This past week, Muammar al Gathafi (1) called for a “jihad, or holy war, against Switzerland, in an escalation of his vendetta against the country where police once arrested his son” (2). Swiss voters  banned the building of minarets in Switzerland last fall. Minarets are important to Islamic mosques, so effectively, Switzerland said no to mosques, to Islam. While there could be some debate about whether or not the Swiss have a moral right to deny Muslims something architecturally essential to their places of worship, or whether or not it is appropriate to suggest that the response should be a religious struggle against Swiss interests, what I have found myself wondering in response to this story was not about that but something else. Specifically, I’ve been wondering if I (or anyone) could make a structuralist argument about the notion of jihad. If terrorism can be boiled down to its rational choice cause, its cultural cause and its structural cause, then I thought jihad could just as easily be explained under each. And, being a structuralist, for the most part, I decided I wanted to find the structural argument behind what is so obviously on the surface a cultural thing: jihad.

So, I would like to begin with Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab Najdi who, in the late 1700s led a political uprising against the Ottoman Empire, which could be called the hegemon of the Middle East from 1299 to 1922. The specifics of what Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab are something worth a whole discussion of their own, I suppose, but I would like to generalize instead about the purpose, a reaction to outside rule at a time when Imperialism and Colonialism around the globe were starting to meet up with the first inklings of Nationalism. Of course, that last sentence is misleading, treating Imperialism and Colonialism and Nationalism as forces the support themselves, structural forces, but they do not necessarily begin as such in and of themselves. While Global Capitalism is the easy structural force to use in modern times, as you go back in history, it is a little harder to use. But, the argument could be made that colonialism and mercantilism, the kind of trade that involved brute force when locals wouldn’t trade—for example, in the Opium Wars, the British and French used military force to make China open up its markets to more outside trade—and used whatever tools were at its disposal to keep natives down and profits up—that this sort of colonialism and imperialism was the immediate predecessor to what we call global capitalism. And, by Marxist terms, this would put feudalism the next step up in that chain, a more localized form of proto-capitalism. And, going back even further, you come to the point that, as Daniel Quinn puts it so succinctly, we “locked up the food.” The first agricultural revolution made possible food surplus. And, someone had to be in charge of the storage and the distribution, and it came down to the priests—or the administrators of such surpluses invented religion as we know it in cementing and guaranteeing their role in various civilizations; it’s a bit of the chicken and egg debate, really, whether the government administrators and/or priests came first and took upon themselves this role or this role came first and those put in charge of it gained more and more import and prominence as time went on. But, however it went, the point at which we had food surplus altered civilization to the point that tribalism and old ways of doing things were thrown to the wayside, and wherever the more “advanced” peoples have met up with the less “advanced” peoples—those still living without food surplus, without proto-capitalist control—they have forced them, my military means if not socio-cultural influence, to change.

Now, having simplified all of that, I’ll simplify even more: it comes down two forces moving against each other, one the one side that which has become Global Capitalism, the force that began with the agricultural revolution and has changed names and tactics a bit as it has gotten more and more integrated into the lives of every man, woman and child around the globe; and on the other side, going with a romantic view here, a more natural, tribal force, that that forms social groups without bureaucracy, without the sort of leaders we are familiar with in modern times… this smaller force is what turns into nationalism when a people are dictated to by outsiders; it is what leads individuals like Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab to preach a stricter form of Islam as a political force (3). It may be a cultural reaction to a structural force, and there may be underlying that a rational choice response in the leader of such a movement, but if these responses cannot exist without the structural force, then can one not argue that such responses, nationalism and revolution, are in fact structural in cause if not in nature?

So, when al Gathafi speaks about pan-Africanism, when he calls for jihad against Switzerland for turning against Islam, is this simply a cultural thing? For that matter, when referendums come up for vote to ban minarets, to politically act against a religion, is it not that same as when the British put down the Indians in order to profit off their labor and their resources, or when the slave trade exploited Africans for economic progress across the globe? Global Capitalism requires nations to exist on the periphery, to be available for exploitation. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then the direct reactions to such structural forces would seem to be, on some level, themselves structural. Nationalism comes from Colonialism, and jihad and terrorism come from Global Capitalism.

(1) Many different spellings of his name are used, so I’ve decided to use the romanization used on his own webpage, http://www.algathafi.org/.

(2) it is of course worth mentioning that in the West we tend to take jihad to refer to a literal war, a violent effort toward some cause, and this line from the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/25/muammar-gaddafi-libya) seems to take that same tone, especially as it mentions the arresting of his son which, while it did clearly anger al Gathafi when it happened, and did directly lead to significant economic and political responses—the Guardian says that he was “so enraged by his son's two-day detention that he shut subsidiaries of Swiss firms in Libya, had two Swiss businessmen arrested, cancelled most flights between the two states and withdrew about $5bn (£3.2bn) from his Swiss bank accounts.” But, this recent call for jihad doesn’t necessarily stem from that. Still, the Guardian calls it a “vendetta” and defines jihad as the usual “holy war,” a simple shorthand in place of looking into the term, which is more akin, especially in this latest call, to something more like a boycott. Despite our usual Western notion of what jihad entails, al Gathafi has not called for violence against Switzerland.

(3) author Philip K. Dick once argued (though I cannot find the exact quote at the moment) that all religion is essentially a political force, and I would agree in that any religion, as it gains followers, will work toward a pseudo-nationalist end of controlling its political environment to match its religious idealogy, just as the uprising led by Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab sought to do.