Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: The Deprived Jihadist Myth (Part 5)

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here.

Al Qaeda recruits “who came to train in Afghanistan in the 1990s were not impoverished social failures,” observed Lawrence Wright in his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. In the twenty-fifth anniversary year of Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, (9/11) attacks, the analysis of Wright and other scholars provides essential analysis in refuting the longstanding myth that socioeconomic deprivation motivates jihadists.

Such root causes in jihadist biographies are absent from Wright’s documentation:

Most of the prospective al-Qaeda recruits were from the middle or upper middle class, nearly all of them from intact families. They were largely college-educated, with a strong bias toward the natural sciences and engineering. Few of them were products of religious schools; indeed, many had trained in Europe or the United States and spoke as many as five or six languages. They did not show signs of mental disorders. Many were not even very religious when they joined the jihad.

Wright locates the will to wage jihad in the ideological, not the material, realm:

What the recruits tended to have in common—besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills—was displacement. Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared. They were Algerians living in expatriate enclaves in France, Moroccans in Spain, Yemenis in Saudi Arabia. Despite their accomplishments, they had little standing in the host societies where they lived. Like Sayyid Qutb, they defined themselves as radical Muslims while living in the West. The Pakistani in London found that he was neither authentically British nor authentically Pakistani; and this feeling of marginality was just as true for Lebanese in Kuwait as it was for Egyptians in Brooklyn. Alone, alienated, and often far from his family, the exile turned to the mosque, where he found companionship and the consolation of religion. Islam provided the element of commonality. It was more than a faith—it was an identity.

Wright did contrast the allure for jihadists of Islam’s proclaimed heavenly paradise in comparison to the material misery of much of the modern Muslim world. Yet this deficiency of peace, prosperity, and good governance resulted from an intellectual poverty in societies that had failed to embrace Western ideas and institutions. More so than any other ideology like authoritarian Arab nationalism, received Islamic orthodoxy had formed this spiritual desert, which jihadist violence would only worsen.

Although not explicitly stated, such conclusions logically flow from Wright’s words:

The lure of an illustrious and meaningful death was especially powerful in cases where the pleasures and rewards of life were crushed by government oppression and economic deprivation. From Iraq to Morocco, Arab governments had stifled freedom and signally failed to create wealth at the very time when democracy and personal income were sharply climbing in virtually all other parts of the globe. Saudi Arabia, the richest of the lot, was such a notoriously unproductive country that the extraordinary abundance of petroleum had failed to generate any other significant source of income; indeed, if one subtracted the oil revenue of the Gulf countries, 260 million Arabs exported less than the 5 million Finns. Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women. Adult illiteracy remained the norm in many Arab countries. Unemployment was among the highest in the developing world. Anger, resentment, and humiliation spurred young Arabs to search for dramatic remedies. Martyrdom promised such young men an ideal alternative to a life that was so sparing in its rewards. A glorious death beckoned to the sinner, who would be forgiven, it is said, with the first spurt of blood, and he would behold his place in Paradise even before his death. Seventy members of his household might be spared the fires of hell because of his sacrifice. The martyr who is poor will be crowned in heaven with a jewel more valuable than the earth itself. And for those young men who came from cultures where women are shuttered away and rendered unattainable for someone without prospects, martyrdom offered the conjugal pleasures of seventy-two virgins…They awaited the martyr with feasts of meat and fruit and cups of the purest wine.

Among jihadists, Wright noted, “the day of a martyr’s death is his wedding day, when he greets the maidens of Paradise.” Accordingly, Jordanian intelligence in 2001 informed American authorities of a rumored Al Qaeda plan to attack the United States. The codename for what later became 9/11 was “The Big Wedding.”

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a prominent sociologist at Cairo’s American University, substantiated Wright’s thesis with a 1970s study of Egyptian political prisoners. Ibrahim’s research, in Wright’s words, showed that

most of the Islamist recruits were young men from villages who had come to the city for schooling. The majority were the sons of middle-level government bureaucrats. They were ambitious and tended to be drawn to the fields of science and engineering, which accept only the most qualified students. They were not the alienated, marginalized youth that a sociologist might have expected.

Ibrahim described the imprisoned jihad supporters as “model young Egyptians. If they were not typical, it was because they were significantly above the average in their generation.” Ayman al-Zawahiri, a leader of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad group who later became a key lieutenant of Osama bin Laden in Al Qaeda, personified this above-average pedigree. His father, Dr. Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, was the son and grandson of scholars at Al-Azhar, “the thousand-year-old university in the heart of Old Cairo, which is still the center of Islamic learning in the Middle East,” Wright noted. “In 1929 Rabie’s uncle Mohammed al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri became the rector of al-Azhar,” Wright wrote; this rector “enjoys a kind of papal status in the Muslim world.”

Umayma Azzam, Zawahiri’s mother,

was from a clan that was equally distinguished, but wealthier and more political. Her father, Dr. Abdul Wahhab Azzam, was the president of Cairo University and the founder of King Saud University in Riyadh. Along with his busy academic life, he also served as the Egyptian ambassador to Pakistan. Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. He was the most prominent pan-Arab intellectual of his time. His uncle had been founder and the first secretary general of the Arab League [Abdul Azzam].

