Islam and Organized Crime
Well I am officially back from my break, relaxed and tanned, though so buried under a pile of paper today and working like mad to get out from under it that I have to make this post short. It relates to something I've mentioned before, the use of shari'a to advance criminal activity.
What got me thinking about this are repeated reports from Iraq that Christians are being threatened by criminal gangs supposedly linked to Al Qaeda and forced to pay what is known as the jizya. The jizya is the classical era tax imposed on Christians and Jews, allowing them to live within the House of Islam (the mythical, unitary Islamic state that never really existed and that is far removed from the lives of Muslims as a result, but that jurists and our own legal academy seem obsessed with) in peace, and in, it must be said, a subservient position to the broader Muslim polity. Modern Muslims tend to rewrite history in order to make the classical system one of modern toleration and mutual respect, but the jizya makes that a tough sell. Not that I mind historical reinventions to reach salutary results, but still, it is fair to challenge the apologists on whether or not classical Muslims carried with them modern sensibilities concerning diversity of faith. As I see it, like their Christian counterparts, they most assuredly did not, even if they were perhaps not as terrifyingly puritanical as the medieval Church. That's a pretty low standard to hold modern peoples too, though.
In any event, though the Islam bashers might have it otherwise, it's pretty hard to connect a caliphate collecting a tax on minorities to the types of mafioso style collections that these groups supposedly connected to Al Qaeda are engaging in. This is plainly not any sort of tax collection, it is extortion, done by gangs, who are probably involved in oil smuggling, kidnapping for ransom and any other number of activities that they might I guess come up with Islamic reasons for, though I don't think very widely held ones. Nobody really approves of gangs running around collecting "taxes" from random people that of course are not going to finance anything but themselves. The idea that ordinary Iraqis somehow approve of this nonsense is belied by the level of support being driven away from this sort of gangsterism and towards cooperation with the US, even among the Sunni population whose contempt for the "occupier" is quite widespread. Modern Muslims, pious or not, generally don't believe in the jizya and as noted above apologize for it, and certainly I haven't met any who would describe this sort of activity as in any way related to Islam.
But this does raise a separate question. Why is the shari'a so commonly used then as a justification for this criminality? Sure it's a great source of legitimacy when a claim can be made that Muslims find plausible, but surely criminal gangs might be able to find other grounds. Why not just adopt the Mafia term "protection money"? Why not raising funds to oust the occupier from Arab lands? Or just stop legitimizing, kidnap for ransom and get your money. Why does a criminal, at times with dubious connections to religious extremism really, so often resort to Islamic lingo?
I think there are two possible explanations. First, because the shari'a as currently developed in our times lies at times in such tension with secular, national law in so many Muslim states, it becomes a convenient avenue through which criminal activity can seek to retain a patina of legitimacy through law violation in the name of applying shari'a. To be specific, say you want to steal yourself an air conditioner in the upscale Baghdad district of Mansour. Well you could rob your neighbor, that happens a fair amount, but there is the risk of getting caught and then you're just a thief. An alternative is to head to the liquor store, declare yourself a mujahid seeking to restore shari'a in the place of this secular decadence, and trash the place and take his air conditioner. That just seems so much more appealing. And because the shari'a is not the law of the state, because in many cases the law violates shari'a (ie liquor stores, an avenue of legitimacy appears so clearly to the potential criminal).
The other reason I think is because Islamic extremism, of the more contemporary variety, has become so toxic, so violent, so marginal to the nation state and to contemporary forms of order as to resemble some sort of band of ideologically driven pirates. People who just sort of live on violence, chaos, disorder and have made it into some form of ideal state of being. And the thing is, that's going to attract the nihilistic set, regardless of their own ideological commitments. They are more likely to just adopt those commitments, to enable them to live that life.
And so religious extremism, of the Muslim variety, molds itself onto a motley crew of law breakers, who then convert to Islam, and Al Qaeda then becomes a rather diffuse set of characters from ideological firebrands (Zawahiri, Bin Laden) to common criminals with the loosest of connections to Islam looking to blow stuff up (those morons from Miami who wanted to bring down the Sears tower) to, perhaps most commonly, folks somewhere between the two poles. And this small form of Islam then becomes (within this marginal area, let me emphasize, not a widely held form of Islam, a tiny but vibrant extremist community within the much broader Muslim faith which I hold dear), a tent of pirates, a communion of thieves and lawbreakers, who have developed any sort of justification using Islamic text and history for their various criminal activities. And that interpretive community, even if small, is alive and well enough to spin out any number of "Islamic" ideas to advance their agendas. The jizya is only the start
What got me thinking about this are repeated reports from Iraq that Christians are being threatened by criminal gangs supposedly linked to Al Qaeda and forced to pay what is known as the jizya. The jizya is the classical era tax imposed on Christians and Jews, allowing them to live within the House of Islam (the mythical, unitary Islamic state that never really existed and that is far removed from the lives of Muslims as a result, but that jurists and our own legal academy seem obsessed with) in peace, and in, it must be said, a subservient position to the broader Muslim polity. Modern Muslims tend to rewrite history in order to make the classical system one of modern toleration and mutual respect, but the jizya makes that a tough sell. Not that I mind historical reinventions to reach salutary results, but still, it is fair to challenge the apologists on whether or not classical Muslims carried with them modern sensibilities concerning diversity of faith. As I see it, like their Christian counterparts, they most assuredly did not, even if they were perhaps not as terrifyingly puritanical as the medieval Church. That's a pretty low standard to hold modern peoples too, though.
