An estimated 70% of males born in the northern Nigerian city of Kano are being named after Osama bin Laden. Jamila Shehu, a nurse in the paediatric ward in the state run hospital said "{A133}This is the season of Osama babies". Kano was one of several Nigerian cities where the September 11 attacks were celebrated...

--The London Times, 31 December 2001

Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda clearly place themselves and their enemies in a theological context. They understand themselves to be fighting on behalf of Islam against the enemies of God, in a struggle that has been underway since the time of the Prophet. Bin Laden's various videos are shot through with references to this struggle: America is the 'Hubal of this age' (a reference to a stone idol that stood in the Kaaba in Mecca prior to the triumph of Islam) and, literally, satanic--that is, actually in league with the devil. The US is, of course, only the most recent centre of idolatry, but by entering into an alliance with Satan has aligned itself with past enemies of God--Crusaders, Zionists, the imperialists who relieved the siege of Vienna in 1683 (on 11-12 September, as it happens) and destroyed the Caliphate after World War I (which the enemies of God promoted for this purpose). This perspective, of course, does not rule out a certain degree of political opportunism on the part of bin Laden; his recent emphasis on Palestine--as opposed to what appears to be his real focus, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf--is obviously intended to draw attention to that aspect of US policy most opposed by the overwhelming majority of Muslims: its support for Israel. Still, the sense Al Qaeda members have that they are acting in the name of God and against God's enemies is real, and provides a partial explanation of their ruthlessness and cruelty--there is nothing like a sense of divine mission for overriding normal human inhibitions in this area. 'Kill them all and let God sort out the innocent' an orthodox Bishop was reported to have remarked during the Albigensian crusades.

	Does Al Qaeda hate the West?
	(2:42 min) Chris Brown: Al Qaeda primarily hate the rulers of the Arab world, especially the Gulf states, whom they regard as having betrayed Islam. Hatred of the West is a secondary phenomenon and composed of two main factors. First, hostility has been aroused by the support the West gives to these people. For example, the Saudi royal family has been heavily backed by first Britain and then America over the course of the last 50 years. However, the issue goes back across hundreds of years of history. The Al Qaeda vision of the last 1,000 years is a vision in which the West has consistently opposed Islam. The term 'crusader' is commonly used, and this relates to events 800 years or more ago. There has been some suggestion that the timing of September 11 was significant because the 11-12 September was the point at which the siege of Vienna was raised by the Christian forces in 1683. That was the beginning of the end for Islamic power in Europe. I should also say that the history here is very suspect. During the Crusades, for example, the Crusaders actually had alliances with some Islamic powers. It isn't the case, as Al Qaeda believe, that the West overthrew the Caliphate in the Ottoman Empire. This was done by the reforming Turks under Ataturk. Some of the other charges against the West and Zionism are patently false, but they are part of a pattern. There are two levels of hostility to the West. One is that the West stands between Al Qaeda and its goal of ruling the Gulf, but the other is the belief that the West has been frustrating Islam for 1,000 years.

Bin Laden's theology is, of course, somewhat unorthodox. His particular take on Islam is a minority position, condemned by the majority of 'responsible', 'respectable' Islamic religious leaders. At the same time, it clearly has quite substantial appeal to ordinary Muslims, even those who do not have a stake in the conflicts in Palestine and the Gulf--as the fathers of the Osamas of Kano can testify. Even those Muslim leaders who condemned the terrorism of '9/11'--the majority--have been reluctant to see US power being used against 'the Muslims' in Afghanistan, and it is interesting that it is in these terms that the US is often condemned. Just as the Muslims of northern Nigeria identify themselves in religious rather than ethnic or cultural terms by naming their sons Osama, so the (Muslim) critics of US action in Afghanistan express their criticisms in religious terms--even though the US has been acting with the support of the indisputably Muslim Northern Alliance in that country. Muslims killing each other is one thing; Americans joining some Muslims in killing other Muslims is quite another.

Religious understanding
Predictably, Western leaders have worked hard to avoid characterising the current conflict in religious terms. Rarely have Muslim leaders been in such demand: President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have taken every opportunity to involve co-operative Muslims in the various state occasions at which the victims of September 11 were mourned (rightly, since there were many Muslims killed in the Twin Towers), and they have tried hard to get their approval for the coalition's actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Those Western leaders who have gone off-message have been greeted with stern disapproval. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi was carpeted for making the kind of observations about Western superiority to Islam that were only the mirror image of the positions held by many, perhaps most, Muslims. George W. Bush was briefly in disgrace for referring to the Coalition's actions as a 'crusade'; admittedly this was naive, even though it seems doubtful that he was using the term as anything other than a generic description of morally driven action, but had he defended himself by making the point that the original Crusades were partly launched in response to Islamic aggression in the Levant, that many Muslim leaders at the time allied with the Crusaders, and that the latter were no more (or less) violent than their enemies, he would have compounded the offence.

st, the West's handling of the religious dimension of the current conflict has been based on a rather irritating, if perhaps politically understandable, double-standard. Christians such as Tony Blair and George W. Bush--undeniably sincere in their beliefs, but living in a world where religious conviction is tinged with irony--cannot express their own deeply held convictions in explicitly Christian terms for fear of alienating the decidedly un-ironic beliefs of their coalition partners in Pakistan and the Arab world. The sensibilities of the latter--however irrational--have to be respected and, indeed, respect in this case seems to mean actually pandering to the irrational. The implicit assumption seems to be that it would be both unfair and unsafe to subject Muslim beliefs, attitudes and behaviour to the kind of robust criticism common in Western societies. The most perfect expression of this kind of reverse racism was given by the British journalist Robert Fisk, who, when beaten up by some Afghan refugees simply for being a Westerner, explained afterwards that he understood their position, given the indignities and violence to which they had been subjected. It is doubtful whether he would have been equally tolerant of the actions of the--astonishingly few--New Yorkers who turned on Muslims in the immediate aftermath of 11 September; the obvious explanation is that Muslims as individuals cannot be held morally responsible for their acts in the way that New Yorkers can--as Fisk puts it, denying their capacity to be moral agents with perhaps unintentional clarity, their brutality 'was entirely the product of others, of us'. There will be more on this later. In the meantime, if not defined in terms of religion, how have Western leaders understood the current crisis?

President Bush succinctly answered this rhetorical question in his post-September 11 address to the joint houses of Congress: 'This is the world's fight. This is civilisation's fight.' The War on Terrorism is constructed on this basis: on the one side is the civilised world; on the other, those who employ terror, whomsoever they may be and in whatever cause. Thus the particular content of the ideology of the terrorist is rendered irrelevant, and the specifically religious content of Al Qaeda's position is not to be answered, save by the generalised assertion that all of the world's religions are part of the civilisation that Al Qaeda has attacked--the readings from the Koran that Tony Blair has frequently called on for assistance have been designed to support this position: as he put it on 2 October to the Labour Party conference, 'Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham.' Presumably some other patriarch, Noah perhaps, will be needed to pull Hindus and Buddhists into this particular big tent.