 Thank you for joining us. There are 130 participants in this meeting. A testament to Thomas Hayhammer's great renown as one of the world's leading scholars of jihadism. And we're here to discuss his new book, The Caravan. Abdullah Azama, The Rise of Global Jihad, which he has spent the past decade working on, and is probably one of the most important books that's been written in and around this subject since 9-11. In fact, I would say it certainly is one of the most important books written since 9-11 on this subject. So I will turn it over to Thomas, and he'll speak about some of the big ideas in the book and some of the key stories. And then we'll have a discussion moderated by myself and we'll open it up to questions which you can put in the chat. So over to you, Thomas. Thanks very much, Peter, for that kind introduction. And thanks to New America for organizing this. I'm very sorry I couldn't be in DC in person, but I'm thrilled that we could do this instead. And I want to thank everyone who's logged in from various places around the world to listening to us and take part in the discussion. I'm also, of course, thrilled to have the book out after so many years. I remember, Peter, I came to your office I think in 2007 or 2008. You probably had no idea who I was, these young guys walking in and asking for help with this new project. And you were very generous and gave me a whole bunch of sources, contacts, etc. That served me well in the beginning. I don't think any of us thought it would take this long, but here we are. And so I'm thrilled to have it out. In fact, I spent so long on this thing that a friend recently said that he knew the book when it was little. So it's about the same age as my eldest son, he's 12 years old. Anyway, so it's a long book and it's quite rich and there are lots of different things I could talk about. There are a lot of new things in there because almost all of it is kind of based on primary sources and a lot of it is new. But I figured I would focus on three main themes in the book. The first is adventure because it's a biography of this person who lived from the early 40s to the late 80s. And he lived a very interesting life, lived in many different countries, did many different things. It's testimony to the fact that he lived in a completely different time as far as jihadi activism was concerned. It was a different era and if you were calling for jihad or doing jihad in Afghanistan elsewhere, you didn't have to leave a clandestine life. People like Azam were out and about in the world to an extent that later militants could not. Imagine you want to write the biography of the leader of IS or whatever the dominant jihadi organization is in, say, 15, 20 years. The bio is going to be like, oh, he joined IS at age 17 and then he lived in the cave. For Azam and in the beginning of the lives of people like Bin Laden too, it was very different. They traveled around and so we get these stories in the book of Azam traveling to America, going to Spain, going to Italy, going to Germany, to the UK giving speeches and operating completely openly. And so you also get these sort of strange stories. Like one of the, I think most perhaps most interesting findings or sort of tidbits in the book is that Abdullah Azam and Osama bin Laden met for the first time, not in Saudi Arabia, but in Indianapolis, Indiana in January 1978. Because in the late 70s, these Islamic cultural centers were popping up on campuses around the U.S. And what they typically did when they launched was to have an inauguration seminar and they would bring in big names from the Middle East. And very often Muslim Brotherhood leaders. And Azam was a Muslim Brotherhood big shot already by the late 70s. So he was invited in along with Muhammad Kotub and a bunch of other figures to speak at this Islamic teaching center in Indiana. And this we know from the student newspaper at the time. And we also know from the autobiography of Bin Laden's wife that Bin Laden was in America at the time and she writes that he heard that Azam was going to speak in Indianapolis. So he did a detour up to Indianapolis to hear him speak. And we don't have details about exactly kind of how they met, how much they spoke, et cetera. But we know that they were in the same place at the same time. And that's the first recorded encounter between them. You get other stories like Tamim Al-Adnani, who was Azam's deputy and right hand in the late 80s. The executive director of the Services Bureau. He goes to places like Nigeria and it goes to Venezuela. In Venezuela, he goes to speak to the Palestinian expat community about the Afghan jihad and all that. And he gets booed because everyone there is PLO and leftist and they don't like the religious guys. And then you also get these sort of other unexpected connections. For example, that Abdullah Azam was friends with Kat Stevens, the pop star. And the story there is that Kat Stevens obviously had converted to Islam in the late 70s. And he had set up a charity called Muslim Aid, which had operations in different areas of the world where there were humanitarian crises. And in the mid 80s, he wanted to set up a branch in Pakistan to help Afghan refugees around Peshawar. And by that time, Azam was sort of, he had been there in Peshawar for a few years and he knew everybody. So it was kind of a big shot in the NGO community in Peshawar. So when Kat Stevens comes there to set up his operation, he meets with Azam and they... Well, we don't know that too. We don't have all that much detail on kind of exactly what they did together. So we know that Azam did an interview with Kat Stevens in Al Jihad magazine. We put him on the front page of the magazine. We also know interestingly that the Services Bureau sold cassette tapes with hymns, so-called Anashid, recorded by Kat Stevens. And we know this because there are ads in Al Jihad magazine saying, buy this cassette tape with Anashid by Kat Stevens. So you get all these kind of crazy stories because it was possible at the time, because people could get around and Jihad was kind of not nearly as politically toxic as it is. At least the type of Jihad that Azam was involved in. And I say this not just because it sort of has an entertainment value, but also because it brings insights. So one of the reasons I chose to write this as a biography is that Azam was a forest gum of Islamism. He was present in all the places where history was being made at the time. And I'm talking here about the 60s, 70s and 80s. So he's there in Palestine in the 48th war between Israel. He's there in 1967. He's there during Black September of 1971. And he's there, of course, in Afghanistan later on. And he also meets with a whole bunch of people who are senior figures in the Islamist movement. He meets pretty much every famous person in the Muslim Brotherhood in this period. So he's a very useful prism for viewing the history of this period. And putting these stories together in a life like that, in a life account like that, it allows us to see how different historical events are connected. How the events of 48, they