• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Azzam presented a sweeping list of reasons why jihad would continue to be mandatory for all Muslims who were able.31 The list included:

• To keep the “disbelievers” from dominating the world. To justify this rather broad motive, Azzam quoted an infamous passage from the Koran that orders believers to fight until all fitna has ceased. Azzam and other jihadist ideologues translate fitna as “disbelief,” although it is more often defined as “internal conflict among Muslims.”

• Because God wants you to. This motive doesn’t require much explanation, but it’s noteworthy in that the injunction lacks a specific provocation. Azzam cited several different variations on this theme, including fear of hell, desire for heaven (via martyrdom), and following the example of the Prophet and his companions.

• Scarcity of men. The global Muslim community, known as the Ummah, was sorely lacking in capable fighters who were also fully committed to religion, in Azzam’s estimation. “We will pass through Afghanistan so that you see for yourself an entire regiment, in which not a single person among them is proficient in the recitation of the Koran,” he lamented.

• Protecting the Ummah. This extended to protecting both the lives and the “dignity” of Muslims around the world and protecting Muslim resources and houses of worship. Although this message was key to Azzam’s appeal, its importance had been significantly demoted during the course of the war against the Soviets. As seen in the previous rationales, the jihad had become to a large extent self-justifying. Once drawn in by an arguably legitimate defensive need, the world’s most influential jihadist was now fighting for more esoteric reasons.

• Establishing a solid foundation as a base for Islam. Azzam also expounded on this idea in a 1988 article for his Al Jihad magazine, titled “The Solid Base.” The use of the word “base” here is highly significant—in Arabic, the word is “al Qaeda.” According to Azzam, the Muslim community must wage jihad from an “area of land.” This base would be “like the small spark which ignites a large keg of explosives, for the Islamic movement brings about an eruption of the hidden capabilities of the Ummah.”

Azzam’s lectures and videotapes of battles fought by the mujahideen against the Soviets were often shown at mosques around the greater New York area. One American who was captivated by the videos and the talk of jihad was Abdullah Rashid, an African American born in Brooklyn under the name Clement Hampton-El.32

His father was a Christian preacher, and his mother was deeply involved with the Moorish Science Temple, raising her son in the same tradition. Young Clement inherited from them both an intensity of belief and a propensity for persuasive talk—the “gift of gab,” as his wife put it.33

Hampton-El had served in the U.S. Army during the 1950s. After being discharged for fighting over a racial incident, he was swept up into the rush of Black Nationalism that erupted during the 1960s. He was headstrong and passionate, even from an early age, and would wax on about the coming Revolution, which never came. He loved all kinds of music, and he loved women, remaining an inveterate womanizer even after becoming a Muslim.

One day in 1967, Hampton-El was walking past the Islamic Mission of America, a Sunni mosque on State Street in Brooklyn, while sporting the distinctive maroon fez commonly worn by Moorish Science adherents. (“He was a man of hats,” his wife remarked dryly.) Several Muslims standing outside the mosque took him to task.

“They said what you are practicing is not really true Islam, and they told me what I should do,” Hampton-El recalled. He converted to Islam the year he got married, changing his name to Abdullah Rashid.

His twenty-one-year-old wife, then known as Elsie, was a Methodist and was not so fast to convert. Rashid was always rushing headlong into a new idea. Elsie took her time, investigated and considered, but eventually joined her husband in his new faith, taking the name