This past November, Noman Benotman went public with his own criticism of al-Qaeda in an open letter to Zawahiri, absorbed and well-received, he says, by the jihadist leaders in Tripoli.
In the letter, Benotman recalled his Kandahar warnings and called on al-Qaeda to end all operations in Arab countries and in the West. The citizens of Western countries were blameless and should not be the target of terrorist attacks, argued Benotman, his refined English accent, smart suit, trimmed beard and easygoing demeanour making it hard to imagine that he was once on the front lines in Afghanistan.
Although Benotman's public rebuke of al-Qaeda went unnoticed in the United States and Canada, it received wide attention in the Arabic press. In repudiating al-Qaeda, [ex-leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group Noman] Benotman was adding his voice to a rising tide of anger in the Islamic world toward al-Qaeda and its affiliates, whose victims since September 11 have mostly been fellow Muslims.
Significantly, he was also joining a larger group of religious scholars, former fighters and militants who had once had great influence over Al Qaeda's leaders, and who -- alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, the senseless killings in Muslim countries and al-Qaeda's barbaric tactics in Iraq --have turned against the organization, many just in the past year.
Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by al-Qaeda's leaders turned against them?
To a large extent, it is because al-Qaeda and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim. Al-Qaeda's Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: First, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s.
It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq, where al-Qaeda's suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, al-Qaeda in Iraq has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost on the Islamic world's Sunni majority.
Additionally, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have killed thousands of Muslim civilians elsewhere since September 11: hundreds of ordinary Afghans killed every year by the Taliban, dozens of Saudis killed by terrorists since 2003, scores of Jordanians massacred at a wedding at a U. S. hotel in Amman in November, 2005.
Even those sympathetic to al-Qaeda have started to notice. "Excuse me Mr. Zawahiri but who is it who is killing with Your Excellency's blessing, the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria?" one supporter asked in an online Q&A with al-Qaeda's deputy leader in April that was posted widely on jihadist Web sites. All this has created a dawning recognition among Muslims that the ideological virus that unleashed September 11 and the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid is the same virus now wreaking havoc in the Muslim world.
Two months before Benotman's letter to Zawahiri was publicized in the Arab press, al-Qaeda received a blow from one of bin Laden's erstwhile heroes, Sheikh Salman Al Oudah, a Saudi religious scholar. Around the sixth anniversary of September 11, Al Oudah addressed al-Qaeda's leader on MBC, a widely watched Middle East TV network: "My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly and women have been killed ...in the name of al-Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions [of victims] on your back?"
Al Oudah's rebuke was also significant because he is considered one of the fathers of the Sahwa, the fundamentalist awakening movement that swept through Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. Al Oudah is also one of 26 Saudi clerics who, in 2004, handed down a religious ruling urging Iraqis to fight the U. S. occupation of their country. He is, in short, not someone al-Qaeda can paint as an American sympathizer or a tool of the Saudi government.
Tellingly, al-Qaeda has not responded to Al Oudah's critique, but the research organization Political Islam Online tracked postings on six Islamist Web sites and the Web sites of al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya TV networks in the week after Al Oudah's statements; it found that more than two-thirds of respondents reacted favorably.
Al Oudah's large youth following in the Muslim world has helped his anti-al-Qaeda message resonate. In 2006, for instance, he addressed a gathering of around 20,000 young British Muslims in London's East End. "Oudah is well known by all the youth. It's almost a celebrity culture out there ? He has definitely helped to offset al-Qaeda's rhetoric," one young imam told us.
More doubt about al-Qaeda was planted in the Muslim world when Sayyid Imam Al Sharif, the ideological godfather of al-Qaeda, sensationally withdrew his support in a book written last year from his prison cell in Cairo.
Al Sharif, generally known as "Dr. Fadl," was an architect of the doctrine of takfir, arguing that Muslims who did not support armed jihad or who participated in elections were kuffar, unbelievers. Although Dr. Fadl never explicitly called for such individuals to be killed, his takfiri treatises from 1988 and 1993 gave theological cover to jihadists targeting civilians.
