Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? The salafi fundamentalists? Sufi Islam? Farrakhan and The Nation of Islam? Baha’ism? Sunni or Shi’a? The Ayatollahs who wish to bring about the end time and reign in the 2nd coming of the 12th Imam? Modern “reformers” like Sayyid Qutb and Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the inspiration for al Qaeda and modern Islamic fundamentalism? What gives them the religious authority to define a religion that does not have priests? Is CAIR really the voice of “moderates”? Is Islam inflexible and incapable of embracing modernity and a divorce from the violence and hatred of political Islam and 7th, 12th century backwardness? Or, can it be reformed by those devout Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser?

Z, a friend of mine, had an opportunity to listen to Dr. Jasser speak; Read the rest of this entry »

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Lawrence Wright yesterday, the author of the excellent book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, and the author of a brand new long article in The New Yorker.

Hugh and Lawrence go over the beginning of al-Qaeda and the radical Islam movement as they have done in the past, its always good to go over it one more time. But the real meat of the interview is where the radical Islam movement is at right now, and it all hinges on a very important man in the movement….Dr. Fadl:

HH: Of course, Zawahiri goes with bin Laden now, Fadl’s been sidelined to Yemen, and the blind Sheik is in America, and in jail, and so the leadership goes to Afghanistan. But then 9/11 happens, and Fadl says al Qaeda’s committed group suicide. Did he disapprove of the action on a theological basis or because of its practical consequences? Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve often heard critics of the war in Iraq assert that we’ve diverted attention away from the real war on terror, and need to focus attention on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan (as if we aren’t engaged against al-Qaeda operatives all over the world). Even Presidential candidates think it’s a winning statement, to push forth the belief that Iraq is still a disaster, and that we’ve only succeeded in “emboldening our enemies” and “We are seeing al-Qaeda stronger now than at any time since 2001.” The other criticism is to dismiss the level of influence of al Qaeda in Iraq, because foreign fighters make up a low percentage number of the insurgents.

Yet developments in Iraq have seen not only the success of the Surge, but also a rejection of al-Qaeda by all Iraqis including (and especially by) Sunnis; as well as a growing rejection of al-Qaeda theology in the Muslim world, in general. Iraq damaged al Qaeda’s image and any prestige they might have commanded, at one point. Al Qaeda knows this. Why doesn’t Senator Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Ariana Huffington?

Read the rest of this entry »

Thought this passage from Lawrence Wrights book The Looming Tower was interesting enough to reproduce it for you.  It’s about the beginning of the Death Cult in Islam in which the culture begins to accept suicide bombers and the death of innocents to achieve their objective.  Not only do they accept this, they embrace it.  This period began during the Afghan/Russian war of the 1980’s and with a man name Abdullah Azzam:

"I reached Afghanistan, and I could not believe my eyes," Azzam would later recall in his countless videos and speeches around the world.  "I felt as if I had been reborn."  In his renderings, the war was primeval, metaphysical, fought in a landscape of miracles.  The Afghans, in his tableau, represented humanity in a pristine state – a righteous, pious, pre-industrial people – struggling against the brutal, soulless, mechanized force of modernity.  In this war, the believers were aided by the invisible hands of angels.  Azzam spoke of Russian helicopters being snared by ropes, and he claimed that flocks of birds functioned as an early warning radar system by taking wing when Soviet jets were still over the horizon.  Repeatedly in his stories mujahideen discover bullet holes in their clothes when they themselves are not injured, and the bodies of those who are martyred do not putrefy but remain pure and sweet-smelling.

The struggle of Islam, as Qutb had framed it, and as Azzam deeply believed, was against jahiliyya – the world of unbelief that had existed before Islam, which was still corrupting and undermining the faithful with the lures of materialism, secularism, and sexual equality.  Here in this primitive land, so stunted by poverty and illiteracy and patriarchal tribal codes, the heroic and seemingly doomed Afghan jihad against the Soviet colossus had the elements of an epochal moment in history.  In the skillful hands of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the legend of the Afghan holy warriors would be packaged and sold all over the world.

