The Self-Sacrificial Violence of 9/11

Towards the end of the 1990s, the failure of jihadist strategies obliged the mainstream Islamist organisations to distance themselves from violence, to accept the legitimacy of existing boundaries, to abandon the project of founding a new Islamic society and to adopt neoliberal economic policies.

This evolution convinced many observers that two decades after its hey­day and one decade after the end of the Cold War the flame of jihadism was, finally, about to extinguish itself. Amid this real de-radicalisation, however, a new form of violence was taking place at the margins of Islamism and the Arab societies. Promoted by former Arab-Afghans such as Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or by much younger mili­tants such as Muhammad Atta who had no militant experience, the new radicalism emerged in spaces with no public visibility: isolated military camps in Afghanistan and Sudan, prisons in the Arab world and student commu­nities in Europe. These milieux which would join the al-Qaeda organisation founded in 1988 by Bin Laden had a double outlook. On the one hand, they were able to think strategically, and promoted a non-territorial war against the West, to start with against the United States. On the other hand, they believed that the individual's body was the main field of battle between good and evil; after having been purified, the body could and should be sacrificed to the Cause. As a consequence of this new orientation, jihad ceased to be articulated within a social and political movement. It became much more violent and self-sacrificial than before, but it also lost its socially and politically revolutionary content, developed earlier by the Muslim Brotherhood from al-Banna to Qotb.

Al-Qaida was not the first organisation to use suicide attacks; the first case of such violence in the region's recent history was that of Sana'a Mehaidli, a Christian young woman who was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party. In 1985, she blew herself up near an Israeli convoy.^[187] Other organisations, both Islamists like Hamas and non-Islamists like the Kurdish PKK, have also organised suicidal violence. In spite of many studies on the issue, this form of violence remains difficult to explain: whatever its strategic utility might be in an armed conflict, by destroy­ing the present, a suicidal attack also destroys the past and the future, and leaves no room for any social-political language. If it is true that al- Qaida emphasised and still emphasises the conflict between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, and legitimates violence against civilians, including Muslims,^[188] its suicidal violence aims at an eschatological delivery. Through the new aesthetic forms it developed, this violence brought back death to the city from which it had been expelled as the condition of ‘civilisation-building'.^[189] Sacrificial violence was, therefore, distinct from the dialectic of state coercion and social and political conflict, which can become violent as a result of a process of radicalisation.

The highly aestheticised attacks of 9/11 in 2001 represented the most striking form of such violence. The destruction of the Twin Towers, which was followed by the new Afghanistan War (2001), the occupation of Iraq (2003), deadly attacks in Europe (Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels) and in the Middle East (Riyadh, Amman, Rabat, Istanbul and no fewer than one thou­sand suicide bombings in Iraq between 2003 and 2011), constituted a heavy mortgage on the entire region and determined American foreign policy during the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

The USA, as well as major European states, gave priority to the consolida­tion of authoritarian states as the only alternative against violence, while in fact, the coercive nature of these ‘fragmented tyrannies'^[190] and their klepto­mania were among the structural reasons behind the violence.