reverberate many years later. For example, Muslim Brothers who fought in the war of 48, who pop up again in among the Fadayeen in 69, and the same person pops up again in the 1980s as a trainer in Afghanistan. And it helps us see that things that are isolated, things that would be in different history books, as it were, actually impact one another. And so that's the kind of adventure part of the book. And the second theme is kind of related, and it's exclusion, or kind of exclusion and rootlessness, because that's basically what Assam's life was like. And I think it helps explain his sort of transnational outlook, his kind of pan-Islamic view, his distrust of nation-states. He basically was the sort of citizen of the Islamic world, more than a citizen of any one Middle Eastern country. And to understand that, you have to look at the sort of the vagabond life that he led. So many will be familiar with sort of the broad outlines of his life, but let me just recap that quickly. He was born in Palestine in 1941. And then in 1967, because of the Six Day War, where Israel annexed the West Bank, including his village, he decided to flee. He walked on foot from the Jinnin area to Amman. And then he was never to return. And from this point onwards, he was a refugee basically, and he was living at the mercy of the regimes that hosted him. And that would work fine for periods, but in other times, not so well. So for example, in 1970, Azam is involved with the Fedayeen in the beginning of the year, and then comes the so-called Black September, where the Jordanian government cracked down on the Fedayeen. And Azam, probably partly because of what has been involved in, he leaves Jordan. He goes to Cairo to study for a peace in Islamic law. He then comes back to Jordan, spends the 70s there teaching, but in the late 70s, he gets into trouble with the regime big time. They see him as an agitator, someone who has a bad political influence on the youth. And they basically haven't fired from the university, and they encourage him to leave the country. So he's basically thrown out of Jordan for political reasons in 1980. So he's uprooted once again. And then he spends this year in Saudi Arabia, where he doesn't like it there, if his family doesn't feel that he's not happy there, and he starts looking for somewhere else to go, and he ends up in Afghanistan. But even in Afghanistan, he has to dodge governments. In 1986, for example, the Pakistani government tried to crack down on the services bureau and the Afghan Arab community. And it gets so bad that Azam has to leave for shower and go into hiding in the border areas. And then a few months later, the Arabs and the Pakistani government come to some kind of agreement and he can return and things are fine again. But just to say that Azam's life is this kind of conflict with regimes and he's kind of living at their mercy and he's thrown out from time to time. And he never finds a place, a country that he can call his own or a kind of a political context where he can invest himself. And so in that sense, he's a kind of a microcosm or a mini-example of a broader phenomenon, which is kind of perhaps the main argument of the book and kind of the answer to the question why jihadism goes global in the 1980s. And my argument in the book is that jihadism goes global because of local repression. Because Azam was not the only person who kind of had to leave his country for political reasons and so on. From the 50s onwards, there are kind of waves of people, especially Muslim brothers who are getting into trouble with their regimes and who are kind of forced into exile. Many of them end up in Saudi Arabia and many of them gather in this area in the western part of Saudi Arabia where they get jobs in universities and in these international Islamic organizations. And basically what happens there, what you get is a community of activists who are kind of excluded from their respective national contexts. So these Muslim brothers from Egypt and Syria and elsewhere, they're in western Saudi Arabia and they have nowhere to kind of exercise politics because they can't participate in politics at home and they're not allowed to participate in politics in Saudi Arabia. But there's one domain which is open to them and that is the international arena. And many of them then get involved in these international Islamic organizations. They're kind of setting up cultural centers and NGOs, et cetera, around the world. And what emerges then is what I call in the book and I've called in previous work the Pan-Islamists. This community of people who kind of emphasize this idea that all Muslims are one people and that this people is under threat from the outside and they need to stand together more, do more solidarity work to resist this outside threat. So it's to say that in the late 70s you already have this pretty powerful community of people I say powerful because they're in these organizations that get quite a lot of money. These people who are, you know, they're advocating this kind of Pan-Islamic view of things and it's a very sort of... the victim narrative is central there. They see conspiracies against Islam everywhere and they kind of produce magazines that show the suffering of Muslims everywhere. So, and this community I think is a product basically of kind of political repression in the region through the 50s and 60s and 70s that many of these Arab regimes, they never found a way to integrate political Islam or Islamists in the political system and then some of those activists realize that if they just did international work the regimes would more or less leave them alone. So this Pan-Islamism is already there before the Afghanistan war and frankly I think even if the Afghanistan war hadn't happened, we probably would have seen some kind of foreign fighter phenomenon in the 80s in another place and that's because this victim narrative it was quite easy to militarize and that's what Assam did. Assam militarized the sort of Pan-Islamist victim narrative. Most of the kind of the Pan-Islamists in the 1970s they were not really militants they were not calling for Jihad or stuff like that their modus operandi was kind of humanitarian aid and that kind of thing. But Assam came along after a few years in Afghanistan saying, look, you know, sending NGOs and stuff that's fine but it's just not enough. We need military solidarity. People need to come here and fight. And that's the roots of the foreign fighter doctrine for which Assam is famous. So that's how kind of, you know, exclusion is sort of a theme in Assam's life but it's also kind of a cause for the globalization of Jihadism. Let me move on to the third theme which is the Pandora's Box theme. And I call it the Pandora's Box because it's sort of the story of how Assam lost control of the movement that he built. Because we all know that Assam was a central figure in the mobilization of Afghan Arabs and he did that in a number of ways setting up the services bureau, writing books, producing Al Jihad magazine, traveling around the world, preaching. So he was a classic sort