The Promise Of The Universal Restoration Of True Islam

If you have not yet read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright you must order a copy asap.  It is the definitive book on the birth of al-Qaeda and radical Islam.  I’ve decided to reproduce a few pages of the book in which Mr. Wright describes the transformation, well maybe the second transformation (the first being after Sayyid Qutb published his thoughts in a book called Milestones), of Islam.  This transformation was important to many men in the Muslim world but the two who are most important to this narrative is Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden:

Zawahiri established his medical practice at a Kuwaiti-backed Red Crescent hospital, which, like most of the aid institutions in the city was dominated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.  They hated him because of a lengthy diatribe he wrote, called Bitter Harvest, in which he attacked the Brothers for collaborating with infidel regimes – that is to say, all Arab governments.  He called the Brotherhood "a tool in the hands of tyrants."  He demanded that they publicly renounce "constitutions and man-made laws, democracy, elections, and parliament," and declare jihad against the regimes they formerly supported.  Privately funded, this handsomely produced book appeared all over Peshawar.  "They were available free of charge," one of the Brothers, who was working in Peshawar at the time, recalls.  "When you would go to get food, the clerk would ask if you wished to have one of these books, or two?"

Another of Zawahiri’s colleagues from the underground days in Cairo arrived, a physician named Sayyid Imam, whose jihadi moniker was Dr. Fadl.  They worked in the same hospital in Peshawar.  Like Zawahiri, Dr. Fadl was a writer and theoretician.  Because he was older and had been the emir of al-Jihad during Zawahiri’s imprisonment, he took over the organization once again.  Zawahiri also adopted a nom de guerre: Dr. Abdul Mu’iz (in Arabic, abd means "slave," and mu’iz means "the bestower of honor," on of the ninety-nine names of God).  He and Dr. Fadl immediately set about reestablishing al-Jihad by recruiting new members from the young Egyptians among the mujahideen.   At first they called themselves the Jihad Organization, then they changed the name again, to Islamic Jihad.  But it was still the same al-Jihad.

The Kuwaiti-backed Red Crescent hospital became the center of a divisive movement within the Arab Afghan community.  Under the influence of an Algerian, Dr. Ahmed el-Wed, known for his bloody-minded intellect, the hospital turned into an incubator for a murderous new idea, one that would split the Mujahideen and justify the fratricidal carnage that would spread through the Muslim Arab countries immediately after the Afghan war.

The heresy of takfir, or excommunication, has been a problem in Islam since its early days.  In the mid seventh century, a group known as the Kharijites revolted against the rule of Ali, the fourth caliph.  The particular issue that triggered their rebellion was Ali’s decision to compromise with a political opponent rather then to wage a fratricidal war.  The Kharijites decreed that they were the only ones who followed the true tenets of the faith, and that anyone who did not agree with them was an apostate, and that included even Ali, the Prophet’s beloved son-in-law, who they eventually assassinated.

In the early 1970s a group surfaced in Egypt called Takfir wa Hijira (Excommunication and Withdrawal), a forerunner of al-Qaeda.  Their leader, Shukri Mustafa, a graduate of the Egyptian concentration camps, attracted a couple of thousand followers.  They read Qutb and plotted the day when they would gain sufficient strength in exile to return to annihilate the unbelievers and bring on the final days.  Meanwhile, they wandered in Egypt’s Western Desert, sleeping in mountain grottoes.

The Cairo press called Mustafa’s followers ahl al-khaf, "people of the cave," a reference to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.  This Christian folktale recounts the story of seven shepherds who refused to renounce their faith.  In punishment, the Roman emperor Decius had them walled up inside a cave in present-day Turkey.  Three centuries later, according to the legend, the cave was discovered and the sleepers awakened, thinking they had slept only one night.  There is an entire sura, or chapter, in the Quran, "The Cave," that refers to this story.  Like Shukri Mustafa, bin Laden would fasten onto the imagery that the cave evokes for Muslims.  Moreover, the modus operandi of withdrawal, preparation, and dissimulation that would frame  the culture of al-Qaeda’s sleeper cells was established by Takfir wa Hijira was early as 1975.

Two years later, members of the group kidnapped a former  minister of religious endowments in Cairo, Sheikh Mohammed al-Dhahabi, a humble and distinguished scholar who often spoke at the Masjid al-Nur, a mosque Zawahiri had frequented in his youth.  When the Egyptian government spurned Shukri Mastafa’s demands for money and publicity, Mustafa murdered the old sheikh.  His body was found on a Cairo street, hands bound behind him, part of his beard torn away.

