As the Muslim Brotherhood grew, they found common cause with the Nazis, who began to fund them and support another founding father of modern jihad: the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.
Al-Husseini personally engaged in violent jihad—armed revolts against Jewish immigrants to Palestine—and enlisted the Nazis to help eliminate the Jews from Palestine. In return for removing the Jews from Palestine and a Nazi guarantee that he would control the Middle East once the Allied powers were defeated, the grand mufti al-Husseini promised Islamic jihad to help exterminate the Jews everywhere in the world. In April 1943, al-Husseini personally organized and recruited a Bosnian Muslim division of SS troops.
“The Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime of Germany and hope for the extension of the fascist antidemocratic governmental system to other countries,” Husseini proclaimed.
In 1936, al-Husseini inspired an Arab revolt. Then, after fleeing to Lebanon, he used Nazi money to instigate another revolution. He later migrated to Iraq, where he supported the prominent fascist society and focused on radicalizing Islamic youth—a program modeled directly after the Hitler Youth. Soon after, the mufti found himself in Germany, where he stayed during World War II, learning radical anti-Semitism from the people who’d perfected it.
It was the grand mufti al-Husseini, in fact, who gave Hitler the idea of making Jews wear a yellow Star of David. He collaborated with top Hitler henchmen like Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler. He even took tours of German concentration camps to see the scientific method with which the Nazis destroyed Europe’s Jews. He hosted a popular radio broadcast from Germany with thousands tuning in to hear his fiery brand of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda. “It is the duty of Muhammadans in general and Arabs in particular to . . . drive all Jews from Arab and Muhammadan countries,” he declared. “This is the sole means of salvation. It is what the prophet did thirteen centuries ago.” He publicly praised Hitler’s decision to eradicate the Jews: “Germany is also struggling against the common foe who oppressed Arabs and Muhammadans in their different countries. It has very clearly recognized the Jews for what they are and resolved to find a definitive solution [endgültige Lösung] for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that Jews represent in the world.”
The Nazis were eventually defeated in Europe, but their anti-Semitic ideology remained in the heart of the Middle East with al-Husseini. From there, it spread like wildfire in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood, which had about one thousand members in 1936, ballooned to hundreds of thousands strong by the end of World War II and emerged as the originator of a powerful second wave of Salafism. Unlike the Islam of Wahhab, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islam grew out of cities, not the desert, and included many professionals and well-educated Arabs among its ranks. That made the group a particularly flexible and effective force, capable of working within governments as part of the process, and of maintaining unity during periods when they were brutally suppressed.
Precisely because of their flexible and long-term approach, which often espoused temporary nonviolence and willingness to work through the political process in an effort to seem mainstream, the Brotherhood generated many offshoots bent on more direct and immediate forms of jihad, particularly against Israel and the United States. These offshoots, which appeared from one end of the Sunni Muslim world to the other, included Hamas and Islamic Jihad among the Palestinians, and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated the great Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat in 1981 for the “crime” of making peace with Israel. Particularly devout jihadis among these offshoots eventually united to form the first globally networked terrorist franchise: al-Qaeda.
The Brotherhood’s goal was to unite all Muslims, even the Shia. And they were incredibly successful. The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood gave rise to every major Islamic terrorist organization in the world. For example, Palestine Liberation Organization terrorist Yasser Arafat was a distant relative of the mufti of Jerusalem, and Hamas was cofounded by Muslim Brotherhood member Abdullah Azzam. Azzam, who moved to Jordan after the Six-Day War in 1967 and led paramilitary attacks against Israel, later became a professor in Saudi Arabia, where he met and mentored a young student named Osama bin Laden.
Another leading light of the Muslim Brotherhood was Sayyid Qutb, who was the group’s leader in the 1950s and 1960s. Qutb called for constant jihad against “enemies of religion,” among whom he included Muslims who didn’t adopt a Salafist orientation and full rejection of modernity and the West. He believed that true Muslims had the power to excommunicate less faithful Muslims from Islam, thereby condemning them, like other apostates, to death. This doctrine, called takfir, was controversial among Muslims, but it remains a key component of how radical Islamists justify the killing of others of their own faith. Violence was often necessary to spread the word of God. Merely preaching was not enough.
In addition to being anti-Israel, Qutb was also virulently anti-American. Qutb hated the materialism of the West, and of the United States in particular. He had spent time in the small town of Greeley, Colorado, in 1949 and came away unimpressed. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity,” he wrote. “She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.” Qutb saw himself as a latter-day Muhammad, preaching against the sins of a pagan, ignorant, and barbaric culture.
Today, all major jihadi groups can, directly or indirectly, trace their roots right back to the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Islamic Revolution of Iran
The Shiites of Islam—followers of the caliph Ali—had lived with a legacy of defeat since the civil war that followed the death of Muhammad in the seventh century. Existing at the margins of Islamic society, never recognized by the Sunni caliphs, the Shia developed a contemplative interpretation of Islam. Because they were minorities and lacking in political power, their faith was largely seen as between the individual believer and God.
