People between birth and age 10 constitute the largest segment of society, followed by people between 60 and 70. The section given to servicing the debt [religious obligations], particularly in jihad, has narrowed. As we know, a person between the birth age and 15 years has no obligations and is not aware of major events. From age 25, a person gets involved in family obligations, graduation from university, and professional obligations. He has a wife and children. He becomes mature, but his ability to contribute [to jihad] becomes very weak: With whom should I leave the children? Who would support them?
Therefore people between the ages of 15 and 25 are the segment that can contribute and engage in jihad. This is what we noticed in the jihad in Afghanistan. Most mujahedin were of this age…. I say the crusader world has decided to devour the Islamic world. The nations have rallied against us, and we have no one else to turn to after Almighty God except the youths, who have not been burdened by the problems of the world.54
When talking to the young, bin Laden has stressed that he and his “brothers” who fought in the Afghan jihad “were near 20 years of age,” and argues it always is the young who fight and die in wars. Bin Laden vigorously rejects the idea that young men join the jihad only because they are poor, unemployed, undereducated, or despairing. “We believe that this [jihad] is a form of worship we must follow despite our financial ability,” bin Laden told ABC’s John Miller. “This is a response to Westerners and secularists in the Arab world who claim the reasons for the [religious] awakening and the return of Islam is financial difficulties. This is untrue. In fact, the return of the people to Islam is a blessing from Allah, and their return is a [demonstration of their] need for Allah.”55
Bin Laden’s views were seconded by Palestinian journalist Sa’id Aburish. “[T]his is not a movement that is an offspring of poverty or anything of the sort. This is a political program. A political attitude.” As an example of this “attitude” in practice, Mary Anne Weaver has reported that the Gama’at fighters responsible for the November 1997 massacre of more than fifty tourists at Luxor, Egypt, were not “driven by economic desperation or by a sense of being marginalized. They were not part of the floating population of university graduates [in Egypt] who were unemployed or underemployed…. [They] were still moving forward, not yet rejected by society.” Weaver then quotes a Cairo-based Western diplomat whose conclusion alligns with those of Aburish and bin Laden. “What the Luxor massacre suggests to me,” the diplomat told Weaver, “is that even people who are not known to be part of a militant group may be sufficiently impassioned to risk their lives to carry out a dramatic statement, and that is frightening.”56
To the nonlistening West, bin Laden has repeatedly explained that the young men of the Muslim world always have been “sufficiently impassioned,” and that they are the key to defeating the Crusaders and “the bright future of Muhammad’s nation.”
There is nothing strange about this: Muhammad’s companions were young men. And the young men of today are the successors of the early ones. It was the young men who killed the [Islamic] nation’s tyrant, Abu Jahl. Abd-al-Rahman Bin-Awf, may God be pleased with him, said: A young man told me: I heard Abu Jahl insulted the Prophet, peace be upon him. A companion [of Muhammad] said: I swear by God that if I see him I will fight him until the strongest wins…. God is great. This is how the young companions [of Muhammad] behaved. Two young men asking one another about the most important target in the enemy’s ranks, namely to kill the tyrant of the nation and the leader of the atheists in Badr, namely Abu Jahl. Abd-al-Rahman Bin-Awf’s role was to tell them about Abu Jahl’s whereabouts. This is the role that is required from those who have knowledge and experience about the enemy’s vulnerable spots. They are required to guide their sons and brothers to these spots. Then the young men will say what their predecessors said: “By God, if I see him I will fight with him until the strongest wins.”57
Among the Muslim world’s young, bin Laden has emphasized the heavy moral and religious responsibility carried by those who have already borne arms in God’s cause: the veteran mujahedin from Afghanistan, Yemen, Central Asia, Somalia, the Balkans, Kashmir, the Philippines, and the Caucasus. “We believe that those who participated in the jihad in Afghanistan bear the greatest responsibility in this regard,” bin Laden told journalist Salah Najm, “because they realized that with insignificant capabilities, with a small number of RPG’s [rocket-propelled grenades], with a small number of antitank mines, with a small number of Kalashnikov rifles, they managed to crush the greatest empire known to mankind. They crushed the greatest military machine. The so-called superpower vanished into thin air.” Bin Laden says that these men must now “spearhead the Islamic rejection of U.S. policy against the Islamic nation.” It is these young men who must train and lead their generation and the next, as did the “four heroes who blew up the Americans in Riyadh [in November 1995].”58 “I tell the young men of the Islamic world who fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia Herzegovina with their money, lives, tongues, and pens that the battle has not yet ended,” bin Laden has written.
