Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 1)

By Marc Erikson
[Editor's
note: As distinct from the world religion of
Islam, Islamism as in part contextually defined
below is a political ideology that adherents would
apply to contemporary governance and politics, and
which they propagate through political and social
activism.]

On November 7, 2001, on the request of the US

government, the Swiss Federal Prosecutor's
Office
froze the bank accounts of Nada Management, a
Luganobased financial services and consulting firm,
and ordered

a search

and seizure

raid on the firm's

offices. Police pulled in several of the company's

principals for questioning. Nada Management, part
of the international alTaqwa ("fear of God") group, is
accused by US Treasury Department investigators
of having acted for years as advisers and a funding
conduit

for Osama

bin Laden's
al-Qaeda.

Among those interrogated by police was a certain

Albert Friedrich Armand (aka Ahmed) Huber, 74, a

Swiss convert to Islam and retired journalist who sits

on the Nada board of directors. Nothing too unusual
perhaps, except for the fact that Huber is also a
highprofile neo-Nazi who tirelessly travels the farright circuit in Europe and the United States. He
sees

himself

as a mediator

between

radical

Islam

and what he calls the New Right. Since September

11, a picture of Osama bin Laden hangs next to one
of Adolf Hitler on the wall of his study in Muri just
outside the Swiss capital of Bern. September 11,
says Huber, brought the radical Islam-New Right
alliance together.
On that, as his own career amply demonstrates, he
is largely wrong. Last year's
horrific terrorist acts
were gleefully celebrated by lslamists and neoNazis
alike (Huber boozed it up with young followers in a
Bern bar) and may have produced closer links. But
lslamism and fascism have a long, over 80-year
history of collaboration based on shared ideas,
practices and perceived common enemies. They
abhor "Western decadence" (political liberalism,

capitalism), fight holy wars - if needs be suicidal

ones by indiscriminate means, and are bent on the

destruction

of the Jews

and of America

and its

allies.

Horst Mahler

once a lawyer for, later a member of,

the 1960s/'70s
German

u|tra|eft

terrorist

Baader

Meinhof gang, and now a leading neo-Nazi

summed up convergent radical Islamic and far-right
views and hopes in a September 21, 2001 letter:
"The USA

or, to be more exact, the World Police -

has shown

itself to be vulnerable

The foreseeable

reaction of the East Coast [= the Jewish controllers

and their gentile allies = the US Establishment] can
be the spark that falls into a powder keg. For
decades, the jihad the Holy War - has been the
agenda of the Islamic world against the Western
value system. This time it could break out in earnest
It would be world war, that is won with the

dagger
The AngloAmerican and European
employees of the global players, dispersed
throughout the entire world, are as Osama bin
Laden proclaimed a long while ago - military targets.
These would be attacked by dagger, where they
least expected an attack. Only a few need be
liquidated in this manner; the survivors will run off

like hares into their respective home countries,

where they belong."

Such convergence of views, methods and goals
goes back to the 1920s when both Islamism and
fascism, ideologically preshaped in the late 19th
century, emerged as organized political movements
with the ultimate aim of seizing state power and
imposing their ideological and social policy precepts
(in which aims fascism, of course, succeeded in the
early '20s
and '30s
in Italy and Germany,
respectively; Islamism only in 1979 in Iran; then in
Sudan and Afghanistan). Both movements claim to
be the true representatives of some arcane,
idealized religious or ethnically pure communities of
days long past in the case of Islamism, the period
of the four "righteous ca|iphs" (632-662), notably the
rule of Umar bin al-Khattab (634-44) which allegedly
exemplifies "din wa daw|a", the unity of religion and
state; in the case of the Nazis, the even more

obscure Aryan "Volksgemeinschaft", with no

historical reference point at all. But both are in reality
as historian Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle
East Forum, puts it - 20th century outgrowths,

radical movements, utopian and totalitarian in their

outlook. The Iranian scholars Ladan and Roya

Boroumand have made the same point.

