On Sept. 26, 2022, Yusuf al Qaradawi died at age 96 in Qatar. The spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qaradawi was the most well-known Muslim cleric in the West, infamous for his calls to murder Americans, Israelis, and others during the height of the Global War on Terror. Once called “the most popular and authoritative” Sunni cleric in the world, Qaradawi’s death attracted little attention, at least as compared to his influence on world events. That reaction, perhaps even more than the death itself, is an important pronouncement: The post-9/11 era is over.
Born in Egypt in 1926, Qaradawi became affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood at age 14 after listening to a speech by the group’s founder, Hassan al Banna. The Brotherhood, noted the late scholar Barry Rubin, was “the first modern Islamist group” and one that would become “by far the most successful Islamist group in the world.” Fiercely anti-Western and antisemitic, the movement’s ideology has served as a wellspring for jihadis of various stripes, sects, and nationalities. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, the two leaders of al Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, were among many inspired by the Brotherhood’s call for Islamist rule.
Banna was killed by Egyptian secret police in 1949, but the Brotherhood survived. The movement’s message was spread throughout the Muslim world by activists and writers such as Sayyid Qutb and, in time, Qaradawi.
Qaradawi was imprisoned several times by the Egyptian government during its various crackdowns on the Brotherhood, which it saw as a threat to its nominally secular police state. In the 1950s, he attended the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo. During that decade and the next, Arab nationalist regimes in Syria and Egypt continually expelled Islamists who challenged, ideologically, religiously, and intellectually, their hold on power. Those who stayed, such as Qutb, often met with imprisonment or death. In 1961, Qaradawi left for Qatar, where he would stay.
However, it would be decades before the Brotherhood’s ideas, embodied in the writings and sermons of men like Qutb and Qaradawi, would become influential.
The crucial year would be 1979. Although few knew it then, several of the factors that would contribute to the Cold War’s end emerged in the final year of a decade characterized by economic stagnation and a West dispirited by Vietnam and Watergate.
In October 1978, Pope John Paul II was installed as head of the Catholic Church. Then in 1979, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The latter event, along with Iran’s Islamic Revolution, would inspire jihadis throughout the world.
In February 1979, the ruling monarch of Iran, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown. Eventually, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would emerge on top. Khomeini transformed the Iranian nation into the Islamic Republic, a country governed by Islamic law and ruled by Islamic clerics. Although Khomeini and his Islamic Republic were from the Shiite branch of Islam, events in Iran would transcend both sect and country.
As Lawrence Wright noted in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11: “For Muslims everywhere, Khomeini reframed the debate with the West. Instead of conceding the future of Islam to a secular, democratic model, he imposed a stunning reversal.” Jihadis the world over, including the future al Qaeda leader Zawahiri, felt the wind at their backs. In 1981, Zawahiri was one of many imprisoned after the assassination of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, who had offered peace with and recognition of Israel — a cardinal sin.
In the 1980s, the Cold War intensified as the West moved from a policy of accommodating Soviet power to confronting it. President Ronald Reagan, aided by key allies such as Thatcher and John Paul, increased pressure on Moscow, including by expanding the Carter administration’s policy of arming those in Afghanistan fighting Soviet troops. The rise of Soviet head Mikhail Gorbachev and his failed attempts to reform the system put the nail in the coffin.
By Christmas Day of 1991, the Soviet Union was no more, a victim of both its own inherent flaws and Western revolve. Walls, thought by some to last forever, had come down. The West was triumphant. The future was certain to be dominated by a Western-led liberal international order, one in which economic and political liberty were paramount. In its final days, Moscow even blessed U.S.-led efforts to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
For many U.S. pundits and policymakers, the looming questions of the 1990s were when to intervene to prevent genocide and famine and what to do with the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. There was even talk of a “peace dividend,” with some theorizing that the United States could invest in myriad social programs now that it no longer, it was thought, needed a massive defense budget.
But Islamists also thought that the future was theirs. They viewed the West as decadent and weak. They considered themselves chiefly responsible for the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Bin Laden, a Saudi-born millionaire, had participated in that jihad and had, he believed, learned that with God on their side, poorly resourced fighters could defeat better-armed and better-equipped infidel armies. Bin Laden helped found and finance a new organization, al Qaeda (the base), which sought to attack the West, Jews, and the many Arabs and Arab governments that they considered to be apostates and collaborators.
Bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Zawahiri, had absorbed Qutb. And in the 1990s, many Islamists began to turn to Qaradawi, whose sermons had brought him fame. Qaradawi had founded the Faculty of Islamic Law at Qatar University in 1977 and had benefited from tying himself to the Qatari government, whose global influence would vastly exceed the population and size of the small Gulf kingdom — a result, in part, of its media savvy, embodied in Al Jazeera, its flagship arm.
