al Qaeda a word that went from late 80s obscurity to 2000s international infamy
they're a terrorist organization that abuses discredited Islamic texts and
extremely stretched interpretations of the Quran to justify murder across the
globe how did such an organization begin what ideas and geopolitical contexts
created such a group today these are the questions we'll explore we're going to
figure out how and why al Qaeda was founded
hi I'm Tristan this is step back be sure to subscribe and hit the bell
notification to not miss a step back video every week alright so let's begin
by going into a little bit of an intellectual history of what ideas
al-qaeda is drawing upon when it founded itself in 1988 the first one we
should talk about is the Salafist movement now you've probably heard
Salafis before but now we're gonna actually explain what that movement is
basically the Salafi movement began as a 19th century attempt to respond to
European imperialism in the Middle East basically it began in 19th century Egypt
as a response to intervention by Europeans in the Middle East it
basically is an intellectual movement that wishes to return the Islamic world
to one that is of the time of the salafs which were the first three generations
of the Islamic world after the death of the Prophet Muhammad and it is a
nostalgic movement it always is looking back to historical precedent as a way to
get an idea for what the future should look like basically the world should
return to a point that is not unlike how the Middle East was in the Middle Ages
in the seventh and eighth centuries it explicitly rejects the bid'ah or religious
innovation trying to modernize an update and try to adapt Islamic principles for
modern day and Salafis typically make up three major categories the first one
that makes up them most of the Salafis are called quietests and as part of
their belief system they explicitly reject the idea of getting involved in
politics they believe that Salafiism is something that should be practiced at
home in family and not something that they should get involved with in the
political structures in the world the second group of Salafis would be called
activists who do get involved in politics and the third in the extreme
minority are jihadists jihadists are the group of the Salafis that want to use
holy war and violence in order to create the world of the first three generations
after the death of Mohammed most Salafis live in the Gulf states especially in
Qatar the UAE and Saudi Arabia also Salafiism is
typically associated with Wahhabism or as like a hybrid of this post 60s
revival to try and move the Islamic world back to more traditional
principles there's a lot of associations with Salafis being literalists or
puritanical and especially Salafi jihadists who make up the religious
worldview of those who founded al-qaeda have become sort of the most vocal group
and so a lot of Westerners seem to think that Salafi jihadists represent all
Salafis which is not true this is why sometimes you'll hear that those who
support terrorism in the Islamic world are a minority of a minority not only
are they a minority within the Salafi movement but the Salafis are a minority
movement within Sunni Islam and Sunni Islam is but one sect of a large
religion that has at least three sects active today
now Salafist will say that they actually belong to a much older movement that
goes back all the way to the salafiyyah the ancient Islam that they try to go to
but a lot of the quotes and things that they refer to are typically considered
dubious when it comes to the standards of Islamic scholarship for the most part
Salafis are depending on a small collection of medieval quotes Salafis
will also trace an origin to the 18th century philosopher and just hang on a
second because my Arabic is terrible Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab and many of his
students it began in a region of Saudi Arabia today called Najd which was
very under populated and specifically they were really against things like
idol worship like visiting shrines and going into tombs which was a common
practice at that point now the jihadi salafists have five extremely important
key things that they try to stick to that make them different from the other
groups the first thing is that they put extraordinary emphasis on something
called the tawhid or like the oneness of God the idea that there is no sons of
God there are no multiple gods there's just just the one and this is a super
big deal in Islam but Salafis make jihad a Salafist especially make huge
deals out of this basically saying that you know it's not exactly good that
other gods are worshipped in the world the
second one is a dependence on God as the sole sovereign over everything which
means that they believe that there should be no government structures that
do not default to God as interpreted by them as the sole arbiter of what is good
or bad moral or immoral ethical or unethical if you remember from my video
over here on Sharia you'll know that there are aspects in the Sharia code
that are not exactly laws as far as like how a government should have laws but
laws in like how one should live a good Islamic life a lot of the jihadists in
the Salafi movement would say that no those are literal laws that should be
