Out of Bali: cybercaliphate rising

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by David Martin Jones

Such a system, thought Qutb, required a unified umma, or community of the faithful, in the novel sense of a transterritorial ideocracy. Politically, this means that the boundaries of the umma reflect the extent of the doctrine's acceptance. Where it is a majority, it rules; where it is not, it struggles. As Gellner pointed out, this Islamist self-reformation addresses directly the predicament of Third World backwardness. It offers scripturalism, asceticism, rule orientation and aversion to backward local particularisms, all of which, he wrote, "may have elective affinities with the virtues required to surmount the arduousness and strains of the long march to disciplined, modern industrial society." (11) Islamism promotes a rule-governed, illiberal arrangement in which society is organized by networks, quasi tribes, alliances forged on the basis of kin, services exchanged...common institutional experience, but still, in general, based on trust, well founded or not, rather than on formal relations in a defined bureaucratic manner. (12)

In its most extreme form, as in Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, the new "community" is forged on mafia activities and terror franchises rather than on traditional pastoral-based clan affinity. This is how Al-Qaeda currently operates in Bali, Hamburg and London.

Islamism thus bulges with paradox. It exemplifies a network-based social order without a real society. It is atomized without individualism. It can operate effectively in a bewildering diversity of settings without intellectual and political pluralism. Against the civilizational prophylactics identified by Gibbon, Islamism has no need of the doubtful joys of modularity, and has developed an asymmetric capacity to turn the West's technological and cybernetic edge against it. lilt has devastated a modern cosmopolitan city like New York and a backpacker's holiday playground like Kuta Beach in Bali with conspicuous ease. And we cannot even assuredly find it, because "it" is not anything we have ever tried or needed to find before.

The Cybercalip hate Within

IF THIS sociology of political Islam is correct, then we immediately recognize that the war against terrorism cannot be conceived according to the heretofore standard geographical assumptions of international conflict. Traditional, even very pious, middle Eastern Islam as such is not the problem. Terror-prone Islamism does arise in a remote sense from the least traditional, most fundamentalist Muslim state, Saudi Arabia; but Islamism's active nodes and cells are not located in Arab countries. As we have seen, many are evolving in Southeast Asia, but the most dangerous networks are located in the West. As we have suggested, dar al-Islam is no longer simply a geographic concept; the "virtual" world of the potential cybercaliphate knows no conventional boundaries. Thus to understand what is happening in Southeast Asia, we also have to look at what goes on, for example, in London.

The Islamist presence in the West presents profound difficulties for all adherents of liberal pluralism. The West addresses the Islamist threat with at least a semblance of realism when it emanates from "states of concern" like Syria and Afghanistan, or failing states like the Philippines and Indonesia. Yet it seems curiously trapped by its own rhetoric of tolerance and multiculturalism when it comes to addressing the fundamentalist challenge within. Hamburg Technological University served as a perfect location for Mohamed Atta to plan his towering day in history. Al-Qaeda cells remain active in Germany, Spain, Italy and France (and, thankfully, also actively well-hounded of late). But it is in Britain that perhaps the most acute cognitive dissonance may be observed.