The new face of Islamic terrorism is a pudgy, long-haired American kid who appears to be locked in a desperate, losing struggle to grow a beard: Adam Yahiye Gadahn. Just as they did in the cases of Gadahn’s fellow Muslim converts (John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid, and others), Western analysts have ascribed Gadahn’s involvement with Al Qaeda as a product of his alienation. Gadahn obligingly expresses this alienation in a written account of his conversion, revealing that he "had become obsessed with demonic Heavy Metal music" and even "eschewed personal cleanliness." Around that time he discovered Islam by cruising the Internet. Unfortunately, Gadahn’s conversion story ends before he landed in the Al Qaeda camp. All the talk of disaffected youth that has filled the airwaves over the last few days doesn’t even come close to explaining that. Gadahn could have just as easily become a Jehovah’s Witness, or a Mormon, or a follower of Phish. None of those choices, made daily by other disaffected youth, would have landed him in a terrorist training camp and made him the new face of Al Qaeda. Why did his choice of Islam do so?
Western converts must approach the Qur’an and other Islamic texts without the culturally ingrained ways of understanding them that Muslims pick up in Islamic societies. Thus they come to Islam more or less in a pure, abstract form. The force of any given passage of Qur’an or Hadith, not blunted by culture or familiarity, can be presented by whoever instructs the convert with any spin the teacher might favor. Gadahn and other Western converts were probably recruited by straightforward appeals to numerous passages in the Qur’an and Sunnah. Violent jihad is founded on numerous verses of the Qur’an -- most notably, one known as the "Verse of the Sword": "Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them . . . " (Sura 9:5). Such verses are not taken "out of context" to justify armed jihad by radical imams such as those who may have taught Gadahn; on the contrary, that’s how they have been understood by Muslims from the beginning of Islam.
One manual of Islamic law, which in 1991 gained the approval of Cairo’s influential Al-Azhar University as conforming "to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community," is quite specific about the meaning of jihad. It is, it says, "war against non-Muslims." This manual stipulates that the Muslim community "makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians . . . until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax." The requirement that non-Muslims first be "invited" to enter Islam and then warred against until they either convert or pay the jizya, a special tax on non-Muslims, is founded upon the Qur’an: "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued" (Sura 9:29). |