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Contemporary Chaos and Muslim Youth:
Getting beyond Defensiveness and

Confronting Our Own Demons
S. Abdallah Schleifer

Why should I, your after-dinner speaker, a time for dessert – for sweetness
– be the bearer of exclusively bad news, of chapters from the contemporary
chaos that seemingly surrounds us. “The Darkness that Surrounds Us,” to
call upon the words of a great American poet Robert Creeley, who, I imag-
ine, never would have imagined that his own troubling personal vision
would become an easily recognized metaphor to be invoked, as I invoke it,
at a gathering of Muslim social scientists. Well, there are some good signs,
like a nice after dinner mint that one discovers tucked just under one’s plate
at the end of the meal, and I will get to them. 

My assumption is that I am really not here to tell you of things you
know, living as you do in the United States … things you know far better
than I, particularly since, as a journalist, I feel on safest ground when I report
to you from personal experience. I cannot and will not even begin to address
the many moments of humiliation and pain that many American Muslims
have experienced in the backlash to 9/11 and the events that have followed,
precisely because I have been personally spared any those experiences. So,
I will address experiences from which I have not been spared. 

I have lived abroad, in what could be called the Arab-Islamic world, for
forty years. And for me, the trajectory of contemporary chaos and the crisis
confronting the Muslim youth has been a long one, long before 9/11. More
than half of those years in the Middle East were spent as a journalist, mainly

S. Abdallah Schleifer is professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the
American University in Cairo, Egypt, and a veteran journalist who has reported and com-
mented on the Middle East for more than three decades. This keynote speech was delivered
at the annual dinner of the 34th AMSS Annual Conference, held on September 30-October 2,
2005, at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.



as a foreign correspondent and producer-reporter for western media. So, my
own sense of a deadly trajectory is conditioned by that.

In 1975-76, I covered the Lebanese civil war as an NBC News
producer-reporter. At that time, I designed a T-shirt for myself and my crew
– a white T-sheet with the NBC peacock on the front, but, more signifi-
cantly, with the word sahafi, which means “journalist,” written out in Arabic
across the back, at the height of one’s shoulder blades. I designed that T-shirt
because I knew at that time that if either the Palestinian and Lebanese Muslim
snipers or the Phalangist Lebanese Christian snipers on the other side of the
barricades were to find one of us in his sniper scope and read sahafi, he would
not fire. It’s true that if somebody in our embattled foreign press corps wrote
a well-publicized story critical of the Phalange or other members of the
Lebanese right wing militia, a rocket or two might be directed, from East
Beirut, at our base in West Beirut: the Hotel Commodore.

Nevertheless, what is significant is that during that one year of some
very nasty fighting, not one member of the foreign press corps was killed for
political reasons. At the time, the prevailing ideologies among the
Palestinian and Lebanese Muslim fighters were highly assorted and often a
blend of such elements as Palestinian nationalism, Arab nationalism, and, of
course, Arab socialism, Maoism, and other variants of Marxism. What they
shared, among other things, was a strong conviction that the American gov-
ernment was an ally of Israel. But we, as journalists, were spared.
Significantly, there was at that time no Islamist current among these predom-
inantly Muslim movements.

Less than a decade later, if a reporter wore that same T-shirt, it would
have been an open invitation for the distinctly Lebanese Shi`ite Islamist
groups to abduct him, hold him hostage, and treat him badly. Two decades
after that, my T-shirt would be an invitation to murder. I’m not talking about
journalists caught in a crossfire or gunned down at a roadblock by stressed-
out soldiers – strangers in a foreign land. I’m talking about being sought out
for beheading, of being consciously targeted. 

Let me go back to an even earlier time. From 1968-70, I covered the
Fedayeen guerrilla campaign against the Israeli occupation, which was
largely fought from the Jordanian East Bank across the river onto the West
Bank. I was reporting for Jeune Afrique, the New York Times, and, eventu-
ally, for NBC News. Again I saw the same assortment of seemingly secular
ideologies. I say “seemingly” because the Fedayeen I hung out with along
the Jordan River or later in southern Lebanon were not just generically
Muslim. They prayed, many fasted even though exempt by virtue of com-

124 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 22:4



bat, and could quote the Qur’an just as easily as they could Mao or Marx, or
to less and less a degree, Gamal Abdul Nasr. 

No doubt, some of their old-fashioned unguided land mines, mostly
intended for Israeli army patrols, would, on occasion, kill Israeli civilians.
But that wasn’t their objective. I felt I was in the company of warriors, not
of men who were convinced they had some sort of “higher right” as mem-
bers of a resistance, be it religious or nationalist, to consciously target and
blow away unarmed civilian men, women, and children. 