Later in the book:

It was death, no victory in Afghanistan, that summoned many young Arabs to Peshawar.  Martydom was the product that Azzam sold in the books, tracts, videos, and cassette tapes that circulated in mosques and Arabic-language bookstores.  "I traveled to acquaint people with jihad," Azzam said, recalling his lectures in mosques and Islamic centers around the world.  "We were trying to satisfy the thirst for martydom.  We are still in love with this."  Azzam visited the United States each year – Kansas City, St. Louis, Dallas, all over the heartland and the major cities as well – looking for money and recruits amoung the young Muslims who were mesmerized by the myths he spun.

He told stories of the mujahideen who defeated vast columns of Soviet troops virtually single-handed.  He claimed that some of the brave warriors had been run over by tanks but survived; others were shot, but the bullets failed to penetrate.  If death came, it was even more miraculous.  When one beloved mujahid expired, the ambulance filled with the sound of humming bees and chirping birds, even though they were in the Afghan desert in the middle of the night.  Bodies of martyrs uncovered after a year in the grave still smelled sweet and their blood continued to flow.  Heaven and nature conspired to repel the godless invader.  Angels rode into the battle on horseback, and falling bombs were intercepted by birds, which raced ahead of the jets to form a protective canopy over the warriors.  The miracle stories naturally proliferated as word spread that Sheikh Abdullah was paying for mujahids who brought him wonderful tales.

The lure of an illustrious and meaningful death was especially powerful in cases where the pleasures and rewards of life were crushed by government oppression and economic deprivation.   From Iraq to Morocco, Arab governments had stifled freedom and signally failed to create wealth at the very time when democracy and personal income were sharply climbing in virtually all other parts of the globe.  Saudi Arabia, the richest of the lot, was such a notoriously unproductive country that the extraordinary abundance of petroleum had failed to generate any other significant source of income; indeed, if one subtracted the oil revenue of the Gulf countries, 260 million Arabs exported less then the 5 million Finns.  Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities.  This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is improverished; where entertainmen – movies, theater, music – is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women.  Adult illiteracy remained the norm in many Arab countries.  Unemployment was among the highest in the developing world.  Anger, resentment, and humiliation spurred young Arabs to search for dramatic remedies.

Martydom promised such young men and ideal alternative to a life was so sparing in its rewards.  A glorious death beckoned to the sinner, who would be forgiven, it is said, with the first spurt of blood, and he would behold his place in Paradise even before his death.  Seventy members of his household might be spared the fires of hell because of his sacrifice.  The martyr who is poor will be crowned in heaven with a jewel more valuable then the earth itself.  And for those young men who came from cultures where women are shuttered away and rendered unattainable for someone without prospects, martyrdom offered the conjugal pleasures of seventy-two virgins – "the dark-eyed houris," as the Quran describes them, "chaste as hidden pearls."  They awaited the martyr with feasts of meat and fruits and cups of the purest wine.

The pageant of martyrdom that Azzam limned before his worldwide audience created the death cult that would one day form the core of al-Qaeda. 

Of course, trying to bring hope and democracy to these countries is a fools errand right?  Bringing hope, freedom, education to the Middle East may be the only way to defeat terrorism in the long run and if we had never even tried what would future generations have said of us?    

Here is another of my forays into Lawrence Wrights excellent book on the history of radical Islam, The Looming Tower. 

First, for those, specifically on the left, who continually state bin Ladens beef with the United States was due to our country having had our troops on "sacred" land, ie Saudi Arabia, Lawrence writes about the Peter Arnett interview in March of 1997 in which we get from the horses mouth what his beef really is. 

