November 20, 1979, is the first day of muharram, or the first month of 1400 according to the Islamic calendar. It is also the day the siege of Mecca took place. The fifteenth century of Islam opened with a sacrilege of such magnitude that its impact took time to dawn upon observers and believers alike. On this day, the collective prayer in Mecca haram was disrupted by some two hundred gunmen, who pledged allegiance to Muhammad al-Qahtani, a self-proclaimed Mahdi. This extraordinary pledge was purportedly based on a classical hadith, whereby the Mahdi would appear at the end of time, between Abraham’s station (maqam) and one of the Kaaba’s corner (rukn). Juhayman al-Utaybi, Qahtani’s brother-in-law, led the insurgents and justified his doomsday jihad by the urge to “purify” Islam. He began with its holiest site.
The siege lasted two weeks, resulted in hundreds of casualties and ruined part of the sanctuary. The Saudi public and the Muslim world watched in horror as Utaybi’s followers turned Mecca’s compound into a battlefield. The rebels, holed up in their apocalyptic creed and loaded with ammunitions became completely isolated and their revolutionary pamphlets stirred only shock and disbelief. Their messianic uprising was so incredible that many conspiracy theories started to float, and radical demonstrators even stormed the US Embassy in Pakistan, pretending this was all an American “plot”. Qahtani was killed, but Utaybi survived, only to be executed with dozens of insurgents, a few weeks later. Revolutionary jihad consequently came to be identified in Saudi Arabia with sacrilege and the Sunni community considered any invocation of the Mahdi with utmost suspicion.
While Utaybi’s message ended with his death, a new front opened for jihad in the East: the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, and the resistance rallied under the banner of jihad against foreign occupation, putting aside ethnic and linguistic differences. This Afghan jihad was the last of a long series of anti-colonial insurgencies against European domination. Others also led by charismatic figures included Abdelkader in Algeria (1832-1847), Shamil in the Caucasus (1834-1859) and Umar al-Mukhtar in Libya (1911-1931). The Afghans fought to liberate their country and, in nearly ten years of anti-Soviet struggle, they never exported their violence outside of the Afghan borders.
The Afghan mujahideen requested their fellow Muslims to support their nationalist uprising politically and materially, but they needed many more weapons than volunteers since the anti-Soviet fighters were numerous. Nevertheless, two former militants of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Jordanian Abdallah Azzam and the Saudi Usama Bin Laden, established, the Services Bureau in Pakistan an international network to channel Arab funds and recruits to the anti-Soviet jihad. The operation was launched at a very low key and developed only in 1986-87. Thousands of Arab militants were welcomed in training camps in Western Pakistan, but only hundreds of them crossed the border to actually fight in Afghanistan, where their contribution to the liberation of the country was negligible.
Azzam respected the Afghan freedom struggle, while Bin Laden planned to organize independent Arab units of jihadi militants. He radicalized this vision under the influence of Ayman al-Zawahiri and the militants from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ): the liberation of Muslim lands from foreign occupation was only one dimension of an all-out jihad, whose ambition was to topple the Muslim regimes, branded as “apostates”. This accusation of apostasy, or takfir, alienated this group from the rest of the militants and was central in the clandestine founding of Al-Qaida (“the Base”, in Arabic), in August 1988. All the members of Al-Qaida had to pledge personal and absolute allegiance to Bin Laden. Azzam had no place in this grand design and he was killed in a booby-trapped bombing in November 1989.
Competing Jihads
At the beginning of the nineties, the stage was set for a renewed era of competition between revolutionary jihad and nationalist jihad. The nascent Al-Qaida played on both sides to promote its original agenda of global jihad. The “Afghan” veterans were back in the Arab world and while their military credentials were often debatable, their political prestige was impressive. In Algeria and Egypt, they weighed in favor of the escalation of the revolutionary campaign of jihadi terror against the regime and its supporters. Al-Qaida tried to take advantage of these civil wars, but the Algerian Islamic Armed Group (GIA) rejected any foreign interference, even from fellow jihadis. Likewise, the Egyptian activists of the Gamaa islamiyya admitted their defeat in 1997 by suspending their violent campaign.
Frustrated with revolutionary jihad, Al-Qaida tried to hijack nationalist struggles for its own benefit. The jihadi volunteers that traveled to Bosnia after the dismantling of Yugoslavia in 1992, where they were contained by the regular Bosnian army and eventually expelled in the fall of 1995. After 1996 Al-Qaida was more successful in monitoring the training of the Pakistani guerrillas that were smuggled into Kashmir to fight the Indian forces. However, they were also successful in eliminating the local supporters of Kashmiri independence. In the same spirit, the Arab fighters that went to Chechnya helped the radical Shamil Basaiev against the nationalist trend. Their offensive against neighboring Daghestan, in August 1999, gave to the Red army the justification for coming into Chechnya and crushing the independent republic.
At the time, Al-Qaida was still a codename, used only by insiders, but in February 1998 global jihad went public when Bin Laden and Zawahiri announced the launching of the “World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders.” In their manifesto, they urged any Muslim individual, anywhere in the world, to strike anytime at any American or any American ally, without distinction between civilian and military targets. This global jihad was clearly a modern invention, contradicting fourteen centuries of Islamic practice and tradition: jihad had generally been a collective duty. Only through a consensus of the ulama and the religious leaders could individual jihad be considered legitimate, and only in very specific and limited circumstances. Al-Qaida’s free-for-all interpretation of jihad was without precedent, it cut the historical link between jihad and a community to be mobilized or a territory to be defended. Both Bin Laden and Zawahiri lacked any dogmatic credentials to substantiate such an innovation.
