Justice and the Enemy Read online

  In 1952 the Brotherhood welcomed the overthrow of the pro-British monarchy by nationalist army officers but was outraged when it became clear that their principal ambition was to create a pan-Arab secular movement rather than an Islamist state.

  After the Brotherhood tried to assassinate the military’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in 1954, Qutb and other Brothers were imprisoned or killed. Qutb was tortured and probably avoided death only because he was much of the time confined to the prison infirmary. But he continued to write, and to argue that anything non-Islamic was evil and corrupt. Western society must be destroyed because it contained “nothing that will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence.” He argued that mankind faced only one choice—Islam or jahiliyya (the barbaric West), that this was a struggle between God and Satan, and that anyone, Muslim or infidel, who did not accept this Manicheanism must die. 8

  In keeping with Al Qaeda and other modern Islamist movements, Qutb’s thinking was infused with anti-Semitism. In the early 1950s, only a few years after the Holocaust, he wrote of “Our Struggle with the Jews,” describing Jews as Islam’s “worst” enemies, “slayers of the prophets,” perfidious and evil. The nature of the Jews, he wrote, “does not allow them to feel the larger human connection which binds humanity together. Thus did the Jews (always) live in isolation.” 9 Jews see that rather differently: they see themselves, understandably, facing a never-ending existential threat, one that in the twentieth century morphed through communism and fascism, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century found its most virulent base in Arab anti-Semitism and the dedicated hatred of Islamism.

  Qutb was tried for conspiracy and hanged in August 1966, becoming a martyr and a symbol of Islamist resistance. His influence and that of the Brotherhood spread well beyond Egypt, and found particular resonance in the conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where many members of the Brotherhood found refuge and ideological sustenance. This next generation of adherents included Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Mohammed, who worked diligently to advance his sibling’s work and legend. One of his adherents was Osama bin Laden himself, pampered child of one of the richest families in the Saudi kingdom. Another was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later became a leading ideologist in Al Qaeda, and after bin Laden’s death in 2011, was named his successor.10 Mohammed Qutb was also a contemporary of the Islamist Abdullah Azzam, who became the ideological godfather of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s own mentor—until bin Laden approved his assassination.

  The example of the Muslim Brotherhood looms large for many Islamist movements, particularly in the Arab world, for it was the first to fuse traditional concepts of political Islam with the modern ideological construct and tactical terrorism. Yet Al Qaeda’s beliefs and membership derive from an eclectic mixture of Islamist influences—from the more cerebral Islamism of the Brotherhood to the tribalist Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and the Deobandis of the Indian subcontinent. It is best known as salafism.

  Just as the influence and violence of the Muslim Brotherhood grew in response to corrupt (and relatively secular) authoritarianism, the most fertile settings for violent Islamism have been states in which the people have, to varying degrees, lacked the freedom to control their own destinies. In many of the countries that have been particularly influential in the development of modern Islamism, religion has been both a vehicle to articulate grievances and a method of state control. Like two threatening weather systems, these instruments of Islam have had a tendency to reinforce one another, often to devastating effect.

  The Wahhabi movement, centered in what is now Saudi Arabia, is a two-hundred-year-old reform group originally intended to cleanse Islamic societies. Wahhabis believe in the literal interpretation of the Koran and insist that believers live simple lives; they reject luxury, tolerance of infidels, and every form of “impurity.” The school has had a huge impact on modern Islamism and helped form many of Al Qaeda’s leaders.

  The House of Saud possesses a sword with many sharp edges. The monarchy’s control of the spiritual home of Islam has been an enormous source of power; yet that has also left the monarchy vulnerable to the charge of usurping the holy land. And of course, like any monarchical autocracy, the Saudi monarchy suffers the insecurity of the unelected, which, in these times, invites inevitable challenges. In an effort to co-opt those who might aspire to religious revolution, the House of Saud intensified its long-standing commitment to Wahhabism to increase its control of both its own country and the wider Muslim community.