of, you know, social movement entrepreneur. But in order to make this happen he articulated a message which was when a Muslim territory is under attack or occupation all the world's Muslims have to go there and fight. And this is an individual obligation. So people shouldn't listen to their parents, they shouldn't listen to their local imams or to their governments. They shouldn't listen to any kinds of objections. They should just realize that this is an individual duty. In any objections they hear they should just ignore and head to Afghanistan. Now this was of course effective in the short term for getting people to Afghanistan. But the problem is that when you tell people not to listen to anyone it's really just a matter of time before they stop listening to you. And what do you do then? And that's what happened with the African Arabs. Ozam kind of sowed the seed of this big authority problem inside the movement. And he got to experience the initial effects of that authority problem in his lifetime. Because as you know and as you know Peter the African Arab community started to fragment pretty quickly in the late 80s. And at the end of it it's just this kind of hodgepodge of various groups and factions many of them don't like each other and they do different things etc. And of course this is where al-Qaeda comes from. Let me spend a minute or two on that because in my book I offer a sort of a revised history of the birth of al-Qaeda. In my view what happened was basically that there was a clash of interest or desires in the African Arab community. You had those like Ozam who were pragmatists who wanted the whole war to kind of go well and had a strategic view of things and who saw fighting as just one component out of several necessary to win a war. That was kind of Ozam's approach. And as a result the services bureau especially in the beginning was not mainly a training organization. They did lots of other things, humanitarian work etc. Because you had this holistic view of things. But then you had a bunch of other people perhaps most people because they were young and they'd come for the adventure. What they wanted was something else. They wanted action. They wanted the thrill. They wanted to go out in the field and fight around as soon as possible. They wanted to live out their... They wanted to be sort of rambos for a while. And they came to Peshawar and they found that the services bureau did not offer that. The services bureau might put them to work in an orphanage or sweeping the corridors of one of the guest houses or something. And the few training camps that the services bureau had were very basic. So you only got this sort of conflict between what I call the pragmatists and the militarists. And Bin Laden was among the militarists. And so by mid-1986, Bin Laden and a few other people, they're fed up. They fed up with the services bureau giving up all hope that he can kind of save the military honour of Arabs there. So Ozam sets up this camp called Al-Maqsada in Jaji just inside the Afghan border. And it becomes sort of semi-independent from the services bureau. And the thing is to run a camp on a kind of a full-year basis, you need kind of a bureaucracy. You need some people to take care of procuring water, others to get hold of ammunition, others to empty the latrines, some people to run the training camps. So you need some type of organization to get a camp running. And my argument is that Al-Qaeda emerged out of this proto bureaucracy that was necessary to run the Al-Maqsada camp. And I think the argument is strengthened by the fact that we find in Al-Qaeda, a year or two later, many of the people who were trainers and leaders of the Al-Maqsada camp. So the point here is that Al-Qaeda was a symptom of this authority problem that was already manifesting itself in the Afghan Arab community. And this authority problem was Assam's own making. Now, of course, this authority problem becomes much worse after Assam. After Assam is killed in 1989. Because he's the last person with sufficient authority to sort of tame the Afghan Arabs. After he disappears, we see the jihadi movement fragmenting even more, and we see some of the groups descending further and further into violent excess with the beheadings al-Maqs in Bosnia, the massacres in Algeria, the 9-11 attacks, and of course now Islamic State. And fundamentally, very simply put, it's a product of this authority problem, this Pandora's box that Assam opened. And I don't think Assam kind of realized the consequences of this. And I certainly don't think that he would have wanted to see this type of violence in his time. He wanted a more conventional type of fighting in Afghanistan. But then others stopped listening to him and went their own way. Before I conclude, I guess to say something about Assam's death, because it's sort of the biggest murder mystery in the history of jihadism. And as many listeners will know, it was a pretty spectacular incident. This happened on Friday, 24th of November, 1989, right outside the so-called Arab mosque in Peshawar, where most of the Afghan Arabs went to pray. And this, Assam was coming to deliver his weekly Friday prayer. So you had lots of people assembled in front of the mosque, waiting for him. And just as he kind of pulls off the main road, get close to the mosque, a bomb which is hidden under a small bridge explodes and rips through the car and kills him, his two sons who were with him. Now I'm sorry to say that even after 10 years and 700 pages, I can't answer the question of who killed him. But I have some thoughts and I have some suspects. And the thoughts are first of all that whoever did this must have wanted to send a signal. Because you could liquidate Assam quietly in so many other ways. Drive by shooting by someone on a motorcycle at night. Assam's kind of whereabouts were fairly well known in the community and not be a problem to just take him up somewhere where nobody would look. But here it happened on a Friday noon, lots of people watching near a mosque, etc. and they would send a message. Secondly, I think there probably was a government hand involved because it's quite a complicated operation when you think about it. To get a bomb to go off under a moving car or under a specific moving car is not straightforward. Because Assam was going to come and you couldn't put a pressure plate bomb there because other cars were going to drive under there before him, etc. You needed to have eyes on the target. There must have been a team of people involved. And someone with eyes on the target and someone with a finger on the trigger. And this would have been installed the night before, a few days before without police noticing. This team would have had to be present at the site without attracting attention and to extract from the area, potentially from the country without getting notice. This requires quite a bit of OPSEC as we can say, operation security. For a non-state actor to do this, it would have been very risky. If you get caught the reputational damage would have been terrible and if you got caught for them