Al-Qaida could flourish in Afghanistan under the protection of Mullah Umar’s “Islamic emirate”. A new generation of jihadi volunteers flocked to training camps, this time not to fight an invading army on a specific territory, but to export subversion globally. Al-Qaida’s encompassing vision could articulate the regional agendas of its most vibrant partners, like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in Central Asia or the Jemaa Islamiyya (JI) in South East Asia. The Taliban trusted their Arab allies in the international arena letting them implement violent provocations and effectively turning their whole territory into a full-fledged “Jihadistan”, dedicated to the promotion of global jihad.
The attacks on New York and Washington, on September 11, 2001, were planned to trigger a wave of revolutionary jihad all over the Muslim world, while Al-Qaida was betting on American reprisals against Afghanistan and hoping the US would be defeated on that battlefield like the late USSR. Bin Laden’s strategic gamble collapsed with the quick demise of the Taliban regime and with the general outrage against the 9/11 attacks. So Al-Qaida, increasingly isolated, went underground to prepare its own terror campaign against Saudi Arabia. Launched in May 2003, this series of bombings generated a backlash against the jihadi ideology and most of the activist networks were dismantled in less than two years.
The Crisis of Global Jihad
It took the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, for Al-Qaida to reconstitute some of its potential, collaborating with the nationalist insurgency. But the local guerrillas resented Zarqawi’s use of Iraq as a platform to export terror in the neighboring countries, like in Amman in November 2005. So tensions escalated and the national jihadis ultimately expelled Al-Qaida from its stronghold in the Western province of Anbar, in 2007. The defeat of Bin Laden’s followers, not by the US army, but by Sunni guerrillas, was a devastating blow for the global jihad and sent shockwaves all over the Muslim world, weakening Al-Qaida’s prestige and franchises.
This showdown between global and national jihad reached new rhetorical heights when Al-Qaida, frustrated with the absence from Lebanon and Palestine, started a propaganda campaign against Hezbollah and Hamas. It accused them of having “sold” their land and their cause to Israel by accepting ceasefires or elections. It urged Hamas to establish an “Islamic emirate” in Gaza, but Bin Laden’s sympathizers were crushed by Hamas forces. Al-Qaida repeatedly used sectarian slanders to attack the Shi’a guerrillas in Lebanon, without reaching a breakthrough on the ground. Global jihad turned increasingly virtual and relied heavily on Internet, while national jihad was deeply pushing its militant roots.
So Al-Qaida, unable to sustain a revolutionary jihad in Saudi Arabia, also failed to divert national jihad in the Middle East. The crisis of the global jihad was worsened when even the most radical of the jihadi scholars withdrew their support from Al-Qaida (including one of its founding members, the Egyptian “Doctor Fadel”, or Sayyid Imam al-Sharif). Bin Laden and his followers were portrayed as having “betrayed” the core values of Islam. They reacted by stressing the privilege of the jihadi fighters, even those with no religious background, to decide what is right and wrong in Islam. Al-Qaida is promoting a new cult, transferring the theological legitimacy from the ulama to the militants. This escalation of symbolic violence matches the fact that the overwhelming majority of Al-Qaida’s victims are Muslims.
Bin Laden, faced with this growing problem, looked more positively on Utaybi’s revolutionary jihad. But Al-Qaida continues to adhere to its global agenda and does not follow any doomsday countdown. The sacrilege of Mecca has neutralized most of the messianic energies in the Sunni world. The situation is totally different in the Shi’a world, where the longing for the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam, has strong political undertones. Moqtada Sadr, an Iraqi cleric aged only 30, but son and grand-nephew of two “martyred” ayatollahs, played on this dimension when launching his “Mahdi’s army” in 2003. The “sadrist” movement combined military jihad and political maneuvers, while a more clear-cut doomsday militia, “The Supporters of the Imam Mahdi”, developed in Southern Iraq. Their uprising was crushed in the holy city of Najaf, in January 2007, and the outrage was comparable in the Shi’a world to the shock caused in the whole umma, in November 1979, by the storming of the Kaaba.
Utaybi’s Hallow Call
Thirty years after the bloodbath in Mecca, Utaybi’s call for arms rings no echo. Revolutionary jihad has failed everywhere in the Muslim world or, like in Somalia, has engineered endless cycles of civil war. The jihadi scene is therefore dominated by national jihad, especially in the cases of Hamas and Hezbollah, but their confrontation with Israel has made them more popular outside than inside their own territories. Ethno-national jihad is also the name of the game for militant guerrillas fighting for Muslim minorities, as in Thailand or in Philippines, but the lack of unified leadership is weakening their position. In all these crises, the need to convert the military records into political achievements is the main challenge faced by nationalist jihad.
During the past three decades, news headlines have been focusing on the violent dimension of jihad, ignoring the growing popularity of the non-military version of jihad. International campaigns against poverty, illiteracy or pandemics have been launched under the banner of jihad, for instance through the Organization of Islamic Conference. The increased empowerment of civil society led to other initiatives of socially-conscious jihad. While Al-Qaida is drifting away from Islam and promoting its own cult, this grass-root evolution is a welcome reminder that jihad is not necessarily violent and that it is a comprehensive endeavor to fulfill the Prophet’s message.
Professor at Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and was visiting professor at Georgetown University. The French History Convention awarded its main prize to his “Apocalypse in Islam,” to be published in English by the University of California Press.
