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by Marc Erikson
from
AsiaTimesOnLine Website
Contents
Part 1
Nov 5, 2002
[Editor’s note: As distinct from the world religion of Islam,
Islamism - as in part contextually defined below - is a political
ideology that adherents would apply to contemporary governance and
politics, and which they propagate through political and social
activism.]
On November 7, 2001, on the request of the US government, the Swiss
Federal Prosecutor’s Office froze the bank accounts of Nada
Management, a Lugano-based financial services and consulting firm,
and ordered a search and seizure raid on the firm’s offices. Police
pulled in several of the company’s principals for questioning. Nada
Management, part of the international al-Taqwa ("fear of God")
group, is accused by US Treasury Department investigators of having
acted for years as advisers and a funding conduit for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
Among those interrogated by police was a certain Albert Friedrich
Armand (aka Ahmed) Huber, 74, a Swiss convert to Islam and retired
journalist who sits on the Nada board of directors. Nothing too
unusual perhaps, except for the fact that Huber is also a
high-profile neo-Nazi who tirelessly travels the far-right circuit
in Europe and the United States. He sees himself as a mediator
between radical Islam and what he calls the New Right. Since
September 11, a picture of Osama bin Laden hangs next to one of
Adolf Hitler on the wall of his study in Muri just outside the Swiss
capital of Bern. September 11, says Huber, brought the radical
Islam-New Right alliance together.
On that, as his own career amply demonstrates, he is largely wrong.
Last year’s horrific terrorist acts were gleefully celebrated by
Islamists and neo-Nazis alike (Huber boozed it up with young
followers in a Bern bar) and may have produced closer links. But
Islamism and fascism have a long, over 80-year history of
collaboration based on shared ideas, practices and perceived common
enemies. They abhor "Western decadence" (political liberalism,
capitalism), fight holy wars - if needs be suicidal ones - by
indiscriminate means, and are bent on the destruction of the Jews
and of America and its allies.
Horst Mahler - once a lawyer for, later a member of, the 1960s/’70s
German ultra-left terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang, and now a leading
neo-Nazi - summed up convergent radical Islamic and far-right views
and hopes in a September 21, 2001 letter:
"The USA - or, to be more
exact, the World Police - has shown itself to be vulnerable ... The
foreseeable reaction of the East Coast [= the Jewish controllers and
their gentile allies = the US Establishment] can be the spark that
falls into a powder keg. For decades, the jihad - the Holy War - has
been the agenda of the Islamic world against the ’Western value
system.’ This time it could break out in earnest ... It would be
world war, that is won with the dagger ... The Anglo-American and
European employees of the ’global players,’ dispersed throughout the
entire world, are - as Osama bin Laden proclaimed a long while ago -
military targets. These would be attacked by dagger, where they
least expected an attack. Only a few need be liquidated in this
manner; the survivors will run off like hares into their respective
home countries, where they belong."
Such convergence of views, methods and goals goes back to the 1920s
when both Islamism and fascism, ideologically pre-shaped in the late
19th century, emerged as organized political movements with the
ultimate aim of seizing state power and imposing their ideological
and social policy precepts (in which aims fascism, of course,
succeeded in the early ’20s and ’30s in Italy and Germany,
respectively; Islamism only in 1979 in Iran; then in Sudan and
Afghanistan).
Both movements claim to be the true representatives of
some arcane, idealized religious or ethnically pure communities of
days long past - in the case of Islamism, the period of the four
"righteous caliphs" (632-662), notably the rule of Umar bin al-Khattab
(634-44) which allegedly exemplifies "din wa dawla", the unity of
religion and state; in the case of the Nazis, the even more obscure
Aryan "Volksgemeinschaft", with no historical reference point at
all. But both are in reality - as historian Daniel Pipes, director
of the Middle East Forum, puts it - 20th century outgrowths, radical
movements, utopian and totalitarian in their outlook. The Iranian
scholars Ladan and Roya Boroumand have made the same point.
