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

Parameters, Spring, 2005 by Christopher Henzel

Theology and Politics: Ibn Taymiyya

The medieval Sunni scholar Taqi ad-Din Ahmed ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) is an important reference for today's revolutionary Salafists. Ibn Taymiyya needed an argument that would rally Muslims behind the Mamluke rulers of Egypt in their struggle against the advancing Mongols from 1294 to 1303. Some objected that there could be no jihad against the Mongols because they and their king had recently converted to Islam. Ibn Taymiyya reasoned that because the Mongol ruler permitted some aspects of Mongol tribal law to persist alongside the Islamic sharia code, the Mongols were apostates to Islam and therefore legitimate targets of jihad. Today's revolutionary Salafists cite Ibn Taymiyya as an authority for their argument that contemporary Muslim rulers are apostates if they fail to impose sharia exclusively, and that jihad should be waged against them.

Although Ibn Taymiyya's medieval theology is important to the contemporary Salafists, Salafism had its true origins in modern times, in the reform movement at Sunni Islam's Egyptian core in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This reform movement arose out of the reaction of Muslims in the Ottoman Empire to the growing dominance of the West in international politics, in science, and in culture. Napoleon's occupation of Egypt, the French colonization of North Africa, and Britain's domination of Muslims in India and later Egypt all dealt profound shocks to a Muslim world that had, until the 18th century, confidently regarded itself as superior to the West.

Muslim Rationalist: Al-Afghani

Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani (1839-1897) launched this modernizing reform movement in Islam, one strain of which developed later into the revolutionary Salafism the United States confronts today. Chiefly through his preaching and pupils in Cairo, Al-Afghani spread the idea that Muslim defeats at the hands of the West were due to the corruption of Islam. Al-Afghani admired Western rationalism, and saw it as the source of the West's material strength. Rather than advocating secularization, however, Al-Afghani taught that rationalism was the core of an uncorrupted "true" Islam, the Islam supposedly practiced during the golden age of Muhammad and his first few successors. Al-Afghani believed that if this spiritual revival of Muslim society were accomplished, the Muslim world would soon develop the intellectual equipment it needed to redress the West's technological and military advantages. (6)

Al-Afghani's teachings flew in the face of conventional wisdom in both the Muslim world and the West. Most Ottoman reformers who contemplated the disparities between Western and Eastern power concluded that the Ottoman Empire needed to adopt the science of the West, and set aside much of the thought of the East, a tendency that culminated in Attaturk's radical secularism.

Al-Afghani, on the other hand, diagnosed the Muslim world's problem as theological at root, and prescribed as an antidote religious revival. Al-Afghani also taught that political struggle, even revolt, was sometimes justified.