Why al Qaeda hit the towers

Responses to 11 September tend to fall into two groups, those that look at the Western world, particularly the USA, and the ways in which the West has contributed to the crisis, and those which look at the Islamic world, and the causes of fundamentalist violence that lie within it. Malise Ruthven has a long-established reputation as an expert on the Muslim world, but he has also worked on the politics of religion in the USA. The result is this very informative, learned and incisive book that deals with both sides of the story. The west has contributed to the rise of fundamentalism, by some of its policies in the Middle East and beyond, but there are deep sources of intolerance and violence within the Muslim world which have their own causes and agenda.

If you want an informed analysis of where Bin Laden and his supporters come from, and of what fuels their determination, this is the book to read. There are excellent accounts of the rise of an intolerant, Sunni fundamentalist, current within the Middle East in recent decades: two of the figures he analyses, and who were inspirational for Bin Laden, are Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer who promoted the idea of a militant, uncompromising, Islamic party committed to fighting the west and its followers in the Middle East, and Abdullah Yousuf al-'Azam, a Palestinian who in the 1970s and 1980s toured the Muslim world mobilising pan-Islamic support for the jihad in Afghanistan. It was upon this background of religious militancy in the Arab world that Bin Laden then built his following in Afghanistan. There he turned a collection of volunteers from dozens of countries, but not it seems any Afghans, into the force that became al Qaeda.

One of the issues Ruthven tackles head on is that of the role of religion in regard to violence. An early chapter looks at the concept of jihad and demonstrates how, while it may be interpreted in a cautious way, it can also legitimise intolerance and violence. The same point he makes about other religions, whose texts and practices are often of a deeply intolerant kind.

Ruthven shows very well how within Islamic thinking there is a long tradition of an open, rational attitude to the holy text of the Koran. In modern times this independent spirit has been carried forward by writers such as the Egyptian Nasr Abu Zaid. The question is often asked whether Islam can have a "Reformation", in the sense of a freeing of attitudes to the authority of religion. But this may be the wrong question since that freer attitude has always been there, in doctrines and in social practices. The question is: who does the interpreting? This is a matter of politics, and power, as much as of religion as such. Here his discussion of Saudi Arabia and of the influence of the conservative clergy within it is matched by an account later on in the book of the mind-set of US Evangelicals.

The world of the fundamentalists is not one separate from the modern world, but very much part of it. Ruthven talks of the divided world that many Islamic militants inhabit, both drawn to and angered by the west, but also of how within their apparently timeless programmes there are contemporary concerns, not least about the kind of society they live in. The suicidal hijackers of 11 September were not alienated individuals, or purely religious zealots, but felt themselves to be part of a much broader movement of protest which had been building for years. They were sustained by myths of struggle, heroism and global cataclysm that have parallels outside the Islamic world: Ruthven makes the comparison, qualified to be sure, between this interpretation of Islam and fascism.

To all of this Bin Laden and his conspiratorial organisation gave deadly form: yet here the role of western states was to play a decisive role, in promoting the jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s and early 1990s out of which this armed movement emerged. Other causes were to be linked to that of Afghanistan, from Bosnia and Chechnya to Iraq and Kashmir, but it was in that conflict that the USA and Britain backed the Mujahideen against the Soviet forces, and where al Qaeda was born.

In response to this, and the threat of possible further attacks, there will inevitably be a heightened security response. This runs the risk of being one which takes a crude definition of "terrorism" to crush all political dissent. But Ruthven's analysis suggests other routes that need to be taken as well. One is diplomatic intervention, much evident in recent weeks: the issues that fuel the fundamentalist cause, be they Palestine or Kashmir, need addressing urgently. Equally important, however, is the promotion of debate within the Islamic world, and among Muslims in the west, about the different possible interpretations of text, and belief, in order to deny the monopoly of interpretation to the fundamentalists and the jihadis.

There is, however, another lesson present here, to which Ruthven returns throughout his fascinating book, and that is to deny the claims of religion as such on human behaviour, in other words secularism. This, above all others, may be the lesson of 11 September 2001, in East and West.

? Fred Halliday is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics.