To Americans who feel outraged that they have become the target of terrorist attacks, bin Laden asks: Who is funding the Israeli government’s war machine against Muslims? Who is backing and paying for the marauding actions of the U.S. military? Whose debauched values of promiscuity, pornography, family breakdown, and separation of church and state are being thrust—via military rule and corrupt local dictators—on the Muslim people? In each case bin Laden’s answer is: You, the American people, are responsible. These are your morals, your government, your policies, that are threatening the future of Islam.
The indignation that bin Laden frequently expresses toward the United States surprises the Western observer. “Even ravenous animals,” bin Laden writes, “do not do the deeds” routinely performed by Americans.18 Such rhetoric is incomprehensible without recognizing that bin Laden is using a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him. American outrage toward bin Laden’s actions usually focuses on the issue of killing noncombatants. Drawing on a long tradition of Western warfare, most Americans consider this inexcusably barbaric. Few Americans are likely to be persuaded by bin Laden’s rationalizations for the murder of civilians. Bin Laden’s outrage, however, is focused on the issue of proportionality. An old concept, respected in many cultures, proportionality simply means “measure for measure.” As a well-known verse in the Koran has it, “Whoever transgresses against you, respond in kind.” The moral doctrine here is that aggression should be punished according to the scale of the original crime: if I raid your tribe and kill ten people, you have the right to raid my tribe and kill ten people. But you do not, in this view, have the right to raid my tribe and kill ten thousand people. This would be utterly disproportionate to the original offense.
Proportionality is not an unfamiliar notion in the West, but it is often set aside because of another common belief in America, pointed out by military historian Victor Davis Hanson.19 This principle says, in effect, “If you start it, we have the right to wipe you out completely.” So if the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and kill a few thousand Americans, America will not retaliate and kill an equivalent number of Japanese; rather, America will engage in a “fight to the finish,” even to the point of killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese, both combat soldiers and civilians, until Japan unconditionally surrenders or is completely obliterated. As Hanson points out, Americans see this sort of unmitigated carnage as a fair and reasonable way to fight. According to bin Laden, however, it is an abomination.
Here is his way of reasoning. How many Americans did Muslims kill on 9/11? Around three thousand, every victim counted, every death mourned, every victim’s family generously compensated. How many Muslims has the United States killed in response? Many thousands in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands in Iraq so far. It’s possible that the death toll in those two countries has already topped fifty thousand. No one knows for sure, and few Americans seem distressed over these numbers. From bin Laden’s point of view, these levels of carnage show that the United States is barbaric in its rules of war, a nation “without principles or manners.” As he sees it, the immorality of America expresses itself in the way that America fights. Consistent with a country that has no God and no ethics, America refuses even to respect the norms of savage tribes: it kills without any measure of justice or restraint. The U.S. and Israel, bin Laden says, are like crocodiles ferociously devouring the children of Islam. In bin Laden’s view, no amount of persuasion or pleas can be expected to dissuade the crocodile. “For does a crocodile understand any language other than arms?”20
Bin Laden concludes, “Just as you lay waste our nation, so shall we lay waste yours.” The goal, he says, is a “balance of terror.” And in this campaign the 9/11 attacks are just the beginning. Without revealing the basis for his calculations, an Al Qaeda spokesman asserts that Muslims would have to kill 4 million Americans, about half of them children, in order to achieve proportionality for all the Muslims who have died at the hands of America and its sidekick Israel.21 Presumably the only way to do this would be for radical Muslims to detonate a nuclear bomb.
IN ORDER TO more fully understand bin Laden, it is necessary to examine the general outlook of radical Islam, which has formulated a comprehensive philosophy and strategy that is now the blueprint for Muslim activism, insurgency, and suicide bombings throughout the world. In discussing radical Islam, I will cite several thinkers but I intend to focus on the work of the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb. Originally a traveler in literary and pro-Western circles, Qutb became fiercely anti-American after living in the United States. He returned to Egypt, joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and advocated Islamic radicalism as an antidote to what he perceived as American decadence. Although he died in 1966, martyred for his opposition to Nasser’s secular socialist regime, Qutb’s work has continued to grow in influence; indeed, no single person has done more to shape the minds of Islamic radicals.
