The town of Tuz Khormato lies a little more than a hundred miles north of Baghdad, in Iraq’s Salah ad-Din province. It is an ethnically and religiously mixed city of Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds, and Turkmen, which may explain why it has attracted so much attention from the mostly foreign Jihadists in the country who make up what the U.S. military calls al-Qa’ida in Iraq, or AQI (to differentiate the group from al-Qa’ida Central, Osama bin Laden’s organization, which is based near the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and seems to have little operational control over its Iraqi franchise). Since the American invasion in 2003, Tuz Khormato has been targeted by wave after wave of Jihadist militants who have journeyed to Iraq from countries as far away as the Philippines and Malaysia to wage war against those they call “infidels” and “hypocrites.”
These two terms—infidel (kafir) and hypocrite (munafiq)—have become permanent fixtures in the Jihadist lexicon. Both words have quite specific meanings in the Qur’an. Kafir is the term most often used to designate the powerful pagan rulers of pre-Islamic Mecca, the Quraysh, who fought a bloody, decadelong war with the nascent Muslim community. Munafiq is the term reserved for Arab tribes that joined the Muslim community, but only for political or material gain, and ultimately abandoned the new faith and returned to their old tribal ways. In Jihadism, however, both words have been stripped of their historical context, so that infidel has come to mean anyone who is not a Muslim, while hypocrite means any Muslim who is not a Jihadist. Both groups are designated as “unbelievers;” both are marked for death.
Jihadism is a puritanical movement in the sense that its members consider themselves to be the only true Muslims. All other Muslims are impostors or apostates who must repent of their “hypocrisy” or be abandoned to their fate. As an exclusively Sunni movement, Jihadism reserves particular contempt for the Shi’a (approximately 15 to 20 percent of the Muslim world and centered around Iran, Iraq, and the Levant), whom the Jihadists regard not as Muslims but as rawafidah, or “rejectionists”—heretics who are considered worse than the infidels and hypocrites. The Jordanian Jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a petty thief and barely literate brute who was, until his death in 2006, the leader of al-Qa’ida in Iraq, argued that the Shi’a were a far graver threat to Islam than even the Americans. Shi’ism is “patent polytheism,” Zarqawi claimed, a religion that “has nothing in common with Islam.” The Shi’a are “the most evil of mankind … the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, the penetrating venom.” Through random kidnappings, torture, and beheading of Shi’a civilians, Zarqawi almost single-handedly launched a sectarian civil war in Iraq.
Tuz Khormato, with its large Shi’ite population, became a favorite hunting ground for Zarqawi’s roaming death squads. Jihadist suicide bombers linked to al-Qa’ida in Iraq have incinerated crowded restaurants and cafés. Tuz Khormato’s market was practically razed by a car bomb. Improvised explosive devices have decimated the town’s already anemic police force. In 2005, Tuz Khormato’s main Shi’ite mosque was nearly burned to the ground. Mass graves have been unearthed on the outskirts of town, some of them filled with the bodies of women and children, their corpses bound, a few without heads.
Somehow, Tuz Khormato thrives. Despite the barbarity inflicted upon its people, the city has not undergone the same level of internal displacement and ethnic homogenization that one sees in Baghdad, where entire neighborhoods have been cleansed of any hint of diversity. The people of Tuz Khormato have known one another too long, have lived next to one another too long, have married and buried one another too long to be pried apart by a gang of militant puritans. And for that they have paid a price. The city bears the scars of their defiance. In the center of town, at the edge of what used to be a parking lot, is a crater the size of a Humvee.
It was the last day of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, a holiday like no other in Islam, when friends and families gather to exchange gifts and break the monthlong fast together. Little girls put on their new dresses, boys don spit-shined shoes, and, after twenty-eight long, hot days of denial and deprivation, everyone spills outdoors for a night of food and celebration.
The elders of Tuz Khormato had cleared out a parking lot for Eid and set up a makeshift carnival complete with swings and a slide, a rusty metal merry-go-round, and a small, hand-cranked Ferris wheel that creaked and groaned with each unsteady rotation. Confection booths sold sodas, snacks, and balloons. Lamps were lit. Music blared from loudspeakers.
The sun had just set when a young man walked onto the playground leading a horse-drawn cart filled with candy and toys. He was a stranger in Tuz Khormato; no one recognized him. But who knew anyone anymore? The war had fractured the country. Every day a new batch of refugees from Baghdad or Diyala or nearby Kirkuk arrived in Tuz Khormato—broken families, destitute widows, single men trying to remake their lives in a new town.
The young man stopped his cart in the center of the playground and began shouting out his wares. He opened the cart and pulled out a couple of chocolate bars, a stuffed animal, a small plastic soccer ball. Children jumped up from their games, abandoned the rides, rushed toward the cart, clasping wrinkled bills in their hands—money they had received from uncles and aunts and grandparents for making it through the difficult month. They waved the bills in the air, calling out their orders as they ran. But the young man was in no rush. He waited patiently for the girls in their new dresses and the boys in their new shoes to gather around him, to come close enough to touch, before calmly lifting the top of his candy cart, flipping a switch, and blowing himself up. A monstrous plume of black smoke hovered over the playground, blotting out the last light of the sun.
It is tempting, even comforting, to consider such abominable acts of terror to be the result of irrational or pathological behavior. But the truth is that terrorism is almost always a calculated choice. Terror is purposefully chosen, because it is often seen as the most effective, most expedient, and most economical method of pursuing a group’s aims.