  Using its vast income from the export of oil, Saudi Arabia has invested enormously in spreading this doctrine abroad through mosques, madrassas, and broadcast propaganda. Wahhabism has indeed helped to cement the legitimacy and the ideological monopoly of the House of Saud; yet it has also been used as a way of fomenting revolution against all that is considered un-Islamic, and that has sometimes backfired against the Saudi rulers. Bin Laden, for instance, was a product of a Wahhabist background, and took its puritanical lessons to the most radical conclusion: he insisted that the House of Saud was a traitor to Islam because, in order to counter Saddam Hussein, it allowed American military bases in the land of Mecca and Medina.

  The history of Islam has given Arab culture a disproportionate influence over the Muslim world, the majority of which is non-Arab. In fact, the demographic strength of the umma (community) largely derives from South Asia, which has also exercised an important influence on the global jihadist movement. Arguably, the most significant contribution of this region has been the northern Indian and Pakistani Deobandi school, which holds that Islamic societies have fallen behind the West because they have deviated from the teachings of the Prophet and insists that jihad is the duty of faithful Muslims.

  The Deobandi movement originated as a hostile response to both the British Empire and the Hindu majority. After Indian independence, Deobandi madrassas and clerics were used by the newly-formed Pakistan as a way of binding together the disparate groups of Muslims it now ruled. They became particularly significant following the destabilizing and violent secession of East Pakistan in 1971, and during Zia ul-Haq’s military regime, which deliberately fostered Islamist education and law. Since then the parent Indian Deobandi school has distanced itself from political violence; the Pakistani Deobandis, on the other hand, have been closely associated with the Taliban leaders and their brutal methods.

  Osama bin Laden began his active involvement in the jihadist movement as a financier for the mujahideen fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Many jihadis ended up in Peshawar, where virulent interpretations of Wahhabist and Deobandi Islam co-mingled, and Islamist leaders such as Abdullah Azzam propagated the romanticized death-cult of martyrdom that has become a common strain in global jihadism.

  In the 1980s, Afghanistan became a holy destination for jihadists—a campaign in which they honed practical experience, forged networks of comradeship and kinship, and achieved their first significant military—and highly symbolic—victory over a world superpower. Moscow’s defeat in Afghanistan led perhaps inexorably to the collapse of the Soviet Union for it showed to the Russian and many other peoples that the Marxist promise of history’s unilinear march toward a glorious communist future was a lie. And it was this victory that emboldened jihadists, and Al Qaeda in particular, to wage war on the other hated superpower—the United States.

  Al Qaeda is thought to have come into being in 1988, towards the end of the Afghan-Soviet War. As Michael Burleigh has pointed out, Al Qaeda was unique in that it drew its recruits from a variety of social, religious, and nationalist backgrounds, which he observes “gradually dissolved into a new global jihadi salafist identity that picked and mixed from secular geopolitics and several extreme Islamic traditions in a thoroughly eclectic, post-modern fashion.” 11

  Throughout the 1990s bin Laden inspired, planned, directed, and celebrated attacks against the Saudi regime and its American allies. He declared war on the United States first in 1996 and then again in 1998, claiming that Ameri
ca was waging war against Muslims, God, and his messenger, Muhammad. He called for the murder of any American, anywhere on earth, as “the individual duty of every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” 12 In an American television interview, he asserted that in this war, American deaths were more valuable than any other and that he would make no distinction between American soldiers and civilians. “We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans.... We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned they are all targets.” 13

  Bin Laden and Al Qaeda offered disaffected Sunni Muslims a way of life that might be more properly called a way of death. It has proved tragically attractive to a small, but nonetheless worrying, minority of young men in the Muslim lands of North Africa and the Middle East and, increasingly, beyond. It has become a powerful barrier to the march of change, a march which, one must acknowledge, is often unsettling if not deeply disruptive of traditions around the world.