The Nazi ("national socialist") movement was formed

in reaction

to the World

War

I destruction

of the

"Second Reich", the "unequal and treasonous"

Versailles Treaty and the mass social dislocation
that followed, its racialist, corporatist ideology laid
out in Hit|er'sMein
Kampf (My Struggle). The Muslim
Brotherhood (Al lkhwan Al Muslimun), parent

organization of numerous lslamist terrorist outfits,

was

formed

in 1928

in reaction

to the 1924

abolition

of the caliphate by Turkish reformer Kemal Ataturk,

drawing the consequences of the World War I
demise of the Ottoman Empire. lkhwan founder
Hassan alBanna, an Egyptian school teacher, wrote
at the time that it was endless contemplation of "the
sickness that has reduced the ummah (Muslim

community) to its present state" which prompted him

and five like-minded

early twenties
it.

followers

- all of them

in their

to set up the organization to rectify

Fascist Nazi history need not be dwelt on further

here.

It led to the horrors

and destruction

of World

War II and the Holocaust. NeoNazism, whether in

Europe or the US, remains a terrorist threat and - as

the French

Le Pen version

demonstrated

in

parliamentary elections this year retains a measure

of political clout. It is nonetheless a boxedin niche
force with little capability for breakout. Its ideological
twin, lslamism, by sharp contrast, has every chance
for wreaking escalating worldwide havoc based on
its fastgrowing influence among the world's
more
than one billion Muslims. Immediately following
September 11 last year, US President George W
Bush declared war on terrorism. It's
a catchy phrase,
but a serious

misnomer

all the same.

Terrorism

is a

method of warfare, not the enemy. The enemy is

lslamism.

Al-Banna's
brotherhood, initially limiting itself to
spiritual and moral reform, grew at astonishing
speed in the 1930s and '40s
after embracing wider
political goals and by the end of World War II had
around 500,000 members in Egypt alone and
branches throughout the Middle East. Event

background, ideology, and method of organizing all

account for its improbable success. As the war drew
to a close, the time was ripe for an end to British and
French colonial rule and the lkhwan was ready with
the persuasive, religious|ybuttressed answer: Free
the Islamic homeland from foreign, infidel (kafir)
control; establish a unified Islamic state. And al-

Banna had built a formidable organization to

accomplish just that: it featured sophisticated
governance structures, sections in charge of
different segments of society (peasants, workers,
professionals), units entrusted with key functions
(propaganda, press relations, translation, liaison with
the Islamic world), and specialized committees for
finances and legal affairs all built on existing social
networks, in particular those around mosques and

Islamic welfare associations. Weaving of traditional

ties into a distinctly modern political structure was at
the root of alBanna'ssuccess.

But the "Supreme Guide" of the brethren knew that

faith, good works and numbers alone do not a
political victory make. Thus, modeled on Mussolini's
blackshirts (al-Banna much admired "|| Duce" and

soul brother "Fuehrer" Adolf Hitler), he set up a

paramilitary wing (slogan: "action, obedience,
silence", quite superior to the b|ackshirts'
"believe,

obey, fight") and a "secret apparatus" (al-jihaz alsirri) and intelligence arm of allkhwan to handle the
dirtier side

terrorist attacks, assassinations,

and so

on of the struggle for power.

In 1948, after the brotherhood had played a pivotal
role in mobilizing volunteers to fight in the war
against "the Zionists" in Palestine to prevent
establishment of a Jewish state, it considered itself

to have the credibility, political clout, and military

might to launch a coup d'etat
against the Egyptian
monarchy. But that wasn't
to be. On December 8,
1948, a watchful Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha
disbanded it. He wasn't
watchful enough. Less than
three weeks later, the brethren retaliated by
assassinating the prime minister in turn prompting
the assassination of al-Banna by government agents
on February 12, 1949.
That didn't
end it. Under a new, more radical leader,

Sayyid Qutb, the allkhwan fight for state power

continued

and escalated.