Still, there is something uniquely repulsive about the tactic of suicide terrorism, even more so when it is framed as a religious act. Suicide terrorism is by no means a distinctly Islamic or even religious phenomenon. The tactic was popularized by the Marxist militants of the Tamil Tigers during their violent insurgency against the Sri Lankan government. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, has compiled a database of every suicide attack that took place in every part of the world from 1980 to 2003. His data demonstrate that “there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions.” In Pape’s database, secular groups account for a third of all suicide attacks. There is, it seems, a simple reason why suicide has become such a common method of terrorism: it works. When one’s adversary possesses the most formidable military hardware, when its strength cannot be challenged in battle, suicide terrorism levels the playing field. As a Palestinian militant coldly explained to an Israeli reporter, “We have no planes or missiles, not even artillery with which to fight evil. The most effective instrument for inflicting harm with a minimum of losses is this type of [suicide] mission.” Put crudely, the suicide terrorist has become the poor man’s smart bomb.
Nevertheless, there is no question that killing and dying are always easier to justify if they can be framed as ritual or ceremonial acts, which is why Jihadists refer to suicide terrorism as “martyrdom operations.” This is not a euphemism but an earnest attempt to infuse death with a sense of cosmic significance. It seems not to matter that, on the topic of suicide, the Qur’an is absolutely clear: “Do not kill yourself; if someone does so [God] shall cast him into Hell” (4:29–30). Nor does it seem important that countless sayings (Hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad refer to the gruesome punishment that awaits those who take their own lives: “Whoever purposely throws himself from a mountain and kills himself, he will forever be falling into the fire of Hell, wherein he will abide eternally; whoever drinks poison and kills himself with it, he will forever be carrying his poison in his hand and drinking it in the fire of Hell, wherein he will abide eternally; whoever kills himself with an iron weapon, will forever be carrying that weapon in his hand and stabbing his abdomen with it in the fire of Hell, wherein he will abide eternally.” The Qur’an is equally unambiguous in its injunction against killing women, children, the elderly, protected minorities, and, most significantly, other Muslims. Some Jihadist ideologues go to great lengths to try to justify both suicide terrorism and attacks against fellow Muslims or civilian targets (“If the unbelievers kill young and old,” argues Yusuf al-Ayiri, the Saudi Jihadist who was once bin Laden’s bodyguard, “then Muslims should be permitted to do the same”). Yet even bin Laden has stated that “the one issue on which all people are agreed, even if they themselves have been the victims of oppression and hostility, is that you cannot kill innocent children.”
The truth is, there is no religious argument in Islam for the crime of murdering Muslim children at play. And so, for the most part, Jihadists do not bother making one. Instead, they put forth a simple proposition: The universe is divided into two. On one side are “the people of heaven;” on the other, “the people of hell.” There is no middle ground. If you are not on one side, then you are on the other. If you are not us, then you are them. If you are them, then it does not matter whether you are a soldier or not, a child or not, a Muslim or not. In a cosmic war one is either with God or against God. No one is innocent. In the words of a member of Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (GIA), “There is no neutrality in the war we are waging. With the exception of those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserve to die.”
There is a term in Islam for this uncompromising moral dichotomy: al-wala’ wal-bara’. It is difficult to render this phrase into English. Al-wala’ wal-bara’ can mean “loyalty and enmity,” “allegiance and disavowal,” or even “love and hate.” According to the al-Qa‘ida ideologue Muhammad Saeed al-Qahtani, “Wala’ inspires intimacy, concern and help. Bara’ provokes obstruction, enmity and rejection.”
However the phrase is translated, al-wala’ wal-bara’ suggests a cosmic duality, in which the whole of creation is partitioned into “believers”—by which Jihadists mean themselves—and “unbelievers”—a category that includes non-Muslims; Shi’ite Muslims; Muslims living in Europe or America, which Jihadists refer to as dar al-kufr (“the land of unbelief”); the rulers and governments of the Arab and Muslim world; the clerical leaders of Islam’s traditional religious institutions and schools of law (“imams of infidelity,” Jihadists call them); and anyone who accepts such political or religious authority. “The difference between the unbelievers and believers,” Maulana Masood Azhar, founder of Jaish-e Mohammed, writes in his book Virtues of the Jihad, “is similar to the difference between light and darkness.”
Although long a fringe doctrine in Islamic thought, one not found in the Qur’an and totally abandoned by contemporary Islamic scholars, al-wala’ wal-bara’ has, in Jihadism, become “the very foundation of the religion,” to quote Zarqawi’s spiritual mentor, the Palestinian Jihadist Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. The aforementioned Al-Qahtani considers the doctrine to be inherent in the Muslim declaration of faith: “There is no god but God.” The shahadah, as this statement is called, is, for the Jihadist, both an affirmation and a denial. It is simultaneously an acceptance of God’s law and a rejection of the laws of the world. In the minds of the Jihadists, the shahadah demands not only the promotion of virtue but also the proscription of vice; not only love of God but hatred of God’s enemies. “If you were sincere,” writes Abu Hamza al-Masri, the one-eyed Jihadist preacher who briefly led the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, “if you really loved God, you’d hate even the shadow of [the unbeliever].” Ayman Zawahiri puts it more simply: “Whoever loves an infidel is an infidel.”
The power of al-wala’ wal-bara’ as a religious doctrine derives from its ability to unilaterally proclaim someone an infidel, or kafir—a practice known in Jihadist circles as takfir. Islam has no means of excommunicating a Muslim. There is not, nor has there ever been, a centralized religious authority with the power to declare who is and who is not a Muslim. The practice of takfir, however, places that authority into the hands of individual believers, allowing them to simply declare their Muslim enemies to be “unbelievers,” thereby avoiding any religious prohibitions against shedding Muslim blood. Jihadists use takfir with remarkable skill, applying it to those who disagree with any aspect of their worldview, for example Muslims who vote or take part in the political process: “Those who believe in democracy and they vote and they don’t mind being elected or to make laws when they have a chance. These people are kuffar [plural of kafir],” writes al-Masri in his book Beware of Takfir. “It does not matter how much worship they do or how many times they go on Hajj [pilgrimage], they cannot come an inch closer to Islam because of this action.”