The Muslim fundamentalists who planned and carried out the assassination of Anwar Sadat were inspired by Qutb. The blind sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, now incarcerated for terrorism in the United States, routinely cited Qutb in his sermons. Bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam was a fiery advocate of Qutb’s ideas, and one of bin Laden’s professors at King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda was Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb. Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an acknowledged disciple of Qutb. In his essay “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner” Zawahiri writes, “Sayyid Qutb was the spark that ignited the Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad.”22 Here, then, with an emphasis on Qutb, are the two key elements of radical Muslim thought.
“Islam is the solution.” This is now the most popular slogan in the Muslim world, and has become a sort of rallying cry for radicals. At first glance the notion that Islam is the solution may seem absurd to Western observers—especially Western liberals—for whom Islam and Islamic “fundamentalism” are viewed as part of the problem. But let’s try and see things from the point of view of the Islamic radicals. The Islamic world, they concede, is in miserable shape. It is weak. Israel has shown that it can defeat the combined force of all the Arab countries. It is disunited. Despite a common religion the Muslim world has been rent by internecine conflict, such as the Iran-Iraq war, and by opportunistic alliances that set one Islamic country against another. It is poor. According to the Unified Arab Economic Report, published by a consortium of Muslim organizations, per capita income in the Arab world is around $2,000 a year. Unemployment is high and there are no jobs for young people coming out of the schools and colleges. Moreover, the Arab world has seen a declining standard of living at a time when everyone else—not only the West but also India and China—has gotten richer.23 If you don’t consider oil income, which after all is the product of luck and which will not last forever, the Arab world would join sub-Saharan Africa as the least developed, most insignificant part of the globe.
The Islamic radicals know all this. Their question is, how have we reached this low point? To answer this question, they look at history. Unlike sub-Saharan Africa, the Muslim world once had a rich, sophisticated, and powerful civilization. By the time of the Prophet Muhammad’s death all of Arabia was united under the Islamic banner. The early converts to Islam conquered the rest of the Middle East, defeating the Sassanid dynasty in Persia and pushing back the Byzantine Empire. The Islamic armies then drove into Asia, Europe, and Africa. Within a few centuries after Muhammad’s death the Muslims had established an empire from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees that rivaled in size the Roman Empire.
Muslim fundamentalists ask, how did the Muslims do this? What accounts for the “miracle in the desert” that gave rise to a new faith and a new form of monotheism that surpassed the reach of Judaism and Christianity and established a new kind of human community throughout the known world? Their answer: Islam. It was their religious conviction that inspired the armies of Muhammad to create the great Islamic empire. It was religious conviction and not just force that won over
tens of millions of converts to Islam. It was religious conviction that built the resplendent civilization stretching across three continents. Western historians in general agree with this.
How, then, did Western civilization grow so strong and Islamic civilization so weak? Western historians emphasize the internal changes in the West—the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and so on. Islamic fundamentalists concede that the West discovered a new form of power: technology, created out of the dynamic interaction between science and capitalism. But they stress that if the West has solved the economic problem, it has not solved the moral problem. Although Islam may not be relevant in creating prosperity or military success, it is relevant in showing human nature the way to justice, goodness, and happiness. In the words of Qutb, Islam represents “an unparalleled revolution in human thinking” and far from being superseded or outdated it provides the only solution to “this unhappy, perplexed, and weary world.”24
The Islamic fundamentalists argue that the distinctive contribution of Islam to the world was religious and moral. Coming after, and in a sense transcending, Judaism and Christianity, Islam in this view finalized the triumph of monotheism over polytheism and paganism, and it introduced to the world a new concept of a universal moral law, or sharia, that reflects divine rules for human behavior and human happiness. Consider how Islam transformed the Arabian desert. Before Islam, there was the age of what the Koran calls jahilliya. The term, which means “ignorance,” refers to the state of pagan barbarism in the bedouin tribes before the arrival of the Prophet Muhammad.
