In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (14 page)

In 1998, bin Laden formally announced the creation of a World Islamic Front for jihad against the “Crusaders” meaning the West and specifically the Americans—and the Jews. Most of those who signed on were leaders of peripheral factions who were beholden to bin Laden for financial support. They included Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad; Rifa’i Ahmad Taha (also known as Abu Yasir) of the Egyptian Islamic Group; Sheikh Mir Hamzah of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan; and Fazlur Rahman of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. The largest of these fringe movements was the Egyptian Islamic Group, but Taha did not speak for the jailed senior leadership of his group and was later forced to rescind his group’s participation. Zawahiri also caused a split within his own Egyptian Islamic Jihad, some of whose members preferred to focus on Egypt rather than the United States.
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Bin Laden even began to talk about using weapons of mass destruction against the United States. In 1998, the U.S. State Department had “reliable intelligence that the bin Laden network has been actively seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction—including chemical weapons—for use against U.S. interests.”
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Fighting on Multiple Fronts

Ayman al-Zawahiri and the rest of the al Qa’ida leadership were prepared for sustained struggle. In
Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner,
Zawahiri called for a multifaceted battle to pursue three major goals. One was to overthrow “corrupt regimes” in the Muslim world. Another was to establish
sharia
in these lands. And a third was to inflict significant casualties on “the western crusader” and to “get crusaders out of the lands of Islam especially from Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.”
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As with any movement, there were differences among al Qa’ida leaders and jihadists across the globe. For some, the United States
should be a secondary, not a primary, target of military escalation. There had been some entropy in the jihadist movement by the end of the 1990s, as the regimes in Egypt, Algeria, and other Arab countries crushed their jihadist opponents.
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There were also conflicts among al Qa’ida’s national contingents. According to one of bin Laden’s former bodyguards, “there were rivalries among Al-Qa’idah members depending on their countries of origin. The Egyptians used to boast about being Egyptian. The Saudis, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Arab Maghreb citizens used to do the same thing sometimes.” This rivalry angered bin Laden, who argued that it sowed divisions and disagreements among al Qa’ida members.
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Lastly, there were disagreements about money. Zawahiri himself acknowledged the shortage of funds in a note to al Qa’ida colleagues: “Conflicts take place between us for trivial reasons, due to scarcity of resources.”
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Many of al Qa’ida’s leaders were inspired by such influential individuals as Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged in Egypt on August 29, 1966. Qutb argued that anything non-Islamic was evil, that only the strict following of
sharia
as a complete system of morality, justice, and governance would bring significant benefits to humanity.
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Modern-day Islam, he wrote in his book
Milestones,
had also become corrupt, and he compared the modern Muslim states with
jahiliyya.
As used in the Qur’an, the term describes the state of ignorance in which Arabs were supposed to have lived before the revelation of Islam to the Prophet Muhammad at the beginning of the seventh century.
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In two of his key works,
In the Shadow of the Qur’an
and
Signposts on the Road,
Qutb pleaded for contemporary Muslims to build a new Islamic community, much as the Prophet had done a thousand years earlier.
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This meant that most Muslims could not be viewed as true Muslims.

In Islamic doctrine, denying a Muslim his faith is a serious accusation, referred to as
takfir.
The term derives from
kufr
(impiety) and means that one is impure and should therefore be excommunicated. For those who interpret Islamic law literally and rigorously,
takfir
is punishable by death. Qutb’s philosophy allowed for no gray areas. The difference
between true Muslims and non-Muslims was the same as between good vs. evil and just vs. unjust. According to his interpretation, the only just ruler is one who administers according to the Qur’an. There is no such thing as a defensive and limited war, he argued, there is only an offensive, total war.
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Qutb’s work found an eager readership among some of the younger generation in the 1970s because of its stunning and drastic break with the status quo. One problem, however, is that he never clearly specified what the Prophet’s experience had been and how it should be replicated in the modern era.
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After his execution, Qutb’s fiery ideology gradually emerged as the blueprint for Islamic radicals from Morocco to Indonesia. It was later taught at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah and Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.
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According to Qutb, most leaders from Islamic governments were not true Muslims. “The Muslim community has long ago vanished from existence,” he wrote. It was “crushed under the weight of those false laws and teachings which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.”
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Like Qutb, Abdullah Azzam had argued that Islam’s main challenge was against
jahiliyya.
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In the minds of Qutb and the al Qa’ida leadership, any regime that did not impose
sharia
on the country and collaborated with Western governments such as the United States was guilty of apostasy. The Prophet argued that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam. Zawahiri took this line of argument to its extreme, concluding that because regimes had departed from Islam and failed to establish
sharia
law, they were not truly Muslim countries and therefore subject to attack.
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Indeed, even Muslims could be punished if they did not obey conservative Islamic law. Abdel Aziz bin Adel Salam (also known as al-Sayyid Imam), an Egyptian militant who was one of Zawahiri’s oldest associates, argued that Muslims who did not join the fight against apostate rulers were themselves impious and must be fought.
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What constitutes sufficient justification for
takfir
has long been disputed among different schools of Islamic thought. The orthodox
Sunni position is that sins do not prove that someone is un-Islamic, but, rather, denials of fundamental religious principles do. Consequently, a murderer may still be a Muslim, but someone who denies that murder is a sin must be a
kafir,
as long as he or she is aware that murder is a sin in Islam. The irony, of course, is that while Islamists argued that Allah’s law and rule must be made supreme, translating this into concrete political terms required human interpretation. There have long been deep and even violent differences among Islamists about how to do this.
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This internal confusion explains the motivations of al Qa’ida leaders to overthrow successive regimes in the Middle East (the “near” enemy, or
al-Adou al-Qareeb
) to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate, as well as to fight the United States and its allies (the “far” enemy, or al-Adou
al-Baeed
) who supported them.
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As Zawahiri wrote, the “establishment of a Muslim state in the heart of the Islamic world is not an easy or close target. However, it is the hope of the Muslim nation to restore its fallen caliphate and regain its lost glory.”
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Zawahiri argued that “the issue of unification in Islam is important and that the battle between Islam and its enemies is primarily an ideological one over the issue of unification…. [it] is also a battle over to whom authority and power should belong—to God’s course and shari’ah, to manmade laws and material principles, or to those who claim to be intermediaries between the Creator and mankind.”
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Like many Islamists, Zawahiri drew heavily on the Salafist teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, the thirteenth-century reformer who had sought to impose a literal interpretation of the Qur’an, which serves as the basis of
sharia
and lays out the commandments of God. Al Qa’ida leaders raised the status of militant jihad and put it on a par with the five pillars of Islam. For instance, bin Laden argued that “fighting is part of our religion and our
sharia.
Those who love God and the Prophet and this religion may not deny a part of that religion. This is a very serious matter.”
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Bin Laden considered jihad an individual duty
(fard ‘ayn)
and a critical pillar of Islam. In addition, many Islamists argued that
sharia
law cannot be improved upon, despite fif
teen centuries of social change, because it came directly from God. They wanted to bypass the long tradition of judicial opinion from Muslim scholars and forge a legal system that was untainted by Western influence or modernity.
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As al Qa’ida members chanted at one training camp in Afghanistan:

