[iwar] [fc:Osama's.Fatwah]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-22 22:11:55
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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This is an analysis of Osama's 1998 Fatwah by Bernard Lewis, a 
leading scholar of Islam and professor emeritus at Princeton.

LICENSE TO KILL
by Bernard Lewis, Foreign Affairs, November/December 1998

A little-noticed declaration of jihad by Osama bin Laden in an Arabic 
newspaper underscores the Islamist's main grievance: U.S. troops in 
Arabia.

  On February 23, 1998, Al-Quds al-Arabi, an Arabic newspaper 
published in London, printed the full text of a "Declaration of the 
World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders." 
According to the paper, the statement was faxed to them under the 
signatures of Usama bin Ladin, the Saudi financier blamed by the 
United States for masterminding the August bombings of its embassies 
in East Africa, and the leaders of militant Islamist groups in Egypt, 
Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The statement -- a magnificent piece of 
eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose -- reveals a version of 
history that most Westerners will find unfamiliar. Bin Ladin's 
grievances are not quite what many would expect.

The declaration begins with an exordium quoting the more militant 
passages in the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, then 
continues:

"Since God laid down the Arabian peninsula, created its desert, and 
surrounded it with its seas, no calamity has ever befallen it like 
these Crusader hosts that have spread in it like locusts, crowding 
its soil, eating its fruits, and destroying its verdure; and this at 
a time when the nations contend against the Muslims like diners 
jostling around a bowl of food."

The statement goes on to talk of the need to understand the situation 
and act to rectify it. The facts, it says, are known to everyone and 
fall under three main headings:

"First -- For more than seven years the United States is occupying 
the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, 
plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its 
people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the 
peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic 
peoples.

Though some in the past have disputed the true nature of this 
occupation, the people of Arabia in their entirety have now 
recognized it.

There is no better proof of this than the continuing American 
aggression against the Iraqi people, launched from Arabia despite its 
rulers, who all oppose the use of their territories for this purpose 
but are subjugated.

Second -- Despite the immense destruction inflicted on the Iraqi 
people at the hands of the Crusader-Jewish alliance and in spite of 
the appalling number of dead, exceeding a million, the Americans 
nevertheless, in spite of all this, are trying once more to repeat 
this dreadful slaughter. It seems that the long blockade following 
after a fierce war, the dismemberment and the destruction are not 
enough for them. So they come again today to destroy what remains of 
this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third -- While the purposes of the Americans in these wars are 
religious and economic, they also serve the petty state of the Jews, 
to divert attention from their occupation of Jerusalem and their 
killing of Muslims in it.

There is no better proof of all this than their eagerness to destroy 
Iraq, the strongest of the neighboring Arab states, and their attempt 
to dismember all the states of the region, such as Iraq and Saudi 
Arabia and Egypt and Sudan, into petty states, whose division and 
weakness would ensure the survival of Israel and the continuation of 
the calamitous Crusader occupation of the lands of Arabia."

These crimes, the statement declares, amount to "a clear declaration 
of war by the Americans against God, his Prophet, and the Muslims." 
In such a situation, the declaration says, the ulema -- authorities 
on theology and Islamic law, or sharia -- throughout the centuries 
unanimously ruled that when enemies attack the Muslim lands, jihad 
becomes every Muslim's personal duty.

In the technical language of the ulema, religious duties may be 
collective, to be discharged by the community as a whole, or 
personal, incumbent on every individual Muslim. In an offensive war, 
the religious duty of jihad is collective and may be discharged by 
volunteers and professionals. When the Muslim community is defending 
itself, however, jihad becomes an individual obligation.

After quoting various Muslim authorities, the signatories then 
proceed to the final and most important part of their declaration, 
the fatwa, or ruling. It holds that

"To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an 
individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where 
this is possible, until the Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Haram 
Mosque [in Mecca] are freed from their grip and until their armies, 
shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, 
incapable of threatening any Muslim."

After citing some further relevant Quranic verses, the document continues:

"By God's leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and 
hopes for reward to obey God's command to kill the Americans and 
plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can. 
Likewise we call on the Muslim ulema and leaders and youth and 
soldiers to launch attacks against the armies of the American devils 
and against those who are allied with them from among the helpers of 
Satan."

The declaration and fatwa conclude with a series of further 
quotations from Muslim scripture.

INFIDELS

Bin Ladin's view of the Gulf War as American aggression against Iraq 
may seem a little odd, but it is widely -- though by no means 
universally -- accepted in the Islamic world. For holy warriors of 
any faith, the faithful are always right and the infidels always 
wrong, whoever the protagonists and whatever the circumstances of 
their encounter.

