The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  The Lebanese terror group also won notoriety for its jihad suicide bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983, which killed sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans. As he did in the barracks case, Lamberth found that the embassy bombing had been carried out by Hizballah and financed by Iranian officials.

  Hizballah continued its actions against the United States by kidnapping the CIA station chief in Lebanon, William Buckley, on March 16, 1984. Buckley’s captors subsequently delivered several videos to American embassies showcasing how they were torturing him. After viewing the first, CIA director William Casey said: “I was close to tears. It was the most obscene thing I had ever witnessed. Bill was barely recognizable as the man I had known for years. They had done more than ruin his body. His eyes made it clear his mind had been played with. It was horrific, medieval and barbarous.”137 No one knows for certain when William Buckley died. The likeliest time is sometime during the night of June 3, 1985, the 444th day of his captivity.”138

  Hizballah’s primary mission, of course, was to wage jihad against Israel. Hizballah founder Hassan Nasrallah has said, “If they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”139 Hizballah menaced the Jewish state from Lebanon in the North, while Hamas (Sunni, but also funded by Iran) harassed it from Gaza in the South.

  The Islamic Republic’s Example

  In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the Islamic Republic of Iran became for those who believed that Islamic law was the sole legitimate source of law for every society what the Republic of Turkey had been for secular Muslims in the middle of the century: an example and an inspiration, an indication that a group with their perspective could succeed in overthrowing an established national government and take and hold power in a state.

  Bringing down the biggest infidel state of all in the second half of the twentieth century was the goal of other jihad groups.

  VII. JIHAD TERRORISM GOES GLOBAL

  In 1969 and 1970, Egypt, Sudan, and Algeria helped Nigeria fight the rebellious Republic of Biafra, formed from several southeastern Nigerian provinces. Biafran leader Emeka Ojukwu charged that this was because those states were Muslim, and Biafra Christian: “It is now evident why the fanatic Arab-Muslim states like Algeria, Egypt and the Sudan have come out openly and massively to support and aid Nigeria in her present war of genocide against us…. Biafra is one of the few African states untainted by Islam.” The rebellion was crushed. But the most arresting manifestation of the globalization of the jihad in the twentieth century was the formation of global jihad terror groups.

  Al-Qaeda

  Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was, according to Jane’s Intelligence Review, “an influential figure in the Muslim Brotherhood” and “the historical leader of Hamas,” as well as the man who shaped Osama bin Laden’s view of the world.140 Born in a Palestinian village in 1941, Azzam was raised in a pious Muslim household and earned a degree in Sharia from the Sharia College of Damascus University in 1966. In 1973, he received a Ph.D. in Islamic jurisprudence from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the oldest, most respected, and most influential institute of higher learning in the Muslim world. While in Egypt, he met members of key Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb’s family, who revered the author of Milestones as a martyr.

  Azzam then joined the jihad against Israel, but soon grew frustrated, furious that his fellow jihadis spent their off-hours gambling and playing music, both forbidden activities according to Islamic law—particularly in the interpretation of the Shafi’i school, which holds sway at al-Azhar.141 Ultimately, Azzam decided that “this revolution has no religion behind it” and traveled to Saudi Arabia to teach.142 There he taught that the Muslims’ philosophy, in conflicts with non-Muslims, ought to be “jihad and the rifle alone. NO negotiations, NO conferences and NO dialogue.”143

  In 1980, attracted by the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, he went to Pakistan to get to know the movement’s leaders. He taught for a while at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, but soon resigned to devote himself full-time to jihad. In 1988, Azzam and his “dear friend,” a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden, founded al-Qaeda (The Base). In a 2001 interview, however, bin Laden emphasized that al-Qaeda was simply a group of Muslims waging jihad for the sake of Allah:

  This matter isn’t about any specific person, and that it is not about the al-Qai’dah Organization. We are the children of an Islamic Nation, with Prophet Muhammad as its leader, our Lord is one, our Prophet is one, our Qibla [the direction Muslims face during prayer] is one, we are one nation [ummah], and our Book [the Qur’an] is one. And this blessed Book, with the tradition [sunnah] of our generous Prophet, has religiously commanded us [alzamatna] with the brotherhood of faith [ukhuwat al-imaan], and all the true believers [mu’mineen] are brothers. So the situation isn’t like the West portrays it, that there is an “organization” with a specific name (such as “al-Qai’dah”) and so on.144

