Omer Ibn Hajaj Pays a Little Visit

Tower of London Bridge

From some internet lounge, he gazes out...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Back on July 18, 2006, I posted an entry on Abu Bakr Naji's 'textbook' for jihad, the title of which has been rendered in English as The Management of Savagery.

Naji's text has been called "Al Qaeda's Playbook" -- a sports metaphor, I take it, making an analogy especially to the football strategies sketched out in the 'playbooks' that coaches put together.

Terrorism as sport? Perhaps a 'sport of nature'? A debased nature, I mean.

But back to the topic. My blog entry on Naji was merely a summary of his text, or part of it (for I couldn't find time to finish reading the entire, very long tome), along with some speculations of mine on what to expect if the playbook's strategies are put into operation. Here were my concluding speculations:

I've been assuming that this jihadist process will be undertaken in areas of what used to be called the Third World, but how might local application work in Europe itself, where demographic trends project large Muslim populations by mid-century? Expect Islamists to press for autonomy in Muslim dominated areas, to demand the right to apply Sharia in their own communities, to put pressure on non-Muslims to move out of Muslim areas, and to use intimidation to destabilize neighboring areas. Expect Islamists also to use radical versions of multiculturalism and local elections for political office as legitimate channels in pushing their agenda.

I think that we see some of this happening in Europe already, and the current riots in the Val-d'Oise department of France might have some connection, but that link remains unclear to me for now. Sometimes rioting 'youth' are just rioting youth.

Perhaps it's all beyond me anyway, or so says an Islamist from an "Internet Lounge" in London on his "first assignment" (according to information provided with the IP Address, which I've saved), who posted this comment:

however some tries, it will always be almost impossible to get a handle on the islamist and where are they really comming from.

Little knowldge of the cultural/historical and social context of the middle eastern political and religious discourse would always be the greatest block for any western mind when struggling with the modern islamic global resistence movement.

my sincere adivce give up lads and try your hands on something else more simple.

This Islamist signed himself as Omer Ibn Hajaj, which doubtless has some meaning that escapes me -- precisely as Ibn Hajaj expected, I presume, since he has me pegged as lacking "the cultural/historical and social context" necessary for understanding what he calls "the modern islamic global resistence movement."

Yeah, what do I know?

I do know that a certain Abu Omar Ben Hajaj of Morocco or Spain wrote in 1073 on agriculture and the proper fertilization of soil for planting sugar cane, as Felix A. Mathews tells us in "Northwest Africa and Timbuctoo" (Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York (1881), page 208). And a certain Amr Ibn Hajaj is mentioned -- in Imam Mohammad Jawad Chirri's Imam Hussein leader of the martyrs (page 13) -- as leading a battle against Imam Hussein, but that would refer to an Ibn Hajaj fighting against a so-called 'rightly guided caliph', which seems an unlikely nom de guerre for our Omer Ibn Hajaj to take upon himself.

So Omer Ibn Hajaj is right, it seems, about my ignorance. In my brief reply, I wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion, Omer Ibn Hajaj. Perhaps I'll try my hand at something simpler, like subatomic physics.

Except that physics is also beyond my ken ... but I sometimes report on that as well (though not for a good long while now).

So, I'll keep on 'striving' in my own spiritual 'struggle' to understand Islamism and its jihad.