enforced course as I mentioned there's the explicit rejection of bid'ah the idea
of religious innovation the idea that religion can change or update over time
in order to better fit the world they live in Islam itself is actually very
scholarly and very obsessed with constant Reformation reinterpretation
and development and this movement the Salafi movement is an explicit
projection of that and on top of that the jihadist believe that they should
enforce that rejection with violence they also believe in the necessity of
something called the takbir which is the idea that someone outside of the Islamic
faith is an enemy and is permissible to execute these people are very charming
and of course that the most important thing for a good Muslim to do according
to the jihadi salafists is to commit holy war against the infidels and their
states if you get all that that's basically the ideology of a Salafi
jihadist terrorist many times especially if you spend a lot of time on YouTube
you get a lot of people who seem to think that all Muslims are Salafis and
then of course all Muslims are also jihadists and all of this is completely
wrong this is an explicit reactionary group within a reactionary group think
of the Salafi movement something as like sort of a fundamentalist movement and
then on top of that imagine a movement that uses explicit violence on top of
that and you generally have an idea of what this group is like most Muslims
follow different schools and have come the different interpretations of the
Quran and different interpretations of how Islam works and how it should
develop and some people don't think of it at all because it's its religion it's
a part of your life not your entire life so as we move forward let's talk about
the two founders of al-qaeda and where they came from and how they fit in this
movement let's start with a less recognizable one Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
who if you are involved with terrorism studies you'll know as the father of the
concept of global jihad he was a Palestinian theologian and scholar who
was one of the two founders of al-qaeda and his whole contribution to this
movement was he's the person who really advocated for both defensive and
offensive jihad against non-muslims his contribution to this movement was of
course the idea of global jihad that all Muslims have a duty to engage in both
defensive and offensive jihad in his case specifically against the Soviet
Union and we'll get into that a little bit later he was part of an
international effort to go across the world and try to recruit Arab speaking
people to fight in the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan
and 1989 he was actually assassinated by a car bomb now he founded al-qaida along
with his protege and the person that he mentored and someone whose name you
probably do recognize who Osama Bin Laden Osama bin Laden grew up in Riyadh in
Saudi Arabia and he was a business major never trusted those business majors and
he was extremely wealthy when he grew up he was the son of a famous construction
magnate who had very close ties to the Saudi royal family he was raised in an
extremely conservative Sunni Islamic home and then he went to school and got
education in economics and Business Administration which if you think about
it if you want to start a terrorist organization those are probably the two
things that you should probably master there you go that is the major
recommendation for the young person who wants to start a terrorist organization
who doesn't know what major to pick oh god I'm gonna go to prison just a PSA
after saying that please don't start a terrorist organization it's super not
cool in 1979 Osama bin Laden left his school went to Pakistan and
join up with Islam to become part of the holy warriors against the Soviet threat
and he even used money and resources from the construction company that his
family owned to help with the war effort and they were really good at it both him
and Azzam were extraordinarily good at recruiting people across the Middle East
setting up a network that flowed money into these holy fighters and really just
building a foundation for further holy war after there was no more Soviets to
fight with and since al-qaeda translated into Arabic means the foundation or the
fundament now you kind of get what the point of al-qaeda was in the first place
what thing they thought they were trying to solve there basically so good at
doing this recruiting holy warriors thing that after the Soviets were gone
they had to think of a way to carry it on afterwards I guess declaring war
against the whole world was their solution patreon.com/stepbackhistory
hey everyone a quick break here to let you know that this video was a
stretch goal on patreon I want to take a moment in this video to thank the
awesome generous people so so much and let you know that more stretch goals are
coming down the pipe as of this video the next one will be a video about the
Holodomor yeah that's gonna be a fun one so as I said al-qaeda's actual
founding began in the context of a war that happened in Afghanistan in the 80s
called the soviet-afghan war so many of the people who had become the founders
of al-qaeda cut their teeth recruiting and funding this war effort trying to
fund a resistance to the Soviets and the Afghanistan government at that time the
