DAR AL ISLAM: SHI'ITE ISLAM, ASCENDING

Before you read the following articles, if you are not familiar with how difference between Shi'ites & Sunnis' came to be, please read this first:

The origins of Shiite Islam
A split between Muslims started with the battle over who should lead the faithful after the prophet Muhammad's death.
By Staff

Shiite Muslims are the product of the violent schism that followed the death of the prophet Muhammad in AD 632, and through the centuries have generally been the losers in the struggle to lead the faithful and to divide patronage and power. That has left them with a sharp feeling of dispossession, of being a people denied their destiny by corrupt rulers.

The split started with a fight over who should lead the faithful after Muhammad's death. One side believed that direct descendants of the prophet should take up the mantle of caliph – the leader of the world's Muslims. They were known as the Shiat-Ali, or "partisans of Ali," after the prophet's cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom they favored to become caliph. They became known as Shiites.

The other side, Sunnis, thought that any worthy man could lead the faithful, regardless of lineage, and favored Abu Bakr, an early convert to Islam who had married into Muhammad's family. "Sunni" is derived from the Arab word for "followers" and is shorthand for "followers of the prophet."

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Shiites Rising: Islam's minority reaches new prominence
Shiite Muslims are leading an 'axis of resistance' that unnerves Sunnis and challenges the US and Israel.
by Scott Peterson


"Divine victory." That's how Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah portrayed the 34-day war last summer when a few thousand Hizbullah soldiers fought Israel's vaunted military to a standstill.
Lebanon's most renowned Shiite cleric stood before a sea of yellow Hizbullah flags on Sept. 22, 2006, in a rare moment of triumph for a Shiite leader; and it reverberated throughout the Middle East.

For more than 1,300 years, Shiites have been an oppressed Islamic minority. Even today they represent just 10 to 15 percent of the world's Muslims. But Sheikh Nasrallah's clout is part of a broader rise of Shiite power. Iraq and Iran (Shiite-led states) control the world's second- and third-largest oil reserves, respectively. And Shiite leaders - Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iraq's Moqtada al-Sadr, and Nasrallah - are household names with support that crosses national and sectarian lines.

US policies, experts agree, have played a key role in this elevation. Arab Sunni leaders warn of an emerging "Shiite Crescent." But more than political and economic power, they worry about the Shiite world view.

Shiism is suffused with a culture of resistance, an identity that finds spiritual meaning in fighting injustice and through martyrdom. The result is a Shiite-led "axis of resistance" with Iran and Hizbullah at its core, versus a US-led Western alliance that includes Israel.

Is a battle for a "new" Middle East under way? Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seems to think so. Last month, he declared that "great war of wills" is taking place. Iran standing up tothe US and the West has "exploded a bomb in world politics that is a hundred times more powerful than the [atomic] bomb ... exploded in Hiroshima."

Today the Monitor begins a two-part special report on the Shiite ascension - in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon - and its future.



and now, part two:


Shiites Rising: Sect leaders craft message for masses
by Scott Peterson


Emerging for the first time after months in hiding from US forces and Shiite rivals, Moqtada al-Sadr swept into Iraq's Kufa mosque in late May to deliver a potent sermon.

"No, no, no to Satan! No, no, no to America! No, no, no to occupation! No, no, no to Israel!" he roared, wearing a white shroud over black robes to indicate his readiness for martyrdom.

But along with strident calls to resist, the cleric struck another theme that is increasingly heard from ascendant Shiite leaders: Muslim unity.

"I want to say now that the blood of Sunnis is forbidden to everyone," preached the cleric. "They are our brothers in religion and in nationality."

The message is a pan-Islamic blend of Shiite ideology and nationalism heard also in Lebanon from Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and in Iran from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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Pertinent Links:

1) The origins of Shiite Islam

2) Shiites Rising: Islam's minority reaches new prominence (Part One)

3) Shiites Rising: Sect leaders craft message for masses

DAR AL ISLAM / HARB - LEBANON: WE ARE NOT IRAN'S PUPPETS ! ! !

Hezbollah leader denies Iran is stirring Muslim conflict
dpa German Press Agency
Published: Monday January 29, 2007

Beirut- Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah in a speech on Monday evening defended Iran and said said the Tehran government is not planning to implement a "Shiite crescent" in the Middle East. "Iran is far from this plot of transforming Sunnis into Shiites or forming a Shiite Crescent in the region, such accusations are baseless," Nasrallah told a religious ceremony in Beirut's southern suburbs.

In December, Jordan's King Abdullah II told the Washington Post that Iran was seeking to create "a Shiite crescent" in the Middle East that would include Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. The comments angered Iran.

"Shiites are not seeking to take control of the region, and we do not pose a threat to everyone," Nasrallah said.

Hezbollah has been accused by the anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon of acting as Iran's proxy in Lebanon and stirring Sunni-Shiite tensions.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Hezbollah leader denies Iran is stirring Muslim conflict

DAR AL ISLAM - JORDAN: SUPPORT FOR SHI'ISM?!?!?!?

Jordan begins reacting, ominously, to the Sunni-Shiite rift
By Mohammed al-Masri
Saturday, January 27, 2007

The timing of the execution of Saddam Hussein on the first morning of Eid al-Adha, the video clips officially released by the Iraqi government and those from the cell phones documenting the execution, triggered a wave of anger and provoked anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian sentiment in Jordan. Jordanians interpreted the event as an act of Iranian-Shiite revenge against Sunnis in Iraq and throughout the Arab world.

Jordanians expressed their outrage and protest in different ways, ranging from declining to offer sweets during Adha to restraining wedding celebrations and hanging posters praising Saddam as a martyr. Some dedicated their Adha rituals to him and opened houses of mourning. Demonstrations organized in some cities generated calls for revenge.

However, despite the anger, there were no reported reprisals against the 200,000 or so Iraqi Shiite refugees in Jordan - thanks both to measures taken by the security services and precautions taken by some Iraqis to avoid certain areas of Amman for a few days following the execution. Opinion writers in newspapers of different political and cultural leanings, including the Islamic Action Front, expressed anger and dismay and concluded that the execution itself demonstrated the sectarian, militant nature of the Iraqi government, and revealed its servitude to American, Iranian and Israeli interests in the region.

Not surprisingly, the execution led to an upsurge in feelings against Iraqi Shiites in particular, Shiites at large, and Iran as a Shiite and Persian state determined to undermine both Sunni and Arab beliefs and aspirations. Twenty-two Jordanian parliamentarians called for a severing of diplomatic relations with Iran.

The Shiite question does not assume the same level of importance in Jordan as in some Arab countries, where there are significant Shiite communities. The overwhelming majority of Jordanian Muslims are Sunni; Shiites number fewer than 4,000 according to the most generous estimate. The Jordanian public's lack of awareness of this minority that has been part of Jordanian society for around 100 years signifies its assimilation. It has never been a focus of public debate.

The Shiite question becomes relevant to the Jordanian public and Jordanian elites only as a consequence of the American occupation of Iraq. It is political developments in Iraq and the region and the impact of Iraqi refugees in Jordan that have heavily influenced the formation of attitudes toward Shiites in recent times.

Those attitudes, at least during the first 18 months after the war, were only one facet of Jordanians' approach to Iraqis. The general Jordanian attitude was shaped by two widely held perceptions. The first was that Iraqis at large and Shiites in particular determined the outcome of the war by facilitating and welcoming the American occupation. The second was that Iraqi refugees entering Jordan in the wake of the war were mainly from the affluent middle class and skilled laborers, and that they contributed to an overall price surge, especially in the real estate sector. The Iraqis therefore became the focus of Jordanian grievances about increased traffic, prices and fuel costs. Friction between Jordanians and Palestinians receded as mutual resentment of the newcomers emerged.

The new refugees from the 2003 Iraq war were not a homogenous community, but rather a transparent reflection of the complex ethnic, religious and sectarian composition of contemporary Iraqi society. The collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime and subsequent political developments encouraged Iraqis to be open about their sectarian background. Books about Shiism, its history and its martyrs found a place in downtown Amman bookstalls. Jordanians became familiar with Shiite symbols, with the result that differences between Shiite and Sunni Islam were both underlined and exacerbated. Religious lessons given at mosques and Friday sermons emphasized differences between the Sunni and Shiite schools of thought, thereby alerting the Jordanian public to the "correctness" of Sunni interpretations of Islam.

