Incitement: Anwar Al-Awlaki's Western Jihad

by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens

The definitive account of the career and legacy of the most influential Western exponent of violent jihad.

Anwar al-Awlaki was, according to one of his followers, "the main man who translated jihad into English." By the time he was killed by an American drone strike in 2011, he had become a spiritual leader for thousands of extremists, especially in the United States and Britain, where he aimed to make violent Islamism "as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea." Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens draws on extensive research among al-Awlaki's former colleagues, friends, and followers, including interviews with convicted terrorists, to explain how he established his network and why his message resonated with disaffected Muslims in the West.

A native of New Mexico, al-Awlaki rose to prominence in 2001 as the imam of a Virginia mosque attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers. After leaving for Britain in 2002, he began delivering popular lectures and sermons that were increasingly radical and anti-Western. In 2004 he moved to Yemen, where he eventually joined al-Qaeda and oversaw numerous major international terrorist plots. Through live video broadcasts to Western mosques and universities, YouTube, magazines, and other media, he soon became the world's foremost English-speaking recruiter for violent Islamism. One measure of his success is that he has been linked to about a quarter of Islamists convicted of terrorism-related offenses in the United States since 2007.

Despite the extreme nature of these activities, Meleagrou-Hitchens argues that al-Awlaki's strategy and tactics are best understood through traditional social-movement theory. With clarity and verve, he shows how violent fundamentalists are born.

Genres: Middle East, Nonfiction, Islam, Terrorism

352 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2020

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sober, non-sensationalist, and thoroughly documented study of where Awlaki got his ideas, and where they went after he put them out. The most interesting part, which the author scrupulously documents, explores, how various jihadis, two of them homegrown Americans, seized on Awlaki's ideas at a time of crisis, sometimes with direct support from the man himself, to commit themselves to a notion that jihad anywhere and everywhere, against anyone (in the face of arguments against harming non-combatants and not committing suicide, on both of which topics the Qur'an makes itself fairly clear--though it does glorify martyrdom, which confuses things), Awlaki argued that any American citizen wishing to pursue jihad without religious sanction could simply choose to do so and was not bound in any way by citizenship or humanitarian obligation, since civilians were just collateral damage in a country that was attacking Muslims everywhere. (Though you do have to point out that this is more or less the mirror image of US signature strikes, which were based on the notion that six guys in the back of a pickup looked like it might be terrorists, so let's hit them with a missile, whether or not they were going to fight or going to a wedding.) There's an especially weird-to-me bit where Bin Laden himself is distressed by this position, arguing that, once you've sworn an oath of loyalty, that binds you, and we wouldn't want the mujahideen to get a bad reputation as liars and oath-breakers. Did not expect that.

Meleagrou-Hitchens has waded through what must be hours of repetitive speeches and pored through Twitter posts and text messages, and the result is entirely convincing, especially because (credit this being on a university press, probably) he refrains from gigantic big-selling provocations. His central points are that Awlaki could do what he did because he was so indifferently learned in shari'a, boasting certifications he either did not earn or was given as a political favor, and thus could concoct arguments that were not theologically sound or consistent but were (for that reason) especially emotionally appealing to confused young men in search of some purpose and with a dim sense that something in their lives felt wrong (Abdulmutallab, the failed underwear bomber from 2009, posted forlorn remarks about how he had no friends at school in Lomé and was sexually tempted); and also that no experience of the war on terror, at home or abroad, radicalized him--his thought was already trending in this extreme Salafi-jihadi direction before then, and he was reading and taking inspiration from previous jihadi theorists. And the argument that his flexible, anyone-can-do-it doctrine inspired ISIS seems supported by both quantitative (the number of jihadis who quote him seems significant, though it would have been nice to know how often his name crops up in comparison with Al-Baghdadi, or Abdullah Azzam, or Sayyid Qutb, or whoever else, as otherwise these numbers lack context) and qualitative measures. Not a scintillating read, which I think I appreciate, but a measured, persuasive, and abundantly documented exploration of this one thinker's rise, fall, and afterlife.