by Koh Choon Hwee

17 June 2011

Professor Avraham Sela is currently the A. Ephraim and Shirley Diamond Chair in International Relations at the Department of International Relations and Director of the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations, both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He began his presentation by raising questions about the dynamics of a state-society relationship, and the factors that make transnational social movements possible. Professor Sela questioned the motivations one might have for leaving one’s country to fight for another group of people and elaborated upon the case of the Afghan-Soviet war. In the 1980s, Arab states and Islamic social groups set aside their differences in nationality, identity and political allegiances to collaborate in support of the jihad (meaning struggle, and is an Islamic term referring to the religious duty of Muslims) against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Thousands of Arab volunteers flocked to Afghanistan and Pakistan, especially Peshawar, which is very close to the Afghan border. When these volunteers would eventually return to their home countries, they earned for themselves the title of an ‘Afghan Arab’, a title of value, prestige and social status. Even after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, people still went as volunteers to Afghanistan as the war with the communist government continued even though the Soviets were gone. Nevertheless, after the war finally ended in Afghanistan, many of the volunteers could not go back to their home countries as they were viewed as threats to the state. Those volunteers who did return to their countries received harsh treatment – some were even executed. Many were invited to Sudan, which they treated as their second hijra, the first hijra being their journey to Afghanistan. (The hijra refers to the migration or journey of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. ) Professor Sela also observed the influence that Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian Sunni Islamic scholar and theologian, had on the evolution of the concept of jihad. He described Azzam’s idea of jihad as the need to fight everywhere and expand to a global jihad. Conclusion Professor Sela argues that the concept of jihad is constructed and modified to fulfill the aims of, in this case, parties with a vested interest in keeping the Soviet invaders out of Afghanistan. He mentioned that there were scholars who believed the US intended to ‘give the Soviet Union their Vietnam War’, as well as Islamic scholars like Azzam who believed in and developed the concept of a global jihad. These various forces shaped and modified the concept of jihad which hence has to be understood historically and contextually, and not as an ahistorical essence.

Abstract:

The article focuses on the complex relationship between the state as a meta-political institution and transnational social movements that reflect popular sentiments and perceptions. Drawing on theoretical approaches of state-society relations, social movements, and transnational networks, the article conceptualizes the case in which Arab states and Islamic social groups set aside their domestic competition over power and identity to collaborate in support of jihad against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Within this context, the authors explore the organizational and ideological modes of this paradoxical collaboration, with particular emphasis on the prewar, wartime, and postwar motivations and operations of thousands of Arab volunteers for jihad, later called Afghan Arabs. The article argues that where states lack legitimacy, fail to establish ideational hegemony in society, and are inherently challenged by sub- and transnational identities, state and social agents operate in an amorphous web of shifting, interest-based relationships, alternating between allying, tolerating, cooperating with, fighting, and even constituting each other. The state-society collaboration to support the Afghan jihad reflected a temporary convergence between the competing logics of statism and transnationalism; while the state and Islamic opposition groups shared an interest during the war, the Soviet withdrawal marked the end of their cooperation and return to open hostility. Nonetheless, this temporary convergence over jihad in remote and lawless Afghanistan ultimately gave rise to new ultra-revolutionary and violent transnational networks – most prominently al-Qa’ida, the foundational core of which comprised Afghan Arabs.