DICKEY: Muslim radicals kidnapped tourists in the Philippines just a few days ago. Isn’t it early to declare their fall? KEPEL: No. That shows precisely the reason for the decline. In the 1970s and 1980s, such movements had fairly strong backing among the general population. But from the early 1990s onward, there was a split between radical militants and more moderate groups. What we see now is a sort of terrorist refusal to face reality. They are isolated, engaged in actions that have no popular backing anymore. This latest incident in the Philippines, or Osama bin Laden, or mass killings in Algeria–they’re all part of that same trend.
What about Iran? Iran is the archetype of decline. You have a group of people claiming to embody the former ideals of the Islamic Republic, but they are actually just corrupted mafias that control the state apparatus. The revolutionaries–now called the conservatives–are doing what they can to doctor the results of the elections won by reformers. They’ve banned newspapers. But it’s obvious that the population is totally fed up with the regime.
When was the Islamists’ high-water mark? Without any doubt in 1989. That was the year the Red Army pulled back from Afghanistan–the jihad was victorious. The Islamic Salvation Front won municipal elections in Algeria. Hassan Turabi seized power in Sudan. We had the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The Berlin wall fell. Many people in these movements thought that after the fall of communism, Islamism would be the utopia for the century to come. The Islamist movement wanted to create an Islamic state and implement Sharia, the law of God as taken from the sacred books of Islam.
What happened? Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. The Saudis had given him a hand in his 1980-88 war against Iran. But Saddam tried to use the strength of the Islamist movements the Saudis had supported against the Saudis themselves. He had a lot of people behind him because the petromonarchies are not very popular in the Arab world. But the unforeseen result was that the Islamic movement broke apart from the inside.
When did you first see the end coming? In 1995 we began to understand these movements probably would not win. By 1997 there were clear signs they had lost. The massacre of tourists in Luxor, Egypt, in November ‘97, and the great massacres in Algeria in the fall of 1997–though we still do not know for sure who perpetrated them–showed those movements had lost popular support. And 1997 was the year Khatami [a liberal reformer] was elected in Iran.
For Americans, has the danger passed? Well, the story is one of chickens coming home to roost. The CIA and Saudi Arabia financed jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and that became the breeding ground for most of the radical movements of today. Much of the threat is a matter of accounts being settled [by] veterans of those movements who feel betrayed by their former godfather. But they are deprived of the social base they had in the past. The days of the radical Islamist tide of the 1980s and early ’90s are behind us.