like this, you would be facing torture and worse in Pakistani prison. My main suspects are basically government agencies, primarily the Pakistani ISI itself. It was operating on home turf, so the OPSEC problem was not big for them. It had plenty of experience with this type of operation from years of doing similar things in Kabul and other places in Afghanistan. And it had reasons to dislike Assam. As I mentioned before they had been after the IRF since 86 and they didn't like having the IRF there. They were a source of kind of they couldn't be really controlled. And also, Assam was involved around this time in diplomacy in bringing Hekmatiyar and Massoud, two of the biggest Afghan warlords, closer together which was not in the ISI's interest. That would make the Afghans themselves kind of stronger, less dependent on Pakistan. To me, the ISI looks like a prime suspect, but I have no hard evidence to prove it. So we have to wait for some key documents to be classified or like a vital source to come out and tell the truth before we can know more about this. Anyway, I was looking for too long and we need to get into the Q&A part which is the most important. So I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you, Thomas. I mean, picking up on that final question about Assam's death, I mean, in any event, you're looking at two questions, capability and motivation. I think you're emphasizing capability. I think there was another group which had even higher motivations, which is essentially the groups of the group of Egyptians that really hated Assam and they didn't necessarily have the capabilities, but there were quite a number of them who'd served in the Egyptian military who were living in Peshawar and I've always thought, I mean, I think your ISI theory is certainly quite reasonable, but I've always thought the level of hatred for Assam amongst these Egyptian Islamists who were in Peshawar were sort of off the charts and they certainly wanted him dead. Now, did they do it? Who knows? But I just wanted to get some of that. Sure. Yeah, I mean, Assam had your enemies in the Afghan Arab community and there's notably this conflict this dispute rather, that happened a year before his death over, basically over money with a guy called Ahmed Khabar who was basically an Egyptian Canadian and that is kind of an infamous family because some of his children later became involved in al-Qaeda and some of them ended up in Guantanamo, etc. But anyway, this is their father and he was he had an NGO in Afghanistan and he even entered into this kind of cooperation with the Services Bureau. But that relationship went sour for reasons that are too complicated to get into here, but it's basically they disagreed about money and about how kind of, you know, Assam and and what was done, they accused Khabar of stealing money, etc. and the whole thing escalated into this dispute and there was this adjudication, which is sometimes referred to as kind of the trial of Assam in literature, but it was not so much a trial of Assam as a kind of adjudication of a legal dispute over money and this is to say that there was there were tensions, but I think perhaps that in some of the existing literature, the enmity between Assam and the jibs has been perhaps exaggerated a little bit and that there may have been a few individuals who really would hate the guts of Assam, but there were, but Assam also had many Egyptians who liked him and Assam, for example, was close friends with the blind sheikh Umar Abda Rahman. Now, of course, he's from the al-Gamal Islamiyyah, not al-Jihad al-Jihad was the Wahiri and so on, but it's to say that to the extent that there was visceral hatred of Assam it was probably in a small clique in the al-Jihad community and it's certainly possible that they may have done this because as you say, they had expertise and we know from things like the encyclopedia of jihad was from around this time, but they were practicing or thinking about techniques like techniques of urban warfare and the like. Just picking up on that and then I'll turn to the questions from because we have quite a few. The founding of al-Qaeda does seem to be largely about a split between Assam and people that he used to be friendly with or close to even and that does seem to be relevant to the question of who killed him potentially. Right, well yeah, the problem is is that when you kind of look at the contemporary sources and what I found doing this book was that there's quite a big gap between the narratives that come out in the years right off 9 level when people like Abdullah Anas and many others speak out or they're kind of journalists chase them down and get them to talk about the but then in some of them write books etc. but most of this comes after 9 level. So the narrative of what happened then is very often you look at the sources and some statement comes after 9 level. When you look at the contemporary sources from the late 80s, there's a slightly different picture where it's much harder to find clear evidence that Assam and bin Laden were really not friendly or even something basic like the Wahiri being a prominent figure at all. Zahiri is almost absent from the contemporary sources in the late 80s. I completely agree with that. And I think bin Laden, it seems unlikely to me that bin Laden would have been involved in attacking a man who was really his mentor in many ways. But it seems people in Zahiri's circle and the people that were kind of pulling bin Laden away from Assam to me they seem to have some motivation, potentially. Yeah, sure, sure. And let me ask you another follow-up question. The materials that were entered in the Benevolence International Foundation trial which for those on the call who may not know about them are what appear to be minutes of a meeting that discusses the founding or perhaps of Al Qaeda or if not the founding of Al Qaeda sort of in some way memorializes the fact that Al Qaeda has recently been created. I mean, how do you treat those in the book? I read that section pretty carefully. As I recall it, you seem to sort of stress that Al Qaeda may have been founded a little bit earlier than these actual meetings and this might have been a sort of later recording of something that already happened. But leaving inside the question of timing, how do you assess those notes? Right. Yeah, so as you say, I kind of revisit those notes and I don't see them as the founding minutes of an organization like Al Qaeda. The content just it's not what the founding minutes of an organization would look like. Also the content also makes it quite clear to me that this is an organization that's already in existence. So I think it was kind of crystallized probably in the winter of 87-88. That's I guess a detail. What I see those documents as is basically as kind of records of talks between this existing Al Qaeda and the services bureau. And there's one of the documents refers to a shake. It's kind of the main interlocutor to the Al Qaeda people. And in some existing literature that shake has been assumed to be Assam. So that's one of the reasons why some