Al Qaida's ideology

Usama bin Laden and other Al Qaida figures promote an ideology that unites a variety of grievances and motivates their supporters. Many of these grievances have existed for some time as consistent themes in Middle Eastern politics - for instance, opposition to Israel - but Al Qaida has merged them into a "single narrative" of a global conspiracy against the Muslim world.

They claim that the current impoverished state of many Muslim countries is the fault of an alliance between "Zionists and Crusaders" (principally meaning Israel and the United States) and corrupt Muslim governments. They assert that the solution to this problem is to eradicate Western influences from the Muslim world, replace existing governments with a supranational "caliphate" and impose a strict and exclusive form of government based on their particular interpretation of Sunni Islam.

Al Qaida's members adopt an extreme interpretation of Islamic teaching which they believe places an obligation on believers to fight and kill to achieve their aims. Most Muslims and the world's leading Islamic scholars reject this position. Europe's leading Islamic scholars have declared that "under no circumstances does Islam permit terrorism and the killing of civilians. Terrorism is in direct contravention to the principles of Islam and the vast majority of Muslim remain faithful to these teachings." [1]

Al Qaida brands the governments of many Muslim states as "apostates" who do not adhere to its definition of "true Islam". Secular republics and religiously-based monarchies alike are attacked on this basis. By branding them as guilty of apostasy - an offence for which Islamic law prescribes a death sentence - the terrorists justify taking violent action against the governments and citizens of those states, even though they are co-religionists.

Al Qaida strongly opposes Western influences and ideas that it regards as "unIslamic". Notably, it is explicitly opposed to democratic principles. It has released statements rejecting democratic elections in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Territories. It claims that democracy is a rival "religion" and that principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion are equivalent to apostasy, punishable by death. In Al Qaida's view, the only acceptable form of government is a "Caliphate" exclusively based on Sharia law. However, Al Qaida is careful to define itself only by what it opposes and has yet to define what the Islamic Caliphate it advocates would actually stand for.

Al Qaida's opposition to "un-Islamic" ideas extends to condemnation of Muslim religious practices of which they disapprove. In particular, Al Qaida supports a narrow interpretation of Sunnism, the largest denomination of Islam, and is violently opposed to other Islamic denominations which it regards as "infidel" as well as Sunni Muslims whom it regards as insufficiently pious. Al Qaida and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan have killed thousands of Muslims of both Shia and Sunni denominations.

Finally, Al Qaida claims that Islam itself is facing an active, sustained, and long-term attack from what they characterise as a Christian-Jewish alliance against Muslims. It supports this claim by characterising relations between Muslims and Westerners as a long history of injustices and grievances, whilst downplaying any evidence to the contrary. For instance, Usama bin Laden has cited the suffering of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia as being the fault of the "Zionist-Crusader alliance and their collaborators," without mentioning the facts that NATO military intervention brought the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo to an end, and Western countries saved hundreds of thousands of lives through the provision of humanitarian aid.

[1] The Topkapi Declaration, Muslims of Europe Conference, Istanbul, 1-2 July 2006