REVOLT FROM WITHIN
THE EGYPTIAN TOWN of Tura lies 8 miles south of Cairo, near the mouth of the Nile River Delta as it fans out into the Mediterranean Sea. Ancient Egyptians drew massive quantities of limestone out of quarries in the low, brooding hills east of the Nile and used the white, fine-grained, polished Tura limestone as facing stones for the great pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.1 By 2007, however, Tura had been absorbed into greater Cairo and transformed into a gritty industrial hub distinguished by metalworks factories and Soviet-style apartment buildings.
On the northern edge of Tura, wedged between the east bank of the Nile and the Eastern Desert, sat one of the area’s most infamous landmarks: the great Tura prison. The complex encompassed seven separate prisons, which housed some of Egypt’s most renowned political prisoners.2 It was ringed by twenty-five-foot-high concrete walls, parallel interior fencing, entry control points, and multiple guard towers. Thick layers of dust and grime clung to the buildings, and the grounds were a patchwork of dirt, sand, and parched grass. When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat came to power, one of his first acts was to take a pickax to the brick wall at Tura prison. When he had been in Tura prison, his cell contained “no bed, no small table, no chair, and no lamp,” Sadat reported in his autobiography. “You simply can’t imagine how filthy” it was, he wrote. In the winter “water oozed from the cell walls day and night, and in the summer huge armies of bugs marched up and down.”3
It was here, at one of Tura’s prisons, that al Qa’ida faced one of its most brazen attacks. The culprit was Sayyid Imam Abd al-Aziz al-Sharif, the former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and long-time colleague of Ayman al-Zawahiri. By 2007, Sharif had aged considerably. His beard had become almost pure white, though there were still some patches of dark hair in his eyebrows and beard. His eyesight had deteriorated and his skin had taken on a pale hue, thanks in part to being imprisoned for several years. He wore thick glasses that clung to his head and had rather large, protruding ears. But like that of an aging boxer, Sharif’s frail body masked an energetic fighting spirit. After his break with Zawahiri and Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the early 1990s, Sharif had moved his family to Yemen, in 1994, and begun working as a doctor in the General Al-Thawrah Hospital. A month after the September 11 attacks he was arrested, and he was eventually extradited to Egypt, in February 2004. Egyptian authorities, who were concerned about his ties to al Qa’ida and other Islamic militant groups, threw him into Tura prison.
As the Anbar Awakening scattered the forces of Zarqawi, Sharif mounted a blistering attack against al Qa’ida.
“I say this to those who defend al Qa’ida’s leaders,” wrote Sharif. “Your friends bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and their followers are treacherous, backstabbing people. Anyone who admires their deeds is their partner in sin. They are now counted as people of weak faith because they committed the major sins of lying and treachery. Only a thin line separates them from being outright infidels.”4
Sharif likened the September 11 attacks to a “trick of Lucifer,” arguing that al Qa’ida succeeded only in creating “mountains of skulls, blood, torn body parts, devastation, captives, and humanitarian tragedies.” But he saved his most withering criticism for his former friend Zawahiri, calling him “evil” and “impotent,” the latter a particularly insidious insult for a proud Egyptian man.5
Sharif’s attack, published in a book titled Rationalization of Jihad in Egypt and the World, came at an inopportune time for al Qa’ida, just as it was facing a second reverse wave. Senior al Qa’ida leaders mustered a merciless and personal counterattack. Zawahiri led the charge, skewering Sharif in a 268-page rebuttal and calling him an apologist to “the Crusaders and Jews.”6 Sharif had been an icon for many radical Islamists, including al Qa’ida operatives, who had reverentially absorbed his works on jihad in their training camps. The verbal jousting quickly spread as a number of radical Islamists across the Muslim world jumped to Sharif’s defense.