Jordanians observed the new political developments within Iraq that signaled the rise of Shiite power at the expense of the Sunnis. The formation of the new Iraqi government, the elections and the drafting of a constitution all generated heated debate and uneasy feelings toward Iraqi Shiites. These anxieties deepened as a result of the intensified mutual attacks between the two communities in Iraq.

Iraqi Shiites were thought by Jordanians to have established political hegemony through their collaboration with US occupying forces, and to have marginalized the political role of the Sunnis. Southern and central Iraq came to be viewed as Iranian outposts, and the perception evolved that many Shiite militias and politicians constituted an anti-Sunni camp serving an anti-Arab agenda - be it Iranian, American or both.

King Abdullah's well-known warning of the emergence of a Shiite crescent two years ago deepened Jordanian society's concerns about a possible Iranian threat, creating a corresponding unease over Shiite politics in Iraq. The Jordanian establishment warned frequently of the conversion of some Jordanians to Shiism. While the number of such converts is extremely limited and does not exceed hundreds by even the most generous estimate, the Jordanian state has followed a zero-tolerance policy toward the public practice of Shiism. Since the main concern of the Iraqi Shiites in Jordan right now is to keep their residency rights valid and intact, they practice their religious rituals in private.

In fact, the threat to the Jordanian state is not conversion to Shiism as such, but what may be termed political Shiism: support for Shiite political organizations and acceptance of their political paradigms. For example, the sweeping support for Hizbullah during the war in Lebanon last summer was a clear manifestation of political Shiism. As much as events in Iraq and interaction with Iraqi communities within Jordan lead to Jordanian antipathy toward Iraqi Shiites and Iran, the Israeli factor and potential conflict between Israel and Hizbullah still encourage support for Hizbullah-style Shiite organizations. Therefore it might be misleading to assume that new anti-Iranian feelings in Jordan are sustainable, when the Israel factor in regional developments could undermine them.


Pertinent Links:

1) Jordan begins reacting, ominously, to the Sunni-Shiite rift

DAR AL ISLAM - IRAN / TURKEY: IRAN COURTS TURKEY, TURKEY LOOKS TOWARDS THE SHI'ITE CRESCENT

Turkey Eyes the Shia Crescent
Iran clearly seeks to lure Turkey away from its traditional moorings to the West, and the Kurds may be just the wedge it needs.

Feb. 12, 2007 issue - If you were a mullah in Tehran facing a new western "coalition of the willing," there's one country you would try to get on your side: next-door NATO neighbor, Turkey. And lately, the Iranians have been doing this quite well. The reason: Ankara and Tehran increasingly share a cause that unites them: Kurdish guerrillas operating in northern Iraq, and America's failure to do anything about them.

It would be premature to speak of any entente. Yet Iran clearly seeks to lure Turkey away from its traditional moorings to the West, and the Kurds may be just the wedge they need. During visits to Ankara in recent months, Iranian officials and other state representatives—including Ali Larijani, head of the supreme National Security Council—have gone out of their way to stress the troubles created for both nations by the PKK terrorist movement. Despite myriad promises, U.S. troops in the region do nothing to prevent cross-border raids. Suggesting that Turkey should join with Iran and Syria to establish a tripartite platform of security cooperation against the Kurdish separatists, Larijani and others impressed upon their counterparts the advantages of a large-scale Turkish military incursion to clean out the guerillas—possibly in coordination with Iranian forces, according to Turkish and Iranian news reports.

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You may also be interested in any other stories that I have here that may mention the Shi'ite Crescent...

Here are the results of a search of Thoughts of American Infidel that deal with the subject: search results.

Well, I hope the works, if not, just use the search function and type in 'shiite crescent'...


Pertinent Links:

1) Turkey Eyes the Shia Crescent

JORDAN: SHI'A INFLUENCE SPREADING THROUGHT THE REGION?!?

Shia Crescent - Fact or Fiction

Once again, King Abdullah II of Jordan has expressed concern at the growing influence of the Iran in the region. In an interview with Time Magazine, he said: "The region is going through throes where there are other regional powers that are vying for supremacy in this area. Usually when that happens the net result is conflict and violence. [The Palestinian issue] is the core issue, one that should be dealt with very easily because there is something looming over the horizon that is a lot worse."

Arabs feel that US intervention in Iraq has given Tehran a unique opportunity that it has not had for many years to exercise a dominant role. They fear that the rising of the Shias in the northern tier of the Arab world will destabilize the region. With a Shiite Iraq now in Iran’s sphere of influence, and the Shiite leadership of Syria looking to Iran, Tehran is well on its way. Add in the powerful tool of Hezbollah — Iran and Syria’s made-to-order terrorist group — and we can see an Islamic alliance that will only grow in its ability to challenge the West.

This alliance between the Iran and the Alawite-ruled Syria has frightened the traditional Sunni rulers of the region. King Abdullah of Jordan described this alliance as "Shia crescent". Vali Nasr, a Council for Foreign Relations fellow, explains, "The first decade of Khomeini trying to mobilize Saudi Shiites, Lebanese Shiites, and trying to stage a coup in Bahrain and cause trouble in Kuwait all hardened views."

Khomeini threatened the countries around him. He threatened Iraq, and he threatened Saudi Arabia, and each responded in a wrong way. Iraq ended up attacking Iran.

The Dawa Party, Shi'a Islamist party in Iraq, with many linkages to Hezbollah even to this day, is active on the other side of the Middle East. It conducted attacks in Kuwait in 1983, bombing the French and U.S. embassies in December of that year, and launching a nearly successful assassination attempt against the emir of Kuwait in May 1985.

Grand Ayatollah Sistani has been calling for Parliamentary democracy and the exercise of the will of the people for the Shi'ites in the oasis of al-Hasa, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, which angered Riyadh. Now, Sistani's Shiites are the major political force in Iraq. They are leaders in the new government; they run the key Interior Ministry; and one of their own, Nouri al-Maliki, serves as prime minister.

The real cause of the tension according to Iranian author Amir Taheri is that “Iran intends to reshape the Middle East after its own fashion” (New York Post, August 8).

Ahmadinejad stated clearly his vision for the future of the region in his election campaign: "The Middle East can have either an American future or an Islamic one led by Iran." This kind of rhetoric has frightened the Arabs rulers. They are of the opinion that Israel is the devil they know, but Iran is the growing threat.

There is no doubt Shias in the Arab world share a common problem, one of marginality. Whether they are majorities or minorities, they are marginalized from power. They are essentially asking for the same thing. And they do have an attachment to Iran. It’s an attachment of culture and faith, but it does not mean that they are controlled by Iran.

It is good to hear that Arab Leaders like King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia realized this problem. He brought reforms, which helped Shias to practice their religion freely. King Abdullah is their hero now. Under King Abdullah, we can even see the Shia clergy in the royal courts along with typical Wahabi clerics who hate the Shiite. The King is trying get to the Sunni traditional clergy to accept diversity and existence of other schools of thoughts in Saudi Arabia.

Other states should follow the example of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Shias minorities should also try to be loyal to the country in which they live. The have a right to ask for equal opportunities in all affairs. But resorting to violence to get these rights brings more miseries. They should also look for traitors among themselves who collaborate with outsiders and want destabilize governments under the pretext of helping their coreligionists.


Pertinent Links:

1) Shia Crescent - Fact or Fiction

DAR AL HARB/ISLAM - U.S.A./IRAN/IRAQ: IRAN IS WINNING THE IRAQ WAR

Iran Is Winning The Iraq War
by Andy Selepak

A group called the Iran Policy Committee held a press conference on July 25 to declare that Iran, not the U.S., is winning the war in Iraq. The event featured the release of a new book, Baghdad Ablaze: How to Extinguish the Fires in Iraq.

Speakers agreed that while the Bush Administration has badly handled the Iraq war, giving Iran a chance to exploit the conflict and make tremendous gains, an immediate pullout of U.S. forces would make the situation worse, giving Iran even more power.

The book was written by Georgetown University Professor Raymond Tanter; Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, USAF (ret.); Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, USA (ret.); and R. Bruce McColm, the President of the Institute for Democratic Strategies.

Tanter and McColm, as well as William A. Nitze, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and Jed Babbin, the editor of Human Events and former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, were at the press conference.

