The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [74]
Deraz became bin Laden’s first biographer. He soon came to notice how the Egyptians formed a barrier around the curiously passive Saudi, who rarely ventured an opinion of his own, preferring to solicit the views of others in his company. This humility, this apparent artlessness, on bin Laden’s part elicited a protective response from many, including Deraz. He claims he sought to counter the influence of his countrymen, but whenever he tried to speak confidentially to bin Laden, the Egyptians would surround the Saudi and drag him into another room. They all had designs on him. Deraz thought bin Laden had the potential to be “another Eisenhower” by turning his wartime legend into a peaceful political life. But that wasn’t Zawahiri’s plan.
IN MAY 1988 the Soviets began a staged withdrawal from Afghanistan, signaling the end of the war. Slowly, Peshawar shrank back into its shabby former self, and the Afghan mujahideen leaders started stockpiling weapons, preparing to confront their inevitable new enemies—each other.
Bin Laden and his Egyptian handlers were also surveying the future. Zawahiri and Dr. Fadl constantly fed him position papers outlining the “Islamic” perspective, which reflected their takfiri tendencies. One of bin Laden’s close friends paid a call on him in Peshawar during this period and was told that bin Laden was unavailable because “Dr. Ayman was giving him a class in how to become the leader in an international organization.”
As he groomed bin Laden for the role that he envisioned for him, Zawahiri sought to undermine Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the single great competitor for bin Laden’s attention. “I don’t know what some people are doing here in Peshawar,” Azzam complained to his son-in-law Abdullah Anas. “They are talking against the mujahideen. They have only one point, to create fitna”—discord—“between me and these volunteers.” He singled out Zawahiri as one of the troublemakers.
Azzam recognized that the real danger was takfir. The heresy that had infected the Arab Afghan community was spreading and threatened to fatally corrupt the spiritual purity of jihad. The struggle was against nonbelievers, Azzam believed, not within the community of faith, however fractured it might be. He issued a fatwa opposing the training of terrorists with money raised for the Afghan resistance, and he preached that the intentional killing of civilians, especially women and children, was against Islam.
And yet Azzam himself was in favor of forming a “pioneering vanguard” along the lines called for by Sayyid Qutb. “This vanguard constitutes the solid base”—qaeda—“for the hoped-for society,” Azzam wrote in April 1988. Upon this base the ideal Islamic society would be built. Afghanistan was just the beginning, Azzam believed. “We shall continue the jihad no matter how long the way, until the last breath and the last beat of the pulse—or until we see the Islamic state established.” The property he surveyed for the future of jihad included the southern Soviet republics, Bosnia, the Philippines, Kashmir, central Asia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Spain—the entire span of the once-great Islamic empire.
First, however, was Palestine. Azzam helped create Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group, which he saw as the natural extension of the jihad in Afghanistan. Based on the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas was meant to provide an Islamic counterweight to Yasser Arafat’s secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Azzam sought to train brigades of Hamas fighters in Afghanistan, who would then return to carry on the battle against Israel.
Azzam’s plans for Palestine, however, ran counter to Zawahiri’s intention of stirring revolution within Islamic