Al-Qaeda Is A Cult

The article: "Can Utilizing Knowledge of Cults Help Us with Terrorist Groups?" by Steven Hassan

Some of you will surely dispute me on this, the same way people disagree when I insist that there is no such thing as a split infinitive. Some will insist Al-Qaeda is strictly a "terror organization". As with the alleged split infinitive in English, this is really a semantic quibble. I look at it structurally. The Manson Family and Aum Supreme Truth committed some of history's most infamous acts of terrorism, but they have always been seen as what they are: doomsday cults. Structurally, in organization and doctrine, Al-Qaeda is clearly a cult.

The author of the linked article, Steven Hassan, is a former Moonie (Sun Myung Moon/Unification Church cultist) turned cult expert. His experience in a cult allows him to know a cult when he sees it. I decided to write this entry when I read his article and realized that he was saying publicly what I already believed but hadn't told anybody yet (except maybe my mother and brother). He begins: "When is it time to start recognizing that Al Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups are cults?"

What makes a cult? First: an authoritarian organization taken to the totalitarian extreme. Second: a charismatic and all-powerful leader who believes with absolute conviction that he alone can cure the world's ills, if everybody bows down and worships him. Outsiders see him as a power-hungry maniac. This leader is generally called a "messiah" in the Abrahamic religions and a "guru" outside them. Third: a doctrine that is seen as the one and only absolute truth that must be believed in every particular if you want to be saved; those who doubt even one particular are, by the cult's definition, servants of Satan in whatever form the Fiend takes. If you have all three of these structural elements in place, you have a cult.

A cult doesn't have to be religious. Lyndon LaRouche, for example, is generally regarded as the guru of a political cult. There have been many books and articles on the Ayn Rand cult; to this day, the Objectivist movement hasn't fully shaken the accusation of cultism (and the antics of the Ayn Rand Institute seem intended to prove such accusers as Albert Ellis and Murray Rothbard right). Dictators tend to reinforce their power by deliberately building cults around themselves. When a cult actually takes power, it replaces the entire political and social structure of the society with the cult's own totalitarian power system.

Conversely, religious cults have a strong tendency to interfere in politics, sometimes violently. 9/11 should be considered the canonical example. When a cult commits terrorism, don't interpret it as anything but a demand to the people and their leaders for unconditional surrender to the cult and its leader. Aum's 1995 nerve-gassing of the Tokyo subways was intended as a coup d'état; its guru, Shoko Asahara, was trying to overthrow the Japanese government by trying to kill as many civilians as possible to force them to hail him as their messiah. Instead, he and his lieutenants got the death penalty.

Al-Qaeda is an Islamic fundamentalist doomsday cult of the dominionist variety, that is, its eschatology demands that the cult take over the world and exterminate the infidels. Similar Christian cults plague the US, though most of them are still politically powerful enough, through the Republican Party and the TEA party movement, that they don't yet feel the need to declare holy war against the American people (though some Dominionist cults, such as the recently arrested Hutaree, already have). Its messiah, Osama bin Laden, is absolutely convinced that his is the Mahdi, or the Messiah of the End Times. He believes that God commanded him to conquer the world. Actually, Al-Qaeda strongly resembles Aum Supreme Truth in its structure. It has reorganized into an underground cell structure only to keep itself from being annihilated by its ever more numerous and enraged enemies. Its tactics are terroristic because it has only one goal: total world domination, required by its dominionist eschatology.

Steven Hassan is exactly right. In its totalitarian structure, fundamentalist doctrine, and dominionist eschatology, Al-Qaeda is a cult. We already know how to deal with cults. So why don't we deal with them like the cults they are? The answer is that the US government is set up to see them merely as military threats. That's how it handled the Branch Davidians, for example, and it explains the perceived difference between "cult" and "terror organization" — a strictly military classification. A "terror organization" is classified by the US military as an army (of a paramilitary variety), not a mere fundamentalist religious group. But the militarization of the US government's response to practically everything is a subject for another post...

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