Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [25]
He earned a degree from Cairo’s Al Azhar, the most prestigious Sunni Islamic university in the world, and lectured there on the fundamentals of Islam. He also became embroiled in the seething cauldron of the Islamic movement in Egypt and eventually emerged as a spiritual guide to the Islamic Group and the EIJ organization led by Ayman Al Zawahiri.25
The relationship between Rahman and Zawahiri was close and operational but riddled with rivalry and animosity. At one point, Zawahiri sided with a faction that sought to remove Rahman from his position on the grounds that blindness made him an unfit leader for the jihad. Nevertheless, they were both potent figures who commanded substantial resources, and ultimately an uneasy accommodation was reached. Rahman continued to lead the Islamic Group, while Zawahiri established a branch of EIJ in exile. Each man exerted significant influence within the other’s circles, despite the tensions.26
Rahman was arrested after the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat by EIJ in 1981 and accused of having foreknowledge of the attack and having provided a fatwa to justify the killing on religious grounds. He was acquitted, but Egypt became unfriendly ground for him. Despite his blindness, he made his way to Afghanistan to “see” the war for himself and soon became one of the most vocal supporters of the mujahideen.27
Some people in the United States looked on Rahman favorably because of his support for the CIA-backed jihad in Afghanistan. He made several trips to the United States to raise funds for the mujahideen and call American Muslims to join the fighting, attracting a large number of followers. Although Afghanistan was a strong focus for his speeches, Rahman roused a different sort of inspiration than Azzam and attracted more of a hardcore radical audience.
Azzam, in his rhetoric, had a tendency to lead with the glories of jihad, leveraging the spectacle to introduce ideological aspirations more subtly. His writings and speeches still contained plenty of blood and fire, and his goals were unabashedly those of Islamic supremacism. The Azzam style, however, was to first entice new recruits to Afghanistan to see the miracles and later inculcate them with ideology—that approach had drawn in Loay Bayazid, the mostly secularized Muslim from Kansas City, among others.
If Azzam used jihad as the carrot, for Rahman it was unquestionably the stick. The blind sheikh was more vocally—or at least more visibly—critical of Western and American morals than many of his contemporaries. Yet much of his venom was reserved for Muslim leaders. As the incendiary nature of his rhetoric became clear, Rahman was added to a State Department watch list that barred him from entering the United States.
Soon afterward, he wrote a scathing commentary questioning whether the leaders of Arab countries could be considered Muslims. His arguments were consistent with the radical Islamic movement known as takfir—Arabic for “excommunication”—claiming that only leaders who conformed to the strictest interpretation of Islam should be considered Muslims. Leaders who adopted secular legal systems, instead of shariah law such as the government of Egypt, could legitimately be killed in the name of jihad and “must not remain unopposed even for a moment.”
How could a Muslim be so bold, after all we have seen, as to replace even one part of the Shariah? How could a ruler claim to follow Islam, and still do such a thing? Wouldn’t he be aware that by giving preference to his own legislation over that of Allah he would inevitably have excluded himself from the Islamic Community? [ … ] The common people and their rulers, the educated and the ignorant, the cultured and the illiterate, all agree that these things are fundamental to Islam. Someone who denies any part of this has left Islam, and must perish in the mire of apostasy.28
In April 1989 Rahman was arrested by Egyptian authorities on charges of provoking an antigovernment riot. A few days later, the Islamic Group began to make tentative overtures to the U.S.