Zawahiri married in 1978 Azza Nowair, described by Wright as the “daughter of an old family friend” and also from a wealthy, “notable Cairo clan.” “In another time and place she might have become a professional woman or a social worker,” he observed. Yet as a Cairo University sophomore she adopted hijab, the Muslim body covering for women, thereby “alarming her family with the intensity of her newfound religious devotion,” Wright noted.

Traditional hijab attire covers a woman’s body except for the hands and face, but “Azza went further and put on the niqab, the veil that covers a woman’s face below the eyes,” Wright elaborated. Meanwhile Azza’s brother observed her spending whole nights in Quran reading and found her in the morning “sitting on the prayer mat with the holy book in her hands, fast asleep.” Such religious zeal expressed in the niqab caused many suitors to reject Azza, Wright explained:

The niqab imposed a formidable barrier for a marriageable young woman, especially in a segment of society that still longed to be a part of the westernized modern world. For most of Azza’s peers, her decision to veil herself was a shocking abnegation of her class. Her refusal to drop the veil became a test of wills.

Azza found an appropriate mate in Zawahiri; though “polite and agreeable, he refused to greet women, and he wouldn’t even look at one if she was wearing a skirt,” Wright wrote. This Muslim match among Egypt’s upwardly mobile was not unique. Zawahiri boasted in 1974 to an American journalist that “the Islamist movement had found its greatest recruiting success in the university’s two most elite faculties—the medical and engineering schools,” Wright observed.

The Sudanese “Hasan al-Turabi, one of Africa’s most complex, original, charismatic, and devious characters,” as Wright presented him, matched Zawahiri in erudition. Turabi was the “prime mover” in a June 1989 Islamist military coup d’etat against Sudan’s democratic government. As a student in 1960, Turabi had “wandered across America, staying with American families” and completed a London School of Economics graduated law degree in 1961, followed three years later by a law doctorate from Paris’ Sorbonne University.

“Like bin Laden and Zawahiri, Turabi attributed the failures of the Arab world to the fact that its governments were insufficiently Islamic and too dependent on the West,” Wright explained. Although “surprisingly progressive” concerning matters such as women’s rights, “Turabi envisioned the creation of an international Muslim community—the ummah—headquartered in Sudan.” Here would develop an “Islamist revolution in an ever-widening circle” internationally with the help of groups like Al Qaeda, to whom Turabi offered Sudan as a base.

Under international pressure, Sudan expelled Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in 1996, whereupon these jihadists established their base in Afghanistan, where the planning for 9/11 would take final shape. Here more pious Muslims from privileged backgrounds would arrive to form the 19 hijackers who would so devastate America in 2001. Among them was Nawaf al-Hazmi, a Saudi whose “father was a wealthy grocer in Mecca. His boyhood friend Khaled al-Mihdhar was also from a prominent Meccan family,” Wright documented. In Bosnia and Afghanistan during the 1990s “these two rich Saudi boys” had waged jihad in various conflicts.

Particularly Muslims familiar with modern Western societies had a special appeal for jihadist groups like Al Qaeda. Such was the case in 1999 when four Muslim friends living in Hamburg, Germany—the Egyptian Mohammed Atta, the Yemeni Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the Emirati Marwan al-Shehhi, and the Lebanese Ziad Jarrah—arrived in bin Laden’s Afghan training camps. Al Qaeda leaders “spotted immediately,” Wright observed, these four as

educated, technical men, with English skills ranging from rudimentary to fluent. They did not need to be told how to live in the West. Visas would be no problem. All they needed was to learn how to fly and to be willing to die.

As Wright explained, these skills manifested the professional approach of the construction mogul bin Laden to jihad. He sought to merge jihadist groups into a “multinational consortium, with common training and economies of scale and departments devoted to everything from personnel to policymaking.” While there existed before 9/11 “many Islamist movements, all of them concentrated on nationalist goals, it was bin Laden’s vision to create an international jihad corps.”

Rohan Gunaratna offered similar conclusions about Al Qaeda’s expertise in his 2002 book Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror.  “Intelligence and security services worldwide, including the CIA and MI6, have never before encountered a global terrorist financial network as sophisticated as Al Qaeda’s,” he wrote. Osama bin Laden was likewise “meticulous in documentation” of Al Qaeda members and “promoted and appointed people based on merit, ability and performance” after careful personnel file reviews.

Bin Laden thus placed modernity’s tools in service of an ideology that was the stuff of myths and the Middle Ages, reminiscent of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Here advanced military sciences existed alongside, one the one hand, Nazi reverence for racial delusions, pagan beliefs, and Teutonic legends, and, on the other, the samurai warrior code and a supposedly divine Japanese emperor. This unstable ideological mixture has reflected itself in the political realm, where alliances of convenience with jihadists have repeatedly broken down, often to the dismay of the jihadists would-be partners. This will be the focus of the next installment in this series.