When hijacked planes were crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, people reacted in many different ways. However, most speculated that the acts were the work of religious fanatics. A number of commentators warned against making premature judgments about the identities of the hijackers, but the idea that the actions could have been undertaken by religious militants was clearly credible to almost everyone. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world has become accustomed to terrorists and militant revolutionaries with religious identities. As a result, no one was surprised to learn that those responsible for the destruction on September 11 appeared to be identifiable as Muslim activists, and that they are alleged to be associated with an Islamically identified terrorist organization.
What is surprising is that no one was surprised by the prominent role of religion in this very public act. The lack of surprise reflects the remarkable transformation of the role of religion in modern (and post-modern) society and how both scholars and the general public understand that role. The change is highlighted by a remarkable coincidence. Almost exactly a century before the destruction of the trade towers, a president of the United States was murdered. On September 6, 1901, William McKinley was shot; he died of his wounds eight days later on September 14. His murderer, Leon Czolgosz, was identified as part of an international, ideologically inspired network striving to destroy the existing world order and replace it with a new visionary Utopia.
The inspiration for Czolgosz’s act of violence and opposition was not, however, a “religious” vision; it was the vision of anarchism. Few observers at the time were surprised by the fact that Czolgosz was an anarchist, and there is no evidence that anyone’s first thought was that the murderer might be a religious fanatic. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the first suspicions in any major act of political or public violence were not directed toward religious adherents. The first suspects in the minds of security forces as well as the general public were relatively secular revolutionaries, ranging from anarchists in the early years of the century to “Bolsheviks” and then, during most of the Cold War era, more generally “communist” revolutionaries of various types, directed from the Kremlin or by Castro or some other secular revolutionary.
In the Middle East by the early 1970s, plane hijacking and terrorism were often associated with radical Marxist Palestinian organizations like the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). One reflection of the changing context is that when there was a report that responsibility for the acts of September 11 had been claimed by the DFLP, an organization with a historical record of “terrorist” acts, an informed observer could describe the report as “comically implausible.”1 Of course, the murder of an Israeli cabinet minister in October 2001 by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), another old-style leftist radical group, was clear evidence that not all acts of public violence are now committed by religious zealots. However, the credible prominence of religious militants in the arena of public violence at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a sign of a major change in the dynamics of revolution and violent activism.
The rise of religious activism is seen by many as a significant development in contemporary world history. Many analysts have noted that “religious resurgence” on a global scale during the late twentieth century calls into question important aspects of the way the processes of modernization have been understood. Some have gone so far as to declare that the theory of secularization as a necessary part of modernization is, in the words of Peter Berger, one of the early formulators of that theory, “essentially mistaken.”2 However, the rise to prominence of movements of religious resurgence may reflect an even broader phenomenon of the transformation of the nature of social movements of opposition and militancy and of advocacy of radical social change.
In interpreting the rise of new social movements in the 1960s and later, some of the scholars active in developing contemporary social movement theory describe a change in the basic nature of these social movements. In a classic discussion of this change, Jurgen Habermas noted in 1981 that the “new conflicts [in society] no longer arise in areas of material reproduction . . . . Rather, the new conflicts arise in areas of cultural production, social integration and socialization . . . . In short, the new conflicts are not sparked by problems of distribution, but concern the grammar of forms of life.”3 Using somewhat different terminology, Ronald Inglehart distinguishes between “materialist” and “postmaterialist” value priorities, noting that “postmaterialist values underlie many of the new social movements” and that “the emergence of new value priorities has . . . been an important factor” in the rise of new social movements.4 The religious resurgence can usefully be viewed in this broader context of the emergence of movements based on postmaterialist values, where some of the movements have a traditional “religious” identity and others do not. In the new global context of these value-based movements, it is not surprising that some of the most militant (and violent) movements will be identified as “religious.”
The militant Muslim movements that are most visible at the beginning of the twenty-first century reflect these postmaterialist priorities. The Taliban in Afghanistan, for example, do not have the industrialization of their society as a high priority. The old ideology of the politics of material distribution that dominated the programs of the communist regimes in Afghanistan has been replaced by the politics of competitive cultural reproduction, in which the Taliban and others seek to determine the grammar of the forms of Afghan life.
The old materialist goals of the radical socialists in the Muslim world of the 1960s have been replaced by effectively postmaterialist (not anti-materialist) values. When the Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front or FIS) defeated the long-dominant Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) in elections in Algeria in 1990-91, it was not on a platform that offered more rapid industrialization or increased productivity. Instead, the FIS offered a new set of value priorities. The challenge of Islamist movements to existing regimes throughout the Muslim world is articulated in terms of new values, not more effective implementation of materialist values. The appeal of Osama bin Laden’s message is not that he promises material prosperity to Muslims, but rather that he calls Muslims to break out of what he sees as their submission to foreign domination to affirm values that are different from those of the current ruling elites.
