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PARTISAN REVIEW
the World Trade Center. Al-Zayyat's truce provoked al-Zawahiri's great
anger, for he wanted his Egyptian comrades in arms to go on fighting on
all fronts to the very end.
The visitor to the bookshop will find a new history of Afghani Arabs
(Waqai sanuat al jihad-Years
of Jihad-by Mohammed Sahel), the for–
eign legion which assembled in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the
1980s and '90S and fought in the Balkans, Algeria, and other places.
There are interesting videos-some showing how to massacre young
Algerian soldiers, others exposing the Elders of Zion-that were put out
by Maktaba al-Ansar and by Azzam publications.
Azzam cannot be accused of making a secret of its convictions. The
following quotation should give a general idea of its publishing policy:
Regarding calls by Western leaders
to
moderate Muslims tackling
"extremist elements" within their ranks, these are merely appeals
to
divide the Muslims. What is the "moderate Muslim" that these
leaders refer to? One that does not pray or fast or wear
hijab,
one
that agrees with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, one that thinks
cutting off a thief's hand is barbaric and one that thinks that Islam
is primitive and backward? There is no such thing as a "moderate"
or "liberal" Muslim.
If
there was, in what category would he place
the Prophet Muhammed? Would we say he is a moderate or liberal,
an extremist, a fanatic, a terrorist, a fundamentalist? He certainly
would not be a moderate or a liberal since he ordered 600-700 Jew–
ish males
to
be beheaded in Madinah after the Jewish tribe of Bani
Quraizah betrayed the Muslims and stabbed them in the back. He
also fought in 27 battles for the sake of Allah. Are we now going
to call him a terrorist as well?
Azzam is named for Abdullah Azzam, the man who, according to all
accounts, gave bin Laden his ideas. Born in Palestine and educated in
Jordan, he trained first as an agriculturist in the Kadoorie school, later
as an expert in Muslim jurisprudence, and he taught for a while in Saudi
Arabia. In the early eighties he moved to Pakistan and opened the Ser–
vices Bureau in Peshawar, which for years served as the liaison office for
foreign volunteers. Azzam was not primarily a military leader, though
he took part in military actions, but something of an intellectual, and
certainly a leader with a vision. A man of boundless energy, he traveled
near and far trying to mobilize young people all over the Muslim world
to join the armed struggle against the infidels and to establish
khilafa,
God's rule on earth. He was also a very pious man, performing rituals
such as fasting every Monday and Thursday.
