CIA analyst Michael Scheuer emphasized the “overwhelming centrality of religion in all of [Osama] bin Laden’s activities” in his 2002 book Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America. Twenty bloody, trauma-filled years after Al Qaeda’s devastating September 11, 2001, attacks, Scheuer’s writing remains as relevant as ever, however much policymakers have often failed to heed his advice.
In the years since 9/11, Scheuer, the former leader of the CIA’s bin Laden Unit, has become known as an anti-Israel, conspiracy-mongering crank, but what he wrote in 2002 as “Anonymous” is highly thought-provoking. Bin Laden in his statements and behavior contradicted the “media’s portrait of him as a more-or-less blood-crazed ‘terrorist,’” Scheuer noted. He chillingly, yet with uncritical admiration, outlined how bin Laden exhibited sterner, more substantial character:
Osama bin Laden appears to be a genuinely pious Muslim; a devoted family man; a talented, focused, and patient insurgent commander; a frank and eloquent speaker; a successful businessman; and an individual of conviction, intellectual honesty, compassion, humility, and physical bravery.
Controversially, Scheuer analogized bin Laden to hallowed Western civilization figures such as America’s Founding Fathers, while wanting “not to say bin Laden and his al Qaeda colleagues were correct or deserve sympathy.” Yet his “philosophy and actions have embodied many of the same sentiments that permeate the underpinnings of concepts on which the United States itself is established.” Bin Laden’s statements, for example, mirrored Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, a “timeless exposition of America’s profoundly conservative and religious mind.”
Bin Laden manifested for Scheuer the declaration’s conservative message that only a “long train of abuses” could justify resort to violent change. This terrorist “has been a worthy enemy, one who turned to war only after years of peaceful and law-abiding agitation” in Saudi Arabia, Scheuer argued. Therefore, bin Laden “deserves no less thoughtful consideration than that of the American revolutionaries we revere as heroes.”
Scheuer elaborated that bin Laden is leading a “worldwide, religiously inspired, and professionally guided Islamist insurgency.” Jihadists such as Osama believe “that their struggle is an integral part of Islam’s more than 1,400-year historical continuum in which the central feature is the defense of Islam against Christian aggression,” Scheuer argued. Today the “Islamic world, at all societal levels, is fed up with what it views as a U.S.-led Western/Christian attack on the Muslim world’s religion, people, dignity, and economic resources.”
Contrary to recurring attempts to dismiss jihadists such as bin Laden as extremist ignoramuses, Scheuer noted that “bin Laden has a substantial knowledge of Islamic history.” “Bin Laden’s intentions and goals are grounded in his reading of the Koran, the Prophet’s sayings and practices, and the interpretations of classical and contemporary Islamic scholars and jurists,” Scheuer wrote. In such teachings the “Koran sanctions a defensive jihad, calling on each Muslim to defend the attacked and making this aid a religious duty and an individual responsibility.”
Such doctrine explains why bin Laden has not “ever claimed to be a religious jurist or scholar,” even as Islam apologists have often attempted to dismiss bin Laden’s legitimacy by noting that he has no formal theological training, Scheuer observed. Yet bin Laden “has often described himself as a simple Muslim who is ready and waiting to be directed by the jihad’s rightful leaders.” He has given “not one hint that…he wants to be the Muslim world’s leader, the next caliph,” but “believed that by inciting a defensive jihad he was doing no more than fulfilling his personal duty as a Muslim.”
Although Scheuer provides key insight into bin Laden’s thinking, Scheuer fails to question the Islamic understanding of jihad’s legitimacy. In the book’s glossary he stipulated that in Islam the “greater jihad is the individual’s struggle against evil and temptation; the lesser jihad is the armed defense of Islam against aggression.” Such a definition sounds like the Judeo-Christian understanding of just war, yet ignores that Islam has also justified centuries of offensive jihad to subjugate non-Muslims, while “defensive” jihad is hardly less supremacist in nature.
Scheuer, for example, accurately observed that the “tenets of Islam strictly guide all aspects of Muslim life, personal, political and sacred.” Accordingly, the “legitimacy of the Muslim leader—be he president, king, prime minister, or military dictator—depends on his steadfastness in hewing to the Sharia.” Heresies by countries such as Saudi Arabia, which sought non-Muslim military aid in 1990 against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, prompted bin Laden’s call for “defensive” insurrection against Western-aligned regimes such as the Saudi kingdom.
