Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (34 page)

George and Bill both helped me to navigate the rough waters of Washington politics, giving me an inside sense of when to try to push policy in a better direction and when to hold my breath.

I
remember the first time I saw Mecca as if it were yesterday. I was almost fifteen when I accompanied my father on Umra (the lesser pilgrimage, which, unlike Hajj, can be made at any time of the year). Years later I performed the Hajj, one of the five Pillars of Islam. There were well over a million pilgrims that year, each clothed only in a white sheet tied around the waist with a piece of rope. I felt an amazing sense of community and brotherhood as I stood with these pilgrims gathered from all over the globe, all dressed alike, signifying our equality before God.

We performed the tawaf, walking counterclockwise round the ancient Kaaba, the most sacred site in all Islam, and the place toward which all Muslims turn when they pray. My father had taught me about our ancestry, and the historical role the Hashemites had performed as guardians of Mecca, but to actually be there and to touch the Kaaba left me speechless. I sat down, humbled and overwhelmed, waiting to begin the afternoon prayer. I could hear a faint hum, and felt that I was present before God.

Islam is a religion that requires believers to perform daily rituals that act as a framework for the exercise of faith. But its deeper meaning lies in the spiritual values it awakens within its faithful, and the way believers come to manifest these values in daily life. The five Pillars of Islam consist of the Shahadatayn, or the acknowledgment of God and of Mohammad as God’s messenger; prayer, which Muslims are instructed to perform five times a day, symbolizing their attachment to God; Al Zakat, giving alms to the destitute and the poor, a sign of detachment from the world; fasting in the holy month of Ramadan, to reveal detachment from the ego; and performing the Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca.

I am troubled by the way in which many today view Islam, as a strict system of rules, instead of reflecting on the deeper meanings of our faith. We should think about how we can help a neighbor who is in trouble, a colleague at work who needs our advice, or a family member who needs our love and support. I feel at peace when I say my prayers, but I am also comforted when I can help others and show compassion and kindness. Islam stands for justice, equality, fairness, and the opportunity to live a meaningful and good life. These virtues have unfortunately been corroded by empty adherence to reactionary interpretations of our sacred texts.

When I pray, I often ask for protection for my loved ones and family, my government, my soldiers, and my country. As the head of a country, I pray for my people, for improvement in their standard of living and health. Sometimes I pray for specific things, like creating more jobs for young people. And sometimes I even pray for rain.

One of the things in the last two decades that has saddened me the most is the misinterpretation of a great faith as a result of the misguided actions of a very few. An example is the meaning of the term “jihad.” Many associate this term with violence and war, yet jihad literally means “struggle” and refers primarily to the internal struggle to better oneself. It is a struggle for self-improvement but also a wider struggle to improve the lives of others around you. Victory does not come as the result of a single battle, but as the result of many small triumphs throughout the day, some of which may be so small as to be almost invisible to others.

I am pained by the twisting of my religion by a small band of misguided fanatics. Such people embrace a deviant form of Islam. While claiming to act in its name, they are in reality just murderers and thugs. They constitute an unrepresentative minority of the 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, but they have had a disproportionate impact on how the faith is perceived. These people are called takfiris, which in Arabic means “those who accuse others of being heretics.” They rely on ignorance, resentment, and a distorted promise of achieving martyrdom to spread their ideology, turning their backs on over a thousand years of Quranic scholarship and commentary in the name of what they presume to be the authentic ways of seventh-century Arabia.

Takfiris are a small part of a larger fundamentalist movement, the Salafi movement. Salafi ideology (Salafi in Arabic means “going back to the past”) proposes to go back to the “fundamentals” of the early faith, but the majority of Salafis do not condone terrorism or the killing of innocent civilians. They declare total war on their enemies and believe that people who kill themselves in suicide attacks go straight to heaven. For them there are no limits on how war can be waged against their enemies, and they disregard traditional Islam’s moral codes, enshrined in the Quran and in the Hadiths. Almost all Muslims are aware of the tradition set in the early days of Islam in the seventh century by the first Muslim Caliph, Abu Baker Al Sediq, whose instructions to his armies were to not kill women or children or elderly people and to not cut any tree that bears fruit. In what can be considered the Muslim “Geneva Conventions,” Abu Baker’s first act as Caliph said:

The actions of the takfiris have nothing to do with Islam and its message. Islam celebrates life; they seek to destroy it.

