Since World War II, the United States has pursued a policy of bolstering all dictatorial [Arab] regimes, encouraged corruption and the corrupt, prevented the democratic tide from spreading toward the region and dedicated its intelligence apparatuses to safeguarding the rotten conditions in the Arab world, whereas in other countries it has speeded up the collapse of dictatorships, exposed corrupt and corrupting regimes, sided with reform forces, and bolstered the prospect of democratic change.13
The goal for Islamists, bin Laden told Al-Hayah in August 1998 and ABC News in December 1998, is to join together to create a situation where “Islamic groups will emerge and follow other groups, and all will be fighting U.S. interests which are still based on theft and pillage…. The main effort, at this phase, must target the Jews and Crusaders.” Most recently, bin Laden told the daily Pakistan that Muslims must unite against America “because it is very difficult, if not impossible, to defeat anti-Islam forces without unity.”14
Betrayal from Within
Another factor that has motivated bin Laden and permeated his statements is the idea that Islam has been betrayed from within by Muslim governments whose leaders are, per bin Laden, “criminal despots who betrayed God and his Prophet, and betrayed their trust and their nation.” According to bin Laden, the premier betrayers have been Islamic governments that cooperate with the United States, regimes, he has said, that are “morally depraved” and that he has described as “hypocrites” that “champion falsehood, support the butcher against the victim, the oppressor against the innocent child.”15
Bin Laden fairly dripped venom, for example, when he denounced the Muslim governments that, after several suicide attacks by HAMAS (Islamic Resistance Movement) in Israel in early 1996, “came to Sharm al-Shaykh, [Egypt,] submissive and servile, to embrace the Jews and Christians and to aid them … [and] to submit their condolences to the occupying Zionist thugs in Palestine.” For bin Laden, the Saudi regime has been the first among equals in this regard, having let U.S. troops into the kingdom and by having previously given aid to the Yemeni Communists and PLO chief Yasir Arafat, both of whom, bin Laden has said, “are fighting against Muslims.” “So the [al-Saud] regime has betrayed the nation and allied with and supported the infidels against Muslims,” bin Laden wrote in Al-Islah in September 1996. “As is known, this is one of the contradictions in Islam. By opening the Arabian Peninsula to the Crusaders, the regime has violated the Prophet’s will to his nation before his death: ‘Move the atheists out of the Arabian Peninsula.’” He also said, “‘If I live, I will move the Jews and the Christians out of the Arabian Peninsula.’”16
In addition, bin Laden has argued that these governments have betrayed the ummah—the worldwide community of Islamic believers—not only by permitting infidels into the holy land of Saudi Arabia, but also by gradually surrendering their sovereignty to them and allowing them to plunder the nation’s energy resources. While stressing that the United States is the primary target, for example, bin Laden told ABC journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai in December 1998, “Some regimes in the Arab and Muslim worlds have joined the [Crusader-Jewish alliance in] preventing us Muslims from defending the holy Ka’aba [in Mecca]. Our hostility is in the first place, and to the greatest extent, leveled against these world infidels, and by necessity the regimes which have turned themselves into tools for this occupation of the greatest House in the Universe and the first House of Worship appointed by [sic—for?] men.” The Gulf countries and the “criminal despots who betrayed God and his Prophet” who rule them, bin Laden told ABC, “have lost their sovereignty. Now, infidels walk everywhere on the land where Muhammad, God’s peace and blessing be upon him, was born, and where the Koran was revealed to him through Gabriel, peace be upon him. This happens while our scholars and Ulemas, who are the heirs of prophets, are in jail…. These Ulemas are jailed while infidels, be they Jews or Christians, are free to go wherever they want in these countries.”17
Bin Laden has also claimed that Saudi leaders—whom he derides as the Riyadh-based “branch or agent of the U.S.”—and those of other Gulf states have allowed the United States to “devour its Gulf prey” by depriving Muslims of the full financial benefit from the exploitation of their natural resources. Bin Laden argued that these losses resulted from three factors: the fiscal and religious corruption of the al-Saud family; excessive Saudi spending on Western military equipment; and the calibration of oil production at levels that keep prices acceptable to Western consumers. In 1932, bin Laden has said, “The [al-Saud] regime started under the flag of applying Islamic law and under this banner all the people of Saudi Arabia came to help the Saudi family take power. Abd-al-Aziz [al-Saud] did not apply Islamic law; the country was set up for his family.” This situation has caused “terror, repression, and corruption” in the kingdom, bin Laden argued, “[and] the rivalry of the princes overseeing their own personal interests has ruined the country.” Worse than fiscal corruption is what bin Laden saw as the al-Sauds’ willful flouting of Islamic law.18
