“The Secret History of al Qaeda” by Abdel Bari Atwan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 256 pages.
Atwan, a Palestinian Arab journalist living in London, is one of the few people to interview Osama bin Laden, which happened in 1996 in a cave in Afghanistan. Realizing the importance of the man and his organization, he followed and researched both, resulting in this book. There is a detailed account of his 2-day meeting with bin Laden and a history of his life, focusing on the time after his 1982 move to Afghanistan to participate in the jihad against the Soviet Union. Atwan describes the theological background of al Qaeda and other militant fundamentalists in a key section, noting that “It is a completely alien cultural concept for many in the West that a religion might not only sanction killing but enjoin its followers to kill as a religious duty. In certain circumstances Islam does just this.”
Written at a time when al Qaeda in Iraq was creating increasing havoc, the last two chapters have been overtaken by events, but his analysis of militant Muslim fundamentalists and Western secular societies is on target. Fundamentalists attack Muslims that they deem insufficiently pious, thus alienating the majority of Muslims in the middle and turning them to the West. Western societies mistakenly try to occupy Muslim lands, turning that majority against the West and towards the fundamentalists. But when the militants attack Western targets, most Muslims are behind them. Atwan credits poor economic and political conditions for this reaction, but Islam itself is also a factor. His analysis of the contradictory nature of Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of both bin Laden and radical Islamic fundamentalism, is must reading for all of us depending on oil from that region.