The Nazi ("national socialist") movement was formed in reaction to
the World War I destruction of the "Second Reich", the "unequal and
treasonous" Versailles Treaty and the mass social dislocation that
followed, its racialist, corporatist ideology laid out in Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The
Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan Al
Muslimun), parent organization of numerous Islamist terrorist
outfits, was formed in 1928 in reaction to the 1924 abolition of the
caliphate by Turkish reformer Kemal Ataturk, drawing the
consequences of the World War I demise of the Ottoman Empire. Ikhwan
founder Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian school teacher, wrote at the
time that it was endless contemplation of "the sickness that has
reduced the ummah (Muslim community) to its present state" which
prompted him and five like-minded followers - all of them in their
early twenties - to set up the organization to rectify it.
Fascist Nazi history need not be dwelt on further here. It led to
the horrors and destruction of World War II and the Holocaust.
Neo-Nazism, whether in Europe or the US, remains a terrorist threat
and - as the French Le Pen version demonstrated in parliamentary
elections this year - retains a measure of political clout. It is
nonetheless a boxed-in niche force with little capability for
break-out. Its ideological twin, Islamism, by sharp contrast, has
every chance for wreaking escalating world-wide havoc based on its
fast-growing influence among the world’s more than one billion Muslims. Immediately following September 11 last year, US President
George W Bush declared war on terrorism. It’s a catchy phrase, but a
serious misnomer all the same. Terrorism is a method of warfare, not
the enemy. The enemy is Islamism.
Al-Banna’s brotherhood, initially limiting itself to spiritual and
moral reform, grew at astonishing speed in the 1930s and ’40s after
embracing wider political goals and by the end of World War II had
around 500,000 members in Egypt alone and branches throughout the
Middle East. Event background, ideology, and method of organizing
all account for its improbable success. As the war drew to a close,
the time was ripe for an end to British and French colonial rule and
the Ikhwan was ready with the persuasive, religiously-buttressed
answer: Free the Islamic homeland from foreign, infidel (kafir)
control; establish a unified Islamic state. And al-Banna had built a
formidable organization to accomplish just that: it featured
sophisticated governance structures, sections in charge of different
segments of society (peasants, workers, professionals), units
entrusted with key functions (propaganda, press relations,
translation, liaison with the Islamic world), and specialized
committees for finances and legal affairs - all built on existing
social networks, in particular those around mosques and Islamic
welfare associations. Weaving of traditional ties into a distinctly
modern political structure was at the root of al-Banna’s success.
But the "Supreme Guide" of the brethren knew that faith, good works
and numbers alone do not a political victory make. Thus, modeled on
Mussolini’s blackshirts (al-Banna much admired "Il Duce" and soul
brother "Fuehrer" Adolf Hitler), he set up a paramilitary wing
(slogan: "action, obedience, silence", quite superior to the
blackshirts’ "believe, obey, fight") and a "secret apparatus" (al-jihaz
al-sirri) and intelligence arm of al-Ikhwan to handle the dirtier
side - terrorist attacks, assassinations, and so on - of the
struggle for power.
In 1948, after the brotherhood had played a pivotal role in
mobilizing volunteers to fight in the war against "the Zionists" in
Palestine to prevent establishment of a Jewish state, it considered
itself to have the credibility, political clout, and military might
to launch a coup d’etat against the Egyptian monarchy. But that
wasn’t to be. On December 8, 1948, a watchful Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha disbanded it. He wasn’t watchful enough. Less than
three weeks later, the brethren retaliated by assassinating the
prime minister - in turn prompting the assassination of al-Banna by
government agents on February 12, 1949.
That didn’t end it. Under a new, more radical leader, Sayyid Qutb,
the al-Ikhwan fight for state power continued and escalated. A
mid-1960s recruit was Ayman al-Zawahiri, present number two man of
al-Qaeda and the brains of the organization.
Go Back
Part 2
Nov 8, 2002
Osama bin Laden has the money, proven organizational skills, combat
experience, and the charisma that can confer the air of wisdom and
profundity even on inchoate or trivial utterances and let what’s
unfathomable appear to be deep in the eyes of his followers. But
he’s no intellectual. The brains of al-Qaeda and its chief ideologue
by most accounts is Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, 51, the
organization’s number two man and former head of the Egyptian
al-Jihad, which was merged with bin Laden’s outfit in February 1998
to form the "International Front for Fighting Jews and Crusaders".
