Radical Islamists seek to realise a Caliphate in which political and religious power are fused and whose hypothetical borders are indicated here. One should note that it encompasses the Christian, Confucian, Jewish and Hindu populations of Spain, the Balkans, Greece, central Africa, India and Indonesia.

The deeper context of jihadist terrorism involves simultaneous bursts of religious enthusiasm across the Muslim world over thirty years ago. This process was paralleled - without the same violent effects - in other monotheistic faiths from the 1970S onwards. These bursts were sustained by a series of secondary conflagrations, which lent apparent substance to the paranoid jihadist claim that Muslims were the victims of a temporal 'Crusader-Zionist' aggression unchanged since the Middle Ages. This self-serving myth resonated with the more widespread assumption of the moral purity of the oppressed, a source of self-righteous violence from time immemorial within a variety of cultures and traditions, spiritual and secular. Criminals were able to find apologists, supporters and sympathisers from the wider Muslim community by cloaking their activities in an ideology largely derived from a major religious tradition with one and a half billion adherents.1

In January 1978 US president Jimmy Carter visited Iran. He lauded his ally, shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi, and pronounced Iran 'an island of stability', praise he coupled with criticism of the shah's shabby human rights record. The regime's modernizing emancipation of women was accompanied by the repression symbolized by Savak, the shah's secret police. Carter's contradictory pronouncements were as helpful to the shah as traffic lights signaling red and green simultaneously are to a motorist. That summer and autumn, Iran was convulsed by demonstrations and strikes, which the shah, already suffering from cancer, answered with limited repression (under a thousand people died in the course of the Revolution) and concessions which his many different opponents brushed aside. The shah left his kingdom, never to return, on 16 January 1978; a year later, an elderly cleric, the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, flew in from his exile in Paris.2

The Islamic Revolution was also for export, and two immediate manifestations this were the creation, by Sunni Palestinian admirers of Khomeini, of a terrorist organization called Islamic Jihad, which presaged the transformation of a conflict about rival nationalisms into one involving religion, and the parallel mobilization of Lebanon's Shi'ites through an Iranian surrogate called Party of Allah or Hizbollah, founded in late 1982, a process the Alawite rulers of Syria aided and abetted to extend their domination over their Westernised Lebanese neighbor. Iran sent an estimated US$50 million to US$100 million per annum to Hizbollah, basing hundreds of training personnel in the Bekaa valley, and using Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, its ambassador to Damascus, as co-ordinator of Hizbollah's campaign of assassination, bombings and kidnappings.

On 18 April 1983 a Hizbollah steered pickup truck, swerved into the exit of the US embassy on Beirut's seafront, and then exploded as it crashed into the main lobby. Sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans, were killed in a blast that momentarily lifted up the entire building before most of it collapsed in a mountain of dust and rubble. The dead included all six members of the CIA's Beirut station, as well as Robert Ames, the CIA's top man on the Middle East and its former liaison with Black September's Ali Hassan Salameh. Ames's hand was found floating a mile away, his wedding ring still visible on a finger.

Six months later two massive suicide truck bombs killed 240 US Marines housed in temporary barracks dubbed the Beirut Hilton, and fifty-eight French soldiers who were also in Lebanon on peace-keeping duties. In the former case, a five-ton Mercedes truck smashed its way through flimsy guard posts at fifty miles an hour early one Sunday morning, enabling the driver to detonate 12,000 pounds of Hexogen high explosives, with tanks of bottled gas tied on to magnify the deadly brisance. The effects of both attacks were like some colossal natural disaster. Over at the French barracks, an uncomprehending lieutenant colonel stared into a huge crater amid mountains of rubble: 'There are about a hundred soldiers still under there. The bomb lifted up the building. Right up, do you understand? And it put it down again over there.' He indicated a distance of about twenty feet. The Iranian Pasadren and their terrorist helpers in Hizbollah further pressured the West to vacate Lebanon through a series of kidnappings, including professors at the American University of Beirut, CNN reporters, priests and the local CIA station chief Bill Buckley. Kidnapping of Soviet diplomats was less successful, as the KGB abducted a relative of one of those involved, and began posting pieces of him back to his family to indicate their earnestness. Hizbollah also acted as Iran's long arm by assassinating Kurdish dissidents based in Europe on behalf of its paymasters, who were the biggest state sponsors of terrorism in the world. Agents based in Iranian embassies would enable Hizbollah to strike at Jewish and Israeli interests as far away as Argentina.3

Next, increases in the price of oil after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war enabled the Saudis to propagate their puritanical Wahhabist strain of Islam globally. Named after Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92), Wahhabism was the austere version of Islam that underpinned the rule of the Saud dynasty in Arabia through a contract between clerics and rulers.4 Vast sums were disbursed to build some fifteen hundred mosques around the Sunni world, as well as in western Europe, which were then equipped with books and audio sermons, in the hope that they would speak with the voice of a Saudi moralising conservatism, whose existence was paradoxically underwritten by the kingdom's 'decadent' Western allies. The Saudis further institutionalised their political and financial reach through the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Islamic Development Bank, and by donating money to Western and Eastern universities to promote Islamic and Middle Eastern studies.

This petro-Islamic largesse was one of the main contributors to the gradual rise in consciousness of a global Muslim ummah or community. This was more viscerally real than the secular nationalism, whether local or pan-Arab, or the socialism that had enthused earlier generations. Saudi influence was also secured through the millions of remittance men drawn to the Gulf states in the 1970S and 1980s from as far afield as Pakistan and the Philippines, not to speak of the two million Muslims who each year made the hajj to Mecca, whose infrastructure had been improved by an immigrant Yemeni construction tycoon called bin Laden. For this was the essence of the matter. Whereas the Saudis hoped to keep the words Islam and Revolution separate, the Iranians wanted them to fuse, notably in Saudi Arabia itself, a regime Khomeini hated. Behind that fundamental disagreement lay competition between an ultra-conservative and a reactionary-revolutionary power for dominance within Islam as whole, a struggle that has only increased in recent decades.5

The venerable texts which the Saudis were making available on a global basis were amenable to many interpretations, especially when increased literacy enabled people to read them for themselves. Using the frequency of citations from certain authors it is possible to construct a diagram resembling a spider's web of who counts in the mental universe of the jihadis. Modernity is of little account. High on the list would be the writings of Ibn Taymiyya (1268-1323), a contemporary of Dante, who influenced Wahhab himself. His thought was largely conditioned by the depredations various Arab Islamic civilizations experienced at the hands of invading Mongols, depredations made worse by the Mongols' syncretic assimilation of Islam to their existing paganism. Never afraid to make enemies, Taymiyya denounced Muslim clerics whose learned elaborations distracted from the essentials of the faith, as once practiced by the salaf, the earliest followers of the Prophet. Moreover, rulers who did not accept clerical guidance, by instituting sharia (Islamic religious law), and living lives of conspicuous piety, were apostates whom it was the faithful Muslim's duty to depose. Taymiyya added this duty to the existing offensive and defensive definitions of jihad, which in turn he elevated into a sixth pillar of Islam, along with the declaration of faith, charity, fasting, pilgrimage and prayer. These teachings were subversive in the fourteenth century - Taymiyya was imprisoned five times and died in jail - and they remained so six hundred years later to anyone who dismissed the official clerical ulema (including Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi clerical Establishment) as venal apologists for corrupt governments.6

At dawn on 20 November 1979 the imam of the Grand Mosque at Mecca prepared to usher in the Muslim New Year with special prayers. He paid no attention to a group of young men with red headbands shouldering coffins - for this was where the dead were often blessed - until they set down their load and produced dozens of weapons. A young man called Juhayman bin Muhammed bin Sayf al-Utaybi who seemed to be in charge declared his own brother-in-law the mahdi, the Islamic messiah, for the date was fourteen hundred years after Mohammed's Hijra from Mecca to Medina, an anniversary already loaded with apocalyptic portents. Attempts to halt this armed manifestation by deploying the monarchy's Bedouin praetorian National Guards proved futile since al-Utaybi was one of their number and he quickly had the entrance gates barred. As the day wore on, he issued damning denunciations of the Saudi ruling dynasty, calling them corrupt apostates who had prospered by allowing their Western allies to plunder the country's oil wealth. Al-Utaybi's well-equipped fighters made mincemeat of regular Saudi soldiers who were dispatched to eject them from the mosque, a mission inhibited by the need not to destroy it. Eventually the monarchy called in assistance from France's Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale and the Pakistani army. Three hastily converted commandos recommended using mass electrocution by putting a high-voltage cable into the mosque's flooded basements, or nerve gas to flush the Mahdists out. After two weeks of close-quarter combat, al-Utaybi and the other surviving fighters were captured, a task made easier when the construction firm Bin Laden Brothers, which had refurbished the mosque, provided blueprints essential to storming it. Al-Utaybi and sixty comrades were quickly beheaded. At the time this siege seemed like a perplexing incident of cultic violence, as mysterious in meaning, or meaninglessness, as similar events that happened in the Christian world. The fact that during the siege rioting Arab and Pakistani students from Pakistan's Qaid-i-Azam university stormed the US embassy in Islamabad - on the rumour that the Americans and Israelis were behind al-Utaybi's seizure of the Mecca mosque - merely seemed like a bizarre pendant, as did ayatollah Khomenei's warm words to the embassy rioters, which included the observation: 'Borders should not separate hearts.'7

Although Egypt is the size of France and Spain combined, 95 per cent of its population of sixty million live on 5 per cent of its land, the lush, lotus-shaped strip that follows the course of the Nile. Beyond lies inhospitable desert, whose only redeeming grace may be that it is unsuited to guerrilla warfare. Mysterious monuments remind Egyptians that they are not really Arabs, but heirs to one of the world's greatest polytheistic civilizations, whose mysterious iconography still shimmers beneath the high art of Christianity. The French left the legacy of Napoleonic law. Egypt became an independent parliamentary monarchy in 1922, although the British remained a powerful, and often resented, commercial and military presence, clinging on to the vestiges of Empire. The flourishing of Western modernity during the 192os, as manifested in a vibrant press, cinema and  literary culture, inevitably triggered an Islamic response, which took the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1928 by a devout primary school teacher called Hassan al- Banna. Appalled by British military bases, foreign ownership of utilities, Egypt's almost foreign-seeming Turko-Circassian upper class, and a vocal feminist movement, al- Banna incorporated existing charitable and pious associations into a series of cell-like 'families', which were linked by such modern communications as magazines and newspapers as well as sermons. Education and charitable work (or da'wa) would lead to social reformation, provided evil Western influences were contained. The Brotherhood patiently built a grassroots base that rapidly reached into every Egyptian province, with a membership of half a million people. One of the main ideological influences upon al-Banna was Rashid Rida, an erstwhile moderniser turned salafist who demanded the replacement of Western-influenced laws by the sharia, and revived the Koranic notion of jahiliyya - that is the pre-Islamic state of pagan benightedness - to denounce the regimes of the Arab present. At first viewed sympathetically by a monarch who saw the Brotherhood as less menacing than secular nationalism or socialism, this mood changed when its surface network of charitable and pious foundations was accompanied by an underground military organization, the Secret Apparatus, that began to infiltrate the armed forces. The Brotherhood was compulsorily disbanded in 1948, prompting it to assassinate the prime minister responsible. By way of revenge, a year later, the forty-three-year-old al- Banna was killed in turn. 8

Initially, the largely lower-middle-class Brothers welcomed the coup which in 1952 chased out the reforming sybarite king Farouk. They confused their own drive for Islamic unity with the pro-Soviet crypto totalitarian state being established by Nasser and his junta of young officers. Nasser invited in some twenty thousand Soviet 'advisers', while sending promising young officers, like the air force pilot Hosni Mubarak, to the Frunse Military Academy in Moscow. Relations between Nasser and the Islamists quickly deteriorated to the point where in October 1954 a young Brother called Muhammad Abd aI-Latif tried to shoot the president at one of the regime's mass rallies in Alexandria, the shots being broadcast live on radio. Nasser's response was swift and brutal.

