[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