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Although there is no single explanation for bin Laden’s antipathy to America, the Gulf War and its aftermath, particularly the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, were primary. But bin Laden still did not yet translate this hostility into concrete action African Mango by establish- ing a paramilitary organization along al-Qaeda lines. After the Saudi authorities seized his passport in 1991 in an effort to keep him under control, he used his family contacts to retrieve it. He left the country, never to return.

There was nothing inevitable about bin Laden’s journey, which first took him briefly to the western Pakistani frontier city of Pesha- war in March 1992, and then to cheap wedding dresses Sudan, where he stayed for four years until his departure to Afghanistan in May 1996. According trade show booths to the dominant terrorism narrative, as soon as bin Laden left Saudi Arabia in exile in 1992, he activated al-Qaeda al-Askariya, which he had set up in 1988 before penny stocks to watch he left Afghanistan. This relates to the assertion—a false one, as I have argued—that al-Qaeda al-Askariya was merely an extension of Azzam’s As noted previously, Azzam’s “solid base” was more theoretical than actual; it was not a true organization with operational capacity. There is debate as to electric cigarette whether bin Laden founded a group called “al- Qaeda” in either late 1987 or early 1988. Although the evidence is sketchy and inconclusive, in 1988 in Peshawar, bin Laden and a dozen or so close associates appeared to have set up al-Qaeda al- Askariya, or “a training base”—as bin Laden subsequently recalled— “and that is where the name came from.”

One rationale for the training base stems from a late 1987 com- plaint from SEO Services some young Afghan Arabs to bin Laden about Azzam’s services bureau. Bin Laden leather furniture had been raising funds from Saudi Ara- bia for Azzam and the Afghan leaders, but decided to set up a sepa- rate facility near the Afghan-Pakistan border and called on the Egyptian Tanzim al-Jihad to run it. Bin Laden’s camp was a limited venture and primarily focused on training recruits for the front against the Soviets, notes Fadl, who provided bin Laden with skilled diamond engagement rings cadres to train Afghan Arab fighters. In a series of interviews with the Arabic newspaper

al-Hayat from the Egyptian prison, Tura, Fadl conceded that his Tanzim al-Jihad had  established bin Laden’s orig- inal training base and, moreover, that  he had “tried to direct him to the right path,” by which he meant battling the near enemy. Bin Laden proved to be a huge disappointment to Fadl, who maintained that by the end of the akes.com”>baby shower cakes

Afghan war bin Laden was more interested in waging jihad against the socialist-based government in South Yemen than anything else.

It should be no surprise that few of bin Laden’s associates remembered calling themselves “al-Qaeda” and that there is no mention of the group in the comprehensive Encyclopedia of Jihad published by Azzam’s Maktab al-Khidmat (services bureau) between 1991 and 1993. Never- theless, at this stage, the term “al-Qaeda” referred more to “fundamentals,” as they called them—maxims, or rules—rather than to an organization. Peshawar, the alleged home of bin Laden’s 1988 al-Qaeda, was not as welcoming the next time around, when he arrived as an exile in 1992. He had no photocopier hire organizational infrastructure and few ardent supporters left over from the Afghan jihad. In addition, Pakistan, a close ally of the Saudi royal family, had come under intense pressure from Arab countries  as well as the United States to repatriate the Afghan Arabs, many of whom had been battling their own regimes. Although he had planned to provoke the Saudi authorities and incite trouble, bin Laden soon discovered that Pokis was pokies hostile and thus immediately left for Sudan, a state ruled by a friendly Islamic-based coalition for the rest of the pokies.

Sudan was an important way station email lists on bin Laden’s journey to al-Qaeda and transnational jihad. He spent almost four years in this poor African-Arab country and utilized his skills in construction to build roads and experiment sole f63 with arboriculture and a soap-making factory and tannery in Khartoum. Welcomed as “the great Islamic investor” by Hassan al-Turabi, sole f80 the country’s most important Islamic scholar, bin Laden duly invested tens of millions of dollars in road construction and other projects.