  Although Al Qaeda is a resolutely Sunni organization, the Shiite Islamic Revolution in Iran had an enormous effect on the jihadist imagination. Ayatollah Khomeini’s surge to power in 1979 was an astonishing victory for all proponents of political Islam, and was a powerful rebuke and humiliation for the West. There is much in common between bin Laden’s vision of hatred and of death and the views put forward by Khomeini, who warned in a speech in December 1984:If one allows the infidels to continue playing their role of cor-rupters on Earth, their eventual moral punishment will be all the stronger. Thus, if we kill the infidels in order to put a stop to their [corrupting] activities, we have indeed done them a service. For their eventual punishment will be less. To allow the infidels to stay alive means to let them do more corrupting. [To kill them] is a surgical operation commanded by Allah the Creator.... Those who follow the rules of the Koran are aware that we have to apply the laws of qissas (retribution) and that we have to kill.... War is a blessing for the world and for every nation. It is Allah himself who commands men to wage war and to kill. 14

  In considering the pronouncements of both Khomeini and bin Laden, one is drawn back to the description of Hitler by Justice Jackson at Nuremberg. Hitler, he said, “was a mad ‘Messiah’ who started the war without cause and prolonged it without reason. If he could not rule, he cared not what happened to Germany.” So it is with Khomeini, bin Laden, and other leaders of the Islamist revival. They may not be, by their own standards, mad—but nor was Hitler. Their madness resides in the fact that for them dogmas, not consequences, matter.

  Thus, despite the rhetoric of Islamists who routinely accuse the Western powers of responsibility for all the ills of the Muslim world, the truth is that over the last half century, by far the greatest numbers of Muslims killed around the world have been murdered by other Muslims. In East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), between a half million and one million people were slaughtered in 1971 by the Pakistani army in an attempt to prevent secession. In the devastating war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, there were an estimated 1.5 million military casualties, and thousands of civilians were also killed. The Algerian civil war that began in 1992 claimed over 150,000 lives. In Darfur, between 200,000 and 500,000 civilians (mostly non-Muslims) are estimated to have been killed by the Islamist government in Khartoum. In Iraq, the vast majority of the estimated 106,000 civilians who lost their lives after the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein in March 2003, were killed by other Muslims.c

  Almost every day of every year brings more accounts—not news any more—of Muslim men, women, and children being murdered in the latest suicide bombing by followers of Al Qaeda and other such groups. The Radical Islamist reach for power is almost always bloody; and where Radical Islamists achieve power—as in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Iran—they practice mass murder on a scale not equaled in the world except by Nazi and Communist rulers.

  This cult of death, embraced by both Sunni and Shia extremists, has been described by the philosopher Roger Scruton as “both a protest against modern nihilism and a form of it—a last-ditch attempt to rescue Islam from the abyss of nothingness by showing that it can still demand the ultimate proof of devotion.” 15 But Scruton also points to the responsibility of globalization in the rise of international Islamism. Western money, Western banking, Western communications, Western concepts of the individual, even Western architecture, since the 1960s have reached ever further and deeper across the globe. Globalization has changed the world forever. For good, in the eyes of its advocates, who point to the rising prosperity that follows free trade and the greater intermingling of peoples. But to its critics, “it means the loss of sovereignty, together with large scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption.” Worse still, Western habits, Western morals (particularly sexual), and Western television are seen as temptations, not freedoms, “and the normal response to temptation is either to give in to it or to punish those who offer it.” Globalization thus “offers militant Islam the opportunity that it has lacked since the Ottoman retreat from central Europe.” It has created “a true Islamic umma, which identifies itself across borders in terms of a global form of legitimacy.... This new form of globalized Islam is undeniably threatening, since it satisfies a hunger for membership that globalization itself has created.” And it has created an international army ready to do battle with the enemies of God, wherever they are. 16

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s own background and influences mirror the diverse nature of Al Qaeda. He is both a product of the various strands of violent Islamism that have permeated the Muslim world, and a natural-born killer who has devoted most of his adult life to a path of jihadist mass murder. His defining characteristic is said to be his egoism.

