Terrorism Inc.: Violence And
Counter-Violence (of the Letter- Part III)By Mustapha Marrouchi
26 June, 2006
Countercurrents.orgSixty years ago, German soldiers shaved off the beards of Orthodox Jews. Now the US army is doing the same to Islamists captured in Africa and elsewhere, before flying them to Guántanamo to be tortured, degraded, and interrogated in all sorts of ways that involve electric shock, forcible feeding, and sleep deprivation.1 Other aspects of the US response to the so-called war on terror is the sheer disregard for world opinion and total disrespect for international law: the deliberate destruction of the infrastructure of a country, say, Iraq, and plans for special military commissions with low evidentiary standards, the refusal to accord detainees presumptive POW status all indicate a callous attitude toward the world we all live in and are supposed to respect. The aberration may be temporary (although I doubt it), but there are reasons to believe that something fundamental has changed forever. For today, the planet is seen through the lenses of Bush/Bin Laden Inc. Most disturbing, however, is incriminating innocent civilians in crimes they were never involved in, let alone committed. A case in point is the lack of proof that Africans were behind the criminal attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. And this is in spite of what then FBI chief, Louis Freeh, told the world: “We are still in a fairly preliminary stage of the inquiry,” and his most senior colleague in the field was admitting that the main suspect arrested had neither confessed nor implicated bin Laden, the Tomahawks were already on their way.2 Never mind that foreign technicians who worked in the bombed Khartoum factory dismissed the notion that it could be used to produce chemical weapons. And the US’s unwillingness to countenance a UN commission of inquiry said little for its good faith.
People in Africa are getting tired of this arrogance. Some of them intone “a terrorist reaction to a terrorist action is unacceptable.”3 The most moderate think a military response has its limitations. As an Egyptian editorial put it: “All the Pentagon’s power may help in fighting terrorism, but it will never be fully effective as long as discontent and [the Islamic world’s] will to resist persist. A better approach would be policy shifts in favor of the oppressed, such as the Palestinians.”4 This claim confirms what Robert M. Gates said at a hearing in the Senate: “We can pursue policies and strategies that in the long term weaken terrorism’s roots. We can pursue a peace in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa that does not kowtow to Israel’s obstructionism.”5 True, insofar as terrorism is drawing strength from the mounting crises and frustrations in the Muslim world, from Algeria to Tanzania, Mauritania to Egypt. Obviously, the US is not responsible for all the region’s woes. But as the world’s only superpower (at least for now), it is accountable for a good number of its dramas: the sanctions which harmed Libya and Sudan, the suffering of the Palestinians who live in Egypt, the civil wars in Rwanda, Congo, and Sudan, the embargo in Zimbabwe, and the list goes on. You do not have to be an “Islamist” to question Washington’s role in the mess, or see how the West conveniently overlooks its declarations about democracy when it comes to our friend, the king of Morocco, or authoritarian rule in Egypt. This makes it not irrelevant to ask how come that Osama bin Laden is America’s public enemy number one and that he is still at large six years after the 9/11 tragedy? Is it due to his shrewdness? After all, this is no Saddam Hussein who was caught like a rat in a hole. Even so, could the former “freedom fighter” have dreamed of a better role in that thousands of young Muslims will now find a reason for joining his “holy war” against the West while others will be reduced to silence for fear of being accused of complicity with a power that helps perpetuate an unjust war? Is Al Qaeda really an organization with a global political movement representative of an entire religion and if so, how powerful is it? Or, is it another of the many death-fixated sectarian movements to emerge in the last quarter of a century? Such an obsession with death could be seen in the spectacular horror of the sort that struck New York (and to a lesser degree Washington) which ushered in a new world of unseen, unknown assailants, terror missions without a political message, senseless destruction. I will return to Al Qaeda. For now I would like to emphasize the lack of interest in trying to understand America’s role as a super power, and its direct involvement in the complex reality beyond its two coastlines that have for so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average mind.
This is nowhere more obvious than in the political fable “300,” a movie in which a blood-dark account of the battle of Thermopylae, the Spartan king, Leonidas (Gerard Butler), and his noble Queen, Gorgo (Lena Headey), make love in the full splendor of their nakedness. When the Spartans, pumped like linebackers leaving the weight room, go out to fight, they wear nothing but leather codpieces and red capes; they die clutching one another’s hands. The Persians go one better. Their king, Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), an epicene seven-footer with a shaved head and what looks like a gold-lamé thong, lounges on cushions in his court, surrounded by aroused lesbians intertwined and writhing like snakes in a basket. When he goes out to fight, he commands an army of robed and turbaned slaves who enthusiastically hurl themselves onto Spartan spears. Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, 300, the movie is porno-military curiosity–a muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film. In Teheran , after pirated copies hit the streets there a few weeks ago, the movie was quickly denounced by an Iranian government spokesman as an act of “psychological warfare” that was intended to prepare Americans for an invasion of their country. The film is, of course, less an act of psychological warfare than an act of capitalism. It was called into being not by a hunger for war (although that too may have been intended by the director, Zack Snyder), but for the desire to exploit a market. Even so, “300” easily engages the current moment. An all-volunteer expeditionary force of Spartans ventures forth, the warriors sacrificing themselves to stop the invading hordes from killing their wives and children, which may be an allusion to the Bush Administration’s get-them-in-Iraq-before-they-hit-us-here rationale. The Spartans also fight, as a lofty narration informs us, “against mysticism and tyranny.” Against mysticism? How many ancient armies went to their deaths with that as their battle song? And how many men have died, as the Spartans do, to defend “reason”? A whiff of contemporary disdain for the East–what the late Edward Said called “Orientalism”–arises from the mayhem: “300” turns into a dawn-of-democracy epic in which violence is marshaled to protect the future of Western civilization. Made in a time of frustration, when Americans are fighting a war that they can neither win nor abandon, the movie feels like the product of a culture slowly and painfully going mad.6
Perhaps the most extravagant of the many shows of force is the portrait drawn of the trigger-happy GIs who go on a rampage killing thousands of innocent people in a war that dares no longer speak its name, and movies such “300” and “Shooter,” another film where wise men go insane, celebrate their prowess in all its solitary cultic glory, Osama bin Laden’s name and face has become so numbingly familiar as in effect to obliterate any history and his shadowy followers might have had before they metamorphosed into stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination in the West and Rest. Put simply, all that was necessary for the 9/11events was present before the tragedy took place. But as with all strategic revolutions, the attacks brought together accelerating trends, causing the first conflict between a super state (America) and a sect (Al Qaeda), and the first war without a front, its aim not territorial conquest but the physical destruction of an adversary who has assumed an unparalleled mythological dimension. It is in this sense that the issue of how the strategic revolution in Muslim thinking demands a complete reappraisal of concepts on which Western analysts have based their interpretation. Few observers have examined changes in the Muslim world with regard to the sectarian movements that have spread through the world over the last quarter of a century. Islam gives believers considerable freedom to interpret holy texts, the exercise is called ijtihad, and does not treat recent Islamist groups as sects. Al Qaeda has much in common with other sects, in particular its millenarian ideology and obsession with death. Bin Laden has been operating in an exclusively religious frame of reference. In a statement, broadcast by Al-Jazeera television, he said: “Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years.”7 This is an allusion neither to Palestine nor Iraq, but to Kemal Ataturk’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. He added that the US would not “enjoy security before we can see it as a reality in Palestine (with Jerusalem liberated] and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Mohammed (Saudi Arabia].”8 Significantly, he did not refer to local political issues, such as the war in Iraq or the civil war in Algeria that has claimed more than a quarter of a million innocent victims. A follower of Salafi Sunnism, bin Laden does not express absolute solidarity with all Muslims. The assassination of two devout Muslims, Ahmad Shah Massoud and Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, meant nothing to him.9 Nor does he claim to have the support of the regime in Iran, which is Shi’ite. The religious intensity ties with the millenarian beliefs underlying his statements; politics play a poor second role. Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, 1 200-page document found in the UK in 2000, enjoins combatants to “martyrdom for the purpose of establishing the religion of majestic Allah on earth.”10 As with all sects, religion takes precedence over politics and renders them pointless, announcing instead the advent of paradise on earth. In addition, the new radical Islamism has fed on a growing awareness of political and ideological setbacks. The Third World no longer counts as a political force, Arab and/or African nationalism is bankrupt, the Left has collapsed, and Islamism has reached a dead end and this is in spite of a revival of sorts in The Maghreb.11 All this coincides with a realization that African governments have nationalized their official religious authorities (as Egypt has done with al-Azhar University and Tunisia with a-Zaïtouna University). After all, none of the terrorists who died on 11 September had a militant background. None was linked to an Islamist party. As Trotsky refused the notion of “socialism in one country,” bin Laden rejects the idea of Islamism in one region. He does not have a national strategy because he is working for the global triumph of Allah.
Another sect-type characteristic of this form of Islam is its espousal of crude violence. In Algeria, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) made no attempt to justify their atrocities as political legitimacy or strategic necessity. Bloodshed became the method of war.12 Bin Laden borrowed the notion of martyrdom from the Shia in Iran, for whom it is commonplace–as demonstrated by the bassiji, young volunteers the Khomeini regime sent to the front against Iraq to defend the revolution.13 All the attacks attributed to Al Qaeda–the 1998 bombings of US embassies, the strike on the USS Cole in 2000, the attacks in Bali October 2002, Casablanca in May 2003, Istanbul in November 2003, the wave of shootings in Saudi Arabia in May 2004, the Madrid bombing in 2004, the London subway tragedy in 2005, the Algiers massacres in 2007–required the sacrifice of men. The death of the believer is necessary, the price for paradise–a recurrent feature of group suicides (the People’s Temple in Guyana, Heaven’s Gate in California).14 It recurs in the punishment for betraying a political sect (Japanese Red Army, Tamil Tigers) or religious sect (Aum Shinrikyo in Japan).15 Sects see innocent victims as necessary to their objectives. The will in Muhammad’s Atta’s luggage shows no pity for those who were about to die, sometimes referred to as enemies simply because they were not Muslims.16 A guru is also essential. Members of bin Laden’s inner circle call him Sheikh Osama or Emir bin Laden, a sign of respect and veneration (he is not a religious scholar).17 In the first videos that were projected to the world, he was standing in front of a cave, a reference to Mohammed’s banishment from Mecca. He implicitly identifies with the Prophet in exile, with Saladin driving out the crusaders, and with Hassan ibn al-Sabbah, the “Old Man of the Mountain,” head of the Nizari sect, better known as The Assassins.18 His ideology is based on the intellectual comfort provided by unequivocal racism: the enemy are “the Jews, the crusaders, and al-munafiqin (infidels) from within Islam” according to the 1998 fatwa supporting Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, convicted for the first bombing of the World Trade Center. “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies–civilians and military–is an individual duty for every Muslim.”19 This is close to other simplistic sect-originated ideas, such as the claim that the Jews invented Shi’ite Islam to weaken Islam. In addition, bin Laden’s racism surfaces in his obsession with the idea that the Jews rule the financial world. No wonder that the attacks did not target the Vatican, the Knesset or the Statue of Liberty, but the World Trade Center, thereby demonstrating an anti-globalization ideology. He also condemned the US as the “modern world’s symbol of paganism.”20 This mixture of theology and anti-globalization mirrors the deep schizophrenia of Saudi society, which enjoys abroad what it will not allow at home.21 At the same time it considers as hell, anywhere else, particularly the US. Yet the inferno is much like paradise, since wine and women will greet al-mujahidin (martyrs), according to the notebook in Atta’s bag. “Know that Paradise has been most beautifully decorated for you and that the maidens of Paradise are calling you to meet them, on devotee of God, and they have put on their most beautiful clothes.”22 However, the confusion of purpose comes out in the number of generations of Al Qaeda combatants. The founding fathers are all from the Middle East, veterans of the resistance movement against the Soviets in Afghanistan (bin Laden himself and his maître à penser, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri). The second generation date from 1992-93; these are the attackers of 11 September. (Think of Ramzi Yussef). They are outcasts by necessity, children of marriages between parents with complicated backgrounds or immigrants sans-papiers. (Samir Al-Jarrah comes to mind). Life in the West radicalized them as it did their godfather, Sayyid Qutb.23 They are not Palestinians. Some are from Pakistan, others from the Philippines, East Africa, or The Maghreb where Al Qaeda is resurfacing in the form of the GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) led by the Algerian Emir, Abu Musab Abd al-Wadud whose ultimate goal is to establish a pure Islamic state in Algeria.24
As in all sects, recruits must break with family, birthplace, and home country. For many of them this is the start of a one-way journey. If they go home, they face prison, even the death penalty. Afghanistan was a refuge for all those who wanted or had to flee. Martyrdom is a perfect way out of the impasse. Bin Laden sifted through these exiles and bright-eyed kamikazes. The Taliban put him in charge of recruiting foreign mujahidin–a telling sign of masterminding the generation who lived through the failure of Islamist parties in various countries and backed the fight against the new enemy, the West. (Le Front Islamique du Salut led by the charismatic Abbas Madani and the fiery preacher Ali Belhaj in Algeria and Ennahdha spearheaded by Ali Ghannouchi who has been living in exile in London since the 1987-coup d’état in Tunisia are a case in point). The number of Saudis among the perpetrators of 9/11–between a half and two-thirds–highlights the political and moral crisis in their country. Like the Russian Nihilists, these men–children of upper middle-class families, with a university educated–form an intelligentsia that speaks to the populace by means of attacks designed to provoke it into action. The most recent generation is youths in revolt. In the 1960s they would have joined a Maoist movement. Now they convert to Islamism, following a similar route to John Walker Lindh, the American who joined the Taliban. They have not lost their citizenship. Some hold several nationalities. Wadi al-Hajwas was born in Lebanon, but holds a US passport. He was convicted for the first World Trade Center attack. The young men enjoyed rapid early promotion, followed by setbacks, and, disappointed, became an easy prey for radicalization (Zakarias Moussaoui and Kamal Daoudi are one example). The recruiting agencies are based in mosques around the West. They are particularly active in tabligh centers–Finsbury Park in London, Mantes la Jolie near Paris, and last but not least, Brooklyn in America.
