Infiltrating Al Qaeda - Inside Al Qaeda. How I Infiltrated the World's Deadliest Terrorist Organization - Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Dec, 2003 by Roger Kershaw

Inside Al Qaeda. How I Infiltrated the World's Deadliest Terrorist Organization. Mohamed Sifaoui. Granta. [pounds sterling]6.99 p.b. 154 pages. ISBN 1-86207-682-0. Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern. John Gray. Faber & Faber. [pounds sterling]10.99. 145 pages. ISBN 0-571-21980-2.

The first title is quite a thriller, as gripping as any film about an FBI agent infiltrating a Mafia family. The self-motivated 'plant' was an Algerian journalist working in Paris, who had lost colleagues to Islamist terrorism. This background explains not only his remarkable courage during his three-month mission, but also the recurring passages of didactic exposure of the inhuman nihilism of Islamist fascism, and its propagandist accessories on the French far left and in the media. The role of these new fellow-travellers is to sooth the fears of the French by denying violent Islamist intent. The book was conceived very much as a means of counteracting that.

What is very clear, though not explicitly analysed, is the fact that his success in infiltrating a network of terrorist recruitment was due partly to the hopes of these Algerian 'brothers' that his skills as a TV journalist could be mobilised to strengthen their cynical 'offensive of charm' towards the hated infidels. This would be Mohamed Sifaoui's own jihad, they told him. In the event, he got his dramatic story and it was they who were duped. Their vulnerability owed something to the importance they place on dress and behaviour, which an adversary can emulate as effectively as they may disguise their allegiance by shaving off their beards when on a mission.

The English translation of the book reads very well, but the French title, Mes 'Freres' Assassins, seems to fit the events better than Inside Al Qaeda. In a rather short period the author did not, apparently, get to know any active 'operationals', only individuals who were looking for would-be 'martyrs' among disaffected Algerian youths and converts. Nevertheless, his contacts referred to Osama bin Laden with love and adulation as 'the Sheikh', and audited his videos for semi-coded instructions to prepare bomb attacks in Europe. If one understands Al Qaeda as a loosely-linked, worldwide web of common aspiration, comprising an inspirational nucleus and infinite concentric circles fading off into the ranks of non-active sympathisers, one can begin to accept that the author did 'infiltrate the world's deadliest terrorist organization'.

Of special interest to British readers will be the moments spent in London. The author admonishes British authorities on the laxity of their border controls. He clearly got the impression that London was a more dangerous hotbed than Paris, higher up the international chain of command because it was a refuge for terrorists uncovered and expelled by other states. This is an important book for a European civilisation in its historically most tolerant and relativist phase, deeply inclined to seek 'mitigating' factors for evil perpetrated against itself.

One possible weakness consists in the author's own ideological disposition to regard only his own, peaceful, conception of Islam as 'correct' by the Prophet. This is thrown in question by his citation of one of the Quranic verses by which the terrorists justify their acts, and by references to a long tradition of militancy reaching back to the twelfth century. At best, there may be 'two Islams', in competition with each other. Unfortunately, the peaceful tendency has no monopoly of scriptural authority!

Another short book, of more 'weighty' appearance, is the essay by the Professor of European Thought at the L. S. E. John Gray takes no position on what may be the 'correct' form of Islam. In fact, the question scarcely arises, for Prof. Gray is concerned to portray Al Qaeda as an expression of 'modernity', first and foremost. Despite a culminating insistence that modernity can take many forms according to country and culture--plus a considerable animus against Western positivism and the ridiculous American myth of the natural universality of the free market and democracy--the basic thesis sees Al Qaeda as replicating the most pathological philosophical and political phenomena of the post-Enlightenment West. The possibility that the roots of anti-liberalism lie in Islam itself is simply not addressed. Incredibly, there is not a single reference to Wahabism.

Indeed one cannot help wondering whether the essay was conceived earlier than 11th September 2001, possibly as a critique of the 'New World Order' of George Bush, Senior. In that case, Al Qaeda would have been inserted as an after-thought, contingently portrayed not only as an imitation of the worst in the West but as a sort of just revenge for American hegemonism. The book is packed with stimulating philosophical (and depressingly prophetic) allusion within the author's own field, but ends up as a bit of a rigmarole. Reasonably enough, Malise Ruthven is quoted on the Jacobin antecedents of Al Qaeda's revolutionary anarchism. But just as germane would have been some lines of hers in International Affairs last year: 'Despite its modernist elements, the structure of al-Qa'ida, and its purpose, broadly fit the historical pattern of cyclical revolt and renewal observed by Ibn Khaldun more than six centuries ago'.