Indeed, the importance of Sharif’s diatribe against al Qa’ida was less in the document itself, which was not particularly lucid or well written, than in the debates that ensued across the Muslim world, most of which occurred under the radar of Western audiences. As al Qa’ida engaged in violent conflict against the West in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other areas, it was drawn into a struggle across the treacherous landscape of the Arab press and the Internet. Al Qa’ida was now on the defensive as the second wave ebbed. And it was fighting a new kind of war.7
The First Volleys
Sharif’s main target was al Qa’ida, though he was not an apologist for the West. He shared al Qa’ida’s disgust with America’s support for Israel and its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, calling them an affront to humanity and Islam. Sharif was particularly hopeful that the Taliban would triumph in Afghanistan and establish sharia law, much as it had done in the 1990s. The Afghan war, he believed, was a defensive war in response to the American invasion. “Jihad in Afghanistan is the duty of its people and Muslim neighbors as needed,” he explained.8 His choice of words was important, indicating that jihad against the United States in Afghanistan was not just an option but a duty. Several years later he went even further, excoriating the West for conducting what he called an assault on Muslims around the globe. “Following the 11 September events,” he would write, “unprecedented discrimination against Muslims and Arabs in America and Europe took place and reached the point of killing them on the streets in reaction to the bombing, in addition to the infringement of their freedom and rights.”9
This time, however, al Qa’ida, not the United States, was his main target. Sharif’s goal in writing Rationalization of Jihad in Egypt and the World was to condemn the hijacking of Islam by what he considered to be an uneducated fringe group. Sharif had been contemplating writing such a book for several years. Starting in December 2006, he began to write, and his time in jail enabled him to reexamine his views. “One cannot write something, especially a lengthy research like the document, from memory without going back to any book unless it is of one’s own ideas and old knowledge well-established in one’s mind,” he acknowledged.10
After completing a draft, he circulated it among Egyptian extremists in prison, asking for feedback. In February 2007, Egyptian prison authorities allowed him to host a small gathering of trusted colleagues, during which he carefully listened to their critiques. Sharif then revised the document and in April held a conference at the prison, where he presented Rationalization of Jihad in Egypt and the World to hundreds of jihadists. He also sent it for comment to the Islamic Research Council of Al-Azhar, the highest Islamic scholarly council in Egypt.11
Sharif opened several lines of attack against al Qa’ida. The first was a repudiation of civilian casualties. Al Qa’ida’s perpetration of acts that resulted in civilian casualties, he argued, was a gross distortion of Islam. By 2007 terrorist attacks across the Muslim world had reached epidemic proportions, killing and maiming civilians in grotesque acts often captured on television and the Internet. That year there were 8,225 terrorist attacks and nearly 10,000 deaths from terrorism around the world, excluding Iraq—a 27 percent increase in deaths from 2006. In Iraq the numbers were staggering. Al Qa’ida in Iraq leaders committed gross human rights abuses, committing 6,210 terrorist attacks and 13,612 deaths. Even more alarming, 70 percent of the victims were civilians and, most discouraging for Sharif and others, over 50 percent of terrorist victims were Muslims.12 In some countries, such as Iraq, Al Qa’ida in Iraq operatives proudly distributed videos of savage beheadings, which they performed by hand. Sharif was repulsed. “The Prophet, may the prayers and peace of God be upon him, forbade the indiscriminate killing of people and assured that those who do that do not belong to the Prophet, may the prayers and peace of God be upon him, for this method is a great sin,” he wrote.13 “There is nothing that invokes the anger of God and His wrath like spilling blood and wrecking property without justification.”14
Sharif’s decision to invoke the Prophet Muhammad and to castigate the indiscriminate violence as a “great sin” challenged al Qa’ida leaders. It was preposterous to accuse all Westerners of apostasy, Sharif argued; this went against the teachings and actions of the Prophet. He was particularly critical of Zawahiri, who had stated that since the population elects its leaders in a democracy, everyone could justifiably be targeted. “Cause the greatest damage and inflict the maximum casualties on the opponent, no matter how much time and effort these operations take,” Zawahiri wrote in Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, referring especially to Jews and Christians, “because this is the language understood by the West.”15
Adam Gadahn, the American-born al Qa’ida propagandist, agreed. “So after all the atrocities committed by America,” he said, “why should we target their military only?” It was both permissible and scrupulous to “bomb their cities and civilians.”16
This conclusion was absurd, Sharif retorted, and had no basis in Islam. For starters, there were countless theological minefields, not to mention moral ones, in such a cavalier approach to killing. Such violence would surely send the perpetrator to hell, not paradise. Were Muslims killed by the attacks? Were women and children wounded or killed? Had the individuals been invited to Muslim countries by Muslim hosts? If yes, then killing them was strictly prohibited under Islam, even if they were Christians or Jews. To support his point, Sharif cited the Prophet Muhammad’s belief that war occurred on the battlefield between armies. “As far as we know,” Sharif maintained, “they did not send any Muslim to undertake jihad operations inside the countries of Persia, the Romans, or Mecca before it was conquered.”17
This argument also covered Jews and Christians, who had lived in communities throughout the Arab world for centuries and who had allowed Muslims to settle in their countries. Why kill them now? After all, the punishment for the kafir—one who does not believe in Islam—would be meted out in the next life.18 “Let it be known to you, o Muslim,” said Sharif, “that there is nothing in the sharia that calls for the killing of the Jews and the Christians, to whom some refer as the Crusaders.” He continued that, “these people have been living in the Muslim countries since the distant past, and have been enjoying their rights as citizens of the country.”19 Sharif still condemned the United States and Israel for oppressing Muslims, but the real tragedy, he said, was that Muslims were dying in record numbers from terrorism.
The crux of this debate, it turned out, was over the definition of takfir, or nonbelief. Takfir can lead ultimately to the excommunication of a Muslim whose acts are in violation of Islam. Bin Laden and Zawahiri adopted a fairly liberal interpretation, condemning virtually all Muslims who didn’t subscribe to their extreme interpretation of Islam as takfiris, potentially punishable by death. Sharif shuddered at this rationale, arguing that there were restraints on takfir to avoid unjustly accusing someone of nonbelief. Only those qualified in Islamic law could accuse someone of takfir. Sharif feared that an overly punitive interpretation of takfir would lead to mistakes, and consequently indiscriminate violence.