Al-Zawahiri hails from an elite Egyptian family. His father was a
professor at Cairo University’s medical school from which Ayman
graduated in 1974. His paternal grandfather was the Grand Imam at
the al-Azhar Institute, Sunni Islam’s paramount seat of learning.
His great-uncle, Abdel-Rahman Azzam, was the first secretary-general
of the Arab League.
Such family background notwithstanding, perhaps because of it, al-Zawahiri
joined the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun)
as a young boy and was for the first time arrested in 1966 at age
15, when the secular government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser
rounded up thousands of al-Ikhwan members and executed its top
leaders in retribution for repeated assassination attempts on the
president. One of those executed by hanging was chief ideologue
Sayyid Qutb. Al-Zawahiri is Qutb’s intellectual heir; he has further
developed his message, and is putting it into practice.
But without Qutb, present-day Islamism as a noxious amalgam of
fascist totalitarianism and extremes of Islamic fundamentalism would
not exist. His principal "accomplishment" was to articulate the
social and political practices of the Muslim Brotherhood from the
1930s through the 1950s - including collaboration with fascist
regimes and organizations, involvement in anti-colonial,
anti-Western and anti-Israeli actions, and the struggle for state
power in Egypt - in demagogically persuasive fashion, buttressed by
tendentious references to Islamic law and scriptures to deceive the
faithful. Qutb, a one-time literary critic, was not a religious
fundamentalist, but a Goebbels-style propagandist for a new
totalitarianism to stand side-by-side with fascism and communism.
Hitler’s early 1933 accession to power in Germany was widely cheered
by Arabs of all different political persuasions. When the "Third
Reich" spook and horrors were over 12 years later, a favorite excuse
among those who felt the need for one was that the Nazis had been
allies against the colonial oppressors and "Zionist intruders". Many
felt no need for an excuse at all and simply bemoaned the fact that
the Nazis’ "final solution" to the "Jewish problem" had not proved
final enough. But affinities with fascism on the part of the Muslim
Brotherhood and other segments of Arab and Muslim society went much
deeper than collaboration with the enemy of one’s enemies, and
collaboration itself took some extreme forms.
Substitute religious for racial purity, the idealized ummah of the
rule of the four righteous caliphs of the mid-7th century for the
mythical Aryan "Volksgemeinschaft", and most ideological and
organizational precepts of Nazism laid out by chief theoretician
Alfred Rosenberg in his work The Myth of the 20th Century and by Adolf Hitler in
Mein Kampf, and later put into practice, are in all
essential respects identical to the precepts of the Muslim
Brotherhood after its initial phase as a group promoting spiritual
and moral reform. This ranges from radical rejection of "decadent"
Western political and economic liberalism (instead embracing the
"leadership principle" and corporatist organization of the economy)
to endorsement of the use of terror and assassinations to seize and
hold state power, and all the way to concoction of fantastical
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories linking international plutocratic
finance to Freemasonry, Zionism and all-encompassing Jewish world
control.
Not surprisingly then, as Italian and German fascism sought greater
stakes in the Middle East in the 1930s and ’40s to counter British
and French controlling power, close collaboration between fascist
agents and Islamist leaders ensued. During the 1936-39 Arab Revolt,
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, sent
agents and money to support the Palestine uprising against the
British, as did Muslim Brotherhood founder and "supreme guide"
Hassan al-Banna. A key individual in the fascist-Islamist nexus and
go-between for the Nazis and al-Banna became the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini - incidentally the later mentor
(from 1946 onward) of a young firebrand by the name of Yasser
Arafat.
Having fled from Palestine to Iraq, el-Husseini assisted there in
the short-lived April 1941 Nazi-inspired and financed anti-British
coup. By June 1941, British forces had reasserted control in Baghdad
and the mufti was on the run again, this time via Tehran and Rome to
Berlin, to a hero’s welcome. He remained in Germany as an honored
guest and valuable intelligence and propaganda asset through most of
the war, met with Hitler on several occasions, and personally
recruited leading members of the Bosnian-Muslim "Hanjar" (saber)
division of the Waffen SS.
