What does al Qaeda want?

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.“History,” the American writer William Faulkner famously observed, “is not was, it is.” Sept. 11 is that rare thing in history: an undeniable hinge point in which one era ended and another, more uncertain one began. Yet, for all of its well-deserved infamy, one of the worst and most consequential days in U.S. history also remains one of the most misunderstood.The scope and scale of the tragedy are still hard to fathom all these years later. A total of 2,977 people were murdered on American soil, and thousands more have died since from related injuries and illnesses. The United States entered the labyrinth of the Middle East and has been fighting wars in the region ever since. Society has changed, and our politics with it.But a quarter-century later, it is regrettably clear that many in the U.S. still do not truly understand the motives of those who perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in American history.The confusion began not long after the towers fell.“Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist attacks,” then-President George W. Bush told the nation that night. “We stand together to win the war against terrorism.”Debates raged, but the course was largely set. The U.S. was now at war with terrorism. Yet terrorism is not an ideology. It is a tactic — a mere means to achieve an end.As several leading Bush administration figures recognized early on, it’s hard to fight a war against an opponent without first fully identifying your enemy. Victories will be hard to come by.“Looking back now on 9/11 and the early U.S. response, I see things we should have done differently and things that we might have done better,” Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defense secretary, wrote in his well-written 2011 memoir Known and Unknown.“The administration, for example, should have focused more effectively and earlier on the ideological nature of the Islamist extremist enemies instead of describing the enemy vaguely as terrorism,” Rumsfeld wrote. “We should not have shrunk from labeling the challenge Islamist while still properly making clear that we did not view Islam–the religion, as opposed to the totalitarian ideology–as an enemy.”But for many Americans, both then and now, a full understanding of our enemy remains elusive.Several lines of argument have been advanced. Two of the most popular: Al Qaeda and its fellow Islamists hated America for our “freedoms.” Or, alternatively, U.S. foreign policy, particularly our intervention in the region and support for Israel, was to blame.But these explanations are both inadequate and incomplete. The truth is at once more frightening and more incomprehensible.On Sept. 10, 2001, Americans in particular, and the West more generally, were fixated on the future while Islamists looked to the glories of their past. This remains true today.For centuries, the West had become increasingly secular, enthralled with its economic success and the progress of its industrial revolutions. This has made understanding the motives of those who perpetrated 9/11, what Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants called the “Planes Operation,” all the more difficult.But Islamists have their own motives, their own ideology, and their own narrative. They are not, as some on the right and left wings would have it, purely reacting to what the West does and has done. Shortly after Sept. 11, it became fashionable in some circles to claim that the U.S. had, if inadvertently, created the very problem that it now faced.From 1979 until 1992, the U.S. had supplied the mujahideen, “those who struggle for jihad,” in Afghanistan with weapons to counter the Soviet Union. Scores of jihadists, bin Laden among them, traveled from all over the world to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invaders. Al Qaeda, “the base,” was born amid this rabble and the rubble.For bin Laden, it was a near-perfect origin story. A small, ragtag band of pious believers had successfully expelled an infidel military superpower.It proved to be a great recruitment tool, even if bin Laden exaggerated both his own role and those of his fellow mujahideen.But the roots of the Islamist holy war on the West predate America’s decision to send Stinger missiles to shoot down some Soviet helicopters. Indeed, they predate America’s involvement in the Middle East itself.In 1928, an errant Egyptian watchmaker and schoolteacher named Hasan al Banna formed the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Banna, like many young Muslims of his generation, was seeking to solve the undeniable decline of the Islamic world.The victory of the Allied Powers in World War I led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 and the subsequent abolition of the Caliphate in 1924.The Ottoman Empire had once been a colossus, stretching from the gates of Vienna in Central Europe through the Balkans and Anatolia into the African continent, and across the Levant and Holy Land, and all the way down to the Arabian peninsula.But after its defeat on Sept. 12, 1683, in Vienna, Ottoman fortunes began to wane.By the time that Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798 with 400 ships and 40,000 men, a reversal was readily apparent. The Ottoman rulers themselves belatedly recognized as much and ushered in a series of reforms beginning in the late 1830s.But by that point, it was already too late. The Ottoman Empire had become the “Sick Man of Europe,” and the course was set.An entire generation of scholars had begun debating ways for the Islamic world to regain the momentum that it had lost. Among them was Rashid Rida, whose journal, Al-Manar, advocated the creation of an Islamic state governed by sharia law.Rida was far from the first to advocate salafism, “ancestors,” which argued that an Islamic rebirth would only come by returning to the practices of the religion’s early forefathers. But at the dawn of the 20th century, he was among its most influential.Rida’s pupils, indirect and otherwise, included al Banna and Amin al Husseini, the future grand mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi collaborator. Under al Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood grew and expanded. Husseini led the jihad against Zionism and Israel, before passing the baton to his distant cousin, Yasser Arafat.After al Banna’s 1949 assassination, the Muslim Brotherhood found its new soothsayer in Sayyid Qutb, whose 1964 book, Milestones, has been a touchstone for Islamists ever since. Qutb was also executed by the Egyptian state in 1966, but his writings influenced scores of budding jihadists, including a young bin Laden and an Egyptian doctor named Ayman al Zawahiri, who came to know Qutb’s siblings.Yet, the idea of creating an Islamic state still seemed impossibly far-fetched. 1979 changed everything.In Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini, a fiery old cleric who had listened to Husseini’s radio broadcasts as a young man, led an Islamic revolution and installed a brutal theocracy. In Saudi Arabia, jihadists seized the Grand Mosque of Mecca. And the Soviets, the penultimate godless infidels, invaded Afghanistan. For Islamists, the stars were suddenly aligned.For decades, Arab nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser had tried and failed to destroy Israel and vanquish America from the Middle East. Scores now turned to another, far older ideology for their salvation.They created the world anew by looking to centuries past. Their leaders were not poor and uneducated. Indeed, the opposite was often true. Bin Laden, like Husseini before him, was the scion of a wealthy and illustrious family. Zawahiri was a doctor, a profession which, along with engineers and teachers, is often overrepresented in jihadist circles.In 1981, they murdered Nasser’s successor, Anwar al Sadat. Zawahiri, a co-founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and bin Laden’s eventual successor in al Qaeda, was among those imprisoned in the subsequent roundup. One can still go on YouTube today and find videos of him yelling Quranic verses at Egyptian authorities from behind bars.In the 1980s, groups supported by Khomeini, including the nascent Hezbollah, pioneered suicide and vehicle bombings in war-torn Lebanon. They trained in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, the very same place where, a decade before, Arafat’s men had trained the nucleus of what would become Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. While the West slept, Lebanon, Sudan, and eventually Afghanistan all became key nodes for terrorist training.These were the men and the ideas percolating when the Berlin Wall collapsed, and a triumphalist West declared the end of history. But Islamists have their own timeline.On Sept. 11, 2001, after nearly a decade of attacks by al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and others, history returned with a vengeance. Al Qaeda, harkening back to the tactics of their heroes more than a millennium ago, referred to 9/11 as the “Manhattan raid.”A quarter-century later, the West still struggles to understand what groups like al Qaeda want. But this says more about us than it does them. The Islamists have been crystal clear about their objectives. We just haven’t been listening.