As Nasser's supporters burned Brotherhood property, six of its leaders were hanged. Others disappeared into Tura prison in southern Cairo. Their number included the Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb, whose thought and travails are essential to the story of modern jihadi-salafist terrorism, perhaps the closest way we can describe this ongoing phenomenon without either indicting Islam and fundamentalism or resorting to terms like Islamofascist or the more appropriate Islamobolshevik. The hyphenated term, which has the virtue of being culturally specific, means armed struggle in the service of the creed of the 'pious forefathers' as reassembled into a politico-religious ideology by men who had no recognized religious authority outside the circles of their supporters. It might be useful to explain how we arrive at this definition.

Simply imagine four circles of diminishing size nestling within one another. The largest circle is the world's one and a half billion Muslims, divided into Sunni, Shia and hundreds of other sects like the Sufi and often as historically accommodating of local non-Islamic beliefs as Christianity is of animism in Africa. Observance can be as casual or fundamental, as grimly austere or colorfully sensuous as religious practice is among Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or Christians, which is why the term fundamentalist does not accurately describe Islamist terrorists. Islamists are the next, smaller circle, that is people who want states to introduce Islamic law, a goal they usually pursue through guns and the ballot box in the tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood. The third smaller circle are salafists, or followers of the wise founders who surrounded Mohammed. They want to establish Islamic states of an extremely puritanical kind. The most influential salafist clerics are Saudis. Most jihadists are salafists, but not all salafists are jihadists, that is people who seek to bring about the violent transformation of societies into Islamic states of which the only known model has been the chaos created by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Some envisage this on a vast scale, a revived caliphate, stretching from Spain through the Balkans, North Africa and the Middle East, and on across the former Soviet 'stans' to South Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Thailand and parts of China. Within non-Islamic states, jihadi-salafists take a territorial approach too, with each radicalized mosque being like a separate mini-kingdom, bent on dominance over the immediate neighborhood. Victory has the smell of derelict bars, pubs and dance halls, and the chill of a draught in a room.

These people would not like being called Qutbists, for to name them after a mere mortal would be blasphemous. The son of a teacher in Upper Egypt, Qutb was a typical beneficiary of Egypt's modernization, before the schools inspector's politico-religious activities led to his being sent to the US in 1948 on an indefinite fact-finding trip that was intended to get him out of the way. Qutb was repelled by the relatively innocent materialist society he found there, and especially by the succession of women who appeared bent on seducing the middle-aged Arab bachelor in scenes worthy of the actor Peter Sellers. Ironically, many of his responses to the West resembled the strain of cultural pessimism which industrial, urban modernity had evoked among the West's own conservative intelligentsias.9 He had eccentric observations to make about such subjects as orderly grass lawns and joyless pigeons in anomic city squares. This exposure to the West - in the form of soporifically suburban Colorado - led Qutb to the view that the modern world had reverted to a state of pagan jahiliyya, against which the true Muslim had to insulate himself through total submission to Allah. Becoming a slave of God liberated the true believer from the slavery of merely human rulers, and such false creeds as the separation of religion and politics, democracy, human rights, liberalism and so on. In local terms, this meant that wherever Arabs thought they were on the side of the future - democracy, nationalism, socialism and so forth - they were merely rendering obeisance to false idols as worthless, despite their greater sophistication, as the old stone gods of ancient Mecca. They were what Qutb dubbed 'so-called Muslims' and as such they could be killed along with the infidel kuffar, in what Qutb envisaged as an endless jihad.10

Many have compared Qutb's book with Lenin's What is to be Done? Writing with a directness that was unlike the learned disquisitions of the ulema, Qutb managed to slip in the very Western, Marxist-Leninist notion of an elite revolutionary vanguard, albeit camouflaged as the belief that only the imprisoned Brothers were true Muslims, the rest being in various states of thrall to false idols. Regimes not solely based on sharia law should be combated with the sword as well as the book. The worst idolaters were the guards in Qutb's prison, who in 1957 responded to the prisoners' refusal to break rocks as part of their sentence of hard labour by entering the cells and killing twenty-one of them. The consumptive Qutb avoided this fate as he was kept in the infirmary.

By the time of his release in May 1964, and by virtue of such writings as Signposts, Qutb had become the leading ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood as it tentatively sought to regroup. Not every Brother agreed with his violent prescriptions, preferring instead the slow but steady creation of a parallel Muslim society outside the state, a tendency that has periodically enabled Egyptian governments to make peace with the Brotherhood. Qutb was not free for long because in order to boost its credibility vis-a-vis another security agency, the Military Security Services uncovered a wide-Fanging conspiracy against Nasser's regime, of which Qutb was alleged to be a leading light. Brutal raids on shanty towns and villages where the Brotherhood was strong, and routine torture of suspects, provided the evidence the regime needed for the existence of a ramified conspiracy that it hoped would galvanise its own supporters. After trial by a military court, Qutb and two colleagues were hanged on 29 August 1966. The decades of abuse he suffered, culminating in such a death, provided a powerful example of martyrdom for the faith that would reverberate around the Muslim world, not least in the form of a lurid biopic that leaves no torture unexplored. One of the places where Qutb's doctrines flourished was in Saudi Arabia. Many exiled Egyptian Brothers were given refuge there as their intellectual skills were locally in short supply. One of them was Mohammed Qutb, Sayyid's brother, who became chief propagator of the martyr's cult, his future disciples including the young Osama bin Laden.11

For a decade or so after the Suez Crisis, Nasser basked in the adulation of much of the non-aligned world. Then his vision fell apart, beginning with the failure of the United Arab Republic created by amalgamating Egypt and Syria, although the name lingered on until in 1971 Egypt reverted to being the Arab Republic of Egypt. Widespread disillusionment with Arab nationalism, in the wake of the disastrous 1967 Six-Day War with Israel, and Jordan's Black September, gave a brief boost to socialist alternatives, at least among students who looked to the Paris of 1968 as a model. The fact that the Jordanian Muslim Brothers had supported king Hussein's suppression of the Palestinians inclined many rulers to view Islamism as a useful counterweight. As part of his so-called Corrective Revolution, Egypt's new ruler Anwar Sadat, who came to power in late 1970, first ejected Nasser's phalanx of Soviet advisers, and then released all the Muslim Brothers from prison and allowed exiles to return home.

As elsewhere in the world, Egyptian universities underwent ill considered expansion in the 1970s, with student numbers rising from two hundred thousand in 1970 to more than five hundred thousand seven years later. Facilities and teaching were atrocious, because any professor of ability had left to earn better money in the Gulf, leaving behind student-teacher ratios of 1; 100. Except for a few elite professional faculties, higher education involved learning mimeographed lecture notes by rote, with crash private tuition before exams for qualifications that brought some lowly unsatisfying job in societies where to get ahead one needs some connection to the local Big Man.12 The state sector could not expand quickly enough to absorb this demi-educated lumped intelligentsia, whose degrees were the intellectual equivalent of a Western high-school certificate.13 Overcrowding brought problems peculiar to the Islamic world, since men and women unaccustomed to close physical proximity found themselves pressed up against one another on the campus bus, or jostling three at a time for each available seat in the lecture halls.

The Believing President, as Sadat was known in his own press, encouraged the Jamaat Islamiya student associations to proliferate on campuses, seeing only the virtuous side of multiplying numbers of pious young women wearing veils and bearded men in white robes. Equipped with the funds of the student unions, they were ever fertile in their solutions to the problems of universities, providing sexually segregated housing and transport, free photocopying, and organized camps where religion played a major part. Inevitably, this attempt to realize Islam within the universities had its dark side. Concerts, dances and films were bullied into non-existence by Islamists armed with clubs and iron bars, while intimidation was used to prevent even the most innocent relations between the opposite sexes. In 1980 hundreds of militant students stormed the offices of the dean of the science faculty, to force his compliance with a series of Islamist ultimata. Meanwhile, radical preachers inveighed against nightlife on Cairo's Avenue of the Pyramids, where pious visitors from the Gulf got drunk on bottles of whisky that cost as much as an Egyptian peasant saw in a month, while stuffing banknotes into the bosoms of belly dancers, and against a regime that celebrated the millennia of pre-Islamic Egyptian culture. 'Egypt is Muslim, not pharaonic,' they reminded their own pharaoh when Sadat campaigned to preserve Ramses II's mummy. That Sadat lived increasingly in Farouk's ten palaces further fuelled envy and hostility.14

These students included tiny bands of terrorists committed to the violent overthrow of Sadat, especially after his efforts to make peace with Israel in the late 1970s, efforts which meant the Saudis cut off the massive subsidies that mitigated Egypt's chronic economic problems. The first attempted coup by militant Islamist students was suppressed before it started and the ringleaders were hanged. They were succeeded by a group called al-Jamaat al-Muslimin, or the Islamic Group, led by Shuqri Mustafa, an ardent Qutbist agronomist, who pronounced that the whole of Egyptian society was in a state of apostasy, to which the group's initial response was to dwell in desert caves. There their minds took a remarkably prescient turn, forecasting the emergence of an Islamic caliphate that would challenge both the US and the USSR. When a leading Establishment cleric denounced them as heretics, the group kidnapped and killed him. Shuqri was apprehended and put on trial, a theatre he used to denounce the ulema, who also got it in the neck from the prosecutors for allowing 'charlatans' like Shuqri to operate within the universities. In that respect they resembled liberal university administrators in the West, with their limitless indulgence towards fanatics' desire for social justice. In 1978 Shuqri and four other members of the Islamic Group were executed. These measures did not halt the proliferation of radical Islamist groups, which found greater grievances than the colossal corruption of the regime. The issues included Sadat's peace deal with Israel, which posted an ambassador to Cairo, resulting in the president becoming a pariah in the wider Arab world; and efforts in 1979, supported by Sadat's wife Jihan, to rebalance marriage and divorce laws to benefit women represented the final straw.15

The democratization of religious Opinion as against received authority, and the rage that ensued when mass education did not automatically translate into status, was evident in the group that eventually assassinated Sadat. One cell developed in a Cairo suburb, where a young electrical engineer called Mohammed Abd aI-Salam Faraj linked up with two men from the prominent al-Zumr family. Together with Muhammed Zumi, a fugitive from southern Upper Egypt where a further cell developed, they formed Tanzim aI-Jihad in 1980. From the start, the group was divided between the northern group which focused on killing Sadat, and southerners more concerned to persecute Coptic Christian goldsmiths and jewelers. The latter's numbers and prosperity had exceeded Islam's threshold of tolerance, while their pope was gaining the ear of Americans concerned about persecution of fellow Christians. Not only were the Copts getting above themselves, but it appeared that their greater assertiveness was being manipulated by their 'Crusader' allies abroad. Minor incidents, perhaps the charge that someone had put the hex on a buffalo, resulted in sectarian violence which the police struggled to contain. It spread to the Cairo slums when in the autumn of 1981 Copts and Muslims attempted to massacre each other.

The conspiracy assumed lethal proportions when it was joined by twenty-four-year-old first-lieutenant Khalid Ahmed Shawqi al Islambouli, like the al-Zumrs from a prominent family. Frustrated in his desire to become an air force- pilot, he had washed up in artillery. The electrician Faraj provided the vision, borrowing bits of Qutb and venerable Taymiyya to justify an attack on the 'near enemy' of apostate Muslim rulers, preparatory to the assault of a consolidated Islam on the 'far enemy' of Israel. Clerical endorsement of this strategy was supplied by a blind lecturer in theology from a southern outpost of Cairo's al-Azhar university, whom Sadat had released from a nine-month prison sentence when he signaled the break with the Nasser era. This forty something cleric was sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, thenceforth a pivotal figure in several terrorist atrocities.