A mid1960s

recruit

was

Ayman al-Zawahiri, present number two man of alQaeda and the brains of the organization.
(@2002 Asia Times Online Co Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Next, Part 2: The World War II Nazi connections of

the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological precursors

of lslamism, and its presentday exponents and
financiers.

lslamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 2)

By Marc Erikson
lslamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 1) iirtaizr
mm

Osama bin Laden has the money, proven

organizational skills, combat experience, and the
charisma

that can confer

the air of wisdom

and

profundity even on inchoate or trivial utterances and

let what's
unfathomable appear to be deep in the
eyes of his followers. But he's
no intellectual. The

brains of al-Qaeda and its chief ideologue by most

accounts is Egyptian physician Ayman alZawahiri,
51, the organization's
number two man and former
head of the Egyptian al-Jihad, which was merged
with bin Laden's
outfit in February 1998 to form the
"|nternationa| Front for Fighting Jews and
Crusaders".

A|Zawahiri hails from an elite Egyptian family. His

father was a professor at Cairo University's
medical
school from which Ayman graduated in 1974. His
paternal grandfather was the Grand Imam at the alAzhar Institute, Sunni Islam's
paramount seat of
learning. His greatuncle, Abdel-Rahman Azzam,
was the first secretarygeneral of the Arab League.
Such family background notwithstanding, perhaps
because of it, a|Zawahiri joined the radical lslamist
Muslim Brotherhood (al-lkhwan al-Muslimun) as a

young boy and was for the first time arrested in 1966
at age 15, when the secular government of
President Gamal Abdel Nasser rounded up
thousands

of al-lkhwan

members

and executed

its

top leaders in retribution for repeated assassination

attempts on the president. One of those executed by

hanging was chief ideologue Sayyid Qutb. AlZawahiri is Qutb's
intellectual heir; he has further

developed his message, and is putting it into

practise.

But without Qutb, present-day lslamism as a noxious

amalgam of fascist totalitarianism and extremes of
Islamic fundamentalism would not exist. His principal
"accomplishment"

was to articulate the social and

political practices of the Muslim Brotherhood from

the 1930s through the 1950s including
collaboration with fascist regimes and organizations,
involvement

in anti-colonial,

antiWestern

and anti-

Israeli actions, and the struggle for state power in

Egypt - in demagogically persuasive fashion,
buttressed by tendentious references to Islamic law
and scriptures to deceive the faithful. Qutb, a onetime literary critic, was not a religious fundamentalist,
but a Goebbels-style propagandist for a new
totalitarianism to stand sidebyside with fascism and
communism.

Hitler's
early 1933 accession to power in Germany

was widely cheered by Arabs of all different political

persuasions. When the "Third Reich" spook and

horrors were over 12 years later, a favorite excuse

among those who felt the need for one was that the
Nazis had been allies against the colonial
oppressors and "Zionist intruders". Many felt no
need for an excuse at all and simply bemoaned the
fact that the Nazis

"final

solution"

to the "Jewish

problem" had not proved final enough. But affinities

with fascism on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood
and other segments of Arab and Muslim society
went much deeper than collaboration with the

enemy of one's
enemies, and collaboration itself
took

some

extreme

forms.

Substitute religious for racial purity, the

idealized ummah of the rule of the four righteous
caliphs of the mid7th century for the mythical Aryan
"Volksgemeinschaft", and most ideological and
organizational precepts of Nazism laid out by chief
theoretician Alfred Rosenberg in his work The Myth
of the 20th Century and by Adolf Hitler in Mein
Kampf, and later put into practice, are in all essential
respects identical to the precepts of the Muslim

