Author: Robert Worth
Publication: The New York Times
Date: October 13, 2001
Long before Osama bin Laden appeared
on television screens with an AK-47 by his side, he released earlier videotapes
in which he appears in the guise of a holy man, sitting peacefully in front
of a wall of books. That scholarly backdrop is an important symbol for
Mr. bin Laden's terrorist movement as he tries to legitimize his extremist
views of Islam.
"Many Americans seem to think that
bin Laden is just a violent cult leader," said Michael Doran, a professor
of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. "But the truth is that
he is tapping into a minority Islamic tradition with a wide following and
a deep history."
Although many Muslims are horrified
at the notion that their faith is being used to justify terrorism, Mr.
bin Laden's advocacy of jihad, or holy war, against the West is a natural
extension of what some radical Islamists have been saying and doing since
the 1930's. These radicals were jailed, tortured and often executed in
their home countries, particularly in Egypt during the 1950's and 60's,
for their attacks on Western influences and their efforts to replace their
own regime with an Islamic state.
The Muslim extremists, members of
Islamic Jihad, who assassinated the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981,
for instance, left behind a 54-page document titled "The Neglected Duty"
that provided an elaborate theological justification for what they had
done. Addressed to other Muslims rather than to the West, the document
drew on earlier thinkers in arguing that rebelling against one's rulers
- which is forbidden by most Islamic authorities - is in fact a duty if
those rulers have abandoned true Islam.
Mr. bin Laden, whose Al Qaeda movement
merged with Islamic Jihad several years ago, has taken the same tack, drawing
on medieval authorities to argue that killing innocents or even Muslims
is permitted if it serves the cause of jihad against the West.
The roots of Mr. bin Laden's worldview
date back to a school in medieval Islam that spread throughout the Arab
world in the 20th century, known as the Salafiyya, said Bernard Haykel,
a professor of Islamic law at New York University. Its name comes from
the Arabic words al-salaf al-salih, "the venerable forefathers," which
refers to the generation of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. The
salafis believed Islam had been corrupted by idolatry, and they sought
to bring it back to the purity of its earliest days.
"Salafis are extreme in observance,
but they're not necessarily militant," Mr. Haykel said. The official Wahhabi
ideology of the Saudi state, for instance, as well as the religious doctrine
of the Muslim Brothers falls under the banner of Salafiyya.
Early salafi reformers believed
they could reconcile Islam with modern Western political ideas. Some argued
that Western- style democracy was perfectly compatible with Islam, and
had even been prefigured by the Islamic concept of shura, a consultation
between ruler and ruled.
That optimism began to fade after
World War I, when the Western powers carved up the remains of the Ottoman
empire into nation-states. A crucial step came in the 1930's, when some
radicals began to argue that Islam was in real danger of being extinguished
through Western influence, said Emmanuel Sivan, a professor at Hebrew University
in Jerusalem, who has written extensively on modern Islam. It was then
that Rashid Rida and Maulana Maudoodi developed the notion that modern
Western culture was equivalent to jahiliyya (the word is the Arabic term
for the barbarism that existed before Islam).
But if one man deserves the title
of intellectual grandfather to Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists,
it is probably the Egyptian writer and activist Sayyid Qutb (pronounced
SIGH-yid KUH-tahb), who was executed by the Egyptian authorities in the
mid-1960's for inciting resistance to the regime.
As Fathi Yakan, one of Qutb's disciples,
wrote in the 1960's: "The groundwork for the French Revolution was laid
by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the Communist Revolution realized
plans set by Marx, Engels and Lenin. . . . The same holds true for us as
well."
In his most popular book, "Signposts
on the Road" (1964), Mr. Qutb wrote: "This is the most dangerous jahiliyya
which has ever menaced our faith. For everything around is jahiliyya: perceptions
and beliefs, manners and morals, culture, art and literature, laws and
regulations, including a good part of what we consider Islamic culture."
