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

Parameters, Spring, 2005 by Christopher Henzel

Reform Movements beyond Sunnism's Core

Meanwhile, other Sunni Muslim reform movements beyond Sunnism's Egyptian core were maturing independently of the Salafists. Wahabism, a puritanical Sunni sect, first arose in the 1700s, but remained confined to the sparsely populated deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. In 1816, Sunnism's orthodox core, in the form of an Egyptian army acting in the name of the Ottoman Sultan, reached out to Arabia to destroy the first Wahabi state. Ridha, early in his career, condemned the Wahabis as heretical, as did all mainstream Sunnis. But Ridha gradually came to sympathize with the Arabian dissenters. (11) Wahabi influence throughout the Sunni world grew as oil wealth fed Saudi power in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like Wahabism, the Deobandi and Barelvi movements of South Asia developed independently of the reformers at Sunnism's Egyptian core. The Deobandis and Barelvis attempted to address the problems of South Asian Sunni Muslims who went from being the ruling minority of the Mughal Empire to living after 1857 under direct British rule as a minority among South Asia's Hindus. Their solution was to call on believers to exclude non-Muslim influences from their lives, build purely Muslim institutions, and strive to live a wholly Islamic life, as understood by the movements' scholars. It was not until the 1960s that these South Asian currents influenced the revolutionary Salafists, through the writings of Pakistani cleric Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-1979) (12) and their impact on another Egyptian outsider, Sayyed Qutb.

Sayyid Qutb

Qutb (1906-1966), the next bearer of the revolutionary Salafist flame, was an educator and member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qutb warned against the Westernizing influences that continued to permeate the Muslim world during the 1940s and 1950s. He had no formal theological training, but, hearkening back to 'Abduh and Ridha, believed it the duty of the ordinary believer to seek out the supposedly pure Islam of the aslaf. (13) Expanding on Ibn Taymiyya's teaching on jihad against apostate rulers, Qutb argued for struggle against the secular regimes of the Muslim world, even if this meant killing Muslims. Qutb was also influenced by Mawdudi's call on individual Muslims to exclude nonMuslim influences from their lives and institutions. Qutb's endorsement of Mawdudi began a convergence between the revolutionary Salafists and the South Asian movements. (14) The Nasser regime hanged Qutb in 1966. (15)

Nasser's secular agenda, his socialism, and his spectacular defeat in the 1967 war generated opposition to his regime and disillusionment with secularism in general. Some of this opposition flowed into the ranks of the underground Islamic political movements. The Muslim Brotherhood had by this time split with the revolutionary Salafist movements over the Salafists' calls for overturning Muslim states and societies. The Brotherhood became the most significant Islamic political opposition to Nasserism. However, the revolutionary Salafists, who viewed Qutb as a visionary martyr, gained adherents as well. Thousands from both movements languished in Egyptian prisons.