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    T4 B6 Berman FDR - Entire Contents - 3-23-03 Paul Berman Article - 1st PG Scanned For Reference - Fair Use 423

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    The document summarizes the intellectual roots and philosophy underpinning Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism. It describes how Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian philosopher executed in 1966, was the key intellectual influence through his book "Milestones". This book laid out a worldview of a battle between Islam and the non-Muslim world that saw violent jihad as justified. It became hugely influential for later terrorist groups like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda. While Al Qaeda is led by Osama bin Laden, its broader ideological foundations lie in the writings and philosophy of Sayyid Qutb from the 1950s-60s.

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    T4 B6 Berman FDR - Entire Contents - 3-23-03 Paul Berman Article - 1st PG Scanned For Reference - Fair Use 423

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    9/11 Document Archive
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    The document summarizes the intellectual roots and philosophy underpinning Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism. It describes how Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian philosopher executed in 1966, was the key intellectual influence through his book "Milestones". This book laid out a worldview of a battle between Islam and the non-Muslim world that saw violent jihad as justified. It became hugely influential for later terrorist groups like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda. While Al Qaeda is led by Osama bin Laden, its broader ideological foundations lie in the writings and philosophy of Sayyid Qutb from the 1950s-60s.

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    T4 B6 Berman Fdr- Entire Contents- 3-23-03 Paul Berman Article- 1st Pg Scanned for Reference- Fair Use 423

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    The document summarizes the intellectual roots and philosophy underpinning Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism. It describes how Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian philosopher executed in 1966, was the key intellectual influence through his book "Milestones". This book laid out a worldview of a battle between Islam and the non-Muslim world that saw violent jihad as justified. It became hugely influential for later terrorist groups like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda. While Al Qaeda is led by Osama bin Laden, its broader ideological foundations lie in the writings and philosophy of Sayyid Qutb from the 1950s-60s.

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    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    27 views1 page

    T4 B6 Berman FDR - Entire Contents - 3-23-03 Paul Berman Article - 1st PG Scanned For Reference - Fair Use 423

    Uploaded by

    9/11 Document Archive
    The document summarizes the intellectual roots and philosophy underpinning Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism. It describes how Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian philosopher executed in 1966, was the key intellectual influence through his book "Milestones". This book laid out a worldview of a battle between Islam and the non-Muslim world that saw violent jihad as justified. It became hugely influential for later terrorist groups like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda. While Al Qaeda is led by Osama bin Laden, its broader ideological foundations lie in the writings and philosophy of Sayyid Qutb from the 1950s-60s.

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    of 1

    The Philosopher of Islamic Terror wysiwyg://90/http://www.nytimes.com/2003...

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    March 23,2003

    The Philosopher of Islamic Terror


    By PAUL HERMAN

    I In the days after Sept. 11,2001, many people anticipated a quick and satisfying American victory over
    Al Qaeda. The terrorist army was thought to be no bigger than a pirate ship, and the newly vigilant
    police forces of the entire world were going to sink the ship with swift arrests and dark maneuvers. Al
    Qaeda was driven from its bases in Afghanistan. Arrests and maneuvers duly occurred and are still
    occurring. Just this month, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants was nabbed in Pakistan. Police
    agents, as I write, seem to be hot on the trail of bin Laden himself, or so reports suggest.

    Yet Al Qaeda has seemed unfazed. Its popularity, which was hard to imagine at first, has turned out to be
    large and genuine in more than a few countries. Al Qaeda upholds a paranoid and apocalyptic worldview,
    according to which "Crusaders and Zionists" have been conspiring for centuries to destroy Islam. And this
    worldview turns out to be widely accepted in many places — a worldview that allowed many millions of
    people to regard the Sept. 11 attacks as an Israeli conspiracy, or perhaps a C.I.A. conspiracy, to undo
    Islam. Bin Laden's soulful, bearded face peers out from T-shirts and posters in a number of countries,
    quite as if he were the new Che Guevara, the mythic righter of cosmic wrongs.

    The vigilant police in many countries, applying themselves at last, have raided a number of Muslim
    charities and Islamic banks, which stand accused of subsidizing the terrorists. These raids have advanced
    the war on still another front, which has been good to see. But the raids have also shown that Al Qaeda is
    not only popular; it is also institutionally solid, with a worldwide network of clandestine resources. This
    is not the Symbionese Liberation Army. This is an organization with ties to the ruling elites in a number
    of countries; an organization that, were it given the chance to strike up an alliance with Saddam Hussein's
    Baath movement, would be doubly terrifying; an organization that, in any case, will surely survive the
    outcome in Iraq.

    To anyone who has looked closely enough, Al Qaeda and its sister organizations plainly enjoy yet another
    strength, arguably the greatest strength of all, something truly imposing — though in the Western press
    this final strength has received very little attention. Bin Laden is a Saudi plutocrat with Yemeni ancestors,
    and most of the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 were likewise Saudis, and the provenance of those people has
    focused everyone's attention on the Arabian peninsula. But Al Qaeda has broader roots. The organization
    was created in the late 1980's by an affiliation of three armed factions — bin Laden's circle of "Afghan''
    Arabs, together with two factions from Egypt, the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the latter led
    by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from an older
    current, a school of thought from within Egypt's fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in
    the 1950's and 60's. And at the heart of that single school of thought stood, until his execution in 1966, a
    philosopher named Sayyid Qutb — the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went
    into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide.

    Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb) wrote a book called "Milestones," and that book was cited at his trial,
    which gave it immense publicity, especially after its author was hanged. "Milestones" became a classic

    ofll 4/25/03 4:16PM

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