The upshot is that Al Qaeda is like a holding company run by a council (shura) including representatives of terrorist movements. It verges not on Islamofascism no matter how hard Christopher Hitchens and his tribe of neocons want us to believe, but on totalitarianism, with sub-divisions to manage key functions: ideology, administration, military action, and the media. This organization provides all the backup terrorist operations needed, probably including care for the families of martyrs. It forms alliances and engages in terrorist joint ventures with other movements such as the Egyptian jihad or Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines.25 The US may too often have failed to look outside. Still, it is depressing to see how little time was spent trying to understand Al Qaeda as a mujahida organization that emerged in Afghanistan in the 1980s and mushroomed in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Sudan among other countries where shanty towns on the edges of Cario, Casablanca, Algiers, and Khartum, inhabited by the despised and forgotten migrants from the countryside, are fertile grounds for rebellion and despair.26 Needless to add that the dynamic of terrorism has fed on the sheer vileness of the master minds of Al Qaeda itself: the devout, bookish, middle-class Cairo guru, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri and his partner in terror, Osama bin Laden. Where al-Zawahiri comes across as cold, treacherous, and calculating; bin Laden is vain, naive, generous, and idealistic, which combined with the fact that he is a mass murderer, makes him the more sinister character. Still, a portrait of al-Zawahiri is de rigueur if we are to undo the web of intrigue and deceit he has spun over the years. Consider the mess the two Sudanese teenage boys found themselves in in 1995. It was al-Zawahiri himself who presided over their trial for treason, sodomy, and attempted murder in a shari’a court of his own devising. During the trial, he had them stripped naked to show that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. After a semblance of a trial, the court found the boys guilty. Once their confessions were filmed, al-Zawahiri had them hanged in a public place where everyone could see the horror in broad daylight. He then put out video copies of the hanging to warn other potential traitors of their fate. It did not exonerate him that the boys really had tried to kill him: Ahmed, only 13, told Egyptian spies exactly when al-Zawahiri was going to come to treat him for malaria; Musab, 12, twice tried to plant a bomb in his car.27 The assassination attempts were part of the Egyptian government’s ruthless efforts to destroy al-Zawahiri and his organization, jihad, after it came close to killing the Egyptian president for life, Hosni Mubarak during a visit to Ethiopia in June 1995. “Ruthless,” in this instance, is a merited adjective. The way Egyptian intelligence recruited the boys–both were sons of senior jihad members, and Musab’s father was Al Qaeda treasurer–had been to drug them, anally rape them, then show them photos of the abuse and blackmail them. The boys were trapped; the photos could have led to their execution.
The story does more than illuminate the sheer brutality of the conflict that has been underway for some time between the death-loving hardcore of Islamists and the stooges of European and American governments in the Arab world. It underlines the centrality of Egypt to the origins and perpetuation of the conflict, which goes back to the founding of al-Ikhwan by Hassan al-Banna in 1928 and on through the execution of Sayyid Qutb in 1966. It was a crucible for the theorizing of violence which led to the events of 11 September 2001. By now, the prisons of Egypt became a networking venue for al-mujahidin. It was there that the Egyptian jailers made their investment of cruelty in al-Zawahiri which he would later pay back a thousandfold. The struggle in Egypt, not the wider world, took precedence for the doctor; that he may have believed the narrow, Nile-confined geography of populated Egypt made it hard for Islamists to operate, but that he put the goal of Islamic revolution there to one side, in favor of closer cooperation with bin Laden, only when he had no choice. It was after an attack on Egyptian interests in 1995–a suicide bombing at the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan, just after al-Jihad was expelled from Sudan–that al-Zawahiri first established the theological underpinning of suicide attacks. Eighteen people died in a truck explosion, including two suicide bombers. He justified the attack by arguing that, since the Egyptian government was munafiq or apostates, and everyone who worked for the government, they all deserved to die; innocent Muslim bystanders or children caught up in the explosion were sad but necessary collateral damage.