What is even more interesting for those on the left who state we should stop supporting Israel, we should leave Iraq, just give them what they want and they will be happy, bin Laden’s words should wake your ass up:

Bin Laden cited American support for Israel as the first cause of his declaration of war, followed by the presence of American troops in Arabia.  He added that American civilians must also leave the Islamic holy land because he could not guarantee their safety.

In the most revealing exchange, Arnett asked whether, if the United States complied with bin Laden’s demands to leave Arabia, he would call of his jihad.  "The reaction came as a result of the aggressive U.S. policy toward the entire Muslim world, not just the Arabian Peninsula," bin Laden said.  Therefore, the United States has to withdraw from any kind of intervention against Muslims, "in the whole world."  Bin Laden was already speaking as the representative of the Islamic nation, a caliph-in-waiting.  "The U.S. today has set a double standard, calling whoever goes against its injustice a terrorist," he complained.  "It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose on us agents to rule us…and wants us to agree to all these.  If we refuse to do, it will say, ‘You are terrorists.’"

If we look at the beginning of al-Qaeda in 1988 there are two meetings, which Lawrence writes about, that began al-Qaeda.  On August 11th, 1988, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam chaired a meeting  with bin Laden, Abu Hafs, Abu Ubaydah, Abu Hajer, Dr. Fadl and Wa’el Julaidan.  Notes were taken and Lawrence writes:

Although the notes don’t reflect it, a vote was taken to form a new organization aimed at keeping jihad alive after the Soviets were gone.  It is difficult to imagine these men agreeing on anything, but only Abu Hajer voted against the new group.  Abu Rida summarized the meeting by saying that a plan must be established within the suitable time frame and qualified people must be found to put the plan into effect.  "Initial estimate, within 6 months of al-Qaeda, 314 brothers will be trained and ready."  For most of the men in the meeting, this was the first time that the name al-Qaeda had arisen.  The members of the new group would be drawn from the most promising recruits among the Arab Afghans, but it was still unclear what the organization would do or where it would go after the jihad.  Perhaps bin Laden himself didn’t know.

Few people in the room realized that al-Qaeda had already been secretly created some months before by a small group of bin Laden insiders.  Bin Laden’s friend from Jeddah, Medani al-Tayeb, who had married his niece, had joined the group on May 17, the day after Ramadan, so the organizational meeting on August 11 only brought to the surface what was already covertly under way.

On Saturday morning, August 20, the same men met again to establish what they called al-Qaeda al-Askariya (the military base).  "The mentioned al-Qaeda is basically and organized Islamic faction, its goal is to lift the word of God, to make HIs religion victorious," the secretary recorded in his minutes of the meeting.

Later Lawrence writes:

The leaders of al-Qaeda developed a constitution and by-laws, which described the utopian goals of the organization in clear terms: "To establish the truth, get rid of evil, and establish an Islamic nation."  This would be accomplished through education and military training, as well as coordinating and supporting jihad movements around the world. 

Lawrence writes about a speech bin Laden gave in the bin Laden family mosque in Jeddah in which he railed against the plight of the Arab world, and blamed it all on the US:

At first, it was difficult to grasp the basis of bin Laden’s complaint.  The United States had never been a colonial power, nor for that matter had Saudi Arabia ever been colonized.  Of course, he was speaking for Muslims in general, for whom American support of Israel was a cause of anguish, but the United States had been a decisive ally in the Afghan jihad.  The sense of humiliation he expressed had more to do with the stance of Muslims in the modern world.  Their lives were sold at a discount, bin Laden was tellnig his hometown audience, which confirmed their sense that other lives – Western, American lives – were fuller and more worthwhile. 

Bin Laden gave them a history lession.  "America went to Vietnam, thousands of miles away, and began bombing them in planes.  The Americans did not get out of Vietnam until after they suffered great losses.  Over sixty thousand American soldiers were killed until there were demonstrations by the American people.  The Americans won’t stop their support of Jews in Palestine until we give them a lot of blows.  They won’t stop until we do jihad against them."

