Excerpts from

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/27/international/asia/27JIHA.html

January 27, 2002

Bin Laden Stirs Struggle on Meaning of Jihad

By JOHN F. BURNS

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Jihad literally means striving.
The Prophet Muhammad gave
Muslims the task of striving in the
path of God. Whether that striving
is armed or a personal duty of
conscience is a question causing
consternation in the world's 1.2
billion Muslims, and that question
goes to the heart of President
Bush's war on terrorism.

In the Muslim world, it seems that
Osama bin Laden is now....
...............
....people think of him more as an adventurer
than as an Islamic leader, and they know from their own
studies that his sense of jihad is deeply flawed."

................

From Cairo, Beirut and Tehran, and a dozen other centers
of fervent Islamic belief, pioneers of Mr. bin Laden's kind
of jihad — violent, anti- Western, above all
anti-American and anti-Israeli — have called him a
coward and an enemy of Islam.

No example is starker than that of Sheik Muhammad
Hussain Fadlallah, spiritual leader of Hezbollah, the
Lebanon-based Party of God, for 25 years a scourge of
Israel and the United States with its suicide bombings and
other terror attacks in Lebanon and Israel. After a 1983
truck bombing of a United States Marine barracks near the
Beirut airport killed 241 servicemen, American officials
accused Sheik Fadlallah of having ordered the attack, an
allegation he returned when he blamed the Central
Intelligence Agency for a 1985 car bombing outside his
Beirut home that killed 75 people.

But Sheik Fadlallah, now 66, has been relentless in his
condemnation of the attacks in America.

He preaches that they were 
"not compatible with Shariah law," the Koranic legal code, 
nor with the Islamic concept of jihad, and 
that the perpetrators were not martyrs as Mr.
bin Laden has claimed, but "merely suicides," because
they killed innocent civilians, and in a distant land,
America. In an interview with a Beirut newspaper, Al
Safir, Sheik Fadlallah again accused Mr. bin Laden of
having ignored Koranic texts.

"There is no concept of jihad as aggressive combat," he
said, quoting verses of the Koran that Islamic theologians
have argued over for centuries. In misreading these texts,
he said, Mr. bin Laden had relied on 
"personal psychological needs," including a 
"tribal urge for revenge."

An Egyptian-born theologian, Sheik Yusuf Abdullah
al-Qaradawi, with a history of anti-American militancy
even longer than Sheik Fadlallah's, expresses a similar
view. From his base in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, the
75-year-old sheik has issued Islamic fatwas, or decrees,
on issues like the need for Muslims to boycott McDonald's
restaurants, and on husbands' right to beat their wives as
long as they do not draw blood.

But on the Sept. 11 attacks, he has used language similar
to that of Mr. Bush and other American politicians.

"Islam, the religion of tolerance, 
holds the human soul in high esteem, and 
considers the attack on innocent human beings a grave sin," 
he said. "Even in times of war, Muslims
are not allowed to kill anybody save the one who is
engaged in face-to-face confrontation with them.

"Killing hundreds of helpless civilians," he added, "is a
heinous crime in Islam."

To many Western scholars, Mr. bin Laden stands out not
for the liturgical context, but for drawing on the
wellspring of anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world.

Another French scholar, Gilles Kepel, said Mr. bin Laden
drew his views from a deadly mixture of the
fundamentalist, aggressive form of Islam known as
Salafism that he knew as a student in Saudi Arabia and the
heady, but misleading, experience he had when he arrived
in Afghanistan in the 1980's to join the last stages of the
jihad against Soviet occupation troops.

"By 1989, the jihadists thought that they had destroyed the
Soviet Union, and that militant Islam was a force that
could prevail against any enemy, forgetting that what
really drove the Russians out of Afghanistan was the
Stinger antiaircraft missiles given to them by the United
States, which neutralized Soviet air power," Dr. Kepel
said. "This led them to believe that they could triumph
everywhere."

That has not been the case. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan
for just five years. Islamic militancy has been violently
suppressed in Egypt and Algeria, has crested as an
influence in Sudan, and has achieved little in Chechnya
and Kashmir.

In Pakistan, clerics who saw the country as following in
the Taliban's rise have instead witnessed the nation's
president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, starting a broad-based
crackdown on Islamic militancy.

Yet there are legions of young men who seethe with
resentment at America and its power, and long after Mr.
bin Laden and Al Qaeda have faded into history, they
seem likely to form a ready pool of recruits for messianic
leaders.

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