I remind them of Gabriel’s discussion with the messenger of God after the al-Ahzab battle: When the messenger of God arrived in Medina, he put his weapon aside. Gabriel came up to him and said: Have you laid down your weapon? By God, the angels have not laid down their weapons. So move with those who are with you to Bani Qurazah, as I will be moving in front of you, rocking their fortifications and striking terror in their hearts. So Gabriel joined a procession of angels with the Prophet behind them, joined by emigrants and supporters.59
Inspiring and Inciting Muslims
The substantial increase in bin Laden’s stature as an Islamist leader following his return to Afghanistan in 1996 caused some journalists, policy makers, and terrorism experts to wonder if he was more a media creation than anything else. This is particularly true in the Western media. “Not since Che Guevara’s face was a ubiquitous presence on the walls of American college dormitories has a revolutionary figure [bin Laden] been so blown out of proportion,” according to a New York Times piece by a retired U.S. intelligence official. “One might argue that the following of Osama bin Laden that has been created by the romantic mythology has become more dangerous than the man himself” and that Islamists are “more often inspired by him than controlled by him.”60
“Inspired by him”—exactly, that is exactly what makes bin Laden so dangerous to U.S. citizens and interests. Some commentators have begun to see that bin Laden’s “strategy may be to create the leadership and motivation that might galvanize individual independent units into action.” When discussing bin Laden’s organization, Al-Watan Al-Arabi warned that the West should not think “bin Laden controls these organizations from an operational point of view. In other words, despite his relationship with these organizations, bin Laden may not be in a position to choose their operations or targets and is not in control in this regard. He extends such aid to these groups that have wide networks in a number of states but he does not always control their operations.”61 Bin Laden repeatedly has said he did not control all of the jihad’s forces and instead claimed only that he and his lieutenants wanted to rouse, instigate, and incite Muslims, to drive them “to the ignition point not in a long time” and to support “anyone who carries out military action against the Americans.”62 “We seek to instigate the nation [the ummah],” bin Laden told Al-Jazirah in late 1998, “to get up and liberate its land, to fight for the sake of God, and to make the Islamic law the highest law, and the word of God the highest word of all.”63
In this enterprise, bin Laden is following the lead of his earliest mentor, the Palestinian Islamist scholar Abdullah Azzam. U.S. terrorism expert Steven Emerson argues that Azzam contributed greatly to the jihad bin Laden is waging through his writings, speeches, and actions, all of which were aimed toward “reigniting the Islamic rage against those non-Islamic powers that had conspired against Islam since before the crusades.”64 Bin Laden concurs with Emerson. “The sh
aykh [Azzam] left the atmosphere that was familiar to Muslims, the atmosphere of the mosques and the narrow confines of the city, and launched a struggle to liberate the Islamic world,” bin Laden told the journalist Jamal Ismail.