Over the centuries, numerous fatwas, or religious declarations, have been issued by Muslim clerics denouncing the practice of takfir as a usurpation of God’s judgment (the practice has no basis in the Qur’an). In 2005, one hundred seventy of the world’s leading clerics and religious scholars, representing every sect, schism, and school of law in Islam, gathered in Amman, Jordan, to issue a joint fatwa “to reaffirm that there is no [such thing as] takfir” and that no Muslim is allowed to label any other Muslim an apostate for any reason. The response from the Jihadists was to proclaim everyone who took part in the Amman conference an apostate deserving of death. Almost four months to the day in which the declaration against takfir was issued, four suicide terrorists, sent from Iraq by Zarqawi, blew themselves up in a series of coordinated attacks in Amman, killing sixty people, most of them Muslims.
Practitioners of takfir usually justify the doctrine by referencing the writings of one of Islam’s most revered legal theorists, Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah. Born in 1263 C.E, ibn Taymiyyah is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest thinkers in Islamic history, a philosopher and theologian whose immense oeuvre—he wrote more than three hundred individual works—and famed piety led his disciples to give him the title of Shaykh al-Islam, an honor reserved only for the most supreme legal authorities.
Ibn Taymiyyah was reared in a family of prominent religious scholars. Both his father and his grandfather belonged to the Hanbali School of Law, the most conservative of the four schools in Sunni Islam (the other three are the Hanafi, the Maliki, and the Shafi’i). A diligent student who had memorized the Qur’an before he was nine years old, ibn Taymiyyah joined his father and grandfather as a Hanbali cleric at the astonishingly young age of nineteen—though, significantly, only after he had spent a number of years under the tutelage of major scholars from the other three schools of law, an unusual practice at the time, especially for someone from such an ultraconservative background. The decision to dabble so deeply in other schools may have annoyed his father and grandfather, but the experience provided ibn Taymiyyah with a comparative perspective on legal issues that would, in later years, allow him to challenge certain Hanbali orthodoxies in a way that had rarely been attempted.
Ibn Taymiyyah’s family hailed from the ancient city of Haran, near Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid Empire and the cultural and political capital of the Muslim world. Situated at the crossroads of half a dozen different trade routes and nourished by the life-giving waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, Baghdad (the name means “the gift of God,” in Persian) was the wealthiest and, with approximately one million inhabitants, most populous city in the world. It was also the most learned; it is said that every citizen in Baghdad was expected to know how to read and write. While Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, a steady stream of scholars and artisans from every corner of the world, of every religion and ethnicity, flowed into Baghdad to study medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and the arts. A corps of royal scribes worked day and night translating the accumulated knowledge of the Western world from Greek, Latin, Syriac, Sanskrit, and Persian into Arabic, the lingua franca of the arts and sciences. The texts were transferred from ancient scraps of parchment and papyrus onto fresh sheets of paper, made in Baghdad’s very own paper mill (the first paper mill in the world), and placed inside the legendary Library of Baghdad—known in Arabic as bayt al-hakma or “the House of Wisdom”—where they were preserved for future generations. (Were it not for the work of these scribes, the world might well have lost track of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid, Plotinus, and the rest of the foundation of Western philosophy, much of which was translated into European languages from Arabic.) Algebra was invented in the Library of Baghdad; so was the science of optics. Anatomy and physiology, music and meteorology, logic and philosophy, all were developed or advanced by the scholars who made Baghdad their home.
Alas, such a glorious city—such magnificent bathhouses and terraced gardens, such fountains, mosques, museums, and libraries—could not escape the notice of the Mongol warrior who would come to be known as “the devourer of cities.” At the dawn of the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan united the nomadic tribes scattered along the grass-fed steppes of the Central Asian plateau into a mobile machine of death and destruction. In just a few years, Genghis’s army had swept through modern-day China, Russia, Afghanistan, and India, razing entire towns and slaughtering millions of people (eighteen million, by some estimates). The Mongol horsemen continued westward, descending upon the legendary cities of Iran—Merv, Nishapur, Samarkand— laying waste to everything, killing everyone in sight, uprooting graves, flattening buildings, looting, pillaging, burning.
In 1258, the Mongol army, led by Genghis’s grandson Hülegü Khan, arrived at the gates of Baghdad. As per Mongol custom, Hülegü sent an emissary to the Abbasid caliph, al-Mustasim, giving him the option of laying down his arms and surrendering the city. When the caliph refused, Hülegü’s army forced its way through Baghdad’s fortified walls and unleashed a brutal punishment upon its inhabitants.
The Mongols burned everything. The books in the Library of Baghdad were flung into the Tigris, turning the waters black with ink. Al-Mustasim’s family was massacred, down to the last child. The caliph himself was wrapped in a rug and kicked to death. No one was spared. Hülegü’s army rounded up Baghdad’s scholars, scribes, and artisans and chopped off their heads. The bodies they left to be picked clean by the birds. The heads they piled into a giant pyramid in the center of the city. The stench of decay carried for miles. By the time the Mongols’ thirst for blood had been sated, Baghdad had been practically depopulated.
