Jihad Against America

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In Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower he writes a excellent, historical, account of the formation of al-Qaeda and as I did last week I have selected passages from the book that I feel need some highlighting.  In this one we witness the transformation of the anti-Communist vision Osama bin Laden had for al-Qaeda to the anti-American version we have today. 

He begins by describing the man who was behind this change, Mamdouh Salim aka Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, a Kurd from Iraq who was a colonel in Saddam’s army during the war with Iran but fled to Iran not long after.  He became bin Laden’s religious advisor and as such held great sway:

Besides being bin Laden’s friend, Abu Hajer was his imam.  There were remarkably few among the members of al-Qaeda who had any extensive religious training.  Despite their zealotry, they were essentially theological amateurs.  Abu Hajer had the greatest spiritual authority, by virtue of having memorized the Quran, but he was an electrical engineer, not a cleric.  Nonetheless, bin Laden made him head of al-Qaeda’s fatwa committee – a fateful choice.  It was on Abu Hajer’s authority that al-Qaeda turned from being the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden originally envisioned into a terrorist organization bent on attacking the United States, the last remaining superpower and the force that bin Laden and Abu Hajer believed represented the greatest threat to Islam.

Why did these men turn against America, a highly religious country that so recently had been their ally in Afghanistan?  In large part, it was because they saw America as the locus of Christian power.  Once, the piety of the Muslim mujahideen and the Christian leaders of the U.S. government had served as a bond between them.  Indeed, mujahideen leaders had been considerably romanticized in the American press and had made tours through American churches, where they were lauded for their spiritual courage in the common fight against Marxism and godlessness.  But Christianity – especially the evangelizing American variety – and Islam were obviously competitive faiths.  Viewed through the eyes of men who were spiritually anchored in the seventh century, Christianity was not just a rival, it was the archenemy.  To them, the Crusades were a continual historical process that would never be resolved until the final victory of Islam.  They bitterly perceived the contradiction embodied by Islam’s long, steady retreat from the gates of Vienna, where on September 11 – that now resonant date – in 1683, the kind of Poland began the battle that turned back the farthest advance of Muslim armies.  For the next three hundred years, Islam would be overshadowed by the growth of Western Christian societies.  Yet bin Laden and his Arab Afghans believed that, in Afghanistan, they had turned the tide and that Islam was again on the march.

Now they faced the greatest military, material, and cultural power any civilization had ever produced.  "Jihad against America?" some of the al-Qaeda members asked in dismay.  "America knows everything about us.  It knows even the label of our underwear."  They saw how weak and splintered their own governments were – empowered only by the force of America’s need to maintain the status quo.  The oceans, the skies, even the heavens were patrolled by the Americans.  America was not distant, it was everywhere.

Al-Qaeda economists pointed to "our oil" that fueled America’s rampant expansion, feeling as if something had been stolen from them – not the oil, exactly, although bin Laden felt it was underpriced – but the cultural regeneration that should have come with its sale.  In the woefully unproductive societies they lived in, fortunes melted away like snow in the desert.  What remained was a generalized feeling of betrayal.

Of course, oil had brought wealth to some Arabs, but in the process of becoming rich hadn’t they only become more Western?  Consumerism, vice, and individuality, which the radical Islamists saw as the hallmarks of modern American culture, threatened to destroy Islam – even the idea of Islam – by blending it into a globalized, corporate, interdependent, secular commercial world that was part of what that these men meant when they said "America."  But by defining modernity, progress, trade, consumption, and even pleasure as Western assaults on Islam, al-Qaeda thinkers left little on the table for themselves.

If America owned the future, the Islamic fundamentalists laid claim to the past.  They were not rejecting technology or science, indeed, many of the leaders of al-Qaeda, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Hajer, were men of science themselves.  But they were ambivalent about the way in which technology weakened the spirit.  This was reflected in bin Laden’s interest in earth-moving machinery and genetic engineering of plants, on the one hand, and his rejection of chilled water on the other.  By returning the rule of Sharia, radical Islam could draw the line against the encroaching west.  Even the values that America advertised as being universally desirable – democracy, transparency, the rule of law, human rights, the separation of religion from governance – were discredited in the eyes of the jihadis because they were Western and therefore modern.  Al-Qaeda’s duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular, modernizing West.  In order to do that, bin Laden told his men, al-Qaeda would drag the United States into a war with Islam – "a large-scale front which it cannot control."

Many on the left say that the whole reason radical Islam is at war with us is because we have troops on "sacred" soil.  But as Lawrence writes, this is not the case.  While it pissed them off for sure, the real reason they are at war with us is to ensure that their vision of Islam takes over the world.  Because there is only Islam, and competing religions cannot survive.

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I haven’t read “The Looming Tower”, but it sounds like this Wright fellow has it exactly right. Walid Phares says much the same thing in his book “Future Jihad”; that the jihadists are out to reestablish the Caliphate. To them Islam is destined to rule the world.

Different groups of jihadists have different strategies, but the goal is the same. As Wright seems to understand, to the jihadists the Crusades are not ancient history, they may as well have happened last Thursday. The Byzantine Empire fell last Friday. They believe in a continuity of history, tying what we call “ancient” to today in a way few Westerners can imagine.