Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  The Afghan Taliban combined their Pashtun tribal chauvinism with Deobandi rigorism, an unholy hybrid and maverick form of Islam that expressed itself in violent opposition to any rival ideology. After the Soviet withdrawal, Afghanistan had descended into chaos, and when the Taliban managed to take control, they seemed to both the Pakistanis and the Americans to be an acceptable alternative to anarchy. Their leader, Mullah Omar, believed that human beings were naturally virtuous and, if placed on the right path, needed no government coercion, social services, or public health care. There was therefore no centralized government, and the population was ruled by local Taliban komitehs, whose punishments for the smallest infringement of Islamic law were so draconian that a degree of order was indeed restored. Fiercely opposed to modernity, which had, after all, come to them in the form of Soviet guns and air strikes, the Taliban ruled by their traditional tribal norms, which they identified with the rule of God. Their focus was purely local, and they had no sympathy with Bin Laden’s global vision. But Mullah Omar was grateful to the Arab-Afghans for their support during the war, and when Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan, he admitted him to Afghanistan, in return for which Bin Laden improved the country’s infrastructure.32

  Other uprooted radicals gathered around Bin Laden in Afghanistan—Zawahiri and his Egyptian radicals most especially.33 Yet al-Qaeda was still a minor player in Islamist politics. A former militant told ABC television that even though he had spent ten months in training camps run by Bin Laden’s aides, he had never heard of the organization.34 It seems that, even though he expressed his approval of both operations, Bin Laden played no part in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York by Arab-Afghan veteran Ramzi Youssef or in the 1995 truck bombing in Riyadh that killed five Americans. However, al-Qaeda may have provided an ideological focus for militants in Afghanistan, who were feeling increasingly dispirited.35 Not only had they failed to advance on their three main fronts of Bosnia, Algeria, and Egypt, but by the end of the 1990s, political Islam itself seemed in terminal decline.36 In a dramatic turnabout, Hojjat ol-Islam Seyyed Muhammad Khatami, running on a democratic ticket, won a landslide victory in the 1997 elections in Iran. He immediately signaled that he wanted a more positive relationship with the West and dissociated his government from Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In Algeria the government of President Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika included militant secularists as well as moderate Islamists, and in Pakistan the secularist colonel Pervez Musharraf toppled Nawaz Sharif, patron of the Islamist parties. In Turkey the Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erkbakan had to resign after a single year in office, and Turabi was deposed in a military coup in Sudan. It seemed increasingly urgent to Bin Laden to reignite the jihad in a spectacular operation that would catch the attention of the whole world.

  In August 1996 he issued his Declaration of War on the United States and Israel, the “Crusader-Zionist Alliance,” which he accused of “aggression, iniquity, and injustice” against Muslims.37 He condemned the American military presence in the Arabian Peninsula, equating it with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and denounced American support for corrupt governments in the Muslim world and the sanctions led by Israel and the United States against Iraq, which, he claimed, had caused a million Iraqi deaths. In February 1998 he announced the World Islamic Front Against Zionists and Crusaders, stating that all Muslims had a religious obligation to attack the United States and its allies “in any country in which it is possible to do it” and to drive American troops from Arabia.38 Three entirely new themes were emerging in Bin Laden’s ideology.39 The first was his identification of the United States as the prime enemy rather than Russians, Serbs, or “apostate” Muslim rulers. Second was his call to attack the United States and its allies anywhere in the world, even in America itself—an unusual step, because terrorists usually avoided operations outside their own country, which cost them international support. Third, even though Bin Laden never wholly abandoned Qutb’s terminology, he drew chiefly on pan-Islamic themes, focusing particularly on the suffering that Muslims were enduring worldwide.