But in 1979, Shia Islam acquired a virulent new force in Iran, a force that, in some ways, was more absolute and threatening than all the Salafist-inspired movements of the Sunni Arab heartland.
Nearly half of the world’s Shia live in Iran, formerly known as Persia. Like the sultans of the Ottoman Empire, the shahs of Iran had ruled over a multiethnic, multireligious empire for centuries. By the late nineteenth century, Persian society was still virtually cut off from the outside world. But the shahs attempted Western reforms and inventions: telegraph lines, railroads, banks, and even constitutional governance. Their willingness to modernize by accommodating imperial European powers roused both nationalist sentiments and religious fervor.
Oil brought the matter to a head in 1951, when Iran nationalized the Anglo-Iranian oil company under the leadership of their new prime minister, Muhammad Mossadeq. Mossadeq’s coalition of nationalists and religious conservatives was a volatile stew. When Shah Reza Pahlavi tried to dismiss Mossadeq in 1953 after a successful boycott of Iranian oil by Britain and Western countries, Mossadeq refused to leave and his supporters poured into the streets. Mossadeq won and the shah was forced to flee instead.
With the help of the CIA, the shah was ultimately restored to power—a move that further infuriated Mossadeq’s nationalist and religious supporters and alienated and incensed the Shiite clergy, which began to plot an Islamic revolution.
With Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in charge, Iran’s Shiite clerics led a popular movement to oust the shah, and then established the Islamic Republic of Iran. They moved quickly to establish their brand of pure Islam, a combination of political and religious authority under the principle of velayet e faqih, the “mandate of the wise” or “rule of the jurists.”
Khomeini institutionalized the political power of the clerics who followed his revolutionary brand of Islam. The Isla
mic revolution that it espoused called for open war against Israel and the United States, and included a call for jihad in the constitution for the newly Islamic Iranian republic:
In the formation and equipping of the country’s defense forces, due attention must be paid to faith and ideology as the basic criteria. Accordingly, the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are to be organized in conformity with this goal, and they will be responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world (this is in accordance with the Koranic verse “Prepare against them whatever force you are able to muster, and strings of horses, striking fear into the enemy of God and your enemy, and others besides them.” [8:60])
This allowed the Islamic Revolution to claim a high ground, above that of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, not to mention the Saudi Wahhabis, who were openly allied with the United States. Many of the Brotherhood’s splinter groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, soon held the Islamic Revolution in great esteem—one reason that Shiite Iran has long been the primary source of material support for the Sunni terrorists like Hamas and Islamic Jihad that are fighting Israel in the occupied territories.
Until the rise of al-Qaeda, the Islamic Republic of Iran was the only Islamist group that directly challenged and made war with the United States. It started with the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the ensuing 444-day hostage crisis, and continued with the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed 241 Americans; the “tanker war” in the Persian Gulf in the late 1980s; the Khobar Towers bombing, which killed nineteen Americans in Saudi Arabia in 1996; and its support for Shiite militias that have killed thousands of Americans in Iraq. Through Hezbollah (“party of God”), its terrorist proxy army in Lebanon, Iran has attacked Israel and has continually armed Palestinian terror groups.
The Totalitarian Strain of Islam
The two centuries since Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt brought turmoil and further decline to the Islamic world. Though there were different theories about what to do, many believed that only by going back to the seventh century, when the purest version of Islam ruled, could the Muslim world be made new. Only by uniting politics and religion in the way Muhammad did could Muslims triumph over their powerful Western oppressors.
The utopian vision of the Salafists, from Saudi Arabia’s Wahhab to Egypt’s Qutb, provided, if nothing else, ruthless consistency. Totalitarian ideologies provide ready answers to everything. They obliterate freethinking and debate, and in their place they prescribe an entire way of life, right down to the minutest of details. They define enemies and friends in black-and-white terms that leave nothing to the imagination.
But totalitarian ideologies also tend to do something else: they obliterate freedom and morality. Anything done to help achieve the goal of bringing about their vision becomes justified, including the murder of children and women.
Americans were about to see that firsthand.
4
* * *
REESTABLISHING THE CALIPHATE
Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan
September 9, 2001
He was achingly tired. A lesser man might have thrown in the towel years earlier. After all, he had seen enough war and bloodshed to last many lifetimes. And while the territory he now controlled had been reduced to a small pocket in northeastern Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud had no intention of yielding to the Taliban’s Islamists.
Known as “the Lion of the Panjshir,” the name of the valley that he called home, Massoud was leader of the Northern Alliance, a patchwork of tribes and ethnic groups united only in their opposition to the men in dark turbans committed to returning the land to the seventh century. Though Massoud considered himself a faithful Muslim, the brutal Islamist ideology of the Taliban was alien to him.