Why did al Qa’ida leaders adopt such a broad definition? Sharif maintained that ignorance drove them to such heresy. In his mind, al Qa’ida leaders did not have the religious qualifications to make any statements about Islam. Bin Laden and Zawahiri lacked proper Islamic education, were not Islamic scholars, and therefore could not issue fatwas and religious edicts. “Regarding a sharia-based response,” Sharif wrote, “al Qa’ida has no one who is qualified from a sharia perspective to make a response. All of them, bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and others are not religious scholars on whose opinion you can count. They are ordinary persons.”20 As far as Sharif was concerned, bin Laden’s and Zawahiri’s pronouncements on takfir had no basis in Islam, which left al Qa’ida morally and religiously bankrupt. Quoting from the Qur’an, Sharif warned readers not to do “that of which thou hast no knowledge.”21 This error was particularly egregious, he noted, in the case of jihad because it involves human lives and property.
But bin Laden and Zawahiri were not the only guilty ones. The proliferation of social media—the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other forums—meant that armies of charlatans and firebrands were preaching distorted versions of Islam to adolescents. Sharif feared that many impressionable young Muslims would fail to recognize that the vast majority of those preaching on Internet chat rooms were heretics, pure and simple. “Similar to the case of theology books,” Sharif explained, “material posted on the international information network, the Internet, should not be accepted without scrutiny and without knowledge of the sharia qualifications of those who post them and their integrity, especially material containing incitement to Muslims to go on a collision course with others.”22
Few people had attempted such bold criticism of al Qa’ida. Painting al Qa’ida as a fringe group put into words what had already been true: many of the young Muslims who plotted or executed attacks in the name of al Qa’ida had actually abandoned mosques and shunned established religious scholars, preferring the teachings of extremists who lacked Islamic credentials.
José Padilla, who was arrested by FBI officials in 2002 in Chicago, converted to Islam in Florida and linked up with a radical network of individuals with no Islamic pedigree. Several of the Madrid bombers, including Jamal Ahmidan, were heavily involved in drug trafficking, a major sin in Islam, and his accomplices had abandoned local mosques because the mosques weren’t radical enough. The imams, they believed, did not support bin Laden’s and Zawahiri’s view that violent, offensive jihad was a duty of Muslims. Mohammad Sidique Khan and his accomplices involved in the July 2005 London attacks became radicalized outside the mosque and lambasted Muslim scholars for being out of touch with the extremist views of al Qa’ida. Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Tanvir Hussain, and their colleagues in the United Kingdom, who had planned to blow up airplanes on their way to the United States and Canada in 2006, became radicalized with the help of al Qa’ida operative Rashid Rauf, who had no serious Islamic credentials. Adam Gadahn came from a similar mold. After meeting Khalil al-Deek, Gadahn eschewed the mosque in Orange County, California, much to the dismay of mosque officials.
For Sharif, these uneducated al Qa’ida operatives were wolves in sheep’s clothing. “O Muslim folks,” Sharif warned, “jihad for Allah’s sake is just, but do not allow those people and their likes to auctioneer with this noble cause. They push youths to extreme sacrifices, and they bring major catastrophes on the Muslims even though they are most careful about their personal safety and about reaping benefits without realizing the least benefit for Islam and the Muslims.”23
Just as maddening to Sharif was the al Qa’ida leaders’ skewed understanding of jihad. Sharif found the theory of the Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb that offensive jihad was a duty of all Muslims preposterous.24 He wrote that “there must be some controls on the figh [theology] of jihad.”25 For starters, the Qur’an outlines several options for Muslims in response to a threat, not just violent jihad, including advocacy (al-da’wa), migration (al-hijrah), pardon (al-afw), forgiveness (al-safh), shunning (al-i’rad), and patience (al-sabr). “The Prophet, Allah’s prayers and peace upon him, resorted to all of them,” Sharif pointed out, “as did many of his disciples, Allah’s favors on them.”26 War should be reserved for specific circumstances—for instance, when Muslim communities come under an imminent threat from outsiders.
Furthermore, Sharif argued that there were clear boundaries to jihad, especially when adolescents were involved. “Among the conditions for jihad becoming a duty is requiring the permission of the parents,” he wrote.27 Parents were an important barrier to prevent children from following false prophets. José Padilla, Mohammad Sidique Khan, Adam Gadahn, and many of al Qa’ida’s younger foot soldiers had committed themselves to jihad without the permission—or, often, the awareness—of their parents. Most family members were devastated to learn of their involvement in terrorist acts.
Sharif left his most virulent attacks for Ayman al-Zawahiri, his old friend from Egypt and Pakistan. In an interview with the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat, he accused Zawahiri of being motivated mostly by money, fame, and his own personal safety.28 In addition, Sharif shamed Zawahiri and bin Laden for corrupting the minds of young Muslims, insisting that their punishment would be eternal damnation. Summoning the language of the holy book, he wrote that they “will go into the Fire, dwelling therein forever. Such is the reward of the wrongdoers.”29 It was a stunningly public and personal denunciation of al Qa’ida’s leadership, especially Zawahiri, and caught much of the Arab world by surprise. Had Sharif not been in prison, his life would almost certainly have been in jeopardy.
