“Westoxification.”
[Look] at this materialistic attitude which deadens the spirit; at this behavior like animals, which you call “free mixing of the sexes”; at this vulgarity which you call “emancipation of women” . . . at this evil and fanatic racial discrimination.
To counter Westoxification, Sayyid Qutub looked to religion. “Islam,” he proclaimed, “is the answer.” And having been brutalized in Nasser’s prisons, he was no pacifist. Those who would deny jihad’s active and aggressive character, he wrote, “diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life.”
The ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood were similar to those of the Salafis and also of the dawah wahhabiya (Wahhabi mission)—to reestablish the order of Allah and to bring about the perfect Islamic state. But the rhetoric of the Brotherhood dealt in change-promoting concepts like social justice, anticolonialism, and the equal distribution of wealth. Politically they were prepared to challenge the establishment in a style that was unthinkable to mainstream Wahhabis, who were reflexively deferential to their rulers and enablers, the House of Saud.
It was heady stuff for the young students of Jeddah, taking the Wahhabi values they had absorbed in childhood and giving them a radical, but still apparently safe, religious twist. They had learned of jihad at school as a distantly romantic concept—part of history. Now they were hearing of its practical possibility today, and they could even make personal contact with jihad in the barrel-chested shape of Abdullah Azzam, who gave lectures in both Jeddah and Mecca in the early 1980s. A Palestinian, Azzam had taken up arms against the Israeli occupation of his family home in Jenin, on the West Bank, after the Six-Day War of 1967, the humiliating defeat ruefully known throughout the Arab world as “Al-Nakba,” the “Disaster.” But this eloquent warrior sheikh, whose long beard spilled over his chest like a rippling gray waterfall, had no time for Yasser Arafat or his PLO henchmen, whom he considered insufficiently religious.
The Saudi government had welcomed ideologues like Azzam and Mohammed, the surviving Qutub, 7 to the Kingdom as pious reinforcement against the atheistic, Marxist-tinged thinking of their Middle Eastern neighborhood. But in the process they were exposing young Saudi hearts and minds to a still more potent virus—hands-on, radical Islam. As the 1980s progressed, hundreds of young men, many of them from outside the university, gathered on Fridays to pray and listen to the booming, inspirational sermons of Abdullah Azzam.
“I went to hear him several times,” remembers Jamal Khashoggi, the young second cousin of Adnan, the business tycoon. Jamal had been studying in America and was just getting his start in journalism. “It was a huge gathering. There were so many listeners that the mosque was full. People had to sit and pray outside in the street.”
Among the throngs who gathered to absorb the ideas of Azzam and Mohammed Qutub in the shade of the dusty neem trees on the Jeddah campus was a tall and thin, rather thoughtful young student with a smooth olive complexion, high cheekbones, and a hawklike nose. As a sign of his Islamic consciousness, the young man had for some time been trying to cultivate a long and wispy beard.
Osama Bin Laden was a demon center forward.
“We used to make up teams and go out to the desert by the Pepsi factory,” recalls Khaled Batarfi, a football enthusiast who was three years’ Osama’s junior. The advantage of having Osama on your team, Batarfi remembers, was his height. Already approaching his adult stature of six feet four, the lanky beanpole would soar effortlessly above his opponents to head the ball into the goal. He was the Peter Crouch of Jeddah pickup games.
Today the Pepsi factory area of Jeddah is occupied by the glittering shops and malls of Tahliah Street. In the late 1970s the tahliah (desalination plant) lay beyond
[Look] at this materialistic attitude which deadens the spirit; at this behavior like animals, which you call “free mixing of the sexes”; at this vulgarity which you call “emancipation of women” . . . at this evil and fanatic racial discrimination.
To counter Westoxification, Sayyid Qutub looked to religion. “Islam,” he proclaimed, “is the answer.” And having been brutalized in Nasser’s prisons, he was no pacifist. Those who would deny jihad’s active and aggressive character, he wrote, “diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life.”
The ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood were similar to those of the Salafis and also of the dawah wahhabiya (Wahhabi mission)—to reestablish the order of Allah and to bring about the perfect Islamic state. But the rhetoric of the Brotherhood dealt in change-promoting concepts like social justice, anticolonialism, and the equal distribution of wealth. Politically they were prepared to challenge the establishment in a style that was unthinkable to mainstream Wahhabis, who were reflexively deferential to their rulers and enablers, the House of Saud.
It was heady stuff for the young students of Jeddah, taking the Wahhabi values they had absorbed in childhood and giving them a radical, but still apparently safe, religious twist. They had learned of jihad at school as a distantly romantic concept—part of history. Now they were hearing of its practical possibility today, and they could even make personal contact with jihad in the barrel-chested shape of Abdullah Azzam, who gave lectures in both Jeddah and Mecca in the early 1980s. A Palestinian, Azzam had taken up arms against the Israeli occupation of his family home in Jenin, on the West Bank, after the Six-Day War of 1967, the humiliating defeat ruefully known throughout the Arab world as “Al-Nakba,” the “Disaster.” But this eloquent warrior sheikh, whose long beard spilled over his chest like a rippling gray waterfall, had no time for Yasser Arafat or his PLO henchmen, whom he considered insufficiently religious.
The Saudi government had welcomed ideologues like Azzam and Mohammed, the surviving Qutub, 7 to the Kingdom as pious reinforcement against the atheistic, Marxist-tinged thinking of their Middle Eastern neighborhood. But in the process they were exposing young Saudi hearts and minds to a still more potent virus—hands-on, radical Islam. As the 1980s progressed, hundreds of young men, many of them from outside the university, gathered on Fridays to pray and listen to the booming, inspirational sermons of Abdullah Azzam.
“I went to hear him several times,” remembers Jamal Khashoggi, the young second cousin of Adnan, the business tycoon. Jamal had been studying in America and was just getting his start in journalism. “It was a huge gathering. There were so many listeners that the mosque was full. People had to sit and pray outside in the street.”
Among the throngs who gathered to absorb the ideas of Azzam and Mohammed Qutub in the shade of the dusty neem trees on the Jeddah campus was a tall and thin, rather thoughtful young student with a smooth olive complexion, high cheekbones, and a hawklike nose. As a sign of his Islamic consciousness, the young man had for some time been trying to cultivate a long and wispy beard.
Osama Bin Laden was a demon center forward.
“We used to make up teams and go out to the desert by the Pepsi factory,” recalls Khaled Batarfi, a football enthusiast who was three years’ Osama’s junior. The advantage of having Osama on your team, Batarfi remembers, was his height. Already approaching his adult stature of six feet four, the lanky beanpole would soar effortlessly above his opponents to head the ball into the goal. He was the Peter Crouch of Jeddah pickup games.
Today the Pepsi factory area of Jeddah is occupied by the glittering shops and malls of Tahliah Street. In the late 1970s the tahliah (desalination plant) lay beyond
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