Brotherhood after its initial phase as a group

promoting spiritual and moral reform. This ranges
from radical rejection of "decadent" Western political
and economic liberalism (instead embracing the
"leadership principle" and corporatist organization of
the economy) to endorsement of the use of terror
and assassinations

to seize and hold state power,

and all the way to concoction of fantastical antiSemitic conspiracy theories linking international
plutocratic finance to Freemasonry, Zionism and allencompassing Jewish world control.
Not surprisingly then, as Italian and German fascism
sought greater stakes in the Middle East in the
1930s

and '40s
to counter

British

and French

controlling power, close collaboration between

fascist agents and lslamist leaders ensued. During
the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,

head of German military intelligence, sent agents

and money to support the Palestine uprising against
the British, as did Muslim Brotherhood founder and

"supreme guide" Hassan al-Banna. A key individual

in the fascist|s|amist nexus and gobetween for the
Nazis

and a|Banna

became

the Grand

Mufti

of

Jerusalem, Haj Amin elHusseini - incidentally the

later mentor (from 1946 onward) of a young
firebrand by the name of Yasser Arafat.
Having fled from Palestine to Iraq, elHusseini
assisted there in the short-lived April 1941 Nazi-

inspired and financed antiBritish coup. By June

1941, British forces had reasserted control in

Baghdad and the mufti was on the run again, this

time via Tehran and Rome to Berlin, to a hero's

welcome. He remained in Germany as an honored

guest and valuable intelligence and propaganda
asset through most of the war, met with Hitler on
several occasions, and personally recruited leading
members of the Bosnian-Muslim "Hanjar" (saber)
division

of the Waffen

SS.

Another

valued

War

World

II Nazi collaborator

was

Youssef Nada, current board chairman of al-Taqwa

(Nada Management), the Lugano, Switzerland,
Liechtenstein, and Bahamasbased

financial

services outfit accused by the US Treasury

Department of money laundering for and financing of
Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda. As a young man, he

had joined the armed branch of the "secret

apparatus" (al-jihaz al-sirri) of the Muslim
Brotherhood and then was recruited by German
military intelligence. When Grand Mufti el-Husseini
had to flee Germany in 1945 as the Nazi defeat
loomed, Nada reportedly was instrumental in
arranging the escape via Switzerland back to Egypt
and eventually Palestine, where el-Husseini
resurfaced

in 1946.

(@2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights

reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Next, Part 3: The Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser and

Sadat, and the reshaping of Brotherhood lslamism

into its present form by Sayyid Qutb.
lslamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 3)
By Marc Erikson
lslamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 1)
lslamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 2)

Islamism, or fascism with an Islamic face, was born

with and of the Muslim Brotherhood. It proved (and

improved) its fascist core convictions and practices
through collaboration with the Nazis in the runup to
and during World War II. It proved it during the same
period through its collaboration with the overtly
fascist "Young Egypt" (Misr al-Fatah) movement,
founded in October 1933 by lawyer Ahmed Hussein
and modeled directly on the Hitler party, complete
with paramilitary Green Shirts aping the Nazi Brown
Shirts, Nazi salute and literal translations of Nazi

slogans. Among its members, Young Egypt counted

two promising youngsters and later presidents,
Gamal

Abdel

Nasser

and Anwar

E|Sadat.

In later years, the Brotherhood had serious failingsout with Nasser, whom it attempted to assassinate
on several different occasions, and with Sadat,
whom it did assassinate in 1981. But up until at least

the time of Nasser's

1952 coup d'etat,
all was
sweetness and light between Hassan alBanna's
brethren and Nasser's
"free officers". In his personal
diary, Sadat wrote in the summer of 1940:

"One day I invited Hassan alBanna, leader of the

Muslim Brotherhood, to the army camp where I
served, in the Egyptian Communication Corps, so
that he might lecture before my soldiers on various
religious topics. A few days before his scheduled
appearance it was reported to me from army
Intelligence that his coming was forbidden and
canceled by the order of General Headquarters, and
I myself was summoned for interrogation. After a
short while I went secretly to El Bana's
office and
participated in a few seminars he organized. I like
the man and admired

him."