For the past five years he had fought against the Taliban, who, in his view, were ravaging his homeland with the same kind of barbarism he had seen during the Soviet occupation twelve years earlier. He had long appealed to the United States for help—but none had come.
Now, dressed in his military fatigues and fringed scarf, the bearded Massoud sat on a couch as a Belgian camera crew began to set up for filming. Massoud had done many interviews like this. When he wasn’t leading troops into battle, his job was to tell the media about Afghanistan’s plight under the Taliban and the peril it posed to countries like the United States.
He had warned them especially about the Taliban’s terrorist foot soldiers, the Arabs who called themselves “al-Qaeda,” meaning “the Base.” These men had pledged bayat, or an oath of loyalty, to Sheikh Osama bin Laden. Massoud had met with CIA officers during the Clinton administration to tell them of the evil that had overtaken his land. He’d even offered to undertake a Northern Alliance mission to kill bin Laden. The CIA advised him not to. “You guys are crazy,” Massoud told them. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
The chaos of Afghanistan was Massoud’s problem now, but he continued to warn the West that it would soon be their problem, too, unless something changed. He figured that his appeals to Western journalists were the only shot he had at getting Washington and the CIA to change their position and help him take the offensive.
An aide to Massoud asked the two reporters what questions they would be asking on camera. One of the journalists scribbled on his notepad with his blue pen, as if he hadn’t heard him. He let several seconds pass before looking up and smiling. “Why are you against Osama bin Laden? Why do you call him a killer?”
The aide began translating the English questions into Massoud’s native Tajik, but before he could finish a blinding light enveloped the room. The explosion was heard for miles around.
The two journalists were al-Qaeda operatives, sent on a mission of the highest priority. One of them had strapped explosives around his waist, and the other had packed the video camera with a bomb aimed directly at Massoud’s chest.
War Against the Infidels: The Opening Salvo
Al-Qaeda’s war against the West began much earlier than September 11, 2001.
There had been a failed attempt to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. embassy bombings in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in a Yemen harbor in 2000, among others. But on September 9, 2001, the twenty-year plan to install a Caliphate and return Islam to global dominance officially got under way.
It was that day that the terrorist group assassinated Massoud, the one man who could have united Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. They knew that, within forty-eight hours, jetliners commandeered by terrorists would be heading to their targets in New York and Washington, D.C., and that this would undoubtedly provoke a fearsome response of American military might. Without a unifying hero like Massoud, the country was all but guaranteed to disintegrate, to be ruled by petty warlords and weak figurehead governments. But it would mostly be chaos—and that’s exactly what they wanted.
Those of us who are old enough will never forget the sunny, deep blue skies of that Tuesday morning. The air was perfect for early September—cool, then warming. Then suddenly there was a boom. Crowds began to gather on the sidewalks of Water Street and Wall Street to look up at the burning World Trade Center tower. Then, just as suddenly, another airliner screamed into view and slammed into the other tower.
It was terrorism of a magnitude never before witnessed by mankind. Hundreds of Americans were dying before our eyes live on television. The shock brought home to America just how near and lethal the Islamist danger really was.
The anti-American jihad had scored a historic victory. The first steps of their twenty-year plan had gone off smoothly, and within days, America would be successfully goaded into sending troops into Afghanistan, a country known for centuries as “the graveyard of empires.”
It was, after all, the place where the mujahedeen like bin Laden had brought another
superpower to its knees in the 1980s. With the support of U.S. money and arms, the mujahideen had expelled their Soviet invaders. It was a dedicated, decade-long effort that proved the resourcefulness, combat capability, and will of the Islamist movement.
The Twenty-Year Plan (2000–2020)
If we want to understand our enemies, it helps to know what they think and they say. The U.S. government spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year gathering intelligence information about al-Qaeda and its affiliated terror organizations. For a tiny fraction of the cost, and with far less danger to our civil liberties, they could read the newspapers and accounts from people who have spent time with the terrorists and understand their goals and grand strategy.
One prominent example is a Jordanian journalist named Fouad Hussein, who spent years working his way into al-Qaeda’s inner circle. He has interviewed some of the most sought-after terrorists in the world, earning their trust and getting them to open up about their plans. “I interviewed a whole range of al-Qaida members with different ideologies to get an idea of how the war between the terrorists and Washington would develop in the future,” he wrote. In a little-noticed 2005 book, Al-Zarqawi: The Second Generation of Al Qaeda, which was published in Arabic, Hussein revealed the terrorist group’s twenty-year plan, which, in their own words, has seven different phases.
• Phase I: The Muslim Awakening (2000–2003)
Beginning with 9/11 and ending with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, this phase was aimed at provoking the West. “The first phase was judged by the strategists and masterminds behind al-Qaida as very successful,” Hussein reported. “The battlefield was opened up and the Americans and their allies became a closer and easier target.”
• Phase II: Opening Eyes (2003–2006)