Tellingly, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy and Al Qaeda's chief planner and ideological theorist, responded by issuing a lengthy “rebuttal” to Dr. Fadl's clearly damaging announcement. Yet it is not only bin Laden and al-Qaeda who embraced a totalitarian vision of absolute power. After he seized control of Iran, Khomeini proceeded to advance the revolutionary doctrine that his was the single, ultimate religious and political authority in that country. In an edict released in 1988, Khomeini claimed that “the government is authorized unilaterally to abolish its lawful accords with the people and…to prevent any matter, be it spiritual or material, that poses a threat to its interests” (emphasis added). He went on to make the astonishing declaration that “for Islam, the requirements of government supersede every tenet, including even those of prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca” (emphasis added). Thus did Khomeini subordinate the traditional prescriptions of religion to the absolute dictates of the state.9
Like bin Laden, Khomeini was essentially declaring himself and his movement to be above the law, beyond the reach of traditional religious authority. Highlighting this fact were the enormous posters of Khomeini that hung in public places during his reign. This cult of personality is redolent of the historical totalitarian practice of elevating despots to iconic status. Stalin, Hitler, Mao—each elevated himself into the personification of the dominant ideology. Thus was the cult of the supreme, infallible leader on full display.
Clearly, then, the intellectual and political aspects of violent Islamist extremism mirror Western radicalism. This extreme Islamism reflects Western totalitarian ideology thinly cloaked in Muslim rhetoric. But this raises a crucial question. Is it a coincidence? If not, how and when did this foreign, ideologically driven outlook penetrate the Middle East, distort Islamic teaching, and develop into the threat we are facing today?10
History: Tracing Radical Islamism's Western Roots
The answer may be found by examining the decade that followed World War I. For a number of Muslim-reared intellectuals, it was an especially dark and painful chapter of history. The ignominious collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent assumption of mandate authority over much of the Middle East heartland by Britain and France were viewed as humiliating setbacks to the advance of Islamic civilization. The abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by the Turkish reformer Kemal Ataturk, in the land where proud Ottomans once ruled, was perhaps the crowning indignity of that period.
Post-World War I Germany provides a striking parallel. Like the Ottomans, the Germans lost the war. Many felt humiliated by the defeat and its implications, including the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. It was in the bleak postwar era that Hitler's Nazis blamed Germany's troubles on foreigners and advocated the recovery of a mythical past by empowering a pure Aryan master race that would rule not just Germany but the world. In that same era, in response to a similar sense of crisis, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher. Blaming his civilization's problems on the rise of foreign influences, Banna favored a similar return to a romantic, idealized origin, so that an ideologically pure pan-Islamist movement and its leaders would arise and its leaders would take their place as masters of the Middle East and eventually the world. University of London professor Efraim Karsh noted how Banna admired Hitler and Mussolini, created a paramilitary wing patterned after Hitler's SS, and synthesized “the tactic of terror, the cult of death, and the lust for conquest.”11 Banna himself stated that “death is an art, and the most exquisite of arts when practiced by the skillful artist.”
What Banna supported, in other words, was not only the rejection of liberal democracy, but the violent perversion of traditional Islam for the purpose of advancing a more radical, politically driven vision similar to today's radical Islam. Not surprisingly, Banna warned his followers to expect vehement opposition from traditional Muslim scholars and clerics.12
The affinity of his vision with totalitarianism, along with its hatred of Jews and Zionism, led Banna's Brotherhood to connect with Nazi Germany through the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Nazi collaborator who lived in Berlin for most of the Second World War. The intellectual commerce between Banna's Is-lamism and Hitler's Nazism helped open the Middle East to paranoid conspiracy theories alleging Jewish capitalist control of the world's financial and economic systems, as well as the notorious Czarist forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” about a supposed Jewish plot to control the world. And following the end of World War II, when Britain and the United States were seeking to apprehend Husseini as a war criminal, the Brotherhood helped ensure that he was granted asylum in Egypt.13
By the close of World War II, Banna's organization claimed more than 500,000 members in Egypt alone. More important, in the decades that followed, it spawned a new generation of leaders and disciples that created the extremist organizations of today, along with their totalitarian mindset and practices.
In 1949, following the assassination of Egypt's prime minister, the government responded by assassinating Banna. His successor, Sayyid Qutb, further articulated the Islamist vision, employing both Marxist and fascist critiques of democratic capitalism. Tellingly, he compared his version of Islam not to other religions, but to distinctly secular ideologies and stages. As part of this effort, Qutb explicitly embraced Marx's stages of history. Along with Marx, he believed that just as industrial capitalism had replaced agrarianism, capitalism, in turn, would yield to a superior Marxian socialism. Significantly, he added Islamism as the fourth and final stage that would follow Marxism.14
Ultimately, Qutb wanted this extremist ideology imposed from above by an elite revolutionary vanguard seizing state power in Bolshevik fashion. Building on Banna's teachings, he supported unleashing this vanguard in pursuit of a world caliphate by removing all traditional restraints on warfare. In 1966, Qutb, along with a number of other Muslim Brotherhood members, was hanged for conspiring to assassinate Egypt's nationalist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Among the many members arrested in connection with that conspiracy was a fifteen-year-old named Ayman al-Zawahiri.15 Zawahiri first met bin Laden in the mid-1980s and then joined him in Sudan in the early 1990s. He is said to have exclaimed that bin Laden was “the new Che Guevara.”16 By the early 1980s, bin Laden was in Afghanistan. Concomitantly, in Peshawar, Pakistan, fellow member Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was providing the infrastructure to fight the Soviets through his Office of Services, which would later form the basis for Al Qaeda.17
Today, the Muslim Brotherhood publicly renounces violence. Yet unquestionably its early formation and development, influenced heavily by Western totalitarianism, helped produce not only the ideology but eventually the leadership for today's violent Islamist extremism.18 That includes not only the Sunni extremism of bin Ladenism but the Shiite radicalism of Khomeini's regime in Iran. From the beginning, Banna had envisioned a pan-Islamic ideological and political network that would span the Muslim world.
As World War II drew to a close, Navab Safavi, an Iranian cleric, created a radical group that assassinated a number of Iranian intellectual and political leaders. In 1953, he visited the Brotherhood in Egypt. While Safavi was later executed for attempting to assassinate his country's prime minister, several among his group went on to play critical roles in helping Khomeini seize power a generation later.19 Khomeini's conversion from conservative cleric to radical Islamic ideologue by the early 1970s helped paved the way for the Revolution of 1978 and for Islamism to penetrate Shiite strongholds in the Middle East, including parts of Lebanon, where the terrorist group Hezbollah was created.
Far from being an exclusively Shi`a phenomenon, Khomeini's revolution made it a point to honor Sunni fellow radicals. Under the ayatollah, a postage stamp commemorating Qutb was unveiled, and under Khomeini's successor, Ali Khamenei, Qutb's voluminous works were translated into Persian.20 Until 2006, streets in Tehran, such as Islambouli Street, could still be found named in honor of the Sunni assassins of Egyptian
