A History of the Middle East (63 page)

In the short term, the Islamization of divorce, clothing and family planning, coupled with the focus on holy struggles abroad, assuaged Islamist pressure, but longer term it fuelled their cause. Islamists led the crowds chanting angry denunciations not just of Sharon, but of their own passive leaders. Ten years after the outbreak of
jihadi
Arab revolts, the Middle East had become a more monochrome if angry place. As in Ottoman times, a person’s religious sect, rather than their
state, was their badge of identity, and as the swathe of veils was intended to prove, Sunni revivalists were again the ascendant group.

The Globalization of Islamic Jihad

There was another reason for mistaking the lull in local Islamist violence for victory, namely that the movement had been less crushed than chased abroad, where as in the early 1980s it set its sights on confronting a superpower. In the throws of the Afghan struggle in 1987, an imaginative young
mujahid
, Usama bin Laden, revealed his night-time ‘vision’ of the re-creation of an Islamic superstate. The Prophet Muhammad had defeated the two great empires of the day: first Persia, then Byzantium, he told his fellow brothers-in-arms; the Arab Afghans would overcome the Soviets, and then set their sights on America. Such foresight marked a radical departure from the norms of
jihadi
ideology. Hitherto, Qutb’s followers had focused on the local overthrow of their own leaders, or ‘Pharaohs’, and their replacement with a puritan Islamic state. Evincing parallels with President Bush’s speeches, bin Laden postulated the creation of a new (Islamic) world order in which Muslims were either with him, or against Islam.

Had the Arab Afghans been integrated in their homelands following their victory over the Soviets, bin Laden’s reinterpretation of
jihad
might have been no more than the reverie of a dreamer. As it was, by 1993 the Arab veterans had dispersed to the four corners of the earth, where global reach fed the global idea. Hundreds of fighters found refuge in the poor warring peripheries of the Arab world, in Somalia and Sudan. In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Salih recruited returning Afghan veterans in another anti-Marxist
jihad
against his leftist rivals in the former Soviet-backed state of South Yemen. But perhaps the largest number, an estimated 12,000, quietly slipped home to Saudi Arabia. Among them was bin Laden. He arrived in the kingdom shortly before the 1991 Gulf War, in time to watch Western forces of ‘unbelievers occupy Islamic soil’.
He offered to mobilize his Arab Afghans to fight the Iraqi threat instead, and then, when spurned, returned in a huff to Afghanistan in spring 1991. Once again, he was chased out, this time by Afghans, who having rid the country of Soviet troops were less than enthused at the prospect of accommodating an arrogant foreign militia. He spent the next four years in Sudan, evading Arab secret police and an assassination attempt in his local mosque, before US and Saudi pressure persuaded Sudan to expel him. By now, his peregrinations had begun to echo those of Imru al-Qays, the wandering, mythical king of Arabian epic forced out of his ancestral valley into the harsh world of Byzantine–Persian superpower politics. In 1996, he arrived in Afghanistan as a guest of the newly ascendant Taliban and set about using his family wealth to revive al-Qaeda and build what one of his foot-soldiers later described as a ‘
jihad
camp for the world’.

The Muslim periphery was not the only sanctuary for
jihadi
exiles. Britain’s reputation as a haven for foreign opposition groups, and for lax asylum laws, also made it an attractive destination. The first to arrive were injured Afghan veterans sent to Britain for rest and recuperation. But many mujahideen had grave misgivings about resorting to infidels to salvage their Islamic mission. In the summer of 1993, twelve
jihadi
scholars, including the Jordanian spiritual mentor of radical Islam, Abu Qatada, met in Peshawar to debate the question of whether Islamic law permitted a Muslim to seek asylum in a non-Muslim land. A few, including a preacher who had journeyed from London, argued that a non-Muslim society would tempt the true Muslim from the righteous path. But a majority consented, citing the precedent of the Prophet Muhammad’s flight to the then Christian haven of Abyssinia. ‘There’s no difference between British and Arab governments,’ Abu Qatada is said to have argued. ‘None of them are Islamic. As a Muslim, you must go where you feel secure.’

