[The aftermath of 9/11 has yielded a stream of books on Islam and violence, so much so that it is rare to find a book about Islam that does not tackle the issue one way or the other. Part of this is due to media promotion of books like Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? and the neocon mantra borrowed from Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis. A refreshing rejoinder to all this clash talk is provided by Gene Heck in his recent When Worlds Collide: Exploring the Ideological and Political Foundations of the Clash of Civilizations. Here is an excerpt from his Introduction. Webshaykh]

What are the Causes of Modern Middle East Terror?

5. That the so-called Wahhabi movement is often unjustly maligned for alleged doctrines and precepts that do not comport with the actual teachings of the movement’s eighteenth-century founder, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who advocated jihad by peaceful, not militant, means.

6. That much of the basic infrastructure fore, and inducements to, modern Mid-East terrorism, on the other hand, were actually forged by regional operatives of Western intelligence agencies seeking to engage radical elements of “Political Islam” as a counterbalance to perceived enemies of their own political and economic interests and designs.

7. That the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in the second quarter of the twentieth century, was created with both the encouragement and funding of an affiliate of the British foreign intelligence agency , M16, to counter the spread initially of the rise of Wafdist Party nationalism, then of Nazism, and subsequently of communism — all, in their time, viewed as threats to London’s diplomatic an financial ambitions in the environs of the Suez Canal.

8. That when Egyptian intelligence drove the Muslim Brotherhood underground, after it attempted assassination of Jamal Abdul Nasser in 1954, it took refuge in the western half of the Arabian Peninsula wherein it proceeded to convert dissonant elements within the traditionally benign religiously fundamentalist Wahhabi movement into a virulent, politically active one — thereby establishing an ideological milieu propitious for modern jihadism to be spawned.

9. That it was the equally diligent efforts of M16’s U>S. counterpart, the CIA, to spark jihad as a “homegrown” counterinsurgency to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan throughout the late 1970s and the early 1980s that served as the delivery room for the birth of many modern Mid-East terrorist movements — for which today, Iraq serves as a primary nurturing incubator…

10. That the flowering of al-Qaeda, the latest offspring of what some call radical islam, today continues to be sustained by deep Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood roots in that:

• Osama bin Laden was raised in part of what is modern day Saudi Arabia that the Brotherhood had deeply penetrated;
• He reads and quotes the works of its chief theorist Sayyid Qutb;
• Some of the organization’s most prominent members, including Sayyid Qutb’s brother Muhammad and Abdullah ‘Azzam, who was key in establishing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian Hamas spin-off, were amongst the foremost college mentors;
• Egypt’s “blind sheikh,” ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman, later implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, and his two sons, served with bin laden in Afghanbistan;
• Ayman al-Zawaheri — a disciple of Sayyid Qutb and the head of his own Egyptian Jihad group — is concurrently al-Qaeda’s doctrinal leader and chief spokesman;
• Muhammad ‘Atif, al-Qaeda’s chief military commander until his death in a U.S. air strike in the Afghan War in November, 2001, was Egyptian;
• Abu Muhammad al-misri, former general manager of al-Qaeda’s former training camps in Afghanistan, likewise is Egyptian;
• Muhammad ‘Atta, al-Qaeda’s lead 9/11 hijacker who died in the World Trade Center disaster, also was Egyptian; and
• The linkages go on ad infintum, as much of the infrastructure of al-Qaeda has been built upon the foundations of Egyptian jihadist groups.

Excerpt from Gene W. Heck, (2007) When Worlds Collide: Exploring the Ideological and Political Foundations of the Clash of Civilizations. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 12-14.