Another valued World War II Nazi collaborator was Youssef Nada,
current board chairman of al-Taqwa (Nada Management), the Lugano,
Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Bahamas-based financial services
outfit accused by the US Treasury Department of money laundering for
and financing of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. As a young man, he had
joined the armed branch of the "secret apparatus" (al-jihaz al-sirri)
of the Muslim Brotherhood and then was recruited by German military
intelligence. When Grand Mufti el-Husseini had to flee Germany in
1945 as the Nazi defeat loomed, Nada reportedly was instrumental in
arranging the escape via Switzerland back to Egypt and eventually
Palestine, where el-Husseini resurfaced in 1946.
Go Back
Part 3
Dec 4, 2002
Islamism, or fascism with an Islamic face, was born with and of the
Muslim Brotherhood. It proved (and improved) its fascist core
convictions and practices through collaboration with the Nazis in
the run-up to and during World War II. It proved it during the same
period through its collaboration with the overtly fascist "Young
Egypt" (Misr al-Fatah) movement, founded in October 1933 by lawyer
Ahmed Hussein and modeled directly on the Hitler party, complete
with paramilitary Green Shirts aping the Nazi Brown Shirts, Nazi
salute and literal translations of Nazi slogans. Among its members,
Young Egypt counted two promising youngsters and later presidents,
Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat.
In later years, the Brotherhood had serious fallings-out with
Nasser, whom it attempted to assassinate on several different
occasions, and with Sadat, whom it did assassinate in 1981. But up
until at least the time of Nasser’s 1952 coup d’etat, all was
sweetness and light between Hassan al-Banna’s brethren and Nasser’s
"free officers". In his personal diary, Sadat wrote in the summer of
1940:
"One day I invited Hassan al-Banna, leader of the
Muslim
Brotherhood, to the army camp where I served, in the Egyptian
Communication Corps, so that he might lecture before my soldiers on
various religious topics. A few days before his scheduled appearance
it was reported to me from army Intelligence that his coming was
forbidden and canceled by the order of General Headquarters, and I
myself was summoned for interrogation. After a short while I went
secretly to El Bana’s office and participated in a few seminars he
organized. I like the man and admired him."
Whether al-Banna, who had already been in contact with German agents
since the 1936-39 Palestine uprising against the British, or someone
else introduced Sadat and his free officer comrades to German
military intelligence is not known. But in the summer of 1942, when
Rommel’s Afrikakorps stood just over 100 kilometers from Alexandria
and were poised to march into Cairo, Sadat, Nasser and their buddies
were in close touch with the German attacking force and - with
Brotherhood help - preparing an anti-British uprising in Egypt’s
capital. A treaty with Germany including provisions for German
recognition of an independent, but pro-Axis Egypt had been drafted
by Sadat, guaranteeing that "no British soldier would leave Cairo
alive". When Rommel’s push east failed at El Alamein in the fall of
1942, Sadat and several of his co-conspirators were arrested by the
British and sat out much of the remainder of the war in jail.
Islamist-fascist collaboration did not cease with war’s end. King
Farouk brought large numbers of German military and intelligence
personnel as well as ranking (ex-) Nazis into Egypt as advisors. It
was a bad move. Several of the Germans, recognizing Farouk’s
political weakness, soon began conspiring with Nasser and his free
officers (who, in turn, were working closely with the Brotherhood)
to overthrow the king. On July 23, 1952, the deed was done and
Newsweek marveled that,
"The most intriguing aspect [of] the revolt
... was the role played in the coup by the large group of German
advisors serving with the Egyptian army ... The young officers who
did the actual planning consulted the German advisors as to ’tactics’ ... This accounted for the smoothness of the operation."
And yet another player fond of playing all sides against the middle
had entered the game prior to Farouk’s ouster: In 1951, the CIA’s
Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of president Teddy, who in 1953 would
organize the overthrow of elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh
and install Reza Pahlavi as Shah) opened secret negotiations with
Nasser. Agreement was soon reached that the US, post-coup, would
assist in building up Egypt’s intelligence and security forces - in
the obvious manner, by reinforcing Nasser’s existing Germans with
additional, "more capable", ones. For that, CIA head
Allen Dulles
turned to Reinhard Gehlen, one-time head of eastern front German
military intelligence and by the early 1950s in charge of developing
a new German foreign intelligence service. Gehlen hired the best man
he knew for the job - former SS colonel Otto Skorzeny, who at the
end of the war had organized the infamous ODESSA network to
facilitate the escape of high-ranking Nazis to Latin America (mainly
Peron’s Argentina) and Egypt. With Skorzeny now on the job of
assisting Nasser, Egypt became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals
galore. The CIA officer in charge of the Egypt assistance program
was Miles Copeland, soon a Nasser intimate.