One of the groups I covered was the PFLP (the Jabhah Sha`biyah), who
pioneered the hijacking of civilian commercial aircraft, including an Israeli
aircraft. In every case I covered, what was significant was how they went out
of their way not to kill the passengers; taking them off the planes at Dawson
Field or in Cairo before blowing up the planes and even giving them biscuits
and a lecture before releasing them. Or in Zurich, shooting out the wheels of
an El Al plane so it couldn’t take off and then surrendering to the Swiss with-
out harming a hair of any Israeli or other civilians on board. Forgive me, but
thinking about that behavior sort of makes me, astaghfir Allah, nostalgic for
the old seemingly secular Arab Left. (Tragically, the contemporary PFLP has
adopted the terrorist tactics of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.)

But at that time, the PFLP was led by Dr. George Habesh, an evolved
Arab nationalist-turned-Marxist of Palestinian Christian background.
During one of my many interviews with him, he conceded my observation
that his fighters, in contrast to his political cadre, were what I, as an ex-
Marxist and an ex-atheist, would describe as nominal Marxists. These nom-
inal Marxists were men and women who were overwhelmingly, to one
degree or another, believing and practicing Muslims. Indeed, as an ex-
Marxist and as a practicing Muslim, when I was with these fighters I felt that
I was in the company of Muslims. Forty years ago, this meant young male
and female Feyadeen raised in traditional Muslim homes where Islam was
precisely the five pillars and not an ideology. 

I could give you some very dramatic examples of this phenomena and I
shall, insha’Allah, in an extended essay that I hope to publish someday. That
I felt myself to be in the company of Muslims, given their manners, their tra-
ditional courtesies, and even a certain elementary but noticeable spiritual
bearing, has been particularly troubling to me all these years. And that is
because in the decade that followed – the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties
– when I found myself covering radical Islamist militants in Egypt and
Sudan, I would frequently feel, on a psychic plane that took me beyond the
sight of these militants at prayer, that I was back in the party. Well, clearly I
was not. 

Schleifer: Contemporary Chaos and Muslim Youth 125



But what was going on was an existential response on my part to men
who believed and declared that Islam was not just a religion, not just the five
pillars, but that Islam was an ideology. Indeed, these young militants were
pious – but they were pious ideologues, not pietists. And their piety had an
edge, like the combative way they stood for prayer, not like the ordinary
pietists in the madinahs of Morocco, whose spiritual grace and beauty of
gesture and movement had so deeply moved me more than forty years ago,
when I was in flight from ideology.

Now at this moment, for those of you who are wondering what sort of
weird, gut-reaction analysis is being offered up at a gathering of Muslim
social scientists, let me invoke, if not necessarily, in my defense, the name
of Dr. Hassan Turabi. I first interviewed him when he was serving in Jafaar
Numeiry’s government as Sudan’s attorney general. I was so intrigued by his
obvious knowledgability that after my camera crew took leave, I told Dr.
Turabi of my curious existential response, as an ex-Marxist, in the company
of militants from his own movement. Turabi laughed and said that I was not
alone, that even though his movement, the Islamic Front (the Jebhah) had far
different slogans and a far different program than that of the Sudanese
Communist party, somehow, out in the countryside the traditional Sudanese
farmers couldn’t tell the difference. And, again laughing, he said that his
opponents from the Ummah and the Ittihad parties would tell the farmers
that the reason why they couldn’t tell the difference was because there was
no difference.

Of course, my own personal apolitical – if not anti-political – perspec-
tive was so close and yet so different from the Islamists of Sudan and Egypt.
My flight from Marxism was as much a flight from revolutionary ideology
in general as it was a flight from a specific ideology. It was a flight from
Leninist utopianism, for I would argue that nearly all modern revolutionary
ideology is Leninist in assumption and method. I was in flight from the
vision of a society that could be truly and collectively perfected by organ-
ized collective struggle, be it the primordial classless society or, now for rad-
ical Islamists, a pure righteous caliphate leading the ummah as a redeemed
global collectivity … a utopia so righteous that it justified or moralized (in
religious terms) whatever means it chose to employ.

Many of the young Islamists I met were directly or indirectly in flight
from what was perceived, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, as the failure of
Arab nationalism and, eventually, even of Marxist socialism. Not a spiri-
tual failure, but a worldly one. The answer for them was not my answer –
the rejection of ideology – but rather a search for a more viable ideology.

126 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 22:4



And this was reinforced by the profound misconception that Israel had tri-
umphed in 1967 because it was a religious society and a religious state, in
contrast to the supposed fallen or irreligious Arab societies at that time.