  He was born in Kuwait in 1965 to Baluchi parents, who had escaped the poverty of Baluchistan (in western Pakistan) by emigrating to the increasingly wealthy Gulf state. He spent a comfortable childhood in Kuwait with eight siblings and his nephew Ramzi Yousef, three years his junior. When his father died before he began school, his elder brothers took over his religious and academic education. He was radicalized during the course of several summers at desert camps where, according to The 9/11 Commission Report, he became “enamored of violent jihad.” In 1980, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of sixteen. 17

  In 1984, he went to study in the United States and was enrolled in Chowan, a small Baptist college in North Carolina, and subsequently attended the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where he obtained a degree in mechanical engineering. His distaste for America grew while he was there, rather like Sayyid Qutb almost forty years before.

  The Arab students at these schools tended to divide almost viscerally. Some happily enjoyed what they saw as the opportunities of American life—the alcohol, the women, the cars—while others, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, rejected these pleasures as decadent and became increasingly religious. The devout segregated themselves from their peers; they lived together, ate together, and prayed together. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s high school teacher later claimed that he had decided that most Americans did not like Arabs and Islam because of Israel.

  According to one U.S. intelligence summary, “KSM’s limited and negative experience in the United States”—which included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills—almost certainly propelled him on his path to becoming a terrorist. He stated that his contact with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was “a debauched and racist country.”

  While KSM was completing his studies in the United States, his three elder brothers moved to Pakistan to support the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. KSM joined them in the late 1980s and spent much of his time in Peshawar, where the Deobandis had, and continue to have, considerable influence. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, he later joined the jihadist forces fighting in the Bosnian war between the Bosnian Muslims and the Serbian nationalists. Then, apparently seamlessly, he moved to work as a government
engineer in Qatar before committing himself more permanently to the path of jihadist murder.

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s first major terrorist success came in 1993 when he helped finance the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Indeed, this was a family plot—it had been devised by Ramzi Yousef, his nephew. Yousef, aka Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim, was under thirty years old when he arrived in New York, claiming to be an Iraqi dissident and requesting asylum. He was welcomed into the country he planned to attack. Basing himself among the Arab community in Brooklyn, he assembled a gang of petty criminals committed to radical Islam.

  Yousef worshipped at mosques in New Jersey where the preacher was often the extremist Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman who, for inexplicable reasons, had been given an entry visa from Sudan. The Egyptian government considered the blind Sheikh Rahman dangerous and sought his extradition but, in the name of free speech, the U.S. government tolerated the Sheikh’s rabble-rousing diatribes against America and Israel.

  To attack the World Trade Center, Yousef and his crew, using funds KSM had raised for the purpose, bought and assembled 1,500 pounds of explosives, a huge bomb. On February 26, 1993, they loaded their homemade weapon aboard a rented van and drove it into the garage of the Center. The bomb detonated at midday, killing six people and injuring thousands. The blast tunneled through seven floors and caused massive damage: the repairs cost some half a billion dollars.18

  Yousef managed to flee the country that night, while others of their group, including the blind Sheikh, were arrested. They were indicted and tried for complicity in a wide-ranging series of terrorist plots, including the murder of Meir Kahane, a fanatical Israeli rabbi shot dead in New York in 1990; the Trade Center bombing; and plans to blow up several other vital sites in Manhattan, including the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, F.B.I. headquarters, and the United Nations. After a protracted trial in federal court in the Southern District of New York, they were sentenced to life imprisonment. During the proceedings, the prosecution was required by the standard practice of conspiracy cases to reveal the names of unindicted co-conspirators. The list included Osama bin Laden—it was the first time that his name had surfaced in such a context. Then resident in Sudan, he was thus put on notice that the U.S. authorities were aware of his activities. The presiding judge in the trial, Michael B. Mukasey, who became attorney general during the second administration of George W. Bush, said later that that case made clear to him that the United States was facing a military, not a criminal, problem in Islamist terrorism, and captured terrorists should be dealt with in military not civilian court. 19