Takfiris have turned their back on this tradition of clemency and compassion. They aim to overthrow governments across the Arab world by violent means in order to declare a worldwide “Islamic” republic. For the sake of what they imagine to be Islam, they are killing Muslims and corrupting Islamic ethics, and they also seek to destroy the world embraced by 99.99 percent of all Muslims.

The takfiri movement, which can be traced back to the revival of a doctrinaire jihadi tendency in Egypt in the 1970s and had connections to the 1979 uprising in Mecca, would spawn many violent terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. Takfiris are drawn to wars where Muslims are under attack, and they swarmed into Afghanistan. Many, including Osama bin Laden, learned about war, strategy, death, and terror while fighting the Soviet occupation forces in the 1980s. After that conflict ended in the early 1990s, large groups of these fighters returned to their native lands, bringing their new “skills” with them.

In Jordan we have been following the activities of these takfiris for many years. A large number of them flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s and to Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s. After France and the UK, Jordan was the largest contributor of troops to the UN forces in the former Yugoslavia, sending three battalions, or over three thousand troops, from 1993 to 1996. A Jordanian general even commanded UN forces in Croatia. We saw takfiri fighters coming to take part in the conflict, and we knew we were facing a new and lethal combination of nationalism, religious extremism, and violence.

Along with veterans of Afghanistan who returned to Jordan and were linked to the so-called Prophet Mohammad’s Army, we also had to cope with a group of fighters returning from Chechnya. Jordan is home to a sizable community of Chechens, and some of these, in addition to other Jordanians, went to support their kin in what they saw as a jihad against the Russians. So in the 1990s we faced a new problem in the form of highly trained mujahideen fighters who had come home from Afghanistan and Chechnya. Unfortunately, some groups knew all too well how to use their skills, and they began carrying out terrorist attacks throughout the region.

When these takfiris began to unleash a more wide-ranging campaign of terror at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we knew exactly who we were dealing with. Their brutality came as a shock to many in the West and prompted some people to lump all Muslims in with them, using terms such as “Islamo-fascism” or “Islamic extremists.” But these labels insult the faith and intelligence of 23 percent of the world’s population. I repeatedly tell my friends in the West, “Do not be taken in by their pretense of religion. These people are murderers, pure and simple. Be careful not to paint their deeds with such a broad brush that you would seem to include the entire Muslim world.”

 

The first time I was personally threatened by Al Qaeda was in the summer of 2000. I had decided to take a short vacation with my family, and we had chosen the Greek islands. On June 22, 2000, I flew from Amman to Rhodes with my son Hussein, who was then five, and my daughter Iman, then three. Rania, who was pregnant with Salma, was scheduled to join us in Greece the next day. Also with me were my brother Ali, who was responsible for my personal security, and two of my sisters.

As we flew into Diagoras airport on Rhodes, I looked down at the rocky mountains and ancient buildings below. Famous as the site of one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, the Colossus of Rhodes, a gigantic statue that once stood near the harbor, this historic island had not been immune to the conflicts of the Middle East. Part of the Byzantine Empire, it was conquered by the Muslim warrior Muawiyah I in the seventh century and recaptured for the Byzantines in the First Crusade four centuries later. It was ruled after that by a fierce band of warrior knights, who were driven out in the sixteenth century by the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent. In the twentieth century the island had been the scene of peace negotiations between my great-grandfather, Abdullah I, and the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. The talks resulted in the armistice agreements of 1949 that produced a cease-fire between the newly formed state of Israel and its Arab neighbors.