But to return to Hassan Turabi. He did not end that particular conversa-
tion just with a joke. He went on to observe that as an ex-communist I had
to acknowledge, on the other hand, that it was his movement, whether it was
called the Islamic Front or the Muslim Brotherhood, which had stopped the
communists in the Sudanese universities, and not the Ummah or the Ittihad,
the two political parties with ties to two rival traditional religious communi-
ties in Sudan whose rivalry dated back more than one hundred years. I con-
ceded the point and noted that in Pakistan, where I had been based to cover
the second Indo-Pakistani war and the military’s post-war fall from power,
it was the Islamist party that never seemed to get more than 15 percent of the
vote in those days, just like the Sudanese movement, which was far more
effective in blocking communist control of the universities than the more
secular and relatively traditional Muslim League. 

It took me a couple of decades to look back at Leninist revolutionary
movements, be they left-wing or right-wing, be they Marxist or be they
right-wing Leninism (Fascism), and to try and figure it out. My conclusion
is that on an even playing field, secular or clerical fascism will always
defeat communism.

Let me also note parenthetically, and to avoid the danger of indiscrimi-
nate catch-all definitions of Islamism, that even Marxism at its most histor-
ically significant time was no more monolithic than what I am alluding to as
Islamism. Indeed, the great victims of Stalinism in Eastern Europe after
World War II were the relatively non-utopian, non-Leninist Marxist political
and trade union movements characterized as socialist, or democratic social-
ist or social democratic, just as this same democratic Marxist current would
be, in the cold war years, one of the most effective forces against the com-
munist parties of Western Europe. Nor should any analysis ignore the par-
ticularly important development of post-Islamist political movements in the
Muslim world, most significantly the current governing party of Turkey, as
well as elements associated with the Dawaa Party in Iraq that are just as
responsive to what one now describes as democracy, but what we could just
as easily call the “rule of law” and the decencies of a constitutional political
order.

Indeed, one of the good signs that I promised to allude to earlier is the
imperative, felt by both many Islamist as well as all traditional Muslims, to
denounce terrorism unambiguously … to make it increasingly clear in a

Schleifer: Contemporary Chaos and Muslim Youth 127



series of declarations over the past year that nothing can justify the inten-
tional targeting of unarmed civilians, and that which has been described by
extremist Islamists as jihad is, in fact, hirabah, a classic Islamic legal cate-
gory that can best be translated as “terrorism.” 

In his critically important essay “Domestic Terrorism in the Islamic
Legal Tradition,” which appeared in The Muslim World (fall 2001),
Sherman Jackson noted that in the classic legal literature on hirabah, it is
the elements of intimidation, of the terrorist spreading fear and a sense of
helplessness in the community, that are central. Jackson quotes the eleventh-
century Spanish Maliki jurist Ibn `Abd al-Barr, who defines the agent of
hirabah as 

Anyone who disturbs free passage in the streets and renders them unsafe
to travel, striving to spread corruption in the land by taking money, killing
people or violating what God has made it unlawful to violate is guilty of
hiraba … be he a Muslim or a non-Muslim, free or slave, and whether he
actually realizes his goal of taking money, or of killing or not.

And it is clear, in his extensive review of all of the classic legal sources
from all of the schools of Islamic law, that the very impersonality of hirabah,
of terrorism, in which there is invariably no personal relationship between
the terrorist and his/her victim, is what makes it more criminal than homi-
cide. And in the eyes of the classical jurists, this is why the terrorist deserves
to be sentenced to death regardless of the status of the victim, whether he/she
is a Muslim or a non-Muslim. 

There have been many declarations this past year from representatives
of the Muslim community condemning terrorism. What is particularly per-
tinent is that it is precisely in the juridical part of the extensive literature
of traditional Islam that Muslim thinkers have found a very precise, very
applicable, and unsentimental definition as well as an unambiguous con-
demnation of terrorism.

That is why, in my opinion, the Amman Initiative called last spring
[2005] by Jordan’s King Abdallah II was so important. The conference made
manifest by the Amman Initiative was organized on the king’s behalf by the
Aal al Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, an institute that embraces both the
ulema in the most classical sense and contemporary Muslim intellectuals of
various perspectives. Together, the ulema and the intellectuals signed off on
a document that affirmed the mutual recognition of all classical schools of
Islamic law, be they Sunni or Shi`ah, and condemned all attempts to takfir
Muslims – a doctrine that allows one Muslim to classify another Muslim as

128 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 22:4



an apostate worthy of being slaughtered. This is the doctrine that has been
used in an attempt to justify terrorism, in Islamic terms, within Egypt since
the mid-1970s and now is the basis for the almost daily mass murder of
Shi`ahs in Iraq.