The Islamic prohibition on suicide was tougher to overcome, since the Prophet himself had foretold eternal damnation for one of his warriors after he killed himself rather than suffer the pain of battle wounds. Al-Zawahiri reached back into distant history for the case of a group of Muslim martyrs who had been offered a choice by their idolatrous captors of renouncing their faith, or dying. They chose death. Their apparent breach of Allah’s word was accepted by other Muslims at the time as heroic martyrdom, because it was for the sake of Allah’s word that they died. “With such sophistry, “ Lawrence Wright observes, “al-Zawahiri reversed the language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder.”28 Al-Zawahiri finally set Egypt aside to concentrate on bin Laden’s war against America in 1997, when Egypt as a whole turned against his methods in revulsion. The catalyst was an attack by his faithful followers on tourists at Luxor. A small group of Islamists in police uniforms crippled every visitor within range by shooting them in the legs first, then strolled from injured person to injured person, finishing them off with shots to the head. Some of the dead were mutilated with knives. One Swiss woman saw her father’s head being cut off. A flyer reading “No to Tourists in Egypt” was found inside the eviscerated body of a Japanese man. Most of the 62 innocent victims were Swiss. Others included four Egyptians and three generations of a British family–grandmother, mother, and five-year-old daughter.29
To understand how al-Zawahiri’s mind functions, one must go back to the life of Sayyid al-Qutb, whose Milestones had enormous influence on the Islamic revivalist movement. Published in 1964, it is a contradictory, self-referential, anti-Semitic tract that calls for war against the infidel world to establish a universal Islam, following which the conquered–or, as Qutb put it, liberated–will be free to believe what they wish. Qutb insists that the world–not only the non-Muslim world, but the Muslim world itself–is in a state if jahilia (ignorance), or defiance of Allah’s sovereignty. In the jahili world, instead of the ideal synthesis of worship and governance that Allah provides through al-Qur’an, men blaspheme and lead one another astray. The most subversive aspect of Milestones, from the point of view of secular, multicultural governments and people, is its insistence that personal belief in and worship of Allah is insufficient to avoid jahilia. You can be as devout as you like, but if you tolerate and obey jahili institutions, you are defying Allah. It is a powerful prescription, especially when you consider that Qutb greatly admired the scientific and cultural achievements of Europe, and believed a future Islamic civilization would emulate if not rival the West. What is interesting, though, is that Qutb wrote Milestones after spending some time in the US, from 1948 to 1950, during which his proud, sensitive, shy, classical-music-loving personality was assailed by what he saw as the lewd heartiness of American women and materially rich, spiritually poor lives of its people in general. He was propositioned by a scantily clad, drunk young woman in his stateroom on the crossing out, scandalized by a nurse in Washington who told him what she looked for in a lover, shocked by a feminist teacher in Colorado who declared that there was no moral element to sexual relations, repelled by a minister who delighted in the libidinousness of a church dance, disgusted by the crude violence of American football, appalled to see a black man being beaten in the street, horrified by the “primitive Negro” sounds of jazz, and dismayed by prodigious drinking at student parties. He saw the abundance of churches as a sign of hypocrisy rather than piety. “The soul has no value to Americans,” he wrote. “There has been a Ph. D. dissertation about the best way to clean dishes, which seems more important to them than the Bible or religion.”30 Back in Egypt, al-Ikhwan, the Islamist organization he had helped to create, already had a million members and supporters when Qutb left for the US, and the movement’s founder, al-Banna, no stranger to the concept of jahilia, played a massive role in the making of both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. The latter’s uncle was Qutb’s pupil and protégé, and, at the trial which led to his execution, his lawyer. Qutb’s death had a profound effect on the teenage al-Zawahiri.
Al-jihad was one of the three underground groups dedicated to the overthrow of the corrupted Egyptian government and the establishment of an Islamic state. The largest, oldest, and most moderate, mixing politics with violence, was al-Ikhwan. In the 1970s, a second organization, The Islamic Group, emerged as a force on Egyptian campuses; the socialist and secular nationalist fashions of the previous decade yielded, beards sprouted, and women students veiled up. The Islamic Group was led by Sheikh Omar Abdulrahman, blind since childhood. Sheikh Omar and al-Zawahiri met and plotted together in prison. Their clandestine organizations were similar: small, suspicious and ready to use extreme violence to achieve their goals. They also strove to found Islamic Egypt under Shari’a law. In fact, they found co-operation difficult, partly because of personal jealousies, partly because Sheikh Omar’s was ultimately a more tolerant route to global Islam than al-Zawahiri’s. Yet Sheikh Omar trod an ominous trail which prefigured the Egyptian doctor’s subsequent descent into gore. At one point he issued a fatwa justifying the murder of Christians, to make it possible for his young foot-soldiers to fund their jihad by killing and robbing Coptic businessmen with a clear conscience. In 1993, in New York, his followers detonated a massive van bomb in the basement car park of the World Trade Center, gouging a 200 foot-wide crater and killing six people, but failing to topple the structures. Sheikh Omar, who had been applying for political asylum in America, while at the same time issuing a fatwa asking his followers to kill Jews and making speeches in Arabic denouncing Americans as “descendants of apes and pigs,” was subsequently arrested and jailed in the US.31 Still, the most intriguing and in some ways chilling mystery remains the fate of the fourth remarkable Islamic revolutionary leader, the Palestinian religious scholar, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam who studied with Sheikh Omar in Cairo, and inspired bin Laden. As a result, al-Zawahiri became quite envious. What remains unknown to this day is who was responsible for his murder in Peshawar in 1989. The assassination of Azzam–who, with bin Laden’s financial support, turned the American effort to defeat the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan into a pan-Islamic jihad–marked a turning point in the saga of Islamism.
Azzam was a devout Muslim who had contempt for secular life. With the help of Israel, he founded Hamas as an Islamic Palestinian counterweight to Yasir Arafat’s secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). To drum up support for the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan he issued a fatwa declaring jihad in Afghanistan a religious duty for every able-bodied Muslim. To spread the word of Allah, Azzam embarked on a grand tour, preaching of divine miracles on the battlefield–of the perfumed corpses of martyrs and birds turning aside Soviet bombs. He was a hero to young Arabs. It was he who popularized the lurid rewards awaiting the martyrs in paradise which later lay at the heart of Al Qaeda manifesto. It was also Azzam who, on 11 August 1988, with the Soviet Union already beaten in Afghanistan, called a meeting which brought all his lieutenants together and planted the first seed of the organization that came to be known “Al Qaeda.” At that stage, however, it could have been anything insofar as his vision of jihad after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban differed subtly from bin Laden’s and profoundly from al-Zawahiri’s. Azzam’s idea was for a wide guerilla war to win back lands which Islam had once held and lost, from Soviet Central Asia to Bosnia and even Spain. He feared that al-mujahidin would instead begin to fight against each other, that Muslim would fight against Muslim. He opposed al-Zawahiri’s dream of fomenting a cycle of terror and repression in Egypt. He did not want to kill women and children. He was deeply disturbed by the dark, heretical doctrine that al-Zawahiri had seized on in Afghanistan–takfir, or excommunication.32
In a Kuwaiti-backed Red Crescent hospital in Peshawar, which became his base during the years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri fell in with other Arab doctors who had been influenced by an outbreak of takfir, understood this time as heresy. At the heart of it, takfir is a means to justify murdering anyone who disagrees with one’s interpretation of Islam. In order to impose his view, al-Zawahiri got round the explicit Qur’anic prohibition on killing, except as punishment for murder, by pointing out that the Prophet said anyone who strayed from a-tariqa (path) must die. According to Kutb, those who co-operate with jahili institutions were turning away from Islam and must be killed because they are leading a jahili life. Democracy was jahili, ergo, anyone who voted could be–no, should be–executed. Azzam, who had done more than either bin Laden or al-Zawahiri to further the Islamic cause in Afghanistan, and who opposed takfir, nevertheless fell victim to it. There is no evidence that al-Zawahiri had a hand in his murder, which, Wright describes thus: “Earlier that Friday, on the streets of Peshawar, Azzam’s main rival, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been spreading rumors that Azzam was working for the Americans. The next day, he was at Azzam’s funeral, praising the martyred Sheikh, as did his many other jubilant enemies.”33 It is possible to see the events of 9/11 as a synthesis of all these ideas: the application of al-Zawahiri’s takfir and suicide heresies to Qutb’s jahili America, by men holding dear Azzam’s vision of the martyrs’ reward, their prime target influenced by the obsessions of Sheikh Omar’s followers. Yet of all the countries in the jahili world, why America? The answer seems to lie in the quixotic mind of al-Zawahiri himself and the environment in which he was raised in Egypt.34