The emerging picture of Bin Laden’s organization, al-Qaeda, also reflects the changing nature of social movements in the contemporary world. The old-style revolutionary parties were often hierarchical and had some form of a relatively clear organizational structure. In the new world of global social movements, the network pattern of association is emerging as the more effective mode of operation. The “information revolution favors the rise of network forms of organization. The network appears to be the next major form of organization – long after tribes, hierarchies, and markets – to come into its own to redefine societies, and, in so doing, the nature of conflict and cooperation.”5
The picture of al-Qaeda as the core of a transnational, non-state network provides the basis for understanding the conflict emerging after September 11 as a “netwar,” which is “an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists . . . use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy and technology attuned to the information age.”6 This style of conflict is very different from the Gulf War of the early 1990s, in which the immense military power of the United States could crush the armed forces of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in a clash between two hierarchically organized forces.
In the current netwar context, the worldview framework of the Muslim militants plays an important role that some discussions of social-movement theory can help to explain. Movements are framed by the interpretations, visions and symbols through which they define their identity and goals. Contemporary Muslim movements like Bin Laden’s are framed in terms that are identifiably Islamic and familiar to all Muslims. Throughout the Muslim world there are people who are dissatisfied with their own condition and the position of the community of Muslim believers in the contemporary world. These people can form what some scholars have called “sentiment pools” or groups of individuals “who share common grievances . . . but who lack the organizational base for expressing their discontents and for acting in pursuit of their interests.”7 The frame of the basic shared concepts can provide the linkage that bridges the gap between existing social-movement organizations like al-Qaeda and the widely scattered sentiment pools throughout the world of Islamic communities.
Such “frame bridging” has been mostly studied within the context of advanced industrial or post-industrial societies,8 but, in the global information age, the bridging is possible in all types of societies and across all types of boundaries, whether national, civilizational or economic. Many different types of movements reflect these new dynamics. Insurgent indigenous peasants in rural Mexico would, under old global conditions, have had little visibility or chance of success. However, the Zapatista insurgency “can be thought of as a new type of transnational social-movement activity emerging in the global order to counter globally defined threats and the shrinking of national political-action spaces. The intercontinental encounters and the subsequent efforts to form networks of communication and resistance can be seen as constitutive parts of an incipient global civil society.”9
Al-Qaeda and the Zapatistas are very different types of organizations, but both draw strength from utilizing network modes of action in the emerging global civil society. The strength of al-Qaeda as an organization rests, then, not on the numbers of members directly and organizationally tied to Bin Laden. It rests instead on its ability as a flexible network of relationships to appeal to widely dispersed sentiment pools within which people can be recruited. In this structure, there is no hierarchical core whose destruction would bring an end to the system. Instead, the destruction of some part of the network in a highly visible way might simply add to the strength of the concept and symbol frame of the movement by creating a new symbolic narrative and highly appealing symbols of martyrdom. The strength of Bin Laden’s message rests at least partially as well on the nature of the role of religion within the emerging postmaterialist global civil society. His call is not to rouse the lower and working classes to a revolution defined by material values and class conflict. Instead, the appeal of the message of the militant religious movement rests on its call to fight for a religious vision of the future. Most mainstream Muslims condemn both Bin Laden’s rigid religious vision and his terrorist methods, but Bin Laden frames his message in the mode of the new age of social movements advocating postmaterialist values.
It is essential to recognize that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are not simply mindless religious fanatics or anachronisms. Instead, they represent the extremes that can emerge in the new age of desecularized modernity and social movements of protest and revolution that are organized as networks and frame their message in ways that are congruent with the age of the “resurgence of religion.”
1 Rema Hammami, “Intifada in the Aftermath,” MERIP Press Information Note 74, October 30, 2001.
2 Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L. Berger (Washington: Ethics and Policy Center, 1999), p. 2.
3 Jurgen Habermas, “New Social Movements,” Telos, No. 49, Fall 1981, p. 33. Emphasis in the original.
4 Ronald Inglehart, “Values, Ideology, and Cognitive Mobilization in New Social Movements,” Challenging the Political Order, eds. Russell J. Dalton and Manfred Kuechler (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 44-45.
5 David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, “Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future,” First Monday (www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_10/Ronfeldt).
6 Ibid.
7 David Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven Worden and Robert Benford, “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review, No. 51, August, 1986, p. 467.
8 Ibid.
9 Markus S. Schulz, “Collective Action Across Borders: Opportunity Structures, Network Capacities, and Communicative Praxis in the Age of Advanced Globalization,” Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 41, No. 3, 1998, p. 606.
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