During the next four years bin Laden built

total gym xls a complex network,one that combined business practices with ideological indoctrina- tion and recruitment. Management and militancy pokies were intertwined. Most of the managers employed by bin Laden were either hardcore Islamist ideologues, associates of the uggs Afghan jihad, or exiled mili- tants who sought refuge in the friendly Sudan. Although at this stage al-Qaeda  was not yet an operational organization, the plans to make it into one were put in place. In the first half of the 1990s Sudan was a

focal point for radical Islamists and Afghan Arabs on the run. With the Afghan muja- hideen embroiled in a vicious civil war and Pakistan repatriating the diabetic diet Afghan Arabs to their respective countries, Islamic Sudan emerged as the new jihad headquarters, offering  shelter and ideological and theological substance to a new breed of Salafi-Jihadi traveling fighters. Turabi was the man behind the transformation of Sudan from a military junta to a pan-Islamic  hub treadclimber reviews. In particular, he wel- comed Algerian and Egyptian jihadis, such as Zawahiri, who were then battling regimes in their respective countries, and precipitated a serious crisis with the two neighboring Arab states, particularly Egypt. For example, when bin Laden refused to finance Zawahiri’s Tanzim al-Jihad to carry out attacks inside Egypt, the Sudanese in- telligence service reportedly provided the financing. In late 1993

Zawahiri told Fadl work from home

that the Sudanese authorities gave him 100,000 dollars on the condition that he execute ten operations against the Egyptian regime. 32 According to Fadl, when, in the mid-1990s, weight loss pills bin Laden began to excommunicate Saudi rulers, Fadl warned him that this may incur the wrath of the Sudanese government. Bin Laden retorted by saying that the Sudanese authorities had encouraged him to undertake these operations.At critical junctures in the 1980s, 1990s, and after  September 11, state actors have used non-state actors, such as the Afghan muja- hideen, the Afghan Arabs, Tanzim al-Jihad, al-Gamaa al-Islamiya,  al-Qaeda, and others, to serve their interests. Transnational actors allowed themselves to be used to wage wars by proxy; their own sur- vival was at stake, as was their ability to go on the offensive against secular Muslim rulers and ultimately to replace them. Far from being passive victims of the games nations play, Zawahiri, bin Laden, and their cohorts were active participants. They Bose Companion 3 desperately  strug- gled to shed their non-state status and to join the privileged and exclusive nation club. despite harman kardon soundsticks ii tensions over money in Sudan, bin Laden, who had drawn closer to the Egyptian contingent at the end of the Afghan war, was now surrounded by logitech z-5500 lieutenants logitech x-540 of Tanzim al-Jihad and al- Gamaa al-Islamiya who offered their services. In Afghanistan, bin Laden had had Azzam to counterbalance the weight of logitech z-2300 Zawahiri and other militant Egyptians; in Sudan he had no such countervailing authority. His inner circle consisted almost entirely of Egyptian travelers from the Afghan jihad, who fed him an extreme theological and ideological diet tailored to his rigid, authoritarian sensibility and worldview. Herein lie the origins of the marriage of ideas between Egyptian radicalism of the Qutbian variety and the ultra- conservative Saudi variety, a marriage that gave birth to al-Qaeda. Sudan was an incubator of this Proactol union, subsequently consummated in Afghanistan.

Moreover, while in Sudan, bin Laden was torn between con- frontation and accommodation, pursuing both approaches simulta- neously and sending out feelers to the Saudi authorities about a potential seo firms rapprochement and a return home. Until mid-1995, bin Laden was on record as saying that he opposed the killing of inno- cent noncombatants, including Americans, and it is not clear whether he was involved in some of the attacks carried out in the early 1990s. After September 11 there was a tendency among Rolex replica watches ob- servers to blame bin Laden while he was in Sudan for all the bomb- ings that occurred in that period; many accept al-Qaeda’s exaggerated claims about its early military exploits as fact. Elevated to new heights of prowess and invincibility, bin Laden’s reach was por- trayed as extensive, even limitless. The reality is more complicated than that.

