This post arises out of a deep conversation with a Muslim reader who disagreed with virtually all my views on Islam and Extremism.He continually claimed that Islam is a religion of peace and has been diluted with errors that has affected its position world wide. So, I hope this post answers deep questions that may have made you quite confused.
Bin Laden who enjoyed the political and financial backing of many conservative donors. A man about six-foot-six who usually wore saville row suits, he arrived in Peshawar in the mid 1980's. After getting there, he realized that not so many shared his devotion to militancy especially the fiercely factional Mujahideen who spoke not Arabic but Pashtu and dari. As time passed, he found refuge in a clique of like-minded volunteers who soon came to be known as the Arab-Afghans. What must have held this group together was a sense of Muslim camaraderie in the loneliness of a strange land. While in the shelter of this group, Laden and his cohorts developed their plan to lay ground for a universalist Islamic state, If necessary through the use of Violence. His agenda began to lord over Arab, and the Islamic states, reviving the Islamic notion of the caliphate.
In Peshawar, Bin Laden's Influence continued to boomerang especially the defeat of the soviet forces added to his prestige in Afghanistan and within the Islamic world generally. As the soviets were withdrawn Bin laden founded Al Qaeda-a cluster of military-ideological camps. But this also failed. After his defeat, he returned to Saudi Arabia, and moved to Sudan.
All through this, no one took him serious. When Laden proposed to launch a Jihad against Iraq, he was turned down by the Saudi Authorities who found him a nuisance. The intervention of U.S was seen as mustering a grand coalition against Iraq for the sake of his own national interest. What Infuriated him the most was that the Saudi authorities revoked his passports and froze his assets under American pressure. Two years later Washington succeeded in pressuring Sudan to deny him safe haven he enjoyed.He then sought support in Taliban in exchange for his financial and logistic support
Sooner than later, he began his militant student movement that eventually took over Afghanistan. He began financing construction of new communal mosques from Indonesia and the Phillipines to sub sharan and central Asia training young students. He facilitated Scholarships for the poor and built a strong network that is now changing the face of Islam throughout the towns and villages of the Muslim world. This began the rise of indoctrination. It revived and imposed a strict Patriarchal order deeply hostile to women and their education and public presence. It allowed battering, even killing of women by their male relatives, enforced facial veiling, and closed most girls schools. It also undermined all women and individual rights.
In the year that Laden arrived in Afghanistan, he issued a Fatwa, or religious ruling that called upon all Muslims to kill all Americans as a religious duty. The 1998 bombing of the Embassy of American in Nairobi, as far as we know, his own ruling into practice. For Laden, The terrorist war against the U.S was a struggle rooted in Islam's noble past and ensured of Victory by God. So, in this context, the attack on giant structures representing American economic and military might was a largely symbolic act that would subdue their enemy just as the infidels of early Islam eventually succumbed to the prophet's attack on their caravans.
I would have loved to continue today on its massive expansion. But I would stop here and complete tomorrow because I am not use to writing really long compositions. Extremism would never be curtailed unless drastic majors as the one that was taken to spread it is applied.
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