McColm said a key mistake was de-Baathification, a purge of Saddam loyalists in the Iraqi government and military forces, which led to a political and military vacuum in Iraq that Iran has exploited for its own purposes. Babbin said that one of the big mistakes the U.S. made was occupying Iraq for the long term, rather that just draining "the swamp" and deposing the Saddam regime.

Babbin said the administration's War on Terrorism is misleading because it needs to be a "War Against States that Sponsor Terrorism," adding that "Iran is the central terrorist nation in the world" and is not being adequately confronted by the U.S. for its military interference in Iraq and the region. He said, for example, that U.S. military commanders know that explosive devices coming into Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers are from Iran.

McColm said Iran's objective is to create an Islamic Republic in Iraq, in order to complement and facilitate the activities of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. An Islamic Republic in Iraq would create a Shiite Crescent of influence and provide Iran with a direct land route to Syria to supply terrorists in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza with military equipment.

However, McColm said, Iran faces problems of its own. He said that because of its failure to modernize its oil industry, Iran may not be able to export oil by 2015. Hence, the regime could lose international influence and stature. In addition, the regime faces serious internal opposition and dissent at home.

In Iraq, he said, Iran funds religious schools and mosques, especially in the Shiite-dominated south. Iran has also provided medical, charitable, and welfare assistance to the local Shiite populations that are in desperate need of such services in the face of an ineffective Iraqi government. Iran has seven Arabic language television stations that broadcast pro-Iranian messages to Iraq and influence elections there.

McColm said U.S policy in the past actually encouraged Iranian influence in Iraq, mistakenly thinking this would help stabilize the country. McColm said U.S. policy should be to strengthen Iraq's status as an independent nation and get it more involved in the global economy.

A big question is how U.S. forces could eventually be withdrawn. Tanter said there are several problems. One, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has become an excuse for terrorists to grow in power and influence. Two, Iraqis don't like the U.S. occupation and want their own forces to provide security. And three, Iran is providing Sunni and Shiite insurgents with training, weapons and funding.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Iran Is Winning The Iraq War

USA: ISLAM & THE BOMB

Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age
By NOAH FELDMAN

I.

For nearly 50 years, worries about a nuclear Middle East centered on Israel. Arab leaders resented the fact that Israel was the only atomic power in the region, a resentment heightened by America’s tacit approval of the situation. But they were also pretty certain that Israel (which has never explicitly acknowledged having nuclear weapons) would not drop the bomb except as a very last resort. That is why Egypt and Syria were unafraid to attack Israel during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. “Israel will not be the first country in the region to use nuclear weapons,” went the Israelis’ coy formula. “Nor will it be the second.”

Today the nuclear game in the region has changed. When the Arab League’s secretary general, Amr Moussa, called for “a Middle East free of nuclear weapons” this past May, it wasn’t Israel that prompted his remarks. He was worried about Iran, whose self-declared ambition to become a nuclear power has been steadily approaching realization.

The anti-Israel statements of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, coupled with Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas, might lead you to think that the Arab states would welcome Iran’s nuclear program. After all, the call to wipe the Zionist regime from the map is a longstanding cliché of Arab nationalist rhetoric. But the interests of Shiite non-Arab Iran do not always coincide with those of Arab leaders. A nuclear Iran means, at the very least, a realignment of power dynamics in the Persian Gulf. It could potentially mean much more: a historic shift in the position of the long-subordinated Shiite minority relative to the power and prestige of the Sunni majority, which traditionally dominated the Muslim world. Many Arab Sunnis fear that the moment is ripe for a Shiite rise. Iraq’s Shiite majority has been asserting the right to govern, and the lesson has not been lost on the Shiite majority in Bahrain and the large minorities in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah of Jordan has warned of a “Shiite crescent” of power stretching from Iran to Lebanon via Iraq and (by proxy) Syria.

But geopolitics is not the only reason Sunni Arab leaders are rattled by the prospect of a nuclear Iran. They also seem to be worried that the Iranians might actually use nuclear weapons if they get them. A nuclear attack on Israel would engulf the whole region. But that is not the only danger: Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere fear that the Iranians might just use a nuclear bomb against them. Even as Iran’s defiance of the United States and Israel wins support among some Sunnis, extremist Sunnis have been engaging in the act of takfir, condemning all Shiites as infidels. On the ground in Iraq, Sunni takfiris are putting this theory into practice, aiming at Shiite civilians and killing them indiscriminately. Shiite militias have been responding in kind, and massacres of Sunni civilians are no longer isolated events.

Adding the nuclear ingredient to this volatile mix will certainly produce an arms race. If Iran is going to get the bomb, its neighbors will have no choice but to keep up. North Korea, now protected by its own bomb, has threatened proliferation — and in the Middle East it would find a number of willing buyers. Small principalities with huge U.S. Air Force bases, like Qatar, might choose to rely on an American protective umbrella. But Saudi Arabia, which has always seen Iran as a threatening competitor, will not be willing to place its nuclear security entirely in American hands. Once the Saudis are in the hunt, Egypt will need nuclear weapons to keep it from becoming irrelevant to the regional power balance — and sure enough, last month Gamal Mubarak, President Mubarak’s son and Egypt’s heir apparent, very publicly announced that Egypt should pursue a nuclear program.

Given the increasing instability of the Middle East, nuclear proliferation there is more worrisome than almost anywhere else on earth. As nuclear technology spreads, terrorists will enjoy increasing odds of getting their hands on nuclear weapons. States — including North Korea — might sell bombs or give them to favored proxy allies, the way Iran gave Hezbollah medium-range rockets that Hezbollah used this summer during its war with Israel. Bombing through an intermediary has its advantages: deniability is, after all, the name of the game for a government trying to avoid nuclear retaliation.

Proliferation could also happen in other ways. Imagine a succession crisis in which the Saudi government fragments and control over nuclear weapons, should the Saudis have acquired them, falls into the hands of Saudi elites who are sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, or at least to his ideas. Or Al Qaeda itself could purchase ready-made bombs, a feat technically much less difficult than designing nuclear weapons from scratch. So far, there are few nuclear powers from whom such bombs can be directly bought: as of today, only nine nations in the world belong to the nuclear club. But as more countries get the bomb, tracing the seller will become harder and harder, and the incentive to make a sale will increase.

II.

The prospect of not just one Islamic bomb, but many, inevitably concentrates the mind on how Muslims — whether Shiite or Sunni — might use their nuclear weapons. In the mid-1980’s, when Pakistan became the first Islamic state to go nuclear, it was still possible to avoid asking the awkward question of whether there was something distinctive about Islamic belief or practice that made possession of nuclear technology especially worrisome. Most observers assumed that Islamic states could be deterred from using nuclear force just like other states: by the threat of massive retaliation.

During the last two decades, however, there has been a profound change in the way violence is discussed and deployed in the Muslim world. In particular, we have encountered the rise of suicide bombing. In historic terms, this development is new and unexpected. Suicide bombing has no traditional basis in Islam. As a technique, it was totally absent from the successful Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. Although suicide bombing as a tool of stateless terrorists was dreamed up a hundred years ago by the European anarchists immortalized in Joseph Conrad’s “Secret Agent,” it became a tool of modern terrorist warfare only in 1983, when Shiite militants blew up the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Since then, suicide bombing has spread through the Muslim world with astonishing speed and on a surprising course. The vocabulary of martyrdom and sacrifice, the formal videotaped preconfession of faith, the technological tinkering to increase deadliness — all are now instantly recognizable to every Muslim. And as suicide bombing has penetrated Islamic cultural consciousness, its list of targets has steadily expanded. First the targets were American soldiers, then mostly Israelis, including women and children. From Lebanon and Israel, the technique of suicide bombing moved to Iraq, where the targets have included mosques and shrines, and the intended victims have mostly been Shiite Iraqis. The newest testing ground is Afghanistan, where both the perpetrators and the targets are orthodox Sunni Muslims. Not long ago, a bombing in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, killed Muslims, including women, who were applying to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Overall, the trend is definitively in the direction of Muslim-on-Muslim violence. By a conservative accounting, more than three times as many Iraqis have been killed by suicide bombings in the last 3 years as have Israelis in the last 10. Suicide bombing has become the archetype of Muslim violence — not just to frightened Westerners but also to Muslims themselves.