In the first half of the 1990s a number of domestic jihadis exiled in Sudan fought their own governments and carried out attacks in their various home countries. Bin Laden had never been in favor of waging war hair removal against the near enemy, though he provided limited financial assistance to militants battling certain Muslim rulers. This partly explains why bin Laden was not on the radar screen of Western intelligence services, which monitored Liposuction Thailand transnational jihadis op- erating in the world during the 1990s; he was seen more as a “financier of terrorists” than as an operational leader plotting and ordering replica handbags attacks.

Jason Burke, who has written a thoroughly researched book on al-Qaeda, notes that bin Laden had little or nothing to do with most of the attacks in the first half of the 1990s: while bin Laden is often linked to the bombings in Aden in December of 1992, in fact it is far more likely that Tariq al-Fadhli organized the attacks. Burke also asserts that bin Laden was falsely linked to the attempted as- sassination of Egyptian custom shirts President Hosni Mubarak and the 1995 and 1996 attacks in Saudi Arabia. Prince Turki blamed him for the 1995 bombing of the National Guard Training Center in Riyadh, which was considered the first “terrorist blow” against the Arabian kingdom.

In any case, by late 1994 the pendulum tilted against reconcilia- tion between bin Laden and the rulers of his native land. He mis- trusted King Fahd and his senior advisers who, in return, demanded that he give up jihad and disband his militant network in Sudan. King Fahd’s alleged support of secular laws and the stationing of American troops in the kingdom definitively turned bin Laden against the ruling royal family. Bin Laden listened more and more to his inner circle, which fed him reports about American plots to expand its military presence to Sudan and other Arab countries after Somalia.

Bin Laden’s views of America hardened into overt hostility. In a message addressed to the “honorable scholars of the Arabian pen- insula and Saudi Arabia in particular,” he called on Muslims to rise up and resist the enemy that had invaded the land of the umma, violated her honor, shed her steriods blood, and occupied its sanctuaries.

In contrast, al-Qaeda was a top-down, militarized organization designed to wage a transnational war against the West, trying to bog it down in a total war against the greater Islamic world. Al-Qaeda aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Muslims and spearhead- ing popular resistance against the Western crusade against no no hair removal the umma.

Once bin Laden and Zawahiri gained credibility in the eyes of the Muslim masses, they would level the playing field with local rulers and then seize power in their native lands.

Thus the transition from Qutb’s Secret Apparatus to bin Laden’s al-Qaeda has been marked by continuities and discontinuities. Bin Laden and Zawahiri adopted some of Qutb’s key concepts and terms, and then adapted them to their cyprus company formation transnational jihad cause. For ex- ample, they borrowed the concept of al-Islam al-haraki (“a pioneering vanguard”)—which Qutb coined and popularized—and deployed it against the religious and political establishment at home and against foreign powers. Qutb was a theorist of domestic jihadism, not al- Qaeda’s transnational jihadism. Since his execution, domestic jihadis have struggled to enact his vision and exact vengeance on secular- leaning Arab rulers, such as Nasser and his successors.

Al-Qaeda and transnational jihad in general are
bike stand primarily creatures of the Afghan war against the Soviets, a conflict that lasted almost a decade and brought together between 10,000 and 50,000 volun- teers from every region of the Muslim world. Afghanistan was the cradle of a new generation of mujahideen, baptized by blood and fire, who tasted the sweetness of victory over one of the most pow- erful fighting machines the world pet supplies uk has known. The Afghan jihad molded the character and worldview of many members of this gen- eration and bred among then a sense of invincibility. This helps explain the resilience and perseverance of this generation whose asabiya has withstood considerable adversity.

