Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (15 page)

was convicted of being part of the conspiracy which led to the first attack against the World Trade Center in New York City on February 26, 1993. Abd al-Rahman was in the same Egyptian prison as Zawahari in the early 1980s because Abd al-Rahman was also suspected of conspiring in the assassination of Anwar Sadat.142 Before his imprisonment, Abd al-Rahman taught courses related to Islam at the Asyut branch of al-Azhar University in Upper Egypt, where he developed a strong following among some of the Islamist students there. He also became an adviser to al-Gam(iyya al-Islamiyya, which was one of the largest Islamist student groups in the country.143

As Anwar Sadat ordered mass round-ups of Islamists during the 1970s, Abd al-Rahman traveled to Saudi Arabia and other majority-Muslim countries soliciting financial contributions for Islamists in Egypt. In 1980, Abd al-Rahman returned to Egypt as the adviser and head of al-Gam(iyya al-Islamiyya. In one of Abd al-Rahman’s fatwas (religio-legal rulings), without specifying Anwar Sadat by name, Abd al-Rahman stated that Muslims have an obligation to assassinate jahili rulers. In the trial for Sadat’s assassination, Abd al-Rahman’s attorney stated that because Abd al-Rahman had not actually named Sadat, he could not be considered as an essential part of the assassination conspiracy and he was released.144

While Zawahiri and Abd al-Rahman were in prison, they bitterly disagreed as to who should lead Egypt’s Islamists, should both of them be released. Each one thought that he should be the leader. Abd al-Rahman had been blinded by diabetes in childhood and Zawahiri stated that according to Sharia an emir (or Muslim leader) cannot be blind, thus disqualifying Abd al-Rahman for the leadership position. In response, Abd al-Rahman’s position involved the argument that the leader of the Islamist groups in Egypt could not be considered an emir because emirs are supposed to lead “truly Islamic states” that already exist and since no truly Islamic state exists, the leader of these groups cannot be considered an emir. Since such a leader cannot be considered an emir, a blind person can lead the Islamist groups.145 This bitter argument between Abd al-Rahman and Zawahiri led to a major and long-lasting rift between the two men.146 Eventually, Abd al- Rahman was allowed to enter the United States legally, became an Imam at a mosque in New York City, was convicted of conspiring in the attacks on the World Trade Center in February 1993, and was given a life sentence by an American court.147 Most Islamists believed that because of the limited damage to the World Trade Center as a result of the 1993 attack and the fact that American foreign policy toward the majority-Muslim world did not considerably change as a result of it, that first attack did not constitute a major success. Partly for those reasons and because many Islamists viewed the World Trade Center as a symbol of Western colonialism and hegemony, Zawahiri and Bin Laden decided to launch a second and more catastrophic attack on that site in 2001.148

Zawahiri was released from prison in 1984 and, fearing retribution because of his suspected involvement in Sadat’s assassination, he left Egypt for Jidda, Saudi Arabia, where he met Usama bin Laden. Then, Zawahiri went to Peshawar, Pakistan, which was a major base of operations for the Islamist guerrillas (mujahideen) opposed to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (which began in December 1979) and the Soviets’ continued occupation of that country.149 The governments of the United States and Pakistan were also using Peshawar as a center for providing support to the mujahideen.150 Islamists from many parts of the majority-Muslim world were coming to Peshawar and Afghanistan to join the Afghanis in their militant struggle against Soviet occupation.151 In Peshawar, Ayman al-Zawahiri worked with his brother, Muhammad, and others, to reconsti- tute Egypt’s Islamic Jihad organization; however, on this occasion, one of the group’s primary goals would be to combat the Soviet occupation.152 Under Zawahiri’s leadership, Islamic Jihad succeeded in recruiting small numbers of Egyptian Muslims to join the war against Soviet occupation.

