[lbo-talk] Juan Cole on the London Statement

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Jul 10 07:01:12 PDT 2005


[As he points out, it is by no means an established fact that the guys who wrote the statement set off the bomb. But if they are connected, these are interesting observations.]

http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/update-on-london-bombing-investigation.html

Saturday, July 09, 2005

Update on London Bombing Investigation

Cole: Unlikely to be by British Muslims

AP is reporting that London police have issued new conclusions about

the July 7 London bombings. The three subway bombings were virtually

simultaneous, suggesting that they were coordinated somehow (or maybe

the timers had just been set for the same time). It is a little

unlikely that they used cell phone detonators since the phones don't

always work in the Underground. This AP report is now saying that the

plastic explosives were in fact powerful and sophisticated, contrary

to earlier reports. The 49 dead cannot even be identified because of

the force of the blasts.

CNN ran a piece Saturday in the US with Peter Bergen, speculating on

the "chilling" possibility that the bombers were Muslim British

subjects with UK passports. I have to say that I was outraged and

appalled by this piece of potentially destructive speculation.

First, we still have no idea who did this. It is very likely the

"Qaeda al-Jihad in Europe" group that claimed responsibility

immediately. Their statement appeared very quickly after the bombings

and yet had none of the appearance of being rushed. That suggests it

was carefully composed before the fact. The rumors that the statement

has errors in the Arabic or the Quran citation are absolutely

incorrect, and al-Sharq al-Awsat came to the same conclusion in its

Saturday edition.

The statement was in Arabic. The instances of British Muslim

participation in terrorism given in the CNN piece were all non-Arabs:

Richard Reid and several South Asian British, all of whom undertook

operations abroad rather than in the UK. None of them probably even

knew Arabic well or could compose a statement in it. Britain's South

Asian Muslim community is almost certainly not the origin of this

attack. The statement celebrated Arabness or `urubah along with Islam.

No Bangladeshi-Briton or Pakistani-Briton wrote that.

The statement was probably not written by a second-generation Arab

Briton or even by a long-term, integrated Arab Briton resident.

So, if the statement is a guide to the identity of the attackers, this

bombing could not have emanated from the British Muslim community.

I did a keyword search in OCLC Worldcat, an electronic database with

40 million volumes, for `urubah and Islam. Virtually all of the hits

came from Egyptian Muslim thinkers publishing in Cairo and Giza during

the past 30 years, roughly in a Muslim Brotherhood tradition. Egyptian

Muslim revivalist intellectual Muhammad Amara wrote the big book on

Uruba and Islam. Likewise, there was a book on Islam and uruba in

Darfur, presumably supporting the Sudanese government (the Fur of

Darfur are Muslims and often know Arabic, and the Arabic-speaking

Sudanese living there are a minority, with whom the Fur will

intermarry. The Arabic speakers, who look just like the Fur in being

black Africans, have engaged in predations against the Fur in the past

few years, with tens of thousands killed, even as some of the Fur

sought greater regional autonomy from Khartum).

My guess is that the author of the statement is Egyptian or Sudanese,

with some sort of intellectual genealogy in the radical fringes of the

Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad al-Islami.

Of course, all of this is premised on the statement being a guide to

the perpetrators, which we cannot know for sure. But everything else

above follows pretty tightly if it is.

posted by Juan @ 7/09/2005 05:46:00 PM

On the same topic from a post a day earlier:

http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/london-bombing-by-less-sophisticated.html

<snip>

By the way, if the communique issued by Qaeda al-Jihad in Europe is

authentic, then this attack cannot be linked to Zarqawi. They say they

are taking revenge for British troops' "massacres" of Muslims in

Afghanistan and Iraq. But Zarqawi's Salafi group would never celebrate

"Arabism" or speak of "heroes" (abtal) when referring to the "holy

warriors" or mujahidin. Urubah and batal, Arabism and hero, are

typical of the vocabulary of secular Arab nationalism-- in, say, the

tradition of Gamal Abdel Nasser. That message is coming from a group

of terrorists that is much more comfortable with this language than

are typically the extremist Salafis like Zarqawi. "Hero" would sem a

term of humanistic pride to them, and Arabism would seem narrow and

idolatrous as a competitor with Islam. There are Muslim thinkers who

meld political Islam and Arabism-- this is common in Egypt, e.g. But

they belong to a different religious and intellectual tradition than

Zarqawi.

<end quote>

Michael



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