TWO

Peshawar: The Office of Services

If you take the long view, you could say that the attacks of September 11 had their origin in the very distant past, perhaps in the fourteenth century when a militant Islamic purism and the concept of jihad were born out of the Mongol invasion of the Middle East. Or perhaps the origin of September 11 lies even further back, in the seventh-century Muslim sect known as the Kharajites, who believed that it was God’s work to slay nonbelievers—and nonbelievers in this view included Muslims who did not practice a strict interpretation of Islamic law. As scholars have pointed out since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, there has always been a powerful strain in Islam, one of the great monotheistic religions of the world, of a cult of death and sacrifice, a conviction that the highest calling, the quickest path to worldly prestige and heavenly reward, is through the slaughter of infidels and the enemies of Islam.

In fact, as some of these same scholars have written, the vengeful, fanatical, intolerant Islam that lay behind the September 11 attacks has always been a minority strand in a religion with many historical attributes, including tolerance and pluralism, pacific mysticism and gentleness.1 If you, for example, were a Jew in the fifteenth century, you would have been far better off in Muslim Baghdad or Alexandria than in Christian Paris or Madrid—indeed you might have taken refuge in one of the Muslim places after being expelled, in the name of religion, from the Christian ones. “There must be no coercion in matters of religion” is a line that comes straight from the Koran.2 But it is a line that, quite obviously, is ignored by many Muslims today, who embrace, not the pluralist concept of their faith, but a narrow, anti-modern, vengeful, and fanatical version of it.

In many ways, the story of September 11 is a story of a battle within Islam itself—between the Islam that is not spread by the sword and the Islam that is spread not only by the sword, but by a fetish of martyrdom and murder. In recent years, this second Islam has been sanctioned by the rulings of a contingent of fanatical religious scholars for whom Islam is locked in a duel to death with the rest of the world and with the impure elements of the Muslim world itself. The theological basis for this point of view also goes back many hundreds of years, to the concept that the umma, the Muslim community, sometimes becomes internally corrupted and humiliated by foreign conquest, and that, under those circumstances, Muslims should be summoned to wage Holy War. In this view, Islam itself needed to be purified, brought back to its fundamentals, and the foreigners thrown out. One very influential figure who espoused that doctrine was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran who, upon taking power in 1979, popularized the slogan “Death to America!”

But there have been other such figures, less known in the West but immensely prestigious and famous in the Middle East, and in many ways the more recent origins of September 11 lie with one of them, an intense, charismatic Palestinian religious scholar named Abdullah Azzam. Indeed, in this sense, the origins of what happened on September 11 in New York and Washington can actually be traced to a specific place and time—the dusty, frontier city of Peshawar in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan in 1979. It was there and then that Azzam set up a modest storefront office aimed at recruiting volunteers for an Islamic army that would win historic renewal and glory for Islam. Out of Azzam’s call to Muslims everywhere to join him in a new jihad, or holy war, grew the force that would eventually carry out the worst foreign attack on American soil since the War of 1812.

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Even now in the wake of September 11 and other terrorist attacks on the United States, carried out by men proclaiming Islam as their guide and inspiration, few Americans have heard of Abdullah Azzam and far fewer knew of him in 1979 and the early 1980s. And yet, perhaps more than any other single person in recent history, Azzam galvanized Muslims around the world to fight against what they deemed to be the enemies of Islam. He was a fierce and forceful man of about thirty-nine years of age when he arrived in Peshawar, with his full beard and his knack both for international organization and for the florid rhetoric of Islamic militancy. In his own autobiographical writings, he talked of his “untold love to fight in the Path of Allah.” He repudiated the very concept of compromise: “Jihad and the rifle alone” is one of his most quoted pronouncements. “No negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues.”