This declaration, which embraced fatwas by the sheikh al-Azhar, the
mufti of Egypt, and the rector of al-Azhar University; Grand Ayatullah
Sayyid Ali Sistani and many other outstanding Shi`ah ulema in Iraq and
Iran; muftis in Jordan, Oman, and other Sunni countries; as well as by an
officer of the Fiqh Council of Saudi Arabia and Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
struck at the very roots of theologically justified terrorism. By mutually rec-
ognizing all Sunni and Shi`ah schools of law and by insisting that only those
scholars who have mastered the traditional legal disciplines within their
respective schools have the authority to issue fatwas, the mainstream ulema
and Muslim intellectuals who participated in Amman also explicitly
declared that Islam is not a do-it-yourself store-front religion.

Why I find the Amman Initiative particularly significant is precisely
because, like the unsentimental legal prescriptions against terrorism derived
from the Qur’an and the Sunnah by the ulema of the tenth to the twelfth cen-
turies, the Amman Initiative, which clearly reflects a traditionally main-
stream Muslim perspective if not necessarily an overwhelmingly popular
perspective, illustrates the naïveté of those usually but not exclusively non-
Muslim journalists and Washington think tankers – I have a Rand Report
specifically in mind – who call for a Protestant reformation of Islam. Well,
if we appreciate that at its most radical or self-defining the Protestant refor-
mation was based on the legitimacy of individual interpretation of the holy
text outside of an ongoing tradition and the hierarchy that interpreted that
tradition, then we are now living through a radical reformation, one equiva-
lent, let us say, to Cromwell’s regicide and the Puritan dictatorship, his des-
ecration of holy places, and mass murder of the Irish or of the One Hundred
Years War for that matter. And, the most outstanding reformer in that historic
context is none other than Usama bin Laden.

Let me put it another way. Madrassahs have been providing basic edu-
cation, literacy, and sacred texts to otherwise uneducated youths in the
Muslim world for hundreds of years without producing terrorists or suicide
bombers. Indeed, thanks to the madrassahs, an ordinary or not-so-ordinary
Egyptian prior to the Egyptian revolution could live out his youth as a play-
boy or even a criminal. But at a moment of introspection and spiritual yearn-
ing, say at middle age, he/she had the memorized Qur’an implanted in
his/her soul to fall back on, thanks to this very system that, in Egypt, was the

Schleifer: Contemporary Chaos and Muslim Youth 129



equivalent of the first year or two elementary school for those who never
went beyond it. In Indonesia, the largest and most tolerant Muslim move-
ment is itself a product of that country’s extended version of the madrassah
and is led by traditional scholars, not ideologues.

So the problem isn’t the madrassah system, but what happened to the
madrassahs – what extremist doctrines and what sort of funding by what
donors made their way into established madrassahs or provided the
dynamic for many, many new ones. 

If many liberal- and neo-conservative-inclined journalists or think
tankers haven’t gotten it, the very secular western left certainly has. As a
result, it has formed close alliances, particularly in England, with both pro-
Palestine and anti-Iraqi war groups, both of which have stimulated that sense
of grievance that surreptitiously becomes a substitute for Muslim identity
and that, if scratched at enough like any sore, becomes the basis of that
moral equivalence that has allowed such an ambiguous response from with-
in much of the Muslim community in the wake of the second intifadah, 9/11,
and even before 9/11. Think of the first bombing of the New York Trade
Center in 1993 and the guarded response of many in the Muslim commu-
nity to its perpetrators.

One of the reasons why I have taken solace in these terrible times from
a spate of declarations over the past two years, from CAIR’s refreshingly
unambiguous “Not in Our Name” and, most clearly, the Spanish ulema’s
condemnation in clear Qur’anic terms of radical Islamist terrorism in gen-
eral and Bin Laden and al-Qaeda in particular and by name, is because the
phenomena to which these condemnations are reacting – Madrid and
London in particular, and Iraq in what is now a daily occurrence – is over-
coming the lack of clarity that has allowed communal grievance to displace
religious morality.

Over the past few months, I briefly participated in an American Muslim
online debate about the importance of these declarations. Much of the result-
ing discourse reflected the sort of defensiveness and moral equivalence that
we, and in particular Muslim youths, must transcend. This current of thought
is very prevalent among us, as if all of the sins or crimes of everyone else are
valid reasons for Muslims not to continuously denounce any act of terrorism
committed in the name of Islam. And perhaps even more unfortunate, we
can believe that these injustices, committed by others, are reasons for us, as
Muslims, not to attempt to understand what it is in many Muslims’ modern
understanding of Islam that allows such crimes to take place and be justified
in its name. 