And then things got truly complicated and messy. Having played a
large role in Nasser’s power grab, the Muslim Brotherhood, after the
1949 assassination of Hassan al-Banna by government agents [see part
1] under new leadership and (since 1951) under the radical
ideological guidance of Sayyid Qutb, demanded its due - imposition
of Sharia (Islamic religious) law. When Nasser demurred, he became a
Brotherhood assassination target, but with CIA and the German
mercenaries’ help he prevailed. In February 1954, the Brotherhood
was banned. An October 1954 assassination attempt failed. Four
thousand brothers were arrested, six were executed, and thousands
fled to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon.
Within short order, things got more tangled still: As Nasser in his
brewing fight with Britain and France over control of the Suez Canal
turned to the Soviet Union for assistance and arms purchases, the
CIA approached and began collaboration with the Brotherhood against
their ex-ally, the now pro-Soviet Nasser.
We leave that twisted tale at this stage. A leading Brotherhood
member arrested in 1954 was Sayyid Qutb. He spent the next 10 years
in Jarah prison near Cairo and there wrote the tracts that
subsequently became (and till this day remain) must-reading and
guidance for Islamists everywhere. (The main translations into Farsi
were made by the Rahbar of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei.) But while brother number one went to jail, other
leading members who had escaped were given jobs in Saudi
universities and provided with royal funding. They included Sayyid’s
brother Muhammad and Abdullah al-Azzam, the radical Palestinian
preacher (the "Emir of Jihad") who later in Peshawar, Pakistan,
founded the Maktab al-Khidamat, or Office of Services, which became
the core of the al-Qaeda network. As a student at King Abdul Aziz
University in Jeddah, Osama bin Laden, son of Muhammad bin Laden,
the kingdom’s wealthiest contractor and close friend of King Faisal,
became a disciple of Muhammad Qutb and al-Azzam.
Sayyid Qutb was born in 1906 in a small village in Upper Egypt, was
educated at a secular college, and subsequently worked as an
inspector of schools for the ministry of education. In the 1930s and
1940s, nothing pointed to his later role. He wrote literary
criticism, hung out in coffee houses, and published a novel which
flopped. His conversion to radical Islam came during two-and-a-half
years of graduate studies in education in the United States
(1948-51). He came to hate everything American, described churches
as "entertainment centers and sexual playgrounds", was shocked by
the freedom allowed to women, and immediately upon his return to
Egypt joined the Muslim Brotherhood and assumed the position of
editor-in-chief of the organization’s newspaper.
While in jail, Qutb wrote a 30-volume (!) commentary on the Koran;
but his most influential book, published in 1965 after his 1964
release from prison for health reasons, was Ma’alim fi’l-tariq
("Signposts on the Road", also translated as "Milestones"). In it,
he revised Hassan al-Banna’s concept of establishing an Islamic
state in Egypt after the nation was thoroughly Islamized, advocating
instead - fascist or Bolshevik-style - that a revolutionary vanguard
should first seize state power and then impose Islamization from
above. Trouble is, this recipe went against the unambiguous Muslim
prohibition against overthrowing a Muslim ruler.
Qutb found his clue to resolving the dilemma in the writings of his
Pakistani contemporary, Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), founder
in 1941 of the Jamaat-i-Islami, who had denounced the existing
political order in Muslim societies as partial jahiliyyah -
resembling the state of unenlightened savagery, ignorance and
idolatry of pre-Islamic Arab societies. There was nothing "partial"
about the jahiliyyah of the existing order, nothing that could be
redeemed, pronounced Qutb:
"... a society whose legislation does not
rest on divine law ... is not Muslim, however ardently its
individuals may proclaim themselves Muslim, even if they pray, fast
and make the pilgrimage ... jahiliyyah ... takes the form of
claiming the right to create values, to legislate rules of
collective behavior and to choose any way of life that rests with
me, without regard to what God has prescribed."
