Quote Originally Posted by slapout9 View Post
Galula said that are several types of insurgencies of which, a religious insurgency is one type. I can't remember the page number but it is near the front of his book.

The radical insurgency inside Islxam started in 1979 with the seizure of the holy mosque in Mecca and everything else we see today is an extension of that event.
Slap, religion is one of the primary types of ideology employed in insurgency, but remember, Galula was a counterinsurgent, not an insurgent. He looked at the problem through the biased eyes of a foreign colonist. He grew up a Frenchman in Africa, and in his book he also said that the insurgency was never against France, only against the ineffective colonial regimes France had put in power. In short, for all of the good in Galula, he was just a man with bias and opinions just like you and I. I think he missed the ball on that particular insight.

As to the Middle East, the political revolts of the modern era against governance began long before 1979. Look to the Constitutional Revolutions in Turkey and Iraq in 1906-08; or the broad resistance energy against the Ottomans that Lawrence tapped into across the Arabian Peninsula and Levant in WWI. By 1979 the concerns with the how Saudi governance was heading were growing. One cannot separate governance from religion in the Middle East, but what you are pointing to are illegal challenges to governance.

But I could be missing something. Lets find an example purely about religion in deed, not just message, and lets discuss.