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Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part
4)
By Marc Erikson
Islamism,
fascism and terrorism (Part 1)
Islamism,
fascism and terrorism (Part 2)
Islamism,
fascism and terrorism (Part 3)
An early
convert to Sayyid Qutb's new-fangled fascist Islamism
which condones, indeed commands, terrorism and murder
was the alleged number two man of Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. [see part 2]. Having joined
the Muslim Brotherhood at age 15, he was caught in the
Nasser dragnet after the 1965 assassination attempt on
the Egyptian leader and - young age and elite family
background notwithstanding - was thrown in jail. An
April 1968 amnesty freed most of the brethren, and
Ayman, in that regard following in his father's
footsteps, went on to Cairo University to become a
physician. He obtained his degree in 1974 and practiced
medicine for several years.
His profession,
however, was not his calling. By the late 1970s, he was
back full-time in the Islamist revolution business
agitating against the Egypt-Israel peace treaty
(concluded in 1979). In 1980, on the introduction by
military intelligence officer Abbud al-Zumar, he became
a leading member of the Jama'at al-Jihad of Muhammad
Abd-al-Salam Faraj which on October 6, 1981,
assassinated President Anwar El Sadat while he was
reviewing a military parade.
Faraj, like
al-Zawahiri, had been a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, but became disenchanted with its passivity.
In 1979, he penned a short pamphlet titled "The
Neglected Obligation" (al-Farida al-Gha'ibah), which
relied heavily on the ideas of Sayyid Qutb. It became
the founding document of al-Jihad, arguing along the
familiar lines that acceptance of a government was only
possible and legitimate when that government fully
implemented Sharia, or Islamic law. Contemporary Egypt
had not done so, and was thus suffering from
jahiliyya. Jihad to rectify this, wrote Faraj,
was not only the "neglected obligation" of Muslims, but
in fact their most important duty.
Following the
Sadat assassination, al-Zawahiri was arrested on a minor
weapons possession charge and spent three years in jail.
In 1985 he left Egypt for Saudi Arabia and later
Peshawar, Pakistan, where he was joined by Muhammad
al-Islambuli, the brother of one of Sadat's five
assassins, 24-year-old artillery lieutenant Khalid Ahmed
Shawki al-Islambuli. There, connections were made with
the groups of Palestinian Islamist Abdullah Azzam and
the latter's one-time student Osama bin Laden, by then
fully engaged (with well-known CIA support) in assisting
the mujahideen struggle against Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan.
Al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad was in many
respects better organized and better trained than other
groups in the Afghanistan theater. Prior to the murder
of Sadat, it had succeeded in recruiting members of the
presidential guard, military intelligence and the civil
bureaucracy. Most importantly, it was in possession of a
cogent and comprehensive ideology pointing beyond the
Afghan struggle against the Soviet occupiers.
"Afghanistan should be a platform for the liberation of
the entire Muslim world," was the distinguishing creed
of al-Jihad.
Al-Zawahiri wrote several books on
Islamic movements, the best known of which is The
Bitter Harvest (1991/92), a critical assessment of
the failings of the Muslim Brotherhood. In it, he draws
not only on the writings of Sayyid Qutb to justify
murder and terrorism, but prominently references
Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami founder and ideologue Mawdudi
on the global mission of Islamic jihad.
Mawdudi
had written, "Islam wants the whole earth and does not
content itself with only a part thereof. It wants and
requires the entire inhabited world. It does not want
this in order that one nation dominates the earth and
monopolizes its sources of wealth, after having taken
them away from one or more other nations. No, Islam
wants and requires the earth in order that the human
race altogether can enjoy the concept and practical
program of human happiness, by means of which God has
honored Islam and put it above the other religions and
laws. In order to realize this lofty desire, Islam wants
to employ all forces and means that can be employed for
bringing about a universal all-embracing revolution. It
will spare no effort for the achievement of this supreme
objective. This far-reaching struggle that continuously
exhausts all forces and this employment of all possible
means are called jihad."
And further, "Islam is
a revolutionary doctrine and system that overturns
governments. It seeks to overturn the whole universal
social order ... and establish its structure anew ...
Islam seeks the world. It is not satisfied by a piece of
land but demands the whole universe ... Islamic jihad is
at the same time offensive and defensive ... The Islamic
party does not hesitate to utilize the means of war to
implement its goal."
Not just or even
principally the expulsion of the Soviets from
Afghanistan or the removal of any one godless Muslim
regime, but global jihad as Mawdudi had prescribed,
became al-Zawahiri's obsession. And he acted as he had
read and written. After several years in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, constructing there the platform from which to
launch broader pursuits, Zawahiri traveled extensively
on Swiss, French and Dutch passports in Western Europe
and even the United States on fund-raising, recruiting
and reconnaissance missions. Then came initial
implementation of the offensive.
It is not known
whether he had a hand in the 1993 bombing of the New
York World Trade Center. But he had close connections to
Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the
group that carried out the attack. Then, in 1995, he was
behind the truck bomb attack on the Egyptian embassy in
Pakistan; in November 1997, he led the Vanguards of
Conquest group responsible for the Luxor (Egypt)
massacre in which 60 foreign tourists were
systematically murdered and mutilated; in August 1998,
he organized the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania; and probably, in 2000, the speed-boat bomb
attack on the USS Cole in Aden. Israeli intelligence
considers him the "operational brains" behind September
11; the fact, in any case, is that the Egyptian Mohammed
Atta, principal of the Hamburg, Germany, al-Qaeda cell
that was instrumental to the World Trade Center
destruction, was a member of Zawahiri's al-Jihad.
Osama bin Laden, as we wrote earlier, had the
money, some of the connections, and perhaps the charisma
to function as the leader of the al-Qaeda global jihad.
But it was not until Zawahiri's al-Jihad in February
1998 formally joined forces with bin Laden that the
present global Islamist terrorist threat truly emerged.
With his long experience in the Muslim Brotherhood, his
critical assessment of its failures, his cunning -
albeit highly eclectic - fashioning of a fascist
ideology drawing on Islamic religious elements, and his
organizational and operational skills, al-Zawahiri is
the key personality of global jihad. The key point to
understand is that Zawahiri fascist Islamism has seized
the ideological initiative in the Muslim world against
which traditional Islam has so far proved an impotent,
indeed often unwilling, opponent. Young Muslims
everywhere are captivated by Zawahiri Islamism and jihad
to which they attribute selfless idealism and in which
they admire ruthless determination. It will be a long
war.
And make no mistake: In this war against a
new, ideologically vigorous fascism, collateral assets
of the Islamists, the neo-Nazis of the Ahmed Huber
variety which we described in part 1 of this series, or
- for that matter - Saudi financiers wittingly pushing
narrow sectarian Wahhabism upon youths in
madrassas worldwide, are key forces in the enemy
camp. Islamism as we have portrayed it in its historical
and present dimension is a form of fascist madness - the
same type of madness which one of Hitler's closest
confidants, convicted war criminal Albert Speer, saw
during the Fuehrer's final days. In his Spandau prison
diary entry for November 18, 1947, Speer recollects:
"I recall how [Hitler] would have films shown in
the Reich Chancellory about London burning, about the
sea of fire over Warsaw, about exploding convoys, and
the kind of ravenous joy that would then seize him every
time. But I never saw him so beside himself as when, in
a delirium, he pictured New York going down in flames.
He described how the skyscrapers would be transformed
into gigantic burning torches, how they would collapse
in confusion, how the bursting city's reflection would
stand against the dark sky."
(©2002 Asia Times
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