Allah, the Prophet, and the Companions Perhaps the hardest aspect of Osama’s youth to pin down with preci- sion is the development of his religious beliefs. His father was a devout Muslim, of course, and raised his children accordingly; he appears to be the fundamental source of Osama’s fervor. Muhammad bin Laden, according to Steve Coll, was a man who “bequeathed to his children . . . a religious faith in a borderless world.”96 This surely rings true; after all, part of every Muslim’s belief is that God plans for Islam to become over time the whole earth’s faith, and Osama repeatedly emphasizes that “borders mean[t] nothing. . . . The entire earth belongs to God.”97 But Muhammad bin Laden’s role in Osama’s religious development did not merely lie in inculcating theological tenets—though it did that—but in convincing him that every Mus- lim’s duty was to act on the words of God and His Prophet to defend his faith. And Muhammad bin Laden was as good an example of a Muslim who matched beliefs with actions as it would be possible to find. Not only was he the king’s main contractor for building palaces for the royal family, he was central to the construction campaign to modernize Saudi Arabia’s roadways, airports, port facilities, military bases, and other infrastructure. Osama would know his theology but, thanks to his father, also believe it insufficient unless acted upon.98 Osama received regular religious instruction throughout his youth—in school, at home, and in the mosque—as does every young- ster in the Kingdom. Osama was raised by his parents to be a devout follower of the puritanical Wahhabi creed dominant in Saudi Arabia, although neither parent could be described as a particularly fierce Wahhabi. The key texts Osama studied were the hadith (also known as the sunnah), which are considered the second most important source of Islamic thought and law after the Koran. In his public pro- nouncements, in fact, bin Laden gives slightly more prominence to quotations from the hadith than to Koranic quotations. He clearly loves the Prophet Muhammad and the example he set. And in his words, demeanor, activities, and reasoning—which often amounts to asking “What did the Prophet do in a similar situation?”—Osama fully justifies Steve Coll’s conclusion that he is “particularly drawn to teach- ings that a righteous Muslims should imitate the dress and customs that pervaded in the Prophet’s time.”99 All Muslims must act as the Prophet acted. “The hadith is taught to Muslims,” he has said, “but young Muslims need to be taught—along with learning—they need to be taught to act on that knowledge. . . . If you are taught [religious] learning but do not act on it, it is evidence against you. . . . The fruit of knowledge is that we should act in the way that Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, made clear, so that we obtain the approval of God, Who is praised and exalted. As we read in the Sahih of al-Bukhari [one of two canonical hadith collections], when the Prophet was asked about actions, which is the best of them, he said, on him be blessings and peace, ‘a man who goes out to risk his life and wealth [in jihad] in the way of God.’”100 Bin Laden began interacting with Islamist groups and scholars outside of school and home in the early 1970s.101 One writer claims that by then “he preferred the company of the ulemas” to that of any- one else.102 This is supported by his mother’s memory of when her son started focusing on Islamic issues. “Osama became politically aware in EDUCATION, 1957–1979 | 39 40 | OSAMA BIN LADEN his early teens,” she said after 9/11. “He was frustrated about the situ- ation in Palestine in particular, and the Arab and Muslim world in general. He thought Muslim youths were too busy having fun to care about what they should do to propagate Islam and bring back the old glories of the Muslim nation. He wanted Muslims to unite and fight to liberate Palestine. He had been a devoted Muslim all his life but he was a moderate one. He played football. Went to picnics, rode horses and socialized. He never caused me to worry about him in his teenage years.”103 Khalid al-Batarfi also has cited Osama’s early concerns with the broader Islamic world and especially his focus on Palestine. “Unless we, the new generation, change and become stronger and more edu- cated and more dedicated,” bin Laden told al-Batarfi, “we will never reclaim Palestine.”104 Najwa also has written that this continued after their marriage. “As my husband became older and more educated,” she has written, “I noticed that a new and broader awareness of the outside world began to occupy his mind.”105 Allia and Najwa bin Laden hit upon three preoccupations that would stay with bin Laden to this day. First, he has been focused since his youth on inspiring young Muslims to join an effort to defend Islam from the Western powers and to take back from them the Muslim land they had occupied. Even before he became involved in the Afghan jihad, bin Laden—as his mother said—believed it was the responsi- bility of youth to “propagate Islam and bring back the old glories of the Muslim nation.” Inciting jihad was, indeed, one of the major roles played by the Prophet Muhammad in the founding days of Islam. “The most important function of the doctrine of jihad,” according to scholar Rudolph Peters, “is that it mobilizes and motivates Muslims to take part in wars against unbelievers.”106 The role of inciter in chief is one bin Laden began moving toward early in life. Second, Osama’s mother’s reference to the “Muslim nation” sug- gests that at an early age he was quite conscious of and concerned about the larger world. He also had obviously made his own what Steve Coll has described as his father’s faith in an eventually border- less Muslim world. Third, bin Laden has always argued that if Islam is to be defended there must be unity among Muslims. As will be seen below, bin Laden has consistently avoided attacking those who have betrayed, disap- pointed, or abandoned him (with the exception of Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal). Likewise, he has rarely faulted others because their beliefs differed from his; indeed, he has consistently argued that Muslims must work together regardless of specific religious beliefs and prac- tices. While regrettable and needing eventual remedy, such differ- ences are natural, and must not be allowed to hamstring Muslims from uniting against a common enemy. When the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was launched in 2003, for example, bin Laden declared that there was no harm in Islamists fighting alongside Iraqi socialists against the U.S.