, so McCants’ wide variety of sources were also a delight. The book is peppered with excerpts from Babylonian tablets, Sumerian poetry, Egyptian scrolls, the works of Homer and Aeschylus and Hesiod and Herodotus, Jewish/Christian apocrypha in which wayward angels sleep with humans and spread corruption, the Iranian epic Shahnamih, the Bible, and the Qur’an, just to name a few.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history or mythology, or a penchant for thinking about complex ideas like the blurred lines of influence between conquerors and conquered. It is well-written, rich with wonderful source materials, educational on the cultural milieux of these ancient conquests, and thought-provoking in terms of how we perceive culture, power, and influence.

———

My one tiny quibble with the book is purely geekery-based and has nothing to do with writing or scholarship, but I just can’t help myself from mentioning it: McCants devastatingly missed an opportunity to reference the greatest science fiction film ever made (and my favorite movie) Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner, in his conclusion. He uses the phrase “more Arab than Arab” and references a 2002 book’s use of the term “more English than the English” rather than Blade Runner‘s Tyrell Corporation’s motto “More Human Than Human,” an oversight that I’m sure will haunt him until the end of his days.

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