Fighting on Multiple Fronts
Ayman al-Zawahiri and the rest of the al Qa’ida leadership were prepared for sustained struggle. In Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Zawahiri called for a multifaceted battle to pursue three major goals. One was to overthrow “corrupt regimes” in the Muslim world. Another was to establish sharia in these lands. And a third was to inflict significant casualties on “the western crusader” and to “get crusaders out of the lands of Islam especially from Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.”26
As with any movement, there were differences among al Qa’ida leaders and jihadists across the globe. For some, the United States should be a secondary, not a primary, target of military escalation. There had been some entropy in the jihadist movement by the end of the 1990s, as the regimes in Egypt, Algeria, and other Arab countries crushed their jihadist opponents.27 There were also conflicts among al Qa’ida’s national contingents. According to one of bin Laden’s former bodyguards, “there were rivalries among Al-Qa’idah members depending on their countries of origin. The Egyptians used to boast about being Egyptian. The Saudis, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Arab Maghreb citizens used to do the same thing sometimes.” This rivalry angered bin Laden, who argued that it sowed divisions and disagreements among al Qa’ida members.28 Lastly, there were disagreements about money. Zawahiri himself acknowledged the shortage of funds in a note to al Qa’ida colleagues: “Conflicts take place between us for trivial reasons, due to scarcity of resources.”29
Many of al Qa’ida’s leaders were inspired by such influential individuals as Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged in Egypt on August 29, 1966. Qutb argued that anything non-Islamic was evil, that only the strict following of sharia as a complete system of morality, justice, and governance would bring significant benefits to humanity.30 Modern-day Islam, he wrote in his book Milestones, had also become corrupt, and he compared the modern Muslim states with jahiliyya. As used in the Qur’an, the term describes the state of ignorance in which Arabs were supposed to have lived before the revelation of Islam to the Prophet Muhammad at the beginning of the seventh century.31 In two of his key works, In the Shadow of the Qur’an and Signposts on the Road, Qutb pleaded for contemporary Muslims to build a new Islamic community, much as the Prophet had done a thousand years earlier.32 This meant that most Muslims could not be viewed as true Muslims.
In Islamic doctrine, denying a Muslim his faith is a serious accusation, referred to as takfir. The term derives from kufr (impiety) and means that one is impure and should therefore be excommunicated. For those who interpret Islamic law literally and rigorously, takfir is punishable by death. Qutb’s philosophy allowed for no gray areas. The difference between true Muslims and non-Muslims was the same as between good vs. evil and just vs. unjust. According to his interpretation, the only just ruler is one who administers according to the Qur’an. There is no such thing as a defensive and limited war, he argued, there is only an offensive, total war.33 Qutb’s work found an eager readership among some of the younger generation in the 1970s because of its stunning and drastic break with the status quo. One problem, however, is that he never clearly specified what the Prophet’s experience had been and how it should be replicated in the modern era.34 After his execution, Qutb’s fiery ideology gradually emerged as the blueprint for Islamic radicals from Morocco to Indonesia. It was later taught at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah and Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.35
According to Qutb, most leaders from Islamic governments were not true Muslims. “The Muslim community has long ago vanished from existence,” he wrote. It was “crushed under the weight of those false laws and teachings which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.”36 Like Qutb, Abdullah Azzam had argued that Islam’s main challenge was against jahiliyya.37
In the minds of Qutb and the al Qa’ida leadership, any regime that did not impose sharia on the country and collaborated with Western governments such as the United States was guilty of apostasy. The Prophet argued that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam. Zawahiri took this line of argument to its extreme, concluding that because regimes had departed from Islam and failed to establish sharia law, they were not truly Muslim countries and therefore subject to attack.38 Indeed, even Muslims could be punished if they did not obey conservative Islamic law. Abdel Aziz bin Adel Salam (also known as al-Sayyid Imam), an Egyptian militant who was one of Zawahiri’s oldest associates, argued that Muslims who did not join the fight against apostate rulers were themselves impious and must be fought.39
What constitutes sufficient justification for takfir has long been disputed among different schools of Islamic thought. The orthodox Sunni position is that sins do not prove that someone is un-Islamic, but, rather, denials of fundamental religious principles do. Consequently, a murderer may still be a Muslim, but someone who denies that murder is a sin must be a kafir, as long as he or she is aware that murder is a sin in Islam. The irony, of course, is that while Islamists argued that Allah’s law and rule must be made supreme, translating this into concrete political terms required human interpretation. There have long been deep and even violent differences among Islamists about how to do this.40
This internal confusion explains the motivations of al Qa’ida leaders to overthrow successive regimes in the Middle East (the “near” enemy, or al-Adou al-Qareeb) to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate, as well as to fight the United States and its allies (the “far” enemy, or al-Adou al-Baeed) who supported them.41 As Zawahiri wrote, the “establishment of a Muslim state in the heart of the Islamic world is not an easy or close target. However, it is the hope of the Muslim nation to restore its fallen caliphate and regain its lost glory.”42 Zawahiri argued that “the issue of unification in Islam is important and that the battle between Islam and its enemies is primarily an ideological one over the issue of unification…. [it] is also a battle over to whom authority and power should belong—to God’s course and shari’ah, to manmade laws and material principles, or to those who claim to be intermediaries between the Creator and mankind.”43
Like many Islamists, Zawahiri drew heavily on the Salafist teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, the thirteenth-century reformer who had sought to impose a literal interpretation of the Qur’an, which serves as the basis of sharia and lays out the commandments of God. Al Qa’ida leaders raised the status of militant jihad and put it on a par with the five pillars of Islam. For instance, bin Laden argued that “fighting is part of our religion and our sharia. Those who love God and the Prophet and this religion may not deny a part of that religion. This is a very serious matter.”44 Bin Laden considered jihad an individual duty (fard ‘ayn) and a critical pillar of Islam. In addition, many Islamists argued that sharia law cannot be improved upon, despite fifteen centuries of social change, because it came directly from God. They wanted to bypass the long tradition of judicial opinion from Muslim scholars and forge a legal system that was untainted by Western influence or modernity.45 As al Qa’ida members chanted at one training camp in Afghanistan: