The march of folly
Saïd Aburish
THE SECRET HISTORY OF AL-QAIDA by Abdel Bari Atwan Saqi, £16.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0863567606 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This wonderful small book brings to an end much journalistic nonsense that followed 11 September 2001 in its definitive treatment of its causes and repercussions. To the Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, what happened on that day was a natural conclusion to decades of Arab frustration and Western neglect.
Honourably, but not totally successfully, he tries to be condemning of both sides. The sweep of his broad, sensitive and near perfect judgment cancels the importance of individuals, Osama bin Laden included, and focuses instead on the march of folly, which promises more such catastrophes in the future.
However, bin Laden is still central to the tale. Atwan begins his narrative by recalling his own 1996 trip to Afghanistan to interview him. What must have been a ghastly, uncomfortable journey slips into an exposé of why bin Laden matters and why he was in Afghanistan. The background to Islam’s pretender to the Caliphate, modern Islamic fundamentalism and what they mean to the rest of the world, is laid out in a simple, memorable way. This is a book for both the layman and for the professional.
The rest of the book, crammed with original information and uncomplicated opinion, unfolds with the ease of Jay Gatsby’s captivating tale of how the very rich are different from the rest of us:
It is my opinion that Western governments — in particular the US of President George W. Bush and the UK of Prime Minister Tony Blair — do not fully understand the level of the threat, why it has arisen or how to deal with it.
Superficially, this condemnation of the two Western leaders who claim the moral high ground absolves the Arab side of the conflict. But in fact, bin Laden and Saddam Hussein get as much condemnation, if not more. Atwan, who is full of despair about American and British behaviour, is also dismissive of all Arab leaders almost to the point of not expecting them to know better. He uses the Saudi royal family — providers of ample reason for the success of today’s militant Islamists — as his whipping boy:
The Royal family has played into the hands
of al-Qaida. The Kingdom’s 6,000 umara
[princes] receive salaries from birth and they and the 24,000 of their relations and offspring enjoy lives of ostentatious wealth.
Combining the folly of both sides, Atwan takes us to what he considers the origins of this later phase of the MuslimWest crisis (he sees it as an ongoing historical process). To him it began with the house of Saud agreeing to the stationing of American troops in their country in 1991, prior to the first Gulf war. When the majority of the religious ulemas of the desert kingdom protested against the infidel presence on holy Muslim soil, they were dismissed and imprisoned. This opened the door for dissent based on Islam. Bin Laden wasted no time moving in.
But there is more to the book than Atwan’s ability to follow the strategic outline of a disaster in the making. His analy sis of how the internet is used by the Islamists, a 20-page chapter, deserves a book in itself. The detailed history of alQaida’s relationship with Iraq and the savagery of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi is a stunning study of the Islamists’ methods, organisational structure and internal arguments. And the twisted history of al-Qaida and the house of Saud has never been told better.
This book is required reading for all journalists covering the present Middle East mess and indeed for anybody concerned with the future of the globe. But I cannot help being uneasy about Atwan’s standpoint. His condemnation of al-Qaida and bin Laden does not go far enough. Moreover, he never tells us why the Islamists appear to favour the London-based newspaper al-Quds alArabi, of which he is editor-in-chief, with so many scoops. We are entitled to hear more. The English language is rich in adjectives that describe the criminality of people who kill thousands of innocents without feeling any pain.
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