Other jihadist tenets in Scheuer’s book are equally absurd and terrifying. For instance, the
Philippines has received steady attention from bin Laden since 1996, at least, in part, because the insurgency there is the only Muslim one that is directly fighting the ascendance of what al-Qaeda would classify as a crusading Catholic power.
Piety dominates jihadist behavior in ways small and large, Scheuer noted, as in the case of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and the Islamic Group (IG), led by the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman, in Egypt:
Many EIJ members initially belonged to the IG but formed their own organization in part because of their unwillingness to accept Shaykh Rahman as their leader. The dissenters believed that the Koran forbid leadership being given to a blind man.
Blind Islamic faith has horrifying results in warfare, Scheuer analyzed. For example, the “taking of booty—in terms of material assets and slaves—has long been an integral component of the conduct of jihad.” Jihadist bloodshed would also not be discriminatory, he elaborated:
Bin Laden and his followers…are learned in the history of the Crusades—where the slaughter of captured soldiers and non-combatants by Catholic fighters and Muslim mujahedin was commonplace—and are the products of the century of total war, where civilians and economic infrastructure have…been primary targets.
As substantiated on several occasions in subsequent years, Scheuer warned about the link between jihadist atrocities and seemingly benign Islamic nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) operating in Western societies. These NGOs
are almost always legally registered, certifiably involved in humanitarian and charitable activities, and affiliated with legitimate religious organizations. The use of Islamic NGOs as conduits for funds and contraband, and as curtains behind which to hide illicit activities, is an excellent example of how bin Laden and other Islamists have manipulated the West’s legal system for their benefit.
Logically, Scheuer wanted “to undermine the tenet of U.S. foreign policy that decrees that poverty and unemployment cause terrorism.” Contrary to this thesis debunked numerous times in the years since 2002, Al Qaeda’s leaders were “well educated, and drawn from the Islamic world’s urban middle- and upper-middle classes,” he noted. Rather than societal losers, “bin Laden’s senior lieutenants are a talented and experienced group; there is no lack of military, political, theological, scientific, technical, or propaganda know-how in the inner circle.”
Given such capable, conscientious jihadists, the “clash of civilizations—Islam versus what-passes-for Christendom—appears to be as inevitable as it will be bloody,” Scheuer accurately predicted. While bin Laden and other jihadists seemed foolhardy to challenge mighty Western powers such as the United States, Islamic history nevertheless offered inspiration. “With little more than their beliefs to gird them, the Prophet Muhammed and a small number of devoted followers started a movement that brought the most powerful empires of the day crashing to the ground,” Scheuer observed.
Scheuer’s book reads like prophecy after years in which Western commentators and policymakers have claimed that jihadists such as bin Laden have “hijacked” a pacific Islamic faith. As Scheuer omitted to specify, a moral chasm exists between Western defenders such as Jefferson of the universal rights of a humanity made in God’s image and those who brutally seek global sharia supremacy. Nevertheless, Scheuer correctly recognized an equivalent zeal motivating America’s Founding Fathers and jihadists’ dark ambitions.
This ignorance of Islam’s many decidedly illiberal doctrines would disastrously affect various American-led military campaigns to promote democracy in Muslim-majority countries following 9/11. As a forthcoming article will explore, Scheuer presciently examined how Al Qaeda’s base country of Afghanistan exposed the myth of Muslim masses worldwide yearning to breath free.
TruthWFree says
Amazing this guy could see the Truth in bin Ladin’s and Al Qaeda’s basis for Jihad but then completely and erroneously compare the Islamic movement to our Founder’s philosophies based on FREEDOM. Dangerous that he counsels the FBI.
Doomer says
He suffers from Stockholm Syndrome, he has come to identify with the group that hates him.It’s over.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Scheuer is from Buffalo, NY, and speaks with an obvious Buffalo accent; listen to the hard “ar” in words like “start”, and the high-pitched short-a sound in words like “last”, “at”, “that”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JnNP_IWzSc
Kepha says
The West cannot fight because it is guided in its governments, legal establishments, academia, and general culture by thoroughgoing relativists. Men like OBL, however, believe they know the truth, and will give all for it. Hence, Scheuer laid his finger on something that is way too important to ignore.
