Messages to the world: the statements of Osama Bin Laden

305 Pages·2011·2.59 MB·English

by  Bruce B. Lawrence

First published by Verso 2005
Introduction © Bruce Lawrence 2005
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the editor and translator have been asserted
13579 10 8642
Verso
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CONTENTS
Editor's acknowledgments
Translator's note
Introduction by Bruce Lawrence
I FROM SUDAN 1994-1995
1 THE BETRAYAL OF PALESTINE 3
2 THE INVASION OF ARABIA 15
II IN KHURASAN 1996-1998
3 DECLARATION OF JIHAD 23
4 THE SAUDI REGIME 31
5 FROM SOMALIA TO AFGHANISTAN 44
6 THE WORLD ISLAMIC FRONT 58
III TOWARDS 9/11 1998-2001
7 A MUSLIM BOMB 65
8 UNDER MULLAH OMAR 95
9 TO OUR BROTHERS IN PAKISTAN 100
10 THE WINDS OF FAITH 103
11 TERROR FOR TERROR 106
CONTENTS
IV WAR IN AFGHANISTAN 2001-2002
12 CRUSADER WARS 133
13 THE EXAMPLE OF VIETNAM 139
14 NINETEEN STUDENTS 145
15 TO THE PEOPLE OF AFGHANISTAN 158
16 TO THE AMERICANS 160
17 TO THE ALLIES OF AMERICA 173
V WAR IN IRAQ 2003-2004
18 TO THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ 179
19 AMONG A BAND OF KNIGHTS 186
20 QUAGMIRES OF THE TIGRIS AND EUPHRATES 207
21 RESIST THE NEW ROME 212
22 TO THE PEOPLES OF EUROPE 233
23 THE TOWERS OF LEBANON 237
24 DEPOSE THE TYRANTS 245
Further reading 277
Index 279
vi
EDITOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The labor of many went into the making of this volume. Dr Miriam Cooke
read through most of the longer statements with me and offered invaluable
insight into the rhetorical nuances of Osama bin Laden's often archaic Arabic.
Also providing help tracking down the cascade of Qur'anic and hadith references
in the messages was Kevin Fogg, a recent graduate of Duke University. Another
Duke resource was Dr Ebrahim Moosa. A trained religious scholar and an
authority on Islamic law, he commented on juridical aspects of bin Laden's
persona, and also read drafts of the Introduction. Finally, Dr Flagg Miller, a
linguistic anthropologist, gave permission to cite his unpublished talk on Osama
bin Laden's use of Arabic speech forms in audiocassettes.
Dr Khaled Hamid and Tammy Elmansoury provided invaluable help in
tracking down Arabic transcripts of bin Laden's speeches, as did the staff at the
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. Statement 5 is
reproduced by kind permission of CNN.
To all of these individuals I am grateful, though none of them bears responsi-
bility for the final form of these statements, the headnotes introducing them, or
the Introduction to the book as a whole. I remain the person of record in the
challenging but critical endeavor to bring Osama bin Laden's actual statements
into the conversations and considerations of a wider English-speaking public.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
The publication of these translations—rendered directly from the Arabic—
requires some brief contextualization. Although Osama bin Laden enjoys
global notoriety (and a considerable virtual presence), the primary material has
often been surprisingly difficult to track down, and has been obtained from
numerous different sources: transcripts of video and audio tapes, newspapers
and the internet; the latter complicated by the fact that many of the websites
on which the statements were first posted have subsequently been shut down.
In certain cases, various different versions of an "original" text appear to be in
circulation. Nevertheless, although the question of authenticity inevitably
arises when ever a message is released in bin Laden's name, the 24 statements
in this collection, issued over a ten-year period, have all been accepted as
genuine by a majority of the experts and officials who have examined them.
In the case of four statements (Messages 4, 5, 16, and 21), Arabic texts could
not be sourced, and existing English translations have therefore been used;
where appropriate, the syntax has been altered for consistency and clarity of
meaning.
All due effort has been made to overcome the syntactical and stylistic diffi-
culties of rendering bin Laden's distinctive style into English. For clarity and
flow of language, religious formulae that normally follow the invocation of
God or the Prophet Muhammad (in particular the customary "Peace be Upon
Him") have been omitted. For the most part, key Arabic terms have been
translated into English; those of particular significance are glossed in the foot-
notes on first usage. A handful of terms, including umma and jihad, have been
retained in the original Arabic throughout the text, due to their intrinsically
untranslatable nature.
MESSAGES TO THE WORLD
Bin Laden's citations from the Qur'anic and the hadith have been referenced
in the footnotes wherever possible. Hadith, the "traditions" conveying the
words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad that were accumulated by
scholars after his death, are seen as critically important within Islamic jurispru-
dence. For Sunni Muslims, there are six canonical collections of hadith, of
which two in particular (those by al-Bukhari and Muslim) are seen as the most
authoritative. While every attempt has been made to identify all those cited by
bin Laden, given that hundreds of thousands of hadith exist some have
inevitably proved impossible to track down; it is to be hoped that future schol-
arship will identify them. All dates are given in the Western calendar (AD),
unless where indicated by AD (anno hegirae, the year of the Prophet Muhammad's
