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Review [published February 2005]
Jason Burke: Al Qaeda
Ben Granger
The most striking fact Jason Burke hammers through
time and again in this meticulous and comprehensive
study is that Al Qaeda does not exist. Or at least, ‘Al
Qaeda’ the organised terrorist group, cohesive and complete
we hear of in the media doesn’t. I like Spooks as
much as anyone, but I fear we have been misinformed.
What does exist is a series of interconnected yet
disparate and competing forms of militant Islamism.
Bin Laden’s faction, amorphous in itself and rarely
termed “Al Qaeda” by its followers is only one part
of this, yet it has become lazy shorthand for a massive
phenomenon. Burke does not claim Islamist fundamentalism
isn’t a large, violent and dangerous force,
but does show that this one key misunderstanding is
disastrous if you want to deal with it. For one example,
the twin towers atrocity could be said to be the work of
‘Al Qaeda’; the ones in Madrid and Bali cannot. And as
another, al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug currently given
to beheading aid-workers in Iraq has been described as
an “Al Queda operative” and “bin Laden’s Lieutenant”
in highly reputable papers despite the two having never
met, and their groups being bitter rivals of one another.
BUY Jason Burke books online from and
Burke, who has spent the last ten years as The Observer’s
Middle East correspondent, tells two separate
yet interlinked stories; that of the formation of militant
political Islamism, and that of the more specific violent
groupings of which bin Laden became a leading figure.
He traces the roots of modern political Sunni ‘Islamism’
(as opposed to the Shia extremism of Khomeini)
as comparatively recent, stemming from Wahaabism,
a variant of Islam espoused in the 18th century by the
ultra-orthodox renegade Abdul al Wahaab. This was
developed into an all-encompassing political doctrine
by an Egyptian, the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan
Al-Banna in the 1920s and 30s. Explicitly rejecting
all Western influence as degenerate, Al-Banna and his
successor Syed Qutb, (another Egyptian campaigning
in the 50s and 60s) sought to recreate the world according
to the laws of Islam in the early post-Mohammed
years as they interpreted it, an interpretation very
obscure and unpopular at the time in the wider Islamic
world (though, crucially, not in Saudi Arabia, where it
gained credence amongst the ruling royal family who
used it to re-inforce their legitimacy).
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