Ok, so we understand what the goals of al-Qaeda was and is.  The formation of an Islamic state.  To stop the support of Israel by the West.  Not because we are in Iraq, not because we were in Saudi Arabia.  If none of these things had happened they would still wage jihad against us.  They hate what we stand for, they hate we are "unbelievers", and they hate that we support Israel.

But lets look at the central argument in the al-Qaeda/Iraq connection.  The left will constantly state that bin Laden would never support secular Saddam, or Shiites.  But wait a minute, when he moved to Sudan he formed a relationship with Hasan al-Turabi, who also envisioned a international Muslim community with Sudan as it’s headquarters:

Although bin Laden distrusted Turabi – hated him, even – he experimented with one of Turabi’s most progressive and controversial ideas: to make common cause with Shiites.  He had Abu Hajer advise the members of al-Qaeda that there was only one enemy now, the West, and the two main sects of Islam needed to come together to destroy it.  Bin Laden invited Shiite representatives to speak to al-Qaeda, and he sent some of his top people to Lebanon to train with Iranian-backed group Hezbollah.  Imad Mugniyah, the head of Hezbollah’s security service, came to meet bin Laden and agreed to train members of al-Qaeda in exchange for weapons.  Mugniyah had planned the 1983 suicide car bombings of the US Embassy and the U.S. Marine Corps and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, which killed more then three hundred Americans and fifty-eight French soldiers and had led to the prompt withdrawal of American peacekeeping forces from Lebanon.  That precedent had made a profound impression on bin Laden, who saw that suicide bombers could be devastatingly effective and that, for all its might, America had no appetite for conflict.

He didn’t like working with them, but he would indeed work with those he despises to succeed in  destroying the west, and the best way to do that was to inflict mass casualities on America.  Do it enough and he hoped we would capitulate.

So far from being unwilling to work with Shiites, far from being only out to get us out of Saudi Arabia or Iraq, their goal is the destruction of the West and the promise of a new, powerful, Muslim nation to spread the word and get rid of the unbelievers. 

In Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower he writes a excellent, historical, account of the formation of al-Qaeda and as I did last week I have selected passages from the book that I feel need some highlighting.  In this one we witness the transformation of the anti-Communist vision Osama bin Laden had for al-Qaeda to the anti-American version we have today. 

He begins by describing the man who was behind this change, Mamdouh Salim aka Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, a Kurd from Iraq who was a colonel in Saddam’s army during the war with Iran but fled to Iran not long after.  He became bin Laden’s religious advisor and as such held great sway:

Besides being bin Laden’s friend, Abu Hajer was his imam.  There were remarkably few among the members of al-Qaeda who had any extensive religious training.  Despite their zealotry, they were essentially theological amateurs.  Abu Hajer had the greatest spiritual authority, by virtue of having memorized the Quran, but he was an electrical engineer, not a cleric.  Nonetheless, bin Laden made him head of al-Qaeda’s fatwa committee – a fateful choice.  It was on Abu Hajer’s authority that al-Qaeda turned from being the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden originally envisioned into a terrorist organization bent on attacking the United States, the last remaining superpower and the force that bin Laden and Abu Hajer believed represented the greatest threat to Islam.

Why did these men turn against America, a highly religious country that so recently had been their ally in Afghanistan?  In large part, it was because they saw America as the locus of Christian power.  Once, the piety of the Muslim mujahideen and the Christian leaders of the U.S. government had served as a bond between them.  Indeed, mujahideen leaders had been considerably romanticized in the American press and had made tours through American churches, where they were lauded for their spiritual courage in the common fight against Marxism and godlessness.  But Christianity – especially the evangelizing American variety – and Islam were obviously competitive faiths.  Viewed through the eyes of men who were spiritually anchored in the seventh century, Christianity was not just a rival, it was the archenemy.  To them, the Crusades were a continual historical process that would never be resolved until the final victory of Islam.  They bitterly perceived the contradiction embodied by Islam’s long, steady retreat from the gates of Vienna, where on September 11 – that now resonant date – in 1683, the kind of Poland began the battle that turned back the farthest advance of Muslim armies.  For the next three hundred years, Islam would be overshadowed by the growth of Western Christian societies.  Yet bin Laden and his Arab Afghans believed that, in Afghanistan, they had turned the tide and that Islam was again on the march.