In the view of Zawahiri and other Islamists during the 1980s, one of the reasons that the Islamists had had limited success in achieving their goals of toppling “non-Islamic” governments in the majority-Muslim world was because the Islamists did not have adequate amounts of money.153 In addition to apparent affinities in personality and ideology between Zawahiri and Usama bin Laden, one of the reasons that Zawahiri attempted to forge close ties with Bin Laden in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and subsequent periods may have been because of Bin Laden’s enormous wealth and the possibility that Bin Laden could use this wealth to benefit the Islamist cause.154 One of the ways that Zawahiri deepened his relationship with Bin Laden was by consistently providing Bin Laden with medical care during that war in Afghanistan.155 The two were also brought closer together as a result of the hardships they experienced in the warfare against the Soviets. The Soviets began a full retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, which Zawahiri, Bin Laden, and other Islamists claimed as a God-given victory for Muslims. Soon after the Soviet pull-out, the Islamists in Afghanistan, including Zawahiri, held a meeting in Khost, Afghanistan in 1989 where they decided to create a confederation of Islamist groups that would carry physical jihad outside of Afghanistan with the goal of ridding majority- Muslim countries of all non-Islamic influence, including that of the United States and Israel. These Islamist conferees decided that the organization would be called al-Qaida (which means “the base” in Arabic) and that Usama bin Laden, who possessed more money than any of the Islamist leaders in Afghanistan, would be its leader.156

After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Usama bin Laden went to Saudi Arabia, his country of birth, and told the Saudi government that he was willing to bring the mujahideen from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia to

help the Saudi government eject Iraq from Kuwait and to assist the Saudi government in defending Saudi Arabia from a possible Iraqi invasion.157 The Saudi government declined Bin Laden’s offer and decided to rely on what Bin Laden considered the “infidel countries” of the United States and its allies to eject Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait and to defend Saudi Arabia.158

Soon after the Soviet pull-out from Afghanistan, civil war ensued in Afghanistan and, within that context, there was fighting among Islamist groups in that country, even though several of them had brought themselves under the confederation of al-Qaida. Bin Laden, deeply frustrated by the Saudis’ rejection of his offer and the in-fighting among Islamist groups in Afghanistan, went to Khartoum, Sudan, where he aligned himself with the Sudanese Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi (b. 1932) and where Bin Laden attempted to establish a stable base of operations for creating a “truly Islamic state” in Sudan. Bin Laden also wanted to use his time in Sudan to make efforts to expunge the United States’ military, political, economic, and religious influence from the majority-Muslim world. Zawahiri followed Bin Laden to Sudan, where the two cooperated in attempting to implement their operations and to make their Islamist vision a reality. In spite of Bin Laden’s enormous wealth, he resisted donating substantial amounts to Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad group because of the serious disagreements about tactics between Islamic Jihad and other Islamist groups.159

Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad had a number of members. Believing he needed to provide for them as their leader and hoping to expand the scope of his operations, Zawahiri went to mosques in California to raise funds. Zawahiri only raised a few hundred dollars on that trip and returned to Sudan to continue to cultivate his relationship with Bin Laden. Zawahiri persuaded Bin Laden to place some important members of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad on al-Qaida’s payroll. Although Islamic Jihad had been involved in the Afghan-Soviet war, Bin Laden’s decision to fund Islamic Jihad’s most impor- tant members influenced many in the group who wanted its main focus to be the overthrow of Egypt’s secular government and to turn its attention toward internationalizing its jihad, with the hope of eventually establishing a global Islamic state under Islamic law. Thus, Bin Laden’s decision to fund significant elements of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad played a pivotal role in influencing members of the group to focus their attention on ridding the majority-Muslim world of all Western influences, while still attempting to overthrow Egypt’s secularist regime.160

The alliance between Bin Laden and Zawahiri enabled the newly-financed Islamic Jihad to use the base it shared jointly with al-Qaida in Sudan as a staging area for its operations against Egyptian governmental officials. These operations included failed assassination attempts against Egypt’s Interior Minister and its Prime Minister in 1993 and against the country’s President, Hosni Mubarak, in 1995. As a result of these attacks, the Egyptian

government engaged in severely repressive measures against Islamic Jihad, causing it to lose much of its membership in Egypt. Because of the possibility that American or Egyptian authorities might be able to locate and kill Bin Laden and Zawahiri in Sudan, the two of them made their way to Afghanistan where they felt they could have a higher level of security.161 The continued deepening of ties between Bin Laden and Islamic Jihad culmi- nated in the World Islamic Front’s “Statement of Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” which was issued by four Islamist groups including Egypt’s Islamic Jihad on February 23, 1998.162 Among other things, this statement listed some of these Islamists’ grievances against the West and restated their justification for launching attacks against Western interests.