The Afghan jihad was pivotal to the rise of al-Qaeda and to trans- national jihad, fertilizing two powerful ideological currents—Egyp- tian radical Islamism and Saudi ultra-conservatism. Al-Qaeda was born out of a marriage of convenience between Zawahiri and a pow- erful Egyptian funny shirts contingent on the one hand, and bin Laden, in- cluding Saudi and Yemeni volunteers, on the other: an alliance of two Islamist tribes. Although this unholy union will survive despite bin Laden’s death, it faces a bleak future and its descendants are few and isolated from the mainstream Islamist family.

Zahiri and the Egyptian contingent have spent a lifetime bat- tling the secular-nationalist Egyptian regime. As late as 1995, he authored an essay entitled “The Road to Jerusalem Goes through Cairo,” which appeared in his group’s newsletter, al-Mujahidun (April 26) published by Tanzim al-Jihad. He wrote, “Jerusalem will not be liberated unless the battle for Egypt and Algeria is won and unless Egypt is liberated,” thus reaffirming his commitment to battle Muslim rulers. According to Fadl, Zawahiri’s senior associate,
home builders edmonton from the 1960s through the mid-1990s Zawahiri never showed any oper- ational interest in attacking the far enemy.

That would have squan- dered his Rolex replica watches precious, limited resources and contradicted deeply held theoretical and theological percepts.

For the Zawahiri generation, the struggle against the near enemy was a strategic necessity as well as a religious duty; only Qur’anic-based states would protect and promote Islam against the West’s corrupting cultural influences and imperial crusades. His associates were even more steadfast in their belief that the domestic jihad must take priority over everything else. For ex- ample, in the late 1990s Zawahiri appealed to his key lieutenants and associates in Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, and elsewhere to join the recently formed World Islamic loveseats Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders (referred to hereafter as the “World Islamic Front”) with bin Laden; he faced an internal revolt within his own Atkins Diet Phase 1 organi- zation, a group known as “al-Jihad,” later renamed “Tanzim al- Jihad,” and fierce opposition against the new transnational venture with bin Laden.

A good number of Zawahiri’s associates pointedly accused him of recklessness, of endangering the survival of the Islamist move- ment as a whole. Several of his top cohorts also cautioned him against falling under the spell of bin Laden, whom they perceived as an untrustworthy amateur, a self-promoter more interested in culti- vating his media image than in struggling to make God’s words supreme. At a key meeting in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, Zawa- hiri tendered his resignation as emir of Tanzim al-Jihad because of the intensity of opposition to his joint venture with bin Laden. According to accounts by some participants, senior members expressed shock that their leader would join bin Laden’s World Islamic Front without consulting them first and examining the re- percussions of such a dangerous venture.

In addition to the opposition within Zawahiri’s inner circle to attacking the United States, there were few buyers of transnational jihad within the jihadist movement generally. In particular, incarcer- ated leaders of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, the largest jihadist organiza- tion in the Muslim world, called on their members to refrain from joining the World Islamic Front and to abide by the unilateral cease- fire that they declared in 1997. A war of words developed between al-Gamaa’s senior chiefs and Zawahiri, who labored to drive a wedge between these imprisoned leaders and their counterparts in exile.

The World Islamic Front was a foolish idea that was bound to exact a heavy toll on the sons of Islam, according to some of Zawa- hiri’s former cohorts, whom I interviewed in Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere in the late 1990s. None of them bought into Zawahiri’s sudden Pizza Express vouchers switch to transnational jihad. The consensus was that pressing financial and operational circumstances forced his hand and caused him to join bin Laden’s front, a tactical move to rescue his sinking ship. Bankrupt and without independent financial re- sources in the second half of the 1990s, Zawahiri could not pay the meager salaries of his fighters’ widows, a painful blow, nor the living expenses of his dispersed lieutenants and foot soldiers. Moreover, Zawahiri’s Tanzim al-Jihad had suffered a catastrophic military set- back (in 1993 almost a thousand members, including senior lieu- tenants, were captured by the Egyptian authorities because of tactical blunders by low- and mid-ranks). In 1995 Zawahiri sent a memo to his subordinates and suspended attacks against the Egyp- tian regime at Essay writing service home because of operational difficulties, thus implic- itly conceding defeat.

