Authors: Jason Burke
Osama bin Laden finished high school in Jeddah in 1974 and decided against joining his siblings overseas.
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He was one of only three bin Laden children not to have been educated abroad. One elder brother, Salim, had been educated at Millfield, the British boarding school. Another, Yeslam, went to university in Sweden and California.
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Instead, Osama entered the management and economics faculty at Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. It appears that he married his first
wife, a Syrian related to his mother, at this time. He was 17 but a marriage at such a young age would not have been seen as unusual. There is no evidence that in this period, or any other for that matter, Osama bin Laden travelled to the West, despite reports to the contrary.
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Salim, the elder brother who had run the bin Laden corporation after their father’s death, hoped Osama would take up a useful role in the family business and ensured that a key element of his university course was civil engineering.
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Osama preferred the (compulsory) Islamic studies component of his course.
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He graduated in 1979. At university, Osama, already a devout young man, was exposed to the radical fringe of contemporary Islam. Jeddah itself, and Abdul Aziz University in particular, was a centre for Islamic dissidents from all over the Muslim world.
Lecturing at Jeddah were Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian academic who was to go on to be the primary ideologue of the ‘Arab Afghans’, and Mohammed Qutb, the brother of Syed Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist executed in Egypt in 1966, who, posthumously, had become one of the most influential writers and thinkers of modern radical Islam. Both were among the hundreds of radical Islamic activists given sanctuary by the Saudi Arabians as part of their campaign to counter the atheistic socialism that was the dominant ideology in the Middle East at the time. Many lived and worked in Jeddah.
Among those activists every strand within contemporary Islamic thought was represented. There were rigorous Wahhabis and Salafis. There were men whose hope for reform was based on ideas formulated by the moderate reformist thinkers of the late nineteenth century. Many, including Azzam, Syed and Mohammed Qutb, were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a social and religious reforming movement founded by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928. Al-Banna himself was drawing on older ideologies, primarily that of Jamal al-Din Afghani. With Syed Abdul A’la Maududi, a Pakistani thinker who lived at roughly the same time, al-Banna is considered the father of what is known as modern political Islamism. Bin Laden and other Islamic militants active today have travelled an enormous ideological distance from the theories and practices of such men. Their thinking is barely
recognizable in the nihilistic, anti-rational, millenarian rhetoric and worldview of today’s extremists.
As al-Wahhab, ibn Taimiya and the Kharijites had been searching for an answer to the problems that faced them in the eighteenth, fourteenth and seventh centuries respectively in the original texts of Islam, so the major Islamic revivalist thinkers of the mid twentieth century sought solutions for their own set of problems. Others, including bin Laden, were to do the same towards the end of the century. At the time when al-Banna and Maududi were becoming active, it was the end of the caliphate, the parcelling up of almost all the Muslim lands by the Western colonial powers and the clear technological and material supremacy of the West, coupled with the iniquity and social failures of Islamic society, that were felt as a profound humiliation and threat by many Muslims. Al-Banna, who was born in 1906, was a schoolteacher who lived in the Egyptian town of Isma’iliyya on the Suez Canal. He saw Islam as a perfect, total and all-encompassing system, regulating every part of the social, political, personal and religious life of the believer. Like so many reformers before him, he believed that the Qur’an, the hadith and the example of the early Muslim community provided the model for every Muslim’s every action, and the
Shariat
, which he saw as the totality of a Muslim’s practice of his faith, was the ideal blueprint for a modern Muslim society. He deduced, like ibn Taimiya and others, that the current problems faced by Islam were the result of the failure of Muslims to follow the ‘straight path’.
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Given the social injustice that existed everywhere around him, al-Banna concluded that the ulema had failed in their primary duty of regulating the exercise of temporal power to promote a fair and just society and that others now had to take up the struggle. This struggle was, of course, jihad. But al-Banna was not an unthinking reactionary. He believed that a jihad against colonial or neo-colonial domination and for Islamic reform and regeneration should be married to a jihad for literacy, education, social services and justice.
Da’wa
, or preaching, should be directed both at reforming the state and at making existing Muslims better Muslims. This was to be a gradual process; al-Banna did not expect quick results. He started preaching himself and in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood. It
was, he said, ‘a Salafiya message, a Sunni way, a Sufi truth, a political organization, an athletic group, a scientific and cultural union, an economic enterprise and a social idea’. In the 1930s, al-Banna expressed admiration for the Nazi Brownshirts.
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Like all Islamic revivalists, al-Banna was working in the space between the holy texts and their interpretation. Physically, he was working in the space between the establishment mosques, with their loyal ulema, and the domestic home. It is clear that al-Banna was reacting to the experience of British colonialism and contact with the West. ‘Until recently,’ he wrote, ‘writers, intellectuals, scholars and governments glorified in the principles of European civilization, gave themselves a Western tint, and adopted a European style and manner; today… the wind has changed, and reserve and distrust have taken their place. Voices are raised proclaiming the necessity for a return to the principles, teaching and ways of Islam… for initiating the reconciliation of modern life with these principles as a prelude to final “Islamization”.’
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Al-Banna, like Syed Abdul A’la Maududi in Pakistan, aimed to transform his society in an immediate and real way. He had begun the process, which, like Maududi, he knew would be gradual, of creating a mass political movement that eventually would, he hoped, establish a truly Islamic state. It is important to remember that he was thinking and working in the 1930s and was interested in mass movements in Soviet Russia and the West. Al-Banna recruited from every sector of society though particularly among the rural, or recently urbanized, petty bourgeoisie. The Muslim Brotherhood built schools and tutorial colleges for poor Muslims and founded clinics and hospitals. Within twenty years his organization, which became increasingly explicitly political, had recruited millions of members in Egypt and set up dozens of branches overseas. The Brotherhood began to develop violent strands, particularly after groups of activists had fought in the 1948–9 war in Israel-Palestine, and the Egyptian government, which had at times tried to use the movement to counter radical left-wing thought, dissolved it amid widespread disturbances. Al-Banna was assassinated by Egyptian secret police in 1949 in retaliation for the murder of the Egyptian prime minister, allegedly by a member of the Brotherhood’s ‘secret organization’, a year earlier.