  Azzam’s written exhortation to Muslims to join the jihad in Afghanistan, Join the Caravan, is likewise studded with Qur’anic quotations and references to the life of Muhammad. Azzam denied that Muhammad ever understood jihad solely as a spiritual struggle. “The saying, ‘We have returned from the lesser Jihad [battle] to the greater Jihad,’ which people quote on the basis that it is a hadith, is in fact a false, fabricated hadith which has no basis. It is only a saying of Ibrahim bin Abi Ablah, one of the Successors, and it contradicts textual evidence and reality.” He quotes several authorities charging that ahadith narrated by Ibrahim bin Abi Ablah are false, including one who reports: “He was accused of forging hadith.” Azzam also invokes the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyya, who wrote: “This hadith has no source and nobody whomsoever in the field of Islamic knowledge has narrated it. Jihad against the disbelievers is the most noble of actions and moreover it is the most important action for the sake of mankind.”145

  For this important action, jihadis receive especial rewards. Azzam held out as enticements to would-be jihadis statements like this from Muhammad: “Paradise has one-hundred grades [or levels] which Allah has reserved for the Mujahidun [warriors of jihad] who fight in His Cause, and the distance between each of two grades is like the distance between the heaven and the earth.”146

  “Jihad and hijrah [emigration] to Jihad,” writes Azzam, “have a deep-rooted role which cannot be separated from the constitution of this religion.”147

  Azzam points out in Join the Caravan that Muhammad himself went on twenty-seven “military excursions” and that “he himself fought in nine of these.” After summarizing Muhammad’s military career, Azzam notes that “this means that the Messenger of Allah (SAWS) used to go out on military expeditions or send out an army at least every two months.”148 He quotes a hadith in which Muhammad says that Islam’s “highest peak” is jihad.149

  Azzam quotes the medieval Qur’an commentator Abu Abdullah Muhammad Al-Qurtubi, who declared that “going out for Jihad is compulsory in times of need, of advent of the disbelievers, and of severe furore [sic] of fighting.”150

  Osama bin Laden carried on with al-Qaeda after Azzam’s death in 1989, waging jihad first against the Soviets in Afghanistan and then turning to other infidels. The group grew quickly into a worldwide movement, with help from (according to U.S. State Department estimates) as much as two billion dollars from the Saudi government.151 It demonstrated its reach on February 26, 1993, when al-Qaeda operatives exploded an eleven-hundred-pound bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six people and injuring a thousand.152 As it happened, the jihadis had placed the bomb poorly, minimizing the damage; they had hoped to bring down the Twin Towers and murder tens of thousands.

  Al-Qaeda operatives also took their jihad to the Balkans, streaming into the former Ottoman holdings in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, when the dissolution of Yugoslavia provided them a new opportunity to conquer and Islamiz
e the land once and for all.

  The jihad commander Abu Abdel Aziz Barbaros, his two-foot-long beard dyed with henna after the example of the Prophet Muhammad, declared that the Bosnian war “confirmed the saying of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, ‘Verily, the jihad will endure until the Day of Judgment.’ A new jihad was beginning in Bosnia; we went there, and we joined the battle, according to God’s will.”153 In a 1994 interview for a Muslim newspaper in the United States, Aziz firmly rejected the prevailing view that jihad rhetoric was a cover for political motivations: “As to your question about the characteristics needed for someone to be a Mujahid [warrior of jihad], I say: Belief in Allah, praised be He [comes first]. He should be in our sight, heart and mind. We have to make Jihad to make His word supreme, not for a nationalistic cause, a tribal cause, a group feeling or any other cause. This matter is of great importance in this era, especially since many groups fight and want to see to it that their fighting is Jihad and their dead ones are martyrs. We have to investigate this matter and see under what banner one fights.”154

  Al-Qaeda moved into Chechnya as well. Muslim Chechens have been waging jihad against the Russians for over two centuries.155 As long ago as the 1780s, a convert to Islam from Catholicism who called himself Sheikh Mansour led a jihad against the Russians in Chechnya on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan. Later, Ghazi Mullah, a disciple of the Naqshbandi Sufi mullah Muhammad Yaraghi, proclaimed a jihad against the Russians and attempted to institute the Sharia in Chechnya. Ghazi’s Sufi ties—and the Sufi army he raised—are interesting in that present-day Westerners generally regard Muslim Sufis as peaceful; this may be true, but it would be hasty to assume that they have all rejected the Islamic doctrines of jihad. His disciple, the imam Shamyl, actually presided over what Chechens still remember as the “Time of Sharia in the Caucasus.” In the 1990s, Chechen struggles for independence took on a decidedly Islamic cast. With material and religious aid from Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, a disciple of Osama bin Laden named Omar Ibn al Khattab positioned the Chechen independence fight as part of the global jihad.156