The three areas of grievance listed in the declaration -- Arabia, 
Iraq, and Jerusalem -- will be familiar to observers of the Middle 
Eastern scene. What may be less familiar is the sequence and 
emphasis. For Muslims, as we in the West sometimes tend to forget but 
those familiar with Islamic history and literature know, the holy 
land par excellence is Arabia -- Mecca, where the Prophet was born; 
Medina, where he established the first Muslim state; and the Hijaz, 
whose people were the first to rally to the new faith and become its 
standard-bearers. Muhammad lived and died in Arabia, as did the 
Rashidun caliphs, his immediate successors at the head of the Islamic 
community. Thereafter, except for a brief interlude in Syria, the 
center of the Islamic world and the scene of its major achievements 
was Iraq, the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium. For 
Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever 
be finally renounced, but none compares in significance with Arabia 
and Iraq.

Of these two, Arabia is by far the more important. The classical 
Arabic historians tell us that in the year 20 after the hijra 
(Muhammad's move from Mecca to Medina), corresponding to 641 of the 
Christian calendar, the Caliph Umar decreed that Jews and Christians 
should be removed from Arabia to fulfill an injunction the Prophet 
uttered on his deathbed: "Let there not be two religions in Arabia." 
The people in question were the Jews of the oasis of Khaybar in the 
north and the Christians of Najran in the south. Both were ancient 
and deep-rooted communities, Arab in their speech, culture, and way 
of life, differing from their neighbors only in their faith.

The saying attributed to the Prophet was impugned by some earlier 
Islamic authorities. But it was generally accepted as authentic, and 
Umar put it into effect. The expulsion of religious minorities is 
extremely rare in Islamic history -- unlike medieval Christendom, 
where evictions of Jews and (after the reconquest of Spain) Muslims 
were normal and frequent. Compared with European expulsions, Umar's 
decree was both limited and compassionate. It did not include 
southern and southeastern Arabia, which were not seen as part of 
Islam's holy land. And unlike the Jews and Muslims driven out of 
Spain and other European countries to find what refuge they could 
elsewhere, the Jews and Christians of Arabia were resettled on lands 
assigned to them -- the Jews in Syria, the Christians in Iraq. The 
process was also gradual rather than sudden, and there are reports of 
Jews and Christians remaining in Khaybar and Najran for some time 
after Umar's edict.

But the decree was final and irreversible, and from then until now 
the holy land of the Hijaz has been forbidden territory for 
non-Muslims. According to the Hanbali school of Islamic 
jurisprudence, accepted by both the Saudis and the declaration's 
signatories, for a non-Muslim even to set foot on the sacred soil is 
a major offense. In the rest of the kingdom, non-Muslims, while 
admitted as temporary visitors, were not permitted to establish 
residence or practice their religion.

The history of the Crusades provides a vivid example of the relative 
importance of Arabia and other places in Islamic perceptions. The 
Crusaders' capture of Jerusalem in 1099 was a triumph for Christendom 
and a disaster for the city's Jews. But to judge by the Arabic 
historiography of the period, it aroused scant interest in the 
region. Appeals for help by local Muslims to Damascus and Baghdad 
went unanswered, and the newly established Crusader principalities 
from Antioch to Jerusalem soon fitted into the game of Levantine 
politics, with cross-religious alliances forming a pattern of 
rivalries between and among Muslim and Christian princes.

The great counter-Crusade that ultimately drove the Crusaders into 
the sea did not begin until almost a century later. Its immediate 
cause was the activities of a freebooting Crusader leader, Reynald of 
Chatillon, who held the fortress of Kerak, in southern Jordan, 
between 1176 and 1187 and used it to launch a series of raids against 
Muslim caravans and commerce in the adjoining regions, including the 
Hijaz. Historians of the Crusades are probably right in saying that 
Reynald's motive was primarily economic -- the desire for loot. But 
Muslims saw his campaigns as a provocation, a challenge directed 
against Islam's holy places. In 1182, violating an agreement between 
the Crusader king of Jerusalem and the Muslim leader Saladin, Reynald 
attacked and looted Muslim caravans, including one of pilgrims bound 
for Mecca. Even more heinous, from a Muslim point of view, was his 
threat to Arabia and a memorable buccaneering expedition in the Red 
Sea, featuring attacks on Muslim shipping and the Hijaz ports that 
served Mecca and Medina. Outraged, Saladin proclaimed a jihad against 
the Crusaders.