Now they faced the greatest military, material, and cultural power any civilization had ever produced.  "Jihad against America?" some of the al-Qaeda members asked in dismay.  "America knows everything about us.  It knows even the label of our underwear."  They saw how weak and splintered their own governments were – empowered only by the force of America’s need to maintain the status quo.  The oceans, the skies, even the heavens were patrolled by the Americans.  America was not distant, it was everywhere.

Al-Qaeda economists pointed to "our oil" that fueled America’s rampant expansion, feeling as if something had been stolen from them – not the oil, exactly, although bin Laden felt it was underpriced – but the cultural regeneration that should have come with its sale.  In the woefully unproductive societies they lived in, fortunes melted away like snow in the desert.  What remained was a generalized feeling of betrayal.

Of course, oil had brought wealth to some Arabs, but in the process of becoming rich hadn’t they only become more Western?  Consumerism, vice, and individuality, which the radical Islamists saw as the hallmarks of modern American culture, threatened to destroy Islam – even the idea of Islam – by blending it into a globalized, corporate, interdependent, secular commercial world that was part of what that these men meant when they said "America."  But by defining modernity, progress, trade, consumption, and even pleasure as Western assaults on Islam, al-Qaeda thinkers left little on the table for themselves.

If America owned the future, the Islamic fundamentalists laid claim to the past.  They were not rejecting technology or science, indeed, many of the leaders of al-Qaeda, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Hajer, were men of science themselves.  But they were ambivalent about the way in which technology weakened the spirit.  This was reflected in bin Laden’s interest in earth-moving machinery and genetic engineering of plants, on the one hand, and his rejection of chilled water on the other.  By returning the rule of Sharia, radical Islam could draw the line against the encroaching west.  Even the values that America advertised as being universally desirable – democracy, transparency, the rule of law, human rights, the separation of religion from governance – were discredited in the eyes of the jihadis because they were Western and therefore modern.  Al-Qaeda’s duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular, modernizing West.  In order to do that, bin Laden told his men, al-Qaeda would drag the United States into a war with Islam – "a large-scale front which it cannot control."

Many on the left say that the whole reason radical Islam is at war with us is because we have troops on "sacred" soil.  But as Lawrence writes, this is not the case.  While it pissed them off for sure, the real reason they are at war with us is to ensure that their vision of Islam takes over the world.  Because there is only Islam, and competing religions cannot survive.

If you have not yet read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright you must order a copy asap.  It is the definitive book on the birth of al-Qaeda and radical Islam.  I’ve decided to reproduce a few pages of the book in which Mr. Wright describes the transformation, well maybe the second transformation (the first being after Sayyid Qutb published his thoughts in a book called Milestones), of Islam.  This transformation was important to many men in the Muslim world but the two who are most important to this narrative is Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden:

Zawahiri established his medical practice at a Kuwaiti-backed Red Crescent hospital, which, like most of the aid institutions in the city was dominated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.  They hated him because of a lengthy diatribe he wrote, called Bitter Harvest, in which he attacked the Brothers for collaborating with infidel regimes – that is to say, all Arab governments.  He called the Brotherhood "a tool in the hands of tyrants."  He demanded that they publicly renounce "constitutions and man-made laws, democracy, elections, and parliament," and declare jihad against the regimes they formerly supported.  Privately funded, this handsomely produced book appeared all over Peshawar.  "They were available free of charge," one of the Brothers, who was working in Peshawar at the time, recalls.  "When you would go to get food, the clerk would ask if you wished to have one of these books, or two?"