He instigated the nation from the farthest east to the farthest west. During the blessed [Afghan] jihad, the activities of Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, may God bless his soul, as well as the activities of our brother mujahedin in Palestine, particularly HAMAS, increased. His books, particularly The Verses of the Merciful, began to enter Palestine and instigate the nation against the Jews. The Shaykh proceeded from the narrow, regional, and often city atmosphere, that was familiar to Islamists and shaykhs, to the larger Islamic world and began to instigate this Islamic world. We and the Shaykh are in one boat.65
Bin Laden has said that he believes instigation is his chief responsibility and is proud of this role and the success he has had thus far. “Come to me, O people of ours,” he wrote in a letter published in March 1998. “I am your herald in this grievous catastrophe of the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula and the Americans’ firm control of the wealth of Allah’s land, of the Muslims’ Ka’aba, of the cradle of the revelation, and of the resting place of the heroic prophet, may Allah’s peace and prayers be upon him.”66 When the United States accused him of responsibility for the four bombings in Saudi Arabia and East Africa, bin Laden denied culpability, but he said that “if [the U.S. accusation] means that I have something to do with instigating them, [then] I would like to say that this is obvious. I have frequently admitted to having done so.”67 Driving home the point in late 1998, bin Laden told ABC’s Rahimullah Yusufzai—with some heat—that “if the instigation for jihad against the Jews and Americans in order to liberate Al-Aqsa mosque, and the Holy Ka’aba, is considered a crime, then let history witness that I am a criminal.”68 In the final analysis, bin Laden told ABC’s John Miller, “It is our duty to lead people to [the] light,” and that he and other Islamists are essentially calling on Muslims to “abide by religious principles that are already deeply embedded in the consciousness of the great majority.”69
After decades of covering Islamic insurgencies, journalist Eric Margolis has cogently summed up the reason why the Islamists’ rhetoric of incitement attracts attention and support across the Islamic world. “Such earnest and pious professions may sound romantic, even theatrical to western ears,” Margolis wrote. “In our world consumerism and movie-star worship long ago replaced religion. But among Muslims it is common to ‘live by the book’ and be guided by its commands.” Margolis’s judgment is on the mark. Shaykh Kamal Khatib, a senior Muslim cleric in Israel, for example, amplified Margolis’s point in an article about bin Laden and the Chechen Islamist leader Shamil Basayev; the article also supports bin Laden’s contention that his major duty is incitement, not direct command-and-control of a huge military organization. “We are certain,” Shaykh Khatib wrote in late 1999 in response to U.S. and Russian animosity toward Islamist leaders,
that the United States is not fighting bin Laden’s person as much as it is fighting bin Laden’s phenomena and model. It actually fears that bin Laden will become a hero to be imitated or an example to be followed by many Arab and Muslim youths.
The United States which has invaded us in our very home, fed hamburgers to our youth, made them wear blue jeans, and had them listen to Michael Jackson and CNN reports, also fears a “renegade” move by Arab and Muslim youths. In this case, they would imitate the heroic deeds, positions, manliness, loftiness, and pride of bin Laden and Basayev instead of imitating John Travolta, Michael Jackson, and Superman.
Moreover, the United States … has actually been prevented from sleep and shaken by the fact that someone from Saudi Arabia arose from the rubble to tell the Muslims to turn their faces again to the first Qiblah and not to the United States. He also told Muslims: “Close your ranks under the banner [of the] Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him. It is shameful to rally around Russia or the United States….
We know and expect that bin Laden and Basayev may fall as martyrs or may be held captive during this unequal war. But this is not a shame for them, nor is it a source of pride for their enemies. On the path of martyrdom, bin Laden and Basayev were preceded by those better than them, such as the companions of the Prophet and the elite Muslims throughout Islam’s eventful and great history.
However, we will tell the enemies of bin Laden and Basayev, as well as the drunken president and philanderer [Yeltsin and Clinton]: If you capture or kill bin Laden or Basayev, this will not close a chapter on what you call terrorism. It will, rather, open chapters of pride and unleash further hostility to Russia, the United States, and other infidels.
We also tell them: Their martyrdom does not mean at all their death. Rather, it means instilling a spirit and breaths of life into thousands of youth who will follow the path and good example of bin Laden and Basayev. The blood of bin Laden and Basayev will draw the map of the future with bright letters that cannot be erased and their bones will be torches that will light the dark night.70
Participate or Be Damned
While bin Laden has championed the “natural right of all Muslims to defend themselves,”71 he has been critical of some of his coreligionists for not yet emigrating from lands where Muslims are persecuted—as did the Prophet Muhammed and his companions—and from a foreign refuge waging a jihad to defeat attacks on Islam by Americans, other infidels, and apostate Muslim regimes. Many Muslims, bin Laden told the Pakistan Observer, “[have] displayed lethargy in fulfillment of this obligation,” adding that “they would be held accountable and would have to face the anguish of [the] Almighty on the day of Judgment.”72 In a poem, bin Laden has asked, “How can I awaken the conscience of insensitive people who seek material benefits? Jews kill my brethren but the Arabs hold summit conferences and feel satisfied with passing resolutions.”73
