Middle East Quarterly

Spring 2009

Volume 16: Number 2

The Al Qaeda Reader

Ibrahim, an Arabic language specialist at the Library of Congress at the time he wrote The Al Qaeda Reader, has compiled a collection of screeds by Al-Qaeda’s top figures, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, that reveal in full the deranged world-view that drives the global Islamist terrorist network.

Ibrahim’s translations are an important contribution to the field. Rather than serve as a middleman, as most analysts do, Ibrahim allows Al-Qaeda to articulate for itself the anti-Semitism, xenophobia, paranoia, anti-modernism, and anarchism that drive its terrorist agenda against the United States and America’s “infidel” allies.

In tract after tract, bin Laden and Zawahiri draw inspiration from radical exegetes Sayyid Qutb, Abul A’la Mawdudi, and Ibn Taymiya to justify their terrorist actions. These and other extremist scholars help Al-Qaeda build a Qur’anic case for killing Americans, Jews, moderate Muslims, and even Muslims caught in the crossfire during a jihad operation.

More than 300 pages of invective leave little doubt that Al-Qaeda seeks nothing less than mass murder to overturn the world order. As Ibrahim notes in the foreword, “millions died as a result of the world’s indifference to Hitler’s straightforward words. This book provides the world with Al-Qaeda’s ultimate vision. The same mistake should not be repeated twice.”

Raymond Ibrahim, a specialist in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS and has been published by the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Weekly Standard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim guest lectures at universities, briefs governmental agencies, and testifies before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
See more from this Author
The Incident Had Britons Protesting in the Streets Against the Government’s Unchecked Migration Policies
After Expelling Every Last Crusader from the Holy Land, Saladin’s ‘Retirement Dream’ Was to Invade and Wage Jihad on Christian Europe
The ancient concept of ‘ribat’ is a model for today’s bastions of Islamization and jihad.
See more on this Topic