Bin Laden’s spiritual mentor
ict.org.il
[EXCERPTS]
Sheikh Abdullah Azzam spent many years involved in the Palestinian Jihad. However, he eventually came to believe that those involved in the Jihad were too far removed from “The real Islam.” For this reason, he turned his back on Jordan and his home in the West Bank, and traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he took up a university teaching position. Sheikh Azzam became convinced that only by means of an organized military force would the Ummah (Islamic nation) emerge victorious. He became preoccupied with religious warfare: “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues.”
The ideology founded by Abdullah Azzam, and its realization in the Afghan war, gave rise to a number of processes in modern history:
 The creation of a kind of Islamic “internationale” through the recruitment of volunteers throughout the Muslim world to aide the struggle of the Afghan mujahideen.
 The creation of a global network of radical Muslim terrorists through ties between these volunteers and radical Islamic movements throughout the Muslim world.
 The creation of a mystique of invincibility. The Islamic fighters’ victory over the Soviet forces won them international acclaim and served as a source of inspiration to Islamists throughout the Muslim world.
 The creation of a broad-based cadre of highly motivated and experienced warriors, bent on exporting the Islamic revolution to the world at large.
Osama bin Laden is one of the outstanding products of the Afghan war, and his Al-Qa’idah organization is one of the main expressions of the Afghan phenomenon. Bin Laden views his struggle as part of the conflict between the Islamic world and other civilizations, particularly “the Jewish-Crusader Civilization,” as he calls it.
As a cultural struggle, the world-wide Jihad is waged on three fronts. The most immediate front is within Muslim countries, where the goals is to reinstate the rule of Shari’a law. The second front is in countries with Muslim minorities, situated on “fault lines” with other cultures, such as the Balkans, the Caucasus, Kashmir, etc. And the last front is the international cultural struggle, in which Islam takes on Western— particularly American—civilization, perceived by the fundamentalists as the source of all evil, and the primary threat to Islam. |