Bin Laden’s position is supported by Islamic history, as well as by contemporary Islamic scholars. Historically, as Amin Malouf has written, in the first phases of the Crusades, the Catholic knights “commanded a weapon even more formidable than their fortresses, and that was the torpor of the Muslim world,” a torpor that initially was so widespread and durable that Saladin attempted to shame Muslims into action. “Behold with what obstinacy they [the Crusaders] fight for their religion,” Saladin said, “while we, the Muslims, show no enthusiasm for waging holy war.” In 1986 Shaykh Abdullah Azzam followed suit, declaring emigration and jihad to be the duty of all Muslims. “Those who believe that Islam can flourish [and] be victorious without jihad, fighting, and blood,” Azzam maintained, “are illusioned and do not understand the nature of this religion. The prestige of preachers, the influence and dignity of Muslims, cannot be attained without jihad.” More recently, HAMAS’s Shaykh Yasin urged Muslims not to despair if the cause of jihad required “deportation and exile from the homeland.” Yasin said such events are necessities and should be seen as “tourism for the sake of God.”74
In his 1996 Declaration of Jihad, bin Laden first focused his anger on his fellow Saudis, whom he said correctly fear “God is tormenting them because they kept quiet about the [al-Saud] regime’s injustice and illegitimate actions, especially its failure to have recourse to the Sharia, its confiscation of people’s legitimate rights, the opening of the land of the two holy mosques to the American occupiers, and the arbitrary jailing of the true Ulema, heirs of the Prophet.”75 In other statements, bin Laden has said that what is true of the Saudis is also true of other Muslims—witness the decades-old plight of the Palestinians, the suffering of Iraqi civilians, and the mass murder of Muslim Bosnians and Kosovars. “You should all shed tears,” bin Laden told his brethren in early 2001, “[when] assessing the prevailing conditions in which the Ummah is going through now. Your hearts should bleed and bemoan the insensitivity the Ummah is reflecting now.” Because of Muslim quiescence in the face of the modern Crusaders’ aggression, bin Laden has said, Muslims must now stand up and attack, in
the words of medieval Muslim jurist Shaykh Tammiyah, the “invader who corrupts the faith and the world.” Urging Muslims to action, bin Laden wrote it is time that men “from all parts of the land of Islam must come forth and emigrate for the cause of Allah so they will make the decision and so they may arrange for jihad battalions to serve the cause of Allah and expel the occupying Christian invaders. Let the persevering young men of the Peninsula emigrate to the sacrifice arenas and join the vanguards preparing for jihad.”76
Notwithstanding scripture’s demands, bin Laden is not sanguine that all Muslims are ready to wage jihad against Christian aggression and fight to end the suffering, humiliation, and murder of Muslims. Even though it is clear to his followers that “since it abandoned the jihad the [Islamic] nation has been suffering the calamities of murder, dispossession, and plunder at the hands of the Crusaders and their allies, led by the United States and Israel,” bin Laden has said that “people are paying no heed … and most of them have failed to obey Allah with jihad and emigration.”77
At times, bin Laden has expressed exasperation with Muslims who are not participating in the jihad. “Where are you, O people of ours,” he asked in a 1998 letter published by the AP. “Rather, where do all Muslims stand vis-à-vis this hard trial, horrid ordeal and atrocious calamity? How come Muslims have been absent, and you have been absent as witnesses against the treachery of the Romans [Christians] and against the raising of the cross on the land of the Two Holy Mosques. What more horrible catastrophe than has already afflicted the people of the Peninsula are you awaiting?”78 He has argued that those who attacked the U.S.-Saudi military facility in Riyadh in November 1995 not only “showed the Americans what manliness is but taught the hordes of opulent and weak materialists [in Saudi Arabia] a lesson in the triviality of life without a creed and in the abjectness of life when dignity is stripped away and honor soiled. They did their utmost to wash away disgrace from the Muslim nation’s face.” Still, their efforts are not enough; all Muslims must participate. “What happened to the honor of Muslims?” bin Laden asked Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir in 1997. “Can we not defend the Ka’aba—the center of prayers…. We Muslims have to defend ourselves. We Muslims should now take care of the Ka’aba, instead of the White House.” Again, in late 2000, bin Laden praised renewed Palestinian attacks on Israel, but expressed “surprise and astonishment” over the failure of other Islamists to aid the fighters. “The Arab and Islamic street have played its role,” he told Al-Hayah, “but the ulema of the [Islamic] nation and the leaders of the Islamic movement have proven they are far below the level of events.” In a clear call for God’s punishment to fall not only on Crusaders, but also Muslims who do not support jihad, bin Laden has prayed
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