Take Manial, the district where he spent most of his youth. It may look dirty and rundown, and its streets are in perpetual gridlock; but by Cairo standards the locality, which is the home to the headquarters of al-Ikhwan, is solidly middle-class, its storefronts hosting not only a variety of small shops but also the Fatin Hamama Cinema, named after one of the country’s most famous actresses, as well as a Kentucky Fried Chicken.35 Al-Ikhwan is an international Sunni movement with affiliates across the African world and beyond, including in the West, but its first and preeminent branch is in Egypt. Established in 1928, the party has periodically been implicated in anti-government violence. In 1948, one of its activists assassinated Prime Minister Mahamud Fahmi Nokrashi; the following year, government security agents murdered al-Ikhwan’s revered founder, Hassan al-Banna. Sayyid Qutb, an influential Sunni thinker and a hero to Al Qaeda, later became a leading member of the group, and in 1966 he and two others were executed for plotting against the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Qutb, though, was long ago repudiated, and while the organization maintains as its slogan “Islam Is the Solution,” it has embraced and reinterpreted the more pragmatic ideas of al-Banna. It renounced violence, apparently in good faith, and it openly endorsed democracy as well as full citizenship rights for the Copts, a Christian minority that constituted nearly 10 percent of Egypt’s population. Al-Ikhwan long shunned electoral politics. Al-Banna, the group’s founder, took a dim view of political parties–partly because he saw them as divisive and partly because the parties of his day were tied to the British government, which exercised significant influence long after Egypt’s formal independence in 1922. But in a landmark decision in 1984, the movement’s ruling Guidance Council decided to reverse that stance. “Imam Hassan al-Banna disliked political parties because during his time they were corrupt and incompetent,” Mohammed Habib, its deputy general today, writes. “That is why he emphasized building a movement, not a party. But we have proclaimed our acceptance of democracy that is based on the peaceful exchange of power, with the umma–the community–the basis of all authority.”36 Because al-Ikhwan is technically banned, its political candidates run as independents, but the group also operates in the open. All political observers believe that if fair elections were held today, al-Ikhwan would win a plurality, if not a majority, of the vote.
Egypt has been Muslim for more than a millennium, but by the early 19th century, the British proconsul there would report home that “for all purposes of broad generalization, the only difference between the Copt and the Muslim is that the former is an Egyptian who worships in a Christian church, whilst the latter is an Egyptian who worships in a Mohammedan mosque.”37 Secularism dominated Egyptian political and cultural life through at least the 1960s, and even today the country does not remotely compare to, say, Saudi Arabia, where the participation of women in the development of the kingdom is limited to courtesans and femmes fatales. But over the past quarter-century–mirroring trends elsewhere in the region–Egypt has become more and more “Islamized,” as Muslims from all social classes have increasingly embraced (whether or not they strictly abide by) a conservative interpretation of Islam. In Cairo, especially in poor neighborhoods, it has become difficult to find small shops that sell cigarettes of all things, due to the growing belief that smoking is un-Islamic. In the wealthy district of Zamalek, an island in the Nile, a single shop–forthrightly named Drinkie’s–sells bottled liquor. The number of restaurants offering alcohol anywhere in the city has dropped sharply. The turn to Islam has been fueled by scholars and televangelists, the latter of whom have been particularly successful in proselytizing to educated Egyptians. A TV preacher named Amr Khaled was deemed to be such a threat by the Mubarak regime that it banned him from his central Cairo mosque; for three years he lived in London, but his sermons continued to circulate in Egypt via satellite television, cassette tapes, and the Internet. Islamic ideas also have gained popularity because of the “good” works done by Islamists. Al-Ikhwan members, for example, pay for weddings, tuition fees, run job-training programs and hospitals; and doctors affiliated with the group offer free treatment for poor patients. Students at overcrowded and underfunded public schools are tutored by their volunteers, and the group distributes pens and paper at the start of the school year. What is noticeable is that the organization has undergone a marked shift since it began competing for public office more than two decades ago. Perhaps because of its increasingly young and educated base, the group’s politics seem to have become more moderate.38
Today, while it still rails against social evils, the organization is more focused on political reform. Its parliamentary officials have led anti-corruption campaigns, shaped debate on a consumer-protection bill, pushed the government to combat bird flu, and fought to lift a draconian twenty-five-year-old “emergency law” that allows the government to severely restrict political activity–a move that has brought scorn in 2006 from Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who issued a video that attacked al-Ikhwan for participating in elections, saying it played into America’s “political game of exploiting the masses and their love for Islam.”39 Still, for many Egyptians, Islam is the point of reference and differing interpretations generate a wide debate, even within the powerful al-Ikhwan whose distrust of the current political regime and its conviction that confrontation was inescapable served to reinforce that fundamental goal in the September elections of 2005. To attain it, its members would have to create an organization that could operate outside the control of the state and its security apparatus. This, they hoped, would allow them to react to whatever might happen in the future. But then, after decades of immobility, the political landscape began to shift under the pressure of internal and external forces until the new opposition movement, Kefaya (Enough) called the first demonstration against Mubarak, in December 2004.40 It took another three months for al-Ikhwan to digest the new reality on the ground and show their discontent in the streets of Cairo. In May of the same year the arrest of Issam al-Aryan, the group’s spokesman, showed that its size could be its weakness. With more than 2,000 members in prison, it began to sink beneath the expense of caring for the detainees and their families. As a result, the demonstrations stopped: it seemed that tactical considerations had outweighed any desire to lead the people of Egypt down the road to freedom.41
This setback was not simply due to repression. What the leaders of al-Ikhwan, and their detractors, failed to recognize is that Islam has changed since the 1970s. In the beginning they were the official standard-bearers of the ideology of Islam with a vision centered on the claim for an Islamic state. Their program addressed the demands of the poor, who saw the organization as a way to end social oppression, and indeed of the middle class, who aspired to higher moral standards and social mobility. But things have changed. Because of its involvements in politics, the group lost sight of its idea of an Islamic state and all that goes with it, including the restoration of the Caliphate. So its program is barely distinguishable from those of its rivals, particularly those who support economic liberalism. Take Kefaya and the case will be clear enough. Its members offer assurances of their unreserved commitment to a democracy without Islamic attributes, not even mentioning the concept of shura (consultation). They are also prepared to accept a multi-party system and abide by the popular will, whether or not it is in conformity with shari’a. They preach equal citizenship and no longer distinguish Muslims from Copts and Jews, to whom they are prepared to give full rights. The organization is even ready to share power with the Communist Party. But these ideas are not accepted by everyone because they are professed by a new generation of leaders, represented by the great orator Abdel Mon’im Abul Futuh.42 Al-Ikhwan, on the other hand, has been affected by dramatic economic change in the country: the process of liberalization known as infitah (open door) happened at the expense of the poor. The organization supported the new policy, including the government’s backtrack on previous agrarian reform in 1997. It also decided to recruit people from the middle class, especially those driven by new religious imperatives, many of whom have become activists. As the role played by influential businessmen increased, the organization moved to the right. In the meantime, the poor found themselves excluded from the decision making process. Today, they bear the brunt of the economic transformation. Official figures put the poverty level at 17%, but the opposition estimate is 40%.43 Alienated and rejected, the working class decided not to participate in the anti-government demonstrations that were staged in 2005. Some observers went so far as to suggest that the leadership of the organization made a deal with the devil (i.e. the government) in order to prevent social unrest.
