Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: Jihadist Justifications (Part 2)

Part 1 is here.

“The Quran is full of references to jihad,” wrote Lawrence Wright in his 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Now that September 11, 2001, the terrorist day of infamy forever known as 9/11, has reached its twenty-fifth anniversary, it is instructive to review jihadist doctrine revealed in Wright’s often perceptive analysis.

Wright qualified that some Quranic references to jihad “have to do with the inner striving for perfection.” This is the “greater jihad” invoked by many Muslims according to a hadith or canonical tradition of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, albeit of rather weak authenticity, a fact unmentioned by Wright. Nonetheless, many Quranic verses proclaim jihad as holy war in Islam’s name, Wright conceded. Yet various “Islamic scholars explain these injunctions by saying that they apply only when war is initiated by the infidels, or when Muslims are persecuted, or when Islam itself is threatened.”

Unstated by Wright, the latter formulation is incredibly vague and far-reaching in the jihadist mind, as his own detailed documentation indicates. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the teaching of Abdullah Azzam, an Arab of Palestinian origin (born 1941 in Jenin) who completed in 1973 a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence at al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. “For aroused young Muslims such as Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam embodied in a modern fashion the warrior priest—a figure that was as well established in Islamic tradition as the samurai in Japan,” Wright noted.

After academic positions at the University of Jordan, where Azzam’s Palestinian activism caused his expulsion in 1980, and as a prayer leader in King Abdul Aziz University’s mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Azzam went to Pakistan in November 1981. There as a teacher of the Quran and Arabic at the International Islamic University in Islamabad he could regularly visit the Peshawar, Pakistan, headquarters of the mujahideen fighting in neighboring Afghanistan against Soviet forces that invaded in 1979. Thus, Azzam could live out his personal slogan of “Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues.”

The Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden, 9/11’s infamous mastermind, had also come to Afghanistan to wage jihad and “revered Azzam, who provided a model for the man he would become,” Wright observed. With funding from bin Laden, the pair in 1984 formed in a Peshawar house the Services Bureau (Makhtab al-Khadamat). The house hosted Arab volunteers for Afghan jihad as well as Azzam’s publishing ventures while donations for Afghan refugees from around the Muslim world “often came in suitcases full of cash,” Wright noted.

Perhaps Azzam’s most important contribution to the Afghan jihad, however, was intellectual. In 1984 he authored a “fatwa that electrified Islamists everywhere,” Wright noted. Azzam eventually published the fatwa as a book entitled Defense of Muslim Lands with a preface from Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, Saudi Arabia’s chief cleric. He proclaimed his own concurring fatwa in the bin Laden family mosque in Jeddah.

Azzam analyzed the Islamic doctrinal distinction between fard ayn and fard kifaya. “The first is an individual religious obligation that falls upon all Muslims, like praying and fasting. One cannot avoid such duties and be considered a good Muslim,” Wright noted. “If nonbelievers invade a Muslim land, it is fard ayn—a compulsory duty—for the local Muslims to expel them. If they fail, then the obligation expands to their Muslim neighbors” in a communal obligation or fard kifaya. Therefore, in Azzam’s analysis, “jihad against the Soviets is the duty of each Muslim individually as well as of the entire Muslim people, and that all are in sin until the invader is repelled.”

While Azzam accordingly globalized jihadist causes, another bin Laden associate, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose Egyptian Al Jihad group later merged with bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, examined Islamic doctrinal issues of jihadist terrorism. Such matters “would always plague the conversation about the morality of global jihad,” Wright noted. Zawahiri had to particularly confront the morality of suicide bombing terrorism after Al Jihad attacked the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad on November 19, 1995.

This date was the eighteenth anniversary of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s 1977 flight to Israel’s capital of Jerusalem, where he initiated the peace process leading to Egyptian recognition of Israel in the 1979 Camp David accords. This peace with Zionist infidels, whose Jewish state developed in a formerly Muslim-controlled territory, enraged pious Muslims like Zawahiri in Egypt and beyond. In response, Al Jihad had organized the October 6, 1981, assassination of Sadat at a Cairo, Egypt, military parade honoring the anniversary of Egypt’s attack on Israel in the 1973 October war.

The 1995 Islamabad bombing manifested the continuing jihadist hatred against Egypt’s secular dictatorship. Zawahiri, Wright noted,

explained that there were no innocents inside the embassy. Everyone who worked there, from the diplomats to the guards, was a supporter of the Egyptian regime, which had detained thousands of fundamentalists and blocked the rule of Islam. Those who carried out the acts of the government must shoulder responsibility for its crimes. No true Muslim could work for such a regime….Yes, he admitted, there might have been innocent victims—children, true believers—who also died, but Muslims are weak and their enemy is so powerful; in such an emergency, the rules against the slaughter of innocents must be relaxed.