What makes suicide bombing especially relevant to the nuclear question is that, by design, it unsettles the theory of deterrence. When the suicide bomber dies in an attack, he means to send the message “You cannot stop me, because I am already willing to die.” To make the challenge to deterrence even more stark, a suicide bomber who blows up a market or a funeral gathering in Iraq or Afghanistan is willing to kill innocent bystanders, including fellow Muslims. According to the prevailing ideology of suicide bombing, these victims are subjected to an involuntary martyrdom that is no less glorious for being unintentional.

So far, the nonstate actors who favor suicide bombing have limited their collateral damage to those standing in the way of their own bombs. But the logic of sacrificing other Muslims against their own wills could be extended to the national level. If an Islamic state or Islamic terrorists used nuclear weapons against Israel, the United States or other Western targets, like London or Madrid, the guaranteed retaliation would cost the lives of thousands and maybe millions of Muslims. But following the logic of suicide bombing, the original bomber might reason that those Muslims would die in God’s grace and that others would live on to fight the jihad. No state in the Muslim world has openly embraced such a view. But after 9/11, we can no longer treat the possibility as fanciful.

Raising the question of Islamic belief and the bomb, however, is not a substitute for strategic analysis of the rational interests of Islamic governments. Like other states, Islamic states act on the basis of ordinary power politics as much as or more than on the basis of religious motivation. Pakistan, which tested a series of warheads in 1998, at the height of tensions with India, has not used its atomic power as a tool of the faithful in a global jihad. The proliferation operation spearheaded by the nuclear scientist — and sometime Pakistani national hero — Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan appears to have been based on a combination of national interest and greed, not on religious fervor. Khan found buyers in Iran and Libya, but also in decidedly non-Islamic North Korea. (In a twist much stranger than fiction, Saddam Hussein apparently turned down the offer.)

Some observers think that Iran, too, wants the bomb primarily to improve its regional position and protect itself against regime change — not to annihilate Israel. According to this view, Iran’s nuclear push reflects a drive to what is sometimes called national greatness and might more accurately be defined as the ability of a country to thumb its nose at the United States without fear of major repercussions. A televised pageant hastily arranged to celebrate Iran’s atomic program in April of this year featured traditional Persian dancing and colorful local garb intermixed with make-believe vials of enriched uranium. To an Iranian audience accustomed to decoding official symbols, these references were nationalist, not pan-Islamic. (They were also subtly subversive of the mullahs: singing and dancing are not favored forms of expression in the clerical enclave of Qom.)

But at the same time, Ahmadinejad has emphasized Iran’s pan-Islamic aspirations to act on behalf of Muslims everywhere. An emerging nuclear power needs friends. Right now Iran wants to reduce, not promote, division between Sunnis and Shiites — and promoting broader “Islamic” interests by going after Israel is one way to lessen Sunni fears about Iran’s rise. Ahmadinejad has put his money where his mouth is, providing Hezbollah with medium-range missiles — though apparently not chemical warheads — to use against Israel. The nationalist language he has sometimes used at home may be a cover for sincerely held pan-Islamic ends — a version of the old revolutionary strategy of making nationalist claims in order to attract the support of those fellow Iranians who do not respond well to Islamist ideology. That it is convenient for Iran to emphasize Islamic unity does not mean that at least some of its leaders do not believe in it as a motivating goal.

It is common among foreign-policy realists to suppose that a country acting on nationalist motives is easier to deter than a country moved by religious ones. There is no especially strong evidence for this assumption — plenty of nationalist regimes have done crazy things when they logically should have been deterred — but the claim has a common-sense ring to it. Nationalists care about peoples and states, which need to be alive to prosper. It is a basic tenet of nationalism that there is nothing higher than the nation-state itself, the pinnacle of a people’s self-expression. Religious thinkers, on the other hand, believe almost by definition that there is something in heaven greater than government here on earth. Under the right circumstances, they might sacrifice lives — including their own — to serve the divine will as they interpret it.

III.

We urgently need to know, then, what Islam says about the bomb. Of course there is no single answer to this question. The world’s billion-plus Muslims differ regarding many aspects of their 1,400-year-old religious tradition. Furthermore, nuclear weapons are a relatively new technology, unforeseen by the Prophet and unmentioned in the Koran. Nevertheless, contemporary Muslims are engaged in interpreting their tradition to ascertain how and when nuclear power may be used. Their writings, contained in fatwas and treatises that can be found on the Web and in print, tell a fascinating and disturbing story.

The Islamic discussion of nuclear weapons is profoundly intertwined with a parallel discussion of suicide bombing that is also taking place in the Muslim world. Suicide bombing and nuclear weapons typically kill without discrimination, murdering soldiers or civilians, men or women or children. And using nuclear force against another nuclear power can be suicidal, in the broad sense that retaliation may destroy the nation that attacked first. Beyond these commonalities is the fact that the rise of suicide bombing is driving a historic reconsideration of what might be called the Islamic ethics of violence. To consider Islam and the bomb today must thus inevitably draw us into the complex legal and political thinking of those Muslim authorities who justify the use of force.

The story starts with traditional Islamic law. The Shariah never followed the Roman adage that in war the laws are silent. Because jihad is a pillar of Islam, and because in Islam God’s word takes legal form, the classical scholars devoted considerable care to identifying the laws of jihad. In common with the just-war doctrine developed in Christian Europe, the law of jihad governed when it was permissible to fight and what means could lawfully be adopted once warfare had begun. There were basic ground rules about who was fair game. “A woman was found killed in one of the battles fought by the Messenger of God,” runs a report about the Prophet Muhammad considered reliable and binding by the Muslim scholars. “So the Messenger of God forbade the killing of women and children.” This report was universally understood to prohibit the deliberate killing of noncombatant women and children. Some scholars interpreted it to mean that anyone incapable of warfare should be protected and so extended the ban to the elderly, the infirm and even male peasants, who as a rule did not fight. Muslims living among the enemy were also out of bounds. These rather progressive principles were broadly accepted by the Islamic legal authorities, Sunni and Shiite alike. For well over a thousand years, no one seriously questioned them.

Such black-and-white rules were well suited to the hand-to-hand or horse-to-horse combat characteristic of limited medieval wars. A few quirky challenges did arise, and the Muslim lawyers had to deal with them. The great theologian and jurist al-Ghazali, who wrote in the 11th and 12th centuries and was widely noted for his revival of religious piety and his skepticism of secular philosophy, dealt with the problem of human shields. He ruled that if the enemy drove captured Muslims before him, the Muslim army could still fight back, even if it might mean killing some of those Muslims. The reason he gave was that “we know that the law intends minimizing killing.” There was also the catapult — precursor of artillery and air power — which was capable of sending a burning projectile into a populated city, where the resulting fire might kill women or children. Authorities differed on whether that tactic was permissible. Some disallowed the catapult when children or Muslim captives were in the city. In support, they cited a verse from the Koran that reads, “Had they been separated clearly, then We would have chastised the unbelievers among them with a painful chastisement.” According to this school of thought, the “separation” of permissible targets (i.e., non-Muslim men) from impermissible targets is the precondition for a general attack. Another school of thought, by contrast, permitted the use of the catapult regardless of collateral damage in order to serve the general interest of the Muslims.

No law can exist for a millennium without being broken, and there are scattered historical reports, mostly from Christian chroniclers, of Muslim forces acting outside the bounds of lawful jihad, without the authorization of the scholars. Men were always considered legitimate targets, and Muslim armies sometimes slaughtered them just as Muslims could be slaughtered by their enemies. Remarkably enough, though, the legal principles of jihad protecting women, children and fellow Muslims survived well into the modern era, when the secular regimes of the Muslim world began to fight according to secular ideas. The World War I Armenian genocide, which took place in the last, secularizing gasp of the declining Ottoman Empire, was the first really substantial systematic violation of the ban on killing women and children in recorded Islamic history. In the bloody 20th century, when mass exterminations took place in Europe, Africa and Asia, Muslim states had a relatively better record, marred of course by Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds. And there have been the genocidal killings in Darfur in this new century. Even these horrific events, however, were not dignified by the claim that they were permitted under the law of jihad.

IV.