people have kind of implicated Assam in the founding of Al Qaeda, which is not the case. There's no relevance that Assam was involved because I think that shake was not the Assam himself, it was probably Tameem Al Adnani, his right hand that I mentioned earlier who went to Venezuela and got booed. And but even he when you read the document carefully he's not part of the same process. It's a negotiation almost. They're kind of coordinated, trying to coordinate training efforts and so on. So to me it shows both that we're dealing with two separate entities there already but also that these entities are capable perfectly capable of sitting down and talking business. And this is one of several indications I found that actually Bin Laden and the men around him were perfectly good working relations with the Services Bureau almost till the end and as part of the same document collection there's a bunch of organigrams that I don't think anyone has written about before. Organigrams that have they're neither al-Qaeda clearly and they're neither the Services Bureau but it's some kind of mix. So clearly at some point there was an attempt to kind of create a super an organization that would kind of bring everyone together because you have a name, they have Bin Laden and Azam and some of the people from al-Qaeda and some of the people from the Services Bureau and on the same organigram. And I think so I think these communities were quite especially Bin Laden's circle and the Azam circle were more closely interwoven than we have thought. Also on this theme it's often said that Bin Laden kind of set up his camp completely you know clandestinely without telling Azam, that's not the case at all. I mean we have sources that say that Azam was present on the day that Bin Laden discovered the site and Azam was one of the first people to come to al-Nasada in inspect and when some people from other Afghans said this is too dangerous, you should close it down Azam said no, maybe let him have it so there's also to say that Azam was quite well aware of what Bin Laden was doing. He may not have been aware of kind of the name al-Qaeda, that this was intended as what it really was but he was aware that Bin Laden was doing this training stuff, that he had his kind of separate roster of members etc. But he let it pass. Great, so from Colin Clark thank you for this amazing work of scholarship, thoroughly enjoyed it put it in a category with Looming Tower and Ghost Wars What books inspired you most during this process? Oh first of all, thanks very much that's a huge compliment Books inspired me the most that's a good question I think both of the books that he mentioned Looming Tower and Ghost Wars and of course also those books they're quite different books so Larry Wright's book is fantastic from a narrative it's an exemplar to kind of dramatize non-fiction and Steve Cole has this incredible way of sort of synthesizing enormous amounts of information into the narrative there are other books of which I've made incredible they were extremely useful I mean your books Peter especially the Asylum of Bin Laden I know was a treasure trove for this and actually I remember many years ago I said this is going to be so useful for people coming a few years down the line and that's exactly what he was for this project but I at the same time I wanted this to be a little bit different so that's why I structured it as a biography and and I think I was inspired by several different types of biographies some from the field people books like Brunnerlias Architect of Global Jihad but also other biographies completely unrelated to Jihad and I looked at the whole bunch of existing biographies so that's kind of one of the luxuries and when you're an academic especially at the early part of your career you have to there's a format you have to follow there has to be a theory chapter and then a test and then a conclusion with implications and stuff like that but as I already have tenure I can be more free I don't have to work always within that strict academic way of structuring things so that's one of the reasons the book is structured the way it is it wouldn't work or it wouldn't pass it's a thesis structure there's a wonderful irony there Thomas do you know if Azam met Said Kutub when he was studying Cairo and was Azam inspired in any way by Kutub's writing yeah Azam was very much inspired by Said Kutub Said Kutub was Azam's hero but they never met because Said Kutub was executed in 1966 when Azam was living in Palestine and he Azam never visited Cairo before then Azam probably first visited Cairo in 67 or 68 but he never got to meet Said Kutub himself however he when he moved to Cairo in 1971 one of the first things he did was to seek out the family of Said Kutub so it was kind of a pilgrimage for him I think he wanted to get as close as possible as he could to Said Kutub you know without Bar Said Kutub himself so who was that? His brother and his family his sister for example Amin Kutub and so and also later on in Jordan when they're in the 70s some people nicknamed Azam the Said Kutub of Jordan that because Kutub was his hero and you see especially in the pre-Afghanistan writings of Azam we see Kutub all over the place citations and especially in his student works like his BA thesis and his less in the PhD thesis especially in the BA thesis from 1966 it describes Said Kutub as sort of an intellectual giant and everything so Kutub was very important and I want to say here that you know in the academic study of political Islam we tend to categorize put things in boxes so Kutub is often put in the revolutionary boxes someone who was focused on the internal enemy and toppling the Muslim regimes because Azam often gets into this international box someone who's building an international community of African Arabs to wage geopolitics but in reality things can be more mixed up and in Azam they are so for all the things he says about kind of pan-Islamism and international politics he's very hostile to Muslim governments and he doesn't hesitate to pronounce Taqfeer on groups of people there's this misperception in some of the literature that Azam was very kind of tolerant and was not a Taqfeer at all he's on the record as saying that all nationalists are non-Muslims all communists are Khufar referring to Qadhafi and other state leaders as Khufar so he had this Taqfeer instinct that some of the Qutbists tend to have so a number of people asked a version of this question which is essentially you arguing in the book that Jihadism include in the 80s because of domestic repression by Arab regimes if they adopted other policies might there have been other outcomes or would it put Islamists in positions as a power from which they would have continued their agendas the next question is too big for this webinar but it's a it's a central dilemma I guess in the modern history of political Islam perhaps in the modern history of the Middle East what could Islamism have been handled better could it have been integrated more without compromising you know principles you know human rights and so on I