Whether al-Banna, who had already been in contact

with German agents since the 1936-39 Palestine
uprising against the British, or someone else
introduced

Sadat

and his free officer

comrades

to

German military intelligence is not known. But in the

summer of 1942, when Rommel's
Afrikakorps stood
just over 100 kilometers from Alexandria and were
poised to march into Cairo, Sadat, Nasser and their
buddies

were

in close

touch

with

the German

attacking force and - with Brotherhood help

preparing an anti-British uprising in Egypt's
capital. A

treaty with Germany including provisions for German

recognition of an independent, but proAxis Egypt
had been drafted by Sadat, guaranteeing that "no
British

soldier

would

leave

Cairo

alive".

When

Rommel's
push east failed at El Alamein in the fall of
1942, Sadat and several of his coconspirators were
arrested by the British and sat out much of the
remainder of the war in jail.
lslamistfascist

collaboration

did not cease

with war's

end. King Farouk brought large numbers of German

military and intelligence personnel as well as ranking
(ex-) Nazis into Egypt as advisors. It was a bad
move. Several of the Germans, recognizing Farouk's
political weakness, soon began conspiring with
Nasser and his free officers (who, in turn, were
working closely with the Brotherhood) to overthrow
the king. On July 23, 1952, the deed was done and
Newsweek marveled that, "The most intriguing
aspect [of] the revolt
was the role played in the
coup by the large group of German advisors serving
with the Egyptian army
The young officers who
did the actual planning consulted the German
advisors

as to 'tactics'
This accounted

for the

smoothness of the operation."

And yet another player fond of playing all sides
against the middle had entered the game prior to
Farouk's
ouster: In 1951, the CIA's
Kermit Roosevelt

(grandson of president Teddy, who in 1953 would

organize the overthrow of elected Iranian leader
Mohammed Mossadegh and install Reza Pahlavi as
Shah) opened secret negotiations with Nasser.
Agreement was soon reached that the US, postcoup, would assist in building up Egypt's
intelligence
and security forces in the obvious manner, by
reinforcing Nasser's
existing Germans with
additional, "more capable", ones. For that, CIA head
Allen Dulles turned to Reinhard Gehlen, one-time

head of eastern front German military intelligence

and by the early 1950s in charge of developing a
new German foreign intelligence service. Gehlen
hired the best man he knew for the job former SS
colonel Otto Skorzeny, who at the end of the war
had organized the infamous ODESSA network to
facilitate the escape of high-ranking Nazis to Latin
America (mainly Peron's
Argentina) and Egypt. With
Skorzeny now on the job of assisting Nasser, Egypt

became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals galore.

The CIA officer in charge of the Egypt assistance
program was Miles Copeland, soon a Nasser
intimate.

And then things got truly complicated and messy.

Having played a large role in Nasser's
power grab,
the Muslim Brotherhood, after the 1949

assassination of Hassan al-Banna by government

agents [see part 1] under new leadership and (since
1951) under the radical ideological guidance of
Sayyid Qutb, demanded its due - imposition of
Sharia (Islamic religious) law. When Nasser
demurred, he became a Brotherhood assassination

target, but with CIA and the German mercenaries

help he prevailed. In February 1954, the
Brotherhood

was

banned.

An October

1954

assassination attempt failed. Four thousand brothers

were arrested, six were executed, and thousands

fled to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon.

Within short order, things got more tangled still: As
Nasser in his brewing fight with Britain and France
over

control

of the Suez

Canal

turned

to the Soviet

Union for assistance and arms purchases, the CIA

approached and began collaboration with the
Brotherhood against their exally, the now proSoviet
Nasser.

We leave that twisted tale at this stage. A leading

Brotherhood member arrested in 1954 was Sayyid
Qutb. He spent the next 10 years in Jarah prison
near

Cairo

and there

wrote

the tracts

that

subsequently became (and till this day remain)

mustreading and guidance for lslamists
everywhere. (The main translations into Farsi were
made by the Rahbar of the Islamic Republic of Iran,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.) But while brother number
one went to jail, other leading members who had
escaped were given jobs in Saudi universities and
provided with royal funding. They included Sayyid's
brother Muhammad and Abdullah al-Azzam, the

radical Palestinian preacher (the "Emir of Jihad")

who later in Peshawar, Pakistan, founded the
Maktab a|Khidamat, or Office of Services, which
became

the core of the al-Qaeda

network.