Al Qa’ida Responds
For FBI leaders, Sharif’s volley indicated that al Qa’ida’s ideological support was beginning to weaken. “Their wave was cresting,” suggested Philip Mudd. Perhaps the most important component of the struggle against al Qa’ida was to counter its ideology, what Philip Mudd called “al Qa’ida-ism.” “In some ways,” Mudd said, “the ideological fights are more important than the counterterrorist operations.”30
But whose job was it within the U.S. government to develop and execute a counternarrative? Many agencies played a role. The State Department was the lead for public diplomacy but had not developed a comprehensive interagency strategy to counteract al Qa’ida’s ideology. In 1999 the State Department had disbanded the U.S. Information Agency, which had played a prominent role in countering Soviet ideology during the Cold War. The CIA was involved in some clandestine propaganda activity, but many senior officials did not view undermining al Qa’ida’s ideology as a core mission. The Department of Defense was also involved in some efforts, but they were dispersed among U.S. Central Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, and other organizations. The FBI was not an ideal fit either. “I don’t think the mission of the FBI is an ideological mission,” explained Mudd. “Somebody else has to worry about ideas and how to prevent those ideas from spreading around the world.”31
This conclusion produced an ad hoc and inadequate U.S. response. Nevertheless, al Qa’ida leaders—especially Ayman al-Zawahiri—understood the gravity of Sharif’s exposé. To say that Zawahiri was angry about Rationalization of Jihad in Egypt and the World would be a gross understatement. He was apoplectic and deeply hurt by his old associate’s accusations. He wrote that his long response was “one of the most difficult things that I have written in my life” and that he had agonized about whether to write it at all.32 But the strategic dangers of remaining silent against someone with Sharif’s credentials were simply too great. Quoting from the tenth-century Arab poet Abu al-Tayyib Ahmad ibn Husayn al-Mutanabbi, Zawahiri offered a glimpse into his inner struggles:
Fate afflicted me with so many troubles that my heart was
Wrapped in a membrane of arrows fired at me.
Fresh volleys of arrows broke on those already in my heart.
I no longer worry about them because it is fruitless to worry.33
It was one thing for his archenemy, President George W. Bush, to insult him. But it was quite another to be attacked by a once dear friend.
By this time Zawahiri had been on the run from the United States and virtually every Western and Middle Eastern government for over seven years. Many of his colleagues had been imprisoned or killed, some quite brutally; he was lucky to be alive. Still, he looked forlorn. His salt-and-pepper beard had grayed, and the circles under his eyes had darkened. Like Sharif, he wore thick glasses because of his dimming eyesight. The mark of constant prayer on his forehead, the zebiba, had become more pronounced. Even his teeth looked aged, with a conspicuous buildup of plaque on the bottom row.
Zawahiri called his manifesto A Treatise on the Exoneration of the Nation of the Pen and Sword of the Denigrating Charge of Being Irresolute and Weak. The majority of Sharif’s document, he charged, criticized al Qa’ida but said virtually nothing about the Egyptian government, one of “the most corrupt regimes that Egypt has ever seen and has, as both its loyalists and opponents agree, perpetrated more torture and murders than any previous regime.”34 How could Sharif fail to criticize the Egyptian government? The only possibility, he mused, was that Egypt’s security services must have assisted in writing, editing, and publishing the document. After all, Zawahiri pointed out, Sharif wrote from a prison cell in Egypt.
Zawahiri also accused Sharif of gross irresponsibility in failing to criticize the United States for its “barbarities.” The indictment was a cheap shot. Sharif had criticized the United States and had supported jihad against the Americans in Afghanistan. In a rhetorical swipe, Zawahiri asked if the electrical current for the fax machine used to serialize Sharif’s book also powered the Tura prison’s electric chair. He also suggested that the Americans must have been involved in producing the document. “What is your opinion about the U.S. embassy and the FBI and CIA bureaus in Egypt?” he asked. “By the way, they are the bodies that supervise your revisions.”35
It was a classic Zawahiri tactic. What better way of denigrating Rationalization of Jihad in Egypt and the World than to accuse Sharif of direct complicity with the infidels? But Sharif gave follow-up interviews with Al-Hayat to explain his arguments better, and his son, Isma’il, acknowledged that the book accurately reflected his father’s views.
Even if the book was untainted by infidel views, Zawahiri insisted that it aided the enemies of Islam. “It served in the best possible way,” he wrote, “the interests of the alliance that the crusaders and Jews have with our rulers, who act in contradiction of sharia . . . The United States is the first beneficiary from these revisions.”36
Zawahiri then debated specific points. On civilian casualties, he conceded that al Qa’ida operatives had made mistakes in killing women and children, but pointed out that al Qa’ida was engaged in a war and “those who have made mistakes can be held accountable and those who suffered damage can be recompensed according to Sharia.”37 But jihad must continue, he protested. Even in the Prophet Muhammad’s era, he pointed out, Muslim commanders made mistakes.