So it was an unwelcome surprise for al-Qaeda's leaders when Dr. Fadl's new book, Rationalization of Jihad, was serialized in an independent Egyptian newspaper in November. The incentive for writing the book, he explained, was that "jihad ...was blemished with grave shariah violations during recent years. ... Now there are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of Jihad!"
Dr. Fadl ruled that al-Qaeda's bombings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere were illegitimate and that terrorism against civilians in Western countries was wrong. He also took on al-Qaeda's leaders directly in an interview with the al-Hayat newspaper. "Zawahiri and his Emir bin Laden [are] extremely immoral," he said. "I have spoken about this in order to warn the youth against them, youth who are seduced by them, and don't know them."
Ultimately, the ideological battle against al-Qaeda in the West may be won in places such as Leyton and Walthamstow, largely Muslim enclaves in east London, whose residents included five of the eight alleged British al-Qaeda operatives currently on trial for plotting to bring down U. S.-bound passenger jets in 2006.
Over the last half-year, we have made several trips to London to interview militants who have defected from al-Qaeda, retired mujahedin, Muslim community leaders and members of the security services. Most say that when al-Qaeda's bombs went off in London in 2005, sympathy for the terrorists evaporated.
In December, al-Qaeda's campaign of violence reached new depths in the eyes of many Muslims, with a plot to launch attacks in Saudi Arabia while millions were gathered for the Hajj. Saudi security services arrested 28 al-Qaeda militants in Mecca, Medina and Riyadh, whose targets allegedly included religious leaders critical of al-Qaeda, among them the Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abd Al Aziz Al Sheikh, who responded to the plot by ruling that al-Qaeda operatives should be punished by execution, crucifixion or exile.
Plotting such attacks during the Hajj could not have been more counterproductive to al-Qaeda's cause, says Abdullah Anas, who was making the pilgrimage to Mecca himself. "People over there ...were very angry. The feeling was, how was it possible for Muslims to do that? I still can't quite believe it myself. The mood was one of shock, real shock."
Is al-Qaeda going to dissipate as a result of the criticism from its former mentors and allies? Despite the recent internal criticism, probably not in the short term. As one of us reported in The New Republic early last year, al-Qaeda, on the verge of defeat in 2002, has regrouped and is now able to launch significant terrorist operations in Europe. And, last summer, U. S. intelligence agencies judged that al-Qaeda had "regenerated its [U. S.] Homeland attack capability" in Pakistan's tribal areas.
Since then, al-Qaeda and the Taliban have only entrenched their position further, launching a record number of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year. Afghanistan, Algeria and Iraq also saw record numbers of suicide attacks in 2007 (though the group's capabilities have deteriorated in Iraq of late). Meanwhile, al-Qaeda is still able to find recruits in the West.
In November, Jonathan Evans, the head of Britain's domestic intelligence agency MI5, said that record numbers of U. K. residents are now supportive of al-Qaeda, with around 2,000 posing a "direct threat to national security and public safety." That means that al-Qaeda will threaten the United States and its allies for many years to come.
However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups like al-Qaeda are the seeds of their own long-term destruction: Their victims are often Muslim civilians; they don't offer a positive vision of the future (but rather the prospect of Taliban-style regimes from Morocco to Indonesia); they keep expanding their list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn't precisely share their world view; and they seem incapable of becoming politically successful movements because their ideology prevents them from making the real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in genuine politics.
Which means that the repudiation of al-Qaeda's leaders by its former religious, military and political guides will help hasten the implosion of the jihadist terrorist movement. As Churchill remarked after the battle of El Alamein in 1942, which he saw as turning the tide in the Second World War, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
Unsurprisingly, Al Qaeda's leaders have been thrown on the defensive. In December, bin Laden released a tape that stressed that "the Muslim victims who fall during the operations against the infidel Crusaders ... are not the intended targets." Bin Laden warned the former mujahedin now turning on Al Qaeda that, whatever their track records as jihadists, they had now committed one of the "nullifiers of Islam," which is helping the "infidels against the Muslims."
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