The terror

Survival

Volumn 43, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 5-18

  Simon, Steven ^a   Benjamin, Daniel ^a  

^a US National Security Council   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0005197940     PISSN: 00396338     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/survival/43.4.5     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Ibn Taimiya and Qutb were not the only influences on al-Takfir, al-Jihad and al-Qaeda, but are the most prominent. The impulse is also suggestive of the Kharijite revolt, which, beginning in 658 AD, led a 50-year insurgency against both Ali and the early Umayyad rulers in protest against their supposed rejection of God’s guidance in the conduct of their rule.
2. Ibn Taimiya devoted much of his writings to issues other than jihad. He was principally concerned with reconciling religion and statecraft and promoting a purified Islam, consistent with the beliefs of the first generations of Muslims as he understood them. The influence of his thought receded with the advent of the Ottoman Empire whose religious thinkers looked to teachers of other Islamic theological schools. Ibn Taimiya’s endorsement of intellectual self reliance firmly rooted in scripture was favored by radicals who were themselves unschooled in traditional commentaries and who distrusted the clerics whose authority derived from such institutional scholarship.
3. Hadiths are accounts of Muhammad’s actions and sayings traced back by Islamic scholars to sources who were close to the Prophet and deemed to be reliable.
4. This is true of other sacred scriptures including the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and Hindu epics regarded as sacred texts.
5. Both al-Takfir al Hijra and al-Jihad are thought to have formed in the mid-to-late 1960s.
6. In May 2001, the Egyptian Supreme State Security Court sentenced Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Director of the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies in Cairo, to a seven-year prison term. Charges included accepting foreign funds without authorisation, disseminating false information harmful to Egypt’s interest and embezzlement. These charges are believed by Human Rights Watch to be unfounded.
7. E.g., the Ikhwan revolt of 1929 and seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979.
8. Bin Laden and his followers express disdain for Saddam Hussein, an arch-secularist and no friend of religious authorities, but this does not detract from al-Qaeda’s opposition to American policy regarding Iraq.
9. Such mosques/recruitment centres have been identified in New York, London, Paris and Hamburg.
10. Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who may have been recruited by the FBI as early as 1996.
11. The authors are indebted to Professor Philip Bobbitt, University of Texas, for this insight.
12. The authors owe this arresting thought to Dr. Eric V. Larson of the RAND Corporation.
13. The Colin Powell speech of 19 November 2001 (McConnell Centre for Political Leadership, University of Louisville, Kentucky) may presage this pressure on both sides. www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/
14. For example, al-Jazeera has done interesting and relatively responsible documentaries on the Lebanese Civil War and the Black September revolt in Jordan, so it is capable in theory of reporting in a somewhat more even-handed way on the Israel/Palestine crisis or US and UK policy toward Iraq. That it does not is due in part to an ideological bias and in part to the failure of the US to use al-Jazeera to explain the objectives of US policy, the basis for these objectives, and the constraints that shape the way America implements policy in the region. See Fuad Ajami in New York Times, Sunday Magazine, 18 November 2001.
15. For many Egyptians, US aid is taken as a right and not seen as a quid pro quo for Egyptian cooperation with the US. See Yaroslav Trofimov, ’Affluent Egyptians in Cairo Gloat Over Attacks While Eating Big Macs’, Wall Street Journal, 18 September 2001.
16. The collapse of public education in key countries, such as Pakistan, due to under-investment has led to the proliferation of madrassas, which emphasise religious values and observance and leave pupils unprepared for a rapidly changing economic environment.
17. Roberta Wohlstetter makes this case definitively in Pearl Harbor: Warning and Response (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962).
18. See James Risen and Stephen Engelberg, ’Failure to Heed Signs of Change in Terror Goals’, New York Times, 14 October 2001, for a bizarre example of this phenomenon.