In what sense is al-Qaeda's terrorism a "degraded form" of their "political revolution"? I mean, is there something "revolutionary" in Sharia Law...? DP
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Yes. Obviously not all revolutionary movements are progressive. And it seems to me, it is critical that the US left figure out the dynamics of how people can start from a positive source of inspiration, some vaguely defined and inarticulate idea of making life better, and then be moved into ever darker and darker realms under ever increasing oppressions.
Take it back say thirty years to somewhere between the '67 war and the Beirut and the Lebanese civil wars and consider the Middle East in an era when there might have still been some vague hope (however fantastic) of building predominately secular representative governments to give some kind of cultural self-determination a positive expression. Instead they got endless wars, police states, outrageously decadent ruling elites, vast swathes of poverty, degradation, and nothing but cold war military development of their ruling elites. The US and western allies made sure through their authoritarian surrogate regimes that all aspiring progressives, socialists, nationalists, and even vaguely positive reform movements were crushed---hence absurdities like the Shah or later Saddam. Now pump all that history back into the one marginally safe way to express revolt, the religious schools and Mosques, where the only acceptable form of revolt and expression had to be channelled through a religious tradition into the authoritarian militancy of an Islamic Jihad, etc.... Al-Qaeda obviously represents some deeply degraded form of that impulse. And there is the Iranian revolution to point to, that started in a very similar way within Mosques, schools, and religious social hierarchies, and used coalitions with vaguely progressive elements to topple the Shah...
Well, if you don't see some relationship some commonality of themes, you don't. I can't prove it, because these dynamics don't exist on any rational level. And I don't have the historical background or sufficient knowledge of the Middle East to give it, its due. But here goes some crude sketch...
Instead of national liberation movements with vaguely progressive and reformist agendas, the multiply stacked oppressions by both the West and its surrogate regimes crushed whatever ground these kinds of national liberation movements might have had. In effect oppression erased all secular ground. So such aspirations turned instead into a whole collection of heavily marginalized renditions of Islam.
Esposito (Unholy War) uses the armed occupation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca (1979) as a way to introduce his chapter, The Armies of God. Here's a brief excerpt:
To Western observers this affair was baffling. An Islamic group was attempting to overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia, an Islamic state and protector of Islam's holiest sites, in the name of Islam? The House of Saud was being judged and condemned as corrupt and un-Islamic by the Islamic yardstick that it used to legitimate itself....
...The terrorists responsible for the atrocities of September 11, 2001, are the radical fringe of a broad-based Islamic jihad that began in the late twentieth century. Islam's power and the idealistic concepts of jihad have been `spun' to become the primary idiom of Muslim politics, used by rulers and ruled, by reformers, political opposition, and terrorists.
Many violent radicals justify the horrors they commit by reciting a litany of deeply felt Muslim grievances against the West. Historic memories of the Crusades and European colonialism, the creation of Israel, the Cold War, and American neo-colonialism---all the actions of a militant Christian West---get superimposed upon current events: the second Palestinian intifada, the presence of American troops in the Gulf, the devastating impact of sanctions on Iraqi children, jihads of resistance and liberation in Kashmir and Chechnya. These memories feed resentment, ignite new anger, and deepen anti-Americanism, not just among terrorists but also in the broader Muslim world...'' (73-4)
Chuck Grimes