The last two decades have seen a challenge to this Islamic tradition of warfare under law, a challenge driven mostly by the attempt to justify suicide bombing despite its evident inconsistency with Islamic tradition. On the subject of suicide, the Koran could hardly be clearer: “Do not kill yourselves; for surely God has been merciful to you.” Faced with this explicit text, the solution of the militant Islamist ideologues has been to avoid the category of suicide altogether and to treat the bomber as a martyr rather than as one who has taken his own life. This interpretation is not very convincing in historical terms: martyrdom classically meant that another person killed the Muslim warrior, not that he pushed the button himself. Nevertheless, many Muslims now seem to find the argument convincing. Even among rather secular Muslims, it has become standard to refer to suicide bombers as martyrs.

The killing of women, children and Muslim men, however, has proved harder to explain away as a permissible exercise of jihad. The reaction to 9/11, which has (so far) been the high-water mark of suicide bombing, illustrates the nature of the difficulty of reconciling suicide bombing with Islamic law. One problem concerns the offensive nature of the attack at a time when the United States was not at war with any Muslim entity. Offensive jihad requires the authorization of a legitimate Muslim leader, absent on 9/11. A more serious concern was the obvious reality that the 9/11 attacks were certain to kill — and did kill — women, children and Muslims, all in direct contravention of classical jihad principles. Since the whole point of 9/11 was to announce and embody jihad on the international stage, the attacks quickly became the centerpiece of a high-stakes debate about whether they did or did not qualify as legitimate acts of jihad.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was sometimes asserted in the West that there were no Muslim voices condemning the attacks. This was never true. Prominent Muslim scholars expressed their disapprobation in public arenas like television and the Internet. These included senior Sunni scholars like the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia and the head of Al-Azhar, in Egypt, nominally the flagship institution of Sunni higher learning — who gave a news conference. More popular figures, like Al Jazeera’s resident cleric, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, explained that Islam “considers the attack on innocent human beings a grave sin.” Shiite scholars also spoke out, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran.

The position of the Muslim scholars and observers who condemned the 9/11 attacks was simple and consistent across the Sunni-Shiite divide: this was not jihad but an unlawful use of violence. Offensive jihad was prohibited in the absence of formal authorization by a Muslim leader. But even if the attacks could somehow be construed as defensive, the perpetrators of 9/11 broke the rules with their willingness to kill women and children. In confident and insistent tones, these critics cited the classical scholars and insisted that nothing in Islamic law could justify the tactics used by Al Qaeda. Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the Lebanese cleric whose spiritual authority is recognized by Hezbollah, gave an interview to the Beirut newspaper Al Safir in which he asserted that given their impermissible choice of targets, the 9/11 bombers were not martyrs but “merely suicides.”

At the same time, it is important to note that in 2001 few prominent Muslim scholars — the Saudi grand mufti was the main exception — condemned the use of suicide bombings in all circumstances. Fadlallah approved the attack on the U.S. Marines in 1983 and, according to the United States, played a role in ordering it. Qaradawi, whose television presence gives him reason to stay within the Islamist mainstream, distinguished the 9/11 attacks from the permissible defensive jihad of the Palestinians. He was happy to praise a God who “through his infinite wisdom ... has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have, and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do.” Qaradawi has also repeated the common view that the killing of Israeli women is justified on the grounds that all Israelis must serve in the military, and so no Israeli is a true noncombatant: “An Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier.”

The equivocation by Muslim scholars with respect to the technique of suicide bombing reflected the reality that throughout the Muslim world, Palestinian suicide bombers were by 2001 identified as martyrs dying in a just cause. This, in turn, was the natural outgrowth of the decades before suicide bombing, when Palestinian terrorists were applauded for killing Israeli civilians, including women and children. Given that embracing Palestinian suicide bombing had become a widespread social norm, it would have been essentially unthinkable for an important Muslim scholar to condemn the practice without losing his standing among Muslims worldwide. In the Islamic world, as in the U.S. Supreme Court, the legal authorities cannot get too far away from their public constituency without paying a price.

What happened, in other words, is that without the scholars paying too much attention to the question, the killing of Israeli women and children had become a kind of exception to the ordinary laws of jihad. Opportunists like bin Laden then began to widen the loophole to include new victims. With respect to the unauthorized nature of his offensive jihad, bin Laden asserted that in fact the attacks were defensive, since in his mind the U.S. was occupying the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia — just as Israel was occupying the Muslim land of Palestine. Once all of Saudi Arabia was placed on a par with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, traditionally closed to non-Muslims, the presence of American soldiers anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula (even if their presence was with the permission of the Saudi government) could be depicted as a profanation, a violation of the Prophet’s deathbed directive to “banish the pagans from the Arabian Peninsula.”

Bin Laden was embroidering on the theories of his onetime mentor Abdullah Azzam, the intellectual godfather of Al Qaeda. Azzam was a Palestinian Islamist who made his way to Afghanistan via Saudi Arabia and established the so-called Bureau of Services to channel Arab youth into the Afghan jihad. As Azzam trod his personal path from Palestinian militancy to universal pan-Islamic jihadism, he wrote an influential treatise called “Defense of Muslim Lands.” In it, Azzam argued that not a single hand span of Muslim territory anywhere could ever be ceded to the enemy “because the land belongs to Allah and to Islam.” Though Azzam would never have acknowledged it, his account of the divine ownership of Muslim lands was probably influenced — unconsciously, to be sure — by religious-Zionist claims about the holiness of the Land of Israel.

When it came to the killing of civilians, bin Laden’s thought developed more gradually. In early pronouncements, before 9/11, he spoke as if the killing of women and children was inherently an atrocity. “Nor should one forget,” he admonished an interviewer in 1996, “the deliberate, premeditated dropping of the H bombs [sic] on cities with their entire populations of children, elderly and women, as was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” After 9/11, however, the argument changed. Now bin Laden began to suggest that American civilians were fair game. He could not argue that like Israelis, all Americans were subject to mandatory military service. Instead he proposed that because “the American people are the ones who choose their government by their own free will,” and because they “have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government,” attacks on American civilians were justified. Voting was now playing the role for Americans that military service played in the case of Israelis: the active step transforming civilians into fair game.

Such an appeal to collective responsibility was, however, pretty weak in Islamic legal terms. It might suffice for bin Laden’s videotaped self-justifications, and it might salve the consciences of potential jihadis hoping to join the rank and file of Al Qaeda. But it would never satisfy serious students of classical Islamic law, who found the 9/11 attacks problematic from an Islamic legal perspective.

In Saudi Arabia in particular, radical Muslim scholars with much more learning than bin Laden have sought to develop legally persuasive justifications for civilian killings. Probably the most sophisticated effort from a legal standpoint is a document titled “A Treatise on the Law of the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction Against the Unbelievers,” written in 2003 by a brilliant Saudi dissident named Sheik Nasir bin Hamad al-Fahd. (Fahd, a theorist rather than an activist, is currently back in prison, as he has been off and on for almost a decade.) The treatise begins with the assumption that the world’s Muslims are under attack. But how are today’s Muslims supposed to defend themselves, given their military inferiority? Fahd’s response is that, if they have no other choice, they may use any means necessary — including methods that would otherwise violate the laws of jihad. “If the unbelievers can be repelled . . . only by using” weapons of mass destruction, then “their use is permissible, even if you kill them without exception.”

Lest his argument prove too much, Fahd tempers it by the claim that the Muslims fighting the jihad may not inflict disproportionately more harm on the enemy than the enemy has inflicted on them. That raises the question of the extent of American guilt. “Some Brothers have added up the number of Muslims killed directly or indirectly by [American] weapons and come up with a figure of nearly ten million,” the treatise states. This total, Fahd concludes, would authorize the use of weapons of mass destruction to kill 10 million Americans: indeed, “it would be permissible with no need for further [legal] argument.” (The number is never explained or analyzed, and you might assume that it was meant to correspond very roughly to the population of New York.)
Fahd’s arguments sit uneasily with the classical Islamic discussions of the laws of jihad. The classical Islamic law never explicitly says that women and children may be intentional targets if it is the only way to win the jihad. It does not allow violations of the law just because the enemy has broken the rules or killed many Muslims. So the treatise must fall back on whatever evidence it can muster from the classical sources that seems to modify the basic rules. The catapult rears its head and is cited as precedent for nonspecific killing. The right to fight even when Muslim hostages may be killed is brought out as proof of the permissibility of collateral damage when there is no other choice.