“We firmly believe,” bin Laden told Al-Quds Al-Arabi in 1996, “that the [al-Saud] regime has passed numerous laws without referring to God and appointed itself as a lawmaker and a co-lawmaker with God. This is unbelief as endorsed by the Ulema and the Book of Almighty God: ‘He does not share His command with anyone.’” So far have the al-Sauds betrayed their duties to Islam and the ummah, bin Laden said in April 1997 after two thousand pilgrims died in a fire near Mecca, that they cannot even be relied on for the “preparation of suitable utilities and their maintenance in a manner for the needs of the pilgrims” during the annual Hajj.19
Bin Laden has also condemned the exorbitant amounts Riyadh has spent for U.S. and European weapons and for the basing of U.S. forces in the kingdom. The U.S. “aggressors” could be badly hurt, bin Laden has argued, if they were denied “the huge profits they make from [the arms] trade with us.” What is the point of this spending, bin Laden asked, after the “small numbers, poor training, and inefficient command” of Saudi forces were “exposed by the Gulf crisis, despite the astronomical and unreasonable figures” spent on them.20
Bin Laden has also argued that the Saudi regime is squandering the Muslim world’s energy resources by selling them at prices set by political considerations, not by market forces. Bin Laden has characterized Saudi oil policy as Islam’s “economic hemorrhage,” and has said that when Islamists take power in the kingdom, they will still sell oil to non-Muslim consumers, but at “the price of the market according to supply and demand.” After all, bin Laden added, “We are not going to drink it.” The results of Riyadh’s oil policy, in tandem with the al-Sauds’ excessive defense expenditures, are, according to bin Laden, increasing poverty, ill health, and illiteracy in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden also claims that the al-Sauds’ pro-Western energy policies are causing identical ills across the Muslim world, this based on his belief that Saudi energy resources are—like the Peninsula’s holy places—held in trust for the benefit of the ummah. “The U.S. is increasing its presence in Arab countries in order to capture its [sic] oil reserves,” bin Laden told the Islamabad daily Pakistan in November 1997, a point that resonates in the Muslim world, as Abd-al-Bari Atwan noted in August 1998 in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, when he wrote that Muslims have seen “successive American administrations” maintain a policy to “consolidate hegemony over Arab oil resources and oil derivatives and have controlled prices to ensure that Arab oil prices remained low so that Western economies would flourish while the Arab economies crumbled.”21 The controlled oil prices, bin Laden has said, have significantly hurt the Muslim world, and are the result of “the Saudi regime playing the role of a U.S. agent … [by] increas[ing] production and flooding the market [in a way] that caused a sharp decrease in oil prices.”22 Further, bin Laden told the daily Pakistan,
After 1973 the increase in the price of oil was not significant when compared to the increases in almost every other commodity in the world. Since 1973, the increases in the price of oil ha
ve only been eight dollars per barrel, while the price of other commodities have gone up three fold. Oil should have gone up by the same rate, but that did not happen. U.S. wheat has become three times costlier, but not Arab oil. During the past twenty-four years the price of oil has not increased more than a few dollars, because the U.S. is holding a gun against the forehead of the Arab countries. We [the Islamic world] are suffering a daily loss of one hundred and fifteen dollars per barrel. Every day, ten million barrels of oil are produced by Saudi Arabia alone. Therefore, the daily loss is more than one billion dollars, while the total loss [when other Arab producers are included] is two billion dollars. During the last 13 years, the U.S. has cost us a loss of eleven hundred billion dollars. It is important that we get this large amount of money back from the U.S. The total population of Muslims in the world is more than one billion. Thus, the eleven hundred billion dollars could be distributed amongst the Muslims at the rate of ten thousand dollars per family. Muslims around the world are dying from hunger and the U.S. is stealing our oil. The U.S. buys cheap oil from us and then sells us its own tanks and aircraft with the threat of Israel. This is how the U.S. takes its own money back from us.23