At the same time, Zawahiri maintained that it was legitimate to kill civilians, including Muslims, under some conditions. One was during night raids, in which al Qa’ida targeted specific individuals and killed women or children accidentally. “If they are not separated from the others,” he wrote, “it is permitted to kill them including old people, women, young boys, sick persons, incapacitated persons, and unworldly monks.”38 A second condition involved killing those who supported infidels by providing money, information, or other aid. Although they were not engaged in actual fighting, abetting the enemy was just as condemnable. “It is permitted to kill women, young boys, and the old and infirm if they help their people,” Zawahiri wrote.39 A third condition was when civilians were used as human shields. “If they mix with others and one cannot avoid killing them along with the others,” Zawahiri insisted, “then it is permitted to kill them.”40
Logic was never Zawahiri’s strong suit. His reasoning grew increasingly strained as the list of caveats for civilian casualties grew longer. He maintained, for example, that while the United States and its allies allowed women to join the armed forces, “those [women] who are not soldiers still behave like men” and “hence it is permitted to kill them.”41 The same applied to young boys and even infirm old men from the West. “We stated above that every Muslim in the world should now fight them and kill them wherever they are found, be they civilians or military men,” he wrote. “We meant every word.”42
As Zawahiri saw it, the Muslim world was engaged in a violent clash of civilizations with the West. It was the U.S.-led crusaders on one side and Islam on the other. Embellishing his political weight, Zawahiri did not refer to al Qa’ida in the document but rather to the “mujahideen.” This rhetorical move presumptuously implied that he spoke for the entire ummah, or Islamic community. War was the only option in this struggle to the death. “This religion came through the sword, rose by the sword, will persist by the sword, and will be lost if the sword is lost,” he claimed.43 Zawahiri’s argument was based not just on his understanding of Muslim actions since the apex of the caliphate but on his belief that the United States and its Arab allies, including Egypt, committed countless atrocities. Al Qa’ida’s actions weren’t terrorism, he said, but the United States’ were.
Zawahiri also vigorously denied the charge that al Qa’ida failed to secure the support of the ulema, rattling off a list of individuals who supported al Qa’ida’s views. They included the Afghan insurgent leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, and nearly two dozen others, some of whom, like Qutb, had been killed for their extreme convictions. Zawahiri also accused Sharif of hypocrisy. He lacked religious credentials, Zawahiri fumed, yet had the audacity to masquerade as an authority. “The author says he is neither a religious scholar nor a mufti but he still calls this action permitted, that action obligatory, and that one prohibited,” Zawahiri wrote. “He passes Sharia judgments over momentous events that are rarely judged by one religious authority alone.”44
Sharif’s goal, Zawahiri charged, was to “stop the Muslim jihad” and prohibit protests against ruling regimes in the Middle East “whether by word of mouth or act of hand, or even peaceful protests in the form of demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, conferences, and meetings.”45 Even worse, Sharif supported an appeasement strategy that placated the crusaders, Jews, and heretics in the Egyptian government. This was an unfair accusation. Sharif strongly supported jihad when Muslim nations were attacked but argued that jihad was only one of several options available to Muslims.
Still, a formidable army of extremists came to Zawahiri’s defense, many of them Egyptians who had worked closely with Zawahiri and knew Sharif personally. Their goal was clear: to demean Sharif’s name and disparage his credentials. One of the most vocal critics was Adil Abd al-Majeed Abd al-Bari, better known to his colleagues as Abbas or Abu Dia. In 1996, Zawahiri appointed Bari as head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad’s cell in London, and he rented an apartment on Beethoven Street, a residential area within walking distance of Paddington train station.46 Bari was an erudite, well-spoken lawyer who had defended numerous Islamists in Egyptian court, including the spiritual leader of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Umar Abd al-Rahman, who was convicted in the United States for involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.47 In the meantime Bari had become a wanted man. The United States indicted him for his alleged involvement in the 1998 terrorist attacks against its embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.48 In 1999, Bari was imprisoned in the United Kingdom following Operation Challenge, a Scotland Yard and MI5 effort against Egyptian extremists.
Though he was stuck in jail, Bari could not stay on the sidelines. He leapt to Zawahiri’s defense and labeled Sharif a failed leader who had been forced out of Egyptian Islamic Jihad because of his poor organizational skills. He was “dismissed as Amir [of Egyptian Islamic Jihad] because of his complacency about the group’s concerns,” Bari remarked. Sharif’s book must have been inspired by revenge for his alienation from Egyptian Islamic Jihad a decade earlier. “His anger here is equal to his anger because of his dismissal from being the Amir of the group,” Bari concluded.49
Muhammad Hasan Khalil al-Hakim, who used the nom de guerre Abu Jihad al-Masri, agreed. He was an al Qa’ida operational and propaganda leader who resided primarily in Iran. “This is not the first time we object to the opinions and fatwas by Shaykh Sayyid Imam,” he said. “We were dumbfounded and amazed by how he ended his involvement with the jihad group which was for reasons inconsistent with Islamic law.”50 As al Qa’ida’s senior leader for Egypt, he was not exactly objective. Hakim, who was later killed by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan, had a boxer’s muscular jaw, a tree trunk of a neck, and a receding hairline that gave him a wild, edgy aura. He also sported a thin layer of stubble and flashed a confident grin, like a Hollywood movie star. For Hakim, Sharif’s Rationalization of Jihad in Egypt and the World was the pathetic last gasp of a failed leader. The document was motivated by revenge and vitriol, pure and simple.