As a

student at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah,

Osama bin Laden, son of Muhammad bin Laden, the

kingdom's
wealthiest contractor and close friend of
King Faisal, became a disciple of Muhammad Qutb
and al-Azzam.

Sayyid Qutb was born in 1906 in a small village in

Upper Egypt, was educated at a secular college,
and subsequently worked as an inspector of schools
for the ministry of education. In the 1930s and
1940s, nothing pointed to his later role. He wrote
literary criticism, hung out in coffee houses, and
published a novel which flopped. His conversion to
radical Islam came during twoandahalf years of
graduate studies in education in the United States
(1948-51). He came to hate everything American,
described

churches

as "entertainment

centers

and

sexual playgrounds", was shocked by the freedom

allowed to women, and immediately upon his return
to Egyptjoined the Muslim Brotherhood and
assumed the position of editor-in-chief of the
organization's
newspaper.
While in jail, Qutb wrote a 30volume (l) commentary
on the Koran; but his most influential book,

published in 1965 after his 1964 release from prison

for health reasons, was Maalim fil-tariq("Signposts

on the Road", also translated as "Milestones").

In it,

he revised Hassan a|Banna's

concept of
establishing an Islamic state in Egypt after the nation
was thoroughly lslamized, advocating instead
fascist or Bo|shevikstyle
that a revolutionary
vanguard should first seize state power and then
impose lslamization from above. Trouble is, this
recipe went against the unambiguous Muslim
prohibition against overthrowing a Muslim ruler.
Qutb found his clue to resolving the dilemma in the
writings of his Pakistani contemporary, Sayyid Abul
Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), founder in 1941 of the
Jamaati|s|ami, who had denounced the existing
political order in Muslim societies as

partial jahiliyyah - resembling the state of

unenlightened savagery, ignorance and idolatry of
pre-Islamic Arab societies. There was nothing
"partial" about the jahiliyyah of the existing order,
nothing that could be redeemed, pronounced Qutb:
a society whose legislation does not rest on
divine law
is not Muslim, however ardently its
individuals may proclaim themselves Muslim, even if

they pray, fast and make the

pilgrimage
jahiliyyah
takes the form of claiming
the right to create values, to legislate rules of
collective behavior and to choose any way of life that
rests with me, without regard to what God has
prescribed."

Only uncompromising restoration of the ideal of the

union of religion and state as evidenced during the
7th century reign of the "righteous caliphs" would do.
Islam was a complete system of life not in need of
manmade additions. Any ruler, Muslim or otherwise,
standing in the way could be justifiably removed - by
any means.

This, naturally, applied to Nasser, and another

attempt on his life was made in 1965. Qutb was
rearrested, tortured and tried for treason. On August
29, 1966, he was hanged. The charge against him of
plotting to establish a Marxist regime in Egypt was
ludicrous.

Nasser

and his minions

knew

full well that

the real danger to the regime stemmed from Qutb's

denunciation of it as jahiliyyah, and not from those
clauses of his Maalim l-tariq which speak of a

classless society in which the "selfish individual" and

the "exploitation of man by man" would be
abolished, which the prosecution cited as evidence

against him.
The martyred Qutb's
writings rapidly acquired wide
acceptance in the Arab world, especially after the
ignominious defeat of the Arabs in the June 1967
"Six Day War" with Israel, taken as proof of the
depth of depravity to which the regimes in the
Muslim

realm

had sunk.

