Rogo is dead but his ideas are the real threat to stability in East Africa

Many people express surprise when they learn that the first suicide bombing recorded in Somalia occurred only in September 2006.

Because of the instability in Somalia, many Kenyans have come to imagine that the country and violent, radical Islamism are birds of a feather.

That’s not true. In fact, the type of Islam that has been practised in Somalia and East Africa for hundreds of years is the peaceful, moderate type.

The radicalism of Al-Shabaab and their enablers is a recent development, brought to these lands by radicals from countries such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations.

As the fight against these extremists is now clearly our top national security issue, we must invest more in understanding the nature of the challenge we face and isolating the very small minority who must be tackled head on.

This approach will also ensure that the wider Muslim community does not feel under siege due to the acts of a few radicalised malcontents – of whom Sheikh Aboud Rogo was undoubtedly a leader.

There are essentially two types of Islam within the Sunni strain of Islam which is the dominant one in Kenya. Sufism, which is the strain that has dominated in East Africa, encourages tolerance and generally frowns on violence.

Salafi Jihadism, which was the type that Aboud Rogo preached and supported, is another kettle of fish. It is intolerant and encourages war against non-believers.

It tells Muslims that they are not good Muslims if they live peacefully in a state where Sharia is not the law of the land. 

It offers Muslim minorities two options: to fight and topple the state (Hence Rogo’s calls in his mosque for the assassination of President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila
Odinga and for the killing of Muslims working for the government) or, like Prophet Muhammad, they should emigrate elsewhere.

This is a reasonably marginal interpretation of Islam. To Salafis, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood which recently took power in Egypt is sinful because Salafi Jihadists do not believe in taking part in elections.

These people are, thankfully, still a small minority in Kenya. Things must be kept that way. But this requires a sophisticated approach to tackling radicalism in the country.

A recent International Crisis Group report charted the rise of Salafi Jihadism in East Africa noting that clerics from Saudi Arabia (the chief exporter of radicalism) sent
millions of dollars to radical groups in the country beginning in the 1970s. This coincided with the Gulf country’s emergence as a major oil exporter.

This money was primarily channelled to NGOs purporting to be promoting social causes and found its way into the coffers of radical Sheikhs.

Those were the seeds from which emerged Al-Shabaab and, before it, Al Ittihad Islamia. The failure to tackle this wave of radicalisation was a big mistake. It should not be repeated.

The government and Muslim leaders all have a role in ensuring that generations of youth are not lost pursuing a path which only leads to disaster. The country must also have an adult conversation about what to do with the likes of Rogo.

Not too long ago President Obama took the unprecedented step of ordering the killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi after receiving legal advice that it is “entirely lawful for the United States to target high-level leaders of enemy forces, regardless of their nationality, who are plotting to kill Americans both under the authority provided by Congress in its use of military force in the armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces as well as established international law that recognises our right of self-defence”.

Instead of skirting around these difficult issues we should have a similar debate in Kenya and exhaustively examine how to strike a balance between protecting lives of innocents from radicals and the dangers inherent in granting extra-judicial powers to governments like the Kibaki administration which appears to be handling security on auto-pilot.

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