  This last was the core of Bin Laden’s message and enabled him to claim that his jihad was defensive.40 In his Declaration of War he exploited the culture of grievance that had been developing in the Muslim world, insisting that for centuries “the people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed upon them by the Crusader-Zionist alliance.”41 In al-Qaeda’s propaganda videos, this verbal message is relayed against a collage of pain. They show Palestinian children harassed by Israeli soldiers; piles of corpses in Lebanon, Bosnia, and Chechnya; the shooting of a Palestinian child in Gaza; houses bombed and bulldozed; and blind, limbless patients lying inertly in hospital beds. A survey of men recruited by al-Qaeda after 1999 revealed that most of them were still primarily motivated by the desire to assuage such suffering. “I did not know exactly in what way I would help,” said a Saudi prisoner in Guantánamo, “but I went to help the people, not to fight.” Feisal al-Dukhayyil, who was not an observant Muslim, was so distressed by a television program on the plight of Chechen women and children that he enlisted immediately.42 Despite Bin Laden’s anti-American rhetoric, hatred of the United States was not a major preoccupation among his recruits; this seems to have developed only during their indoctrination in the al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan, where all, even those intending to fight in Chechnya, were diverted. Muslims from Buffalo, New York, known as the “Lackawanna Six,” later explained that they left their training camp in 2001 because they were shocked by its anti-Americanism.43

  Bin Laden’s “Crusader-Zionist Alliance” model exploited the conspiracy fears that are widespread in Muslim countries where lack of government transparency makes accurate information hard to come by.44 It provides an explanation for an otherwise inexplicable concatenation of disasters. Islamists often quote a hadith that was rarely cited in the classical period but became very popular during the Crusades and the Mongol invasions:45 “The nations are about to flock against you from every horizon,” the Prophet had told his companions, and Muslims would be helpless because “weakness [wahn] will be placed in your hearts.” What did wahn mean? “Love of this world and fear of death,” Muhammad replied.46 Muslims had become soft and had abandoned jihad because they were afraid of dying. Their only hope was to summon again the courage at the heart of Islam. Hence the importance of the huge martyrdom operation that would show the world that Muslims were no longer fearful. Their plight was so desperate that they must either fight or be killed. Radicals also love the Quranic story of David and Goliath that concludes: “How often a small force has defeated a large army!”47 The more powerful the enemy, therefore, the more heroic the struggle. Killing civilians is regrettable but, fighters argue, the Crusader-Zionists have also shed innocent blood, and the Quran commands retaliation.48 So the martyr must soldier on bravely, stoically repressing pity or moral revulsion for the terrible acts that he is tragically obliged to commit.49

  The al-Qaeda leadership had been planning the “spectacular” attack of September 11, 2001, for some time but could not proceed until they found the right recruits. They needed men who were technologically competent, were at home in Western society, and had the ability to work independently.50 In November 1999 Muhammad Ata, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah, on their way (or so they thought) to Chechnya, were diverted to an al-Qaeda safe house in Kandahar. They came from privileged backgrounds, had studied engineering and technology in Europe—Jarrah and al-Shehhi were engineers, and Ata was an architect—and would blend easily into American society while they trained as pilots. They were members of a group now known as the Hamburg Cell. Of the four, only Bin al-Shibh had a deep knowledge of the Quran. None had the madrassa training that is often blamed for Muslim terrorism but had attended secular schools; until he met the group, Jarrah was not even observant.51 Unused to allegoric and symbolic thought, their scientific education inclined them not to skepticism but toward a literalist reading of
the Quran that diverged radically from traditional Muslim exegesis. They also had no training in the traditional fiqh, so their knowledge of mainstream Muslim law was at best superficial.

  In his study of the 9/11 terrorists and those who worked closely with them—five hundred people in all—the forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman found that only 25 percent had a traditional Islamic upbringing; that two-thirds were secularly minded until they encountered al-Qaeda; and the rest were recent converts. Their knowledge of Islam was therefore limited. Many were self-taught, and some would not study the Quran thoroughly until they were in prison. Perhaps, Sageman concludes, the problem was not Islam but ignorance of Islam.52 The Saudis who took part in the 9/11 operation had had a Wahhabi education, but they were not influenced chiefly by Wahhabism but by pan-Islamist ideals, which the Wahhabi ulema had often opposed. The martyr videos of Ahmed al-Haznawi, who died in the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, and Abdul-Aziz al-Omari, who was in the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, dwell intensely on Muslim suffering worldwide. Yet while the Quran certainly orders Muslims to come to the aid of their brothers, Shariah law forbids violence against civilians and the use of fire in warfare, and it prohibits any attack on a country where Muslims are allowed to practice their religion freely.