To come: lslamism, fascism and terrorism

(Part

4)

(2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights

reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies, or
to submit a letter to the editor.)

lslamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 4)

By Marc Erikson
lslamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 1)

lslamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 2)

lslamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 3)

An early convert to Sayyid Qutb's

newfang|ed
fascist lslamism which condones, indeed

commands, terrorism and murder was the alleged

number two man of Osama bin Laden's
a|Qaeda,

Ayman al-Zawahiri. [see part 2]. Having joined the

Muslim Brotherhood at age 15, he was caught in the
Nasser dragnet after the 1965 assassination attempt
on the Egyptian leader and young age and elite
family background notwithstanding - was thrown in
jail. An April 1968 amnesty freed most of the
brethren, and Ayman, in that regard following in his
father's
footsteps, went on to Cairo University to
become a physician. He obtained his degree in 1974
and practiced medicine for several years.
His profession, however, was not his calling. By the
late 1970s, he was back full-time in the lslamist

revolution business agitating against the Egyptlsrael peace treaty (concluded in 1979). In 1980, on
the introduction by military intelligence officer Abbud

al-Zumar, he became a leading member of the

Jama'at
alJihad of Muhammad AbdaISalam Faraj
which on October 6, 1981, assassinated

President

Anwar El Sadat while he was reviewing a military

parade.

Faraj, like al-Zawahiri, had been a member of the

Muslim Brotherhood, but became disenchanted with

its passivity. In 1979, he penned a short pamphlet

titled "The Neglected Obligation" (alFarida alGha'ibah),
which relied heavily on the ideas of
Sayyid Qutb. It became the founding document of alJihad, arguing along the familiar lines that
acceptance of a government was only possible and
legitimate when that government fully implemented
Sharia, or Islamic law. Contemporary Egypt had not
done so, and was thus suffering from jahiliyya. Jihad
to rectify this, wrote Faraj, was not only the
"neglected obligation" of Muslims, but in fact their
most important duty.
Following the Sadat assassination, a|Zawahiri was
arrested on a minor weapons possession charge
and spent three years in jail. In 1985 he left Egypt

for Saudi Arabia and later Peshawar, Pakistan,

where he wasjoined by Muhammad al-lslambuli, the

brother of one of Sadat's
five assassins, 24-year-old
artillery lieutenant Khalid Ahmed Shawki allslambuli. There, connections were made with the

groups of Palestinian lslamist Abdullah Azzam and

the latter's
one-time student Osama bin Laden, by
then fully engaged (with well-known CIA support) in
assisting the mujahideen struggle against Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan.
Al-Zawahiri's
al-Jihad was in many respects better
organized and better trained than other groups in the
Afghanistan theater. Prior to the murder of Sadat, it
had succeeded in recruiting members of the
presidential guard, military intelligence and the civil
bureaucracy. Most importantly, it was in possession
of a cogent and comprehensive ideology pointing
beyond the Afghan struggle against the Soviet
occupiers. "Afghanistan should be a platform for the
liberation of the entire Muslim world," was the

distinguishing creed of al-Jihad.

Al-Zawahiri

wrote

several

books

on Islamic

movements, the best known of which is The Bitter

Harvest (1991/92), a critical assessment of the

failings of the Muslim Brotherhood. In it, he draws
not only on the writings of Sayyid Qutb to justify
murder and terrorism, but prominently references
Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami founder and ideologue
Mawdudi on the global mission of lslamicjihad.
Mawdudi had written, "IsIam wants the whole earth

and does not content itself with only a part thereof. It

wants and requires the entire inhabited world. It
does

not want

this in order

that one nation

dominates the earth and monopolizes its sources of

wealth, after having taken them away from one or
more other nations. No, Islam wants and requires

the earth in order that the human race altogether

can enjoy the concept and practical program of
human happiness, by means of which God has
honored Islam and put it above the other religions
and laws. In order to realize this lofty desire, Islam
wants to employ all forces and means that can be
employed for bringing about a universal allembracing revolution. It will spare no effort for the
achievement of this supreme objective. This far-

reaching struggle that continuously exhausts all

forces and this employment of all possible means
are called jihad."
And further, "IsIam is a revolutionary doctrine and
system that overturns governments. It seeks to
overturn
establish

the whole
its structure

universal
anew

social
Islam

order
seeks

and
the world.

