How to Win a Cosmic War: Confronting Radical Islam
By Reza Aslan
William Heinemann £18.99, 256 pages
FT Bookshop price £15.19

Hasib Hussain, the youngest of four British Muslim suicide bombers who attacked the London transport system in the summer of 2005, was recruited to global jihad at a drop-in centre for teenagers in a grimy suburb of Leeds.

The 18-year-old was “just a normal lad”, according to the archetypal reaction of relatives everywhere when confronted with the inexplicable outrages of which alienated youth is capable.

According to Reza Aslan, in his second book on Islam, Hussain’s personal and cultural grievances led him to join a global war perpetrated by those who see it as the earthly reflection of a cosmic battle between good and evil. “It is an identity formed through the deliberate linking of local and global grievances – both real and perceived – to create a single, shared narrative of suffering and injustice,” Aslan writes. “And only by severing that link, and disrupting the narrative, can Global Jihadism be defeated.”

In How to Win a Cosmic War, Aslan, an Iran-born Muslim American scholar, reminds us that Islam does not have a monopoly on murderous zealotry, a phenomenon that has produced equally inglorious manifestations in Judaism and Christianity. However, after the 9/11 attacks on the US, and bombings in London and Madrid, terrorism became inextricably associated with Islam. The attacks magnified a historical prejudice in the west that the religion of Mohammed was inherently aggressive and malevolent.

The author shows, however, that the jihadists reject the essential teachings of Islam by branding fellow Muslims who oppose them as apostates deserving of the same punishment as infidels.

In the moral panic that followed 9/11, a war on terror was unleashed that focused on Islam but failed to distinguish between al-Qaeda and other groups that declared themselves Muslim and employed terrorist tactics. The US and other governments adopted tactics that served jihadist recruitment by fostering fear of Muslims and grouping all their enemies in the Islamic world in the same wastebasket.

Organisations such as Hamas, Hizbollah, and the clerical regime in Iran were lumped together with al-Qaeda. The architects of the war of terror embraced a mirror image of the jihadist philosophy by adopting a vocabulary of “good and evil” and declaring that those who are not with us are against us.

A siege mentality was fostered by a terrorism industry of political, military, economic, media and religious interests that sought to convince Americans that “terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, with virtually any weapons”, Aslan writes, quoting a Homeland Security manifesto.

The events of 9/11 were seen as vindicating the predictions of theorists such as the late Samuel Huntington, who said the future would be defined by a clash of civilisations, not nations.

The strategy of defining all Muslim opponents as part of a monolithic enemy overlooked the reality that jihadist warriors hold in particular contempt those, such as Hamas and Hizbollah, who engage in politics as part of their nationalist struggles.

Aslan argues for a distinction to be made between jihadists and Islamists: the former are engaged in a struggle with no coherent earthly goal, while the latter use Islam as the focus for struggles to redress what are often legitimate grievances.

“Today, Islamism remains a nationalist ideology,” Aslan writes, “whereas most jihadists want to erase all borders, to eradicate all nationalities, and to return to an idealised past of religious communalism.”

Osama bin Laden and his fellow ideologues nevertheless use political grievances – the occupation of Palestinian territory, the invasion of Iraq – to draw recruits to their cosmic struggle. When such grievances are conflated with the alienation of Muslim youth, the result is people such as Hussain.

“Addressing these grievances may not satisfy Osama bin Laden and his fellow cosmic warriors, whose sights are set beyond this world,” Aslan writes. “But it will bring their cosmic war back down to earth, where it can be confronted more constructively.”

Aslan sees cause for optimism in the election of Barack Obama, who gave his first interview as US president to an Arabic news channel in which he said: “My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that Americans are not your enemy.”

Aslan says the election of a man who takes pride in having Muslim relatives spells the end of a “clash of civilisations” mentality that had partitioned the world into imaginary categories. “Because in the end, there is only one way to win a cosmic war: refuse to fight it.”

Harvey Morris is the FT’s UN correspondent