  Muhammad Ata, leader of the Hamburg Cell, was motivated by Azzam’s global vision, convinced that every able-bodied Muslim was obliged to defend his brothers and sisters in Chechnya or Tajikistan.53 But Azzam would have deplored the terrorist activity that this group would embrace. As moderate members fell away from the cell, they were replaced by others who shared Ata’s views. In such closed groups, isolated from any divergent opinion, Sageman believes, “the cause” becomes the milieu in which they live and breathe.54 Members became deeply attached to one another, shared apartments, ate and prayed together, and watched endless battlefield videos from Chechnya.55 Most important, they identified closely with these distant struggles. Modern media enables people in one part of the world to be influenced by events that happen far away—something that would have been impossible in premodern times—and to apply these foreign narratives to their own problems.56 It is a highly artificial state of consciousness.

  The story of the 9/11 terrorists is now well known. Years after this tragedy, the events of that day are still horrifying. Our task in this book is to assess the role of religion in this atrocity. In the West there was a widespread conviction that Islam, an inherently violent religion, was the chief culprit. A few weeks after September 11, in an article entitled “This Is a Religious War,” the American journalist Andrew Sullivan quoted from Bin Laden’s Declaration of War:

  The call to wage war against America was made because America spearheaded the Crusade against the Islamic nation, sending thousands of troops to the Land of the Two Holy Mosques, over and above its meddling in Saudi affairs and its politics, and its support of the oppressive, corrupt, and tyrannical regime that is in control.57

  Sullivan alerted his readers to the use of the word Crusade, “an explicitly religious term,” and pointed out that “bin Laden’s beef is with American troops defiling the land of Saudi Arabia, ‘the land of the Two Holy Mosques’ in Mecca and Medina.”58 The words Crusade and holy mosques were enough to persuade Sullivan that this really was a religious war, whereupon he felt free to embark on a paean to the Western liberal tradition. Way back in the seventeenth century, the West had understood how dangerous it was to mix religion and politics, Sullivan reasoned, but the Muslim world, alas, had yet to learn this important lesson. Yet Sullivan failed to discuss or even dwell upon the two highly specific and clearly political aspects of American foreign policy mentioned by Bin Laden in the quoted extract: its interference in the internal affairs of Saudi Arabia and its support for the despotic Saudi regime.59

  Even the “explicitly religious” terms—Crusade and holy mosques—in fact had political and economic connotations. Since the early twentieth century, the Arabic al-salibiyyah (“crusade”) has become an explicitly political term, applied routinely to colonialism and Western imperialism.60 The deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia was not only a violation of sacred space but also a humiliating demonstration of the kingdom’s dependence on the United States and of America’s domination of the region. The American troops involved the kingdom in expensive arms deals; its Saudi base gave the United States easy access to Saudi oil and had enabled the U.S. military to launch air strikes against Sunni Muslims during the Gulf War.61

  The hijackers themselves certainly regarded the 9/11 atrocities as a religious act but one that bore very little resemblance to normative Islam. A document found in Ata’s suitcase outlined a program of prayer and reflection to help them through the ordeal.62 If psychosis is “an inability to see relationships,” this is a deeply psychotic document. The principal imperative of Islamic spirituality is tawhid (“making one”): Muslims truly understand the unity of God only if they integrate all their activities and thoughts. But this document atomizes the mission, dividing it into segments—the “last night,” the journey to the airport, boarding the planes, etc.—so that the unbearable whole is never considered. The terrorists were told to look forward to paradise and back to the time of the Prophet—in fact, to contemplate anything but the atrocity they were committing in the present.63 Living from one moment to another, their minds were to be diverted from the appalling finale. The prayers themselves are jarring. Like all Muslim discourse, the document begins with the bismallah—“In the Name of God, the most Merciful and most Compassionate”—but it initiates an action devoid of either mercy or compassion. It then segues to a remark that most Muslims, I suspect, would find idolatrous: “In the name of God, of myself, and my family.”64 The hijacker is told to cut off any feelings of pity for his fellow passengers or fear for his own life and exert an immense effort to put himself into this abnormal mind-set. He must “resist” these impulses, “tame,” “purify,” and “convince” his soul, “incite” it, and “make it understand.”65