Somehow, in the midst of the devastation, ibn Taymiyyah’s family managed to flee to Damascus, leaving behind everything but their books. Yet they could not escape the Mongol horde. Four years after the fall of Baghdad, in 1260 C.E., the Mongols entered Syria and sacked Damascus. Three years later, in 1263 C.E., Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah was born.
The profound social upheaval that followed the Mongol invasion left its mark on ibn Taymiyyah. He came of age at a time of religious uncertainty, compounded by the fact that the descendents of Hülegü, rather than moving on to other conquests, had begun to settle in the occupied Muslim lands and even to adopt Islam as their religion. The Mongols were actually quite tolerant of other faiths, and they easily absorbed Islamic beliefs and practices into their own shamanistic spiritual system, creating a kind of hybrid of Sunni Islam and Eastern paganism. This created a dilemma for Muslims under Mongol rule, many of whom did not know how to respond to the conversion of their new and unfamiliar masters. Now that the Mongols had become Muslims, must they be obeyed as God’s regents on earth? Should the same people who only a few years before had killed millions of Muslims, enslaved their children, plundered their property, burned their mosques, and uprooted their graves now be considered Muslims just because they had declared that “there is no god but God”?
It was ibn Taymiyyah’s simple yet revolutionary answer to these questions, written in the form of a fatwa (an official religious ruling), that set him apart from his fellow Hanbali scholars and made him the hero of Jihadism that he is today. The Mongols, ibn Taymiyyah wrote, are “unbelievers [and] hypocrites who do not really believe in Islam … every type of hypocrisy, unbelief, and outright rejection of the faith is found among the Mongol followers. They are among the most ignorant of all people, who least know the faith and are far from following it.” They were, in short, apostates and need not be obeyed.
What made this fatwa extraordinary was that it violated the most basic tenet of Hanbali doctrine, established by the founder of the Hanbali school, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855 C.E.), which stated that the leader of the Islamic state, whether a caliph, a sultan, or an imam, had been placed in his exalted position by God and thus had to be obeyed regardless of his actions or his piety. “Jihad is valid with the imams, whether they act justly or evilly,” ibn Hanbal declared. “The Friday worship, the two Feasts, and the Pilgrimage (are observed) with [the sultans], even if they are not upright, just, and pious. Taxes are paid to [the caliphs], whether they deal justly or wickedly.” For ibn Hanbal, social order had to be maintained at all costs. No matter how “un-Islamic” the actions of a Muslim leader may appear, his rule must be followed.
Ibn Taymiyyah disagreed with his master. To live freely and justly as Muslims required a leader committed to Islamic guidance, he argued. If that leader failed in his duty to uphold Muslim principles and did not abide by Islamic law, then he was not really a Muslim but a kafir; his rule was invalid. Ibn Taymiyyah declared that it was incumbent upon all Muslims under the rule of an impious leader to rebel. Employing the practice of takfir, he even went so far as to argue that any Muslim who was willing to abide by the rule of the kafir leader was himself a kafir.
There was precedent for such an extremist view. Six hundred years earlier, a sect called the Kharijites had made a similar argument when they rebelled against the leadership of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan. The Kharijites believed that the leader of the Muslim community must be blameless and without sin. He must exceed all other Muslims in his piety and learning; otherwise he had no right to lead the community and must be removed from power by any means necessary.
Ibn Taymiyyah was certainly no Kharijite, but he agreed that it was the obligation of every Muslim to ensure the purity of the community by purging it of all innovation (bida’) and heresy. He also drew inspiration from the Kharijites in proposing a strict geographical division of the world into realms of belief (dar al-Islam) and unbelief (dar al-kufr), with the former in constant pursuit of the latter. But although he lived on the Anatolian frontier, where Christian and Muslim forces continued to clash with one another long after the Crusades had ceased, ibn Taymiyyah focused his attention strictly on the enemy living inside dar al-Islam—that is, on his fellow Muslims who did not adequately follow Islamic law; on those he considered “heretics,” such as the Shi’a, whom ibn Taymiyyah despised; and most especially on the Mongol invaders, who despite claiming to be Muslims were, in ibn Taymiyyah’s view, apostates against whom it was incumbent upon all Muslims to declare jihad. “To fight the Mongols who came to Syria,” he wrote, “is a duty prescribed [to all].”
Ibn Taymiyyah reconceptualized jihad as an “individual obligation” (fard ’ala l’ayn), overturning centuries of consensus among his fellow legal scholars that jihad must be a “collective obligation” (fard ’ala l-kifaya)—a defensive struggle against oppression and injustice that could be authorized only by a qualified imam. Jihad, for ibn Taymiyyah, was an offensive weapon that could be employed, on one’s own and without guidance, to propagate Islam, to purify it and make it prevail over the whole of the globe. Indeed, Ibn Taymiyyah elevated jihad into the highest form of devotion. “Jihad implies all kinds of worship,” he wrote in The Religious and Moral Doctrine of Jihad. “It is the best voluntary act that man can perform … it is better than the hajj (greater pilgrimage) and the ’umrah (lesser pilgrimage), better than voluntary salaat (prayer) and voluntary fasting.”
Ibn Taymiyyah spent many years in prison for his writings and ultimately died there in 1328 C.E. Although his disciples, and in particular his secretary and successor, ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, managed to keep his teachings alive for a generation or two, copying his works and sharing them with others, for most scholars, ibn Taymiyyah’s opinions regarding what he called “apostate rulers” were deemed dangerous and far too radical. By the end of the fourteenth century, when the Ottomans began reclaiming Muslim lands from Mongol rule, the great Shaykh al-Islam had been more or less forgotten, until six hundred years later, in the tumultuous political landscape of postcolonial Egypt, when ibn Taymiyyah’s stark division of the world into spheres of belief and unbelief, his bold use of takfir against the Muslim rulers of his day, and his elevation of jihad into a form of devotion was dramatically resurrected by a group of radical Islamists in an attempt to overthrow the Egyptian government and launch a revolution across the Arab world.
