Stop calling them Salafi Jihadists

Six years after September 11th, Bin Laden roams free and Al Qaeda training camps keep sprouting in Pakistan and Afghanistan, awash with new recruits that then spread their particular brand of violence in Iraq, Lebanon, Indonesia, the West, and so on. Another thing that hasn't changed is our sloppy wrangling over how to label them.

First, using the term "Muslim terrorists" or "Islamic terrorists" was quickly rejected by academics for a variety of reasons: a) Islam and terrorism were deemed contradictory; b) it was unfair to add the epithet Muslim or Islamic when "Christian" was never added to terrorists of that persuasion; or c) disagreement over what's terrorism, who is a terrorist and who isn't, was enough to prolong the discussion endlessly.

Then, the term "Muslim fundamentalists," still widely used, was also objected. First, most Muslim fundamentalists reject the use of violence or the instrumentalization of Islam for political purposes. Second, the term "fundamentalism" was coined for Protestants in the US that believed in a literal reading of the Bible. When applied to the Islamic world, this term loses its meanings, because all Muslims are expected to believe that the Quran is the literal revelation of Allah to Muhammad. That doesn't imply that most of them use only the Islamic scriptures to guide their conduct, or that Wahhabi Muslims of the Hanbali school -which engage in the narrowest and most puritanical reading of the Quran- preach a return to the "fundamentals" of Islam. Instead, as it is well known, they selectively emphasize some elements and downplay others, and fuse supposedly Islamic practices with contemporary tribal mores and customs -as in the Pashtun Taliban.

Lastly, the fashionable label is that of Salafi jihadis, vaguely used to describe those Muslims who combine an ultra-conservative reading of the Scriptures with an embrace of violence in the form, often, of indiscriminate suicide attacks against civilians of all stripes, including Westerners and Muslims deemed apostates -that is, in their eyes, the overwhelming majority. Now I'm not happy with this one either, mainly because it endorses using a compliment -yes, it is a compliment- to describe an aberration. First, both salaf and jihad have positive connotations in the Muslim world. Most Wahhabi Muslims, for example, reject that label because it implies that they are simply a sect of followers of Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, and prefer to be called Salafists, which evokes their effort to imitate their "pious forefathers" (salaf). Secondly, and better known, jihad is another positive word in the Muslim world, both to refer to the greater jihad -personal and apolitical struggle- and the lesser jihad -defensive war against foreign aggression. Now this doesn't seem to endorse blowing yourself up in a wedding in Amman. And worse yet, it not only sounds like a compliment to those that engage in those acts, elevating their stature to that of holy warriors, but it co-opts words that have a positive connotation within the Muslim world in general.

What then? Many Muslim commentators propose and use the word "Qutbists." Sayyid Qutb was the intellectual revolutionary that, among other things, preached violence against the West -civilians included- as legitimate jihad. Qutbism (al-Qutbiyya) is the modern revolutionary ideology that inspires bin Laden and others, and is denounced by most Muslim, Salafi scholars included, as the main culpable of the tribulations of the Muslim world today. It's what rival Muslims call them and it's a label that Jihadis hate, because it implies that they are merely followers of a human and are members of a deviant sect. It's hardly ever used in the Western media, and only a bit more frequently on scholarly articles, but we should give it some consideration. After all, if you can't call it appropriately, how can you fight it?