The origins of al Qaeda's ideology: implications for US strategy

Parameters, Spring, 2005 by Christopher Henzel

(10.) Hourani, p. 228. For a mainstream Sunni criticism of Ridha, see Answer to an Enemy of Islam (Istanbul: Waqf Ikhlas Publications, 1993).

(11.) Perhaps this was because Ridha realized that he himself was moving outside the Sunni mainstream, or perhaps he was impressed by the political success of the Wahabis' patron, Ibn Saud, who reestablished the Saudi state in 1902 and conquered Mecca and Medina in 1924-25.

(12.) Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), 23.

(13.) In the Shade of the Quran is Qutb's exegesis on the Quran, written while in prison.

(14.) One Salafist admirer of Qutb, the Palestinian-born, Egyptian-educated Abdullah Azzam (1941-1989), obtained a professorship at a Saudi university in the 1970s, where his students included Osama bin Laden. Azzam played an important role in the convergence of Egypt-based revolutionary Salafism and Saudi revolutionary Wahabism.

(15.) Robert Siegel, "Sayyid Qutb's America," National Public Radio, 6 May 2003, http://www.npr.org/ display_pages/features/feature_1253796.html. Like many of the revolutionary Salafists to follow him, Qutb appears to have been radicalized partly by a direct encounter with the West. Sent to study at the University of Northern Colorado in the 1940s by the government of King Faruq, Qutb wrote later of the sexual decadence and secularized religion of the United States.

(16.) Faraj (in Jansen), sections 68-70.

(17.) Kepel, p. 85. The establishment compared the Takfiris to the Kharijites of the seventh century, who are universally reviled by mainstream Sunnis for failing to respect the consensus of believers and for denouncing fellow Muslims as unbelievers.

(18.) Zawahiri, p. 74.

(19.) Ibid., p. 80. "Egypt particularly."

(20.) Ibid., pp. 72-73.

(21.) Ibid., p. 71

(22.) Ibid., pp.75, 78.

(23.) It is a strategy analogous to the failed attempts of European leftist terrorists in the 1970s to set off a revolution with terrorist attacks aimed at provoking indiscriminate government crackdowns.

(24.) Ilana Kass and Bard O'Neill, The Deadly Embrace (Lanham, Md., and London: University Press of America, 1996), p. 13.

(25.) Vo Nguyen Giap, People's War, People's Army (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962).

(26.) Zawahiri, p. 75.

(27.) Ibid., p. 76.

(28.) Kepel, pp. 254-75.

(29.) Ibid., p. 297.

(30.) Quintan Wiktorowicz and John Kaltner, "Killing in the Name of Islam: Al-Qaeda's Justification for September 11," Middle East Policy, 10 (Summer 2003), 76.

Christopher Henzel is a Foreign Service officer and a 2004 graduate of the National War College. This article is drawn from his course work there. As is the case with all articles in Parameters, the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the author's department or any US government agency.