The Religious Roots of Violence: Islam IV

not one of the 70 virgins: his niece is cute

(Previously on the LHG: The Religious Roots of Violence: Islam I, II, and III)

Osama Bin Laden:

This is also where Bin Laden comes in: Osama's dad had a flair for palace building and over the years royal favor turned his family business into the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia and one of the largest in the Middle East. The Bin Laden children were raised and educated with Saudi princes and had contact with leaders of Islamic movements all over the Muslim world.

Soon after the Soviet invasion of Afganistan Bin Laden started to raise money for the resistance. By 1984 he had established a guest house in Peshawar to house fighters bound for the front. In 1988 he established a database of all the jihadists and other volunteers who had passed through his camps - giving birth to an organizational structure built around a computer file whose Arabic title Al Qaeda (the [data] base) would become famous later.

When Bin Laden returned to visit Saudi Arabia he warned the Saudis that Iraq was planning to invade Kuwait. This embarrased the Saudi government which at the time was on good terms with Hussein. When the Iraquis did invade Kuwait in 1990, Bin Laden offered his fighters to defend the Saudi kingdom. Instead of accepting the offer, the Saudi government accepted US military assistance. This convinced Bin Laden that the Saudi's Islamic credentials were a sham.

For him, driving out the Americans is the condition for reclaiming Islam in the peninsula. In 1996 he issued a "Declaration of Jihad against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places: Expel the polytheists from the Arabian Peninsula." And on August 7^th of 1998, on the anniversery of the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia, two huge explosions rocked the US embassies in Nairobi Kenya and Dar es Salaam Tanzania.

The rest is well known.

(Christianity coming soon)