Isabella van der westhuizen says
The west cannot fight because the west is no longer Christendom. Our great ancestors fought the crusades, defended Vienna and won at Tours and Lepanto because we were Christian. No one is going to put. themselves on. the line for the modern secular state, which essentially supports pornography and abortion.
gravenimage says
Actually, there are a lot of Agnostic and Atheist Anti-Jihadists here, including Hugh Fitzgerald. Have you not noticed this?
Kepha says
Yes, I have noticed. I’ve also noticed that in their more honest moments, they admit that their ethical and cultural orientations are borrowed from the Christian past. Looking around more widely, I note some others who are “atheist” or “agnostic” towards the Christian God (while worshiping self, science, and state), such as Tom Holland, reluctantly conclude that everything they love about Western civilization comes from its having once been Christendom.
James Lincoln says
+1
gravenimage says
Kepha, it is true that many Agnostics and Atheists acknowledge Judeo-Christian values–for good reason. I think all of us who hold civilized values should ally against the threat of Islam.
Tony Naim says
Well said Isabella.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
“[T]he Koran forbid[s] leadership being given to a blind man.”
A quick search on “blind Koran” finds no such verse in the Quran. Where does the Quran say this?
gravenimage says
I can’t find that, either, Mark:
https://www.islamicity.org/quransearch/index.php?q=blind
gravenimage says
Jihad Through Michael Scheuer’s Eyes
………………
Scheuer got some things right–certainly he at one time understood the primacy of Islam to Jihad.
But the problem is that Scheuer *admires* this sick sh*t. Considering bin Laden–a Muslim polygamist who abused his wives and children–as a “devoted family man” is just grotesque.
Kepha says
Or, is Scheuer noting how Bin Laden appeared to people raised in his religion and culture; or noting that an enemy leader does not necessarily fit our propaganda’s caricature. For example, Uncle Kepha find Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot among the most despicable creatures ever to strut and fret their way across the world stage. Yet he freely admits that these leaders were probably sincere when they set out to do great things for the downtrodden of their varied countries..As for Stalin, many observed that he was quite a “people person”, even if he was also highly skilled at gaining trust and charming people only to stab them in the back later. Clearly Bin Laden had some sort of charisma, a vision for what he thought was the right order of things, devotion, and even a fair amount of physical courage (but, I will also never forget how his first reaction to 9/11 was to say that only Musims could be so brave as to pull off such an attack, only to turn around and blame the JOOOOOZ when the American daisy cutter bombs started falling too close to his cave). I think it would be important for our intelligence community to have a clear-eyed vision of the sort of people we’re up against, rather than merely reducing them to Disney-esque caricatures.
gravenimage says
Kepha, there is no doubt that many of the most evil figures who ever existed were on some level sincere. Sorry–under these circustances, I’d take someone hypocritical any day (and please note, I *hate* hypocrisy). I hate undiluted evil more, though.
And Scheuer has indicated his admiration for these Jihadist thugs that he has to be taken seriously, I think.
Anne says
Scheuer got it right. I disagree with those who think he identifies or admires OBL.
Scheuer was making the case for why this enemy was so formidable and dangerous. As I see it, the problem with the West is not its lack of religious fervor but a failure to recognize the religious base of the jihad in the immutable Koran and in Mohammad’s exhortations to deliver the world to Islam. Every generation of Muslims will source these for its own style of jihad against the non-Muslim world. The West’s own peace with religious differences made after the end of Europe’s religious wars has been fatally transferred to Islam under the protective cover of political correctness. In fact the West, hardened against “hate speech” and “crimes against humanity” foolishly ignores the violence, sexism, prejudices, intolerances and bellicosity of the Koran. PC and western altruism permit continual Muslim migration despite frequent reluctance to assimilate, thus Islamic organizations flourish within our countries. And are virtually free to work quietly to promote sharia as we sanction all public criticism of Islam.
gravenimage says
Anne, you are right that all too few in the west take the ideological roots of Islam sereiously.
But thinking that Scheuer lauding bin Laden as a “devoted family man” is indeed indicative of admiration. Very twisted stuff.