A friend with zero tolerance of nonsense points out that not a shred of credible evidence has yet been produced to support the view that a group of militant Muslims is responsible for the spate of evidently politically motivated bomb attacks in the Western Cape.
He is right. The only support comes from inference drawn from circumstance or leaked police intelligence reports.
This has not, however, prevented many in the media and public life from behaving as if Muslim militants, because they seem responsible for these attacks, must be responsible. In the process, many from what is arguably the Western Cape’s and South Africa’s most peaceful and disciplined community – Muslims – have felt defamed.
While we wait for clear progress in police investigations, however, and at the risk of being accused of repeating a defamation under another guise, I think it is worth exploring the possibility – and that is all it is – that a group of militant Muslims is, indeed, responsible. If they are, what might their motivation be? Or their strategic objective? What chance might they have of achieving their aims? What would be the prospect that the rest of us could persuade them to stop?
Individuals involved in politics usually appeal to high principle to explain themselves. The more violence involved in their brand of politics, usually the more high-minded they would have us believe their motivation is. Few people seek reasons for their political involvement or resort to violence in emotional biography – in, say, the fact that their father disappeared in their early childhood or that their uncle raped them repeatedly. This is unfortunate, if only because many of the greatest crimes committed in the name of politics are crimes committed by unexamined lives.
But let us allow our imaginary militant Muslim bombers their claim to dignity. Many religions embrace a struggle for some form of righteousness or morality. Jews place enormous store by The Law. Some Christian denominations advocate a strict code of behaviour. And the words of the prophet Muhammad require each Muslim to wage a struggle for morality in his or her life and in the world. This struggle is each Muslim’s “holy war”; it is his or her individual jihad.
What distinguishes militants from the main body of Muslims is that they are prepared to use armed violence to take forward this struggle for morality. Once the United States or Western society has been identified as immoral, a Muslim militant may feel justified in using armed violence against it.
This brings us to Planet Hollywood on the Waterfront in Cape Town. Whereas you or I might regard the demolition of this tasteless restaurant as a service to aesthetics, for a militant Muslim bombing it might symbolise a blow against what Ayatollah Khomeini called “the Great Satan” – the US. Likewise the bombing of a synagogue might be a blow against “Zionism” and latter-day “imperialism”. And, the reasoning continues, anyone immoral enough to be attending either when the bombs go off deserves what he or she gets.
It is easier for the rest of us to understand militant Muslims attacking a second category of targets: individuals like gangsters or drug dealers. After years of poor and often corrupt policing on the Cape Flats, which has seen local crime spiral beyond control, it is easy to imagine a gentle inhabitant of the Cape Flats wanting justice to include a fair measure of violence. And those who initially formed People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) – whether or not they are responsible for the bomb blasts – know this. Pagad has had, and may still have, perfectly law-abiding, peace-loving citizens as members.
The third category of targets has, however, made our government take notice. It is the recent set of attacks on the state itself – against police stations. These attacks have, on top of the state’s failure thus far to convict those responsible for other bombings, made the government look impotent and foolish.
Why might a militant Muslim want to attack this government? Because a non- Islamic state is, by militant Muslim definition, an immoral state. Among the more radical Muslim organisations in the Western Cape is one, Muslims against Illegitimate Leaders, saying that any leader not following its version of Islam is illegitimate. By its reasoning, the African National Congress is an illegitimate government, notwithstanding its 62% popular support. Likewise, President Nelson Mandela is an illegitimate leader – as is Ebrahim Rasool, Cape leader of the ANC who is himself a devout (though non-militant) Muslim.
A Muslim militant would take this argument further to say the state’s immorality justifies armed attacks against it. This immorality might also justify the assassination of a leading Cape Town investigator, like Benny Lategan, particularly if he was investigating Muslim militants.
The point is this: a militant Muslim who blew up Planet Hollywood, bombed Woodstock police station or shot dead a policeman would claim to be acting out of deep conviction. He or she would be engaging in mindful violence, not mindless violence.
This violence might have very little hope of achieving the objective – in this case, an Islamic state in South Africa. We could suggest it is irrational. How could South Africa’s half-million-odd Muslims – even less, a few hundred Muslim militants – hope to change the belief systems of the remaining 40-million of us using guns and bombs? But we would need to remember that behind this jihad lay a 1 300-year religious tradition – even if the interpretation of it might be contentious.
The militant Muslim’s mindset is not a million miles away from others the rest of us might be more familiar with. Take the mindset of a young Marxist revolutionary of 30 years ago. He or she would believe – impossible to justify rationally or scientifically – history was moving towards a pre-ordained outcome: a classless society. He or she would also have believed this “inevitability” was a moral and desirable one, and so worth fighting to hasten. He or she would have been so excited by the writings of Che Guevara and Regis Debray to believe that armed activity by a small group could detonate popular revolution and so hasten this inevitability.
It is doubtful that Guevarist thinking hastened anything other than the crisis of Marxism. In the case of Islam, more resilient than the communist movement, the violence of its militants across the world is capable of isolating them and their strain of thinking from the main body of Muslims and the rest of us.
In the South African case – if Muslim militants have been responsible for the recent political violence in the Cape – it is this self-induced isolation that is likely to defeat them. Zero tolerance policing might help achieve it, but it is likely to be most effective only if it is accompanied by a clear recognition by the rest of us that most Muslims are fighting a neighbourly battle for a moral society which is largely consistent with our own.
The first principle of insurgency is to broaden the ranks of one’s allies to the maximum and isolate your enemy as much as possible. The first principle of counter-insurgency is exactly the same.