How the Iraq War United Radical Islam

If it's true that this was an Islamic radical group with ties to Al Qaeda, then it seems to be another act of an organized anti-Western group that has shifted now from the jihad of the Taliban centered around Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to an international war against what is viewed as Western occupation.

No--I think the ideologies under which these groups operate are grounded in one particular radical version of Islam.

Al Qaeda is grounded in aspects of the most militant version of Saudi

, sometimes called Wahhabism. These -ism terms are always difficult because there are a lot of people who follow the teachings of Ibn Wahhab or Saudi Sunnism without being attached to any terrorist groups or sympathizing with them.

But there are some of those teachings that have helped galvanize these groups and have helped form their ideology. Other teachings come from the Egyptian Islamic brotherhood. And these writings have been combined with some of the Saudi Salafi militant writings to form a view that only this one version of Islam is the correct version of Islam. All other versions of Islam are heretical and should be fought, and Christianity and Judaism are inherently threatening, and Muslims should have as little contact with them as possible, and a jihad in a military sense should be carried out against any group that is threatening the purity of this form of Islam.

Radical Salafism is based on a particular reading of the Medieval writer

, who wrote after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols. He viewed non-Salafi Muslims, and Christians, and Jews, as allies of the Mongols and as threats to the security and purity of Islam. And he was particularly angered by Mongols who had invaded Islam and said they had converted, but who weren't, in his view true converts. The latest radical view of Islam sees a [new] threat of occupation by outside forces..It sees the West as occupying Islam, so it views them the way Ibn Taymiyya viewed the Mongols.

When I hear Islamic radicals denounce occupation, I think they are referring to different things: Israeli occupation of the area of the Middle East that Israel is in; the American occupation of Iraq; and American troops stationed in other Islamic countries. But I think occupation also is involved with the saturation of the world with American and Western media -- cultural values which are implicitly Judeo-Christian values.

The Iraq invasion has sparked [outrage] among Muslims from different parts of the world who feel occupied, whether it's culturally or militarily. Some of them will now just join the force that's resisting that operation, which has this generic Sunni Salafi militant ideology.

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