think yes I mean it's I mean and I say this not naively because I think sometimes we forget how radical some of these groups were and especially when we get to the 60s you know the militant end of the brotherhood especially in Syria and Egypt you know they were really they were they were ready to carry out a coup and they were hell bent on having Islamic law implemented without any compromises so you know in some sense you can kind of understand the dilemma of the regimes of the time you know it wasn't easy to always easy to integrate some of these types but I still think that especially these Arab republics used you know excessively heavy to deal with the phenomena that probably could have been dealt with better without necessarily giving you know putting them in positions of power immediately at least not with the most militant elements you know there were more progressive or kind of you know compromise ready elements of the brotherhood in many of these countries but typically what the regime said was to treat the whole organization you know with one template so it would be a tentative yes although I'm kind of you know I do realize that some of these groups at the time where you know they were quite difficult to deal with and they were less progressive less kind of it was nothing like you know the Nahda party in Tunisia today it's not like you know you can't say look it's fine look at Tunisia the Nahda party is doing great the democrats etc so why couldn't you've done the same in Egypt in 1965 well it's just because you know brotherhood at least part of the brotherhood was nothing like the Nahda time so I'm sensitive to those dilemmas but I still think there must have been other strategies available question from Matt Leavitt what happened to the services bureau after his arm died was killed right it basically falls apart in the kind of substance but the shell kind of exists so you know almost immediately you get this sort of internal struggle for leadership and resources and it's a little bit unclear exactly what happens because typically you know when messy disputes like that people want to keep things under you know covered up because they want to keep a semblance of unity but I think we know that there were two kind of big factions inside the bureau the family faction and these other factions and a year or two in they found some kind of modus vivendi whether they could they were just responsible for different parts of the business but the bureau kind of continued to exist and then it continued I think till around 1995 when it disbanded here to the surface sources are a little bit murky but it seems to disappear in 95 in 1995 is also the time when the Pakistanis did another kind of crackdown they had several crackdowns a big one in 92 and then another one in 95 and I think the services bureau kind of died with that 95 crackdown yeah we have a lot of questions here how did Azam become involved in the Muslim Brotherhood and what made him an agitator Azam was recruited to the Brotherhood when he was 12 years old by a teacher in his village and this is not unheard of because people will know that the Muslim Brotherhood has a political strategy of Islamizing from below and of encouraging members to take up positions in the education sector and so you very often found Muslim Brothers employed as teachers across the region and one of Azam's teachers in the village of Seelah Al-Harifiyah was a man named Shafiq Abdul-Hadi who had who was much older I think he was in his 50s or 60s and he had he himself was from the same village but he had spent time both in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia in the 50s and he had kind of become involved with the Brotherhood and so he recruited Azam who was kind of a welcome target he already was religious and interested in this sort of general activity there are lots of accounts by his family about how kind of bookish he was how he didn't want to come out and play how he read at night and also how meticulously he kept his prayers it was unusual at that time he wanted to come by his sister says that one sort of activity the young boys at the time was to go out and eat almonds just take almonds from the field and Azam didn't want to do that but he didn't want to take the almonds because it's considered that theft from the farmer so he had this kind of religious inclination from a very early age and as you said that's even accounting for the hagiographic tendency of some writers if you read biographies of clerics they're often like that he was a genius, he was so pious etc but in this case the sources are so specific and so diverse that I think we can say that's the case but he was religious and so he comes into contact with his teacher and he becomes involved with typical Muslim brotherhood activities in the genean area in in the 60s late 50s and 60s so he goes around knocking on doors to the missionary they organized sort of study circles they have a little kind of office place in Ingenene where they kind of assemble and also this time this is when Azam also comes into conflict with the leftists this is another theme in the first half of the book that I did mention earlier but Azam hated leftists because he saw them as competitors for the leadership of the Palestinian cause he wanted to liberate Palestine but under an Islamic flag and for most of his kind of life at least up until the late 70s the leftists, Palestinians were in charge and the religious Muslim brotherhood Palestinians were a small minority and he was very bitter about that and so already in the 60s when he's like a teenager in genean there are these skirmishes with leftists at some point leftists raid their little apartment take off all the papers and throw them out in the street later in 1969-70 he's in a Muslim brotherhood part of the city a camp apart with just Islamists but they're situated very close to another to other camps with communists PFLP types most hardline leftist Palestinian fighters and there's basically war not literally, they don't fire on each other but they throw insults at each other and then kind of speak badly of each other all the time and Azam is very critical of them in his writings in the 70s so this sort of hatred for the leftist is something that starts early and I think it's perhaps almost a forgotten theme in the history of political Islam and of the Muslim brotherhood the extent to which the brotherhood saw the leftist is kind of fifth column this is an internal threat to the prosperity of of their societies one thing that's striking when you read G-hat magazine I think this is Azam's influence is the kind of mysticism around the martyrs and the perfume of their bodies and I think from reading your book that this came from Azam and is this is this even a kind of quasi heretical view or how would you class that as a sort of is it a mainstream view it's quite complicated to be perfectly honest I don't quite understand it myself but what I can say is that Azam is the first it's the first a militant Islamist to write at length about this in Arabic so in his book the signs of the