Recruitment of others into the developing conspiracy against Sadat occurred in radical mosques, where the more devout were singled out to attend intensive retreats, part of the grooming that draws people into the more select group responsible for acts of terrorism. The next step from these retreats for a select few, whose sense of being the elite within an elite was consolidated, was basic weapons training. The group began by robbing jewellery businesses owned by Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt, robberies which were designed to finance major operations and to make the bumptious Copts - one of whom, Boutros Boutros Ghali, was even foreign minister - feel the Muslim fist. In this climate of sectarian tension, Sadat announced a new line: 'No politics in religion, and no religion in politics'. The regime rounded up about fifteen hundred radicals, including Khalid al-Islambouli's brother Muhammed, leader of Islamic students in the commerce department at Asyut university. This engendered emotions like those that once prevailed in Lenin's family. Their mother recalled: 'When he heard the news, Khalid burst out crying and said to me: "Why have they arrested my brother, who committed no crime?" He cried so much that he had convulsions. When he finally calmed down, he said to me, "Be patient, mother, it is the will of God ... every tyrant has his end."  On 23 September 1981 Khalid al- Islambouli learned that he was to participate in the parade on 6 October designed to celebrate the moment in 1973 when Egyptian troops had captured a salient over the canal in Sinai. This was the thirty eighth attempt on Sadat's life; it was horribly successful.

As an army officer al-Islambouli was spared the searches which Sadat's security inflicted on other ranks, who were supposed to surrender their firing pins and live rounds for the day. No checks were made to see that this had been done, although the orders had certainly been given. This laxity enabled al-Islam.bouli to smuggle ammunition and grenades provided by Faraj into his 'quarters concealed in a duffle bag. He also pulled rank to bring three assassins dressed as soldiers into his barracks; the following day they took the places of the real soldiers - to whom al-Islambouli gave a day's leave - in his Zil truck as it towed a gun carriage across the parade ground. Only the driver did not know what was going on when al-Islambouli grabbed the handbrake as the truck neared the reviewing stand. He and his accomplices dismounted, removing the safety catches from their weapons.

There, Sadat, his ministers, visiting dignitaries and the 150 men deployed in concentric groups - supposedly protecting him were distracted by the roaring jets of an air force fly-past. Sadat was dressed in a natty Prussian-style uniform which had arrived from a London tailor the day before. He refused to don a bullet-proof vest, claiming that it would spoil the tunic's line. Besides, as he said when he told his guards to keep their distance: 'Please go away - I am with my sons,' meaning the massed soldiery. When Sadat caught sight of five men running towards him, he stood up, ready with a salute, inadvertently providing them with a clear target. The five hurled grenades, which sent the Egyptian elite reeling, and then, reaching the bottom of the reviewing stand, unleashed about thirty-five seconds of sustained fire from automatic weapons delivered from a range of about fifteen meters. Despite the efforts of the defense minister, who tried to shield his president, bullets tore into Sadat's chest and neck causing massive blood loss. Incredulous at this fate, Sadat's last words were 'Mish Maaqool, Mish Maaqool' or 'impossible, impossible'. Al- Islambouli, whose shots finished off Sadat, repeatedly shouted, 'My name is Khalid Islambouli, I have slain Pharaoh, and I do not fear death!' He did not bother to kill Mubarak too, the self-effacing vice-president. One assassin was killed by security officers, and the rest were wounded and captured.

The plot to take over Cairo, starting with the television centre, unraveled as the captured assassins boasted how these attacks were supposed to unfold, an interpretation probably over-indulgent of the restraint of their interrogators. In the south there was a four-day seizure of parts of downtown Asyut, which ended abruptly when the government sent in paratroopers. Sadat's killers and more than three hundred radical Islamist defendants were tried in a court erected in Cairo's Exhibition Grounds. The surviving terrorists gave reasons for the assassination. They spoke of the 'decadence' represented by alcohol and discotheques, and the dishonoring contempt Sadat had expressed for women dressed in 'tents'. One mentioned the example of the Iranian Revolution and the need to create a Sunni counterweight. There was one exception to the death sentences passed on the main defendants. Lawyers for Abdel Rahman successfully dissociated their client from specific injunctions to harm or kill either Copts or Sadat, while the blind sheikh himself passionately denounced attempts to relativise an immutable Islam so as to conform with modern Western mores. Incredibly, he was acquitted by a court which knew that what he was saying would have been well received by most of the ulema, even though one of Mubarak's first acts had been to get the heads of Cairo's prestigious al-Azhar university, the Arab world's Oxford, to condemn the assassins.16

Some of the other defendants would achieve even greater prominence. Ayman al-Zawahiri was a young surgeon from a distinguished clerical-medical dynasty with a practice in Cairo's Maadi suburb where he had organized a jihadist cell that was on the periphery of the plot to kill Sadat. Although he had learned of the plot only hours before it happened, al-Zawahiri and his friend Aboud al-Zuma were bent on using Sadat's funeral to kill Mubarak and any foreign dignitaries who happened along. On 23 October al-Zawahiri was arrested by the police, the gateway to endless horrors at the hands of Intelligence Unit 75, the government's expert torturers. During the court hearings, he emerged as the defendants' spokesman, using this public forum to give chapter and verse about beatings, electrocution and wild dogs, testimony - all probably true - that provoked chants of 'The army of Mohammed will return, and we will defeat the Jews' from his co-accused. At the end of the three-year trial, al-Zawahiri was sentenced to three years in jail, which he had already largely served on remand. His sentence may have been lightened by intelligence on other terrorists that he gave his tormentors. When he emerged from this ordeal in 1984, al-Zawahiri was no longer the retiring bookish medic with a sideline in militant jihadism. The physical and psychological humiliations of torture, and perhaps the religious ecstasies that extreme pain can generate, had created a downtown Algiers, smashing up buses, road signs, telephone luxury shops where the local jeunesse donree, or 'tchi-tchi', flaunt their wealth. Much sexual frustration was vented young women driving flashy sports cars - dubbed Bio by the street youths. Symbolically, they tore down the Algerien flag and  raised an empty couscous sack to draw attention to of decades of socialism. When the police counterattacked hundreds of these rioters and torturing detainees, they were c novel experience for representatives of a state that was pathologically anti-Zionist.

The failure of socialism in Algeria provided militant Islamists with their chance, for it was they who deftly interposed themselves as mediators between the rioters and the government. The regime had fitfully encouraged this trend. In the 1970S president (and colonel) Houari Boumedienne, who had deposed Allmed Ben Bella in 1965, launched a sustained campaign of Arabisation to expunge every vestige of the hated French. This was despite the fact that French came much more easily to most Algerians than classical literary Arabic as taught by exiled Egyptian Muslim Brothers, and was the surest route to the best professions and jobs, which required expertise in French. Enforced Arabisation did not please the Berbers either, who were proud of their distinctive dialects and cultural identity. In the spring of 1980 the Berber heartland of Kabylia was rocked by demonstrations and strikes which the regime suppressed with its usual violence. The regime also sought to use Islam when socialism palpably failed to create a united Algerian identity. The 1976 National Charter said that 'Islam is the state religion'; the president had to be a Muslim who swore an oath to 'respect and glorify the Muslim religion'. In that year Friday replaced Sunday as a day of enforced rest. Gambling and the sale of alcohol to Muslims were banned. Three years later Muslims were prohibited from raising swine. Partly as a result of Saudi largesse, the number of mosques in the country rose from 2,200 in 1966 to 5,829 in 1980. Many of these were so-called people's mosques which when left half built technically evaded state control. Although the state continued to monopolize the production of audiocassettes, pirate imports brought the radical tidings of Egyptian, Lebanese and Saudi clerics much as printing presses had once universalized the words of Luther and Calvin.19

The state's attempt to exploit Islam for purely political ends was resented by many radical Islamists such as Mustafa Bouyali, who declared the regime impious and called for a jihad to overthrow it. After repairing, like the Prophet, to the mountains, Bouyali founded a Mouvement Islamique Arme, with himself as its emir. Until Bouyali was killed in 1987, the FLN-army leaders found themselves playing role reversal with the French who had once battled the FLN in the same bleak countryside, Cooler-headed Islamists decided simply to push the regime towards higher levels of Islamisation: An academic called Abassi Madani called for 'respect for the sharia in government legislation and a purging of elements hostile to our religion'. Among his other demands was segregation of the sexes in education. He was immediately imprisoned, his release being a key future demand of Islamist terrorists. After 1978 the new government of colonel Chadli Benjedid responded to the rise of Islamism by building more mosques, so as to sideline the multiplying number of ad-hoc prayer rooms, and controlling who was allowed to preach in them. An Islamic university was created in the city of Constantine to counter the foreign influences that held sway in the absence of a local Algerian ulema. Two distinguished clerics, Muhammad al-Ghazali and Youssef al-Qaradawi, were imported from Egypt, but craftily ignored the regime's efforts to make them its own clerical authorities. Worse, the Islamic faction within the sole ruling party - whom wits called the 'Barbefelenes' because of their beards - began to drift into the orbit of this incipient Islamist movement, mosques being the only legal site of opposition in a one-party state.

Although the October 1988 youth riots petered out, Chadli continued to treat Islamist intellectuals as interlocutors, even though it was not clear at all that they, or anyone else, had much purchase on the young rioters. In a bold move designed to secure his re-election to the presidency, Chadli surprisingly introduced a multi-party system, his intention being to shuffle the parties around so as to give a democratic gloss to a much enhanced presidency. One product of this democratizing strategy was the Islamic Salvation Front or FIS, the Islamist party founded in March 1989, which temporarily brought together Algerianists who believed in the creeping, and entirely legitimate, Islamisation of Algerian society, and salafists who were opposed to democracy as a secular foreign imposition, at the same time as they themselves were heavily engaged with fraternal Arab jihadists. The FIS was the first legal Islamic party in the entire Arab world, and the first openly to proclaim the goal of an Islamic republic, while simultaneously promising to restore ethics, justice and warm family kinship. It wanted to revert to the egalitarianism of the early FLN, a distant memory at a time when a corrupt business and military elite was stealing the nation's oil wealth. Unsurprisingly this especially appealed to the first- and second generation migrants from the conservative countryside huddled in the anomic poor quarters of big cities.

The FIS was both an Islamized political party and a social welfare organization. Till; party was governed by a thirty-eight-member Council, called the Madjlis ech-Choura in conscious echo of the Prophet, with day-to-day business in the hands of a twelve-man Executive Bureau. Its local cells were called ousra or families, another conscious use of Islamic terminology. Its two main leaders were Ali Benhadji, a charismatic associate of the dead jihadist Bouyali, a demagogue on a motorbike who appealed to young people, and the older Abassi Madani, who was respected by pious traders and shopkeepers. Like the parish structures that had benefited Christian democrat parties in post-war Europe, the mosques provided the FIS with a major organizational advantage over the forty or so rival parties, some of which were led by exiles returned from Europe, whose local appeal was limited. Similar advantages flowed from its charitable activities, which were subsidized by the Saudis, since it provided hospital and funeral funds for the poor, while offering to buy indigent women their veils. In other words, it was like a demoralized version of the early FLN, attracting, beyond the Islamists who made up its hard core, many more protest voters who had had enough of a regime that was neither socialist nor Islamic.

In municipal polls held in 1990 the FIS won 54 per cent of the popular vote, decimating the former governing party. Success led it to overplay its hand. Control of municipal councils resulted immediately in prohibitions on alcohol or on people walking about in shorts and swimming costumes. In Oran, the council banned a ral music concert. Another refused to deal with correspondence not written in Arabic. In December 1991 the FIS eventually took part in the first round of legislative elections - after a four-month debate on the propriety of doing so - winning a respectable 47 per cent of a poorly attended poll which suggests that many voters were apathetic about the choices available to them. Four hundred thousand people took part in demonstrations in the capital, chanting 'No police state, no fundamentalist republic!' Correctly fearing that the army had had enough, the FIS made desperate attempts to allay public anxiety about the Islamic society it envisaged for Algeria, even constructing scaled models of a projected Islamic city with cinemas, libraries and sports halls. This did not entirely dispel fears that, if the FIS won the second round of elections, it would abolish democracy, the free press and all other political parties, that being the message from some mosques. On 11 January 1992 the generals mounted a putsch, sacking Chadli and going on to ban the PIS and arrest its leaders. They received lengthy jail sentences, and many of their lesser supporters were despatched to remote Saharan concentration camps. That August a radical Islamist bomb killed ten people at Algiers airport, the beginning of a terror campaign that would eventually be directed at the entire Muslim population.

