Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy

Fawaz Gerges is one of this country's leading scholars of and media commentators on the Middle Eastern. Starting in the late 1990s, Gerges went to Cairo on a McArthur Fellowship, to interview (Arabic is his first language) those involved in the Jihadist Movement, which had begun in the 1970s as a fight against the secularization of Arab countries, hence was national rather than international in scope. But events--the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian Revolution, war in Iraq—began to extend its influence. The new Jihadists were not looking now merely to affect local but worldwide change. In Cairo, Fawaz began a long series of conversations with Kamal al-Said Habib was one of the founders of the modern Jihadist movement and one of its key spokesman. Habib had been jailed after Anwar Sadat’s assassination—organized by the Jihadist Movement—and then become allied with Osama bin Laden’s fringe group, which he subsequently renounced, before the 9-11 attacks. Habib’s life-story emerges as a counterpart to those events and forms the basis of this book. JOURNEY OF A JIHADIST gives readers a look at religious extremism from the inside—from the point of view of someone who founded, shaped, and changed with a movement. The Koran uses "jihad" figuratively to refer to humanity's lifelong struggle with the dictates of faith. This book gives us Habib’s quest, among others, personalizing issues that would otherwise seem inexplicable. It also gives us Fawaz Gerges’ quest. Gerges family was forced out of Lebanon by Muslim extremists during the Civil War, and his brother—a Lebanese army officer—was killed in fighting. He offers a gripping, accessible, even visceral account of the force with which we have been dealing since 9-11 and its aftermath, but which still seems so alien to most Americans.

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A civil war is being waged among jihadists for the soul of Islam. While all Islamist radicals may share a vision of a purified and unified ummah, or Muslim community, few agree over how to bring it about. Ultra-militant wings, such as Al Qaeda, dominate our thoughts and headlines, for they exported their brand of terrorism to America’s shores and now have carried it into the heart of Iraq. Yet they are in the minority. Most jihadists are struggling, often against great odds and under enormous pressures, to accommodate themselves to gradual social and political change in the Arab world.

As Middle Eastern scholar and media commentator Fawaz A. Gerges reveals in this unstinting, deeply personal, and brilliantly illuminating book, we need to know now more than ever who the jihadists are and to listen to what they are saying to each other and the world. Gerges went to Cairo, birthplace of modern Islamist radical thought, and began a dialogue with one of the movement’s founders. Using these conversations as a starting point, Gerges spoke with hundreds of other jihadists throughout the Arab world, tracing the evolution of extremist thought from the 1970s to the present—from the civil war in Lebanon, which Gerges and his family endured, to the war in Iraq that is giving Al Qaeda a new lease on life.

The jihadist journey has led through bloodshed and turmoil. It did not begin on September 11th and it will not end in Baghdad. This crucially important and timely book maps the direction jihadism will take in the months and years ahead by showing where—and with whom—it all started.

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Draws on the author's extensive research into the minds and motivations of Kamal al-Said Habib, a founder of the jihadist movement, in an account that documents the terrorist's life as well as the experiences of numerous Islamic fundamentalists to offer insight into crucial events from the past thirty years. 75,000 first printing.

Portrait of a ­Jihadist:  The First ­Generation
 
 
 
One night in 1999 during Ramadan, Islam’s holiest month, a time of fasting and abstinence, I found myself in Syedeh Zeinab, a historic, run­-­down, and always crowded neighborhood of Cairo. I was headed for a late­-­night meeting with a man named Kamal el­-­Said Habib. I knew him only by reputation. Many of those concerned about events in the Middle East did. He was the former leader of a wing within al­-­Jihad, “armed struggle,” a paramilitary organization that had played a pivotal role in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Al­-­Jihad’s goals were chillingly straightforward: to decapitate Egypt’s secular state, one of the oldest in the world, and replace it with an Islamic polity based exclusively on shariah, or Islamic religious law. Kamal was a key figure in the first generation of Muslim militants, who in the 1970s had planted the seeds of jihad throughout Muslim lands. If I wanted to locate the starting point of the jihadist movement, I needed to find Kamal el­-­Said ­Habib.
 
           My own journey into jihadism thus began on that trip, two years before September 11 and everything that has followed it. “Jihadist” and “jihadism” had not quite yet entered the vocabulary of ordinary Americans, but I was determined to find out more about what was happening outside of most Western perspectives. However, once I had finally managed to arrange a meeting with Kamal, his friends and associates cautioned me. The man I would encounter, they said, was no longer the firebrand who once had dedicated his life to turning the world upside down. He and his generation had learned the hard way what happened when you tried to ­Islamize society through force. The bloodshed that had resulted was horrific; there were executions and lengthy prison sentences (Kamal had spent ten years in an Egyptian prison); families were destroyed. He and other former “warriors of God,” had now, I was told, reassessed their old ways. They were charting a new course, one committed not to violent revolution but to political persuasion and da’wa, or religious calling. They were older now. They were ­wiser.
 
           What I hoped to learn from Kamal was how deeply this reinvention had taken hold. I found myself fascinated by his story, for it seemed simultaneously a reflection of and contradiction of what was happening in the Arab ­world. 
           Kamal was born to a lower­-­middle­-­class family in Deem­shalt, a large village with a population of thirty thousand located in Markaz Dikranis, in the Daqahlyya province in the Nile delta, sixty or so miles north of Cairo. His father traded in agricultural products, catering to the needs of the villagers who depended on ­seasonal agriculture for their livings. Kamal graduated from Cairo University in 1979 at the top of his class, with a degree in political science. Of his nine brothers and sisters, Kamal’s future seemed the most assured. Charismatic and ambitious, he could have trained to become an academic, a writer, or a lawyer, rising above the comfortable though fairly modest standard of living of his parents and grandparents. But neither money nor the allure of ascending the ladder in jahili, “un­-­Islamic,” institutions appealed to him. When he was called up for military service, he rejected the rank of a junior officer, preferring to remain a simple soldier. His goal was to replace jahiliya with haki­miya, “God’s sovereignty,” to bring an end to Egypt’s moral and social ­decline.
 