  The imitation of Muhammad is central to Islamic piety; by imitating his external behavior, Muslims hope to acquire his interior attitude of total surrender to God. But Ata’s document determinedly steers the terrorists away from their inner world by an almost perverse emphasis on the external. As a result, the devotions seem primitive and superstitious. While packing, they were to whisper Quranic verses into their hands and rub this holiness onto their luggage, box cutters, knives, ID, and passports. Their clothes must fit snugly, like the garments of the Prophet and his companions. When they begin to fight the passengers and crew, as a sign of resolution, each one must “clench his teeth just as the pious forefathers did prior to entering into battle” and “strike in the manner of champions who are not desirous of returning to this world, and shout Allahu akbar! For this shout causes fear in the hearts of the unbelievers.” They must not “become gloomy” but recite Quranic verses while they are fighting, “just as the pious ancestors would compose poetry in the midst of battles to calm their brothers and to cause tranquillity and joy to enter their souls.”66 To imagine that a possibility of serenity and joy would be possible in such circumstances indicates a truly psychotic inability to relate their faith with the reality of what they were about to do.

  We find here the kind of magical thinking that we noted in Faraj’s The Neglected Duty. As they went through the security gates of the airport, the hijackers were instructed to recite a verse that was almost “a creedal statement” for radicals.67 It is found in a Quranic passage about the Battle of Uhud, when the “laggers” urged the more intrepid Muslims to “stay at home.” But they had simply replied: “God is enough for us: He is the best protector,” and because of their faith, they had “returned with grace and bounty from God; no harm befell them.”68 If they repeated these words, the document assured the hijackers, “You will find matters straightened; and [God’s] protection will surround you; no power can penetrate that.” The recitation of this verse would not only keep their fea
r at bay but overcome all physical obstacles: “All of their devices, their [security] gates and their technology will not save [the Americans].”69 The mere repetition of the first part of the shehadah, “There is no god but God,” would itself be enough to secure their entry into paradise. The hijackers are told to “consider the awesomeness of this statement while they were fighting the Americans,” remembering that in the Arabic script this verse had “no pointed letters—this is a sign of perfection and completeness, as the pointed words or letters lessen its power.”70

  Just over a year after 9/11, Louis Atiyat Allah would write an essay for a jihad website after watching al-Omari’s martyr video. There is absurdity in Allah’s extravagant eulogy, which imagines the hijackers—“mountains of courage, stars of masculinity, and galaxies of merit”—weeping for joy as the planes hit the target. However, it was obviously written to rebut widespread criticism of the 9/11 perpetrators. It was not only “moderates” who deplored the atrocity; even in radical circles, Muslims were apparently objecting that the Quran forbids suicide; they believed that the hijackers had acted irresponsibly. Their action had been counterproductive too: not only had the atrocity inspired worldwide sympathy for America, but it had weakened the Palestinian cause by strengthening Israel’s bond with the United States. In his article rebutting these complaints, Allah retorted that the hijackers had not “committed suicide”; nor were they simply “crazy people who found planes to hijack.” No, they had had a clearly defined political objective: “to smash the foundations of the tyrant and to demolish the idol of the age, America.” They had also struck a blow against the structural violence of the American-dominated Middle East, rejecting the “silly [rulers] of Ibn Saud, and Husni [Mubarak], and all the other retards who falsely call themselves ‘those in authority’ ” (Quran 4:59) but who were actually “nothing but tentacles of the octopus upon you, with the head of the [octopus] being in New York and Washington DC.” The purpose of this operation was to take a “terrifying historical leap which will … extricate the Muslims in one fell swoop from humiliation, dependency and servility.”71