The legal arguments in use here are stronger than bin Laden’s makeweights, but they, too, would probably not be sufficient on their own to justify the deviation from the legal traditions of jihad wrought by today’s jihadis. The notion that it’s right because it’s necessary is doing the real work, and old-fashioned legal arguments are following along. It is no accident that the argument from necessity has been so prominent in modern Western writing about modern warfare in general and the nuclear bomb in particular. If the technology of mass destruction can be exported, why not the justification that comes with it?

Within the world of radical Islam, there are those who believe that the erosion of the laws of jihad has gone too far. There are reports of difficulty recruiting foreign candidates for suicide missions directed at Iraqi civilians. The debate about how jihad may be prosecuted is not over by any means. But it is an unavoidable fact that the classic restrictions on the killing of women, children and Muslims in jihad have been deeply undermined in the last decade.

V.

If the Islamic laws of war are under revision, or at least the subject of intense debate, what does that mean for the question of the Islamic bomb? The answer is that the expanding religious sanction for violence once thought unacceptable opens the way for new kinds of violence to be introduced and seen as legitimate in turn. First Israeli women and children became acceptable targets; then Americans; then Shiites; and now Sunnis of unstinting orthodoxy. It would seem that no one is out of bounds.

It is therefore now possible to imagine that the classical Islamic principles governing war would not be applied even by a self-consciously Islamic regime deciding when and if to detonate a nuclear device. The traditional ban on killing women, children and fellow Muslims would have gone a long way toward banning most potential uses of nuclear power by a sincerely Islamic state actor. As those prohibitions have eroded, the reassurance that might be afforded by a state’s Islamic commitments has waned.

This means that a nuclear Islamic state would be at least as willing to use its weapons as a comparable non-Islamic state. But would an Islamic state be prepared to take the jihad to the enemy even if it would result in what amounts to collective suicide through the destruction of the state and its citizens? If the leaders of Iran or some future leaders of a radicalized, nuclear Saudi Arabia shared the aspiration to martyrdom of so many young jihadis around the world, might they be prepared to attack Israel or the United States, even if the inevitable result were the martyrdom of their entire people?

The answer depends to a large degree on whether you consider Islam susceptible to the kind of apocalyptic, millennial thought that might lead whole peoples, rather than just individuals, into suicidal behavior. It is important to note that for all his talk of the war between civilizations, bin Laden has never spoken of the end of days. For him, the battle between the Muslims and the infidels is part of earthly human life, and has indeed been with us since the days of the Prophet himself. The war intensifies and lessens with time, but it is not something that occurs out of time or with the expectation that time itself will stop. Bin Laden and his sympathizers want to re-establish the caliphate and rule the Muslim world, but unlike some earlier revivalist movements within Sunni Islam, they do not declare their leader as the mahdi, or guided one, whose appearance will usher in a golden age of justice and peace to be followed by the Day of Judgment.

From this perspective, the utter destruction of civilization would be a mistake, not the fulfillment of the divine plan. Even the most radical Sunni theorists of jihad invoke a passage from the Koran according to which civilization itself — “the crops and the cattle” — must not and cannot be destroyed completely. Bin Laden might seem to have few qualms about killing millions of Americans or other Westerners. He might well use a nuclear device if he gambled that there would be no enemy for the United States to bomb in retaliation. But even he might not be prepared to unleash a global nuclear conflagration on the expectation that a better order would emerge once many millions of Muslims and infidels died. (Bin Laden has called for Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons, and in the 1990’s reportedly tried to acquire them himself — but there is little hard evidence that he has made subsequent efforts in that direction.)

With respect to Shiite eschatology, there is greater reason for concern. Iran’s Shiism is of the “Twelver” variety, so called because the 12th imam in the line of succession from the Prophet disappeared into a state of occultation — or being hidden — from which he is expected to return as the mahdi. Ayatollah Khomeini played on the messianic overtones of this belief during the Iranian revolution, in which some of his followers went so far as to hint that he might be the returning imam. Moktada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia in Iraq is called Army of the Mahdi. Recently, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, contributed to renewed focus on the mahdi, by saying publicly that the mission of the Islamic revolution in Iran is to pave the way for the mahdi’s return, and by visiting the mosque at Jamkaran, on the outskirts of Qom, where, according to one tradition, the vanished imam was last seen. Some reports suggest that youth religion in Iran in increasingly focused on veneration of the vanished imam.

Islam has a vision of the end of days, with wars between the faithful and the tribes of Gog and Magog (Yuj and Majuj in their Arabic incarnation). Twelver Shiism is, at its core, an eschatological faith, focused on the ultimate return of the imam-mahdi, who will restore the Shiites to their rightful place and redeem their generations of suffering. Since the vanished imam is by tradition a human who has never died, but remains in occultation, he is also believed to affect the course of events even from his hidden place. And Shiite tradition fills in the picture of the mahdi’s return with an elaborate account of signs that will herald the event, including advance messengers, earthquakes and bloodshed.

But belief in redemption — even accompanied by wars and death and the defeat of the infidels — need not translate into a present impulse to create a violent crisis that would precipitate the messianic situation. Like their Jewish counterparts, Shiite religious authorities have traditionally sought to resist speculation about the imminence of a messianic return. Shiite messianic thought is less focused than its messianic Christian counterpart on generating global crisis and letting God sort things out. Khomeini himself believed that the mahdi’s advent could be hastened — but by social justice, not by provoking war. This put him on the activist side of Shiite teaching about the mahdi, much as he was also an activist about the exercise of worldly power by the mullahs. A popular revolutionary slogan urged the imam’s coming but asserted that Khomeini would govern alongside him.

Other Shiite thinkers, by contrast, take a more fatalist stance, and prefer to believe that the mahdi’s coming cannot be hastened by human activity — a view that corresponds loosely to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s belief, with regard to Iraq and elsewhere, that the clerics should not themselves govern. One small, semi-secret Iranian organization, the Hojjatiya Society, was banned and persecuted by Khomeini’s government in part for its quiescent view that the mahdi’s arrival could not be hastened.

Ahmadinejad is not the only or even the most important player in Iran’s nuclear game. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, still makes the ultimate decisions on armaments and other matters, and there are numerous factions in the country with opposed interests and ideology and goals. Nevertheless, Ahmadinejad has in some respects succeeded in making the nuclear issue his own, and as a result his personal views about the end of days have been the subject of much speculation and innuendo, inside Iran and out. The Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis, in a recent Wall Street Journal column, hinted darkly and without much evidence that Ahmadinejad might be planning a nuclear attack on Israel for the Night of Power (this year it fell on Aug. 22), when the Prophet Muhammad made his mystical journey to the Furthest Mosque, associated in tradition with al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. Rumors, possibly spread by Ahmadinejad’s enemies, have tied him to the outlawed Hojjatiya — a link mistakenly interpreted outside Iran as evidence that he might want to bring back the imam by violence, rather than that he might prefer to wait piously and prepare for the imam’s eventual return on his own schedule. It is of course impossible to gauge the man’s religious sensibilities perfectly. Yet the relative absence of a contemporary Shiite trend to messianic brinkmanship suggests that Ahmadinejad’s recent emphasis on the mahdi may be interpreted more in terms of an attempt to summon Khomeini’s legacy and Iran’s revolutionary moment than as a desperate willingness to bring the nation to the edge of war. When Ahmadinejad invoked the mahdi in his now-famous letter to George Bush, he seemed to be using the doctrine in ecumenical terms, emphasizing the Islamic tradition that Jesus — revered as a prophet, though not as the Son of God — will return alongside the mahdi and govern in tandem with him.

So although a renewed Shiite messianism does create some cause for concern about the potential uses of an Iranian bomb — in particular because it suggests that Ahmadinejad may be more a utopian than a realist — it is almost certainly a mistake to anticipate that Iran would use its nuclear power in a way that would provoke large-scale retaliation and assured self-destruction. Iranian leaders have been more than ready to sacrifice their own citizens in large numbers. During the Iran-Iraq war, major efforts went into recruiting young boys to the Basij militias, which were then sent to the front lines on what were essentially suicide missions. Religion played the central part in motivating the teenage soldiers, and it is reasonable to believe that religion helped salve the consciences of those who ordered these children into battle. Yet even this discounting of the value of human life — in a war started by Saddam Hussein, not by Iran — fell short of voluntarily putting an entire nation at risk. Ahmadinejad surely understands the consequences of using a nuclear bomb, and Shiite Islam, even in its messianic incarnation, still falls short of inviting nuclear retaliation and engendering collective suicide.