Others asserted that Zawahiri had no genuine interest in trans- national jihad but believed that he ergohuman had thought he would ultimately outsmart and outmaneuver bin Laden and recalibrate the World Islamic Front to serve his lifelong struggle against the near enemy. Zawahiri himself argues that his decision to go on the offensive against the far enemy win ipad 2 stems from US involvement in the late 1990s in the capture and rendition to Egypt of al-Jihad senior chiefs from Albania and other countries, a number of whom received death sen- tences. Zawahiri vowed to retaliate against America. Whatever the case, his call for transnational jihad did not resonate with his inner circle or with the jihadist movement at large. But, once committed, he could not back down. Abandoning a thirty-year struggle against the near enemy, Zawahiri converted wholeheartedly to battling the far enemy; in 2000 he authored an autobiographical manifesto— Fursan tahta rayat al-nabi [Knights under the prophet’s banner]—in which he justified his new conversion and
digital signage called for prioritizing the fight against the head of kufr or infidelity: the United States.

The  Data Mining Software story of al-Qaeda is that of a union between two driven and charismatic men with differing sensibilities, backgrounds, and life- styles. From a very young age, growing up during a period of pro- found socioeconomic and political change in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s, the young Zawahiri sought to bring Qutb’s unfinished struggle to fruition and establish a Qur’anic-based state. One of his prison mates told me, “Zawahiri is a Qutbian from head to toe.” While at high school in Maadi, Cairo, he established an under- ground cell and invited a few of his classmates and close friends to join it. Though he belongs to a professional family with roots in pan- Arab politics, Zawahiri completely rejected the political process and  embraced the underground and paramilitary tactics. Several of his contemporary associates have told me that Zawahiri never believed in religious or political activism as a means to overthrow the secular Egyptian regime and did not even use the mosque for recruitment or mobilization, though he participated in a few protests.

Ironically, Zawahiri emulated his sworn enemy, Nasser, in enact- ing a military coup to bring about radical change. He tried to infil- trate the Egyptian officer corps by recruiting and co-opting junior officers into his cell, avoiding a direct armed confrontation with the Egyptian authorities, and instead plotting in the shadows until the time was right. While Zawahiri was not directly involved in the as- sassination of Sadat in 1981, he was imprisoned for three years because of his close connection with the perpetrators. Through intensive interrogation and torture, Zawahiri’s shadowy life was brought to light, and his jihadist cell was crushed by President Hosni Mubarak’s security forces. Similar to Qutb’s experience in prison, Zawahiri’s years in jail did not turn him away from the underground; they hardened his resolve. His experience of hard labor, psycholog- ical and physical abuse, humiliation, and torture left a permanent scar. In 1984, he left prison with abiding grievances against the state and a deep thirst for revenge. Despite the twists and turns of his vi- olent journey—from local jihad to transnational jihad, Zawahiri has been consumed by the fight against “renegade” Egyptian secular rulers—Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak. For almost fifty years he waged a crusade against them, a crusade that took him from a high school in an upper middle-class neighborhood in Egypt to the killing fields of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In contrast, until the 1980s, bin Laden lived a simpler life than that of his Egyptian co-conspirator. One of the fifty-four children of Mohammed bin Laden, Saudi Arabia’s construction czar, bin Laden enjoyed wealth, privilege, and opportunity from a young age. Bin laden spent his formative years in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, and many hours at his family’s ranch in the hills and valleys between Jed- dah and Mecca. He also frequently visited his mother’s family in Latakia, Syria, and received some of his early schooling there and in Beirut.

