Islamic fundamentalists justify violence on path to restoring divine law

Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, the founder of modern Turkey, abolished the caliphate of the Islamic world in 1924 in a deliberate turn toward Western law and politics.

Osama bin Laden is among the Muslim fundamentalists who say this was the biggest calamity of the modern era and the start of a continuing war on Islam.

The caliph — commander of the faithful — was the unifying figure of mosque and palace, the leader who could give spiritual as well as political direction to Muslims worldwide.

It has been the life mission of men such as Mr. bin Laden to bring that unity back, to drive off colonial and occupying powers, to restore sharia — divinely inspired Islamic law — and to maintain Islamic cultural identity.

Mr. bin Laden's ideas and organizing methods owe much to the Muslim Brotherhood, a disciplined political force begun in Egypt in 1928 to restore Islamic lands, law, and values.

His method — "death to all Americans" — is widely condemned by Islamic clerics and laity. The few who embrace it can wreak terrifying violence. U.S. officials say the suicide hijackers who killed more than 5,000 Americans on Sept. 11 were part of Mr. bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Others with al-Qaeda or another fundamentalist terror group, or those simply goaded by fiery sermons have raged against "infidels and nonbelievers" from Southeast Asia to West Africa.

Nigerian and Sudanese Muslims war with Christians to assert religious and political dominance. Filipino Muslim terrorists decapitate hostages when their demands for Islamic self-rule go unanswered. Kashmiri militants trained in Afghanistan kill Hindus and tourists to liberate the Muslim majority from Indian rule.

Mr. bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders justify all of these groups with the argument that the restoration of the Islamic nation makes their actions righteous.

Terrorism is the choice of only a few. Thousands of others sympathize with Mr. bin Laden's message, if not his methods.

"I don't think theologically he has a leg to stand on," said Michael Hudson, director of contemporary Arab studies at Georgetown University. "But I must say he's very effective. He's going over the heads of the Islamic establishment to say, 'We have an enemy in our midst called the United States of America, invading our space, corrupting our values and killing our people, and we have to do a jihad against it.'

"What should be very worrying to the U.S. government is this message seems to be surprisingly widely accepted," Dr. Hudson said.

So far, the anti-American rioting in response to attacks on Mr. bin Laden's supporters in Afghanistan has attracted no more than a few thousand people in Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Egypt, and the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

This has to be disappointing to al-Qaeda, some analysts say. The dream of restoring the caliphate might have moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan had the U.S. bombing campaign led to an uprising.

Mr. bin Laden's appeal for war against America is not working, said Mark Juergensmeyer, an expert on religious terrorism at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

"The Muslim world is not taking up the cause, so I think it's a big disaster from his point of view," he said. "I think it's a desperate situation for him. My sense is it could be the end of bin Laden."

It is early in the war on terrorism, however. Even if hundreds of millions of Muslims reject Mr. bin Laden, his message resonates with thousands of others filled with rage and despair.

Americans as targets

Hundreds of American soldiers and diplomats died at the hands of Islamic extremists in the 1980s. Those suicide assaults came from Shiite Muslims inspired by Iran's revolutionary guard who formed Hezbollah, or Party of God.

The 1979 Iranian revolution restored a Shiite vision of religion and politics united in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Shiites split from the dominant Sunni branch of Islam more than 1,300 years ago over their belief in hereditary rule through the family of the Prophet Muhammad. Shiite mullahs have more titles and authority than Sunni imams.

Iran's revolutionaries hated America out of a belief that it was colonizing the Islamic world. U.S. support for Israel made America synonymous with the Jewish state. The United States was accused of creating puppet regimes in Iran, then in Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, to protect its access to oil.

Dissenters against these regimes were intimidated into silence, imprisoned, or exiled. The popular media were encouraged to voice outrage against Israel and the United States but censored for any criticisms of the government at home.

The anger of being voiceless was often matched by the despair of poverty. Despite the fabled wealth of a few oil producers, the Middle East is poorer than all regions of the world except sub-Saharan Africa. Average annual incomes in Latin American ($1,880 per person) are almost three times as large as incomes in the Middle East ($640).

Politically mute and poor, much of the Muslim world is also young. Most are disappointed when opportunities for education, jobs, or advancement are scarce.

The Arab world has gone through a decade-long population explosion. Thirty-five percent of Egyptians are under 15, as are 40 percent of Saudis. More than half the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are younger than 15.

Islamic countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia have educated their people to the point that more than 85 percent can read and write. But other Muslim countries have suffered in the provision of education. The literacy rate in Bangladesh is 39 percent. In Pakistan it is 41 percent, and it is less than 53 percent in Egypt.

Poverty, disappointment, and youth form a potent mix for revolt. So it was a shock to some analysts that the suicide hijackers who slammed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had middle-class origins. Many were college graduates.

Western culture

"No single Muslim should presume the power and authority to turn into almost divine judges of the human condition."

The middle-class, educated backgrounds of the hijackers are much like that of their ancestors in the Muslim Brotherhood, however, said Joseph Kechichian, a Los Angeles consultant and author of two books on Saudi Arabia.