VI.

These worries about an Islamic bomb raise the question of why we trust any nation with the power that a nuclear capacity confers. Why, for instance, do we trust ourselves, given that we remain the only nation actually to have used nuclear weapons? The standard answer to why we keep our nuclear bombs — a response developed during the cold war — is that we must have the capability to deter anyone who might attack us first. The promise of mutually assured destruction was its own kind of collective suicide pact, albeit one supposed to scare both sides out of pushing the button. That is why, throughout the heyday of the unilateral disarmament movement, critics of this justification pointed out that our threat was only credible if we were, in fact, prepared to kill millions of civilians in a rapid act of retaliation. If this kind of killing was morally unjustified, went their argument, then the threat to use it was also immoral.

The truth is that we hold on to our nuclear capability not only as a matter of deterrence but also to maintain our own global strategic position. If we do not want Islamic states — or anyone else for that matter — to have a nuclear capability, it is not necessarily because we consider them especially likely to bring on their own destruction by using it. It is, rather, that we do not want to cede some substantial chunk of our own global power to them. This principle — if it is a principle — lies behind the general strategy that is embedded in the international nuclear-nonproliferation treaty. Everybody involved understands that if any government got a chance to acquire nuclear power before the other treaty members had a chance to notice and impose sanctions, it would jump at the opportunity.

So the nonproliferation regime is not and could never be based on some principle of international fairness. But it does not follow that the United States and its allies should simply accept the development of nuclear technology by just anyone. It should be relevant to our deliberations that a particular candidate is our enemy. When it comes to Islamic states, there is serious reason to worry that, both now and in the immediately foreseeable future, popular anti-American sentiment is especially likely to play an important role in the shaping of foreign policy. Over the next quarter-century, it is conceivable and certainly desirable that Islamism and anti-Americanism may be unlinked. But we must be honest and acknowledge that in the short term at least, the U.S. democratization strategy has done almost nothing to reduce Islamist anti-Americanism, whether Shiite or Sunni — this despite the fact that the same strategy has benefited Islamists across the region by allowing them to run for office and enter government.
Much of the reason for this close linkage between Islamism and anti-Americanism comes from Iran. As an enemy of the United States, which has worked consistently against American interests, Iran is in a category by itself, most nearly matched by North Korea, the other still-standing member of President Bush’s axis of evil. In this, Iran’s motives have been primarily Islamic-ideological, not pragmatic.

For many years under the shah, Iran was a natural American ally — precisely because it was Shiite and non-Arab, and uncomfortably close to the Soviet Union and its fantasy of a warm-water port. Even after the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis, it is possible that the United States would have eventually reopened relations with an avowedly Islamic Iran had the government softened its anti-Americanism. The United States has never made secularism a condition of friendship. It has been fully prepared to support Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, and even used religion to cement the anti-Communist alliance during the cold war. The Iraqi Shiite Islamists have been willing to work alongside the Americans, and the United States has in return treated them as its allies, democratically chosen by the Iraqi electorate.

Islamist anti-Americanism is the direct legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini’s success in marrying Islamic faith to anti-imperialism — making “Death to America” into a religious chant, not just a political slogan. Of course the United States was hardly blameless. It did everything it could to open itself to the imperialist charge, including, in Iran, backing the famous 1953 countercoup that removed from power Iran’s first democratically legitimate prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. Contemporary Islamists can also point to America’s continuing hypocritical support of regional authoritarian regimes.

Iranian-rooted Islamist anti-Americanism has worked far better than its designers might have imagined, spreading to Sunni Islamists who have little love to lose for Iran. The marriage of Islamism and anti-Americanism will probably be considered by history as the most significant consequence of the Iranian revolution. Anti-Americanism has become a staple of Islamist sermons and Web postings, an effective tool for drawing to the movement angry young people who might not naturally be drawn to religion. Bin Ladenism, in this sense, owes much to the Iranian revolution even though Al Qaeda was never Iran’s direct ally. United States support for Israel has always been an important part of the argument for Islamist anti-Americanism, but today it is by no means a necessary component. If U.S. support of Israel were to weaken, the American presence in Iraq and elsewhere in the gulf would easily substitute as a basis for hatred.

The United States therefore has strong reason to block its enemy Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — not simply because Iran will seek to become a greater regional power, as any nation might do, but because the Islamic Republic of Iran as currently constituted is definitionally anti-American. There need not be a direct threat of Iranian first use against either the United States or Israel for this reason to weigh heavily. A nuclear Iran will be a stronger and more effective enemy in pursuing anti-American policies under the banner of Islam. That will not change until the Iranian state abandons either its Islamic identity or its association between Islam and anti-Americanism. Iran’s eagerness to acquire nuclear capacity need not be a result of a particularly Islamic motivation, but if and when Iran does have the bomb, its enhanced power and prestige will certainly be lent to policies that it conceives as promoting the Islamic interest.

Whether force, negotiation or some combination is the right path to take to keep Iran from going nuclear is of course a hugely important question. It turns on many uncertain facts, like the true progress of Iran’s nuclear program and how much it can be affected by air attack; Iran’s capacity and will to retaliate against an attack; whether there is any chance Iran would respond to negotiations; and the ability of the United States to withstand any retaliation while 150,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq. As we have recently learned in Iraq, it is not enough to think you have a good reason to go to war — you must also have a realistic understanding of the practical and moral costs of things going horribly wrong. Any choice, though, must be made against the backdrop of the reality that the Islamic government of Iran is not only unlikely to collapse soon — it is also very unlikely to become less anti-American in the near future.

The same, unfortunately, is true of the world’s Islamist movements, for whom anti-Americanism remains a rallying cry and a principle of belief. Perhaps the promotion of democracy in the region, pursued consistently by the United States over the long term, might someday allow the rise of leaders whose Islamism is tempered by the need to satisfy their constituents’ domestic needs — and who eschew anti-Americanism as wasteful and misguided. Iraq was the test case of whether this change could occur in the short term. But we failed to make the experiment work and gave Iraq’s Islamist politicians, Shiite and Sunni alike, ample grounds to continue the anti-American rhetoric that comes so easily to them. In the wake of our tragic mismanagement of Iraq, we are certainly a generation or more from any such unlinking of Islamism and anti-Americanism, if it is to occur at all. And Islamism itself shows no signs of being on the wane as a social or political force.

That means that the best we can hope for in nuclear Islamic states in the near term is a rational dictator like Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, who sees his bread buttered on the side of an alliance with the West. Such rulers can be very strong and can bring stability, but we also know that their rule (or reign) promotes Islamist opposition, with its often violent overtones. When such rulers die or otherwise fall from power, the Islamists will be poised to use the international power conferred by nuclear weapons to pursue their own ends — ends for now overwhelmingly likely to be anti-American.

None of this is inherent in the structure of Islam itself. Islam contains a rich and multivocal set of traditions and ideas, susceptible to being used for good or ill, for restraint or destruction. This interpretive flexibility — equally characteristic of the other great world religions — does not rob Islam of its distinctiveness. An Islamic bomb would not be just the same as the nationalist bomb of a majority-Muslim state, nor would it be the same as a Christian bomb or a Jewish one. But its role in history will depend, ultimately, on the meaning Muslims give it, and the uses to which they put their faith and their capabilities. In confronting the possibility of the Islamic bomb, we — Muslims and non-Muslims alike — need to remember that Islam exists both as an ideal system of morals and values and as a force that motivates actual people living today, with all the frailties and imperfections that make us human.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer, is a law professor at New York University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Pertinent Links:

1) Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age

DAR AL ISLAM-IRAN: AYATOLLAH SEYED ALI KHAMENEI BLOVIATES...

US, Zionists Feel Islamic Vigilance
TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei stressed in a message to the Hajj pilgrims that the United States' administration and system of capitalism and the corrupt Zionist activists now feel the vivid truth of Islamic Vigilance.

The full text of the message reads as follows:

Once again the Hajj season is back with its spiritual tidings, and again it presents a precious opportunity to the Islamic world. While many eager hearts are attracted from all over the world to attend this annual congregation, there are only a fortunate few who actually realize their dream. This is the reason for the perpetuity of this flowing spring.

