BRUSSELS, 21 February 2008 — It was just days after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 that President George W. Bush spoke of a “crusade” against terrorism — a phrase which evoked barbarous campaigns by medieval Christians against Islam.
Bush has long since dropped the expression but the choice of language in his “war on terror” — itself a highly controversial label — remains as heated and divisive an issue as ever.
At a major conference on terrorism in Brussels this week, for example, debate on how to tackle Al-Qaeda was punctuated by repeated arguments over the terms “jihad” and “jihadist”.
Frequently used by Al-Qaeda itself and by counterterrorism specialists and in the media to denote “holy war” against the West, the word jihad signifies for most Muslims a spiritual struggle.
“You can struggle for the elimination of poverty, you can struggle for education ... you can struggle for something very, very positive in life,” said Gen. Ehsan-ul-Haq, former chairman of Pakistan’s joint chiefs of staff.
“Now to call jihadists terrorists is either reflective of a lack of understanding of Islam or it is, I must say, an intended misuse, which again is unfortunate,” he added. “It might have been somewhat excusable in the post-9/11 scenario but I don’t think it is any more.”
Sheikh Muhammad Ali, an Iraqi scholar, told delegates at the annual conference of the East-West Institute think-tank: “Jihad is the struggle against all evil things in your soul... There is no jihadi terrorism in Islam.”
But Nasra Hassan, a Pakistan woman who heads the United Nations information service in Vienna, spoke freely of “jihadist” groups, and Russian counterterrorism official Anatoly Safonov talked about the need to combat two types of jihad — “jihad with the sword and jihad with the word.”
The differences reflect a glaring lack of consensus over how to describe an Al-Qaeda ideology that invokes religion to justify acts of mass murder like the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Muslims are offended by phrases such as “Islamic terrorism” and especially by Bush’s 2006 reference, in the context of an alleged plot to bomb trans-Atlantic planes, to a “war with Islamic fascists”.
On the other hand, some argue such terms are justified to describe religiously-motivated militants. They say that resorting to euphemisms is a form of political correctness that skirts the real issue and absolves Muslims of the responsibility to root out dangerous radicals exploiting their faith.
Officials have become increasingly sensitive to the language issue. In Britain, government ministers prefer to speak about “violent extremism” and security officials use the neutral term “international terrorism” to describe Al-Qaeda activity.
Arguably the hardest linguistic challenge of all is to agree on a definition of terrorism — a hurdle which has prevented the United Nations from agreeing a global convention against it.