His father, who arrived in Saudi Arabia from the rugged terrain of northern Yemen with only what he had in his pockets, built a multibillion-dollar construction empire from the ground up, and established strong ties with the royal family. He rebuilt the great mosque complexes at Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest shrines. Even after his untimely death—Osama was just ten years old—Mohammed bin Laden continued to serve as a role model for his son, who embraced his father’s work ethic, humility, piety, and independence. Mohammed instilled in the young Osama stamina, endurance, and a dogged faith that hardship could be overcome. His hands-on approach to business deeply influenced bin Laden’s lead- ership style. He preferred to be directly involved in a project rather than remain behind a desk in an office.

From a young age, bin Laden was more religious than his half- brothers, and he felt deeply the upheaval in the Arab world after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, in which Israel crushed the Arab armies, and the tumultuous events of the 1970s, culminating in the Islamic rev- olution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the siege of the mosque at Mecca, and the signing of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. His joining an after-school Islamic study group at al-Thaghr, an elite private school in Jeddah, in 1973, marked a transformational moment for bin Laden. He considered him- self reborn. This religious awakening helped fill the void left by the loss of his father.

While bin Laden was perhaps more pious than his brothers, he was not all that different from other young Saudis whose sensibilities and worldview were shaped by pivotal developments in the late 1960s and 1970s. He never exhibited a propensity for breaking away from his family, let alone leaving home to wage a borderless, trans- national war. Until the late 1970s bin Laden remained largely apolit- ical and did not engage in political causes.

Like many young Saudis of his generation, bin Laden studied economics at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah and came in contact with two lecturers there—Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic Islamic scholar who would become his mentor during the Afghan jihad in the 1980s, and Muhammad Qutb, the brother of Sayyid— both of whom played a key role in his subsequent transformation. In addition to studying macroeconomics, Osama read Sayyid Qutb’s revolutionary manifestos and internalized some of his ideas and concepts. Although his piety deepened at the university, it did not preclude him from expanding his role in his family’s construction company. He spent countless hours at various construction sites, overseeing building projects, and traveled in Europe on company business on private jets. At home in Jeddah, however, bin Laden led a more humble and simple life than his brothers, and started a family of his own. Afghanistan transformed him, and his deepening and expanding role in the conflict helped strengthen his family’s posi- tion within Saudi Arabia, a leading driver behind the Afghan jihad.

Bin Laden and Zawahiri led two different lives: one above ground and the other deep underground. Bin Laden was a builder, Zawahiri a demolisher. They met in Afghanistan in the 1980s and their diver- gent lives converged. The Afghan jihad transformed bin Laden, took hold of his imagination, and left a deep imprint on his psyche. He found his calling among young and old mujahideen battling a god- less enemy, seeking martyrdom, and dreaming of heavenly, not earthly, fruits and rewards. The wealthy man from Islam’s holy land, came from afar and sold precious belongings, including their wives’ jewelry and life savings—who were willing to sacrifice themselves to defend the umma. Bin Laden realized that that lesson, mobilizing the collective will of Muslims and undertaking jihad, a personal duty in the Afghan case or fard kifaya (a collective obligation), rep- resented a powerful weapon, one that could be profitably leveraged and deployed to great effect.

Psychologically and spiritually, the Afghan jihad shaped bin Laden more than any school had. His mentor, Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic Jordanian of Palestinian descent, provided ideological and theological guidance and became a driving force behind bin Laden’s entry into the jihad environment. Bin Laden looked on Azzam as a spiritual father and mentor, and fell under his spell. Azzam was to bin Laden what Qutb was to Zawahiri. Both Azzam and Qutb belonged to a radical Islamist school of thought, though with similarities and differences, and both were martyred.

Like Qutb, Azzam favored the formation of a “pioneering van- guard” that would build an ideal Qur’anic society and bring about an Islamic revival worldwide. In his widely read manifesto, Join the Caravan, Azzam states that establishing a solid foundation, a home- land, as a base for Islam was crucial:

The establishment of the Muslim community on an area of land is a necessity, as vital as water and air. This homeland will not come about without an organized Islamic movement which perseveres consciously and realistically upon jihad, and which regards fighting as a decisive factor and as a protective cover. But unlike Qutb, Azzam opposed taking arms against fellowMuslims, including nationalist rulers like Nasser and Mubarak.