There is one other component of the theme of betrayal by the al-Sauds that has held a prominent place in bin Laden’s thinking. This is what he has considered to be the betrayal of the Afghan jihad by its external supporters, led by Saudi Arabia and the United States. “After our victory in Afghanistan and defeating the Russians,” bin Laden told ABC’s John Miller in May 1998, “the world media, led by the American media, started a campaign against us that is still going on despite the fact that the Russians left in 1989, almost ten years ago. They have carried out this campaign accusing us of being terrorists.”24 Bin Laden argued that just as the Afghan and Arab-Afghan mujahedin were about to defeat the Afghan Communists and form a successor government, “America managed, through its agents and especially some Arab countries and Pakistan, to perpetuate the division of the strongest Islamic people in this region [the Afghans], a people that was able to turn the Soviet Union into a myth.”25 U.S. and Saudi actions in this regard were responsible for intensifying post-Soviet intra-mujahedin quarreling and hence for the still ongoing Afghan civil war. The “U.S. scheme” for an interim Afghan government, bin Laden told Qatar’s Al-Jazirah television in late 1998, was meant to deny victory to the Islamists by supporting the Afghan Communist leader Najibullah and “pressuring the Mujahedin through Pakistan, to form a secular government. Fifty percent of its members would be former communists and some of those who had studied in the West, and the rest would be from the seven Afghan [mujahedin] parties.”26
Quite simply, bin Laden argued, “The United States did not want to see an Islamic government in Afghanistan” and so when “[Soviet president Mikhail] Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Afghanistan, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia suspended their aid to the Mujahedin.” For bin Laden and other Islamist leaders, America’s betrayal of the Afghan jihad also is evidence of immense ungratefulness. In 1999, Karachi’s Jasarat wrote that after Moscow’s defeat, the United States turned “against the Muslim countries whose sons made unprecedented sacrifices [in Afghanistan] and helped the United States to become the sole superpower in the world.”27
The Islamic Duty of Self-Defense
Central to bin Laden’s position, and key to understanding his actions and appeal, is his belief that Islam and the Muslim world are being attacked by a more modern, powerful, and predatory version of the medieval Catholic Crusaders: the United States, Britain, or the West generally, allied with Israel, India, and Russia, and supported by apostate Muslim regimes. Armed with this version of reality, bin Laden has said that Muslims are required by God to wage jihad to defend themselves, their creed, and their land against the new Crusaders. The West, bin Laden told Al-Quds Al-Arabi in 1994, wants to “keep Muslims weak and incapable of defending themselves.”28
U.S. support for Israel, the continued sanctioning and bombing of Iraq, and the West’s occupation of holy sites in Saudi Arabia are, according to bin Laden, “crimes and sins committed by the Americans,” and these actions are a “clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims.” Therefore, bin Laden wrote in his August 1996 Declaration of Jihad, “It is no secret that warding off the American enemy is the top duty after faith and that nothing should take priority over it…. The main disease and cause of the affliction [in the Muslim world] is the occupying U.S. enemy. We should lie in wait for him until he is defeated, God willing.”29
Establishing the U.S.-led Crusaders as aggressors is vital to bin Laden in religious terms because it enables him to ask all Muslims to participate in a defensive jihad, just as they joined the Afghans’ anti-Soviet defensive jihad. “Let all [Muslims] know,” bin Laden wrote in a letter the AP published in 1998, “that unless they take up the jihad, it will be an inescapable and inevitable catastrophe—a catastrophe in which faith and honor will be lost, as dignity and land have been lost. It will be a catastrophe with which we will turn [Muslims] into slaves in the hands of God’s basest creatures, Jews and worshippers of the cross.”30
The aura of an offensive war waged by Christians against Islam is powerful in emotive terms, in terms of theological requirements, and in terms of collective historical memory. “In the technical language of the ulema,” Professor Bernard Lewis has written, “religious duties may be collective, to be discharged by the community as a whole, or personal, incumbent on every individual Muslim. In an offensive war conducted by Muslims, the religious duty of the jihad is collective and may be discharged by volunteers and professionals. When the Muslim community is defending itself, however, jihad becomes an individual responsibility.”31 Lewis’s analysis was supported in April 2001 by the highly influential Egyptian Islamist scholar Shaykh al-Qaradawi—now in exile in Qatar—when he explained the difference between the two types of armed jihad recognized by Islamic jurisprudence. “First of all, there are two types of jihad,” Shaykh al-Qaradawi said.