According to the fundamentalists, the main characteristics of the bedouins of sixth-century Arabia were brutality, immorality, and polytheism. Looting and pillaging were their primary way of acquiring property. The bedouins were famous for never-ending feuds. The bedouins worshiped the sun, the moon, trees, and stones; they had no concept of an afterlife. Reputed for their heavy drinking, the bedouins were also known for their sexual adventurousness, not only with women but also with men and on some occasions with their animals. This carousing promiscuity is celebrated in the Mu’allaqat, a collection of sixth-century Arab poetry. One of the courtship styles of the bedouins was to capture a woman from another tribe, stupefy her with blows, and then drag her screaming into a tent. Where the bedouins live, the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun writes, “civilization decays and is wiped out.”25
Islam, the fundamentalists point out, civilized these barbarians. It brought them together into a single community unified not by race or tribe but by allegiance to a monotheistic faith and its universal moral law. In addition, Islam outlawed bedouin practices such as rape, adultery, and homosexuality, as well as the bedouin custom of killing infant girls. Charity and almsgiving, unheard of among the tribes, became a legal requirement for Muslims. While the desert Arabs kept no track of time, the Muslims introduced the Islamic calendar. The Prophet Muhammad did not prohibit slavery, but he advocated the emancipation of slaves who converted to Islam, and he insisted on humane treatment for all slaves. Polygamy was not outlawed either, but men were limited to a maximum of four wives, and Muhammad issued strict guidelines for equitable treatment, including a just distribution of inheritance and conjugal favors.
Fundamentalists stress that, for all its rules, Islam is best understood not in terms of obedience but rather in terms of voluntary submission to a divinely established moral order. In his book Social Justice in Islam Qutb tells the story of a man and woman who came to the Prophet Muhammad and said, “Messenger of Allah, purify us.” Muhammad asked, “From what am I to purify you?” They replied, “From adultery.” Muhammad asked whether the couple was mad or drunk. Assured that they were not, Muhammad asked them again, “What have you done?” And they said they had committed adultery. Then Muhammad gave the order, and they were stoned to death. While the couple was being buried, onlookers scorned them, but Muhammad silenced the scoffers. The couple had repented, he said, and now they were in heaven.
“This is Islam,” Qutb wrote. Analyzing the incident, he pointed out that no one had witnessed the adultery, and the prophet initially sought to attribute the couple’s confession to the influence of alcohol or mental disturbance. Still, they had persisted. Finally Muhammad had no choice but to have them stoned in accordance with God’s law. Qutb posed an interesting question: why did the couple demand to be stoned? His answer: “It was the desire to be purified of a crime of which none save Allah was cognizant. It was the shame of meeting Allah unpurified from a sin which they had committed.”26
The moral outlook of Islam, the fundamentalists say, is codified in a way of life based on the divine government of society. This worldview requires that religious, economic, political, and civil society be based on the Koran, the teachings of Muhammad, and the holy law. In this analysis, Islam cannot be confined to the private or spiritual domain; rather, it governs the whole framework of life. The ayatollah Khomeini noted that “the ratio of Koranic verses concerned with the affairs of society to those concerned with ritual worship is greater than a hundred to one.” In addition to regulating religious belief and practice, Islam also regulates the administration of the state, the conduct of war, the making of treaties, divorce and inheritance, property rights, and contracts. Khomeini writes that Allah has “laid down injunctions for man extending from before the embryo is formed until after man is placed in the tomb…. There is not a single topic in human life for which Islam has not provided instruction and established a norm.”27
Qutb argues that an Islamic society is not merely one that contains a majority of Muslims, or even one in which Muslims govern themselves. Rather, he says, “There is only one place on earth which can be called the home of Islam and it is that place where the Islamic state is established and the sharia is the authority and God’s rules are observed and where the Muslims administer the affairs of state with mutual consultation.”28 This is what the fundamentalists mean by an Islamic society.