October 6, 1981. As Egypt’s president, Anwar al-Sadat, Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s handpicked successor, stood on a platform watching a military parade march before him in commemoration of Egypt’s war with Israel in 1973, a lieutenant in the Egyptian army named Khalid Islambouli, along with three other men, suddenly broke formation and rushed toward the presidential platform, lobbing grenades and firing wildly. “Death to the pharaoh!” Islambouli was heard shouting as he emptied his rifle into Sadat’s chest.
Khalid Islambouli was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), one of dozens of Jihadist organizations centered in and around Cairo University, a place brimming with radical activists of every stripe. Most of these groups had little in common, save for their hatred of the government and their sense of betrayal by the Muslim Brotherhood, which had become increasingly accommodating in its interactions with Egypt’s political establishment. The members of the various organizations were mostly young, middle-class professionals—scientists, engineers, schoolteachers, bureaucrats—the best and brightest of Egyptian society. But they were also profoundly dissatisfied with the spiritual decline of Egyptian society and were prepared to lash out against those whom they felt were sullying the purity of the Muslim community. One group in particular, Takfir wal-Hijra, led by two shadowy Jihadist figures known as Sayyid Imam (aka Dr. Fadl) and Shukri Mustafa, had so fully absorbed the practice of takfir that they began kidnapping and executing members of the religious establishment whom they deemed to be apostates.
In the wake of Anwar al-Sadat’s assassination, more than three hundred members of these radical organizations were rounded up and thrown into prison. At their trial, prosecutors presented an unusual document, written by one of Islambouli’s coconspirators, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, entitled “The Neglected Duty.” This brief and somewhat convoluted pamphlet had never been intended for public consumption. It was, rather, an internal document brimming with a jumble of legal and theological arguments meant to justify Sadat’s murder and answer the objections that were bound to arise from Egypt’s clerical class, particularly the scholars of al-Azhar, that this was a legitimate act.
Faraj based his justification for the assassination squarely on the writings of ibn Taymiyyah. “The rulers of this age are in apostasy from Islam,” he wrote, channeling the famed Hanbali jurist. “They carry nothing from Islam but their names, even though they pray and fast and claim to be Muslim.” According to Faraj, even Mongol rule would be better than “the laws which the West has imposed on countries like Egypt and which have no connection with Islam or with any other revealed religion.” Faraj argued that by signing a peace treaty with Israel (the 1978 Camp David Accords) at the urging of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Sadat had committed a grave sin. He had forfeited the right to be called a Muslim. He was a kafir; it was now the duty of every Muslim to shed his blood.
“The Neglected Duty” laid out, for the first time, the aspirations of the nascent Jihadist movement. Chief among these was the reestablishment of the Caliphate, which had been abolished after World War I by the founder of the modern secular state of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. For a great many Muslims, the destruction of the Caliphate had permanently fractured the worldwide community of faith, the ummah, which the Prophet Muhammad had established fourteen centuries before, into competing nation-states. As Sayyid Qutb, perhaps the most influential of all Jihadist ideologues, claimed, with the end of the Caliphate, the Muslim community had essentially reverted to a state of jahaliyyah—the time of ignorance and idolatry that existed before the introduction to Islam.
“If we look at the sources and foundations of modern ways of living, it becomes clear that the whole world is steeped in jahaliyyah,” Qutb wrote in his celebrated manifesto Milestones. “This jahaliyyah is based on rebellion against God’s sovereignty on earth. It transfers to man one of the greatest attributes of God, namely sovereignty, and makes some men lords over others…. [It claims] the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behavior, and to choose any way of life that rests with men, without regard to what God Almighty has prescribed.” In other words, for Qutb, as for many in the Jihadist movement, the end of the Caliphate had signaled the end of the ummah.
Faraj, however, was adamant that the Caliphate could not be built “without the support of an Islamic state.” Jihadism, at the time, was still very much an Islamist movement, focused not on global transformation but on overthrowing local governments. “To fight an enemy who is near,” Faraj wrote, “is more important than to fight an enemy who is far.”
Not surprisingly, the response from the esteemed scholars at al-Azhar to Faraj’s justification for Sadat’s murder was swift and dismissive. The arguments presented in “The Neglected Duty” were rebutted by no less than the grand mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Jadd al-Haqq, the country’s highest religious authority, whose point-by-point refutation of Faraj’s polemic was published in Al-Ahram, the country’s largest newspaper, for all to read. Written in the form of a fatwa (to emphasize his legal authority over Faraj, who was not a cleric), al-Haqq branded the Jihadists as “Kharijites” and took direct aim at Faraj’s contention that Egypt could not be considered an Islamic country, that its political and religious rulers were apostates. “The prayer ceremonies are executed, mosques are opened everywhere, religious taxes are paid, people make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the rule of Islam is widespread,” al-Haqq argued. Perhaps there were certain matters, such as the practice of usury, in which the government did not fully abide by Islamic law, but, according to al-Haqq, “this does not make the country, the people, the rulers, and the ruled apostates.”