The Gamaa Islamya, which eventually broke away from al-Ikhwan and was involved in armed confrontation with the government during the 1980s, remained able to represent the poor. This was noted by Adel Hussein, a Muslim thinker and politician whose former membership in Marxist organizations made him aware of class conflict. He tried to attract Islamist leaders from the suburbs and disadvantaged backgrounds into his new party, al-Amal, asking them to abandon the armed struggle. Disagreements with Gamma and the proscription of al-Amal by the authorities ended the attempt to represent the working class, especially when the government imprisoned more than 20,000 Gamaa members. In the meantime, al-Ikhwan continue to suffer because they are no longer the sole representatives of the religious-minded bourgeoisie, who have been spoilt for choice since the emergence of new preachers such as Amr Khalid. This potential constituency has little interest in politics and a young believer can find less authoritarian and dangerous leaders than those at the helm of al-Ikhwan. As a result, just as it was losing its position as the exclusive representative of political Islam, the organization diversified, shedding the monolithic image that it sought to project. Among its new members it is now possible to find students from the state-controlled al-Azhar University, Salafists, former jihadists, and arrivals from other political groups, beside peasants and workers who, lacking any political experience, are content to follow orders blindly. Attendance at meetings has declined and is now put at 40%; recruitment is stagnant, the membership ageing, and discipline collapsing. Even the reasons for joining have changed: these days you become a Brother to networks, to oil the wheels of daily life, even to make your business more profitable. The leadership is struggling to agree on the organization’s future. After much hesitation it called on its members to vote in the 2005-election, but did not nominate a candidate–a move that led to the death of its old aspirations.44 In fact, it is not even capable of formulating new ones. The days are long gone when its members hoped, and seemed able, to rival the existing regime and develop a popular support base. Today, neither the organization nor the government for that matter know where it is heading. But one thing is certain: the times have changed. Or, have they?
The answer to the question posed here may be found in the “Bush Doctrine.” Among its precepts–as loyalists to the current president call the set of foreign-policy principles by which they, and no doubt he, hope his tenure will be remembered–by far the most widely discussed has been his stance on democracy in the developing world. The clearest articulation of this stance can be found in a November 2003 speech the president gave at the Washington headquarters of the Chamber of Commerce, when he sharply denounced not just tyranny in the Arab world but the logic by which the West had abetted it. At least in its rhetoric, the speech was nothing less than a blanket repudiation of six decades of American foreign policy in the Arab world. Four years later, democracy in the region is still hanging in the balance. In Egypt, which receives $2 billion per year in American aid, President Hosni Mubarak was “re-elected” two years ago in a landslide, nine months after his regime jailed his primary challenger, the pro-Western Ayman Nour, on the spurious charge that he had forged signatures for his party’s registration. Political repression has also increased in Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Sudan as well as in the rest of Africa. The governments of these countries have imposed new restrictions on free speech and public assembly, a crackdown designed to squelch overwhelming domestic opposition to the regimes’s close alliance with America. Notwithstanding Bush’s new “forward strategy of freedom,” the US has marshaled nothing more than a few hollow demurrals against the anti-democratic abuses by its allies in the region, and it maintains close partnerships with all of its old authoritarian friends who have been in power since the early 1980s. Some of them (Mubarak and Gaddafi) have gone so far as to groom their sons to take over when they become incapacitated. Nepotism is alive and well. Above all, America has refused to engage with Islamic opposition movements such as al-Ikhwan, the FIS, even those that flatly reject violence and participate in democratic politics. It is true that many Islamists long dismissed the concept of elections, which the more radical of them still argue are an infringement on Allah’s sovereignty; others did away with democracy because they believed, with good reason, that elections in their countries were so flagrantly rigged that they offered no realistic path to change. One need not endorse either the ideology or the tactics of these groups to wonder if the wholesale rejection of dialogue with them is truly in the long-term interests of the US. Indeed, looking beyond the disastrous war in Iraq, the bloodbath in Palestine, the carnage in Afghanistan, perhaps the central questions facing American foreign policy today are: How is it possible to promote democracy and fight terrorism when movements deemed by the US to be terrorist and extremist are the most politically popular at home? And given this popularity, what would true democracy in Egypt or Algeria resemble? It is impossible to answer this set of questions without first composing with these movements, but the US government and, frequently, the media have deemed them unworthy even of this; their public grievances–over America’s seemingly unconditional support for Israel, its invasion of Iraq, its backing of dictatorial regimes that rule much of the Muslim world in Africa, but also elsewhere–are dismissed as illegitimate and insincere, their hostility explained away as a rejection of “Western freedoms.” It is a lame and counter-productive reason to offer those who want to at least understand their credos without necessarily embracing them. For if we refuse to engage with Islamist movements like al-Ikhwan, Gamaa Islamya, FIS (Front Islamique du Salut), Ennahda, Hammas, Huzbullah, to name only a few, however foreign or flawed their ideas may seem, we leave the door wide-open to bin Laden and his mignons to foster a climate of wholesale hatred–a recipe for disaster, to say the least.