-led coalition. Al-Qaeda is a unique organization in the Muslim world due to its multiple nationalities, languages, religious practices, and ethnicities. Khalid al-Batarfi perceptively underscored his friend’s tolerance for religious diversity, a fact that ought to be kept in mind by those arguing that bin Laden espouses takfirism—the least tolerant brand of Islam, as we will see. “He did not try to force his [religious] views on the rest of us, who were not as strict Muslims as he was,” al-Batarfi told the journalist Jonathan Randall. “He had a very nice way of winning over young people who did not pray, often leading them by example to become good Muslims. He would encourage us to go to mosque, especially to fajr, or dawn prayer. . . . He sort of hoped you would follow his example and if you did, so much the better, but if not, you were still good friends. He had a very strong, quiet, confident, and effective charisma.”107 Although he received substantial religious instruction during his school years, bin Laden did not become in any formal sense a trained religious scholar, and his discourse lacks the dogmatism often associ- ated with the professional theologian. His knowledge of Islam was and is based on the Koran and the sunnah, as well as on his education, his family life, talks with scholars he met in his youth, his independent study of theology and Islamic history, and working and fighting along- side men who were trained scholars, most especially the Palestinian scholar Shaykh Abdullah Azzam. In an earlier book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, I wrote with rather too much certainty that bin Laden was heavily influenced by Sayyed Qutb (who to my everlasting embar- rassment I mistakenly identified as Muhammad Qutb, Sayyed’s brother). In the decade since writing that book it has become clear EDUCATION, 1957–1979 | 41 42 | OSAMA BIN LADEN that Sayyed Qutb—to whom common wisdom assigns the role of “father of modern Islamic fundamentalism”—did not have much, if any, impact on bin Laden’s thought. Indeed, although it has been argued that Osama studied Sayyed Qutb and that it was “Qutb’s ideas that provoked bin Laden to inflict them on the world,” I have found no evidence that fully supports this assertion.108 Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor, has noticed—alone among bin Laden analysts in the West—that bin Laden “rarely mentions Qutb.”109 I would go further and say that I have found not a single mention of Sayyed Qutb in any of bin Laden’s writings or statements, and that I would agree with the Salafi scholar Husayn bin Mahmud, who has written “that ignorant people affiliate al-Qaeda with Shaykh Sayyed Qutb,” and claim that al-Qaeda is an extension of the Egyptian al-Zawahiri’s jihadist group. “These are incorrect assumptions,” asserts bin Mahmud.110 In any event, many of the ideas attributed to Qutb are really of much older vintage. Qutb is most often cited as having been the first to call for a vanguard to incite and lead other Muslims to return to pure Islam. He also advocated and justified the use of violence against Muslim rulers who do not rule according to the Shariah. Neither idea is original with Qutb. The Prophet Muhammad and his companions, for example, clearly saw themselves as armed with God’s revelation and so duty-bound to incite all the Arabian Peninsula’s peoples to accept God’s call and live by His design. “Our Prophet Muhammad, God’s peace and prayers be upon him,” bin Laden wrote in describing the Prophet’s creation of this vanguard, “spent thirteen years preach- ing in Mecca and the result was a few hundred Muhajirin [immi- grants], may God be pleased with them,” and this group later established “the small Medina state . . . [and] good was established.”111 The duty to attack rulers who refuse to govern according to Islamic law was set down in the early fourteenth century by the Syrian Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyyah. Often referred to as Shaykh al-Islam—an hon- orific understood as a designation for Islam’s most important scholar— Ibn Taymiyyah was a key formulator of Salafism, a puritanical form of Islam centered on the Koran, the hadith, and the practices of the first three Muslim generations, known as the salaf or the “pious ances- tors.” Ibn Taymiyyah articulated the doctrine to deal with what he identified as the un-Islamic governance of the recently converted Mongols, who mixed their own customs and laws with the Shariah. In Ibn Taymiyyah’s view, Rudolph Peters has written, “this is sufficient cause to regard them as unbelievers, even if they pronounce the pro- fession of faith.”112 The mixing of Islamic with pagan tenets, Ibn Taymiyyah argued, proved the “Mongols were apostates and therefore legitimate targets of jihad.”113 On both topics—a vanguard and fighting un-Islamic rulers—Qutb offered nothing that was not already long available in the Koran, sunnah, and Islamic jurisprudence—and Osama was thoroughly indoctrinated with all of these sources during his school years. More important to assessing Qutb’s influence on