Of the world's one and a half billion Muslims, only one-fifth live in the Arab world. Arabia bulks large in the Muslim imagination, and Arabic has enormous prestige as the language of Allah recorded in sacred texts, but the demographic strength of Islam lies in the Indian subcontinent and South Asia. Indonesia's 250 million people, consisting of 250 ethnic groups living on the six thousand inhabitable islands in the thirteen thousand-island archipelago, are nearly 90 per cent Muslim. Since Islam was, as it is said, written over other belief systems, Indonesian Muslims are broadly divided between those who subscribe to this syncretic version and modernizers who sought to make Indonesia conform more tightly to Arab exemplars which exert enormous suasion in the region. Power and wealth in Indonesia sit uncomfortably along ethnic and religious fault lines too. Excepting that part controlled by the ruling dynasts, economic might is largely in the hands of an industrious Buddhist, Christian and Confucian Chinese minority, while bureaucratic, military and political power has been monopolized by a predominantly Christian-educated elite. Although there is a modernized Muslim middle class, the majority of the 49 per cent of Indonesians subsisting on under US$2 a day are Muslims too.

Muslim militias played an important part in fighting the Dutch colonialists, but they broke with the newly established Republic over its refusal to introduce shari a law. A movement called Darul Islam, or the Islamic State of Indonesia, waged a desultory military campaign from its bases in central Java, Aceh and South Sulawesi, until its leaders were captured in 1962. The dictators Sukarno and Suharto propagated a state philosophy called Pancasila, designed to weld this kaleidoscopic nation together. Although Indonesia is a secular state, this creed consists of affirmation of belief in one God, respect for the human individual and social justice, and the unity of the motherland. The pious Muslim minority and the surviving supporters of Darul Islam insisted on adding sharia law, a demand known as the Jakarta Charter. Radical Islam's survival in Indonesia was due to the fact that elements in the security services saw Darul Islam as a useful tool to suppress Communism, as well as due to inflows of Saudi money that financed an Institute for Islamic and Arabic Studies in Jakarta. Another important incubator was the Javanese version of a madrassa or seminary, known locally as a pesantren, run by two Arabs, Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, at Ngruki in the Solo region. These two were linked to a series of terrorist attacks on bars and cinemas in the 1970S and early 1980s, carried out by a shadowy organization called Komando Jihad. Though the fact that the attacks always preceded elections may have reflected a government plot to discredit Islamic parties, these two Arabs were tried and jailed for fomenting terrorism. Released on license, they fled to Malaysia. The restoration of democracy in 1999 saw the mainstream Islamic party achieve fourth place with 11 per cent of the poll. It also saw the development of two terrorist groups. A preacher of Arab descent who was a veteran of the jihad in Afghanistan seems to have been responsible for Laskar-Jihad, a terrorist group formed in West Java to protect Muslims from murderous Christian militias in the Moluccas islands off Sulawesi. Strictly Wahhabist, it also vehemently rejected the presidency of Megawati Setiawati Soekarnoputri (2001-4), largely because of her gender. If Laskar-Jihad has restricted regional ambitions, and would follow Saudi authorities in condemning Osama bin Laden as a sectarian heretic, the front organization known as Majelis Mujahidin, whose spiritual leader is Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, explicitly wants an Islamic state covering Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. For convenience sake, regional intelligence agencies refer to this wider South Asian network as Jemaah Islamiyah, and seek to prove its links with Al Qaeda, certain that this will bring US funds for counter-terrorist operations. The links are not imaginary.20

The Indian subcontinent is not far behind Indonesia in numbers of adherents of Islam. Already in the nineteenth century, a network of madrassas, whose hub was at Deoband, north of Delhi, propagated a rigorously Wahhabist form of Islam so as to enable Muslims to guard their identity in a hostile Hindu sea. Although secular Muslim intellectuals, and British-trained army officers, had created an independent Pakistan in 1947, for want of anything else with equivalent purchase they had to stress a common Islamic identity to hold its Baluchi, Pashtun, Sindhi and Punjabi tribes together, a problem that became more urgent after 1971 with the secession of the eastern Bengalis into an independent Bangladesh. That loss served to tilt rump Pakistan towards the warm waters of the Gulf states. There was also the longer-standing contest over Kashmir, a princely state under the British Raj, with Sunni Muslims dominant in the Kashmir valley and mixed Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist elsewhere. By force of arms in 1947-9 India succeeded in imposing its will on most of Kashmir, including the Sunni valley, leaving Pakistan in charge of the remaining third, a position it sought to overturn in fighting that recurred in 1965 and 1971. Indian misrule in Kashmir led to vicious attacks by Muslims on Hindus, many of whom fled, and the formation of dozens of militant groups, most of them backed by the army, the intelligence services or Islamist parties in Pakistan, who provide them with arms, money and volunteer manpower. These groups include Hizb-ulMujahedin and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, both of which combine guerrilla warfare with terrorism designed to frighten Hindus or to intimidate moderate Muslims. (See case study P.1 and P.2) Pakistani support for these groups makes the country the world's second major state sponsor of terrorism, even if this sponsorship is much more focused in scope than the Iranians'. The general aim is to plague India with a running sore that ties up a quarter of a million Indian troops in the area, while providing a ventilator for radical Islamists in Pakistan itself who might otherwise turn on their own government. That strategy has proved too clever by half, since some Kashmiri and Pakistani militants seek forcibly to Islamize both countries.

For within Pakistan successive governments have sought to instrumentalist Islam with varying degrees of sincerity and success, pandering to a vociferous Muslim lobby that knows how to incite mobs, but whose electoral record - when there have been elections - is modest. A few belated gestures towards Islam in the dying days of the deeply corrupt socialist government of Ali Bhutto did not prevent his overthrow and execution by the military dictator general Zia-ul-Haq in 1977. Zia was a British-trained cavalry officer who while on secondment to Jordan in 1970 had led a group of Jordanian troops he was training into battle against the Palestinians during king Hussein's Black September crackdown. Looking like a slightly oleaginous movie actor with his slicked down hair and handlebar moustache, Zia admired the Islamist ideologue Mawlana Mawdudi, the journalist who in 1941 had founded a jihadist party called Jamaat-e-Islami, which while harking back to the Prophet's band of followers was also indebted to the vanguardist parties of Europe in the 1930s.

Mawdudi was one of the millions of Muslims who went to Pakistan after independence. His party became one element of the broader Pakistani National Alliance with which Zia hoped to stabilize his military regime. Zia brought prominent Islamists into government, briefly including Mawdudi himself, while Islamising education, the law, taxation and so forth. (See also).

Although he introduced sharia law, the dire penalties for adulterers and thieves were rarely implemented because of scrupulous insistence on the need for many eyewitnesses. Down to his death in 1988, Zia succeeded in dividing the Islamic camp by co-opting the modern Islamist ideologues, while leaving the traditional clerical elite in charge of educating the poor in their burgeoning, Saudi-financed madrassas, the alternative to providing a decent public education system. The number of Deobandi madrassas, which the Wahhabist Saudis favored, spiraled from 354 in 1972 to seven thousand in 2002. The military regime was also presented with another cause it could pursue with Muslim radicals when the old struggle over Kashmir was joined by the new war in Afghanistan.

In the spring of 1978, Afghan Communists killed the country's president Mohammed Daoud, instituting a reign of anti- Islamic terror that has received less notice than their desire to have girls attend schools or encouragement of typists to wear Western skirts and trouser suits. By the end of 1979, some twelve thousand religious and community leaders were in Kabul's jails, where many were quietly liquidated. A revolt broke out in Shia-dominated Herat, in which Islamists hacked to death a dozen Soviet advisers and their families. By way of reprisal, Soviet aircraft bombed Herat, killing about twenty thousand people. The revolt spread to Jalalabad, even as the government's troops began to desert to the mujaheddin. As Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chief Yuri Andropov wondered how to respond, in Washington national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski persuaded president Carter to authorize non-lethal covert support to the Afghan rebels. Medicines and radios with a combined value of half a million US dollars were shipped to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISO for distribution to the Afghan mujaheddin. This was the modest beginning of a major enthusiasm. After murdering the Soviets' first client ruler, Hafizullah Amin clambered to the dizzy pinnacle of power in Kabul, despite KGB suspicions that he was a CIA agent. That rumor sealed his fate when on Christmas Eve Soviet transporters landed paratroops at Kabul, with seven hundred KGB paramilitaries in Afghan uniforms dispatched to kill Amin and the current Communist leadership. They were followed by Central Asian Red Army troops - 70 per cent of whom were Muslim - whose armored vehicles rumbled along the metalled road the Soviets had built in the 1960s. Eventually Soviet forces would peak at about 120,000, although some 650,000 men served in Afghanistan during the eight years of conflict, many of them drug-deranged conscripts blasting away from tanks reverberating with heavy-metal rock music. It is useful to recall that this Soviet invasion led to the formation of the Arab Afghans and ultimately to AI Qaeda.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan focused several discrete strategic agendas. The US saw it as a way of bleeding the Russians by using Afghan proxies. Brzezinski wrote to Carter: 'Now we can give the USSR its own Vietnam war.'21 It cost both blood and treasure. Afghanistan is estimated to have cost the Soviet Union some US$45 billion by the time the Russians retreated, leaving a million Afghan dead at the expense of fifteen thousand Red Army fatalities. Three million Afghans fled to Pakistan, while the same number ended up as refugees in Iran. The US expended much less on its support for the Afghan mujaheddin, perhaps US$5 billion in total, much of it scooped out of the country's fathomless defense budget and re-routed to the CIA to be disbursed via the Pakistanis.

A credulous 'Boy's Own' Western media boosted the mujaheddin as noble savages, nostalgically recalling the massacres these tribesmen had once inflicted on the British, as they contemplated Russian soldiers having their eyes gouged out or genitals cut off if they did not convert to Islam. Responding to widespread Muslim outrage at the invasion of Islamic territory by the legions of the Red godless, the Saudis and other conservative Gulf states saw an opportunity for Sunnis to rival the brightly burning Shia star of ayatollah Khomenei with a cause that would also divert their own militant Islamists to foreign fields. They even introduced discounted fares on the national airline to make it easier to get rid of them to Afghanistan. The Saudis hated the Russians, and through a Safari Club had already co-operated with the US in subverting the spread of Marxist regimes in Africa. In July 1980 the Saudis' intelligence supremo, prince Turki, agreed to match dollar for dollar US support for the mujaheddin. Saudi money was sent to the Washington embassy and then transferred to a Swiss bank account of the CIA, which used these funds to purchase weapons for those Afghans the CIA and the Saudis deemed most worthy of support. This meant that the US$200 million the CIA's Mghan programme received in 1984 became US$400 million courtesy of the Saudis. The problem was that Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Directorate was not the only game in town, even assuming that it was trustworthy. Also supporting the Islamist cause in Afghanistan were private and semi-official charitable and religious bodies, which funded not only indigenous Afghan Wahhabis, but also the stream of Gulf Arabs heading to Afghanistan to wage jihad. An estimated twenty thousand Arabs went to Afghanistan to fight. The Saudis even paid for the critically wounded to be treated in private Harley Street clinics in London. Lastly, Pakistan's successive regimes, and an Islamised intelligence agency swollen with Saudi and US money, saw a chance to install a friendly neighboring Islamist regime that would afford Pakistan defense in depth. Moreover, the more far-sighted saw that training camps for Afghan or foreign mujaheddin could become dual purpose, training jihadists to fight India in Kashmir at a time when the US regarded India as a suspiciously pink shape on the Cold War map.22