130 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 22:4



From 9/11 until recently, many of our community spokespersons would
insist that these crimes were the work of a tiny minority that had no signifi-
cant support or sympathy among Muslims, and that this terrorism had noth-
ing to do with Islam. But one could argue that, to the contrary, the willing-
ness to takfir Muslims and then murder them and then justify the murder of
whoever (be they Muslim or non-Muslim) does not agree with whatever
utopian vision one is ready to kill for, has afflicted Islam since its earliest
years. I refer, of course, to the Kharijites, who murdered the caliph Imam Ali
and put women and children, as well as non-combatant men, to the sword
because of a utopian doctrine. This, the first and most grievous heresy in
Islam, was suppressed and universally repudiated by the ulema in the earli-
est centuries, but was revived as an operational arm for radical Islamist rev-
olutionary ideology in the mid-1960s and at a time when it had little or no
reference to Palestine, Iraq, or Chechnya. 

That is why we must reject the insistence, that echoes within all of us,
on finding only those “roots and causes” of terrorism that are exclusively
outside of a particular way in which some, perhaps even many, Muslims
understand Islam. Is the “cause” colonialism? Amir Abd al-Qader al-Jaziri
warred for years in the mid-nineteenth century against one of the cruelest
strains of European colonialism – the French conquest of Algeria – without
committing one atrocious act. On the contrary, he punished his own troops
if they committed atrocities in retaliation for those committed by French
troops, atrocities that are now par for the course among Muslim terrorists.
And this same Amir Abd al-Qader, exiled by the French to Damascus, inter-
vened with his own corps of armed bodyguards to save the lives of Syrian
Christians threatened by a murderous Muslim and Druze mob in 1860, a
mob responding – no doubt, to legitimate economic grievances – as some
sort of moral open season for mass murder.

Perhaps the answer, I would suggest, and particularly to Muslim young
people, is that Amir Abd al-Qader, who was unquestionably a great warrior,
was above all a noble warrior who considered Islam above all as a personal
path to a spiritual reality and not as a religion emptied of spiritual content
and then turned into a modern revolutionary ideology in which utopian ends
justify any means. Indeed, the duties – sources or imperatives of social jus-
tice – toward one’s family, neighbors, and, by analogy, one’s nation all stem
from that personal struggle on that personal path to God that characterizes
the greater jihad.

Traditional Islam, be it in the Indian subcontinent or the Arab world, was
once perfumed by an inner spirituality. In the United Kingdom, far more

Schleifer: Contemporary Chaos and Muslim Youth 131



than is the case in the United States, Muslim young people have two options:
to either hold onto a traditional Islam that was entirely enveloped in an
immigrant ethnic idiom, particularly language, dress, and ethnic insularity,
that was inconceivable for most of them for they are precisely that – British
young people of Muslim faith, and the language, dress, and cultural insular-
ity are foreign and, when imposed, embarrassing. The alternative was to
assimilate into the prevailing mass youth culture that, in the United
Kingdom, tends to be particularly mindless, promiscuous, drug and alcohol
afflicted, and often criminal. Now this narrow prism has been increasingly
radicalized by grievance-obsession. We must recognize that a grievance,
however real, in fact particularly if it is real, can become self-defeatingly
obsessive. Every successful immigrant group or successful sector of an
immigrant group that has come to America and Europe, both Muslim or
non-Muslim, seems to understand this intuitively.

So, radical versions of Islam offered an alternative, one that combined
the fashionable left-wing identity politics of the past few decades with a
Muslim identity that claimed a false universality … a false universality in its
denial that all living and worthwhile human culture, Muslim or not, beyond
the most basic religious rites and law, is invariably local. The alternative that
was not particularly available was traditional Islam, with its core of spiri-
tual priorities, enshrined and expressed in our Anglo-American English lan-
guage and in those strands of Anglo-American culture – one thinks of
Shakespeare, the Lake poets, and the school of politeness and good manners
that is massively endangered, but still alive and easily assimilated into an
Anglo-American Islam – a process that has occurred on a limited individual
middle-class basis in Britain and even more so in the more educated, more
middle-class second-generation as well as the convert Muslim communities
in the United States.

And in a world of overreaching materialism and militant secularism that
could be described as fundamentalist, this evolving British traditional Islam
and its American equivalent must find true allies. I suggest that those true
allies are to be found among those faith communities – Christian and Jewish
– ready to acknowledge our common Abrahamic origins.

132 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 22:4