IV
In the upshot, what is disturbing about the brand of terror Bush and bin Laden keep spreading, albeit in different ways, is that it is attached to religious and political abstractions as well as reductive myths that keep veering away from history, sense, and sensibility. This is where the secular consciousness has to try to make itself felt. Ngugi wa Thiong’o drives the point home: “If one role of the intellectual is to use words in defense of human life, in our times this responsibility should translate into raising a hue and cry against the destroyers of the world. Belief in stability built on mutual assured destruction is pure madness. The first right of any claim to intellectual life is the right to life.”45 Put differently, no cause, no religion, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocent people, most particularly when only a small group of demagogues are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without having a real mandate to do so. Besides, much as it has been quarreled over by Muslims and non-Muslims, there is not a single Islam or single West for that matter: there are Islams, just as there are Wests. This diversity is true of all traditions, religions, and nations; even though some of their adherents have futilely tried to draw boundaries around themselves and neatly pin down their creeds. Yet history is far more complex and contradictory than the rabble-rousers whose motives are dubious want us to believe. The trouble with religious or moral fundamentalists is that today their primitive ideas of revolution and resistance, including a willingness to kill and be killed, seem all too easily attached to technological sophistication and what appear to be gratifying acts of horrifying retaliation. The New York and Washington suicide bombers seem to have been middle-class, educated men, not poor refugees. Instead of getting a wise leadership that stresses education, mass mobilization, and patient organization in the service of a just cause, the poor and the desperate are often conned into the magical thinking and quick bloody solutions that such appalling models provide, wrapped in lying religious claptrap.46 On the other hand, immense military and economic power is no guarantee of wisdom or moral vision. Skeptical and humane voices have been largely unheard in the present crisis, as “America” girds itself for a long war to be fought somewhere out there, along with shady allies who have been pressed into service on very uncertain grounds and for imprecise ends. All that one can say is that we need to step back from the imaginary thresholds that separate people from each other and reexamine the labels, reconsider the limited resources available, decide to share our fates with each other as cultures mostly have done, despite the bellicose cries and creeds. “Islam and the West are inadequate banners to follow blindly,” Edward Said perceptively notes.
Some will run behind them, but for future generations to condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and mutual enlightenment seems far more willful than necessary. Demonization of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent politics, certainly not now when the roots of terror in injustice can be addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or put out of business. It takes patience and education, but is more worth the investment than still greater levels of large-scale violence and suffering.47
This is the verdict of a man who spent his entire life fighting for human understanding and social justice. Unlike Said, however, the new guild of Orientalism comprised of the Hitchens and the wannabe-Hitchens does nothing to alleviate the situation, except to stir up violence and counter-violence. Its being in the world further inflames an atmosphere in which it is considered natural when a Westerner is senselessly and brutally murdered, Western newspapers, like The New York Times, devote between 1,000 and 2,000 column inches to such a death, but when an Arab or African, no less human, is just as coldly and savagely killed, he or she gets only one or two sentences if at all. Have we become so assured of the inconsequence of millions of African and Muslim lives that we assume it is a routine or unimportant matter when they die either at our hands or at those of our favored Western allies? What negative role does Israel play between the so-called Judeo-Christian civilization (a peculiar hyphenation given the terrible historical confrontations between the divergent beliefs) and Muslim civilization? Do we really believe that Africans and Muslims have terrorism in their genes? The worst aspect of the terrorism scam, intellectually speaking, is that there seems to be so little resistance to its massively inflated claims, undocumented allegations, and ridiculous tautologies. Even if we allow that the press, almost to a man or woman, is so traduced by moronic notions of newsworthiness, spectacle, and power that it cannot distinguish between isolated and politically worthless acts of desperation and orchestrated attempts at genocide, it is still difficult to explain how or why it is that those who should know better either say nothing or leap onto the bandwagon. Only a handful of people, like Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Tony Judt, Alexander Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Meron Rapoport, Fred Halliday, seem willing to ask publicly why facts are never discussed or how it has become customary to judge evidence entirely on the basis of what race, party or creed delivers it up. If you say that the US supplied Israel with state of the art missiles used to kill Palestinian children in Beirut, you, and by extension your statement, are dismissed, not because you are “a Palestinian (or Arab or Muslim or African) spokesman,” as if that fact alone doomed you irremediably to spreading terrorist lies. But no one says to David Frum, Richard Perle, or Geoffrey Kemp that their unverifiable claims about “international terrorist conventions” and various “terrorist agreements,” for which no proof or contents are ever given, are unacceptable as evidence. And other Orientalists do not challenge Fouad Ajami or Daniel Pipes for the bilge they regularly spill out on Arab or Islamic culture, which would be considered the rankest racism or incompetence in any other field.
Past and future bombing raids aside, the terrorism craze is dangerous because it consolidates the immense, unrestrained pseudo-patriotic narcissism we are nourishing. For now, at least, riding over the madness to “root out evil” is this set of questions: Is there no limit to the folly of terrorism that convinces large numbers of Americans that it is now unsafe to travel, and at the same time blinds them to all the pain and violence that so many people in Africa and elsewhere must endure simply because we have decided that ignorant armies and local oppressors go on a rampage, killing in the name of anti-Islamism and antiterrorism? Is there no way to participate in politics beyond the repetition of prefabricated slogans? What happened to the precision, discrimination, and critical humanism that we celebrate as the hallmarks of liberal education and the Western heritage? Do not try to answer this set of questions straight out. Instead, get hold of any treatise, article, television transcript, editorial, public proclamation or book on terrorism (virtually any one will do; they are interchangeable) and ask the author questions you would ask someone who argued that the universe was being run from an office, inside the Great Pyramid. Our problems and those of the world will not disappear at all: they will become fully apparent, as now, under the sign of terrorism, they are not. In the barren sphere of this impoverishing confrontation between “us” and “them,” the main task for the intellectual in opposition is not to close his or her eyes when the US attacks a small country (Libya and Somalia come to mind, Sudan too is on the list), but to figure out how this country’s staggering power can be harnessed for communal coexistence with other societies, rather than for violence against them. Certainly such a task cannot be helped by trading in metaphysical abstractions while we charge about the world as if we were the only people who counted. Nor will it be helped by declaring ourselves to be in a perpetual state of siege, partners in this protracted insanity with the Islamic world’s diehard rejectionists. Overlapping yet irreconcilable experiences demand from us the courage to say that that is what is before us. Our provisional home is the domain of an exigent, resistant, and intransigent art into which, alas, we can neither retreat nor capitulate. Only in that precarious realm are we able to truly grasp the difficulty of what cannot be fathomed and then go forth to try anyway. “It is a lonely condition, yes,” Edward Said wrote, “but it is better than not trying in the first place.”48 In this sense, trying again and failing better may be compared to a kind of counter-memory, with its own counter-discourse that will not allow our conscience to look away or fall asleep.