Of course, the grand mufti had altogether missed the point of “The Neglected Duty.” Faraj was not recommending how Egypt could become more Islamic in its laws and practices, and he certainly was not interested in engaging in a theological argument with someone whose religious authority he did not accept as valid. Nor was he proposing an alternative standard of governance that would be more suitable to him and his Jihadist colleagues; nothing of the sort exists in “The Neglected Duty.” Lost in the debates and discussions that took place among the scholars of al-Azhar over the validity of Faraj’s views was the fact that neither he nor any of the assassins had made any preparations whatsoever for what was to be done after Sadat’s death. It appeared that the thought had never even crossed their minds. Such human preparations seemed unnecessary, as Faraj’s translator Johannes Jansen notes, since the Jihadists assumed that “God himself will take care of everything once the Muslims have taken the initiative to obey his command to jihad and have opened fire on the unbelievers.” When Faraj was questioned about his plans for establishing an Islamic state as the first step toward reestablishing the Caliphate, he replied, “The establishment of an Islamic state is the execution of a divine command. We are not responsible for its results … when the rule of the infidel has fallen, everything will be in the hands of the Muslims.” What use were human preparations when one was battling a cosmic war against “the armies of the pharaoh,” as he called the Egyptian military—a war that transcends the bounds of history?
Faraj was executed, along with Islambouli and two other members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, for his role in Sadat’s assassination. The rest of the Jihadists rounded up by the Egyptian police served various years in prison before being released. Among those arrested was a bookish, bespectacled surgeon from Maadi, a wealthy suburb of Cairo, named Ayman Zawahiri.
Born to a successful, affluent family of scholars and physicians, Zawahiri had joined the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a young man but, like Islambouli and Faraj, had left the group when it decided to abandon violence in favor of social engagement. After the execution of Sayyid Qutb, whom he greatly admired, Zawahiri gathered together a few of his university friends into a small underground cell committed to overthrowing Nasser’s regime and replacing it with an Islamic state. His was an amateurish operation, but after Nasser had died and been replaced with Anwar Sadat, Zawahiri managed to merge his organization with a few others to form Egyptian Islamic Jihad, or EIJ.
Though he would later boast of being one of EIJ’s leading organizers, Zawahiri claimed not to have been aware of the plot against Sadat until the morning of the assassination. He confessed to the Egyptian police that he had been “astonished and shaken,” when told of Islambouli’s plan and wanted nothing to do with it. Regardless, Zawahiri was thrown into jail, where, under torture, he betrayed his allies and fellow EIJ members to the Egyptian authorities. Since it was determined that he had played no direct role in the plot against Sadat, he was released after serving only five years and promptly fled Egypt for the city of Peshawar on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he took a position with the Red Crescent, treating Arab soldiers wounded in the war against the Soviets (the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979).
Afghanistan in the 1980s had become a safe haven for Jihadists fleeing persecution in their home countries, just as, two decades earlier, Saudi Arabia had become a haven for the Salafists and radical members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Jihadists viewed the Afghan war as a training ground to learn vital combat and guerrilla skills that would assist them in their nationalist struggles back home. Dozens of independent Jihadist groups from Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, and Turkmenistan had established bases throughout the area. Almost all these groups were still narrowly focused on the Near Enemy and had not yet shifted their consciousness onto the global plane. Though they may have been united against the Soviet invasion, they had very little else in common. Each camp followed its own leader, and each represented a different current, school, doctrine, or ideology within the larger Jihadist movement. There were the Uzbek Mujahidin, the Islamic Fighting Group in Morocco, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Dr. Fadl’s Takfir wal-Hijra, Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (which he had reconstituted under his leadership in order to plot the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s successor, the new pharaoh), another Jihadist group from Egypt called the Egyptian Islamic Group, the Ghuraba (the camp of the Syrian Jihadist Abu Musab al-Suri), and a camp called Maktab al-Khadamat al-Mujahidin al-Arab (“Office of the Services to the Arab Mujahidin”), or MAK, which was headed by a charismatic Palestinian activist named Abdullah Yusuf Azzam and his shy, lanky protégé and chief financier, Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden had met Azzam, a former Muslim Brotherhood activist who had fled from Jordan to Saudi Arabia in 1973, at the prestigious King Abdul Aziz University, where the young Saudi was enrolled as a student of engineering. Though employed as a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at the university, Azzam focused the bulk of his attention on running the MAK, an international network funded by the Saudi government, whose purpose was to send fighters from all over the Muslim world to Afghanistan to battle the Soviet army. It was Azzam who, more than anyone else, helped popularize the burgeoning Jihadist movement. His widely read periodical, Al-Jihad, published in 1984, spread the ideology of global jihad to every corner of the Muslim world. By providing a snapshot of world events (especially the war in Afghanistan) as seen through the lens of Jihadism, Azzam almost single-handedly shifted the consciousness of local Jihadist groups to more global concerns. “Jihad is an obligation upon the whole earth from East to West,” Azzam wrote in his book Defense of the Muslim Lands.
Abdullah Azzam made a deep and lasting impression on bin Laden. Born in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, to a fabulously wealthy family with close ties to the royal family (his father, Muhammed bin Laden, owned a construction company that made him one of the richest “nonroyals” in the kingdom, Bin Laden, like so many of his fellow Saudis, had had very little knowledge of the world beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Azzam broadened bin Laden’s world, giving him a global perspective on the struggle of Muslims in Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya, and Kashmir to gain independence and freedom from foreign oppression. So struck was he by the Palestinian revolutionary’s zeal that three years after meeting him, in 1979, bin Laden completely abandoned his studies, dropped out of university, and moved with Azzam to Peshawar, where he helped his former teacher set up a series of guesthouses for the volunteer fighters who had, at Azzam’s urging, begun pouring into the region to join the jihad against the Soviets.