None of this means that Islam cannot embrace science, commerce, or modern technology. Qutb himself praises science and writes that even when it poses dangers, those dangers must be faced because there is no real alternative to scientific and technological development. The real difficulty, the fundamentalists say, is not with “catching up” to Western modernity. Anyone can do this, as the Chinese, the Indians, and many others are demonstrating. Many of the Muslim radicals are themselves scientifically literate and technically trained. The real challenge, in their view, is to embrace modernity without moral degradation. For all his enthusiasm about science, Qutb concedes that modern institutions like capitalism and science, invented in the West, must be integrated into an Islamic ethical framework that puts them at the service of full human development and the common good of society. Material development must not be at the expense of religious truth or social morality.
In fact, the Muslim radicals believe that the Islamic restoration will bring not only unity and happiness but also economic and political success. According to Maulana Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami (Islamic Society) in Pakistan, the Koran promises that if Muslims follow the teachings of Allah they will have prosperity in this world and paradise in the next world. And for a thousand years, Mawdudi wrote, this was true. Islam was winning. But now, he sighed, Islam is losing, and why is that? Mawdudi’s simple answer has become very famous throughout the Muslim world: it is because we have stopped following the teachings of Allah. Muslims have fallen away from the true faith, a faith understood not merely as a creed but as a system of government and a way of life. Mawdudi’s conclusion is that only by recovering true Islam and restoring Islamic societies under the rule of sharia can Muslims recover their wealth, strength, and former glory.29
“AMERICA IS THE GREAT SATAN .” This is the second great theme of Islamic radicalism. In the view of the radicals, Muslims are prevented from reestablishing Islamic society by two factors. The first is what Iranian sociologist Ali Shariati calls gharbzadegi. The word
means “intoxication with the West” or, since the West is the place where the sun sets, “intoxication with darkness.” Shariati, who was one of the intellectual architects of the Khomeini revolution, was himself Western-trained, having earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne. Shariati’s argument is that ordinary Muslims become so mesmerized with the wealth and power of the West that they become blinded to its severe defects. Moreover, they become ashamed of their own religion and culture. Consequently they become vulnerable to Western occupation, control, and influence. They are seduced by Western propaganda that identifies Westernization with “progress” and “freedom.”30
This freedom, the ayatollah Khomeini contended, is nothing better than the “freedom of debauchery.” Addressing the West in 1979, Khomeini said, “You, who want freedom, freedom for everything, the freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom. You do not believe in any limits to freedom. This is a freedom that would lead our country to destruction.”31
The second obstacle to the revival of Islam, fundamentalists say, is the well-orchestrated campaign by the United States to impose its values on the Muslim world. Thus even Muslims who wish to reject Western values and American culture are prevented from doing so. Fundamentalists argue that America does this partly through force, by occupying countries like Afghanistan and Iraq and then pressing them to adopt American institutions and values. “The West wants to distract you with shiny slogans like freedom and democracy,” Kadhem al-Ebadi, a Muslim clergyman, told his congregation after the fall of Baghdad. “Infidel corruption has entered our society through these concepts.”32
Another way that America thrusts its values on Muslims, fundamentalists say, is through the United Nations and various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In a 1997 interview, the radical sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman accused America and other Western nations of “allocating huge amounts of money to the United Nations conference on population that came out with resolutions allowing adultery, abortion and homosexuality, resolutions encouraging girls to give up their honor and chastity, resolutions to weaken the authority of parents over children.” Americans, Rahman suggested, promote their immoral practices without regard to the desire of other societies to protect the morality of their institutions. Consequently, Rahman concluded, Americans “have freedom for themselves, but they do not allow any freedom to others.”33
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