As an operationally organized, independent, and centralized trans national group, al-Qaeda did not exist until the second half of the 1990s—not the late 1980s, as received wisdom in the United States and the West would have it. By the time American forces had expelled bin Laden and his associates from their home base in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, al-Qaeda was but five years old.

 Far from being a social movement with deep historical roots in Muslim societies, al-Qaeda, and transnational jihad in general, is an orphan within the militant Islamist family, an ambitious venture founded and led by a small vanguard. “Small” is the key word. Al- Qaeda has only ever attracted a limited number of ardent adherents and has never developed a mass following. Its brief history has been characterized by the absence of a thick and durable social base, and by its essentially nomadic quality. Any overview of the rise of al- Qaeda must acknowledge these humble and limited social origins, for they reveal the context and conditions that have given rise to the bin Laden generation.

 And they are very limited. From the very beginning, al-Qaeda has been structurally constrained by weak societal ties and links. There is, in fact, less to it than meets the eye. Nonetheless, the con- ventional terrorism narrative continues to portray al-Qaeda as a potent global power. Rohan Gunaratna, whose book on al-Qaeda was a bestseller in the United States, claims that since September 11 al-Qaeda has become stronger:

Despite the losses Al Qaeda has suffered in Afghanistan as a result of the destruction of its operational and training infrastructure, its cells overseas have moved from strength to strength. While Al Qaeda has been hunted down by the US, its allies and its friends, Al Qaeda has been able to replenish its human losses and material wastage Gunaratna and others contend that radical Islam is “slowly growing.”

In fact, once al-Qaeda’s core elite—the Afghan Arabs— disappear, it will be incapable of replenishing its skilled, depleted ranks whose asabiya, tribal loyalty, has powered the transnational organization.

The organization’s beginnings are key to unlocking the riddle of this transnational group, revealing its relative weight and inevitable decline and fall. Al-Qaeda has always contained the seeds of its own destruction.

From its origins in the late 1950s until the mid-1990s, a period of almost forty years, the militant Islamist movement known as “jihadism” was inward-looking, obsessed with replacing “renegade” secular Muslim rulers with Qur’anic-based states or states governed by the sharia (Islamic law). Sayyid Qutb, while in prison from 1954 until 1965, spearheaded a paramilitary group called al-Tanzim al- Sirri or “the Secret Apparatus.” Qutb instructed his followers to pri- oritize the fight against the enemy within and oust Muslim “tyrants” who did not apply the sharia. According to my interviews with sev- eral of his contemporary disciples over the years, Qutb cautioned them against any activity or engagement that detracted them from this existential domestic struggle between God’s sovereignty (faith) and apostasy, or between hakimiya and jahiliya. For Qutb, the clash within was the defining moment of the day because local secular rulers allowed the West to culturally dominate the abode of Islam.

For almost four decades, politically radicalized religious activists, the disciples of Qutb, fought a prolonged war against the near enemy— pro-Western Muslim leaders. They refrained from attacking the far enemy—Western powers. They kept their focus on the home front. There existed no constituency within the militant Islamist movement calling for an armed confrontation with the West, nor any manifestos that demanded such a clash. Jihadism was a solely domestic affair. After September 11, Western commentators and analysts suddenly discov- ered Qutb, and portrayed him as the “philosopher of terror,” the spiri- tual and operational godfather to bin Laden and Zawahiri; they have drawn a direct, unbroken line between Qutb and al-Qaeda.

This connection fits perfectly with al-Qaeda’s own designs. The organization has engaged in a systematic effort to claim the Qutbian legacy.