Notes
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1. Mustapha Marrouchi, “The Gentle Way in Punishment,” The Dalhousie Review (Summer 2006): 167-83.
2. Quoted in John Dean, Conservatives without Conscience (New York: Penguin, 2006): 56.
3. Bechir Ben Yahmed, “Le moment d’une politique,” Jeune Afrique (janvier 2004): 4.
4. Mohammed Al Kahlaoui, “Masat al irhab,” Akhbar Al Adab (October 2004): 12.
5. Quoted in Steven W.W. Hook and John Spanier, American Foreign Policy since WWII: Washington: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 2006): 56.
6. This is nowhere more so than in “Shooter,” a film directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Mark Wahlberg, as Bob Lee Swagger, a betrayed Marine marksman who becomes a vigilante crusader for justice à l’americaine. The movie is a virtual textbook of action clichés. Fuqua made something fiery and memorable out of “Training Day,” with its demonic performance by Denzel Washington as a corrupt cop, but here the director serves as little more than a skilled functionary. For two hours, chase follows shoot-out as Swagger fires at men who, like movie target from time immemorial, obligingly refuse to take cover. Swagger never misses–he could hunt mosquitoes for a living–and the extras, both live and digital, do their job; they fall down. The action has an oddly undifferentiated, wearying feel to it. Yet this standard industrial product does something strange. On the surface, the movie offers liberal ideological sentiments: it condemns covert overseas operations controlled by oil interests; it is angry at the higher-ups who escaped blame for Abu Ghraib; it exhibits a clear distaste for the person and values of Dick Cheney. But it places these sentiments within a matrix of gun culture and lonely-man-of-honor myths. Swagger is the latest incarnation of Rambo, the anti-government crazy. The film-makers may be trying to appeal both to liberals and to the Pat Buchanan conservatives who hate big government and multinational corporations and want American warriors to stay home. The collusion of political currents suggests the degree of confusion roiling not only at Hollywood but also at the White House. How do movie makers find military heroes in the middle of an unpopular overseas war is a question that has no easy answer. When we first see Swagger, he is taking down uniformed soldiers as part of a mysterious operation somewhere in the Horn of Africa. The operation is scrubbed, and Swagger and his partner, a spotter, are abandoned. Outraged, Swagger quits the Marines, and moves to a cabin in Wyoming with his dog. But he is pulled back into action by a retired colonel (Danny Glover), who works in some unnamed federal agency.
7. See Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida’s Road to 9/11 (London: Allen Lane, 2007): 56.
8. Ibid., 211.
9. For the murder of Ahmad Shah Massoud and Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden (New York: Penguin, 2005): 45-6.
10. See Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, www.feastofhateandfear.com.
11. See Olivier Roy, “La fin de l’Islam politique,” Esprit (August-September 2001): 45-6.
12. Patrick Forestier, Confessions d’un émir du GIA (Paris: Grasset, 1999): chap. 3 in particular.
13. There is an interesting, if eccentric, analysis of this matter in Farhad Khoskhokavar, Cultures et conflits 29/30 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997): 15-22.
14. The suicide group Heaven’s Gate
15. Note on Sects in Japan
16. Mohammed Atta, “The Last Night,” Action Report on Line, www.fpp.co.uk/online.
17. Quoted in Wright, The Looming Tower, 123.
18. Ibid., 234-5.
19. See Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002): 67.
20. Osama bin Laden, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, trans. James Howarth (London & New York: Verso, 2005): 56.
21. Mustapha Marrouchi, “Arabia in Disarray,” Part One and Two www.countercurrents.org 8 February 2007 and 2 March 2007.
22. Atta, “The Last Night,” 3.
23. Adnan A. Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islam (New York: Greenwood Press, 2005): 23-56.
24. Jean-Claude Perez, L’Islamisme dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Dualpha, 2004): 12-20.
25. See L’hyper-terrorisme, ed. François Heisbourg (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001): 56.
26. This is the background to Washington’s war on terror, a background fulled by hatred and ignorance on both sides of the cultural divide. Bush and bin Laden want to persuade us that the world is divided–them and us, believers and infidels, barbarism and civilization. For more on the subject, see Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (New York: Potomac Books, 2005): chap. 4 in particular.
27. Laura Mansfield, His Own Words: Translation and Analysis of the Writings of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri (Lulu.com: 2006).
28. Wright, The Looming Tower, 212.
29. Ibid., 271.
30. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (London: Igram Press, 2003); Sayed Khatab, The Power of Sovereignty: The Political and Ideological Philosophy of Sayyid Qutb (London: Routledge, 2006).
31. Habeck, Knowing the Enemy, 122.
32. Mansfield, His Own Words, 68-9.
33. Wright, The Looming Tower, 111.
34. What would the stern moralist Qutb, or for that matter a psychoanalyst, have to say about the family history of Osama bin Laden? He is one of 54 children whom his fantastically wealthy, self-made father had by 22 wives. His father found his mother, Alia–wife number four–in a small Syrian village, and married her when she was 14. When he was still a small boy, Osama’s father divorced Alia, and “gave” her to one of his employees to marry. Shortly afterwards, Osama’s father died in a plane crash. When he was 17, the youong bin Laden went to the same village where his father found Alia, and met and married his first wife, Najwa, who was also 14. He solemnly resolved to practice polygamy, eventuall taking four wives. For more on the subject, Habeck, Knowing the Enemy, 45-6.
35. Tal, Radical Islam, 92.
36. Quoted in Lawrence, The Looming Tower, 132.
37. Quoted in Khatab, The Power of Sovereignty, 112.
38. For more on the subject, see Emmanuel Razavi, Frères musulmans dans l’ombre d’Al Quaeda (Paris: Godefroy Jean-Cyrille Éditions, 2005): 81-2.
39. Ibid., 111.
40. See Abdel Mon’im Abul Futuh, Reformers, Not Wasters (Cairo: August 2005): 3. The text is written in Arabic.
41. Hussam Tammam and Patrick Haenni, “Egypt’s Air-Conditioned Islam,” Le Monde Diplomatique (September 2006): 5.
42. See Hussam Tammam, “Egypt: Muslim Brothers Retreat,” Le Monde Diplomatique (September 2005): 4. I owe a great deal to Tammam in the formulation of the some of the ideas I explore in this section.
43. See http//www.ikhwanaonline.com (in Arabic).
44. Carré, Seurat, Les frères musulmans, 45-6.
45. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “For Peace, Justice, and Culture: The Intellectual in the Twenty-First Century,” Profession (2006): 36.
46. Edward Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Pantheon, 2001): 56.
47. Edward Said, “Islam and the West Are Inadequate Banners,” The Observer 16 September 2001: 4.
48. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004): 142-3.
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