Jihad in Saudi Arabia

"Yes, I have chosen it because it is a very, very good example of the sort of books you need if you are working in this field. It is meticulous, it is neutral, it is detailed and it is written with one sole aim in mind, which is to tell people what is happening, what has happened and why it has happened, in terms of radical Muslims and Islamic militants in a key country. A fantastic source, and if we had one book like this on every major country which has had problems with militancy and written by an author like this, who fluently speaks the local language and has spent a lot of his time there researching his topic, it would be incredibly useful and we would be much better off. It is just the opposite of so much which is written about Islamic militancy which is badly researched, heavily commercial or slanted and very unhelpful. Saudi Arabia is certainly the heartland of rigorous conservative Islamic practices and clearly the homeland of Osama bin Laden, but then if you look at the senior leadership of Al-Qaeda today you have got as many Egyptians and Libyans in there as well. It is too early to tell in a sense. What you can say is that Bin Laden’s death feels very much to me to be a marker on a road that we have travelled a fair way down already. The critical years for me, for the conflict with militants – which I have called the 9/11 wars in my new book – were 2005 and 2006. That is when there was the critical intensity of the conflict. It looked like Al-Qaeda’s plan to plunge the world into some kind of global conflagration that would pit Muslims against the West might work. But since then Al-Qaeda has been increasingly on the back foot. A very simple reason. They had one key objective back in 1988 when they formed Al-Qaeda – to use spectacular acts of violence to radicalise and mobilise the Islamic world to use force and rise up against local rulers. That goal has not been achieved because Muslims across the world have shown themselves to be revolted by violence when they see it up close. That is critical. When, early on, the violence was in America or a long way away, it was much easier for communities to feel supportive of what was going on. Yes, it was idealised. You didn’t see what it actually meant. When the violence actually came to Pakistan, to Saudi Arabia, to Jordan, to Egypt, to Morocco and to Algeria in successive waves in the middle of the last decade, then the support for any kind of violence dropped away very rapidly. Exactly. It goes back to my earlier point that Islamic militants are ordinary people just like us. The communities they come from are ordinary."