Even in Christian Europe, Saladin was justly celebrated and admired 
for his chivalrous and generous treatment of his defeated enemies. 
His magnanimity did not extend to Reynald of Chatillon. The great 
Arab historian Ibn al-Athir wrote, "Twice, [Saladin said,] I had made 
a vow to kill him if I had him in my hands; once when he tried to 
march on Mecca and Medina, and again when he treacherously captured 
the caravan." After Saladin's triumph, when many of the Crusader 
princes and chieftains were taken captive, he separated Reynald of 
Chatillon from the rest and beheaded him with his own hands.

After the success of the jihad and the recapture of Jerusalem, 
Saladin and his successors seem to have lost interest in the city. In 
1229, one of them even ceded Jerusalem to the Emperor Frederick II as 
part of a general compromise agreement between the Muslim ruler and 
the Crusaders. Jerusalem was retaken in 1244 after the Crusaders 
tried to make it a purely Christian city, then eventually became a 
minor provincial town. Widespread interest in Jerusalem was 
reawakened only in the nineteenth century, first by the European 
powers' quarrels over custody of the Christian holy places and then 
by new waves of Jewish immigration after 1882.

In Arabia, however, the next perceived infidel threat came in the 
eighteenth century with the consolidation of European power in South 
Asia and the reappearance of Christian ships off the shores of 
Arabia. The resulting sense of outrage was at least one of the 
elements in the religious revival inspired in Arabia by the 
puritanical Wahhabi movement and led by the House of Saud, the 
founders of the modern Saudi state. During the period of Anglo-French 
domination of the Middle East, the imperial powers ruled Iraq, Syria, 
Palestine, Egypt, and Sudan. They nibbled at the fringes of Arabia, 
in Aden and the trucial sheikhdoms of the Gulf, but were wise enough 
to have no military and minimal political involvement in the affairs 
of the peninsula.

Oil made that level of involvement totally inadequate, and a growing 
Western presence, predominantly American, began to transform every 
aspect of Arabian life. The Red Sea port of Jiddah had long served as 
a kind of religious quarantine area in which foreign diplomatic, 
consular, and commercial representatives were allowed to live. The 
discovery and exploitation of oil -- and the consequent growth of the 
Saudi capital, Riyadh, from small oasis town to major metropolis -- 
brought a considerable influx of foreigners. Their presence, still 
seen by many as a desecration, planted the seeds for a growing mood 
of resentment.

As long as this foreign involvement was exclusively economic, and as 
long as the rewards were more than adequate to soothe every 
grievance, the alien presence could be borne. But in recent years 
both have changed. With the fall in oil prices and the rise in 
population and expenditure, the rewards are no longer adequate and 
the grievances have become more numerous and more vocal. Nor is the 
involvement limited to economic activities. The revolution in Iran 
and the wars of Saddam Hussein have added political and military 
dimensions to the foreign involvement and have lent some plausibility 
to the increasingly heard cries of "imperialism." Where their holy 
land is involved, many Muslims tend to define the struggle -- and 
sometimes also the enemy -- in religious terms, seeing the American 
troops sent to free Kuwait and save Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein 
as infidel invaders and occupiers. This perception is heightened by 
America's unquestioned primacy among the powers of the infidel world.

TRAVESTIES

To most Americans, the declaration is a travesty, a gross distortion 
of the nature and purpose of the American presence in Arabia. They 
should also know that for many -- perhaps most -- Muslims, the 
declaration is an equally grotesque travesty of the nature of Islam 
and even of its doctrine of jihad. The Quran speaks of peace as well 
as of war. The hundreds of thousands of traditions and sayings 
attributed with varying reliability to the Prophet, interpreted in 
various ways by the ulema, offer a wide range of guidance. The 
militant and violent interpretation is one among many. The standard 
juristic treatises on sharia normally contain a chapter on jihad, 
understood in the military sense as regular warfare against infidels 
and apostates. But these treatises prescribe correct behavior and 
respect for the rules of war in such matters as the opening and 
termination of hostilities and the treatment of noncombatants and 
prisoners, not to speak of diplomatic envoys. The jurists also 
discuss -- and sometimes differ on -- the actual conduct of war. Some 
permit, some restrict, and some disapprove of the use of mangonels, 
poisoned arrows, and the poisoning of enemy water supplies -- the 
missile and chemical warfare of the Middle Ages -- out of concern for 
the indiscriminate casualties that these weapons inflict. At no point 
do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point 
do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders.

Nevertheless, some Muslims are ready to approve, and a few of them to 
apply, the declaration's extreme interpretation of their religion. 
Terrorism requires only a few. Obviously, the West must defend itself 
by whatever means will be effective. But in devising strategies to 
fight the terrorists, it would surely be useful to understand the 
forces that drive them.

Bernard Lewis is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near 
Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His books include The Arabs 
in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, and, most recently, The 
Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years.

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