The Afghan-Pakistan border became the site of a bewildering array of camps for some three million people fleeing the Soviets, whose tactics included ruining crops, sowing millions of anti-personnel mines and depopulating villages. Many Afghan boys were subtracted from the desperate environment of all refugee camps, and sent as boarders to the network of Pakistani Deobandi madrassas, where through the medium of ceaselessly chanting the Koran they were refashioned into total Islamic personalities. Many of these boys would return to Afghanistan in early adulthood, after the Russians had left, as the all-conquering Taliban. Meanwhile, foreign intelligence agencies funneled arms into mujaheddin training camps strung along the Pakistani side of the Afghan border. As agile as goats, the mujaheddin dominated the high ground, hitting and then running from the Russians, before retiring for long seasonal breaks in the fighting. Second World War-era weapons were replaced by AK-47S, heavy machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, together with fleets of trucks to convoy them forwards into Afghanistan. Many of these weapons were purchased from China, allowing the CIA to savour using Chinese Communist arms to kill Soviets. By the mid-1980s the CIA's involvement was deeper, although it baulked at anything like airlifting its own supplies lest it trigger a superpower confrontation. US spy satellites were used to track Soviet positions, which were relayed to the mujaheddin using indecipherable 'burst' communications systems. Next came powerful sniper rifles, plastic explosives and sophisticated detonators, variously intended for sabotage operations and the assassination of Soviet commanders, some of whom were killed by car bombs in Kabul. When the Soviets showed some success by deploying highly trained Speznaz commandos, inserted to ambush the mujaheddin from giant armored Hind helicopters, the CIA supplied the Afghans with Stinger shoulder-launched guided missiles, whose infra-red sensors invariably found their target. The first successful attack on such helicopters, and the bullets pumped afterwards into the bodies of their crews, was shown on video in the Oval Office. The American budget for the Afghan war climbed to US$470 million in 1986 and US$630 million in 1987, all matched too by the Saudis. The US began paying select mujaheddin commanders a decent salary, partly to offset worrying evidence of another presence, for at no point did the CIA arm or promote foreign Islamist fighters. They moved around in different orbits, with the foreign fighters drawing on different sources of funds and recruits.23

The majority of Afghan mujaheddin were suspicious of the Arab volunteers, whom they called Ikhwanis, meaning the Muslim Brothers, or Wahhabis after the puritanical Islamism that rejected more mystical Sufi traditions, saints and shrines. The reason a frontier town like Peshawar was becoming physically Arabised was because that is where the Arabs hung out while not doing any fighting. They would have done the Afghan cause more good by donating the cost of their air tickets. The first Arab presence in Afghanistan consisted of volunteers despatched on humanitarian missions by a wide array of Islamic non-governmental organisations. Since many professionals, such as doctors, were stalwarts of the Muslim Brotherhood, this was how Ayman Arabs come to wage jihad were a mixture of fantasists, who simply had themselves photographed with an AK -47 in front of menacing rocks, and the sort of men who would pitch white tents so as to attract the lethal attentions of Soviet aircraft. They actually wanted to die so as to precipitate the sounds and smells of paradise. Bin Laden himself exhibited many of the characteristics of any spoiled rich kid seeking an older mentor and a higher purpose. He found the former in Azzam, but then gradually migrated to al-Zawahiri. In addition to being personally extremely rich, bin Laden had a network of even wealthier supporters.25

Gnarled mujaheddin who met the lanky Gulf Arab (his family were originally from Aden in Yemen) thought his hands felt weak while his simpering smile reminded them of a girl's. Actually, the soft exterior, which was slowly reconfigured so that bin Laden seemed like a modest, slow-speaking sage despite his relative youth, concealed a huge ego, a ferocious temper and a cunning organizational mind. Most Arab leaders do not need to be eloquent as repression stands in for the arts of persuasion. By contrast, bin Laden was highly eloquent in his native Arabic. He opened his own training camp - the Lion's Den - at Jaji exclusively designed for Arab jihadists. This was an assertion of independence from Azzam. When the Russians attacked in April 1987, bin Laden and fifty of his supporters allegedly held off two hundred Russian troops for a week. This engagement gave birth to a legend of Arab fighting prowess that served to attract further recruits.

Bin Laden showed an adroit awareness of how to use the media. He had a fifty-minute video made of himself riding horses, firing weapons and lecturing his fighters. These have the indirectness of home videos because bin Laden never addresses the camera. He summoned trusted foreign journalists, notably Robert Fisk, to sit at the feet of this prodigal phenomenon: the millionaire Saudi who had given up the high life to share Afghan caves with scorpions. An easy familiarity enhanced the sensation of celebrity. Visitors noted his simple consumption of water, flat bread, rice and potato and tomato stew.26 If many Afghan mujaheddin found his renunciation of the good life incomprehensible - most of their own warlords lived rather well in urban villas kitted out with consumer gismos - it played well among his fellow Gulf Arabs. He did not demur when his followers took to calling him 'the sheikh', a dual title that means clan ruler and religious sage. While bin Laden had no theological expertise or spiritual authority whatsoever, any more than the doctors and engineers around him, and was physically hundreds of miles from the traditional sites of Islamic learning, gradually through his mountainside appearances he assumed all of those roles within the new disorder he was hatching even as US policymakers spoke airily in their big-talking way of the order they were about to impose as the USSR disintegrated. While they described the future architecture of the world in Foreign Affairs, National Interest and similar journals, thousands of miles away others construed the world through the life and times of the Prophet.27

As the Soviet Union under Gorbachev resolved to pullout of its disastrous eight-year campaign in Afghanistan, bin Laden and the other leading Arabs determined to keep the spirit of jihad alive through a secret organization concealed within a wider guerrilla-training programme which included huge Saudi-financed bases at places like Zhawar Khili and Tora Bora.28 They may have helped defeat a global superpower, the first major Muslim victory after decades in which Israel had defeated the Arabs and Indian Hindus the Muslim Pakistanis, but the ensuing Afghan civil war showed that they had failed to create an Islamist state in Afghanistan.

AI Qaeda probably came into existence in May 1988, but it was only in August of that year that the leading Arab Mghans discussed it. Originally the word meant 'base' as in military base, so that the US base at Bagram is 'al-Qaeda Bagram'. While the camps would train Arab fighters destined for Islamist mujaheddin factions battling to control Mghanistan after the Soviets had left an isolated client regime behind, AI Qaeda would consist of a more select cadre, of between 10 and 30 per cent of the trainees, destined for open-ended operations. That is the second meaning of AI Qaeda: as a revolutionary vanguard, similar to the Jacobins or Bolsheviks. Recruits came from a variety of social, religious and national backgrounds, which gradually dissolved into a new global jihadi-salafist identity that picked and mixed from secular geopolitics and several extreme Islamic traditions in a thoroughly eclectic postmodern fashion. One can unthread some of the ideological and religious genealogies, but this entirely conventional approach to understanding the jihadists does not really explain the state of mind any more than learned tomes of Teutonic Geistesgeschichte which chart the ground from Luther to Lanz von Liebenfels say much about Nazism.

AI Qaeda opened an office in the affluent Peshawar suburb of Hyatabad, where it processed would-be recruits from the thousands of Arabs, and others, who flooded in after the departure of the Soviets to fight fellow Muslims who were squabbling over the ruins of Afghanistan.

There were detailed application forms, terms and conditions of employment, and job specifications for senior positions within the organization. Suddenly it seemed to the jihadists as if they had got a job with any Western corporation, an impression reinforced by AI Qaeda's use of the language ·of international business as a code in the network's communications. It even has its own logo, of a white Arabian stallion. On being accepted after extensive vetting, volunteers received a salary of between US$l,OOO and US$1,500 depending on marital status, a roundtrip airfare to visit home, medical care and a month's vacation. A ruling shura or council sat atop various functional sections, which included experts in computers and publicity and the interpretation of dreams. The person chosen to head AI Qaeda's military operations had to be over thirty, with five years' battlefield experience and a degree in a relevant subject.29

Quite a lot is known now about AI Qaeda's initial membership. Many of the Arabs, and especially the Egyptians, did not have much choice other than to remain in Afghanistan or Pakistan since they were wanted men in their homeland. Ayman al-Zawahiri would not be availing himself of the free round-trip to Cairo. The psychologist and former CIA analyst Marc Sageman has studied a representative cross-section of AI Qaeda terrorists, including those who were there at its inception. The most important recruits were Egyptians such as al-Zawahiri, Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, who drowned prematurely in a Kenyan lake, and Mohammed Atef, its military supremo. Many of these men had already combined terrorism with careers as policemen or soldiers, which explains why Egyptians supplied a disproportionate number of AI Qaeda's ruling group as well as its top military commanders. Like al-Zawahiri himself, many of them had been through Egypt's prison torture system, emerging as implacable and steely. Egyptians made up over 60 per cent of AI Qaeda's ruling group, and nearly 60 per cent of them had been imprisoned for political reasons before they had volunteered for jihad in Afghanistan. They were dominant within a wider Arab representation from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the U AE and Yemen, the latter making up bin Laden's personal bodyguard. Some of these men arrived as little family bands. One Kuwaiti group is instructive, because it shows how a terrorist group relies on existing ties of kinship and friendship. The personal loyalties were semi-forged before AI Qaeda had even emerged.

Approximately half the population of Kuwait are 'bidoon', or foreign migrants servicing the oil industry. Many of these second-class citizens are Baluchis, a people straddling several states including Pakistan. Among these expatriates were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his nephew, Abdul Karim, who had been sent by Khalid Sheikh's three elder siblings to study mechanical engineering in the US, where their existing piety had been reinforced in the Muslim circles that Middle Easterners recoiled into upon experiencing the Western world. The three elder brothers went independently to Peshawar. Khalid Sheikh joined them, moving into the orbit of Azzam and bin Laden. He would become the mastermind of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. 30

Close ties were also cemented by marriage alliances within the emerging group, so that Mohammed Atef's daughter married one of bin Laden's sons, while Al Qaeda's treasurer married bin Laden's niece. That is true of other terrorist groups. Jemaah Islamiyah's Mohammed Noordin Top has two wives, both sisters of fellow jihadists. The next cluster that would become important in Al Qaeda, especially after the false dawning of the Islamic Salvation Front, consisted of Arabs from the North African Maghreb, that is Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and a separate group from South Asia, most graduates of two boarding schools run by Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia and Malaysia, with the occasional Uighur from China's westerly Xinjiang province,3l The Maghreb Arabs were the only ones to have prior records for petty criminality such as handbag snatching and credit-card fraud. Those who were not represented in Sageman's sample are no less interesting. There were virtually no Afghans, except for two friends of bin Laden's, and no representatives of the vast Muslim populations of Bangladesh, India, Turkey or Pakistan, although radicalized second- and third-generation Anglo-Pakistani jihadists would make up the deficit. Contrary to expectations, only 17 per cent of these men had received an Islamic education; the majority were products of secular schooling, with over 60 per cent having received some tertiary-level education, and many spoke several languages. Their learning was overwhelmingly in scientific and technical disciplines, such as computer science, engineering and medicine, which in other religious traditions too seem to correlate with fundamentalist religious beliefs born of a desire to extrapolate knowledge from authority. Of course, this could also simply reflect the prestige of utilitarian disciplines in developing societies, although that would not explain why so many engineers and mathematicians are Christian fundamentalists. Unlike other types of terrorist group, some 83 per cent were married men, although only a few - above all bin Laden and al-Zawahiri - insisted on imperilling their wives and children. Marriage for the rest was simply a preliminary to having a child before consigning both wife and offspring to a separate existence.

The Afghan civil war, and the heterogeneous backgrounds of the leaders, led to visceral - and often personal - splits over how AI Qaeda should be deployed. One conspicuous casualty of these was Azzam, who in addition to trying to avoid Arabs fighting Afghans had identified the Lion of the Panjshir, Ahmed Shah Massoud, a minority Tajik, as the most impressive mujaheddin commander, at a time when most Arabs were backing the Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatayar (initially supported by Pakistan). That sealed Azzam's fate, as al-Zawahiri had been spreading lies that he was a CIA agent, and Massoud had been one of the CIA's main clients. On 24 November 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed by a roadside bomb as they went to a mosque. AI-Zawahiri spoke sweetly at his funeral.