On the one hand, the annual congress at the House of the beloved reconnects the hearts with the Kiblah of creation on the other hand, the friends who have been detached from one another find an opportunity for the meeting of hearts. It also brings elation and jubilation to the body, spirituality and politics of the Muslim Ummah.

Freedom from material contaminations and remembrance of Allah in all our deeds and in all places, although for a few days, is a great souvenir for hajj pilgrims. The acts of worship and rituals of hajj are for the purpose of providing an opportunity to gain a spiritual experience and sense this joyous experience with our souls.

In the area of politics, the cardinal purpose of hajj is to show the united identity of the Muslim Ummah. Detachment and separation among the brothers will open the door to those who bear malice toward us and will serve as a breeding ground for the seeds of division among Muslims.
The Muslim Ummah embraces various nations, races and followers of different sects in Islam. This diversity and the vast geographical stretch of the Ummah in a sensitive and important part of the planet Earth can be a source of strength. Our diversity has enriched and enhanced the Ummah's common heritage, culture, history and their effectiveness in the vast part of the globe, and has enabled them to utilize all forms of talents and human and natural potentials.

From the very first days of their entry into The Islamic countries the Western colonialist powers have taken account of this diversity and have consistently attempted to arouse divisive sentiments.

The colonialist politicians knew well that if a united Islamic identity is formed, the door will be closed to their political and economic domination. Therefore, they have planted seeds of division and discord by employing their concentrated and enduring efforts. To succeed in carrying out this nefarious policy and to advance their goal of domination over the Islamic countries, they have taken advantage of the unawareness of the populace and weakness of the political and cultural leaders in Islamic countries.

Suppression of liberation movements in the Islamic countries over the past century, the success of colonialist powers in consolidating their domination over these countries, creation or strengthening of authoritarian regimes, plundering of their natural wealth and destruction of their human resources and consequently keeping Muslim nations behind the caravan of progress in science and technology, have all been made possible under the shadow of disunity that in some cases reached the levels of internecine and fratricidal conflicts.

With the commencement of Islamic awakening which reached its peak with the emergence of the Islamic republic in Iran, the Western camp faced a formidable threat. The failure of political schools of thoughts of East and West, the recognition of the falsehood and the collapse of the values that were represented by the colonialists as the only road to humanity's happiness helped self-awareness among Muslim masses to take root, and successive frustrations of the arrogant powers in covering and extinguishing this divine radiance have sprung up the seedlings of hope in the hearts of Muslim nations.

A glance at today's Palestine which has a government that has come to power committed to the unchangeable principle of "liberation from Zionist occupation", and comparison of the present situation with the seclusion, isolation and weakness of Palestinian people in the past;

A glance at Lebanon in which the Muslims put their lives on the line to defeat the equipped Israeli army with the all the help that it received from the U.S., the West and other hypocritical powers, and its comparison with the Lebanon that the Zionists could easily encroach upon and move forward without any real obstacles;

A glimpse at Iraq, in which its proud people humiliated the pompous America, and bogged down the army and politicians that boasted of having a free hand in Iraq, in a quagmire of political, military and economic problems, and its comparison with previous Iraq in which its bloodthirsty leader brutalized its people with the encouragement of the United States;

A glance at today's Afghanistan in which all the promises of the U.S. and the West have turned out to be lies and the unprecedented military expedition of the united front of Western countries have produced nothing, except destruction, poverty, killings and the growing power of the narcotics mafia;

And finally, a glance at the youthful populations of the Islamic countries and the generation with growing tendency toward Islamic values and the rising sentiments against the U.S. and the West;

Looking at all these developments provide us with a clear and true picture of the falling fortunes and the failed policies of the arrogant powers, especially the United States, and augur well for the emergence of the united Islamic identity. The American government, the domineering capitalism of the West and the corrupt Zionist political lobbyists have begun to sense the living truth of the Islamic awakening, and by admitting that their military might is useless against this truth, they are using all their power to employ political ploys and tactics.

The entire Muslim Ummah, whether the political, cultural and religious elite, or the masses of people, must remain vigilant more than ever before, and try to identify and foil the conniving schemes of the enemy.

One of the most effective schemes of the enemy is to incite the flames of discord and division. By spending money and rushing to put to use whatever they have in their power, they try to keep Muslims engaged in feuding and quarreling over their differences and once again to set us against one another by exploiting our negligence, narrow-mindedness and prejudices.
Today any divisive action in the Islamic world is a historical sin. Those who maliciously use Takfir to declare large groups of Muslims as unbelievers, those who insult the sanctities of various divisions of Islam, those who betray and put a dagger in the back of the Lebanese youth who are a source of honor for the Muslim Ummah, those who speak of the fabricated threat of a Shiite crescent in order to please the Americans and the Zionists, those who incite fratricidal hostilities and lawlessness in Iraq to defeat its Islamic and popular government, and those who put pressure on the elected HAMAS government in Palestine, whether intentionally or unintentionally, will be regarded as culprits, detested by history and future generations and looked upon as mercenaries of the brutal enemy.

Muslims all over the world must know that the era of humiliation and backwardness of the Islamic world has come to an end. We are all witnessing the coming of a new era. The flawed frame of mind that Muslim countries will remain enthralled in the cultural and political claws of the West and will continue to emulate them in their individual and collective behaviors have been eradicated from the minds of Muslim masses by the hands of the Westerners themselves, and as the result of their excessive arrogance and conceit.

The concept of the west especially after being lad by the US, through its flagrant acts of oppression and endlessly arrogant and illogical behavior, is now clearly seen as an anti-value in the Islamic world. Their treatment of the Palestinian people compared to their treatment of the bloodthirsty Zionist regime, their position with respect to the admission of the Zionist regime on possession of nuclear weapons, against their position on civilian use of nuclear energy by Iran, their support for military aggression against Lebanon and their defense for the aggressor, their hostility toward the defenders of Lebanon, who were prepared to sacrifice their lives, relentlessly blackmailing the western governments and constant surrender of the western governments to the demands of the Zionist regime, supporting insulters of sanctities of Islam and even open defamation of Islam by high-ranking authorities in the West, including the Pope, while making any inquiry into and questioning of Holocaust or the formation of the Zionist regime a punishable offence, military attacks against Iraq and Afghanistan and killing of civilian population under the name of democracy, while conspiring against democratic governments in Palestine, Iraq and in Latin America and in fact anywhere that their stooges do no come to power, all the hullabaloo on the war on terror while clandestinely talking with and supporting brutal terrorists in Iraq.

These irrational and malicious behaviors have provided clear proof to Muslim nations and have helped strengthen the Islamic awakening. Whether they like it or not, today a profound and deep-rooted movement has begun in the Islamic world. This movement will lead to the independence, dignity and rejuvenation of the Muslim Ummah.

This is a decisive juncture in history. The elite and the intellectuals have a huge responsibility on their shoulders. Any weakness, wavering, misguided actions and negligence on their part will lead to disaster. Ulema should not remain silent in the face of divisive actions, the intellectuals should not shirk their responsibility to impart spirit of hope in our youth, and politicians and leaders should not distance themselves from the people and must rely on them. And the Islamic governments should strengthen their ranks and solidarity and use the power of the people to overcome the threats of the domineering powers.

Today the intelligence services of the U.S. and Britain in Iraq, Lebanon and in countries of North Africa, and wherever they can, are spreading the virus of religious division and discord. The congregation of hajj keeps us immune from this deadly virus and places this sacred verse of Koran in our full view: And obey Allah and His Apostle and do not quarrel for then you will be weak in hearts and your power will depart, and be patient; surely Allah is with the patient. Surah VIII: 46

Today distancing ourselves from Moshrekin is the heartfelt desire and the call of all Muslim nations. The season of hajj is the only opportunity when this desire can be expressed with full force.

Let us seize this opportunity to pray for Allah's grace and favor on all hajj pilgrims and pray for the earliest coming of the Promised Mahdi (A.S.) Cleanse yourselves in this vast ocean. I pray for your success and happiness and for the acceptance of your hajj.

Sayyid Ali Khamenei
3rd of Dhulhajja 1427 - 3rd of Dey 1385


Pertinent Links:

1) Khamenei's complete bloviations