From Bin Laden to Bill Clinton

What has Bin Laden done with Sayyid Qutb’s* fatwa? This fatwa — which declared the nature of the relationship between the Muslim and the secular state, whether in the West or in the Islamic world — equates the secular state with the ignorance of pre-Islamic times and emphasizes the need to combat and eliminate secularism.

Bin Laden adhered to this fatwa, settling in Afghanistan in the summer of 1996. He then announced the war on America in order to expel it from the Arabian Peninsula. Bin Laden considered this expulsion to be one aspect of the planetary combat , with the U.S. and its allies on one side and the Islamic world on the other.

The circle of jihad widened in 1997, when Iranian intelligence invited terrorist leaders from all over the world to a conference it organized under the cover of celebrating the anniversary of the Iran-Iraq war. Among the participants were Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s deputy, Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as three Hezbollah leaders. The participants determined that attacks on diplomatic and commercial U.S. and Western missions to be among the tasks of the terrorists. As a result, Bin Laden established a “war council” in Afghanistan with senior international Islamic leaders and commissioned Zawahiri and his Egyptian-Afghan cohorts to carry out operations intended to topple the Mubarak regime.

On Nov. 17, 1997, Zawahiri’s forces carried out the Luxor Massacre, killing 70 European tourists and injuring more than 100 others. However, the U.S. announced only the partial truth, specifically that its number one enemy was Islamic extremism; it concealed the whole truth, which was that America will only be destroyed by Muslim hands.

At this point, U.S. president Bill Clinton decided to hold talks with Zawahiri and a CIA representative known as “Abu Omar the American.” During these talks, it was agreed that the U.S. would not prevent the Islamists from seizing power in Egypt if the mujahedeen would not fight against the U.S. army in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This took place, and the CIA representative presented $50 million to Islamic charity organizations in Egypt. Subsequently, former President Mubarak became convinced that his future was guaranteed by an alliance with Iran, in preparation for a confrontation with Israel; within this alliance, Egypt was to hold a leadership role in both the Islamic and Arab worlds, and his regime would be immune from collapse.

Starting in 1998, the U.S. began to cooperate with the Islamists, and Egypt drifted toward the Islamic world’s jihadi leadership. At the beginning of February of that year, strategic cooperation between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Egypt commenced, and henceforth Iran incited its neighbors toward cooperation. Egypt did not escape this incitement. On Feb. 13, nearly 70,000 students demonstrated at Al Azhar calling for jihad against the U.S. for threatening Iraq, with the predominant cry of “there is no god but Allah, and Bill Clinton is the enemy of God. As a result, there were calls for the formation of an Islamist government in Egypt.

On Aug. 7 of the same year, two bombs went off in front of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Al Salaam, Tanzania. These bombs were ordered by Bin Laden as a threat to Bill Clinton, who later backed down from combating Islamists in Pakistan. However, the latter declined to cooperate with him, just as Pakistani intelligence did, as it was aware that cooperating with the U.S. would propel it into “entering into a state of war” with jihadi Islamists.

*Editor’s note: Sayyid Qutb is considered the father of modern fundamentalism and was a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the ’50s and ’60s.