responded by expelling bin Laden from the country and, eventually, revoking his citizenship. When the Gulf War ended, the United States retained its military bases and thousands of troops on the Arabian Peninsula. The removal of US military forces from the holy land was one of al-Qaeda’s primary objectives. As a result, the United States—bin Laden’s onetime ally—would become an important al-Qaeda target.
The First Gulf War also precipitated the 1991 transfer of al-Qaeda’s headquarters and training camps to Sudan. From there the organization launched a network of cells and allied organizations that radiated into the Greater Horn of Africa, a geographic region that included Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. In May 1996, under pressure from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the UN Security Council, the Sudanese government asked bin Laden to leave. He moved al-Qaeda’s headquarters back to Afghanistan, where the organization allied with the Taliban. Blaming the United States for his ejection from Sudan, bin Laden focused new attention on this distant enemy. In August 1996 he issued a declaration of jihad against US military forces in Saudi Arabia and called on all Muslims to expel Americans and Israelis from Muslim lands.
Al-Qaeda’s September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, were preceded by a number of other assaults against US citizens and infrastructure. These included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as well as thwarted attacks on New York City bridges and tunnels, the UN headquarters, and the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; a failed attempt in 1999 to blow up Los Angeles International Airport; and in 2000, a successful attack on the US Navy destroyer USS Cole, which was docked in Yemen. Although al-Qaeda’s September 2001 attacks opened a new chapter in the war on terror, the United States had been fighting the terrorist organizations it had helped to create since the mid-1990s.
Misconceptions about Islam
If the role of the United States and its allies in fomenting extremist violence is frequently overlooked, the role of Islam in abetting terrorism is often misunderstood. The US-led war on terror has inspired or reinforced many misconceptions about Islam, a religion that originated on the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century and has spread around the world since then. The emergence of modern political movements operating under Islam’s banner has led to considerable debate over appropriate ways to distinguish these movements and the terminology used to describe them. The lack of authoritative consensus has resulted in much confusion. Islamism, a twentieth-century ideology and movement pertaining to social, political, and religious life, has been confounded with Islamic fundamentalism, which pertains to religious doctrine. Similarly, political Islam—one aspect of Islamism—is often conflated with political terrorism, actions that are embraced by only a small minority of Muslims and whose legitimacy is widely challenged in the world Muslim community. Finally, the Arabic word jihad is frequently translated as “holy war” and associated with death by the sword. In Islam, however, there are three meanings of jihad, two of them nonviolent. Although experts continue to debate the precise meaning of these terms, this study has adopted the following definitions as the most appropriate.11
Islam is the name of a world religion, derived from the Arabic word salema, which means peace, purity, submission, and obedience. The name implies submission to Allah’s will and obedience to his law. The two main branches of Islam, Sunni and Shi’a, agree on its five pillars: (1) faith in a monotheistic deity, Allah, whose messenger is Muhammad; (2) engaging in prayers five times daily; (3) giving alms to the poor; (4) fasting during the holy month of Ramadan; and (5) making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once, if physically and financially able.
Islamic fundamentalism refers to Islamic beliefs that reject religious innovation or adaptation in response to new circumstances. Practitioners of fundamentalism, more generally, advocate a return to basic religious principles and the strict application of religious law. Fundamentalism often emerges as a reaction to liberalizing trends within a religion or to secularization in the broader society. It represents a struggle between tendencies within a given religion, rather than a clash between religions. The descriptor “religious fundamentalism” was first associated with late nineteenth-century Protestant Christians in the United States who embraced a literal interpretation of the Bible. Like their Christian counterparts, Islamic fundamentalists promote strict observance of their religion’s basic tenets and laws. Their movements have gained strength in the face of the religious innovation, Westernization, and secularization that followed the establishment of European colonialism in the twentieth century and globalization in the twenty-first. The vast majority of Islamic fundamentalists are law-abiding and oppose violent jihad, focusing instead on the ethical, moral, and personal aspects of jihad (see below). They believe that an Islamic state will emerge from a Muslim community that has been purified from within through preaching and proselytizing and that such a state cannot be established through political or armed struggle.
Islamism refers to a social, political, and religious ideology and movement that emerged in response to European colonialism and the social instability wrought by encounters with the West. Its adherents hold that Islamic principles should serve as the basis of the social, political, and legal order and guide the personal lives of individual Muslims. Often led by intellectuals rather than clergy members, Islamist movements focus on social and political change rather than on religious doctrine. Moderate Islamists work within established institutions and political processes to pursue social and political reforms that, they hope, will result in states that are premised on Islamic law and built from the bottom up. Radical Islamists strive to monopolize political power so that they can construct Islamic states from the top down. Islamists do not reject all aspects of Western culture, and they may even embrace Western education and technology as useful tools for the construction of Islamic states. Islamists, in contrast to jihadis (defined below), reject the use of violence to achieve their objectives.
Political Islam is sometimes used synonymously with Islamism, even though it constitutes only one aspect of the social, political, and religious ideology and movement. Although political Islam employs the language of religion, it represents a political rather than a religious response to Westernization. Its adherents do not reject modernity, but they repudiate a particular brand of modernity. They refute the claim that the Western definition of modernity is a universal one and embrace an Islamist variant in its place.
Jihad means effort or struggle. A person who engages in jihad is a mujahid (plural, mujahideen). Jihad has three interrelated meanings: first, the inner spiritual struggle to live righteously, as a good Muslim; second, the struggle to build and purify the Muslim community; and third, the struggle to defend the Islamic faith from outsiders, with force if necessary. The first meaning, which refers to a personal spiritual struggle, constitutes the greater jihad. The second and third meanings, which focus on the outside world, comprise the lesser jihad. Historically, jihad has been understood first and foremost as an inner struggle that begins with the self and extends outward to the broader society. Those who undertake such struggle believe that social and political reforms are best achieved through preaching, proselytizing, and mobilizing the masses to effect change from the bottom up. Engaging in the lesser jihad is held to be a collective duty of the Muslim community, as determined situationally by religious and legal authorities, rather than a permanent personal duty as determined by individuals or self-appointed preachers.
Since the onset of the war on terror, Western observers have frequently collapsed all forms of jihad into one, erroneously defined as a “holy war” against nonbelievers. The concept of holy war originated among Christians in medieval Europe to justify crusades against Muslims; it has no direct counterpart in mainstream Islamic thought. Jihad is not one of the five pillars of Islam and thus is not a practice that is essential to Muslim identity.
Jihadism refers to a minority insurgent movement that broke from Islamism and employs violence in the name of religion. Jihadism emerged in the context of severe social, political, and economic inequalities, and in many cases, political persecution. The