3 Bin Laden and Zawahiri repeatedly pronounced themselves ardent disciples of Qutb, warriors in his Islamic pioneering van- guard. Zawahiri’s relationship with Qutb goes back to the latter’s execution in 1966. Zawahiri, then in high school in a middle-class neighborhood in Cairo, was so moved by Qutb’s martyrdom that he established a small underground cell, together with a few of his schoolmates. Ever since, Zawahiri has looked to al-shahid (“the mar- tyr”) as his model and inspiration, and frequently cites him in his pronouncements and manifestos. Zawahiri’s senior associate, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (alias “Abd al-Qadir Ibn Abd al-Aziz” and also known as “Dr. Fadl”), who as we shall see is a key figure in the story of the rise and fall of al-Qaeda, notes that Zawahiri’s theological growth stopped with Qutb’s writing more than thirty years ago, and that he never really evolved beyond that point. Other close associates of Zawahiri testify that Qutb has shaped Zawahiri’s worldview. Despite their claim of kinship, bin Laden and Zawahiri twisted Qutb’s ideas to suit their purposes. According to Qutb’s contemporary followers, some of whom spent years with him in prison and under- ground, Qutb never called for a confrontation with the West and instead exhorted them to strike at Arab rulers who conspired with Islam’s external enemies and allowed them to infiltrate Muslim lands. 

Contemporary followers maintain that he showed no in- terest in either the internationalization of jihad or the targeting of Western powers. Nonetheless Qutb essentially called on Muslims to defend dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam) against crusading intrusion and cultural invasion. Yet both bin Laden and his detractors have claimed that Qutb supplied the fuel that powered al-Qaeda’s trans- national jihad.

This could not be further from the truth. Qutb was the master theorist of the concept of the “enemy within” and his organization, the Secret Apparatus, targeted the secular-leaning nationalist regime of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. None of the surviving chiefs of the Secret Apparatus whom I interviewed ever mentioned that Qutb had instructed them to attack the United States and its Western allies or had theorized about the need to confront the enemy without. “Qutb’s raison d’être was the replacement of jahiliya with hakimiya at home and the establishment of a Qur’anic state,” pointed out Sayyid Eid, now 80, who spent years with Qutb in prison and who was one of his closest confidants inside and outside jail. “I do not ever recall al-shahid saying that we should wage war against America or Britain; rather he wanted us to be vigilant against the West’s cultural penetration of our societies.”

After Qutb’s execution by Nasser in 1966, the overwhelming ma- jority of politically radicalized religious activists, or domestic jihadis, who heeded his call have focused on the enemy within. What Zawa- hiri and bin Laden did was to substitute the enemy without for the enemy within, and subsequently collapse all distinctions between the two, a testament to Qutb’s absolutist and opaque ideological. Qutb’s anti-American narrative coupled with his revolu- tionary idea of al-Islam al-haraki (dynamic and operational Islam), facilitated al-Qaeda’s efforts and allowed it to reclaim him as the spiritual force behind its “blessed” transnational jihad.

 Qutb did not advocate an armed confrontation with the United States, even though he lashed out angrily against its crusading spirit. Nonetheless many dismiss such distinctions as hair splitting, insist- ing that his hostility to America—where he spent a formative period in the 1950s—created a fertile environment for extremist transna- tional organizations like al-Qaeda; rooted in absolutist cultural and civilization polarities, the Qutbian legacy has been theologically and ideologically deformed. By portraying the United States as Islam’s Public Enemy No. 1 and cautioning Muslims that Islam is under threat, Qutb, it is argued, institutionalized anti-US sentiment among Arabs and Muslims and paved the road to September 11.

 While Qutb’s diatribe against America has widely resonated among Islamists, al-Qaeda’s actions cannot be traced to his rhetoric. Indeed, transnational jihad took Qutb’s strategic priorities and turned them on their head. While Qutb’s Secret Apparatus and al- Qaeda strive to establish a Qur’anic state, they disagreed on how to bring it about. Qutb spent his life in prison and the underground nourishing and training a pioneering vanguard to confront local tyrants and Islamize society from the bottom up.