Sharif had “lost his mind,” remarked Hani al-Siba’i, an Egyptian lawyer and member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad shura.51 Siba’i, who was more colloquially referred to as “Doctor” or “Shaykh Doctor,” had worked with both Zawahiri and Sharif. In 1999, Egyptian authorities convicted him in absentia, along with Zawahiri and Sharif, of planning to overthrow the Egyptian government and sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. But he had secured political asylum in the United Kingdom, where he established the Almaqreze Centre for Historical Studies in London. Over time he became an annoyance to the British, arguing on Al Jazeera that the July 2005 attacks were “a great victory” for al Qa’ida. Wearing a svelte navy blue blazer, button-down dress shirt, crisp white collar, and oval spectacles, he could have been mistaken for an investment banker had it not been for the scraggly beard and black Muslim prayer cap. Speaking softly but confidently into the camera, he remarked that al Qa’ida had “rubbed the noses of the world’s eight most powerful countries in the mud,” a reference to the G-8 members, who were meeting in the United Kingdom at the time of the attack.52
Hakim, Saba’i, and others now considered Sharif a lackey of the West and its allies. “From the beginning of the memorandum to its end,” wrote Siba’i, “he was in favor of the Americans and he poured out his anger against the two Shaykhs Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.”53 For Hakim, Sharif’s book was “the result of a strategic project for the Egyptian Intelligence.”54
Many didn’t believe that Sharif could criticize al Qa’ida and ignore the sins of the Egyptian government. “The question that presents itself and awaits a response from Shaykh Sayyid: Is the tyrant Hosni Mubarak to terrorize more than 70 million Egyptian Muslims” only to have Sharif ignore his actions? asked Abu-Basir al-Tartusi, a Syrian Salafi cleric also living in London, who posted his response to Sharif on jihadist websites.55
Perhaps the most powerful critique of Sharif, however, came from Hani al-Siba’i, who dug into Sharif’s past writings and compared them to Rationalization of Jihad in Egypt and the World. His strategy was to use Sharif’s past arguments to counter his current ones. Siba’i outlined how Sharif’s past works had denounced Egyptian rulers as apostates and contended that “jihad against them is a must.” In a document titled Terrorism Is Part of Islam, Sharif had written that “dividing people into civilians and military personnel is an invented way, and has no origin in the Islamic sharia.”56 For Saba’i and other detractors, Sharif had accomplished the antithesis of what his title promised.
“Shaykh Sayyid did not rationalize the work of jihad as he claims in his revisions titled ‘Rationalization of Jihad,’ but he canceled, abolished, and forbade jihad and incriminated those who are trying to revive it,” remarked Abu-Basir al-Tartusi. “Therefore the correct title for his revisions should be ‘Retraction of Jihad.’ ”57
The Debate Expands
Sharif had prepared for many of these criticisms. “I know how they think,” he said, “and the suspicions they will cast. Therefore, I will reply to them before they present these suspicions.”
To the charges of hypocrisy, he said that his early opinions on jihad, apparent in some of his writings like The Essential Guide for Preparation, had begun to change more than a decade before.
To the charges of bias by his jailers, the Egyptian government, he wrote, “What is significant is the evidence presented by the writing, and not where it took place.”58
“Was I in an Egyptian jail in 1992 when I denounced Al-Jihad Organization’s armed actions inside Egypt? I was in Pakistan at that time and I was in Sudan in 1994,” he noted. “When I did this, was I in the hands of Egyptian intelligence?”59 The real issue, he said, was the substance of his writing. “They know in advance that they cannot respond to the arguments in the document. This is because I do not speak without providing proof from the Qur’an and the prophet’s Sunnah. They found that they had nothing left but to slander the author by alleging that it was written by the Egyptian intelligence service and the security services.”60
Sharif also responded to the argument that his book was helping the Americans and other infidels. “This accusation was made against us when we joined the Afghan jihad against the communists,” he remarked in an interview in Al-Hayat. “They said that we were U.S. agents and that our jihad served the United States against the Russians.”61 Neither Sharif nor most who supported him were zealots of the West. In their eyes, the United States, Israel, and Arab regimes were guilty of atrocities.
By late 2007 the debate had grown beyond either Sharif or Zawahiri and had moved into digital battlefields: jihadist websites, Internet chat rooms, e-mails, and newspapers and magazines spanning the Muslim world, though most Western officials were unaware of it. A growing throng began to attack Zawahiri and his defenders. Nabil Naim, an influential Egyptian Islamic Jihad member, described Hani al-Siba’i as one of the “jihadis of Scotland Yard.”62 Naim’s voice carried a lot of influence, in part because of his long association with Zawahiri, Siba’i, and others. When Zawahiri left for Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the 1980s, he turned over command of the Egyptian faction of Egyptian Islamic Jihad to Naim. By the mid-1990s, however, Naim began to have second thoughts about the effectiveness of the armed struggle against the Egyptian government and focused instead on Israel.63 And he became extremely critical of Zawahiri’s dangerous radicalization and push toward global jihad.
Others lamented that the continuing bloodshed was weakening Islam and causing Muslims to kill each other. “My brother Usama bin Laden, the image of Islam today is not at its best,” wrote Salman al-Awdah, a Saudi cleric and Muslim scholar, in an open letter to bin Laden. “People all over the world say that Islam orders the killing of those who do not believe in it . . . Where is the mercy in killing people? Where is the mercy in turning many Muslim countries into regions of war and fighting? The Prophet, God’s prayers and peace be upon him, conquered and subjugated the entire Peninsula without any massacres.”64
Awdah, who was born in Al-Basr village in Saudi Arabia in 1956, was an antiestablishment Salafi cleric. Like Nabil Naim and others, he was deeply disturbed by al Qa’ida’s atrocities. Much of the violence, he felt, was predicated on “misunderstood or misinterpreted arguments based on sharia.”65 Awdah used multiple media forums to convey his views. Extraordinarily photogenic, with his neatly trimmed black beard and white-and-red-checked kaffiyeh, he was a dynamic speaker and appeared regularly on Al Jazeera and other television programs. He also acted as the general supervisor for IslamToday.com, the website of the Saudi periodical Al-Islam Al-Yawm. Like many other critics of al Qa’ida, he was certainly not pro-American and had criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq, cosigning an “open letter to the Iraqi people” that called for “defensive jihad” against U.S. military “occupation.”66 He believed the United States had come to the Middle East to start a Shi’a-Sunni war. “It will be good for Israel and the United States,” Awdah argued. “They will support both sides, fan the fire of this war, and applaud it. People will kill each other.”67
Another al Qa’ida critic was Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian Islamic theologian and affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, who condemned al Qa’ida and its tactics, arguing, “Islam says that unjustly killing human beings is a major crime that comes after polytheism and it has not been approved by divine scriptures.”68 Qaradawi was a heavyweight in many Muslim circles and had been banned from the United States and the United Kingdom for his extreme views, a testament to his credentials. He publicly supported suicide attacks against perceived foreign occupiers of Muslim lands—including those in Israel, Palestinian territory, and Iraq—but condemned al Qa’ida for attacking Muslims.
Qaradawi had impeccable religious credentials. In 1973 he earned a Ph.D. from Al-Azhar University, the Harvard of Sunni Islamic learning and Arab literature, writing his dissertation on “Zakah and Its Effect on Solving Social Problems.” Yet he embraced modern technology and became a television icon, running a program called Ash-Sharia wal-Hayat (Sharia and Life) on Al Jazeera. He was an animated and charismatic speaker. On his show he could be histrionic, waving his hands and shouting at one moment, quiet and controlled the next, yet he was compelling and empathetic, and deftly used multiple media formats to reach young people all over the world. He could even be hip. He often wore a white prayer cap, fashionable glasses, and a button-down shalwar kameez. For IslamOnline.net, a popular website he helped found in 1997, he served as chief religious scholar. His anti-American and anti–al Qa’ida stance made him a paradox for U.S. intelligence agencies, who often disagreed about whether he was a moderate, mainstream, or extremist Sunni cleric. His criticism of Zawahiri showed that not all young Muslims were taken with al Qa’ida’s appeals.
A number of other Egyptian Islamic Jihad members came to Sharif’s defense. Ahmad Yusuf Hamdallah, an Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader, characterized Sharif’s book as a “tsunami” that would affect current and future generations. He, too, scoffed at the idea that Sharif’s new assertions were the result of pressure from Egypt’s security agencies.69 In 1981, Hamdallah had been convicted in connection with the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and he had spent years in and out of jail. Usamah Siddiq Ayyub, a prominent Egyptian Islamist living in Germany, described Sharif’s writings as “a turning point,” saying that “the revisions conducted by the Islamic Jihad derive their importance from the fact that they were drawn up by the first person to lay down the principles of jihadist ideology in the world.”70
Equally significant, however, was the assault on al Qa’ida from two powerful Sunni organizations, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian Hamas. In an article published on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website, ikhwanweb.com, the group “welcomed the reviews carried out and declared by the Islamic Jihad group leaders.”71 After coming under withering criticism from Zawahiri for this modest support of Sharif, the group attacked Zawahiri himself. Dr. Isam al-Iryan, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau and its chief spokesman, wrote that “al-Zawahiri’s policy and preaching bore dangerous fruit and had a negative impact on Islam and Islamic movements across the world.”72 In addition, leaders of Hamas, which the U.S. government designated a terrorist organization, attacked Zawahiri.73 Hamas’s political leader, Khaled Meshaal, said that the group had “its own vision” and did not need al Qa’ida’s advice.74 “May God have mercy on our brother Ayman al-Zawahiri for making many mistakes,” said Khalil Abu Layla, a senior Hamas leader.75 Both were responding to Zawahiri’s accusation that Hamas had flouted Islam and “fallen in the swamp of capitulation” by participating in Palestinian elections.76
The most devastating attacks against al Qa’ida came from a seemingly innocuous source. In 2008 al Qa’ida’s media organization, As-Sahab, announced that Ayman al-Zawahiri was prepared to answer questions posted on jihadist websites. Hundreds of individuals responded, including supporters of al Qa’ida, media organizations, hostile critics, and presumably foreign intelligence agencies. At first blush it appeared to be a well-conceived propaganda and recruitment move. Al Qa’ida was leveraging some of the most advanced social media and encouraging a personable, one-on-one dialogue with the charismatic Zawahiri. This would perhaps be the public’s only opportunity to engage directly with al Qa’ida’s second-in-command. “I thank all who took an interest in As-Sahab’s invitation to an open meeting with me,” Zawahiri said, “and I thank in particular the unknown soldiers from those garrisoned on our front lines in jihadist media.”77 Yet Zawahiri’s gamble backfired. In the manner of many town hall meetings, there were sycophants praising al Qa’ida, but also a sizable number who had come to express their grievances.