Another aspect of this anti-Americanism is cultural. U.S. culture has spread the allure of change around the world. Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes that "fundamentalism is beleaguered tradition." It seems an apt description of much of Islam's anti-Americanism.

"Muslims the world over are asking, can Islam have a rapprochement with the American-led modern world?" Dr. Hudson said. "It's a world of everything from McDonald's to blue jeans to the notion that religion has no place in the political sphere."

Islamic intellectuals connect globalization with Americanization — and colonization. Egypt's foreign minister and Iraq's deputy prime minister both complained about U.S. cultural hegemony at last year's millennium summit of the United Nations.

The Muslim Brotherhood's founder, Hasan al-Banna, was a devout Egyptian teacher. British journalist Edward Mortimer wrote that Mr. al-Banna began the Brotherhood in 1928 as a reaction against "political turmoil and disunity, increasing moral laxity, widespread enthusiasm for Western secular culture among the upper and middle classes, nominal independence made a mockery by continued British occupation and foreign domination of the economy."

Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's prime minister, is a longtime critic of what he sees as the arrogance of Western culture. That critique, however, may no longer be enough to assure his party's hold on power, which is now threatened by Islamists angered by his intolerance of dissident.

Role of women

"Equality of the sexes, and the sexual freedom of women, which are incompatible with the traditional family, are anathema to fundamentalist groups," Dr. Giddens wrote. "Opposition to them, indeed, is one of the defining features of religious fundamentalism across the world."

Muslim Brotherhood

Al-Gama'a and Islamic Jihad merged with Mr. bin Laden's al-Qaeda in the mid-1990s.

Al-Qaeda has cells spread through as many as 60 countries. The Muslim Brotherhood overlaps with al-Qaeda in many of those same countries.

Al-Qaeda "has structural parallels with the Muslim Brotherhood, but what's new is they have been released from nationalism and have created for themselves a transnational type of force, thanks to direct nurturing by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan," said Dr. Karamustafa. "It is no longer dissidents against a particular nation state."

The Brotherhood started with an emphasis on rigorous scholarship, physical fitness, and an ascetic lifestyle honed in desert camps. Soon it was overtly political. Members were indoctrinated within a "family" or five-man cell.

After World War II, the Brotherhood spread widely in the Muslim world. Volunteers fought in Palestine in 1948 against the creation of Israel. Yasser Arafat and other founding members of the Palestine Liberation Organization were once members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Persecution in Egypt sent many Muslim Brothers to Saudi Arabia and other countries of the Gulf in the 1960s, where some became teachers. The Brotherhood started Medina University, which was the wellspring of the 1979 attempted coup in Saudi Arabia by university students who seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and proclaimed one of their members the Mahdi, or messiah.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria staged a war against the secular regime of President Hafez al-Assad from 1980 to 1982, but Mr. Assad crushed the revolt by destroying Hamas, a Syrian stronghold of the Brotherhood, killing more than 10,000 people in the process.

The war against the Soviet Union brought thousands of Muslim Brotherhood volunteers from throughout the Islamic world together in Afghanistan, where the brotherhood's discipline and teachings were bonded with Mr. bin Laden's personal wealth and connections to other rich Saudis.

Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Pakistan and Sudan inspired and tutored Mr. bin Laden, and helped shape his philosophies.

Bin Laden's mentor

Dr. Azzam, who was killed in a Peshawar car bombing in 1989, also played a leading role in transforming the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestinians into Hamas, which has conducted many suicide bombings against Israelis.

Mr. bin Laden offered to organize an army of Afghan war veterans to repel Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But the Saudi royal family turned to the United States for help instead, and in the process made an enemy of Mr. bin Laden.

Mr. bin Laden went to Sudan at the invitation of Hasan al-Turabi, former dean of the law school at Khartoum University and another of the leading thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. al-Turabi is considered the intellectual author of the 1989 coup that brought an Islamic government to power in Khartoum. He is under house arrest for criticizing the government of Gen. Omar al-Bashir, who has been trying to repair relations with the United States.

Mr. bin Laden set about organizing al-Qaeda while living in Sudan, U.S. officials say. There, he worked with veterans of the war in Afghanistan to organize an effort to free Islam from the corrupting influences of the outside world.

Egyptian Islamic Jihad, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, and Kashmiri, Uzbek, and Filipino radicals endorsed his call to jihad.

Saudi Arabia issues

Tens of thousands of non-Muslims have worked and lived in Saudi Arabia since the oil price spike of 1973 set the kingdom on the road to riches. Mr. bin Laden, however, is most disturbed by the presence of U.S. military forces.

The Saudi government bars non-Muslims from the city limits of Mecca and from entering the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, where Muhammad is buried.

Mr. bin Laden wants them out of Saudi Arabia entirely. But that won't be the end of it, said Dr. Karamustafa.

"I think his task clearly would be incomplete from his perspective if the current Saudi Arabian regime were to stay in power," he said.

To Mr. bin Laden, much of the Saudi royal family is corrupt and apostate. To restore the caliphate, such rulers must be overthrown.