Another of Zawahiri’s colleagues from the underground days in Cairo arrived, a physician named Sayyid Imam, whose jihadi moniker was Dr. Fadl.  They worked in the same hospital in Peshawar.  Like Zawahiri, Dr. Fadl was a writer and theoretician.  Because he was older and had been the emir of al-Jihad during Zawahiri’s imprisonment, he took over the organization once again.  Zawahiri also adopted a nom de guerre: Dr. Abdul Mu’iz (in Arabic, abd means "slave," and mu’iz means "the bestower of honor," on of the ninety-nine names of God).  He and Dr. Fadl immediately set about reestablishing al-Jihad by recruiting new members from the young Egyptians among the mujahideen.   At first they called themselves the Jihad Organization, then they changed the name again, to Islamic Jihad.  But it was still the same al-Jihad.

The Kuwaiti-backed Red Crescent hospital became the center of a divisive movement within the Arab Afghan community.  Under the influence of an Algerian, Dr. Ahmed el-Wed, known for his bloody-minded intellect, the hospital turned into an incubator for a murderous new idea, one that would split the Mujahideen and justify the fratricidal carnage that would spread through the Muslim Arab countries immediately after the Afghan war.

The heresy of takfir, or excommunication, has been a problem in Islam since its early days.  In the mid seventh century, a group known as the Kharijites revolted against the rule of Ali, the fourth caliph.  The particular issue that triggered their rebellion was Ali’s decision to compromise with a political opponent rather then to wage a fratricidal war.  The Kharijites decreed that they were the only ones who followed the true tenets of the faith, and that anyone who did not agree with them was an apostate, and that included even Ali, the Prophet’s beloved son-in-law, who they eventually assassinated.

In the early 1970s a group surfaced in Egypt called Takfir wa Hijira (Excommunication and Withdrawal), a forerunner of al-Qaeda.  Their leader, Shukri Mustafa, a graduate of the Egyptian concentration camps, attracted a couple of thousand followers.  They read Qutb and plotted the day when they would gain sufficient strength in exile to return to annihilate the unbelievers and bring on the final days.  Meanwhile, they wandered in Egypt’s Western Desert, sleeping in mountain grottoes.

The Cairo press called Mustafa’s followers ahl al-khaf, "people of the cave," a reference to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.  This Christian folktale recounts the story of seven shepherds who refused to renounce their faith.  In punishment, the Roman emperor Decius had them walled up inside a cave in present-day Turkey.  Three centuries later, according to the legend, the cave was discovered and the sleepers awakened, thinking they had slept only one night.  There is an entire sura, or chapter, in the Quran, "The Cave," that refers to this story.  Like Shukri Mustafa, bin Laden would fasten onto the imagery that the cave evokes for Muslims.  Moreover, the modus operandi of withdrawal, preparation, and dissimulation that would frame  the culture of al-Qaeda’s sleeper cells was established by Takfir wa Hijira was early as 1975.

Two years later, members of the group kidnapped a former  minister of religious endowments in Cairo, Sheikh Mohammed al-Dhahabi, a humble and distinguished scholar who often spoke at the Masjid al-Nur, a mosque Zawahiri had frequented in his youth.  When the Egyptian government spurned Shukri Mastafa’s demands for money and publicity, Mustafa murdered the old sheikh.  His body was found on a Cairo street, hands bound behind him, part of his beard torn away.

The Egyptian police quickly rounded up most of the members of Takfir was Hijira and brought dozens of them to a hasty trial.  Shukri Mustafa and five others were executed.  With that, the revolutionary concept of expelling Muslims from the faith – thereby justifying their killing – seemed to have been stamped out.  But in the subterranean discourse of jihad, a mutated form of takfir had taken hold.  It still smoldered in Upper Egypt, where Shukri Mustafa had proselytized in his early years (and where Dr. Fadl was reared).  Remnants of the group supplied Zawahiri’s comrades in al-Jihad with the grenades and ammunition used to assassinate Anwar Sadat.  Some adherents carried the heresy into North African countries, including Algeria, where Dr. Ahmed learned of it.