“Excuse me, Mr. Zawahiri,” asked Mudarris Jughrafiya, who described himself as a geography teacher, “but who is it that is killing, with Your Excellency’s blessing, the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco, and Algeria? Do you consider the killing of women and children to be jihad?”
Talib Jami’i Tib al-Jazaa’ir, a medical student from Algeria, similarly inquired, “Is killing women and children jihad in your view? I want al-Zawahiri to answer me about those who kill the people in Algeria. What is the legal evidence for killing the innocents?”
“And what is it that makes legitimate the spilling of the blood of even one Muslim?” asked another questioner, who identified himself as I’laamiyyah.
“Many people in the Islamic world,” wrote another, “complain that al Qa’ida organization was behind many operations that targeted innocent civilians and Muslims within the Islamic nations and many Muslims and children died as a result of such operations. Do you not think that you are shedding prohibited and innocents’ blood?”78
The exchange did not produce the propaganda victory Zawahiri had imagined. The decision to hold a virtual press conference suggested a desire to communicate and alleviate growing concerns among jihadists about the future of the movement. Instead, his responses, and particularly his failure to respond to some questions, revealed growing doubts about al Qa’ida.
Declining Support
In addition to growing discontent on the Internet and in the Arab press, public opinion polls showed that Zawahiri and al Qa’ida were losing the war for hearts and minds. Support for Osama bin Laden plummeted in much of the world: from 56 percent in 2003 to 20 percent in 2007 in Jordan; from 20 percent to 1 percent in Lebanon; from 15 percent to 5 percent in Turkey; from 59 percent to 41 percent in Indonesia; and from 46 percent to 38 percent in Pakistan.79 Many had grown tired of the bloodshed. “Killing those civilians in civilian aircraft and trains and in buildings and hotels is not the legitimate form sanctioning the killing of an unbeliever,” wrote Sharif. He warned Muslim youths, “O you young people, do not be deceived by the heroes of the Internet, the leaders of the microphones and the dealers of slogans who are themselves the largest suppliers of tombs and prisons.”80
Through all of the criticism within Islam, however, there was no coordinated American response. Some officials, including the FBI’s Philip Mudd, argued that this debate was an opportunity to support Islamic groups that opposed al Qa’ida, such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. “The Brotherhood’s role in our new decade-long campaign against al Qa’ida and its affiliates doesn’t appear prominently in the U.S. debate,” Mudd wrote. “It should, especially for those who accept the maxim that the enemy of an enemy is a friend.”
But Mudd went further, arguing that the U.S. should reach out to the Brotherhood. “The rise of Muslim Brotherhood activists is an opportunity for the U.S. As we debate how to best respond to this Islamist wave, we should not lose sight of the fact that the Brotherhood could curb the spread of al Qa’ida’s violent extremism.”81
Yet Mudd’s view was too radical for many U.S. government officials, who labeled the Brotherhood an extremist organization. Thus the reverse wave against al Qa’ida happened in the absence of a U.S. strategy to counter al Qa’ida’s message. As U.S. officials dithered, it became clear that al Qa’ida had gone too far. Its leaders supported a nearly limitless war that had engulfed much of the Muslim world in bloodshed. Moreover, al Qa’ida had failed to establish a caliphate, a goal that many believed was naive and unrealistic to begin with. Instead, they had lost the one country where their version of sharia law was established, Afghanistan, after the overthrow of the Taliban. “There are those who say that jihad has conclusively failed as a method for removing the governing regimes in Muslim countries,” a questioner remarked to Zawahiri during his virtual press conference. “They claim that this jihad has brought disasters upon our outreach and missionary work and [has not given us] a single good thing.”82
Zawahiri had no response. The second wave had now ended. Al Qa’ida’s punishment strategy, which involved targeting civilians, backfired. In several countries where al Qa’ida had established a foothold, such as Iraq, national security forces had improved and were able to establish order, undermining al Qa’ida’s sanctuary. Stories about the decline of al Qa’ida began to appear in the media. Not only had the organization been losing support in its home region, it had repeatedly failed to hit the U.S. homeland. It was time to try again, thanks in part to the work of an upstart Yemeni-American named Anwar al-Awlaki.