  In August 1996, bin Laden published a fatwa entitled “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” declaring jihad against the United States for daring to base its troops in Saudi Arabia, first to defeat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in late 1990 and early 1991, and force it to relinquish its claim to Kuwait as an Iraqi province, and then to keep the peace in the region. Bin Laden retailed grievances, thereby basing his call for jihad firmly within the Islamic theology of defensive jihad: “It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims’ blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies.”157

  Bin Laden listed areas around the world where Muslim blood was supposedly being spilled, and then declared: “The people of Islam awakened and realised that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance.”158 And “the latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet, is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places—the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka’ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims—by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies.”159

  Addressing Americans, bin Laden wrote: “Terrorising you, while you are carrying arms on our land, is a legitimate and morally demanded duty. It is a legitimate right well known to all humans and other creatures. Your example and our example is like a snake which entered into a house of a man and got killed by him. The coward is the one who lets you walk, while carrying arms, freely on his land and provides you with peace and security.”160

  Also, in 1996, bin Laden moved to Afghanistan, joining forces with the Taliban (“Students”), a jihad group that proclaimed the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that year. His vision, however, continued to be global. On February 23, 1998, he joined jihad leaders from Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in what they called the World Islamic Front and issued a statement entitled “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” It begins by invoking martial statements of the Qur’an and Muhammad:

  Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem [of war]”; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-’Abdallah, who said: “I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.”161

  Then, after reiterating many of the charges of American aggression against Muslims from the 1996 statement, it adds: “All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema [Muslim scholars] have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries.”162 Therefore,

  …the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,’” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.”…

  We—with Allah’s help—call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan’s U.S. troops and the devil’s supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.163

  On August 7, 1998, Al-Qaeda killed 223 people in jihad attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but Osama bin Laden and his followers would teach their most memorable and resounding lesson on September 11, 2001.164

  Yet, as the warriors of jihad were preparing for a new onslaught against the West, their targets began to display a most peculiar reaction: a denial that any of it was happening because of the jihadis’ stated motivations, despite fourteen hundred years of history showing that warfare against the unbelievers was indeed a genuine priority of believers in Islam. In 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton said this at the United Nations:

  Many believe there is an inevitable clash between Western civilization and Western values, and Islamic civilizations and values. I believe this view is terribly wrong. False prophets may use and abuse any religion to justify whatever political objectives they have—even cold-blooded murder. Some may have the world believe that almighty God himself, the merciful, grants a license to kill. But that is not our understanding of Islam.… Americans respect and honor Islam.165

  In time, even as the new jihad against the West escalated, Clinton’s words would become cliché, repeated by Western politicians ad infinitum after every new jihad attack.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE WEST LOSES THE

  WILL TO LIVE

  Jihad in the Twenty-First Century

  SEPTEMBER 11

  On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda initiated a new phase of the jihad against the United States, and the free world in general, only to find that the traditional foes of the warriors of jihad were no longer interested in fighting, or at least in conceiving of the conflict as it had historically.

  On that day, al-Qaeda operatives hijacked jetliners and flew th
em into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Passengers resisted on a fourth jet and managed to bring it down in rural Pennsylvania, far from its intended Washington target, which may have been the White House or the Capitol building. Nearly three thousand people were killed.

  This was jihad, but it was markedly different from jihad attacks that the West had faced before. The free world was not facing a state that had declared jihad against it, but an international organization operating in the name of Islam, not dependent upon a charismatic leader (although it had one) or centered in any particular geographical location. Yet this was not a “hijacking” of Islam either, as was widely claimed at the time; the underlying principles of jihad remained the same.

  Why did al-Qaeda strike New York and Washington? Osama bin Laden explained in a 2004 interview that al-Qaeda’s overall objective was to drain the United States economically, a shrewd jihad objective to bring down an enemy many times stronger than the jihad force: “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.… We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.”1 He boasted that it was “easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations.”2