It is not known when or under what circumstances Osama bin Laden first met Ayman Zawahiri. There were many camp leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan vying for the wealthy Saudi’s attention. What is clear is that his sojourn in the refugee camps on the Afghan border had radicalized Zawahiri even further, pushing him toward an acceptance of the doctrine of takfir, most eagerly advanced by his fellow Egyptian Dr. Fadl. The takfir ideology had been slowly spreading through the Jihadist camps like a virus, binding the various organizations together under a single collective identity and allowing them to divide the whole of the world into camps of belief (them) and unbelief (everyone else). Takfir became a tool to distinguish the Jihadist fighters from those they had left behind in their home countries: if you did not support the jihad in Afghanistan, you were a kafir; if you cooperated with Arab governments, you were a kafir; if you took religious advice from the clerical institutions, you were a kafir.
It was the doctrine of takfir, and Zawahiri’s increasingly uncompromising acceptance of it, that would ultimately drive a wedge between him and Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was unconvinced about the usefulness of attacking fellow Muslims, even so-called heretic leaders. After all, he received a good deal of the money for his venture in Afghanistan from the Saudi state and had no interest in antagonizing the royals. An angry rivalry erupted between Azzam and Zawahiri for bin Laden’s loyalty and, more important, his money. Zawahiri was desperate for bin Laden’s financial support to fund his army of Egyptian Jihadists training for revolution in Egypt, while Azzam needed bin Laden to help him unite all the Jihadist camps in Afghanistan, irrespective of their national origins, into a global fighting force that could spread the jihad into Pakistan, Kashmir, and perhaps even Azzam’s national home, Palestine.
In November 1989, just a few months after the last of the Soviet troops had withdrawn from Afghanistan in defeat, Abdullah Azzam was assassinated. To this day, no one knows who was responsible for his death, though the blame has long been placed on Zawahiri, who clearly wanted bin Laden’s attention to himself. Yet even after Azzam’s death, deep divisions remained between Zawahiri, who was still focused on the Near Enemy in Egypt, and bin Laden, who insisted on putting a stop to the internal divisions among the Jihadists by uniting all of the camps in Afghanistan under a single banner focused on the Far Enemy. According to Montasser al-Zayyat, Zawahiri’s biographer, bin Laden “advised Zawahiri to stop armed operations in Egypt [altogether] and to ally with him against the common enemies: The United States and Israel.”
At first, few Jihadists in Afghanistan, Zawahiri among them, accepted bin Laden’s global focus. However, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Saudi regime’s decision to invite U.S. forces into the kingdom to repel the Iraqi forces solidified bin Laden’s case that the leaders of the Arab and Muslim world were mere puppets of the great superpowers and that the Jihadists should therefore focus their energies on the country pulling the strings, the United States. In any case, the money was with the Saudi, so Zawahiri and his fellow Jihadists had little choice but to fold their operations into bin Laden’s (now loosely dubbed al-Qa’ida). The merging of Zawahiri’s radical Salafism and bin Laden’s Saudi Wahhabism to form a new, global version of Jihadism—one focused on the Far Enemy instead of the Near Enemy—would be formalized in 1998, when the two men, along with a handful of other Jihadist leaders, announced the creation of the World Islamic Front. The organization issued an official fatwa clarifying its new agenda: “To kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty (fard ’ala l’ayn) incumbent upon every Muslim” (emphasis added).
Jihadism, it seemed, had gone global. The rest, as they say, is history.
In the years since the creation of the World Islamic Front, in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11 and the launch of the War on Terror, throughout the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans have repeatedly asked the same question: “Why do they hate us?” An entire cottage industry has arisen to answer this question.
There may have been numerous grievances that inspired the attacks, but the strategic purpose behind 9/11 is quite clear: “to awaken the Islamic Nation, which has been drugged, put to sleep and been absent from the confrontation … by imposing a confrontation between us and our real enemy [the West],” in the words of Abu Musab al-Suri. Al-Suri’s assertion reinforces a fundamental truth about terrorism. These are not so much actions in pursuit of specific ends as they are symbolic statements of power directed at a carefully selected audience. Whatever political, economic, or military agenda may lie behind the act of terror is often secondary, and sometimes even irrelevant, to the more elemental aim of terrorism, which is, quite simply, to terrorize. (The word “terrorism” is derived from the Latin terrere, which means “to make someone tremble.”) That is why the most potent weapon a terrorist has is neither a gun nor a bomb but a television camera. As a spectacular, even theatrical display of public violence, terrorism must have a captive audience; otherwise it is not terrorism.
The truth is that for the Jihadists who attacked the United States on 9/11, no goal was achieved, nor, perhaps, was any intended. The mere symbolism of bringing down the impregnable emblems of America’s financial dominance and global military hegemony—with only a few box cutters and a will fortified by the divine—was itself the goal. Their ambition was not just to maim and kill but “to show the world how awesome was the form of power they—and they alone—possessed.” Like the Zealots of ancient Palestine and the radical Religious Zionists of modern-day Israel, like the cross-marked knights of the Christian Crusades and the military missionaries in America’s armed forces, these Jihadist militants are engaged in a ritual drama being waged on a cosmic plane. They cannot be negotiated with because they want nothing—at least, nothing that this world can offer them. Indeed, it is their utter lack of interest in achieving any kind of earthly victory that makes them such a distinctive and appealing force in the Muslim world. As the scholar of religions Bruce Lawrence writes, theirs is “a creed of great purity and intensity capable of inspiring [their] followers with a degree of passion and principled conviction that no secular movement in the Arab world has ever matched.”