merciful in the Afghan jihad and the articles he wrote in in Islamist magazines shortly before that they are the kind of the first lengthy writings about that theme however I mean he wasn't taking this out of thin air and it's not heretical I would say because you know elements of this go way back I mean there are talks about kind of miracles and things you know in scripture and some of these generally it's just belief that you can become a martyr by dying in battle or the special things before the martyr all this is fairly mainstream if you believe that a person becomes a martyr in the first place that's another discussion but also you know even in the modern period you find references to sort of miracles or even battlefield miracles in other places so the some writings about the some of the Indo-Pakistani wars of of is it 1970 71 where there are reports of kind of miracles there and also Egyptian sources with references to miracles helping the Egyptian forces in the war with Israel in 1973 but perhaps more importantly the Afghans had a vibrant kind of oral tradition of sort of martyrdom miracles and battlefield miracles before Islam came to Afghanistan and many of the the stories that Islam reports in his books are from Afghans so so for whatever reason and this is where my kind of knowledge and understanding kind of comes to a limit I don't know where exactly that kind of Afghan tradition comes from how old it is etc to what extent the Afghan the Mujahideen kind of took it in a different direction in the late 70s or not that I don't know but the short answer is that is kind of yes and no I mean it was what he did was new in the sense that he kind of elevated this theme and highlighted it and projected it to audiences that were not that had not really seen it before but also this was not completely new this was in the tradition to some extent I should say that you know this theme wasn't just kind of a curiosity or something how crazy they are they think they believe these superstitious things I think it had a real impact on the mobilization in that it captured people's attention in a way that another you know type of propaganda product would not so if you're we have to think you have to remember that Islam was trying to get the interest in Afghanistan at a time in the early 80s when a lot of other things were going on you know Iran-Iraq war things in Lebanon uprising in Syria etc so you know getting Arabs even to pay attention to Afghanistan will come there it wasn't straight forward so I think just writing kind of a regular report this is what happened this is what happened on the battlefield last month we're struggling please send people money you know probably wouldn't have cut it in that competition for attention but what Iran did was very original in the Islamist movement writing that book was completely new and unexpected nobody saw that coming this guy has this interesting book about all these incredible things that are happening in Afghanistan that captures people's attention and very religious people were inclined to believe this and for them all these stories it was proof that Afghanistan was special if all these miracles were happening it was because God cared about Afghanistan and so if God cared about Afghanistan then we should too so I think that this sort of martyr miracle theme was quite important in mobilizing people he kind of romanticized the conflict in a way yeah romanticized it but also gave it this kind of almost extraterrestrial dimension this is the place where not only your dreams come come true but things you've never dreamt about even come true and also he highlighted this martyrdom and the rewards of martyrdom and his publications celebrated martyrs to a larger extent than previous militant Islamist groups had done so this appealed to people's imagination about also coming to heaven I think often we academics in the west most of whom are atheists don't always appreciate the the fact that the intensity of belief sometimes the extent to which especially kind of conservative religious people genuinely believe in things like heaven and hell and how they think it's kind of almost as real as in a faraway country as Australia it's a place you can go to the transportation mode is a little bit different and and so to them you know Assam's writings kind of visualized and brought out this kind of dream this kind of prospect of actually going to heaven and that's quite a nice project prospect if you believe in it and you know again in academic writing we tend to focus on the sort of the material political explanations and so on but you know the more I read of the accounts of recruits going and about the motivations the bigger the sort of martyr theme became I think I really think that some quite a few of the Arab Afghans went because they hoped that they might come to heaven I mean is there a kind of interesting point about other religions and I mean obviously there was a variety of motivations for people who went on the crusades which was a global movement which recruited people from all across Europe but I mean the religious dimension seems pretty large in this case in this in both the Assam case and in the case of the crusades Yeah I think so too and of course it's always going to be a variation at the individual level there will be for the other African Arabs and other Jihadi groups different people go for slightly different reasons and there's never kind of a single explanation or single motivation involved but I think that many people for many people the religious dimension was important that they were actually they were fulfilling a religious duty and that if they didn't do that they might end up in hell and if they did it and were as lucky as to fall in combat they would go to heaven and I think quite a few of them this was a genuine conviction added to this the thrill of adventure that I think probably drove quite a few of them as is the case I think generally with recruitment to militancy people after the excitement and the adventure and also the camaraderie kind of doing something really dangerous really subversive that nobody else dares to do that kind of feeling is something that some people are after Well that's a good segue to a question from Kevin which is were Azam's ideas influential on ISIS as a group or individuals in ISIS who traveled to join ISIS Yeah I think I don't think Azam's writings were very, have been very influential in shaping kind of the official doctrines of Islamic state their strategy in the in recent years but Azam has been important in kind of providing the initial motivation for many foreign fighters even up to the present day so and we know that many of the people who traveled to Syria from the west for example in the in 2013-14-15 that they had been reading Azam we know that Azam's books were on their computers or we know that they had physical copies of his books under their bed or in their bags or even in one case from here in Oslo the case of two small teenage sisters two small Norwegian teenage sisters who went to Syria in 2013 on the day that they went the day