Suicide operations could also be advantageous, even though the Qur’an prohibits suicide.
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For some disillusioned bombers, martyrdom offered several attractions: honor and fame; the joys of seventy-two virgins; and paradise in “gardens of bliss” for seventy members of the suicide bomber’s household, who might be spared the fires of hell.
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Yet many Muslims, including in Afghanistan, believed that suicide attacks were never justified.
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Zawahiri had to overcome this taboo. Suicide bombers, he claimed, represented “a generation of mujahideen that has decided to sacrifice itself and its property in the cause of God. That is because the way of death and martyrdom is a weapon that tyrants and their helpers, who worship their salaries instead of God, do not have.”
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In addition, Zawahiri regarded suicide bombing as effective: “Suicide operations are the most successful in inflicting damage on the opponent and the least costly in terms of casualties among the fundamentalists.”
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The United States was the most significant “far” enemy. “The white man” in America is the primary enemy, Qutb wrote. “The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our children about his civilization, his universal principles and noble objectives…. We are endow
ing our children with amazement and respect for the master who tramples our honor and enslaves us.” The response to this enslavement, Qutb argued, had to be anger and violence. “Let us instead plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of these children. Let us teach these children from the time their nails are soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity.”
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Most jihadist leaders had long advocated attacking Arab regimes, not the United States or other Western regimes. Zawahiri had made this point in his 1995 essay “The Road to Jerusalem Goes through Cairo,” published in
al-Mujahidin.
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But after their defeat in Egypt, Algeria, and other Arab countries in the 1990s, jihadists began to focus on the West. For such leaders as Zawahiri, then, the United States only knew “the language of interests backed by brute military force. Therefore, if we wish to have a dialogue with them and make them aware of our rights, we must talk to them in the language they understand.” This language was violence and force.
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Osama bin Laden repeated this message regularly. On the eve of the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, for example, he released a video clip in which he said that the goal of the United States was to wipe out Islam across the globe, and that he was left with no other recourse than to “continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you.”
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The United States, and the West more broadly, was a corrupting influence on Islam. For Abdullah Azzam, this meant “expelling the Kuffar [infidels] from our land, and it is Fard Ayn, a compulsory duty upon all.”
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In an article in
Jihad
magazine, Azzam wrote that “jihad in God’s will means killing the infidels in the name of God and raising the banner of His name.”
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This was especially true when Western or other non-Muslim armies invaded Islamic lands such as Afghanistan.

Al Qa’ida leaders also accused the United States of propping up apostate Arab countries. Consequently, in order to reestablish the Caliphate, al Qa’ida had to target these countries’ primary backers.
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The conflict with the United States, then, was a “battle of ideologies, a struggle for survival, and a war with no truce.”
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This language was
remarkably similar to Harvard University Professor Samuel Huntington’s argument in
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
Of particular concern, Huntington argued, was a growing rift between the Judeo-Christian West and Islamic countries, which was becoming pronounced and violent.
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In an early publication,
Loyalty to Islam and Disavowal to its Enemies,
Zawahiri argued that Muslims must make a choice between Islam and its enemies, including the West.
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In
Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner,
Zawahiri similarly wrote that the overthrow of governments in such countries as Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading it in a jihad against the West. “Then history would make a new turn, God willing,” he noted, “in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.”
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In his mind, and in the minds of several of his followers, the United States was primarily interested in “removing Islam from power.”
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