Book Review by Alexander Dietz
The Al Qaeda Reader
Edited and translated by Raymond Ibrahim
Doubleday
ISBN 038551655X
Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, two patterns of thought emerged in the American political consciousness. One group sought to explain Al Qaeda’s catastrophic acts of aggression by pointing to the controversial history of US involvement in the Middle East, suggesting that it was only natural, to paraphrase Malcolm X, that the chickens should come home to roost. The other group saw such efforts as inherently sympathetic to the men who murdered nearly three thousand people, and thought the attackers should simply be recognized as evil.
While there is, unfortunately, a significant constituency whose default position is to vilify the United States, no one should dismiss attempts to study the psychology of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization, for they may be crucial in the war against Islamist extremism. To this end, Americans should welcome the publication of The Al Qaeda Reader, a compilation of both famous and unknown texts by the group, painstakingly translated by Raymond Ibrahim. In the years before the outbreak of the Second World War, Ibrahim asserts, the citizens of what would become the Allied Powers made a fatal mistake by failing to read or take seriously the spectacular claims of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. The author rightly warns the West not to repeat this mistake.
It is clear from reading the tracts of bin Laden and his affiliates that surrendering to their loudest foreign-policy demands would not dissuade them from continuing their jihad. This is a lesson for both Democrats and some isolationist Republicans, such as Ron Paul, who said at a presidential debate that America was attacked on September 11 “because we’ve been over there, we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years.” One of the book’s most useful revelations is the distinction between Al Qaeda’s political propaganda and its theology. Ibrahim shows that the group’s public complaints about America’s presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, and its support for Israel, represent only the surface of the extremists’ enmity for the West.
Of course, this is not to say that the direction of U.S. foreign policy is irrelevant to the appeal of terrorism. Most recruits for organizations like Al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and others do not begin as ideologues. One of the reasons for which bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, emphasize political rather than religious grievances is that political motivations are more likely to drive ordinary young men to fight the Westerners they believe are occupying their land and killing their countrymen. Still, a withdrawal from Iraq or further capitulation by Israel would not be a safe course to reduce the rate at which people decide to become terrorists; it might, after all, only encourage them, just as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan encouraged bin Laden’s mujahidin.
One of the texts featured in The Al Qaeda Reader, confidently titled “Moderate Islam Is a Prostration to the West,” criticizes Saudi religious leaders for seeking to open a constructive dialogue with the United States. A grasp of the nature of this hard-line view is especially timely, as 138 Muslim scholars wrote a letter to the principal leaders of various Christian denominations just weeks ago, proposing the same sort of exchange. Such writings shed light on the complicated and ever-shifting dynamic within Islam between the moderate majority and the fundamentalist minority. If Western governments wish to develop not only effective Middle East policy but to prevent further homegrown terrorism, they must study this relationship.
It is also clear that to appease the organization by cutting back America’s social freedoms would be not only cowardly, but also ineffectual. Conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza argued in his recent book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, that Islamist extremists do not attack the West for its foreign policy, but for its licentious culture. “The left has produced a moral shift in American society that has resulted in a deluge of gross depravity and immorality,” he wrote. Therefore, “American conservatives should join the Muslims and others in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced by liberal values.”
Never mind that Sayyid Qutb, a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the most influential figures in Islamism, drew his righteous indignation not from the sexual revolution, but from the America of the 1940s. As The Al Qaeda Reader shows, Bin Laden and his ilk truly will not be satisfied until all non-Muslims are either killed, converted, or live as dhimmis, second-class citizens in Islamic societies. They believe that their faith requires them to spread Islam and sharia law, without exception or compromise. “The good of the people is found in Islam,” they declare, “and Islam is spread with the sword alone, just as the Prophet went forth with the sword.”
The Al Qaeda Reader is a hugely important step toward a greater public awareness of the aims and the motivations of the people presenting one of the most formidable challenges of the twenty-first century. The West must understand the thinking of this evil and murderous organization not to excuse it, but to defeat it.
Mr. Dietz is a sophomore majoring in Political Science.
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