The Mind of the Islamic State by Robert Manne

Author:Robert Manne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633883727
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

Two fundamental changes took place in the evolution of Salafi jihadism during the 1990s. The first was the replacement of the Soviet Union by the United States and Israel—the Crusader–Jewish alliance—as the principal enemy of Islam. The second was the development and sanctification of a tactic by which the Crusader–Jewish alliance could be attacked with some prospect of success—suicide bombings targeting not only soldiers but also civilians, known by the Salafi jihadists as “martyrdom operations.” The two most consequential Salafi jihadists in the decade following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan were the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the Egyptian jihadist revolutionary Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al-Jihad from 1991. Bin Laden was chiefly responsible for making the Crusader–Jewish alliance the primary target of the Salafi jihadist movement; Zawahiri for providing the theological justification for martyrdom operations. As Fawaz Gerges argues, this involved two apparent conversions. By the end of the 1990s, Zawahiri accepted bin Laden's strategy that targeted the far enemy and not the near enemy. For his part, bin Laden joined Zawahiri in accepting the legality of killing Muslims, women, and children by bombings involving suicide, both in apparent contravention of long-standing Islamic legal rulings.1

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