The tenets of terror
A special report on the ideology of jihad and the rise of Islamic militancy.
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Zawahiri, according to press reports, shaved his beard, dyed his hair, and went to California and Texas for a few weeks in 1991. He visited mosques and community centers under an assumed name, raising money for "Afghan widows and orphans."
In the 1990s, flush with Afghan vets, the Egyptian Islamic Group, and Jihad (the militant group Zawahiri belonged to), launched a series of attacks on politicians and tourists. In 1997, six Islamic militants massacred 58 foreign tourists and at least four Egyptians in Luxor, Egypt.
The next year, Zawahiri and bin Laden publicly reunited, although terrorism experts say that the two were working together throughout the 1990s.
On Feb. 23, 1998, an Arab newspaper introduced to the world the "International Islamic Front for Combating Crusaders and Jews." The founding document was signed by "Sheikh" bin Laden, Zawahiri "Amir of the Jihad Group" in Egypt, and the leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Group, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan, and the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. It condemned the "sins" of American foreign policy for declaring "war on God, his messenger, and Muslims." And it called "on every Muslim ... to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it."
Six months later, the US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed.
While the allure of jihad and defending Islam against America draws many today, not all the young men who are radicalized stay that way.
As a boy growing up as part of the 5 percent minority in the Philippines, Zam Amputan, remembers feeling that Muslims were destined to be forever marginalized unless they were governed by the Koran.
His father was a respected religious teacher, and the family, by Mindanao standards, was well off. Amputan attended a private Catholic school, and after college, the opportunity arose to attend a madrassah in Pakistan. At the height of the jihad against the Soviets, his trip to Peshawar in 1987, like those of other believers, was sponsored by the Saudi-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth. There he was exposed to the Wahhabi ideology, which he saw as a powerful tool against oppression.
He returned to Mindanao full of zeal, thinking of ways to create a separate Islamic state in the southern Philippines.
But as he matured, he says, his ideas changed. Amputan doesn't know exactly what altered his radical route, though he cites a 1995 trip to Iran, in which he began to believe it was a huge mistake to give clerics control over the temporal world.
"I always used my own reasoning, and it led me to a different understanding of the Koran," says Amputan. "The problem with the religious state is that they say religious teachers have the ultimate responsibility to interpret the Koran. I have a different reading: It's each individual's responsibility."
The views of this father of four put him at odds with the growing number of militants in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a separatist group with whom he sympathized. (In March 2000, Amputan survived an assassination attempt by the MILF, while driving home from a radio talk show he hosted.)
"Extremist, intolerant views of Islam have come to monopolize the religious dialogue here, and the moderates have to do more to change that," Amputan says. "My personal jihad is to stop extremism. But few are fighting yet."
Reporting by staff writers Jane Lampman in Boston; Scott Peterson in Douab, Afghanistan; Ilene R. Prusher in Cairo; and Warren Richey in Amman, Jordan; as well as special correspondents Sarah Gauch in Cairo and Dan Murphy in Manila.