In the 1990s, Qaradawi became a “star on the new Al Jazeera satellite channel, with his own highly popular religious program, Sharia and Life,” Alberto Fernandez, the vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute, noted. But the cleric wasn’t only the channel’s leading voice. The late scholar Fouad Ajami once said that Al Jazeera “may not officially be the Osama bin Laden Channel … [but] he is clearly its star.”
Simultaneously, al Qaeda was gaining influence, carrying out attacks in Africa, Yemen, and elsewhere. While some in the U.S. government were increasingly concerned, the public was largely unaware of the growing threat. Then, on a clear Tuesday morning on Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda carried out what it called “the Planes Operation,” claiming 2,996 victims in what remains the worst terrorist attack in the Western Hemisphere.
In an instant, everything changed. In a phrase that soon entered the popular lexicon, “the homeland” had been attacked. Horrifying footage of stranded Americans, everyday men and women who had simply gone to work in Manhattan, having to choose between burning alive and jumping to their deaths filled the TV screens. Haunting final phone calls and voicemails were left, often replayed on news channels. “Freedom itself was attacked … by a faceless coward,” President George W. Bush told the nation that night. “And freedom will be defended.”
“Night,” Bush remarked in a speech a week after 9/11, “fell on a different world.”
The 9/11 attacks rewired the U.S. in ways that the public is still grappling with more than two decades later. For the first time, many Americans wondered if it was safe to fly, to go to work, to travel, to live. Subsequent events that were later revealed to be unrelated to al Qaeda, such as the mailing of anthrax to prominent public officials and broadcasters and a sniper murdering men and women in the Washington metropolitan area, added to what became a pervasive feeling of uncertainty and dread. Policymakers were rightly concerned about terrorists acquiring nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. The U.S. was on a war footing.
For weeks, major news channels brought updates as people sought to understand what had just happened. News tickers, now ubiquitous, were adopted to provide the latest information about death tolls and changed policies, from airport security to the creation of new government agencies.
The 9/11 attacks were different in another respect, too. The U.S. had years, arguably decades, to get used to the idea of communism and the Soviet Union as enemies — the Cold War’s emergence was gradual. Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack, but on a military base in the then-territory of Hawaii, not in the office spaces of downtown Manhattan. The terrorists of 9/11, by contrast, seemed to emerge out of the blue.
Adding to the disorientation and trauma, many Americans had never heard of Salafi jihadism, let alone al Qaeda. In a secular, modern world, it was difficult for many to understand an ideology that wasn’t just medieval but that literally sought to take society backward, not forward.
Americans, always a confident people but perhaps supremely confident as the sole, uncontested world power in the 1990s, now watched nightly news footage of other Americans being beheaded. And as the U.S. and its allies went to war, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, many Americans were shocked to see footage of old Salafist clerics like Qaradawi justifying suicide bombings and the murder of Americans, Jews, and others who didn’t subscribe to their radical ideology.
Qaradawi was as good a gateway as any to understanding the new enemy. Five days after 9/11, he called on Muslims to “fight the American military if we can, and if we cannot, we should fight the U.S. economically and politically,” according to a New York Times profile, which called him “probably the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world.”
Qaradawi’s hateful edicts extended to the Jewish state as well. There are, he once said, “no innocent civilians” in Israel; all are legitimate targets. Indeed, Qaradawi had been blessing suicide bombings in Israel since the 1990s, part of a terror wave that, in some respects, presaged what was to come for the West.
The very nature of the war against Islamist terrorism meant that victory would be hard to define and the battlefields murky. As Bush observed, “This is a different kind of war. You’re not going to see our victories.” The U.S., Vice President Dick Cheney warned, would have to “spend time in the shadows.”
The shadows lasted for nearly two decades. Even after bin Laden was killed in a 2011 U.S. raid in Pakistan, the war continued, renewed by the emergence of the Islamic State. Eventually, Zawahiri would be killed in July 2022, nearly a year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and several weeks before Qaradawi died.
By that point, U.S. interest had pivoted to great power competition with Russia and China and myriad domestic issues. Indeed, in 2018, a Rasmussen poll showed that many Americans were unaware that we were even still in Afghanistan. President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Kabul was a manifestation of the extreme haste of arbitrary timelines, so powerful was the desire for it all to be over. “Every person who has fought in these wars and left them,” the war on terror veteran and writer Elliot Ackerman recently wrote, “has had to declare the war over for themselves.” There are no ticker-tape parades, and there will not be anything analogous to a “Victory in Europe” day. The war against Islamist terrorism, while winding down, will no doubt continue.
But the forever war seems to have reached a turning point, leaving America searching to articulate its posture on the world stage. The muted attention given to Qaradawi’s death suggests the hateful cleric outlived the era he did so much to shape.
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
