In May 1996, while the Kabul offensive was still being fought, Bin Laden and his ideologue Dr Al-Zawahri were forced by US diplomatic pressure to leave Sudan, where Bin Laden had sought to establish a dar ul-Islam on the Wahhabi model. The Egyptian moved from country to country, cementing ties with local militants, before arriving in Chechnya in December 1996. Meanwhile his Yemeni partner had flown to Jellalabad in a chartered jet crammed with Afghanistan veterans and their families, its hold reportedly filled with US dollars. Pathan xenophobia was by now beginning to reassert itself and ‘Arabs’ were no longer welcomed, but memories of the unstinting support and generosity of ‘Al-Shaykh’ ensured that he was given sanctuary at Hadda outside Jellalabad. In October of that same year Bin Laden flew to Kandahar and there met Afghanistan’s newly appointed but strangely reclusive Amir ul-Momineem. He offered Mullah Omar his unconditional support and financial backing, and was given the Taliban Government’s protection in return, so initiating the unholy alliance that eventually led to the destruction of the Taliban Government.
Having secured the regime’s support, Bin Laden returned to his original Bait al-Ansar camp complex near Khost and there set about building up what has been described by Jason Burke as ‘the most efficient terrorist organisation the world has ever seen’. In February 1997 Bin Laden felt confident enough to put out his first fatwa, issued without any claims to religious authority. He declared it to be a duty of all Muslims to ‘kill the Americans and their allies, civilians and military… in any country in which it is possible’.
In April 1997, after being warned from Peshawar that the CIA were preparing to mount a military operation against his Bait al-Ansar camp, Bin Laden moved at the invitation of Mullah Omar to an abandoned Russian air base outside Kandahar. In that same month Al-Zawahri was arrested in Dagestan. Unaware of his guiding hand in a string of spectacular acts of violence, the Russian authorities sentenced him to six months’ detention for illegal entry. Bin Laden paid his bail and the two duly met in Afghanistan, where Bin Laden reoccupied his Bait al-Ansar camp at Khost.
A triple alliance was now joined as these three entered into a symbiotic relationship with each other. Logically, the traditional role of imam should have been filled by the cleric Mullah Omar. But while Mullah Omar enjoyed the unconditional support of Afghanistan’s Pathan majority as their Amir ul-Momineen, he remained irredeemably provincial, clinging to a medieval world view in which even Kabul was a foreign land. Bin Laden was an unscholarly leader without any sort of religious qualification but with a deep faith based on his early Wahhabism. As for Al-Zawahri, here was a man whose education, sophistication and intelligence far surpassed that of the other two and who alone of the three had a clear vision of the way forward, a vision he combined with an almost pathological desire to seek revenge on the non-Islamic world for all the perceived humiliations heaped on Islam and on himself. Logically, the Egyptian was the man to take on the role of amir/emir – except that he lacked precisely the qualities that Mullah Omar and Bin Laden had in full measure: charisma and a capacity for leadership. So Al-Zawahri, the organiser and ideas man, remained in the shadows in the role of wazir (counsellor), content to stand at the shoulder of the man to whom the world community of Islam could rally as both amir and imam of world jihad: Osama bin Laden, idealist and romantic, dreamer of past and future glories and perhaps even then harbouring apocalyptic visions of martyrdom, a Wahhabi Arab at heart but fully conscious of Islam’s ache for a Mahdi, the ‘expected one’ who would set matters to rights – and well aware that already as ‘Al-Shaykh’ he was adored by his ‘Arabs’ and by many Afghans and Pathans as the personification of Islamic resistance to Western imperialism.
At Khost in February 1998 Bin Laden and Dr. Al-Zawahri issued a joint fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. The US Embassy bombings in East Africa followed on 7 August 1998, the suicide attack on the USS Cole on 12 October.
Early in 1999 the Jordanian Al-Zarqawi was inadvertently released from prison in Jordan as part of a general amnesty. In jail his views had further hardened and after a brush with the local authorities he moved to Peshawar and then on to Kandahar to meet up with Bin Laden. However, Al-Zarqawi’s political agenda – the liberation of Jordan and Syria – did not fit in with Al-Qaeda’s and he subsequently struck out on his own, setting up his own dar ul-Islam outside Herat, in eastern Afghanistan, and his own organisation, Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War). Following the overthrow of the Taliban Government he and his band slipped across the border into Iran and then on to the mountains of northern Iraq, where he joined forces with the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar-i-Islam. The US-led invasion of Iraq provided him with a heaven-sent opportunity both to lead his own jihad against unbelievers and apostates and to act as a rallying-point for a new generation of jihadis, to whom he presented himself as both ally and natural successor to the Shaykh, Osama bin Laden.
The Muslim umma is made up overwhelmingly of pious, law-abiding men and women with strong moral values who wish nothing more than to live in harmony with their Muslim and non-Muslim neighbours. They want to see others embrace their faith, but are no more and no less bent on world domination than Christian Evangelicals who wish to see humankind ‘saved’. Islamist fundamentalism, as characterised by men like Osama bin Laden and bodies like the Taliban, is as much a threat to this Muslim majority as to the West. It believes that inclusiveness and tolerance of other values stand in the way of Islam’s destiny as a universal religion, and is prepared to use violence, oppression and fear to achieve its goal.
History teaches that fundamentalist theocracy does not work, because people simply will not put up with it. It may secure a foothold in societies that are isolated and ignorant, but rarely does it outlast its main propagator. Its usual course is to fragment into splinter groups, each accusing the others of heresy. Saudi Arabia became the exception to the rule, initially because of the unique pact between a clerical and a ruling dynasty that greatly benefited both parties, and subsequently because of a unique chain of events involving oil and global politics that made petrodollar multimillionaires of a few thousand male members of one family whose paternal grandfather or great-grandfather (Abul-Rahman ibn Saud) had quite literally measured his means in camels, goats and sheep. Thereafter it was in the interests of the House of Saud to support the religious status quo in Saudia Arabia, and in the interests of the US Government to support the House of Saud. So long as the world buys oil from the Saudis, Wahhabism will prosper in Arabia.
History also demonstrates that fundamentalists will always be listened to whenever and wherever people believe themselves or their religion or their co-religionists to be threatened. That does not mean the fundamentalists will be followed, but it does mean that they will find popular support. This was why Syed Ahmad’s brand of Wahhabi anti-imperialist revivalism took root on Indian soil; why Deobandism, for all its intolerance and sectarianism, came to be seen as a shield of Islam; and why Osama bin Laden is today by far and away the most popular figure in Pakistan – and a cult figure among many young Muslims in much of the umma. At the same time, it has to be remembered that the explosion of fundamentalist madrassahs that began in the 1970s was no expression of popular religious zeal but a direct consequence of political intervention only made possible by Saudi funding.
Deobandism has been the main repository of ‘Wahhabi’ fundamentalism outside Arabia since the mid-nineteenth century, but it is not as monolithic as this short history may have made it appear. Since its inception it has produced many outstanding Asian leaders, very few of whom have chosen the path of violence. General Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan at the time of writing (2005), is the product of a Deoband education, and anyone who is familiar with the sub-continent will know Deobandis who are pillars of both Indian and Pakistani society. The same is true of Deobandis and Deoband institutions overseas. Yet it cannot be denied that Deobandis and their more overtly Wahhabi rivals, the Ahl-i-Hadiths, have in their zeal to revitalise Islam in their own image, played the principal role in promoting Islamist extremism in South Asia and beyond.