In any event, though the Islam bashers might have it otherwise, it's pretty hard to connect a caliphate collecting a tax on minorities to the types of mafioso style collections that these groups supposedly connected to Al Qaeda are engaging in. This is plainly not any sort of tax collection, it is extortion, done by gangs, who are probably involved in oil smuggling, kidnapping for ransom and any other number of activities that they might I guess come up with Islamic reasons for, though I don't think very widely held ones. Nobody really approves of gangs running around collecting "taxes" from random people that of course are not going to finance anything but themselves. The idea that ordinary Iraqis somehow approve of this nonsense is belied by the level of support being driven away from this sort of gangsterism and towards cooperation with the US, even among the Sunni population whose contempt for the "occupier" is quite widespread. Modern Muslims, pious or not, generally don't believe in the jizya and as noted above apologize for it, and certainly I haven't met any who would describe this sort of activity as in any way related to Islam.
But this does raise a separate question. Why is the shari'a so commonly used then as a justification for this criminality? Sure it's a great source of legitimacy when a claim can be made that Muslims find plausible, but surely criminal gangs might be able to find other grounds. Why not just adopt the Mafia term "protection money"? Why not raising funds to oust the occupier from Arab lands? Or just stop legitimizing, kidnap for ransom and get your money. Why does a criminal, at times with dubious connections to religious extremism really, so often resort to Islamic lingo?
I think there are two possible explanations. First, because the shari'a as currently developed in our times lies at times in such tension with secular, national law in so many Muslim states, it becomes a convenient avenue through which criminal activity can seek to retain a patina of legitimacy through law violation in the name of applying shari'a. To be specific, say you want to steal yourself an air conditioner in the upscale Baghdad district of Mansour. Well you could rob your neighbor, that happens a fair amount, but there is the risk of getting caught and then you're just a thief. An alternative is to head to the liquor store, declare yourself a mujahid seeking to restore shari'a in the place of this secular decadence, and trash the place and take his air conditioner. That just seems so much more appealing. And because the shari'a is not the law of the state, because in many cases the law violates shari'a (ie liquor stores, an avenue of legitimacy appears so clearly to the potential criminal).
The other reason I think is because Islamic extremism, of the more contemporary variety, has become so toxic, so violent, so marginal to the nation state and to contemporary forms of order as to resemble some sort of band of ideologically driven pirates. People who just sort of live on violence, chaos, disorder and have made it into some form of ideal state of being. And the thing is, that's going to attract the nihilistic set, regardless of their own ideological commitments. They are more likely to just adopt those commitments, to enable them to live that life.
And so religious extremism, of the Muslim variety, molds itself onto a motley crew of law breakers, who then convert to Islam, and Al Qaeda then becomes a rather diffuse set of characters from ideological firebrands (Zawahiri, Bin Laden) to common criminals with the loosest of connections to Islam looking to blow stuff up (those morons from Miami who wanted to bring down the Sears tower) to, perhaps most commonly, folks somewhere between the two poles. And this small form of Islam then becomes (within this marginal area, let me emphasize, not a widely held form of Islam, a tiny but vibrant extremist community within the much broader Muslim faith which I hold dear), a tent of pirates, a communion of thieves and lawbreakers, who have developed any sort of justification using Islamic text and history for their various criminal activities. And that interpretive community, even if small, is alive and well enough to spin out any number of "Islamic" ideas to advance their agendas. The jizya is only the start
This reminds me of something similar, yet different. I am currently in talks with Muslims in inner-cities about Muslim ownership of liqour stores, lotto slots and other items. Could you possibly tell me just where this became an accepted practice among my fellow brothers? I think they are using the US Constitution alone, but what about the Quran or Sharia? Anything?
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Salams, as always. That is very interesting. Spokesmen for the Taliban used to say that running drugs was not haram because it was part of the broader jihad, weakening the decadent West. So the traditional prohibitions did not apply. There is no real pedigree to such an opinion, by which I mean it doesn't seem to be broadly adopted or based on some reading of foundational text that is widely held, but I have heard it. Still, the general modern feeling tends to be the opposite--that because classical law and foundational text are read to prohibit these sorts of things, that Muslims should not engage in their trade. IN fact, in most of the Middle East, the result is that the Christians sell the booze, and Muslims who drink surreptitiously head over to the Christian areas for a drink. This is sort of the reverse of that, which is interesting.
Thanks for the comment, I like getting Muslim perspectives from areas of the United States that I, as a Muslim in America, am ashamed to say I know very little about.
HAH
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