Roughly five months later, in their effort to force the expulsion of American involvement in the majority-Muslim world, on August 7, 1998 al-Qaida militants engaged in virtually simultaneous attacks against the United States’ embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 223 and injuring 5,000.163 President Bill Clinton responded by ordering a military attack on Zawahiri’s and Bin Laden’s possible locations in Afghanistan and on what was later discovered to be a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.164 Bin Laden and Zawahiri remained safe during the attacks and, what some Muslims believed to be their heroic stance, gained them increased popularity in the eyes of some Muslims. The day after the United States’ military strikes, Zawahiri called a journalist in Karachi, saying, “Tell the Americans that we aren’t afraid of bombardment, threats, and acts of aggression. We suffered and survived the Soviet bombings for ten years in Afghanistan and we are ready for more sacrifices. The war has only just begun; the Americans should now await the answer.”165 The answer came on September 11, 2001.

Influences on Zawahiri’s Thought

Sayyid Qutb’s life and ideas had a substantial impact on Zawahiri.166 In Zawahiri’s Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, he wrote:

Sayyid Qutb underscored the importance of monotheism in Islam, and that the battle between it and its enemies is at its core an ideological difference over the issue of the oneness of God. It is the issue of who has the power: God and his Sharia or human beings and their materialistic laws … . Although the Qutb group was oppressed and tortured by Nasser’s regime, the group’s influence on young Muslims was paramount. Qutb’s message was and still is to be believed in the oneness of God and the supremacy of the divine path. This message fanned the fire of Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad. The chapters of this revolution are renewing one day after another.167

This idea is Zawahiri’s adaptation of the classic Islamic notion of God’s oneness (tawhid), which Qutb interprets for revolutionary purposes. Like Qutb, Zawahiri believes that when jahili nation-states (such as Egypt) are secular, the leaders attempt to make themselves or the state itself partners to God by elevating one or both of these entities to a very high status, thus violating the notion of God’s oneness. For example, Zawahiri states that historically Egypt’s secular dictators and their governments have attempted to make themselves partners to or even equal to God when they use violent force and other oppressive means to quash Islamists who want to overthrow all secular states in the majority-Muslim world. By engaging in such violent acts and through the adulation that they want citizens to give to secular states and their leaders, these authoritarian rulers attempt to give the states and themselves a God-like status, which is one of the many reasons that Islamists want to overthrow such leaders. Qutb’s words are very meaningful to Zawahiri because for him they constitute one “true” interpretation of the Quran and, concomitantly, Qutb died (or in Zawahiri’s view“was martyred”) in his endeavors to fulfill God’s commands. As a “true Muslim” leader himself, Zawahiri believes that his life could well have followed the pattern of Qutb’s.

Another influence on Zawahiri’s thought was that of the Palestinian-born Islamist Salih Sirriya (1933–74), who was a leader of the Islamist organization that came to be known as Egypt’s Military Academy Group. Sirriya and several members of his group organized a failed assassination attempt on President Anwar Sadat in 1974, with the hope that, had it succeeded, Egyptian Muslims would have immediately begun an Islamic revolution which would have toppled the secular government.168 For Zawahiri, one of the most significant aspects of Sirriya’s and his group’s assassination attempt against Sadat was that it marked yet another occasion (in addition to the assassination attempt against Gamal Abd al-Nasser in 1954) when Islamists had attempted to use force to revolt against a secular government.169

Influenced by Sirriya and other Islamists, Zawahiri believes that one of several justifiable tactics in Muslims’ endeavor to establish Islamic states is to assassinate the secular leaders with the hope that Muslims who agree with the Islamists’ objectives will then mobilize themselves and use a variety of tactics to overthrow the remaining members of secularist governments. Although previous assassinations of secular leaders in majority-Muslim countries have not led to such mobilizations, Zawahiri believes that since secular governments utterly contradict both Sharia law and God’s intentions for majority-Muslim societies, the successful implementation of the Islamist groups’ goals is inevitable because God will eventually enable them to succeed.170

Much like many other Islamists, including Sirriya, Zawahiri believes that the nations in the majority-Muslim world which are under secular