There is the call-up jihad and the defensive jihad. Muslim scholars call the call-up jihad collective duty. In other words, if some Muslims carry out this duty, the rest are absolved of it. This type of jihad calls for the recruitment of every rational, mature person who can fight…. As to the defensive jihad, it is when an enemy enters a country and occupies it. In this case everyone must carry out jihad, each according to his ability. This is called a state of public mobilization. In this case, all people resist. The woman goes to war without permission from her husband. The same applies to servant and master. The children also go to war without asking their father’s permission, as the right of the entire society takes precedence over the private rights of individuals. So the children go out. Here the fathers do not force the children to go to war. The children themselves went to war acting on religious and national motivations. So they throw rocks at the enemy. As the saying goes, throw rocks rather than flee. The children throw stones and do what they can. This is different from the call-up jihad that some of our brethren talk about, when jihad becomes a collective duty and we select the persons needed and resist as much as we can.32
Concurring with al-Qaradawi, the American religious scholar John Kelsay has written that the call for a defensive jihad against non-Muslim aggressors “is intended to reflect increased urgency,” which in turn speeds the mobilization of Islamic forces. In a defensive scenario, Kelsay maintains that “jihad becomes a duty for all conscientious Muslims, and one need not—cannot—wait for authorization other than that given by God: command good and forbid evil.”33 In the preamble to a fatwa issued on 23 February 1998, therefore, bin Laden closely follows the analysis of both al-Qaradawi and Kelsay, stressing that the individual Muslim’s responsibility to engage in jihad against those attacking Islam. Self-defense is simply complying with “God’s order,” bin Laden wrote, and supported his argument by reminding Muslims that “ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an
individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries.” Quoting Islamic authorities, bin Laden said that “nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life.”34
Beyond religious interpretations, bin Laden’s call for a defensive jihad harkens the Muslim world to the successful anti-Crusader exploits of two of its most famous soldiers—Nura al-Din and Saladin—who rallied the faithful on the basis of each Muslim’s duty “to protect the territory and religion of Islam from attacks by [non-Muslim] aggressors.” In his book The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions, the American scholar J. T. Johnson accurately describes the valid historical and theological precedents to which bin Laden appeals.
This conception [of defensive jihad] is associated historically with the heroic figures of Nur al-Din and Saladin, but actually the authority they possessed to wage jihad arose from the authority and responsibility of all Muslims, incumbent on every one as an individual duty, to defend the religion and territory of Islam against aggressors. The concept of such individual responsibility and the accompanying responsibility is defined in classical [Islamic] juristic thought. What was different in the conception of the leader’s authority in the struggle against the Crusades, and particularly in Saladin’s war against the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, was that this Muslim leader put himself at the head of a jihad legitimized not by the authority of the caliph or imam of the Muslim community, but by the individual responsibility and authority of Muslims to oppose Crusaders as aggressors against the dar-al-Islam. Their authority as the leaders of the jihad, that is, did not flow downward from the juridically correct authority of caliph or imam, but upward from the religious and moral authority implied by the individual obligation of every Muslim.
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