Introduction

The presence of fifteen Saudis among the nineteen hijackers on September 11, 2001, earned Saudi Arabia a reputation as “al-Qaeda country.” However, this reputation has also blinded observers to an interesting puzzle, namely, the question why there have not been more Saudi al-Qaeda members. Since the 1980s, many thousands of Saudis have fought as mujahidin in foreign conflicts such as Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Iraq. Given this large pool of activists, one would have expected al-Qaeda to be very strong in Saudi Arabia. However, recent research has shown that al-Qaeda has found it notoriously difficult to recruit and operate in the kingdom. The group’s first and last major offensive there, the campaign launched by “al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula” in 2003, was crushed by the government after a couple of years. Moreover, Saudi operatives have not been involved in major attacks in the West since 2001. This chapter seeks to explain the paradoxical weakness of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia by documenting an important ideological split in the Saudi jihadist movement, namely, between two ideological schools I term “classical” and “global” jihadism, respectively.

The inquiry raises a broader conceptual issue, namely, the extent to which transnational Islamist militancy is a homogenous political phenomenon. I argue here that it is not; observers have long conflated two partly distinct forms of transnational militancy, namely, foreign fighter activism and anti-Western terrorism. While al-Qaida has sought to perpetrate mass-casualty attacks against Western noncombatants, most foreign fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya used relatively conventional tactics in confined theaters of war. This, I argue, was not a minor tactical dispute, but a deep-seated ideological disagreement that has shaped entire organizations and inspired numerous debates, some of them public and acrimonious. At the core of the dispute were two different jihad doctrines: The “classical jihad doctrine,” articulated by Abdallah Azzam in the 1980s, advocated restricted military involvement in other Muslims’ wars of national liberation. The “global jihad doctrine,” developed by Usama bin Ladin in the 1990s, prescribed unrestricted global war against the United States and its allies.