As Wright explained, Zawahiri was explicating the Islamic doctrine of takfir or “excommunication, which had been used to justify so much bloodshed within Islam throughout its history.” His fellow, like-minded Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, had detailed this doctrine after being imprisoned in 1954 as a leading Muslim Brotherhood opponent of Sadat’s predecessor, President Gamal Abdul Nasser. In prison before his 1966 execution, Qutb wrote “a lucid, highly personal, eight-volume commentary called In the Shade of the Quran, which by itself would have assured his place as one of the most significant modern Islamic thinkers,” Wright judged.

Although Qutb did not expressly use the Arabic word takfir, the doctrine “had been born again” in his thinking. Wright noted. “Qutb came to a characteristically radical conclusion,” namely that servants of a secular state like Nasser’s Egypt “were not Muslims,” for Qutb “had excommunicated them from the Islamic community.”

In objection to Qutb, Wright cited the common Islamic apologetic that Quran 5:32 “explicitly states that Muslims shall not kill anyone, except as punishment for murder.” Wright’s analysis ignores that this verse read in conjunction with the following Quran 5:33 justifies gruesome punishment precisely for anyone guilty of fitna or causing disorder. Especially as interpreted by jihadists, such fitna can encompass any deviation from Islamic doctrine.

Nonetheless, Qutb had his arguments, observed Wright, for Qutb declared

that a leader who does not impose Sharia on the county must be an apostate. There is a well-known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam.

This reasoning led to Sadat becoming takfir’s “first modern victim,” Wright noted, no matter how Islamically faithful Sadat tried to appear, given a 1980 fatwa from Omar Abdul Rahman, Zawahiri’s fellow al-Azhar graduate. Known as the blind sheikh because of his blindness from childhood diabetes, Sheikh Omar proclaimed as leader of the Islamic Group, another Egyptian jihadist group, “that a heretical leader deserved to be killed by the faithful,” Wright wrote. At the Sadat assassination conspiracy trial, the blind sheikh won an innocence verdict through his lawyer’s arguments “that, because his client had not mentioned the Egyptian president by name, he was, at most, tangential to the plot,” Wright noted.

The takfir death sentence for Sadat has a long pedigree in Islamic jurisprudence, going back to Ibn Tamiyyah (1263-1328), “one of the primary references for Wahhabi philosophy,” Wright noted and a guiding light for Al Qaeda. “In his time, Ibn Tamiyyah confronted the problem of the Mongols,” Wright wrote, who conquered the Abbasid caliphate with the savage 1258 pillaging of Baghdad but then professed Islam. “Ibn Tamiyyah argued that just because the Mongols had made the profession of faith, they were still not true believers, and therefore they could be killed.” “Anyone who aided the Mongols, who bought goods from them or sold to them or was merely standing near them, might be killed as well. If he is a good Muslim, he will go to Paradise; if he is bad, he will go to hell, and good riddance,” Ibn Tamiyyah stated in an “historic fatwa.”

While such analysis supported jihadist indiscriminate slaughter, the “question of suicide was even more problematic” for jihadists like Zawahiri advocating suicide bombings like the 1995 Islamabad embassy attack, Wright observed. “There is no theological support for such an action in Islam; indeed, it is expressly prohibited.” He elaborated:

The hadith, or sayings of the Prophet, are replete with instances in which Mohammed condemns the action. The specific punishment for the suicide is to burn in hell and to be forever in the act of dying by means of the same instrument that was used to take his life. Even when one of his bravest warriors was severely wounded in battle and hurled himself upon his own sword to relieve his terrible suffering, Mohammed declared that he was damned.

Zawahiri countered by grotesquely comparing his suicide bombers to early Christianity’s martyrs, who never murdered anyone. The only similar example he found in Islamic history was a group of early Muslims who chose martyrdom rather than recant Islam before their captors. Thus, Zawahiri concluded, in Wright’s words, that

anyone who gives his life in pursuit of the true faith—such as the bombers in Islamabad—is to be regarded not as a suicide who will suffer the Punishment of hell but as a heroic martyr whose selfless sacrifice will gain him an extraordinary reward in Paradise.

Such jihadist beliefs have ravaged the globe far and wide, as Wright indicated when he noted that Azzam was one of Hamas’s founders. For Azzam, Hamas destroying Israel was “the natural extension of the jihad in Afghanistan.” Thereby, Wright’s claim that Azzam “preached that the intentional killing of civilians, especially women and children, was against Islam,” appears to have had little effect.

By contrast, jihadists have consistently engaged in the most savage of violence in the name of a supposedly prophetic example from primitive seventh-century Arabia, as the next article in this series will examine.