Azzam was born in the West Bank town of Jenin in 1941, though he left for Jordan after Israel occupied the West Bank in the Six Day War of 1967. In Jordan, he worked as a village schoolteacher, but he was also a political activist—or, as this is put in the glowing articles written about him in publications devoted to jihad, he “joined the jihad against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.” According to some accounts, Azzam was a founder of Hamas, which was later to turn to suicide bombings as its chief weapon against the hated Israeli enemy. If Azzam did turn to Hamas, it would have been out of a disillusionment with the mainstream Palestinian movement, a disillusionment that he often expressed, and in this sense illustrated an important element in the larger Arab contention with Israel and with the West. You can say that modern Arab political movements are of two kinds. One is secular and nationalist, and its heroes are figures like Gamel Abdel Nassar of Egypt and Algerian independence leaders like Ahmed Ben Bella, who were inspired by socialist or Marxist ideas that came from Europe. These men who came to power in coups or independence struggles in the 1950s and 1960s were Third World revolutionaries and they had more in common with Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh or Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah than they did with the Prophet Mohammed or his modern-day followers.

The other movement, smaller and less powerful during the early years of Azzam’s life, is religious. Its members believed that a revitalized and usually very strict Islam would provide the true path to restored greatness for both the Arab and the Islamic worlds, since Islam was the great invention of the Arabs and without it, in this view, the Arab states would be mere copies of the decadent and spiritless West. These two visions, one secular, the other religious, have often come into conflict in the Arab world, most conspicuously in the Egypt of today where the secular government is bitterly opposed by Islamic parties, many of whose leaders have been, or are, in prison. The religious movement was also consciously and fiercely anti-modern and anti-Western; its adherents believe in sharia, or rule by Islamic law with its strict punishments for all offenses and its subordination of women, and they cultivate the notions of jihad and the glories of martyrdom, of dying for Allah.

Azzam belonged to this second tendency; he believed in jihad, in sharia, in martyrdom, and that is what led him to break with the mainstream Palestinian movement, which, under the overall leadership of Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian National Council, has always been secular, not religious. Azzam used to tell, with disapproval in his voice, stories of how Palestinian fighters spent their nights listening to music and playing cards. In one camp of thousands of people, he said, only a handful went to daily prayers in the mosques.

In 1970 or thereabouts Azzam went to Egypt where he got a degree in sharia from Al-Azhar University, the world’s oldest and most prestigious institution for Islamic scholarship. For a time, he taught at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a place where the Islamic movement was favored over the secular nationalist one. Then, in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Muslim Afghanistan, Azzam saw the opportunity he believed he was born for. He went to Peshawar, the city in northwest Pakistan just thirty miles from the fabled Khyber Pass, the gateway to Afghanistan. He traveled extensively in Afghanistan itself, and though it is not clear whether he took part in actual fighting, it is certain that he was deeply moved and inspired by the spectacle of Muslims fighting against a great, infidel power. Returning to Peshawar, he founded the Office of Services for the mujahedeen (mujahedeen meaning “holy warriors”), which was soon to become a global network recruiting Muslims to do jihad against the Soviet Union.

At the time, Peshawar, which had been a military outpost in the years of the British empire, was the global epicenter for the anti-Soviet fight, the place where an international assortment of spies, mullahs, mujahedeen, journalists, relief agency officials, arms dealers, and men with money from the American Central Intelligence Agency could be found in the city’s seedy hotels and large masonry houses. The United States was in the process of funneling what would become some $3 billion to Afghan freedom fighters in their successful guerrilla struggle against the Russians. It was a time, in other words, when the United States was favorably disposed to the growing band of foreign Muslims, from places like Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia who were inspired to fight against the Soviet infidel. In fact, accounts differ as to the military importance of the Arabs in Afghanistan itself. They themselves developed an entire inspirational literature about their bravery under fire, their importance in the Afghan struggle. But other accounts depict them as minor players in the anti-Soviet war who built large legends out of a couple of small engagements. But there is no question that in summoning thousands of Arabs to Peshawar, Azzam created what was to become an important new force in the world, a kind of Muslim international, a corps consisting of many thousands of young men—and a smaller group of radical religious teachers—who were deeply dissatisfied with conditions in their home countries and ever more eager to bring about radical changes there; or they had been branded criminals in those countries and were unable to return home. Before the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Peshawar and its surrounding region was an isolated, picturesque, Kiplingesque backwater with very little importance for the outside world. After that war began, it became full of people fired with messianic Islamic zeal, the sense that, if they could defeat the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan, they could do anything.