Following this
fatwa
, or legal opinion, Arab Afghans flocked to London, initially flying British Airways direct from Karachi to London, until their false passports raised the suspicions of the British immigration authorities and they had to travel via the Gulf and
Sudan instead. They were the latest in an incoming wave of Arab political émigrés who by the 1980s had turned Britain into an Arab media centre free from the clutches of the Middle East’s censors. Following suit, Arab Afghans dubbed London ‘the intellectual capital of Islamic Jihad’, and a plethora of Islamic groups, including bin Laden’s, set up their media operations in London, and indulged in the oxygen of publicity afforded by the presence of so many Arab newspapers and satellite channels. So important was London as a
jihadi
centre that the records of bin Laden’s satellite phone used as evidence in American court cases showed that by 1998 the bulk of his calls were made to Britain. In the mid-1990s, the Arab Afghans were joined by a fresh influx of Islamist politicians and fighters on the run from Middle Eastern governments. To the fury of Arab leaders, Britain dismissed official Egyptian, Saudi, Yemeni, Tunisian and Algerian requests for extradition as interference in its liberal traditions of asylum. But there is little doubt that at times London served as a logistical support base, as well as a soapbox, for the armed Islamist struggle, and some asylum seekers continued to illegally exit and re-enter Britain on false passports.

Western exile had a profound impact on the
jihadi
movement. It broadened its horizons and spawned a fresh formulation of its mission. For guerrillas in Egypt and Algeria,
jihad
had been essentially a local armed struggle, a second war of national liberation. For the exiles in London,
jihad
was global, ideological and curiously Anglocentric. They saw individual Arab rulers not as towering Pharaohs, but as American puppets, and their rampant repression and corruption as a symptom of a larger evil, namely Western neo-imperialism. Their target audience was not a nation-state, but the worldwide
umma
, or nation, of one billion Muslims, and their goal was to spark a global Islamic rebellion. The new ideology sparked a bitter doctrinal rift between the nationalist
jihadis
and bin Laden’s ‘cosmopolitans’. The roots of the dispute dated back to the rout of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, when bin Laden had opposed the doctrine of
takfir
, or excommunication, and the declaration of a
jihad
in Muslim countries. In an echo of his Muslim
Brotherhood roots, he argued that
jihad
was only legitimate when waged against non-Muslim rulers in the
dar al-kharb
(‘land of war’). Former brothers-in-arms denounced him as a renegade
jihadi
, and one group tried to assassinate him.

The internal feud flared into the open in 1998, when to the shock of many of his followers, the exiled chief of Egyptian
jihad
, Ayman al-Zawahari, announced an alliance with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. The ideological partnership was signed with a joint
fatwa
declaring war on the United States and sealed with the marriage of the daughter of Zawahari’s deputy, Muhammed Ataf, to bin Laden’s son. Their
fatwa
called on all Muslims to ‘fulfil their duty [
sic
] to kill Americans and their allies’ – civilians and soldiers alike – ‘in order to liberate the al-Aqsa mosque and the Holy Mosque [Mecca] from their grip’. Entitled ‘Declaration of
Jihad
against Crusaders and Jews’, it listed three
casus belli
: the US bases in the Arabian peninsula where ‘the crusader armies are spreading like locusts’, US ‘dismemberment and destruction’ of Iraq, and finally American backing for ‘the petty state of the Jews’. The global movement wound up operations in Egypt, and opened new fronts against the non-Muslim
dar al-kharb
in Chechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines and Bosnia.

The depiction of Western powers as wolves in sheep’s clothing struck a chord in the region. Following Desert Storm, the United States consolidated its military presence on a scale not seen in the region since the days of the British Empire. The US maintained it was protecting the Gulf states from the twin threats of Iran and Iraq, but the continuous footage of Western attacks on Palestine, Iraq and later Afghanistan convinced many that their supposed ally was in fact a foe. Nowhere was this view as deeply held as in Saudi Arabia, where the new prevailing mood of anti-Americanism attracted the interest of a powerful caucus of senior royals, apparently including that of Crown Prince Abdullah. Even during the Gulf War, he was reported to have expressed regret that his soldiers were being sent to fight Iraq, rather than joining Iraqis to ‘reclaim our usurped rights in Palestine’.