These Muslim cosmic warriors legitimize their attacks against both military and civilian targets, against both Muslims and non-Muslims, by dividing the world into what bin Laden calls “two separate camps, one of faith … and one of infidelity”: al-wala’ wal-bara’. They rely on the doctrine of takfir to justify the slaughter of women and children, the elderly and the ill. Although they are mostly holed up with the remnants of the Taliban in the tribal regions of the North-West Frontier Province on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, unlike the Taliban, they have no nationalist ambitions. Their jihad is not a defensive struggle against an occupying power but an eternal cosmic war that transcends all earthly ambitions. As Zawahiri declared, “Jihad in the path of God is greater than any individual or organization. It is a struggle between Truth and Falsehood, until God Almighty inherits the earth and those who live in it. [Taliban commander] Mullah Muhammad Omar and Sheikh Osama bin Laden—may Allah protect them from all evil—are merely two soldiers of Islam in the journey of Jihad, while the struggle between Truth and Falsehood transcends time.”
To its credit, the U.S. military has had a fair measure of success rooting out and killing al-Qa’ida’s cosmic warriors. In fact, as an international criminal conspiracy, al-Qa’ida faces nothing short of an existential crisis. Its infrastructure has been destroyed, its rank and file almost totally decimated. Although al-Qa’ida may maintain some level of operational control over a few of the Jihadist attacks that have taken place around the globe, and while it has proven it can still perpetrate horrific acts of violence, it no longer possesses the resources it enjoyed before 9/11. Its achievements since then have been chimerical at best. Not a single country has fallen into its hands. Iraq’s Sunni insurgents, once allies of al-Qa’ida, have turned their backs on the organization because of its complete disregard for Islam’s rules of war. The possibility of a reconstituted global Caliphate under the group’s command is at this point too laughable to be taken seriously. It has in no way inspired the global Muslim uprising it intended when it changed its focus from the Near Enemy to the Far Enemy. On the contrary, poll after poll across the Muslim world has revealed overwhelming majorities among all classes, ages, and sectors of society condemning al-Qa’ida’s actions. “Excuse me Mr. Zawahiri,” read a recent post on a popular Jihadist website, “but who is it who is killing with Your Excellency’s blessing, the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria?”
Indeed, al-Qa’ida’s wanton slaughter of innocent civilians and its liberal use of takfir to condemn to death anyone who disagrees with the group has turned even fellow Jihadists against it. In 2008, Dr. Fadl, the former head of Takfir wal-Hijra and the man most responsible for the spread of the doctrine of takfir among the Jihadist camps in Afghanistan, published a book denouncing al-Qa’ida and its leaders. “Zawahiri and bin Laden [are] extremely immoral,” he told a reporter with the Saudi daily Al-Hayat. “I have spoken about this in order to warn the youth against them, youth who are seduced by them, and don’t know them.” (Dr Fadl’s rebuke was so damaging to al-Qa’ida’s reputation that Ayman Zawahiri felt compelled to publish a two-hundred-page rebuttal of his former mentor.)
Yet whatever military success the United States and its allies have had in disrupting al-Qa’ida’s operations and destroying its cells has been hampered by the failure to recognize and confront the social movement—Jihadism—of which al-Qa’ida is merely the most militant manifestation. The truth is that al-Qa’ida has always been less an entity than a system of thought, a “mode of activism,” to quote Abdullah Azzam. “Al-Qa’ida is not an organization,” declared Abu Musab al-Suri. “It is not a group, nor do we want it to be. It is a call, a reference, a methodology.” Though the word “al-Qa’ida” is almost always rendered in English as “the base”—something concrete and conquerable, something that can be defended or assailed—“al-Qa’ida” more properly means “the rules” or “the fundamentals” and is used by Arabic speakers primarily to refer to the basic teachings or creed of Islam. In that light, it may be somewhat appropriate to consider al-Qa’ida a form of Islamic fundamentalism, insofar as that word implies puritanical adherence to the elemental doctrines of a religion. But it would be imprecise, even dangerous, to consider al-Qa’ida the operational seat of Global Jihadism. Indeed, as a transnational social movement, Jihadism has no operational seat.
For al-Qa’ida, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become central fronts in what bin Laden calls a “Third World War, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation.” Yet while these wars have no doubt provided Jihadist ideologues with an invaluable recruiting tool, one perhaps on a par with the occupation of Palestine, for those Muslim youths who identify with Global Jihadism as a social movement there is no central front to the War on Terror because their identity cannot be confined to any territorial boundaries. Rather, theirs is a transnational identity linked together not by language, ethnicity, or culture but by a set of grievances—both local and global, real and imagined—that has created a shared narrative of oppression and injustice at the hands of the West. These are young, mostly middle class, politically active, and socially conscious Muslims who, while they may consider al-Qa’ida to be the only force in the Muslim world giving voice to their grievances, are nevertheless unlikely to actually take up arms and join the jihad (though, as we shall see, with the right mixture of incentive and indignation, they can be coaxed into action).
The threat of terrorism from militant groups like al-Qa’ida may never fully dissipate. As is the case with any international criminal conspiracy, it may take years, perhaps decades, of cooperation among the military, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatuses of nation-states around the globe to put an end to their activities. But to adequately confront the social movement that Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri inspired a decade ago will require more than military might. It will require a deeper understanding of the social, political, and economic forces that have made Golbal Jihadism such an appealing phenomenon, particularly to Muslim youth. Whatever the War on Terror means, this is an ideological battle that will take place not in the streets of Baghdad or in the mountains of Afghanistan but in the suburbs of Paris, the slums of East London, and the cosmopolitan cities of Berlin and New York. It is a battle that will be waged not against men with guns but against boys with computers, a battle that can be won not with bullets and bombs but with words and ideas.