The Egyptian police quickly rounded up most of the members of Takfir was Hijira and brought dozens of them to a hasty trial.  Shukri Mustafa and five others were executed.  With that, the revolutionary concept of expelling Muslims from the faith – thereby justifying their killing – seemed to have been stamped out.  But in the subterranean discourse of jihad, a mutated form of takfir had taken hold.  It still smoldered in Upper Egypt, where Shukri Mustafa had proselytized in his early years (and where Dr. Fadl was reared).  Remnants of the group supplied Zawahiri’s comrades in al-Jihad with the grenades and ammunition used to assassinate Anwar Sadat.  Some adherents carried the heresy into North African countries, including Algeria, where Dr. Ahmed learned of it.

Takfir is the mirror image of Islam, reversing its fundamental principles but maintaining the semblance of orthodoxy.  The Quran explicitly states that Muslims shall not kill anyone, except as punishment for murder.  The murderer of one innocent, the Quran warns, is judged "as if he had murdered all of mankind."  The killing of Muslims is an even greater offense.  He who commits such an act, says the Quran, will find that "his repayment is Hell, remaining in it timelessly, forever."  How, then, could groups such as al-Jihad and the Islamic Group justify using violence against fellow Muslims in order to come to power?  Sayyid Qutb had pointed the way by declaring that a leader who does not impose Sharia on the country must be an apostate.  There is a well known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam.  The pious Anwar Sadat was the first modern victim of the reverse logic of takfir.

The new takfiris, such as Dr. Fadl and Dr. Ahmed, extended the death warrant to encompass, for instance, anyone who registered to vote.  Democracy, in their view, was against Islam because it placed in the hands of people authority that properly belonged to God.  Therefore, anyone who voted was an apostate, and his life was forfeit.  So was anyone who disagreed with their joyless understanding of Islam – including the mujahideen leaders they had ostensibly come to help, and event he entire population of Afghanistan, whom they regarded as infidels because they were not Salafists.  The new takfiris believed that they were entitled to kill practically anyone and everyone who stood in their way; indeed, they saw it as a divine duty.

Until he arrived in Peshawa, Zawahiri had never endorsed wholesale murder.  He had always approached political change like a surgeon: A speedy and precise coup d’etat was his lifelong ideal.  But while he was working in the Red Crescent hospital with Dr. Fadl and Dr. Ahmed, the moral bonds that separated political resistance from terrorism became more elastic.  His friends and former prison mates noticed a change in his personality.  The modest, well-mannered doctor who had always been so exacting in his arguments was now strident, antagonistic, and strangely illogical.  He would seize on innocent comments and interpret them in a weird and malicious manner. Perhaps for the first time in his adulthood, he faced a crisis of identity.

In a life as directed and purposeful as Zawahiri’s, there are few moments that can be said to be turning points. One ws the execution of Sayyid Qutb when Zawahiri was fifteen; indeed, that was the point of origin for all that followed.  Torture did not so much change Zawahiri as purify his resolve.  Each step of his life was in the service of fulfilling his goal of installing an Islamic government in Egypt as bloodlessly as possible.  But the takfiri doctrine had shaken him.  The takfiris convinced themselves that salvation for all of humanity lay on the other side of moral territory that had always been the certain province of the damned.  They would shoulder the risks to their eternal souls by assuming the divine authority of deciding who was a real Muslim and who was not, who should live and who should die. 

Zawahiri stood at this great divide.  On one side, there lay before him the incremental process of rebuilding his movement in exile, waiting for the opportunity, if it ever came, of returning to Egypt and taking control.  This was his life’s goal.  But it was only a small step toward the apocalypse, which seemed so much closer at hand when he viewed the other side of the divide.  There, across what he must have known was an ocean of blood, was the promise of the universal restoration of true Islam. 

For the next ten years, Zawahiri would be pulled in both directions.  The Egyptian option was al-Jihad, which he had created and defined.  The universal option had not yet been named, but it was taking shape.  It would be called al-Qaeda.

I felt compelled to post these pages of Lawrence Wright’s book to quell many on the left who state that the reason al-Qaeda, Osama, and the rest of the fanatics were angry at us….indeed the only reason, is due to our soldiers being on sacred ground.  While this may have been an excuse it is more then apparent that if we had not one footprint on that ground they would still find another excuse to make war against those who practice Democracy.

Curt

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