Nir Rosen - Aftermath

By chance, the mosque’s imam was called Sheikh Jihad Mahdi, though the name itself was of no significance (even Christian Arabs are known to call their sons Jihad). Sheikh Jihad wore a simple white dishdasha and white cap and sat in the front with a microphone. As he waited for the proper time to begin, he lectured the men in the mosque—and, through the loudspeakers, the entire neighborhood—on how to pray properly, using a strong colloquial accent and slang. As the majority of men completed their prayers in a low murmur, Sheikh Jihad stood up and began with a short prayer, as is the custom. “Thanks be to God, supporter of Islam,” he said, “for his victory and his humiliation of infidelity with his power and managing all the matters with his orders and deceiving the infidels with his cleverness, the one who estimates the days going over and over by his justice. Prayer and peace on the one who raises the flag of Islam with his sword.” This was no ordinary prayer and was not normally used, but it was the same prayer used by Al Qaeda in Iraq, the movement led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in every message they put out. It was a code, and supporters of the jihad and Al Qaeda would recognize it.

It would soon be time for the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and throughout the world millions were making their way to Saudi Arabia to fulfill this important pillar of Islam. Sheikh Jihad exhorted his flock to go on the hajj, calling it “the most important act of worship.” He warned that if a man did not go on the hajj he was as bad as a Jew. “Remember that we are now building this mosque,” he told his listeners. “It is not finished, so give any amount of money to help build this house of God.”

Like all sermons, Sheikh Jihad’s ended with a prayer. “God support the Muslims and give them victory everywhere,” he said, as the crowd responded with an “Amin.”

“God support the mujahideen and give them victory everywhere, in Iraq in Palestine.”

“Amin.”

“God give us the power to break the thorns of the Jews and the Americans and the Crusaders.”

“Amin.”

“God give us the opportunity to face them.”

“Amin.”

“Bless us and show us the way to jihad in the path of God.”

“Amin.”

Sheikh Jihad repeated this last prayer for jihad three times. Interestingly, he omitted the prayer for the leader of the nation (in this case, King Abdullah) that is traditionally invoked by clerics after their sermons.

The sheikh lived beneath his mosque with his family, and I waited on the steps in front of his door as he kissed and greeted well-wishers following his sermon. He invited me to his guest room, which was lined with books on Islam. Green pillows covered the floor, and we sat down to drink tea that he brought in from the house, which was closed off to me lest I glimpse his wife. I could hear his children watching cartoons on television. Colorful plastic flowers, which seemed to be required in Jordanian homes, decorated the room. On one wall in his guest room Sheikh Jihad had hung an immense sword, right out of Conan the Barbarian , with a wide sharp blade. On its hilt were two skulls and spikes coming out ominously. It was not a Middle Eastern blade, and I had never heard or seen a cleric with such a décor hanging on his walls. The thirty-five-year-old Sheikh Jihad took his name seriously.

Like many in Irbid, Sheikh Jihad was originally Palestinian; his family’s town had been destroyed by the Israelis in 1967. He had been a cleric for ten years, after receiving a degree in Sharia law from a Sudanese correspondence school. “The khutba is a standard that measures the direction of people,” he said, adding that his sermons had once been much more political, especially at the beginning of the Iraq War. But he had been arrested several times by Jordanian authorities as a result, and was forced to moderate his tone, at least a little. He claimed to have been tortured by them as well. I asked him about the ten young men I had seen in court two days before and who were said to have met to discuss their ideas and plans regularly in his mosque, but he claimed never to have heard of them. He no longer explicitly advocated jihad, in public at least, worrying that the November bombings in three Amman hotels had changed things in Jordan. “People were disgusted by it,” he said, explaining that things in Iraq were confusing.

The war in Iraq had changed everything in the Muslim world, creating new confusion and new certainties. In the late 1990s experts on the Muslim world had spoken about the failure of political Islam, even explaining that the September 11 attacks were its last nihilistic act. The planners of the American war in Iraq claimed that the democracy they would install in place of Saddam’s dictatorship would create a domino effect, spreading to other authoritarian states in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Syria. Nearly three years later, with religious parties dominating the Iraqi elections, Hamas winning in the Palestinian elections, the Muslim Brotherhood increasing its power in the Egyptian elections, and authoritarian regimes in the region appearing unthreatened by democracy, it was radical Islam that had spread. In fact, it was experiencing a renaissance.

The father of modern jihad was Abdallah Azzam. Azzam was born in 1941 in Jenin, Palestine. Following the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, Azzam, then a high school teacher, based himself in Jordan and led religious fighters from different Arab countries in cross-border raids against the Israelis from the “sheikhs’ camps” supported by the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Azzam led the Qutbi wing of the Jordanian Brotherhood, which was named after Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and made up of those closest to Salafis in their way of thinking. Qutb, who led the Muslim Brotherhood after Hassan al-Banna, was executed by the Egyptian regime in 1966. His most important book was Milestones on the Road . The two most important concepts in Qutb’s writings were jahiliya and takfir . Takfir , as mentioned above, means excommunicating, or declaring a Muslim to be a kafir . Jahiliya is the pre-Islamic ignorance that Islamists accuse present Muslim governments of having reverted to. Governments that have reverted to such a state can be declared infidel, and jihad against them is legitimate.

During the 1970 civil war in Jordan, when the regime battled Palestinians in what came to be known as Black September, Azzam ordered his men to leave Jordan to avoid killing other Muslims. Azzam was alienated by the dominance of secular nationalism over the Palestinian liberation movement and hoped to internationalize jihad. He studied in Egypt’s prestigious Al Azhar University, receiving a PhD in Islamic law and graduating with honors. He went on to teach in Saudi Arabia as well as in Jordan. Following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam moved to Pakistan, where he founded Maktab al-Khidmat al-Mujahideen (the Office of Mujahideen Services). The office served as the main clearinghouse for Arab fighters seeking to join the jihad in Afghanistan; it housed, trained, and educated them. Although the top Saudi cleric pronounced jihad in Afghanistan a fard ayn (direct obligation), the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood refused to issue a similar fatwa, so Azzam left the movement. Azzam believed that defensive jihad—i.e., defeating infidel invaders in Muslim lands—was a fard ayn . He singled out Afghanistan and Palestine as the most obvious cases. (During the war in Iraq, similar declarations that defensive jihad was a fard ayn were made throughout the Muslim world.) Azzam’s books and sermons formulated his thoughts on jihad, and he mentored Osama bin Laden until 1987, when the Saudi decided to form his own camp for Arabs. Azzam was not radical enough for this new camp; Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would become bin Laden’s key deputy and ideologue, virtually excommunicated him.