We drove from the airport to the harbor, where I had arranged to borrow a yacht from a Saudi friend, a beautiful 177-foot craft with a dark blue hull and a white superstructure. We set sail that afternoon, gliding across the clear blue water of the Mediterranean, followed at a discreet distance by a Greek coast guard vessel. Since we would have to pick up Rania from the same spot the next day, we decided not to go far and sailed around the coast to the town of Lindos.

As we approached the harbor I saw a cluster of white houses huddled around the base of a massive rock, with an ancient acropolis perched at the top. A few people gathered as our yacht pulled up to the dock. We spent a peaceful evening in this small island town. In the morning we went back to pick up Rania.

We had a few hours to wait, so Ali and I left the children with their aunts, rented Harley-Davidson motorbikes, and set off to explore the island. We drove around the dusty roads and small villages and got back just as Rania arrived. We set sail again not long after that, heading for Halki, a small island with just three hundred inhabitants. We had planned to sail for two days through the Greek islands, stopping at Symi, Tilos, and Nisyros before arriving at Santorini, famous for its black volcanic beaches and dazzling white houses.

Around five o’clock in the afternoon I was relaxing with my wife and young children on deck, enjoying the beautiful scenery, when a call came from Amman. I went belowdecks to the communications center and picked up the telephone. On the other end was the head of intelligence. “We have received reports that a group of Al Qaeda assassins are planning to attack your boat when you arrive in Santorini,” he said. “You have to turn around immediately.”

He told me that the terrorists intended to strike our yacht with rocket-propelled grenades, and said they might be planning a suicide attack, which would involve drawing up alongside the yacht and blowing up their boat to destroy the one carrying me and my family. (This technique was used some four months later, on October 12, when suicide bombers attacked the destroyer USS
Cole
in the port of Aden, in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors.)

As a husband and father, I was furious that these terrorists had threatened my family. Although my first instinct was to fight back, I agreed with my brother Ali that it would be wisest to turn the boat around and get out of there as quickly as possible.

We did not want to cause a panic onboard, so we had to come up with a good reason for the sudden change of plan. As Rania was pregnant, we told the crew that she was having complications and that we would have to cancel the cruise and return to Rhodes. We alerted the airport, and our plane was waiting on the tarmac when we reached the harbor. Once we were airborne, I called the head of intelligence and told him to inform the Greek security services of what he knew. We never found out how Al Qaeda discovered I was in Greece; our best guess was that a local informant had passed on intelligence. Because of Jordan’s moderation and its active role in pursuing regional peace and promoting a culture of tolerance among members of different civilizations and faiths, I was viewed by Al Qaeda as a threat.

By this time we had been fighting Al Qaeda for several years, working with our allies to stop their plots across the region, and this may have led to their plot to kill me. It was not personal; they were trying to strike at a larger target. The Hashemite lineage has always commanded respect across the Arab and Muslim world, but our traditional moderation, coupled with our openness to the West, has often made us a target of extremists. By killing me they hoped to kill ninety years of Hashemite rule in Jordan, and more than a thousand years of leadership in Arabia. Part of Al Qaeda’s agenda is to overthrow all Arab regimes and replace them with its fanatic and unorthodox vision of government.

The seeds of Al Qaeda’s violent radicalism were planted in the region in the turbulent year of 1979, when three events took place that would echo through the decades. In January the shah of Iran fled the developing revolution and was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini, who gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran’s Islamic Revolution inspired and energized radicals throughout the region. Then, on November 20, several hundred radicals seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The capture of Islam’s most holy site by a group of armed extremists stunned the Muslim world. Their leader, a Saudi named Juhayman al-Otaibi, claimed that the Saudi government was corrupt and un-Islamic, and that the Mahdi, a foretold and awaited Islamic leader and descendant of the Prophet Mohammad, had returned to take over the country. The rebels were eventually driven from the mosque and Juhayman and many of his coconspirators were publicly beheaded. The rebellion was over. But its implications lingered on.