hijra, or migration, from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, which denotes the first
year of the Islamic calendar).
It hardly needs to be emphasized that the opinions conveyed in these state-
ments in no way reflect the personal views of the translator, nor of any of those
who assisted. This book is intended to provide a better understanding of the
dynamics of political Islam, not an endorsement of bin Laden's ideas.
Besides the editors, whose valuable comments and suggestions helped to
ensure the rapid completion of the project, the following people are also owed
thanks: Muhammad and Harfiyah Abdel Haleem, Esma al-Samarai, Kevin
Fogg, Geert Ruardij, Dominique Zarbhanelian, Koen Strous, Massimo Fusato,
Amani al-Souqi, and Sama al-Souqi.
James Howarth
Amman, August 2005
INTRODUCTION
Bruce Lawrence
Although Osama bin Laden has become a legendary figure in the West, not to
speak of the Arab world, the body of his statements has till now never been
available to the public. Occasional fragments are cited, and—much more rarely
—a few speeches have been reproduced here and there in the press. Yet official
pressures have ensured that, for the most part, his voice has been tacitly
censored, as if to hear it clearly and without cuts or interruption would be too
dangerous. This does not mean that bin Laden's messages have reached no
audience. But they have done so by flying below the radar screen of official—
government and media—discourse about the war on terror, and entering an
alternative sphere, till now largely confined to Arabic-speakers. Although his
addresses are typically scriptural in mode, his rise to prominence mirrors the
latest phase in the Information Age, the techniques of which he has in his own
way proved a master. In a period of ten years that coincide with the emergence
of a virtual universe, moving from print to internet, from wired to wireless
communication around the globe, bin Laden and his associates have crafted a
series of carefully staged statements designed for the new media. These include
interviews with Western and Arab journalists, handwritten letters scanned
onto discs, faxes, and audiotapes, and above all video recordings distributed via
the first independent Arabic-language news outlet, the Qatari satellite televi-
sion network al-Jazeera. These are the texts that make up this volume. For
the first time they make possible informed critical discussion of bin Laden's
outlook; they are no longer limited to the scrutiny of secretive government
agencies and counter-terrorism experts.
To understand them, it is necessary to know something of the biography of
their author. Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden was born in 1957 in Saudi
MESSAGES TO THE WORLD
Arabia. His father was an illiterate Yemeni laborer from the Hadhramaut
whose business acumen enabled him to secure building contracts for the Holy
Sanctuaries, and to become a trusted confidant of the al-Saud family. When
he died suddenly in 1968, Muhammad bin Laden left a fortune of $11 billion
to his 54 children, by twenty or more different women. Bin Laden's mother,
who was Syrian, was quickly divorced by his father, and remarried to another
Yemeni. His father died when he was ten. The young bin Laden attended
the Management and Economics School at King Abd al-Aziz University in
Jeddah. Though he was an indifferent business student, he took courses in
Islamic studies taught by Abdallah Azzam and Muhammad Qutb that seem to
have influenced him deeply. Azzam (1941—89) was a Muslim Brother from
Palestine. He had studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo in the early 1970s,
before moving to Jeddah in 1978. Muhammad Qutb was the younger brother
of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian thinker who became the most powerful voice of
radical Islamic protest against both Arab nationalism and Western hegemony
in the time of Nasser, and who was executed in 1966. Bin Laden dates his own
political awakening from 1973, when an American airlift ensured Israeli victory
over Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War, and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia
imposed a temporary oil embargo on the West.
After leaving university without having completed his degree, bin Laden
entered his father's construction empire. He proved himself a successful
manager of several of its businesses, and seems to have accumulated a sizeable
personal fortune, though not as much as is often attributed to him. While still
a very young man, he seems to have either volunteered or been picked by
Riyadh to help organize the flow of Saudi funds and equipment to the
mujahidin who had taken up arms against the Russian-backed regime in
Afghanistan. He first arrived in Peshawar in 1980, on the border between
Afghanistan and Pakistan, when he was only 23. There he worked with Azzam,
contributing to his free circular al-Jihad, while also setting up his own operation
in Peshawar, a guesthouse for Arab recruits to jihad against the Soviet Union.
Called Sijill al-Qaeda or "Register of the Base," it was later known simply as
al-Qaeda or "the Base." At this time, he cooperated closely with the Pakistani
secret service or ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence Agency), and the CIA, the two
other external patrons of the mujahidin. He may have been uneasy about his
connection with the CIA—later he denied it altogether—but there is no con-
temporary evidence of his moral dilemma. With American and Saudi funds,
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