Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [123]
As the siege of Mecca ended, in December 1979, the third momentous event of the year occurred: Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. This attack on a Muslim country energized fighters across the entire Muslim world. Some wanted Jordan to get involved. An American friend who recently had retired from the armed forces came to see me, saying he had just returned from Afghanistan and wanted Jordan to train a group of mujahideen fighters. I told him it was not my decision to make; I was just a junior officer. But I would pass the request on to my father.
My father said, “Absolutely not.” He felt mixing religious zeal with cold war politics was a very dangerous thing to do. He also felt that getting involved in this conflict would set us up against Russia, something he did not believe would serve the interests of Jordan.
One Muslim group at the forefront of the war in Afghanistan was the Salafi movement. Mainstream Sunni and Shia believers base their interpretation of Islam on a deep historical tradition of scholarship and learning and a corpus of grammatical, linguistic, and etymological analysis. In this tradition, Muslim religious leaders, known as imams, spend years, even decades, studying over a thousand years of Muslim scholarship. When they issue religious edicts or judicial opinions, known as fatwas, they generally offer a nuanced interpretation of Islamic thought, based on the wisdom of those who have gone before. But Salafi leaders disregard this tradition of learning and do not accept a plurality of scholarship in Islamic thought. Instead, they insist that they have a privileged understanding of Islam based on their own interpretation of the Quran. One of the problems with this approach is that it does not contain the internal judicial checks and balances of the mainstream faith, and it is not accepting of other learned opinions. In the wrong hands, this can be very dangerous.
The takfiris take this exclusivism further and use it to justify their distorted version of Islam. They believe they have the right to kill heretics, and to denounce as such those who disagree with their doctrines. They would kill whenever and wherever they can.
Early in the morning of October 28, 2002, Laurence Foley, a senior official for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), stepped out of his white limestone house in an Amman suburb, heading for work. As he walked toward his car a gunman jumped out from behind the car and shot him eight times with a 7mm pistol. The assassin fled to a waiting getaway car, leaving Foley’s wife to discover his body lying in a pool of blood.
The head of the intelligence service called me and said, “There’s just been an assassination of an American diplomat.” I was furious that such a terrible thing could happen to a guest in our country and ordered immediate action to find the culprits.
The next day I went to the U.S. embassy to pay my condolences to Foley’s widow, Virginia. I told her we would find her husband’s killer. Two months later, in December 2002, Jordanian security forces arrested the gunman, a Libyan, and the driver of the getaway car, a Jordanian.
As our security forces investigated further, we found that the plot had been directed from outside Jordan and that the mastermind was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Following a lengthy investigation and trial, in the spring of 2004 a Jordanian court sentenced eight men to death for the killing of Laurence Foley, six in absentia, including Zarqawi. The two men who were in Jordanian custody, the gunman and the driver, were subsequently executed.
Terrible as this act was, it was simply the prelude to a much larger wave of violence that