Osama bin Laden: Declaration of Jihad against Americans

Context

Bin Laden's Declaration of Jihad reflects the intersection of several currents in late-twentieth-century Muslim politics, including the evolution of Islamic revivalist ideologies, the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan of the 1980s, and the emergence of religious dissent in Saudi Arabia. By the 1970s, Islamic revivalist organizations like the Society of the Muslim Brothers, or Muslim Brotherhood, had become influential actors in Arab and Muslim countries. Such organizations sought to make Islam the central principle of politics and society in the belief that doing so would improve moral and material conditions and strengthen society against Western powers. In Egypt, the Society of the Muslim Brothers was the largest and most influential revivalist organization. The Muslim Brotherhood was generally inclined to consider gradual reform the surest path to realizing its vision of a true Islamic social order. In the mid-1970s, however, radical splinter groups jettisoned the gradualist approach and adopted a revolutionary attitude toward the Egyptian government, deeming its leaders to be apostates—renouncers of Islam—and therefore legitimate targets for religiously sanctioned warfare, or jihad.

Throughout the history of Islam from its rise in the seventh century, jihad as a form of military struggle took two forms: either warfare against non-Muslim lands in order to expand the realm of Islam or warfare to defend Muslim lands against non-Muslim aggression. (Jihad as a spiritual struggle to bring one's soul into alignment with divine will is a related but distinct sense of the term, with its own history.) Deeming a Muslim ruler to be an apostate and labeling rebellion against such a ruler to be jihad is a modern development in Muslim thought. In the name of such jihad, militants assassinated the Egyptian president Anwar as-Sadat in 1981. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, was obliged to fight militant organizations that attacked government officials, security forces, and foreign tourists. During the 1990s the Egyptian government succeeded in its campaign to suppress the militant organizations, but their ideology of rebellion in the name of jihad spread to other Muslim countries.

Jihad was also invoked in Muslim movements for national liberation and minority rights. In Palestine and Kashmir, for example, the breakup of the British Empire caused Muslim populations to find themselves living under non-Muslim rule—Jewish Israeli rule in Palestine and Hindu-majority Indian rule in Kashmir. In the case of Palestine, national liberation movements from the 1950s to the 1980s generally framed the cause in secular, anticolonial terms, as did the nationalist movements in African and Asian politics. In the 1980s, however, it became increasingly common for those involved to frame liberation struggle as jihad to free Muslim land from infidel rule. In historical terms, this form of jihad fit the template of defense against non-Muslim aggression and therefore more readily captured Muslim imaginations than did the notion of rebellious jihad against an apostate ruler.

The idiom of defensive jihad likewise colored the struggle in Afghanistan against a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union. In April 1978, a Marxist political party seized power in Kabul. In the context of the cold war rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Afghan coup—called the Saur Revolution—prompted alarm in Washington, which was also preoccupied with events in Iran, where antigovernment protests that year led to the ouster of a pro-Western monarchy. As much of the world's attention focused on developments in the newly proclaimed Islamic Republic of Iran, Kabul's Marxist regime was undermined by disputes between the ruling Khalq faction and the rival Parcham faction. A bloody purge in September 1979, whereby the leader of the Khalq tried to eliminate the Parcham's leadership, threatened to destabilize the government. Moscow responded by sending military forces into Afghanistan to oust the Khalq and install Parcham's leader. Instead of stabilizing the situation, the Soviet invasion initiated the Soviet-Afghan war: The United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia supported the anti-Communist Afghan forces.

Muslim solidarity with Afghans took the form of a transnational volunteer campaign, with headquarters in Peshawar, Pakistan, as thousands of young Muslims from Arab countries and central and southern Asia flocked to fight the infidel Communists. Various Islamic groups operated guest houses that served as centers for recruitment, propaganda, and channels to military training camps. Osama bin Laden founded al Qaeda in August 1988. Al Qaeda originally limited membership to Arab volunteers for the broadly defined purpose of waging jihad on behalf of oppressed Muslims in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

One phase of the Soviet-Afghan War concluded when Moscow decided to withdraw its forces in 1989, leaving its Communist client exposed to Afghan enemies. The ensuing civil war involved the defeat of the Communists in 1992, leaving Afghan forces and the emerging Taliban movement to grapple for power. In the meantime, Muslim volunteers departed for other fronts on the expanding horizon of jihad in defense of Muslims in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kashmir, and elsewhere.

In 1989 and 1990, Bin Laden and other Saudi “Afghans,” as veterans of the jihad in Afghanistan were known, returned home as heroes to a country where upholding Islam formed the core of dynastic legitimacy. Some decades earlier, the Saudi Arabian dynasty had demonstrated Muslim solidarity when it admitted Muslim Brothers fleeing persecution under Arab nationalist governments. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi government ostentatiously championed religious causes by cooperating in Pan-Islamic organizations to distribute funds for mosques, schools, and publications. The one blemish on the Saudi government's Pan-Islamic record was its alignment with the United States, which was unpopular for its close relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia's delicate balance between strategic security under Washington's military umbrella and domestic legitimacy through adherence to Islamic principles was ruptured in the wake of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

When Saddam Hussein's forces occupied Kuwait in August 1990, it was not clear whether he intended to send his army into Saudi Arabia as well, in order to seize the world's richest oil fields. Not trusting Hussein's intentions, the United States dispatched a diplomatic mission to Riyadh to see whether Saudi leaders would allow American and allied military forces into the kingdom to deter a possible Iraqi attack. Bin Laden tried to dissuade the Saudi government from admitting non-Muslim forces, proposing that Saudi forces and Muslim volunteers for jihad, on the Afghan model, could protect the kingdom. The Saudi government nonetheless decided to rely on the massive conventional military power offered by Washington. The upshot was a severe political crisis for Saudi Arabia.

The crux of the controversy over hosting American forces rested on two issues. First, Muslims are not supposed to seek military assistance from non-Muslims. Second, the introduction of non-Muslim troops into Arabia created the impression that the holy places were under infidel occupation. Saudi religious dissidents like Safar al-Hawali and Salman al-Auda emerged as leaders of a movement known as Sahwa, or “the Awakening.” They argued that the government had effectively surrendered the country's sovereignty to Washington. When American troops remained even after the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the dissidents called for fundamental government reform to curb Western influence, broaden the scope of Islamic law, and relieve economic distress. By 1994 the authorities had suppressed the movement through censorship and arrests of leaders such as al-Hawali and al-Auda. Bin Laden ended up in Afghanistan by May 1996.

Meanwhile, debate continued among Muslim militants regarding the strategies of jihad. Until the mid-1990s, the antigovernment facet of jihad had focused solely on secular authoritarian regimes in Muslim nations, seeking to destabilize Algeria and Egypt, for instance. These regimes and others were able to defeat the jihadist rebels, leading some in their ranks to conclude that it was fruitless to attack “the near enemy”—the regional regimes—when they had the powerful backing of the Western powers, “the far enemy,” especially the United States. Proponents of waging jihad against the far enemy eventually decided to target the United States, in the belief that only if its forces were expelled from the Muslim world would jihad against its local clients be successful. The declaration issued by Bin Laden in August 1996, then, embodies the mixing of Saudi religious dissent with the emergence of the notion of fighting a jihad against the far enemy, a struggle that would become known as global jihad.