Only by extirpating the Great Satan can a great and pure Islamic state be created.

Nonetheless, Islamists view the U.S. as the greater enemy, with Israel as its "petty" (Bin Laden's word) proxy. Precisely because it is so small and made up mainly of Jews, who had been for centuries despised, if tolerated, in the Islamic world, Israel constitutes a special affront. Given that the same Western weaponry was used by both sides, Israel's battlefield victories seemed to prove that Western mores and values were superior to those of Islam in achieving power -- the mark of success in a religion where faith and government are intertwined and religious truth is vindicated by political triumph. One reason that Bin Laden's message of hatred against the U.S. resonates in the Muslim world among those who are not fundamentalists -- so that even in wealthy Kuwait, so recently rescued from Saddam by the U.S., polls shows a majority hostile to the U.S. -- is that it feeds their resentiment -- their feeling of envy, alienation, and anger that Islamic societies, despite their numbers, geographical reach, and natural resources, should be so inferior in power, wealth, and influence to those of the West.

For fundamentalists it is the United States, not Israel, whose existence is truly intolerable. This is because their "solution" to the problems Islam faces in the modern world is to return to an earlier, "pure" way of life. In their view, attempts at partially assimilating Western ways have only weakened Islamic societies and corrupted their rulers. But U.S. culture is simply too attractive, pervasive and, from their perspective, degrading of Islamic values, for it to be permitted to flourish. While it does so, there is no way to preserve Islamic youth from ubiquitous American music, videos, TV, movies, fashions, and ideas, whose accessibility has been vastly enhanced by the computer and the Internet.

In his essay "The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror," Robert Worth notes that while the roots of Bin Laden's worldview date back to the school of medieval Islam known as the Salafiyya (which preached purification by returning to Islam's earliest days), his intellectual grandfather is probably the Egyptian writer and activist Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was radicalized by his stay in the United States in the late 1940s, where he was repelled by what he saw as the sexual promiscuity of American culture. (One wonders what he would have made of today's scene, given that he singled out as evidence for this promiscuity a church dance in Greeley, Colorado, where young men and women who had just been singing hymns pressed against each other on the dance floor. To be sure, Qutb was also disturbed by the Kinsey Report, at that time much in the news, as well as Darwin, Marx and Freud.) Qutb's conclusion was that democracy and nationalism, even pan-Arabism, then immensely popular in the Arab world, were obstacles to the goal of recreating a true Islamic state. Bin Laden and his followers go one step further: only by extirpating the Great Satan can a great and pure Islamic state be created.

As Daniel Johnson has pointed out in the London Telegraph, "To abandon Israel now would give the Islamists the strongest possible incentive to escalate the global jihad." One need only look at Bin Laden's 1998 manifesto (issued in cooperation with a number of other Islamist groups), "Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders," to see why this is so. In Foreign Affairs (November/December 1998), Bernard Lewis outlines the chief elements of the Declaration, which describes in order of importance three major grievances against the United States (the "Crusaders" in the title). The first is the U.S. base on Saudi territory, established in the wake of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. In the Declaration, this is described as the United States "occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia." Second is the destruction "inflicted on the Iraqi people at the hands of the Crusader-Jewish alliance." Third is the occupation of Jerusalem, and more broadly the existence of Israel. The desire of the U.S. to destroy Iraq, according to the Declaration, is part of its effort to dismember all the states of the region "whose division and weakness would ensure the survival of Israel." All these "crimes," the statement declares, amount to "a clear declaration of war by the Americans against God, his Prophet and the Muslims," making jihad against America the personal duty of every Muslim.

For the Muslim world, if their program triumphs, the personal fate of Bin Laden and his followers is of no moment -- indeed, as martyrs, their sanctity is all the greater. It would appear to be only a matter of time now before the fearful Saudi royal family asks the United States to relinquish its base on their "holy soil." Also, as Vice President Cheney discovered to his consternation, Arab countries are uniting behind Bin Laden in refusing

Outpost               - 4 -               April 2002