United States an effort to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's
version of the Vietnam War decided that they would actually help these Islamic
radicals in order to put an end to the Afghanistan government which was a
communist government that time and the Soviets working together to fight them
the u.s. interpreted it as the Soviets invading it wasn't but you know that's a
different video and so the CIA started something called Operation cyclone which
was a process to try and fight money and training towards these groups
which were called at this point the Mujahideen which is a term for a
religious warrior in Arabic to use money to go through Pakistan in order to fund
the war in Afghanistan being fought by somebody else although I should say the
Soviets got a little surprised when all of a sudden these poorly equipped
Mujahideen had shoulder mounted Stinger missiles that could take down their
fighter jets we don't have exact numbers for how much money from the United
States actually went into this war effort but one faction reports about 600
million dollars received from the United States that's just one of many groups
this doesn't rule out they also got tons of money from other US allied and also
very religious fundamentalist countries like Saudi Arabia which gave tons and
tons of money of this war effort there's also a group called the Maktab al-Khidamat
or the Mak as I'll refer it for now because it took me like six tries to say
that word that were kind of like a precursor to al-qaeda that were in
charge of raising a lot of money in this case they're like fund raisers nonprofit
sector and they specifically got a lot of money from the Saudi Arabian
government and this group got a lot of the infrastructure that al Qaeda would
use later up they built guest houses on the border with Pakistan they started
the training camps that you might remember and they even had like houses
around the world in fact they had one house in Brooklyn where they were going
and recruiting Arabs who were fundamentalist Muslims in order to go
and fight in the war effort against the Soviets bin Laden himself became really
really good at it he was an expert at getting big petrol dollars to get funded
into this war effort and as al Qaeda began to form and evolve on its own the
Mak started to build camps and training centers
in Afghanistan rather than just in Pakistan and it's reported that up to
35,000 people were recruited around the world in this period and 1989 the Soviet
Union withdrew from Afghanistan and actually the communist government in
Afghanistan survived for another three years but as again that's another video
in the Mujahideen with no Soviets to fight actually found themselves sort of
lost as to how to organ themselves and this is where azam and
bin Laden finally got their idea to start something of their own they
realized that the Mujahideen had only been kept together by fighting one enemy
but they thought that they could make a difference by expanding the scope to non
Soviet people the other countries all of the infidels and the rest of the world
specifically they wanted to get involved more in places like Palestine and in
Kashmir which I haven't done a video about Kashmir but somebody requested it
so I'll probably do one in probably 2019 sometimes the best estimate is that
al-qaeda was founded at a meeting that happened on August 11th 1988 in which
they decided that they were going to make a singular organization that would
be a platform for multiple unorganized terrorist groups to fund money and
resources and people into them and promote jihadist Salafi ideology in all
of these conflict regions and at the meeting apparently there was note saying
they wanted to lift the word of god and make his religion victorious and if you
were a Salafi jihadist and you saw regions like Palestine you saw regions
like Kashmir you would think well these are places where the Muslims need to
fight back and that's what they planned on doing I don't think the global
takeover thing was really a thing for a very long time if ever I think Isis is
the only people who actually thought about that and after Azam died in 1989
the Mak was split apart and most of them went along with bin Laden in the early
nice n't al-qaeda and also in 1989 Ali Mohammed a trained Special Forces
officer from Fort Bragg and America joined al-qaeda to be part of their
strategic operations al Qaeda the base the fundament was now a new player on
the world stage what would follow this would be a heyday of destruction
culminating in the deadliest terrorist attack in history it's a dramatic story
that spans all over the globe from Afghanistan to the United States to
Sudan it's such a big story that this is going to be the first
part of a four-part series I will release over the next few months next
time we're going to talk about al-qaeda in the 90s and its first decade on the
scene as a player in the meantime I have a playlist on Islamic history you can
check out to understand some more context I want to thank twelve-tone for
the step-back theme song as well as special thanks to all the fantastic
patrons who made this video possible I especially want to thank Don and Kerry
Johnson Kolbeinn Mani and Garrek Kwan Michael Kirchner Scott Smith and James
McNiece come back next time for more step back