The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [54]
IN THE MONTH between the surrender of the rebels and their mass execution, there was a new shock to the Islamic world: on Christmas Eve 1979 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. “I was enraged and went there at once,” bin Laden later claimed. “I arrived within days, before the end of 1979.” According to Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden had never even heard of the country of Afghanistan until that point and did not actually go there until 1984, which is when he first became noticed in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Bin Laden explained that the trips he made before then were “a big secret, so that my family wouldn’t find out.” He became a courier, he said, delivering charitable donations from wealthy Saudis. “I used to hand over the money and head straight back, so I wasn’t really familiar with what was going on.”
The most influential figure in bin Laden’s involvement with the Afghan cause was a charismatic Palestinian scholar and mystic named Abdullah Azzam. Born in Jenin in 1941, Azzam fled to Jordan after Israel captured the West Bank in 1967. He went to al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he gained a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence in 1973, two years behind his friend Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheikh. He then joined the faculty of the University of Jordan, but his Palestinian activism got him dismissed in 1980. Soon he found a job leading prayers in the school mosque at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah.
For aroused young Muslims such as Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam* embodied in a modern fashion the warrior priest—a figure that was as well established in Islamic tradition as the samurai in Japan. Azzam combined piety and learning with a serene and bloody intransigence. His slogan was “Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues.” Around his neck he wore the black-and-white Palestinian kaffiyeh, or scarf—a reminder of his reputation as a freedom fighter. By the time he arrived in Jeddah, he was already well known for his courage and oratory. Tall and sturdy, with an impressive black beard distinctively forked by two bright streaks of white and dark eyes that radiated conviction, he mesmerized audiences with his vision of an Islam that would dominate the world through the force of arms.
Despite his growing body of followers, Azzam was restless in Jeddah and eager to participate in the nascent Afghan resistance. “Jihad for him was like water for a fish,” his wife, Umm Mohammed, said. He soon found a position for teaching the Quran and Arabic language at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan, and moved there as soon as he could, in November 1981.
Soon he was spending each weekend in Peshawar, which had become the headquarters of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation. He visited the refugee camps and saw appalling suffering. He met with the leaders of the mujahideen—the “holy warriors”—who made Peshawar their base. “I reached Afghanistan, and I could not believe my eyes,” Azzam would later recall in his countless videos and speeches around the world. “I felt as if I had been reborn.” In his renderings, the war was primeval, metaphysical, fought in a landscape of miracles. The Afghans, in his tableau, represented humanity in a pristine state—a righteous, pious, pre-industrial people—struggling against the brutal, soulless, mechanized force of modernity. In this war, the believers were aided by the invisible hands of angels. Azzam spoke of Russian helicopters