It is not satisfied by a piece of land but demands the

whole universe
lslamicjihad is at the same time
offensive and defensive
The Islamic party does
not hesitate to utilize the means of war to implement
its goal."
Notjust or even principally the expulsion of the
Soviets from Afghanistan or the removal of any one
godless Muslim regime, but global jihad as Mawdudi
had prescribed, became alZawahiri's
obsession.
And

he acted

as he had read and written.

After

several years in Afghanistan and Pakistan,

constructing there the platform from which to launch
broader pursuits, Zawahiri traveled extensively on
Swiss, French and Dutch passports in Western
Europe and even the United States on fund-raising,

recruiting and reconnaissance missions. Then came

initial implementation of the offensive.
It is not known

whether

he had a hand

in the 1993

bombing of the New York World Trade Center. But

he had close

connections

to Sheikh

Omar

Abdel

Rahman, the spiritual leader of the group that

carried out the attack. Then, in 1995, he was behind

the truck bomb attack on the Egyptian embassy in

Pakistan; in November 1997, he led the Vanguards
of Conquest group responsible for the Luxor (Egypt)
massacre in which 60 foreign tourists were
systematically murdered and mutilated; in August
1998, he organized the bombings of the US
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and probably, in
2000, the speed-boat bomb attack on the USS Cole
in Aden. Israeli intelligence considers him the
"operational brains" behind September 11; the fact,
in any case, is that the Egyptian Mohammed Atta,
principal of the Hamburg, Germany, al-Qaeda cell
that was

instrumental

to the World

Trade

Center

destruction, was a member of Zawahiri's

al-Jihad.
Osama bin Laden, as we wrote earlier, had the

money, some of the connections, and perhaps the

charisma

to function

as the leader

of the alQaeda

global jihad. But it was not until Zawahiri's

al-Jihad in
February 1998 formally joined forces with bin Laden
that the present global lslamist terrorist threat truly
emerged. With his long experience in the Muslim
Brotherhood, his critical assessment of its failures,

his cunning - albeit highly eclectic - fashioning of a

fascist ideology drawing on Islamic religious
elements, and his organizational and operational
skills, al-Zawahiri is the key personality of global
jihad. The key point to understand is that Zawahiri
fascist lslamism has seized the ideological initiative
in the Muslim world against which traditional Islam
has so far proved an impotent, indeed often
unwilling, opponent. Young Muslims everywhere are
captivated by Zawahiri lslamism and jihad to which
they attribute selfless idealism and in which they
admire ruthless determination. It will be a long war.
And make no mistake: In this war against a new,
ideologically vigorous fascism, collateral assets of
the Islamists, the neoNazis of the Ahmed Huber

variety which we described in part 1 of this series, or

for that matter

Saudi financiers wittingly pushing

narrow sectarian Wahhabism upon youths

in madrassas worldwide, are key forces in the
enemy camp. Islamism as we have portrayed it in its
historical and present dimension is a form of fascist
madness - the same type of madness which one of
Hitler's
closest confidants, convicted war criminal

Albert Speer, saw during the Fuehrer's

final days. In
his Spandau prison diary entry for November 18,
1947, Speer recollects:
''I
recall how [Hitler] would have films shown in the
Reich Chancellory about London burning, about the
sea of fire over Warsaw, about exploding convoys,
and the kind of ravenous joy that would then seize
him every time. But I never saw him so beside
himself as when, in a delirium, he pictured New York
going down in flames. He described how the
skyscrapers would be transformed into gigantic
burning torches, how they would collapse in
confusion, how the bursting city's
reflection would
stand against the dark sky."
(2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights

reserved. Please contact oontent@atimes.com for

information on our sales and syndication policies, or
to submit a letter to the editor.)