Syed Abdul A’la Maududi, the other great early ideologue of political Islamism and a major influence on al-Banna, was born on 25 September 1903 in Aurangabad, in the princely state of Hyderabad in India. As a
syed
, his ancestry on the paternal side was theoretically traceable back to the Prophet Mohammed. His father, a lawyer, was a devoutly religious man and his family had a long tradition of spiritual leadership.
Maududi went to a relatively progressive high school where modern Western and traditional Islamic styles of education were combined. His undergraduate studies were disrupted by the illness and eventual death of his father and he had no further formal education, Islamic or otherwise. Thus, despite fluency in Urdu, Persian, Arabic and English, he had no credentials as an alim, something that undoubtedly contributed to his view of the ulema as corrupt, conservative and self-serving.
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To earn a living, Maududi turned to journalism, and in his many writings he sought to evolve a coherent body of thought that would equip Muslims, primarily those in India, to face, practically and ideologically, the challenge that the obvious dominance of the West presented. In India in the 1930s that confrontation was particularly acutely felt.
Maududi felt strongly that the de facto split that had emerged in Muslim societies between the functions of secular leaders and the religious leadership, the ulema, must end. The idea that the ulema’s task was to ensure the ruler governed in accordance with the Shariat was wrong.
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In fact, the ulema hindered the implementation of the Shariat. Instead, sovereignty should be exercised in the name of Allah by a small elite, trained in classical Islamic subjects and modern sciences.
To create such a state, Maududi argued that a huge effort, a jihad, was required. In this he was drawing on existing traditions of opposition to oppression in south Asia going back several centuries. His first book, an analysis of the concept of jihad in Islam, was published in 1930 and argued that jihad was the central tenet of the religion. Its aim should be political: to establish an Islamic state. For Maududi, Islam was not just a religion but a political programme that needed to be implemented through practical action. Maududi turned religion
into an ideology of political struggle. As with al-Banna, it is important to remember that Maududi was writing at a time when political debate, even in the Third World, was increasingly dominated by the two newly emergent totalitarian ideologies of fascism and communism. Islamism, with its own totalizing ideology and techniques of mass organization aimed at seizing and controlling the state, bears comparison with both.
This radical development is reinforced by the clear influence of Western political thinkers in Maududi’s writing. His relationship with European thought is far more complex than mere reaction or rejection. According to Malise Ruthven, Maududi was ‘strongly influenced by the intellectual climate of the 1930s, particularly the writings of Alexis Carrel, a popular French writer who would later be discredited for his support for the Vichy government’. Ruthven suggests that Carrel’s denunciations of the ‘corruptions’ of modern living found their way into Maududi’s denunciations of the West as a ‘sewer of vice and wickedness’.
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More obvious, however, is Maududi’s borrowing of revolutionary methodology. Maududi founded his Jamaat Islami in 1941 explicitly to create motivated and trained cadres who he hoped would be the ‘vanguard’ of the Islamic revolution.
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The name Jamaat Islami is significant and has been used again and again by radical groups. ‘The Islamic society’ implied is both the aim of the movement, i.e. to Islamicize all society and societies, and the means, i.e. a small, self-contained community who practise correct Islam within the broader un-Islamic society and who, by their example, spread the faith. Maududi found useful material in Islamic history to dress what are basically Leninist tactics in more locally acceptable clothes. The earliest Muslims who accompanied Mohammed during the hijra to Medina were deliberately and explicitly redesignated a ‘vanguard’. Maududi also used, for the first time, the term
jahillyya
in a modern context. Previously it had been used to describe the state of anarchy, barbarism and lawlessness that the pre-Islamic tribes of Arabia had lived in. Now Maududi used it to describe ‘modern society’.
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This proximity in conception to radical left-wing thought is key, showing the roots of both ideologies in attempts to address genuine social, economic, cultural and political problems.
However, unlike the Bolsheviks, Maududi was committed to staying within the law. Although he initially opposed the creation of Pakistan on the grounds that it was to be dominated by secular nationalists, from 1947, when Pakistan came into existence, his Jamaat Islami cadres – largely recruited from the Urdu-speaking prosperous and educated middle classes – worked hard and without violence (and without much success) to Islamicize the new state.
Indeed it is important to remember that both al-Banna and Maududi were gradualists who looked to appropriate the apparatus of the state to implement their own, admittedly reactionary, aims. As such they were political Islamists and differed greatly from the dogmatically puritan Wahhabis, for whom any state differing from that prescribed by the Qur’an, and any Western influence at all, was anathema. However, whereas Maududi and al-Banna believed in a peaceful jihad through social activism and example, the fiery Syed Qutb, the third great ideologue of Sunni political Islamism and the bridge to the more radical contemporary strains prevalent today, did not.
Qutb, a school inspector, joined al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood in 1953 when he was 47. He came from a poor if well-educated family in Musha, a small village near Asyut in Upper Egypt. His father had been an active member of the secular National Party and involved in rioting against the British colonial administration. Qutb had been an intelligent, sensitive, highly articulate and devout boy whose health was fragile all his life. He read European literature widely in translation and was a well-regarded critic. One of his discoveries was the young Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz.