Osama bin Laden: Declaration of Jihad against Americans

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places was published in al-Quds al-Arabi, a London-based Arabic newspaper. The purpose of the document was to persuade Muslims that the United States is the primary enemy of Muslims, responsible for oppressing them in numerous lands, and that Muslims therefore have a duty to wage jihad against America. The declaration blends religious texts with descriptions of overall Muslim suffering and the specific suffering of Muslims in Saudi Arabia. In the latter case, the declaration asserts that oppression, corruption, and economic mismanagement are connected to what it calls American military occupation of the heart of the Muslim world. The abridged version of the document reproduced here captures all of the major themes in the original version, which expands on grievances particular to Saudi Arabia and incorporates more citations of classical authorities.

Paragraphs 1–9

Bin Laden opens by addressing Muslims in general and the Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula in particular. The declaration follows the convention of Islamic discourse by providing citations from the two authoritative sources for guidance, the Qur'an and the Sunna. In Arabic, al-qur'an means “the recitation,” referring to the recitation of God's revealed word by the prophet Muhammad. The Sunna is the prophetic tradition, Muhammad's words and deeds recorded in hadiths, or reports traced to him. The Declaration of Jihad begins with a hadith in which the Prophet calls for expelling polytheists from Arabia. Bin Laden cites the hadith to remind Muslims of their obligation to rid Arabia of Americans. The Arabic term in the hadith translated as “polytheists” is kuffar, which has the general sense of “unbelievers” and can refer to both Christians and Jews.

Five quotations from the Qur'an follow the invocation of God's guidance. They call on the believers (Muslims) to be mindful of God, to trust that obedience to God and the Prophet will lead to success, and to remember that the believers are the best of humankind. The presentation of these verses serves to reinforce the Muslim believer's resolve to undertake a difficult and risky mission. There follows a hadith warning believers of a duty to restrain oppressors, an allusion to the Saudi authorities.

Paragraphs 10 and 11

The declaration proceeds to remind Muslims that they are under wide-ranging assault by Jewish and Christian powers. In April 1996, Israel had attacked Lebanon in an escalation of border clashes with the Hezbollah militia. On April 18 an Israeli artillery shell had struck a UN compound near the village of Qana, killing over one hundred Arab civilians who had sought refuge there. Meanwhile, Iraq was under UN sanctions that Muslims blamed for shortages of food and medicine, which they considered the cause of many civilian deaths. The list of eleven other regions where Muslims were struggling against occupation or non-Muslim domination illustrates the broad scale of Muslim suffering attributed to the United States and the United Nations for not allowing Muslims to acquire arms to defend themselves. The worst of all offenses against Muslims is cited as the American occupation of Saudi Arabia, because the Arabian Peninsula is the cradle of Islam and site of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Paragraphs 12–14

Bin Laden next asserts that despite the Muslim world's dire condition, believers should not despair, as religious scholars were leading an awakening to stir Muslim believers to rise up against their enemies. Islamic religious scholars have been natural leaders against corrupt rulers who collude with infidel enemies, and there are many historical examples of such scholars. Ibn Taymiyah (1263–1328), a fourteenth-century Syrian scholar who has become a significant influence on modern revivalist thinkers, urged the Muslims of his time to rally against a nominally Muslim Mongol dynasty rulership over Iraq and Iran. ‘Izz al-Din ibn ‘Abd al-Salam al-Sulami (1181–1262) is celebrated for having denounced a Muslim ruler who allied with the Crusaders against a Muslim rival. These two medieval scholars, renowned for standing up to rulers and urging believers to fight infidel enemies, are models for many modern-day Muslims.

Modern heroes include Abdallah Azzam (1941–1989), a Palestinian Muslim Brother whose activities for the Afghan jihad and writings on jihad in general have inspired many Muslims to enlist in the transnational militant movement. Ahmed Yassin (1937–2004), killed by an Israeli missile strike, was the leading religious figure in the Palestinian Hamas movement. Omar Abd al-Rahman (1938–2017) was the Egyptian leader of the militant Islamic Group. He was not killed by the United States, as the declaration states, but is serving a life sentence there for conspiracy to detonate a truck bomb under the World Trade Center in 1993. Salman al-Auda (1955–) and Safar al-Hawali (1950–) were the two leading figures in Saudi Arabia's Awakening (Sahwa) movement of the 1980s and 1990s. The declaration depicts the Saudi government as an American puppet, claiming that the Saudi authorities arrested al-Auda and al-Hawali at Washington's behest.

Bin Laden proceeds to place himself in the line of brave scholars, from Ibn Taymiyah to the present, who suffered for speaking truth to power and were forced to move from one country to another. Bin Laden found a haven in Khurasan, by which he means Afghanistan, site of the recent Muslim triumph over the Soviet Union. From his haven in Afghanistan, he says, he plans to strive against the alliance of Jews and Christians—in secular terms, Israel and the United States—which was inflicting injustice on umma, the worldwide community of Muslim believers. He highlights what are to his mind the two most grievous instances of the Judeo-Christian assault on Muslims: the occupation of Jerusalem by Israel and the takeover of Saudi Arabia by the United States. In his view, they are not discrete, unrelated political events but part of a single plan to oppress Muslims.

Paragraphs 15–19

The declaration turns from an overview of the Muslim world to conditions in Saudi Arabia, where every segment of society was suffering the effects of poverty, repression, and injustice. Bin Laden draws attention to anti-American violence in the kingdom and asserts that this was a natural reaction to widespread suffering. The fatal explosions in Riyadh and Khobar were expressions of mounting internal pressures. The Riyadh explosion took place in November 1995, when five Americans and two Indians were killed in a truck bombing against a National Guard building. A connection to al Qaeda has not been established, although the perpetrators were veterans of the Afghan jihad and Bin Laden applauded their deed. The explosion in Khobar, a city in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, occurred in June 1996, when a massive truck bomb was detonated near a military complex, killing nineteen U.S. soldiers. This attack was not related to al Qaeda; rather, it was probably the work of Saudi Hezbollah al-Hejaz militants.

The declaration taps the current of Saudi dissent in paragraph 16 by addressing economic and political issues. In the early and mid-1990s, low oil prices, a high rate of population increase, and slow economic growth made citizens' daily lives more difficult. Ordinary Saudis felt the effects of inflation and personal debt. The invocation of usury and foreign debt intimates the moral failings of the government, a point driven home with the complaint that the country abides by man-made laws rather than divine law. Government failure was not limited to the economic and legal realms: It included the fundamental task of defending the country against foreign threat, as posed by Iraq when it invaded Kuwait. That failure was embodied in the decision to allow American troops into Saudi Arabia, a situation considered equivalent to foreign occupation. When courageous religious scholars denounced the government for failing to manage the economy, defend the homeland, and rule according to God's law, the authorities threw them in prison.

To emphasize the Saudi government's most grievous offenses, the declaration states that the government lost legitimacy for two reasons in particular: first, for not ruling in accordance with religious law and crushing the dissent of religious scholars and “pious youth” who supported them and, second, for failing to defend the kingdom and permitting a prolonged Crusader occupation, which became the central factor underlying the country's terrible plight. All of these problems and policies came about despite efforts to offer sincere advice to the king. As early as May 1991 (the year 1411 AH in the Islamic calendar), religious intellectuals signed a petition calling for reforms to address economic problems and to buttress the Saudi government's commitment to Islam rather than paying lip service. Instead of heeding that petition and subsequent calls for reform, the ruling family ignored them and punished their authors.

Paragraph 20 and 21

In paragraph 20 the declaration comes to speak more directly to its Muslim audience, first by posing a rhetorical question asking how the Saudi government can be the largest arms buyer and trading partner with a country that occupies the kingdom and props up Israeli control over Palestine, with the accompanying killing and deportation of its Muslims. In order to combat the United States, Muslims in Saudi Arabia should boycott American goods as part of fulfilling the duty to wage jihad.

The declaration then cites authoritative religious texts to summon Muslim youth to wage jihad against the Americans occupying the Muslim holy places. The Qur'an promises heavenly reward to believers who die in the course of waging jihad. Three hadiths describe in detail the heavenly rewards in store for martyrs, such as forgiveness for sins, high standing among the denizens of paradise, marriage to seventy-two virgins, and the right to intercede for seventy kinsmen. Continuing the citation of religious texts in paragraph 21, the declaration cites a hadith in which the angel Gabriel urged the Prophet not to rest after a battlefield triumph against a coalition of Arabian tribes (the ahzab, or parties). Instead, the Prophet was to lead his men against the Banu Qurayza (here spelled Bani Qorayza), a Jewish clan that had not accepted his authority.

Paragraphs 22–24

The lesson for today's Muslims is that achieving victory in one quarter, such as Afghanistan or Bosnia-Herzegovina, is no reason to cease waging jihad when Muslims are under occupation in Saudi Arabia and Palestine. Therefore, Bin Laden calls on Muslims not only in occupied lands but, indeed, everywhere to join the jihad against the Americans and the Israelis, the enemies of Muslims.

The language of the declaration provokes the believer's imagination to see the world through the lens of religion rather than nationality: Muslims are brethren and compatriots, not citizens of different nations, and they share the same political and military fortunes regardless of country of origin. Likewise, the enemies of Muslims, be they Israeli, American, or Soviet, are all part of the non-Muslim—that is, Judeo-Christian or Zionist-Crusader—aggression against Muslims. The division of the world into believers and unbelievers is at the heart of global jihad's appeal for recruiting warriors of various nationalities to armed struggle against oppressors of Muslims anywhere. The declaration closes with a summation of the call for Muslims to cooperate for the sake of liberating Islam's holy places—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem—as part of the effort to unify all Muslims under allegiance to God.