Having destroyed the Soviets, as he pretentiously viewed it, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia as the prodigal become all-conquering hero. The manner began to resemble those self-righteous superannuated rock stars with delusions of grandeur who harangue world leaders about Africa. He tried to interest the Saudi regime in his plans to destroy the Marxist government of the newly minted Republic of Yemen. Yemeni pressure resulted in the confiscation of bin Laden's passport. He warned Riyadh of the threat posed by the secular dictatorship of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, even as the latter was fabricating tensions in order to invade neighboring Kuwait. When this took place, unleashing a reign of Iraqi terror on the inoffensive little emirate, the desperate Saudis immediately availed themselves of US offers of assistance to prevent Saddam from extending his campaign towards their oilfields. Despite their bingepurchasing of Western armaments, for which the ruling clique were rewarded with bribes and kickbacks, the fact remained that the Saudi army numbered only fifty-eight thousand troops, facing a higWy mechanized foe with a standing army of one million. In order to prevent the stationing of defensive US forces in the kingdom, bin Laden offered to raise a force of 'one hundred thousand' from the Arab Afghan mujaheddin and the kingdom's own large numbers of male idle. This offer was rejected as ridiculous. Bin Laden's mood was not improved when the senior clergy issued fatwas to permit the stationing of Christian, Jewish and female US forces in remote parts of the kingdom. Disgusted by his homeland's craven dependence on infidels and females, bin Laden pulled strings to have his passport returned and flew back to Peshawar. Meanwhile, Saddam began to cloak himself not only in Arab nationalism - thereby securing the support of a PLO that was always the unlucky gambler - but in Islamic rectitude, inveighing against the corrupt rulers of Riyadh and proclaiming 'Allahu Akhbar' upon reaching the Kuwaiti shoreline., Although the multinational coalition expelled Saddam from Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm, unleashing a tempest of high-tech violence that sickened even those responsible for it, in the process Saudi Arabia forfeited its unimpeachable Islamic credentials in the eyes of parts of the Muslim world. The kingdom reaped what it had sown everywhere else, It faced unprecedented domestic discontent, both from Saudis seeking to liberalise the regime through such symbolic acts as allowing women drivers, and, by way of a backlash, from radical Islamists who thought the kingdom needed to restore Islamic fundamentals. When some of these extremists were expelled, Saudi Arabia's British ally and arms supplier inevitably provided them with a safe haven in London, where they could propagandise amusing tabloid slanders against the Saudi ruling elite entitled 'Prince of the Month'. These were people who would give an aide £1,000 to buy a drink, and then. be offended when the aide offered something so mysterious as £990 change. Even bin Laden was allowed to establish offices of a Reform and Advice Committee in the British capital. For 'Londonistan' would soon provide a home from home for more dangerous kinds of Islamist subversive, in one of the most complacent, decadent and irresponsible acts of policy and policing of any Western democracy, all undertaken under the delusion that there was an unwritten 'pact of security' in which the hosts would be safe from attack. 32

One emerging rival to a discredited Saudi Arabia was the military Islamist regime of Hassan al- Turabi in the Sudan. The Western -educated al- Turabi advocated the Islamic emancipation of women as well as reconciliation between Sunni and Shia, while waging war on the African animists and Christians of the south. His regime hosted an Arab and Islamic junket to rival the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Islamic Conference, to some extent seeking to take over the mantle of the dead Khomeini as a beacon of radical Islam. Who contacted whom remains in doubt, but in 1991 bin Laden arrived in Khartoum. He cemented his ties with al- Turabi by taking the latter's niece as his third wife. In a country ruined by war and political turbulence, bin Laden's wealth counted. He deposited US$50 million in the Al-Shamal Islamic Bank, which virtually gave him control.33 He gave the Sudanese an US$80 million loan to purchase wheat to prevent mass starvation. He helped build an airport and a road from Khartoum to Port Sudan, and invested in a variety of enterprises, including an Islamic bank, a bakery, cattle stations, stud farms, and various import and export businesses. Like many unsuccessful entrepreneurs bin Laden diversified beyond his ken, as when he began importing bicycles fr~m Azerbaijan into a country where nobody rode them. A series of farms doubled as Al Qaeda training camps, for with the aid of Sudanese passports a small multinational army of jihadi-salafists descended upon Sudan. It was one of those curious, lull-like interludes before the storm. Bin Laden spent much time horse-riding, strolling by the Nile and talking bloodstock, with Izzam al- Turabi, his host's son. Family affairs bulked large too as he had all four of his wives, and their children, with him. One wife elected to divorce him; there were concerns about a disabled child. Money flew out at such an alarming rate that bin Laden began calling for retrenchment. This led to rancid recriminations between different ethnic groups among his supporters, and the defection of a Sudanese, ultimately into the hands of the CIA, after he had embezzled a lot of money.

The Sudan period also saw some tentative terrorist operations, especially after the head of Hizbollah's security service, Imad Mugniyah, came to lecture in Khartoum, in the wake of which he set up a suicide bombing course for Al Qaeda operatives in Lebanon. He had been the prime mover behind the 1983 bombing of US and French peacekeeping troops in Beirut. The first targets were two hotels in Aden where US troops often rested en route to Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. No Americans were hurt in two bomb attacks which killed an Australian tourist and a Yemeni waiter. Ten months later bin Laden's envoys, drawn like mosquitoes to a swamp, watched as khat -crazed Somalia militiamen downed two US helicopters and barbarously killed their crews and US commandos in the middle of Mogadishu. Bin Laden would subsequently claim that it had been Al Qaeda men who shot the Black Hawks down, although in reality his men had run away. Still, behind the retrospective boasting, an idea took shape. His Egyptian mentor was not idle either.

Al-Zawahiri had taken the remnants of aI-Jihad to Khartoum because he needed bin Laden's money to pay his men after a month-long fundraising trip to California had yielded a paltry US$2,000. Although he was effectively on bin Laden's payroll thereafter, al-Zawahiri ran his own operations in his native Egypt. In August 1993 a suicide bomber on a motorbike tried to kill the Egyptian interior minister. Three months later al-Zawahiri tried to murder the prime minister, Atef Sidqi, with a car bomb designed to coincide with the trials of a large number of jihadists. The bomb killed a young girl instead, leading to cries of 'Terrorism is the enemy of God' at he!. well-attended funeral. AI-Zawahiri would persist in these attacks until they led to AI Qaeda being expelled from Sudan. The next level of violence followed a series of events that remobilized the ummah in ways not seen since the response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the wake of this, AI Qaeda would emerge as the brightest star in a vaster nebula of violence.

For much of the 1980S the struggle of the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviets eclipsed the Palestinian cause as an emotional rallying point for many Muslims. Afghanistan was where the Gulf money flowed, partly because events in the Middle East failed to conform to the simple binary enmities that all myths require. Some neighboring Arab states like Egypt and Jordan made their cold peace with the Israelis, and the PLO entered into a protracted US-driven process while continuing to practice terrorism. This climate changed with the two Palestinian Intifadas. Together with wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, these provided endless scenes of Muslim victimhood, and sacred causes which legitimized jihadist violence.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has never been the sole conflict in the Middle East, but the formula 'Jews = News' might lead one to imagine that. The world's Muslims see things this way; judging by the indifference of Western Christians to the predicament of their Maronite co-religionists in the Lebanon, a sense of oecumene is much weaker among Christians despite efforts by the Barnabas Trust to raise awareness. A brief recapitulation of Palestinian history is needed to situate the two Intifadas. The PLO had dissipated its energies in the civil wars of the Lebanon, resulting in the ejection of its fighters from Beirut in August 1982 and a Syrian-backed mutiny within the PLO against Arafat. In December 1983, the Saudis brokered a deal with Syria, which  was about to crush Arafat's northern redoubt in Tripoli, permitting him and his men to withdraw by sea to Tunis. One minor victory, in the midst of this final debacle, lay in the 4,500 Palestinian prisoners the Israelis exchanged for six of their own captives as the IDF pulled out of Lebanon. These would play a crucial role in events that put the plight of the Palestinians back in the world's spotlight.

There was always, strain between the PLO's foreign-based representatives, with their nice apartments, suits and ties, and their hotel suites in Europe, and the Palestinians in the occupied territories. To them the PLO counselled 'fortitude' or 'steadfastness' while Arafat vainly attempted to defend Fatah's military presence in the Lebanon, whence liberation would come from outside. Arafat may have enjoyed immense personal prestige among the Palestinians as the father of their nation, but his madcap diplomatic gambits had become near irrelevant to the grim experiences of young Palestinians in the occupied territories.34

The Gaza Strip is twenty-eight miles long and between three and eight miles wide, and in the 1980s was home to 650,000 Palestinians, including those crammed densely and insalubriously into refugee camps, a burden resented by the indigenous Arab population. There are also powerful clans, which operate somewhere between extended families and Mafia gangs, with memberships of up to five thousand. When it suits them, they adopt titles like Army of Islam to disguise the crime of kidnapping for ransoms. Half the population were under fifteen, the result of an exceptionally high birth rate, Unemployed young men hung around, angry and bored, in the burning summer heat, a problem afflicting the Arab world from the Gulf to the Algerian Maghreb, which teems with superfluous young men, a problem common to many post-industrial Western societies. A skeletal Israeli Civil Administration controlled the Strip with a rigorous inefficiency against which there was little legal redress. The Strip was riddled with undercover officers of the domestic security agency Shin Beth, on the lookout for pliant informers. Although standards of education were good, thanks to external aid, job opportunities were few, with the lucky hundred thousand or so performing manual labor for neighboring Israelis. Demeaning treatment by Arab or Israeli contractors, squeezing muscles as if they were assessing a mule, was followed by degrading treatment at the exit checkpoints, where bored guards sometimes gave meaning to their dull day by messing Arabs around with that irritating air of nonchalant gun-toting punctiliousness. Every hour in a queue was an hour's lost pay and less for a family to eat. Passive anti-Arab racism was as consequential as the active variety which exists in Israel. The majority of Israelis averted their eyes from the occupied territories and the festering hatreds they were engendering. Their government regarded disturbances as episodic and containable, the handiwork of malign extraneous influences.

The first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, originated in a sequence of bizarrely random even.ts that crowned months of tension. In May 1987 six members of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad broke out of Gaza Central prison, where they had been confined for such acts as killing Israeli taxi drivers. Sunni admirers of the ayatollah Khomeini, Islamic Jihad's three hundred militants were armed and directed by Islamist elements in Fatah's Western Sector command. Although the fugitives were mostly run to ground, while on the loose they continued their terrorist attacks, thereby acquiring folkloric kudos among young people receptive to their calls for the liberation of Palestine as the prelude to a wider Islamic revival. Even when Shin Beth agents ambushed and killed three of the Islamic Jihad fugitives in October, they lived on in handbills as 'ghosts who will pursue the Jews everywhere and for all time'. (See also: Intifada and the new Arab Media)

The autumn months of 1987 saw a spate of stabbings of lone Israelis, culminating on 6 December when an Israeli was knifed to death in Gaza's main market. Two days later, the driver of an Israeli truck lost control and hit a car, killing four Palestinian day laborers. A flyer connected the two events as an act of revenge by the Israelis for the earlier stabbing, although the two episodes were wholly unconnected. Thousands of mourners attended the funerals of the four men, shouting 'Jihad! Jihad!' at the fifty-five Israeli reservists holed up in their post in Jebalya, with its sixty thousand inhabitants, the largest of the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. When patrols sallied forth they came under hails of stones from demonstrators who would not disperse. Further patrols the following day got into difficulties when one unit stopped to pursue a rock-throwing teenager into a house, a move that resulted in their being surrounded by an angry mob. The reservists had no equipment or training to deal with a civilian riot. Warning shots in the air, which had become so frequent during riots that they were ignored, were followed by shots at the demonstrators' legs, and the death of a seventeen-year-old boy. Rioting spread to other sites within the Gaza Strip, each flashpoint marked by acrid smoke from piles of burning rubber tires. The uprising quickly spread to the West Bank, where similarly only one in eight Palestinian graduates of the seven universities luxury hotels, seemed symbolic of a wider, abrasive stance, whether from American or Russian settlers seeking to establish facts on the ground, or a Likud party whose rhetoric tilted rightwards to dark talk, on the part of Israeli right-wing blow-hards, of transferring the Palestinians to Jordan.

The storm-like force of this 'rock revolution' caught both the Israelis and the PLO napping, although the latter's functionaries hastened to take charge. The leadership of the Intifada was elusively mysterious, while its foot soldiers quickly encompassed laborers and devout shopkeepers. As they picked up the first hundred or so putative ringleaders, Israeli interrogators were baffled to discover how apolitical the demonstrators appeared to be. Most were ignorant of even the most elementary PLO platforms. They were young male laborers, rather than students, who had had enough of high-handed treatment by the Israelis. Their tactics mutated too, from a straightforward riot to more sophisticated passive resistance, involving a wholesale disengagement from the Israeli economy. Bits of ground were used to grow vegetables, while chicken coops and rabbit hutches proliferated on roofs.

N or did the Israelis have a coherent strategy for dealing with riots that involved women and children as well as young men. If it had once sufficed for an Israeli soldier to expose himself to send prudish Palestinian women fleeing, now women appeared to be egging on the demonstrating males. A fifth of the casualties of the first three months' riots were among women, a further outrage to Muslim sensibilities. Soon even grannies were involved, although as they were the bearers of the inter-generational national flame this is perhaps unsurprising.

Historically, revolutions often develop when a regime has many soldiers but few police; the opposite was true of nineteenth-century London, which had plenty of police and no 1848 revolution. The Intifada exposed a fatal blind-spot in Israel's security capability. Soldiers were useless against women and children hurling rocks or firing catapults from within large crowds. Under the massing lenses of the world's photographers and TV, the Israelis blundered into a propaganda disaster, which not only diminished international sympathy, but in its simple-minded misrepresentation of events outraged the wider Muslim world. Although Muslims did not stop to ponder this, Israel is a democracy which allows open access to the media, in marked contrast to conditions prevailing in the entire Arab world. Domestic opponents of the Israeli government gave interviews to the world's press, avenues which do not exist for critics of the governments of, for example, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco or Saudi Arabia, unless they are among well-populated exiled diasporas. Inevitably coverage concentrated on instances of Israeli brutality, without inquiring about the ways in which prolonged exposure of conscripts and reservists to mob violence was responsible for this. Arguably, Israel has never recovered from this public relations disaster, acquiring the reputation of a thuggish bully among mainly left-liberal and Christian circles, already fed up with Jewish moralizing about the European Holocaust. Their ranks included an increasing number of liberal Jews in the US too, although for them the Holocaust was alternatively a surrogate religion.35

As the Intifada spread to shopkeepers, the Israelis first forced them to keep their shops open, and then welded up their shutters if they refused. This was a small price to pay compared to what the rioters would have done to them. Many of these shopkeepers were devout middleclass Muslims, a matter of import to how the social composition of the uprising mutated from rock-throwing teenagers to more respectable people. A few communities were subjected to collective punishments, involving cutting power supplies and restricting the inflow of food. Although it was infinitely preferable to shooting rioters, the decision to arm soldiers with batons (manufactured by other Palestinians in Gaza) was a public relations disaster, for the world's media focused on outrageous scenes of Israeli troops kicking and bludgeoning Palestinians beyond anything resembling proportionate force, as several cases of people with broken ribs, collarbones or arms that came before Israeli courts confirmed. In the most disgraceful incidents, Israeli high-school students on outings, or drivers ferrying officers about, had been invited to beat up detainees inside army camps. The deployment of rubber rounds was also a mixed blessing as these can be fatal when fired into someone's face. Adverse press coverage, from Israeli and international media, led frustrated ID F soldiers to take out their resentments on journalists and photographers, who met nothing but willingness from the other side, an arrangement that in turn impacted on how the Intifada was reported. The uprising began to leach towards the hitherto quiescent eight hundred thousand Israeli Arabs, who donated blood, medicines and money to the mounting casualties of the uprising.

The PLO leadership succeeded in re-establishing a vestige of remote control over the local Unified National Command which steered the Intifada. This used secretly produced flyers to co-ordinate the myriad grassroots committees that controlled each local epicenter of riot. Local mainstays of both levels of command were students and academics, especially from Bir Zeit university, and the thousands of security prisoners Israel had released in exchange for six soldiers taken hostage, men who had coolly taken the measure of their enemy while in jail 36 Many of these former detainees joined the strong-arm security squads that proliferated to enforce the Intifada among the Palestinians. Inevitably, the international media did not descend in the same strength on victims of Palestinian violence, notably the Arab 'collaborators', seventy of whom the Intifada's ad-hoc security units killed, or the countless Arabs for whom there was no court to redress the beatings and intimidation they received from Fatah and the Intifada's grassroots supporters, and increasingly from a new actor amid the Days of Rage.

There was a further Israeli own-goal, the result of an idea that both CIA and State Department officials thought 'tried to be too sexy'. As the PLO's bureaucrats and intellectuals clambered aboard the Intifada's bandwagon, a very different type of organization bid for control The Civil Administration in the Gaza Strip had encouraged Islamic fundamentalist groups as a way of confounding the left-leaning PLO, especially if they eschewed the terrorism of Islamic Jihad. Defence minister Moshe Arens recalled viewing the rise of radical Islamism 'as a healthy phenomenon'. Right-wingers, by contrast, may have been hoping that the rise of Islamism among the Palestinians would permanently scupper the lengthy talks known as the Oslo peace-process by dividing the enemy.37

Funded by the Jordanians, Israelis and Saudis, the number of mosques in Gaza rose from 77 to 160 within two decades, with forty new mosques constructed in the West Bank each year. Despite warnings from moderate Gazan Muslims, the Israelis elected to ignore the rampant anti-Semitism of the Islamic Congress, the local guise of the Muslim Brotherhood. They regarded its charitable and educational surface activities as preferable, in their steady incremental way, to the bomb and gun attacks of Fatah terrorists. Even better, the Congress's supreme leader, the quadriplegic sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin, regularly denounced Arafat and the PLO leadership as 'pork eaters and wine drinkers' who even allowed women into their senior councils. Born in 1938 into a middle-class farming family, Yassin grew up in the al-Shati refugee camp. At twelve he was injured in a wrestling bout; as his condition deteriorated he went from crutches to a wheelchair. After studying at Cairo's Ain Shams university, he returned to Gaza to work as a teacher, and religio-political agitator, until his disabilities forced him to retire in 1984, by which time he had had eleven children. That year the Israelis discovered an arms cache in the mosque Yassin preached in, which flatly contradicted the strategy of encouraging a pacific Islamist rival to Fatah terrorism. Although Yassin received a fifteen-year jail sentence, he was one of those released in exchange for Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon.38

Yassin led a formidable Islamist network, which included al-Azhar university in Gaza, from which Communist and Fatah rivals were expelled by stabbings and acid attacks in an entirely symptomatic striving for totalitarian control. Everywhere the network physically manifested itself: places selling alcohol, displaying female models or playing pop music were smashed up, as was anyone presuming to eat with his or her left hand. The intention was to extrude anything that smacked of a Western hedonism and materialism which, the Islamists thought, was destroying Palestinian resistance by corrupting its austere spirit. Unlike the PLO, the Islamic Congress offered personal redemption as well as national salvation; unlike the PLO it abandoned any attempts to camouflage hatred of Jews. This was a starkly compelling platform for younger people rebelling against both the social hierarchy and the politics of their parents' generation, who could relate to the old sheikh in ways they could not with PLO bosses as they sped from diplomatic junket to junket, or from sell-out to sell-out, in their fleets of Mercedes, in between tripping the light fantastic in villas and luxury hotels. Islamism licensed defiance of the older generation, breaking the narrow bonds of clan or custom in favor of vaster loyalties that at the same time were warmly personal through God.

Yassin was one of the founders in February 1988 of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, whose Arabic acronym was altered from HMS to Hamas, the word for zeal. The others were sheikh Salah Shehada, from the Islamic university in Gaza, an engineer called Issa al-Nasshaar, a doctor, Ibrahim al-Yazuri, Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, another doctor from Khan Younis, a headmaster and a schoolteacher, all aged between forty and fifty years 0ld.39 These people did not use the same diplomatic niceties as the PLO. Arriving in Kuwait after being expelled from Gaza, one of its leaders, Halil Koka, baldly announced: 'Alhih brought the Jews together in Palestine not to benefit from a homeland but to dig their grave there and save the world from their pollution. Just as the Muslim pilgrim redeems his soul in Mecca by offering up a sacrifice, so the Jews will be slaughtered on the rocks of al-Aqsa.'

In its rivalry with the PLO, Hamas began to dictate the pace of events in the Intifada, by deliberately establishing its own cycle of demonstrations, shop closures and strikes like an alternative calendar to that of the secular nationalists. It issued a charter, which called the destruction of Israel a religious duty. The charter was an odd document, managing as it did to call the Jews Nazis while citing the forged 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' as proof of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination from the French Revolution onwards. Even the Rotary Club gets a discredit. To call the charter ahistorical would be to understate the ways in which it collapsed time into an eternal struggle between Muslims, Jews and 'Crusaders' from the West.40 Hamas's public attitude towards terrorism was also changing, although its armed wing, and secret department for killing Arab collaborators, actually predated the founding of the political movement. In July 1988 it lauded a young Gazan who knifed two prison guards while visiting a jailed relative. The organization had for several years had a small military wing of 'holy fighters of Palestine' who, it now transpired, were planning terrorist attacks on Israel.

That summer, the Israelis struck first at Islamic Jihad by getting the US to force king Hussein to eject the three Fatah chieftains who planned Islamic Jihad's operations. All three were killed by a mystery Mossad car bomb shortly after reaching their sanctuary in Cyprus. Next, Israel detained hundreds of Hamas activists, confining them in Khediot detention camp, where they continued to direct operations by passing and receiving messages through kisses from their families. After initially sparing sheikh Yassin, the Israelis finally detained him too. Despite his disabilities, he and one of his younger sons seem to have been treated in a brutal manner unworthy of a quadriplegic, including being slapped in the face and bashed on the head with a metal tray. Repression only increased the domestic and international appeal of Hamas.

Its candidates began to win elections on Palestinian professional bodies, while in 1990 Kuwait alone donated US$60 million to Hamas as opposed to US$27 million to the PLO. The PLO's attempts to neutralize Hamas by co-opting it on to the umbrella Palestinian National Council, as it had done with the PFLP acnd the Communists, failed when Hamas demanded half the Council seats. The PLO's acceptance of Israel and public renunciation of terrorism through the Oslo Accords deepened the rift between implacable Islamists and Arafat's more diplomatically focused Fatah, however fake Arafat's subscription to non-violence proved.

The human cost of the first Intifada was considerable. By the summer of 1990, over six hundred Palestinians had been killed by the IDF, including seventy-six children under fourteen, with a further twelve thousand people injured. Ten thousand Palestinians were held in detention camps and prisons, a shared experience that served to radicalize even further those affected. On the Israeli side, eighteen people had been killed, including ten civilians, with 3,391 injured, the majority of them soldiers.