Only uncompromising restoration of the ideal of the union of
religion and state as evidenced during the 7th century reign of the
"righteous caliphs" would do. Islam was a complete system of life
not in need of man-made additions. Any ruler, Muslim or otherwise,
standing in the way could be justifiably removed - by any means.
This, naturally, applied to Nasser, and another attempt on his life
was made in 1965. Qutb was rearrested, tortured and tried for
treason. On August 29, 1966, he was hanged. The charge against him
of plotting to establish a Marxist regime in Egypt was ludicrous.
Nasser and his minions knew full well that the real danger to the
regime stemmed from Qutb’s denunciation of it as jahiliyyah, and not
from those clauses of his Ma’alim fi’l-tariq which speak of a
classless society in which the "selfish individual" and the
"exploitation of man by man" would be abolished, which the
prosecution cited as evidence against him.
The martyred Qutb’s writings rapidly acquired wide acceptance in the
Arab world, especially after the ignominious defeat of the Arabs in
the June 1967 "Six Day War" with Israel, taken as proof of the depth
of depravity to which the regimes in the Muslim realm had sunk.
Go Back
Part 4
Dec 5, 2002
An early convert to Sayyid Qutb’s new-fangled fascist Islamism which
condones, indeed commands, terrorism and murder was the alleged
number two man of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
[see part 2]. Having joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age 15, he was
caught in the Nasser dragnet after the 1965 assassination attempt on
the Egyptian leader and - young age and elite family background
notwithstanding - was thrown in jail. An April 1968 amnesty freed
most of the brethren, and Ayman, in that regard following in his
father’s footsteps, went on to Cairo University to become a
physician. He obtained his degree in 1974 and practiced medicine for
several years.
His profession, however, was not his calling. By the late 1970s, he
was back full-time in the Islamist revolution business agitating
against the Egypt-Israel peace treaty (concluded in 1979). In 1980,
on the introduction by military intelligence officer Abbud al-Zumar,
he became a leading member of the Jama’at al-Jihad of Muhammad Abd-al-Salam Faraj which on October 6, 1981, assassinated President
Anwar El Sadat while he was reviewing a military parade.
Faraj, like al-Zawahiri, had been a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, but became disenchanted with its passivity. In 1979, he
penned a short pamphlet titled "The Neglected Obligation" (al-Farida
al-Gha’ibah), which relied heavily on the ideas of Sayyid Qutb. It
became the founding document of al-Jihad, arguing along the familiar
lines that acceptance of a government was only possible and
legitimate when that government fully implemented Sharia, or Islamic
law. Contemporary Egypt had not done so, and was thus suffering from
jahiliyya. Jihad to rectify this, wrote Faraj, was not only the
"neglected obligation" of Muslims, but in fact their most important
duty.
Following the Sadat assassination, al-Zawahiri was arrested on a
minor weapons possession charge and spent three years in jail. In
1985 he left Egypt for Saudi Arabia and later Peshawar, Pakistan,
where he was joined by Muhammad al-Islambuli, the brother of one of
Sadat’s five assassins, 24-year-old artillery lieutenant Khalid
Ahmed Shawki al-Islambuli. There, connections were made with the
groups of Palestinian Islamist Abdullah Azzam and the latter’s
one-time student Osama bin Laden, by then fully engaged (with
well-known CIA support) in assisting the mujahideen struggle against
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Al-Zawahiri’s al-Jihad was in many respects better organized and
better trained than other groups in the Afghanistan theater. Prior
to the murder of Sadat, it had succeeded in recruiting members of
the presidential guard, military intelligence and the civil
bureaucracy. Most importantly, it was in possession of a cogent and
comprehensive ideology pointing beyond the Afghan struggle against
the Soviet occupiers. "Afghanistan should be a platform for the
liberation of the entire Muslim world," was the distinguishing creed
of al-Jihad.
Al-Zawahiri wrote several books on Islamic movements, the best known
of which is The Bitter Harvest (1991/92), a critical assessment of
the failings of the Muslim Brotherhood. In it, he draws not only on
the writings of Sayyid Qutb to justify murder and terrorism, but
prominently references Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami founder and
ideologue Mawdudi on the global mission of Islamic jihad.