that they left they sent an email to their father saying that we're leaving for Syria to understand why please read the attachment and the attachment was the defense of Muslim lands by Azam the book that he wrote 30 years earlier so things like that suggest that you know he has been influencing foreign fighters right up to the present day but of course what happens with many foreign fighters is that once they get to the conflict zone they get sucked into an organization with its own kind of strategy and ambitions and that's what happened with Islamic State so I think generally with foreign fighting the reasons people become foreign fighting are not necessarily the same as the reasons for which the organization is fighting the host organization those can be different so Azam is an entry level ideologue he's like he writes things that are first of all it's clearly articulate but it's things that are not they don't seem that radical and they aren't really if there is a crushing occupation of Muslims somewhere by a non-Muslim power that you should help them out of solidarity go and support them this is not outlandish this is what foreign fighters from other political contexts have done in the Spanish Civil War and so on it's something that aligns with people's moral intuitions, almost regardless of their political orientation and so it's kind of easily digestible as it were and then of course it's kind of a stepping stone to more radical interpretations of violence and so on so that's where Azam fits in it's this sort of entry level ideologue does Azam have anything to say about Shia, the Shia? he did and he he wasn't very hostile to them at all in fact in the beginning at the time of the Iranian Revolution he was quite enthusiastic and we know this from the testimony of none other than Rashid Vanoussi the Tunisian the kind of the grand old man of Tunisia and Islamism and this current speaker of parliament in Tunisia he was a good friend of Azam and he writes that in late 1979 he found himself at a conference in Italy together with Azam and the Iranian Revolution had just happened and Vanoussi says that Azam was ecstatic that he was very hopeful about this and he didn't the kind of sectarian issue wasn't an issue at all but we know then from other sources that enthusiasm waned and I think he came to see Iran just like any other regime in the area operating like a state with pragmatic compromises and some cynical interest based policies etc so he never had a strong affection for Iran or Shiites he just didn't mind he saw them as let them do their own thing and we'll leave them alone and this by the way it's true of the Arab Afghans in general and one of the fun facts of the book is that when bin Laden set up Al-Matsada in late 1986 he did so with the help of Shiites it was a Shiite commander serving under Sayaf who was who controlled that area of Jaji and he was on who showed bin Laden this location and also men from his basically the Afghan Shiites helped bin Laden build Al-Matsada and they were living in Al-Matsada in the autumn of 1986 it was only in 1987 when there wasn't enough space they wanted to get more Arabs in and Afghan Shiites were kicked out of the camp but even bin Laden didn't mind sleeping in a tent next to Afghan Shiites in his personal project it's only much later that you get this vicious bloody sectarian violence the early jihadists were not very fast about this Chris Flanchard asked about his arms relationship with the Saudi government did he have any point in his views how did he feel about bin Laden's ambiguous relationship with Saudi intelligence Azam didn't trust any government he was fundamentally skeptical of governments and this has to do I think with his overall view of the world and of history and that he considered he considered basically that the nation-states of the Middle East were all artificial entities imposed by the West and the Zionists and the ideal the natural state of the region was Caliphate and he was very nostalgic about the fall of the Caliphate that's by the way one of the reasons he is very popular in Turkey as Amis but he was he remained very skeptical of regimes in the region but as far as regimes went Saudi Arabia was one of the ones that he could work with although he didn't have very strong affection for the Saudis he says he says nice things about the Saudis this is one of the countries that helped the Afghan cause the most that sort of thing he did benefit a lot from the hospitality of Saudi they let him preach and fundraise and recruit quite freely in the kingdom so he was kind of dependent on that but then and at some point he's viewed skeptically by the Saudi intelligence services a little bit because he's become so popular among Saudi youth that the government starts to become skeptical of him in the same way that the Jordanian government became skeptical of him in the late 70s so as Amis able to fill mosques with like two to three thousand people when he comes to Saudi to speak in the late 80s he's a rock star and although Azam is not at this time he's not saying anything critical or specifically about the Saudi government or anything or he's just talking about Afghanistan a bit about Palestine and so on but the regime I think was concerned in 89 they start cancelling some of his talks so they kind of they tighten the screw a little bit and also in the in 89 there was a meeting between Azam and then Prince Salman who is now the king of Saudi Arabia King Salman at the time Prince Salman was it was the prince the member of the royal family in charge of kind of the Afghan course of kind of supporting it and making sure the Saudi's interests were observed and so on and the problem is so we know that Azam was kind of in contact with the highest echelons of the Saudi government if you met Prince Salman that's pretty high up but we don't know for sure exactly what happened in that meeting and there are two very divergent accounts there's one account that says that Azam was called to Prince Salman for a kind of a reprimand to face to respond to rumors that Prince Salman had heard about Azam saying anti-Saudi things that's one account of what was said in that meeting another account is from Azam's close family no that's not true at all it was a very cordial meeting Prince Salman just wanted to meet Azam and talk about Afghanistan that's it there was no conflict but the point is that he was he was a pretty prominent figure and he was in touch with people quite high up in government but I don't think he was steered or controlled by the Saudi government and there has been a lot in this relationship with the Saudis which was where there was an intelligence connection I don't know I don't know whether Azam knew about that or whether he cared a brilliant book which you can get online we have to find out a way to get books virtually signed in the coronavirus era but we all want to thank Thomas for his brilliant presentation about 150 people listened to the presentation at various points I want to thank everybody who joined the call and thank you very much Thomas thank you so much Peter