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"The fight against the enemy nearest to you has precedence over the fight against the enemy farther away. . . . In all Muslim countries the enemy has the reins of power. The enemy is the present rulers."
- Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, tried and hanged in connection with the 1981 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat
"Victory for the Islamic movements . . . cannot be attained unless these movements possess an Islamic base in the heart of the Arab region."
- Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden deputy, 2001(2)
"We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia. . . . The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize. We have to ensure the fulfillment of the democratic revolution."
- Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute, 2002
The leader of Sadat's assassins, Bin Laden's chief ideologue, and a leading American neoconservative supporter of Israel all call for a revolutionary transformation of the Middle East. However, the United States, the existing Arab regimes, and the traditional Sunni clerical establishments all share an interest in avoiding instability and revolution. This shared interest makes the establishments in the Sunni world America's natural partners in the struggle against al Qaeda and similar movements. If American strategists fail to understand and exploit the divide between the establishments and the revolutionaries within Sunni Islam, the United States will play into the radicals' hands, and turn fence-sitting Sunnis into enemies.
Outsiders of the Sunni World
Sunni Islam is a very big tent, and there always have been insiders and outsiders within Sunnism playing out their rivalries with clashing philosophies.4 Throughout the past century, the most important of these clashes have occurred between Sunni reformers and the traditional Sunni clerical establishment. The ideology espoused today by al Qaeda and similar groups can be traced directly from the 19th-century founders of modernist reform in Sunnism. Al Qaeda's leading thinkers are steeped in these reformers' long struggle against the establishment. The teaching of the reformers has been heterodox and revolutionary from the beginning; that is, the reformers and their intellectual descendants in al Qaeda are the outsiders of today's Sunni world.
For the most part this struggle has been waged in Egypt, Sunni Islam's center of gravity. On one side of...