During the 1990s Hamas increasingly made the running in terms of devastating terrorist attacks within Israel. In addition to money coming from both Saudi Arabia and Iran, Hamas built a vast charitable money laundering operation that had important nodal points in the USA, where the Irish republican NORAID was said to have shown how easy it was to raise dollars for foreign terrorism (though NORAID has always denied the allegation that it funded the IRA). Unlike Fatah, or the smaller Marxist Palestinian terrorist groups, Hamas used tight five-man cells to insulate itself against traitors and people who caved in under Shin Beth's notorious interrogation methods. It hit Israel at a very delicate spot when it used killers disguised as Orthodox Jews and cars with yellow Israeli license plates to abduct and kill IDF soldiers hitchhiking home. Hamas members also ran over and abducted an Israeli border police sergeant, whose body - bearing signs of strangulation and stabbing turned up in a desert gulley. In response to this, Israel dumped 415 Hamas organizers in the hilly no-man's land on the border with Lebanon. Predictably, the world's left-liberal media descended in sympathy upon these middle-aged accountants, clerics, dentists, doctors and lawyers, shivering in their coats and long-johns around dismal potages of stewed lentils. They did not note that they were fed at night by Hizbollah and Iranian Pasadren agents, who offered money and advanced terrorist training at state facilities in Iran. The men on the hillsides included Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, Hamas's second in command until Yassin and he were assassinated, and Ismail Haniyah, its bear-like current leader.

A by-product of this expulsion was Hamas's Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade, one of whose first acts was to kill a young Shin Beth agent in a Jerusalem safe house, ing axes, knives and hammers to do the job. The flat looked like an abattoir afterwards. They also machine-gunned two traffic policemen dozing in their idling patrol car. The decision to deny Ayyash his chance to study in Jordan to support his wife and son became fateful, as he quickly rose within Hamas as its stellar 'Engineer'. A first attempt to bring the mores of Lebanon to Israel came in April 1993 when a suicide bomber drove a huge bomb hidden in a VW transporter between two buses parked at a crowded service station. Miraculously the blast mainly went upwards, killing a Palestinian who worked in the centre, and the bomber himself.

The murder by Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born Jewish fanatic, of fifty-five Palestinian worshippers in February 1994 led to the mobilization of Ayyash's talents in the service of revenge. His chosen instrument was a nineteen-year-old Palestinian, three of whose family had been killed by the Israelis. This youth drove an Opel Ascona in front of a school bus in the town of Afula, detonating five fragmentation grenades nestling within seven propane-gas cylinders, in turn wrapped with thirteen hundred carpenters' nails. Nine young people died and fifty-five were injured. On 13 April a twenty-one-year-old Arab detonated a duffel bag on a bus in Hadera, killing six and injuring thirty. A pipe bomb exploded as the rescuers arrived, in a double tap which indicated some tactical sophistication. As Ayyash moved at each onset of dusk from safe house to safe house, this otherwise modest man assumed the celebrity of a pop star among young Palestinians. His deeds were celebrated by songs recorded on cheap cassettes. Admirers sent wigs and women's clothing to help him with his multiple disguises. In October, Ayyash dispatched a suicide bomber on a number 5 bus as it sped through the morning bustle of Tel Aviv's Dizengoff district. The bomber detonated an Egyptian land mine which had been filled with twenty kilograms of TNT. The bomb killed twenty-one Israelis, and the nails and screws it spewed out also seriously wounded fifty people.41 Ayyash's relentless campaign of suicide bombing began to impact on domestic Israeli politics in that successive prime ministers engaged in peace talks with the Palestinians had to visit the scenes of Ayyash's depredations, increasingly under the gaze of hostile Jewish crowds. Ayyash was also training members ofIslamic Jihad in bomb making, including Hani Abed, Islamic Jihad's star terrorist. Abed's sudden death in November 2004 after his Peugeot was destroyed by a booby-trap bomb led to combined operations by Hamas and Islamic Jihad with Ayyash as the mastermind. In January 2005 two men dressed in ID.fyniforms blew themselves up sequentially amid soldiers returning from weekend leave. Twenty-one men died and sixty were critically injured in this bombing which occurred at a junction near Ashmoret maximum-security prison - home to sheikh Yassin. As a grim prime minister Rabin surveyed the site of this atrocity, he was lucky that a third bomber had been delayed, making it impossible for him to trigger a bomb hidden in a kitbag by the second suicide bomber. This treble tap might have killed Rabin.

Massive Israeli resources were put into killing Ayyash, who continued with a campaign of suicide bombings that reduced going out to a form of Russian roulette for many urban Israelis. Two senior Izzedine al-Qassam leaders were killed when an apartment blew up in Gaza, and another senior figure was snatched off a Nablus street after he failed to notice two sweaty Sudanese day labourers loitering outside a mosque who were Ethiopian Falasha Shin Beth agents. Islamic Jihad's leader, Fathi Shiqaqi, was assassinated by a Mossad team on Malta. So self-confident was Mossad that, as the killer sped off on a motorbike and caught a boat to Sicily, his colleagues hung around disguised as bystanders to give Maltese police hopelessly inaccurate descriptions. Ayyash's weakness was his family - his wife and son in Gaza, whom he regularly visited, while keeping in touch with his mother and father by mobile phone. Shin Beth stepped up pressure on his mother, with raids on the family home, and prolonged ten-hour bouts of interrogation, designed to infuriate her son. Ayyash was also too comfortable in his routines and grew sloppy.

He accepted the offer of a safe house from a Hamas member in Gaza, unaware that the man's businessman uncle, who owned the building, was on Shin Beth's payroll. Ayyash enjoyed the joke that his apartment was a thousand yards from a major Israeli police checkpoint. Unknown to him this was where his destiny was being settled. He had also discovered mobile phones as an alternative to erratic and easily monitored landlines. He changed them every few weeks, but not before having long calls with his mother and father. On 25 December 1995 Ayyash proudly announced that his wife had borne a second son, rashly telling his father they would speak again on 5 January. In the interim, Shin Beth technicians adapted a mobile phone, inserting fifty grams of RDX high explosive beneath the battery, and a minute detonator that could be remotely triggered. The phone still weighed the same and functioned normally. The phone was passed to his landlord's nephew who said Ayyash could use it any time he liked. The landline in his apartment began to play up. Ayyash told his father that this mobile number, 050-507-497, was his 'preferred number. Freshly returned home at 4.30 a.m. after a night's mystery activities, Ayyash removed his female clothes and settled down for a few hours' sleep in his purple boxer shorts. The mobile rang at 8-40 a.m.; it was his father. After exchanging a few words, the father found the line disconnected. High in the sky above Gaza, an Israeli agent in a spotter plane had detonated the shaped charge in the phone that took half of Ayyash's head off. A hundred thousand gun-toting Palestinians attended his funeral, straining for a last touch of his coffin. His landlord's uncle was slipped away by Mossad to a new life in the US. An Israeli demolition team erased Ayyash's family home in Riffat. Within four days of Ayyash's death, Hamas suicide bombers killed fifty-seven people in an orgy of attacks that by May 1996 felled the government of Shimon Peres. His tough Likudnik successor, Netanyahu, decided to strike at Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas in otherwise friendly Jordan. In October 1997 two Mossad agents posing as Canadians waylaid Mashaal in his Amman offices, spraying a lethal synthetic opiate into his ear. This was designed to kill him, painfully, forty-eight hours later. Both agents were caught by the Jordanians, who were outraged by this botched violation of their sovereignty. Since king Hussein threatened to hang their agents, the Israelis were forced to hand over an antidote to the poison, and to release fifty Hamas prisoners including sheikh Yassin. When Israeli voters went to the polls they dismissed Netanyahu in favour of Ehud Barak, a war hero we have already encountered in his dealings with Black September in Beirut.
 

1 Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God. The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park, Pennsylvania 1994) is an excellent comparative study of the resurgence of the three Abrahamic faiths from the mid-1970S

2 Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin, Eternal Iran. Continuity and Chaos (London 2005) pp. 87-93

3 Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon. A Brief History of the Car Bomb (London 2007) pp. 78-86 and Robert Baer, See No Evil (London 2002) pp. 97ff.

4 See especially Charles Allen, God's Terrorists. The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (London 2006) pp. 42ff.
Gilles Kepel, Jihad. The Trail of Political Islam (London 2002) pp. 69-75

6 Jarret Brachman (ed.), Militant Ideology Atlas (West Point 2006) Appendix 1 p.12

7 Steve Coil, Ghost Wars. The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10,2001 (London 2005)
pp. 24-37; Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca (London 2007)

8 Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement (Reading 1998)

9 As discussed by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism. A Short History of Anti- Western ism (London 2004)

10 For a good explication of his views see Mary Habeck, Knowing the Enemy. Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven 2006) pp. 35-7

11 For an informed discussion see Gilles Kepel, The Roots of Radical Islam (London 2005) pp. 36ff.

12 As starkly depicted in Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building (London 2007)

13 Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Mobilizing Islam. Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt (New York 2002) PP.36ff.

14 Ibid., pp. 145-55

15 For a brilliant memoir of contemporary Egypt see Mary Anne Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt. A Journey through the World of Militant Islam (New York 1999) which is especially good on the Sadat years

16 See YoussefH. Aboul-Enein, 'Islamic Militant Cells and Sadat's Assassination' Military Review (2004) pp. 1-8; and Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York 2002) pp. 81-5

17 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower. AI-Qaeda's Road to 9/11 (London 2006) pp.49-59

18 Martin Stone, The Agony of Algeria (London 1997) p. 97

19 Benjamin Stora, Algeria 18]0-2000. A Short History (Ithaca 2001) pp. 171ff.

20 See  Martin van Bruinessen, 'Genealogies of Islamic Radicalism in Post-Suharto Indonesia' at http://www.let.uu.nl/-Martin.van. Bruinessen! personal! publications! genealogies_islamic - r

21 Wright, Looming Tower p. 99

22 Coll, Ghost Wars pp. 81-2

23 Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia 2004) p. 57

24 Sean 0' eill and Daniel McGrory, The Suicide Factory. Abu Hamza and the Finsbury Park Mosque (London 2006) pp. 23-9 for the two versions of this story. In the other, the engineer Hamza was tracing the outlines of structures on the ground with a stick and triggered a land mine

25 J. Millard Burr and Robert o. Collins, Alms for Jihad. Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World (Cambridge 2006) pp. 51-2. Alms for Jihad has been me subject of legal action in London. Citing it does not imply that I endorse all its assertions

26 See interview in Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of AI-Qaeda (London 2006) pp. 19-30

27 See Faisal Devji, Landscapes of Jihad. Militancy, Morality, Modernity (London 2005)

28 Jason Burke, AI-Qaeda. The True Story of the Radical Islam (London 2003) pp.77-8

29 For extensive documentation on Al Qaeda see West Point Counter­Terrorism Center's Harmony Project. Employment Contract AFGP­2002-600045 and Organisational arrangements AFGP-2002-00078 and AFG P -2002-000080

30 Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers. The 9/11 Hijackers (New York 2005) pp.107-19

31 Peter Brookes, A Devil's Triangle. Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Rogue States (Lanham, Maryland 2005) p. 102

32 Melanie Phillips, Londonistan. How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (London 2006)

33 Burr and Collins, Alms for Jihad p. 94 34 For the above see mainly Tony Walker and Andrew Gowers, Arafat. The Biography (London 2003) pp. 208ff.

35 Bernard Lewis, 'The Other Middle East Problems' in his collection From Babel to Dragomans. Interpreting the Middle East (London 2004) pp. 332-42

36 Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'Ari, Intifada. The Palestinian Uprising and Israel's Third Front (New Yark 1989) p. 154

37 David Pratt, Intifada. The Long Day of Rage (Glasgow 2006) p. 51

38 As well as numerous obituaries of the sheikh, see Matthew Levitt, Hamas. Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service ofJihad (New Haven 2006) pp.34-7

39 Zaki Chehab, Inside Hamas. The Untold Story of Militants, Martyrs and Spies (London 2007) p. 23 and Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas. Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York 2006)

40 'Hamas Covenant 1988' in the Avalon Project edition available at www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/ hamas.htm pp. 1-25 and as an appendix: in Mishal and Sela, The Palestinian Hamas pp. 175-99

41 Samuel M. Katz, The Hunt for the Engineer. How Israeli Agents Tracked the Master Bomber (Guilford, Connecticut 2002) is a brilliant account of Ayyash's career

42 Pratt, Intifada pp. 108ff

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