Mr. Qutb, who began his career as
a modernist literary critic, was radicalized by a roughly yearlong stay
in the United States, between 1948 and 1950. In a book about his travels
he cites the Kinsey Report, along with Darwin, Marx and Freud, as forces
that have contributed to the moral degradation of the country.
"No one is more distant than the
Americans from spirituality and piety," he wrote.
He also narrated, with evident disgust,
his observations of the sexual promiscuity of American culture. Describing
a church dance in Greeley, Colo., he writes: "Every young man took the
hand of a young woman. And these were the young men and women who had just
been singing their hymns! Red and blue lights, with only a few white lamps,
illuminated the dance floor. The room became a confusion of feet and legs:
arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together."
Ultimately, Mr. Qutb rejected democracy
and nationalism as Western ideas incompatible with Islam. Even pan-Arabism,
which was tremendously popular in the Arab world, was simply an obstacle
to the foundation of an Islamic state.
Perhaps even more important, Mr.
Qutb was the first Sunni Muslim to find a way around the ancient prohibition
against overthrowing a Muslim ruler. "Qutb said the rulers of the Muslim
world today are no longer Muslims," Mr. Haykel said. "He basically declared
them infidels."
He did so, Mr. Haykel added, in
a particularly persuasive way, by reinterpreting the works of a medieval
intellectual named Ibn Taymiyya. A towering figure in the history of Muslim
thought, Ibn Taymiyya lived in Damascus in the 13th and 14th centuries,
when Syria was in danger of domination by the Mongols.
Mr. Qutb equated Ibn Taymiyya's
intellectual and political struggle against the Mongols with his own struggle
against Gamal Abdel Nasser and the other Arab rulers of his day. It was
a risky move, because Islamic tradition states that if one Muslim falsely
calls another an infidel, he could burn in hell, Mr. Haykel said. It may
also have sealed his death warrant, because Egypt's rulers did not take
such threats lightly.
But decades after his death, Mr.
Qutb's equation continues to inspire radicals like Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman,
who was convicted of conspiring to blow up the United Nations and other
New York City landmarks, and Osama bin Laden. Mr. bin Laden quotes Ibn
Taymiyya in the same way, arguing that the Saudi government - which earned
his wrath by expelling him and serving as host to American troops during
the Persian Gulf war - is illegitimate.
"By opening the Arab peninsula to
the crusaders, the regime disobeyed and acted against what has been enjoined
by the messenger of God," Mr. bin Laden wrote in his 1996 "Declaration
of War against America." In so doing, the Saudi leaders ceased to be Muslims,
he concluded.
That message resonates even with
Muslims who do not share Mr. bin Laden's extreme views, largely because
many Arabs see not just the Saudi regime but the entire political order
in the Arab world today as tyrannical and corrupt, said John Voll, a professor
at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.
"Part of the appeal of bin Laden
is that he can look people in the eye and say: `I know you live in a police
state, I know you're living in poverty, and the reason for it is clear:
Satan is doing this to you. So come join my holy war,' " he said.
Mr. bin Laden himself, however,
has very little religious education. "He's a playboy from a very rich family,
so he needed other people to relay the message to him," Mr. Sivan said.
The two people who influenced him most directly were Abdallah Azzam, a
Palestinian who was killed by a car bomb in 1989, and Safar al- Hawali,
a Saudi who has periodically been jailed by the authorities. Both men were
steeped in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, Mr. Sivan said.
Mr. bin Laden does seem to have
deviated from the radical tradition in one sense, by focusing his attacks
on the United States rather than Arab regimes. In his 1996 declaration,
he went so far as to say that Muslims should put aside their own differences
so as to focus on the struggle against the Western enemy - a serious departure
from the doctrine of Qutb and even Sadat's killers, who argued that the
internal struggle was the one that mattered.
But that may be merely a shift in
tactics, not in overall strategy. "Bin Laden is using the U.S. as an instrument
in his struggle with other Muslims," Mr. Doran said. "He wants the U.S.
to strike back disproportionately, because he believes that will outrage
Muslims and inspire them to overthrow their governments and build an Islamic
state."