Osama accu- rately is asking why he did not accept all of Qutb’s major ideas. The Egyptian Islamist argued that the world had reverted to the paganism of the period before the emergence of the Prophet Muhammad. And by “world” he meant the entire world. Anyone––Muslim and non- Muslim—who did not lead a pure life was in danger. Qutb was a leading proponent of takfirism, the belief that one Muslim can take it upon himself to decide whether or not another is a good Muslim, and, if not, kill him. Osama has consistently rejected the takfiris’ philos- ophy—although Muslim and Western critics alike consistently try to hang that tag on him. Current U.S. Afghan policy is based on this assumption. Yet Osama has himself been the target of at least three assassination attempts by takfiris. A close reading of bin Laden’s work makes clear that he has never embraced Qutb’s Hobbes-like doctrine of a religious war of everyone against everyone else. Bin Laden has not even called for the deaths of the members of the Saudi royal family—the target of his most scathing rhetoric––but rather their delivery to the Islamist judiciary for trial after they are toppled from power. Indeed, bin Laden has even held out an alternative to the idea of punishing the al-Sauds, saying that the path to peace in the Kingdom would be easy were the Saudi royals simply to repent and change their ways. “Correcting the mistakes [you have made] is not hard at all,” bin Laden told them in December 2004, “if the ruler is willing and capable of doing what it takes to bring about the needed change. Furthermore, to make corrections, the ruler need not invent any solutions, but all he needs is going back to Allah’s reli- gion: Islam that is. As to us [al-Qaeda], Allah knows that we want EDUCATION, 1957–1979 | 43 44 | OSAMA BIN LADEN nothing but changing course so that internal and external policies are crafted according to what Allah and His messenger mandated. . . . To make the story short, let me say that the only way to a safe and happy ending is to embark on the straight path of Allah and His messenger.”114 Bin Laden also rejects outright Qutb’s argument that it is no longer sufficient for Muslims to wage a defensive war against Western influences and corrupt Muslim regimes, but their duty is to wage an offensive war against all opponents until the entire world lives under the banner of “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His mes- senger.” Since first declaring war in August 1996, Osama has left no doubt that he knows that God’s plan is for a world that will eventually be entirely Islamic. Nonetheless, he also made it clear that he would have no truck with Qutb’s call for an offensive jihad. In statement after statement, and interview after interview, over the past fourteen years, bin Laden has called for a defensive jihad: to rid the Muslim world of the U.S. presence; destroy Israel; overthrow rulers who do not govern by Shariah law; and to recover the lands taken from Mus- lims by conquest, including Palestine, Spain, southern Thailand, and Mindanao. Whether or not Western scholars and commentators define these goals as “offensive” war is irrelevant because they are fully covered by the theological guidelines of a defensive jihad. In waging defensive jihad, in other words, Osama is in keeping with the tenets of the Koran, the sunnah, and the mainstream of Islamic juris- prudence; this has been the case especially since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Why has Qutb had such little impact on bin Laden’s thinking? There are several answers to the question. First, Osama is the product of the Saudi educational system; indeed, notwithstanding denials by the al-Saud family, he is the poster boy for that system. Bin Laden was nursed on a pure diet of the Koran, the Prophet’s sayings and deeds, and the teachings of a limited number of revered Islamic scholars and jurists. To this day he has carried the certainty that God’s truth is to be found in these sources alone. Sayyed Qutb, moreover, was a follower of the teachings of the Sunni scholar Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari, who championed a nonliteralist approach to the Koran and who argued that the sunnah “differed radically” from the literalist Hanbali school of Sunni Islam that dominates Saudi religious thought and education.115 Overall, bin Laden probably would agree with the official Saudi posi- tion that Qutb was a takfiri who “was out of touch with reality and rejected even widely accepted interpretations of the Koran.”116 Second, bin Laden almost certainly is wary of Qutb because the Egyptian was not an Islamic scholar. As noted above, he has recom- mended the work of Muhmmad Qutb—a trained scholar—but has never mentioned Muhammad’s brother Sayyed Qutb. The more famous Qutb’s university training was in literature. He is therefore a questionable figure for bin Laden. Untrained in Islam, an on-again, off-again ally of the infidel Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, disrespectful of Islamic scholars he did not agree with, and fundamentally wrong about advocating an offensive jihad—only a caliph can order an offensive jihad, and there has been no caliph since 1924—Qutb simply does not represent someone bin Laden would turn to for guidance or inspira- tion.117 This became crystal clear when Osama returned to Saudi Ara- bia from Afghanistan in 1989 and became a member of what was, at that time, a peaceful reform movement in the Kingdom. Led by prominent Salafi scholars, the movement intended to reform, not dis- mantle, Saudi society, and bin Laden’s writings—as will be seen—in support of the movement clearly show that he is far more comfortable with the movement than with a Qutb-style revolution.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 02:30:47 +0000
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