           By the time he graduated, Kamal and other Islamic activists were prepared to rise up in arms against kufr, “unbelief,” and from the late 1970s until the end of the 1990s they waged an all­-­out struggle. They saw themselves as a vanguard that would restore Islam as a complete way of life. Thanks to Kamal’s al­-­Jihad, renamed Tanzim al­-­Jihad, and al­-­Jama’a al­-­Islamiya, the largest jihadist organization in the Muslim world, a devastating war took place inside Egypt between 1992 and 1997. Though little recognized by the outside world, it caused billions of dollars in damage to the economy and resulted in thousands of deaths. By the end of the 1990s the war was over; the Egyptian government had won. Security services in Egypt and Algeria had killed as many as ten thousand militants. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned, their families and sympathizers fired from their jobs and ­denied even the most minimal social support. Their mosques, bookstores, publishing offices, and papers had been closed. Most conceded defeat and declared a unilateral “ceasefire,” a code word for surrender. Throughout the 1990s Kamal was a voice of moderation, calling on his brethren and former colleagues to lay down their arms and negotiate with the local ­authorities.
 
           A determined minority chose to keep fighting. But rather than continue their resistance against the entrenched Arab governments, Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s dep­uty, took the fight outside Egypt. Bin Laden and Zawahiri declared war against the world’s last remaining superpower, the United States, and its allies, focusing upon the “the head of the snake,” the “Great Satan” itself, with the hope of resurrecting militant jihadism among the rank and file. Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was therefore at odds with Kamal and with the great majority of jihadists, who had by then rejected violence as a means of gaining political power. The jihadist civil war had started, one that would spread throughout the Muslim world and determine the future of the entire ­movement.
 
           It is not by happenstance that it all started in Egypt. With seventy million people the most populous Arab state and the Muslim world’s cultural and intellectual epicenter, Egypt was the birthplace of the modern jihadist movement, and remains to this day the best place to understand its complexities and locate its fault lines. The movement’s founding fathers were almost entirely Egyptian, as were the authors of many of its defining documents. At its height, al­-­Jama’a al­-­Islamiya’s membership was estimated to be in the tens of thousands. Along with Zawahiri, Egyptians—Abu Ubaidah al­-­Banshiri and Mohammed Atef (also known as Abu Hafs al­-­Masri)—had founded Al Qaeda with bin Laden. Al Qaeda’s shura, “ruling council,” which constituted bin Laden’s inner circle, was dominated by Egyptians, who supplied organizational skills and military ­expertise.
 
           Egypt is also home to the first mainstream Islamist organization, Ikhwan al­-­Muslimun, the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Hassan al­-­Banna, a school teacher turned ideologue. Initially, al­-­Banna, whose outlook was permeated with the teachings of Sufism—a philosophical, mystical, and inner­-­directed school of Muslim thought—intended the Brotherhood to be a youth organization aimed at moral and social reform through education and propaganda. Ho

Fawaz Gerges teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in Middle Eastern Studies. He has also taught at Harvard and Oxford. Gerges is a senior analyst and regular commentator for ABC News and NPR's Morning Edition, and has been a guest on The Charlie Rose Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show, as well as on CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. He lives in northern New Jersey.

A familiar face to anyone who follows reporting on the Middle East (he's been seen on ABC, BBC, Oprah, and Al Jazeera), Sarah Lawrence professor Gerges was talking to jihadists nearly three decades before 9/11. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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In this fascinating and highly informative account of the development of militant Islamist praxis and ideology in the contemporary Middle East, Gerges (Middle Eastern studies, Sarah Lawrence Coll.; The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global ) explains what the jihadists are about and what they intend to accomplish. In addition to relying on a number of primary Arabic sources, the author has interviewed several jihadists, most importantly Kamal al-Said Habib, who founded the Jihadist Movement. Gerges, born and raised a Christian in Lebanon, demonstrates remarkable objectivity in explaining the world as seen from the vantage point of Muslim militants. He is especially revealing when analyzing the pivotal role of Sayyid Qutb, the mid-20th-century Egyptian Islamic writer and educator, in the thinking of the contemporary jihadists. The author's ability to explain complex issues in a jargon-free and easy-flowing narrative makes this book one of the best, most useful, and most timely volumes for nonspecialist readers. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/06.]--Nader Entessar, Spring Hill Coll., Mobile, AL

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In September 2005, Gerges, an academic turned news commentator, published a rare and thoughtful piece of scholarship, The Far Enemy , that sought to map the different views within militant Islam's explosive underworld. Gerges argued nimbly, drawing upon numerous primary sources and firsthand interviews. After traveling across the Middle East and meeting with former jihadists, he learned that Islamic militants often disagreed on critical issues (including whether to attack the United States) and that their movement was far more variegated than Washington's official portrayal suggests. Published less than a year later, this new volume reads like a quicky follow-up. It covers similar ground, draws upon similar sources and is considerably more limited in its scholarly aspirations--although not, perhaps, in its commercial ones. Yet the follow-up may be the better book. Gerges has distilled his ideas to their core and done away with some of The Far Enemy 's repetitions. The book's structure is also improved. It's now built around a series of profiles that give focus to each chapter and shed light on how key personalities within the jihadist vanguard see the world. Gerges even devotes time to his own upbringing in war-torn Lebanon, and although the veers into his personal story are not always relevant, they are fascinating in their own right, adding both intimacy and depth to this valuable book. (May)

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