Ideological clash of two jihadi titans shakes Al Qaeda

A growing feud between Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant, and Sayyed Imam al-Sharif, the jailed ex-leader of Egypt's Islamic Jihad, could weaken support for Al Qaeda.

from the December 15, 2008 edition

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After months of heated debate among militants on jihadi online forums, Zawahiri responded in March with a 200-page book called "Exoneration." He charged that Imam lacked credibility because he wrote from prison and was supervised by US intelligence.

Last month, Imam's reply to Zawahiri, a book titled "Denudation of the Exoneration," was serialized in Cairo's Al Masri Al Youm newspaper. It also was published at IslamOnline.net and in the Saudi-owned Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper, according to McCants, who posted English summaries of the Masri Al Youm installments on his site.

In the first, called "The Lies of Zawahiri," Imam claims that Zawahiri told him in 1993 that "he had to carry out 10 operations for the Sudanese in Egypt and that he received $100,000 from them."

Apparently aiming to play down Zawahiri's importance inside Al Qaeda, Imam asserts that "only three people knew of the 9/11 operation before it happened: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Hafs al-Masri, and a third person – not Zawahiri." The third person was only told 24 hours before the attack.

As for Al Qaeda's idea of violent jihad, Imam calls it "a corrupt, wayward school [of Islamic thinking] to justify excess in shedding blood." In order to sell it, the group launched "media propaganda to promote the corrupt idea that America is the cause of all the ills afflicting Muslims."

Imam's latest attacks on Zawahiri are so vituperative that some analysts say he has damaged his own credibility. "This is an embarrassment," former Islamic Jihad member Kamal Habib told Agence France-Presse in Cairo. "I don't think he realizes what this does to his image."

McCants argues that Imam's arguments will likely be most influential outside Al Qaeda's inner circle of die-hard jihadis. "We shouldn't be assessing the impact of Imam's book on jihadis but rather on neutral pious, educated Arabs, particularly high school and college-age youth, whom Imam considers his primary audience," McCants wrote on his website.

McCants also singles out Imam's "vigorous rejection of the victimization" theme in jihadist thinking.

"The cause of Muslims' problems is Muslims themselves," Imam writes. Noting that Muslims are killing Sudanese in Darfur, Imam asks: "What was the reason the US opened the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba for imprisoning Muslims? Bin Laden's stupidity…. Putting blame on others while not accepting it yourself ... is the school of Satan."

Some analysts say Imam's writings are not all that significant because he does not reject jihad per se, only Al Qaeda's tactics. But a total abandonment of jihad would be tantamount to rejecting a Koranic concept integral to Islam since its inception, leaving Imam with no credibility.

For centuries, jihad was embedded in the legal framework of Islamic law, or sharia, making it pretty much the prerogative of an Islamic ruler, that is, of the state. Sharia also imposed clear rules on jihad, prohibiting the slaughter of innocent civilians, for example. It is this legal framework that Al Qaeda has tossed aside in its glorification of jihad.

Perhaps Zawahiri's strongest argument against Imam is that he is a prisoner. Indeed, some passages in Imam's latest book seem made-to-order for intelligence agencies. For example, he writes, "Regardless of the legitimacy of their presence, the American forces did not kill a single Muslim in Saudi Arabia during their presence there after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990."

He does not mention Iraqi deaths caused by US forces during the war in Iraq. Instead, he focuses on Al Qaeda in Iraq, which he said "killed far more Iraqis than it killed Americans."

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