Azzam and his Office of Services were thus at the center of the spirit of a newly armed Islam. Like such other Islamic figures of the time, most notably the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, he communicated to his followers and to potential recruits to the cause by making audiotapes of his lectures and sermons. “Jihad must not be abandoned until Allah alone is worshipped” was typical of the sort of statements that he made, and that would be heard in mosques from Tucson, Arizona, to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “Jihad continues until Allah’s Word is raised high … Jihad is the way of everlasting glory.”3 His Office of Services moved from its original storefront location to a large house in a quiet, affluent area of Peshawar called University Town, because of its proximity to Peshawar University. The American consulate and cultural center are nearby. When a young Arab fighter or a not-so-young Muslim cleric would arrive in Peshawar, Abdullah Azzam’s house would often be the first place he would go. There he would get oriented, assigned for military training, and eventually he would be put into a group that would cross over the border into Afghanistan itself.

Azzam’s main activity was recruitment, and for that purpose he rapidly expanded the Office of Services into a truly global organization. There were branches in most of the Arab countries as well as in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and Norway, all of which had large numbers of Muslim students and immigrants. Azzam dispatched a close follower, one Mustafa Shalabi, to Brooklyn, New York, where a branch of his office was flourishing by the mid-1980s, a part of another organization called AlKifah, which had centers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, and Tucson, and minor branches in some thirty other American cities.4 Mosques and Islamic centers around the world reverberated to Azzam’s call to do jihad in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands of volunteers for jihad, a large number of them Arabs, heeded that call.

What is extraordinary is the large number of figures who came to Peshawar during the Soviet war, or shortly after it, and who later participated in terrorist attacks against the United States. Two of the men implicated in the Sadat assassination later turned up in Peshawar where they became part of the Azzam circle. One of them was Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind preacher from the city of Fayoum in southern Egypt who had provided a religious sanction, known as a fatwa, for the assassination of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat. Another was Ayman Zawahiri, a Cairo medical doctor who was arrested after the Sadat assassination and spent three years in prison. Zawahiri, another of the charismatic figures who emerged in this period, was the leader of Egyptian Jihad, one of several radical Islamic groups. Among the others who passed through Peshawar, getting their first taste of jihad, was el-Sayyid Nosair, who would later assassinate the Jewish extremist Meier Kahane in New York and would be a primary instigator of the terror bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. There was Mahmud Abuhalima, an Egyptian who was later convicted in the 1993 bombing. There was a mysterious Egyptian army officer and secret jihadist named Ali A. Mohammed, who would later become at the same time an informant for the FBI and, unknown to the FBI, a trainer of terrorists in the United States. There were the members of the terrorist teams that blew up the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the same day in 1998. In other words, many of the men who would later figure in the story of terrorism against the United States were first received into the jihad movement in Peshawar by Abdullah Azzam or by one of his successors (since, as we will see, Azzam himself was assassinated in 1989).

But none of these figures would turn out to be more important than a young Saudi who, as best as can be determined, came first to Peshawar in about 1980, in the early stages of the anti-Soviet struggle, and became a key Azzam supporter. He was about twenty-three years old at the time, an extremely tall, self-possessed, and sad-eyed young man from a very rich, well-connected family, the kind of man, Azzam understood, whose wealth and connections, allied to his own religious and political credentials, could help to make for a powerful combination.

Arriving in Peshawar, he was distinctive in his carefully tailored shalwar kameez, the long, flowing tunic and trousers favored by the Pashtuns of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and his English handmade leather boots. But he was a young man who wanted to do something more meaningful with his life than spend lavish sums on his own pleasures, which is what he had done until then. It is said that while still in Saudi Arabia he had listened to taped sermons by Azzam calling on Muslims everywhere to do jihad and that they had had a profound impact on him. They gave him the cause that would occupy him for the rest of his life. His name: Osama bin Laden.