Mawdudi had written,
"Islam wants the whole earth and does not
content itself with only a part thereof. It wants and requires the
entire inhabited world. It does not want this in order that one
nation dominates the earth and monopolizes its sources of wealth,
after having taken them away from one or more other nations. No,
Islam wants and requires the earth in order that the human race
altogether can enjoy the concept and practical program of human
happiness, by means of which God has honored Islam and put it above
the other religions and laws. In order to realize this lofty desire,
Islam wants to employ all forces and means that can be employed for
bringing about a universal all-embracing revolution. It will spare
no effort for the achievement of this supreme objective. This
far-reaching struggle that continuously exhausts all forces and this
employment of all possible means are called jihad."
And further,
"Islam is a revolutionary doctrine and system that
overturns governments. It seeks to overturn the whole universal
social order ... and establish its structure anew ... Islam seeks
the world. It is not satisfied by a piece of land but demands the
whole universe ... Islamic jihad is at the same time offensive and
defensive ... The Islamic party does not hesitate to utilize the
means of war to implement its goal."
Not just or even principally the expulsion of the Soviets from
Afghanistan or the removal of any one godless Muslim regime, but
global jihad as Mawdudi had prescribed, became al-Zawahiri’s
obsession. And he acted as he had read and written. After several
years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, constructing there the platform
from which to launch broader pursuits, Zawahiri traveled extensively
on Swiss, French and Dutch passports in Western Europe and even the
United States on fund-raising, recruiting and reconnaissance
missions. Then came initial implementation of the offensive.
It is not known whether he had a hand in the 1993 bombing of the New
York World Trade Center. But he had close connections to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the group that carried out the
attack. Then, in 1995, he was behind the truck bomb attack on the
Egyptian embassy in Pakistan; in November 1997, he led the Vanguards
of Conquest group responsible for the Luxor (Egypt) massacre in
which 60 foreign tourists were systematically murdered and
mutilated; in August 1998, he organized the bombings of the US
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and probably, in 2000, the
speed-boat bomb attack on the USS Cole in Aden. Israeli intelligence
considers him the "operational brains" behind September 11; the
fact, in any case, is that the Egyptian Mohammed Atta, principal of
the Hamburg, Germany, al-Qaeda cell that was instrumental to the
World Trade Center destruction, was a member of Zawahiri’s al-Jihad.
Osama bin Laden, as we wrote earlier, had the money, some of the
connections, and perhaps the charisma to function as the leader of
the al-Qaeda global jihad. But it was not until Zawahiri’s al-Jihad
in February 1998 formally joined forces with bin Laden that the
present global Islamist terrorist threat truly emerged. With his
long experience in the Muslim Brotherhood, his critical assessment
of its failures, his cunning - albeit highly eclectic - fashioning
of a fascist ideology drawing on Islamic religious elements, and his
organizational and operational skills, al-Zawahiri is the key
personality of global jihad. The key point to understand is that
Zawahiri fascist Islamism has seized the ideological initiative in
the Muslim world against which traditional Islam has so far proved
an impotent, indeed often unwilling, opponent. Young Muslims
everywhere are captivated by Zawahiri Islamism and jihad to which
they attribute selfless idealism and in which they admire ruthless
determination. It will be a long war.
And make no mistake: In this war against a new, ideologically
vigorous fascism, collateral assets of the Islamists, the neo-Nazis
of the Ahmed Huber variety which we described in part 1 of this
series, or - for that matter - Saudi financiers wittingly pushing
narrow sectarian Wahhabism upon youths in madrassas worldwide, are
key forces in the enemy camp. Islamism as we have portrayed it in
its historical and present dimension is a form of fascist madness -
the same type of madness which one of Hitler’s closest confidants,
convicted war criminal Albert Speer, saw during the Fuehrer’s final
days. In his Spandau prison diary entry for November 18, 1947, Speer
recollects:
"I recall how [Hitler] would have
films shown in the Reich Chancellory about London burning, about
the sea of fire over Warsaw, about exploding convoys, and the
kind of ravenous joy that would then seize him every time. But I
never saw him so beside himself as when, in a delirium, he
pictured New York going down in flames. He described how the
skyscrapers would be transformed into gigantic burning torches,
how they would collapse in confusion, how the bursting city’s
reflection would stand against the dark sky."
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