Takfir is the mirror image of Islam, reversing its fundamental principles but maintaining the semblance of orthodoxy.  The Quran explicitly states that Muslims shall not kill anyone, except as punishment for murder.  The murderer of one innocent, the Quran warns, is judged "as if he had murdered all of mankind."  The killing of Muslims is an even greater offense.  He who commits such an act, says the Quran, will find that "his repayment is Hell, remaining in it timelessly, forever."  How, then, could groups such as al-Jihad and the Islamic Group justify using violence against fellow Muslims in order to come to power?  Sayyid Qutb had pointed the way by declaring that a leader who does not impose Sharia on the country must be an apostate.  There is a well known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam.  The pious Anwar Sadat was the first modern victim of the reverse logic of takfir.

The new takfiris, such as Dr. Fadl and Dr. Ahmed, extended the death warrant to encompass, for instance, anyone who registered to vote.  Democracy, in their view, was against Islam because it placed in the hands of people authority that properly belonged to God.  Therefore, anyone who voted was an apostate, and his life was forfeit.  So was anyone who disagreed with their joyless understanding of Islam – including the mujahideen leaders they had ostensibly come to help, and event he entire population of Afghanistan, whom they regarded as infidels because they were not Salafists.  The new takfiris believed that they were entitled to kill practically anyone and everyone who stood in their way; indeed, they saw it as a divine duty.

Until he arrived in Peshawa, Zawahiri had never endorsed wholesale murder.  He had always approached political change like a surgeon: A speedy and precise coup d’etat was his lifelong ideal.  But while he was working in the Red Crescent hospital with Dr. Fadl and Dr. Ahmed, the moral bonds that separated political resistance from terrorism became more elastic.  His friends and former prison mates noticed a change in his personality.  The modest, well-mannered doctor who had always been so exacting in his arguments was now strident, antagonistic, and strangely illogical.  He would seize on innocent comments and interpret them in a weird and malicious manner. Perhaps for the first time in his adulthood, he faced a crisis of identity.

In a life as directed and purposeful as Zawahiri’s, there are few moments that can be said to be turning points. One ws the execution of Sayyid Qutb when Zawahiri was fifteen; indeed, that was the point of origin for all that followed.  Torture did not so much change Zawahiri as purify his resolve.  Each step of his life was in the service of fulfilling his goal of installing an Islamic government in Egypt as bloodlessly as possible.  But the takfiri doctrine had shaken him.  The takfiris convinced themselves that salvation for all of humanity lay on the other side of moral territory that had always been the certain province of the damned.  They would shoulder the risks to their eternal souls by assuming the divine authority of deciding who was a real Muslim and who was not, who should live and who should die. 

Zawahiri stood at this great divide.  On one side, there lay before him the incremental process of rebuilding his movement in exile, waiting for the opportunity, if it ever came, of returning to Egypt and taking control.  This was his life’s goal.  But it was only a small step toward the apocalypse, which seemed so much closer at hand when he viewed the other side of the divide.  There, across what he must have known was an ocean of blood, was the promise of the universal restoration of true Islam. 

For the next ten years, Zawahiri would be pulled in both directions.  The Egyptian option was al-Jihad, which he had created and defined.  The universal option had not yet been named, but it was taking shape.  It would be called al-Qaeda.

I felt compelled to post these pages of Lawrence Wright’s book to quell many on the left who state that the reason al-Qaeda, Osama, and the rest of the fanatics were angry at us….indeed the only reason, is due to our soldiers being on sacred ground.  While this may have been an excuse it is more then apparent that if we had not one footprint on that ground they would still find another excuse to make war against those who practice Democracy.