Washington’s failure to appreciate the resentment engendered by
its military presence in Saudi Arabia showed a distinct lack of historical perspective. Only a generation earlier, neighbouring Yemenis had fought to expel British troops from Aden, and the mood was as militant in Saudi Arabia. For centuries, the ruling puritanical Wahhabi sect had defended the al-Sauds from outside predators, and their zeal had ensured that Saudi Arabia was the only Arab state to escape European colonization. The Western thirst for oil and the heady pace of modernization made their task all the more urgent. Through their control of the kingdom’s education, media and mosques, ultra-orthodox prelates raised Saudi youth on a theological diet that taught good Muslims to combat
kufr
, or infidel, forces. Even in kindergarten, children learnt to recite the saying attributed to the second caliph, Omar: ‘I will purify the Arabian peninsula of Jews and Christians.’

A showdown between the opposing forces was only a matter of time. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, a hundred prominent preachers presented King Fahd with the first in a series of increasingly vehement petitions attacking his ‘illegitimate foreign alliances’. ‘What is happening in the Gulf is part of a larger Western design to dominate the whole Arab and Muslim world,’ warned one of their most prominent preachers, Safar al-Hawali, in a taped 1991 sermon for which he was jailed. The authorities oscillated between intermittent crackdowns in deference to their American allies and forbearance, noting that acceptance of a Western military presence had led to the downfall of Arab monarchies in Egypt, Iraq and Libya. In 1994, bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship, and soon after hundreds of his followers were imprisoned. Bin Laden replied with an open letter to King Fahd in which he admonished the Saudi leader for marrying his ‘destiny to that of the crusader Western governments’. In late 1995 a car bomb destroyed the US military training mission in the centre of Riyadh: the opening shot in his war on America.

Islamist guerrillas in Algeria and Egypt had both attacked foreigners as part of their local armed struggle; bin Laden’s
jihad
was the first to make them its primary objective. His targets were initially either
military or official, audaciously simple and spectacularly high-profile. In 1996 a truck bomb devastated an American military barracks in the eastern Saudi city of Khobar, injuring or killing nearly 400 Americans (although Washington pinned the blame on Iranian-backed Shiite groups), and two years later the same method was used to destroy two US embassies in East Africa in simultaneous attacks on 7 August 1998. Saudi political columnists noted that the operation coincided with the eighth anniversary of the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia. For the first time, Washington hit back at bin Laden, lobbing cruise missiles at Afghan caves and Khartoum, which did little to damage al-Qaeda but wrecked a Sudanese plant manufacturing medicines. Two years later, al-Qaeda packed a motorboat with explosives and rammed it into the side of an American destroyer, USS
Cole
, docked off the southern Yemeni port of Aden. In what bin Laden interpreted as a sign of success, the United States abandoned the Yemeni refuelling depot for its Fifth Fleet and pulled its military personnel out of Aden.

Over the following months, Western expatriates in the peninsula continued to fall victim to small-scale attacks inspired but not planned by al-Qaeda. By now Washington was fully appraised of the threat, and bin Laden was named as the United States’ most wanted terrorist. Under American pressure his cadres were chased from Yemen, Sudan and Britain back to the safe haven accorded them by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Armed with their laptops they wrote treatise after treatise of Islamist theory. One intellectual, Abu Walid al-Masri, typed his 100,000th page on the history of the
jihad
movement, and Zawahari finished his partially published opus,
Knights Under the Flag of the Prophet
, forewarning the onset of the final showdown with the ‘evil empire’ of the United States on its home turf.

For
jihadis
who had long despaired of their impotency in the face of outside forces, al-Qaeda’s coordinated crashing of hijacked planes into Manhattan’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 recaptured their imagination and revived respect for Islamist militancy. From Java to New Jersey, small groups of worshippers performed the
Q
unut
– an additional supplication, accompanied by the words, ‘May God destroy America’. At the same time it triggered horror, within the Muslim world as well as without, over the morality of a cause which claimed to act in accordance with divine will. Iran’s President Khatami publicly denounced the killing of 2,976 people as a crime against humanity and its perpetrators as beyond the pale of Islam.