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At the outset I identified this as a preliminary paper. I have thus far attempted to identify the salient features of the religion of bin Ladin. I have proposed that it has grown out of a cultic milieu of revolutionary movements that are organized around an exclusive interpretation and novel application of the Islamic concept of jihad. I have mentioned the context of persecution in Egypt that provoked a popular and relatively peaceful Muslim Brotherhood movement to turn to armed struggle as the sole means of bringing about what Joachim Wach called "ultimate reality." It is clear from the historical context and religious milieu of the jihadist groups that my phrase "the religion of bin Ladin" stands for much more than the statements and purposes of one man. The globalization of the jihadist movement under the aegis of Al Qa'ida could not have intensified so rapidly had it not been for the convergence of several enabling factors that included: the commitment of Abdullah Azzam to recruit members from several countries and of bin Ladin to set up military training camps for jihadists from Muslim countries throughout the world; the fortuitous meeting of bin Ladin in Afghanistan and the Egyptian revolutionaries, who lent their organizational talents to Al-Qa'ida; the failure of Egypt under Nasser to permit the Muslim Brotherhood to become part of the political process; the power of bin Ladin through words and deeds to present himself as a messianic figure capable of redressing the grievances of the Muslim population and reversing their collective humiliation by defeating the "Crusaders and the Jews" he believes have caused it. And finally, I have attempted to demonstrate that underneath the differences in content, place, time, and milieu, there is an enduring "genotype" of violent religious movements that share more defining features with each other than they do with their parent religious traditions.

What remains to be addressed are the specifics of bin Ladin's message and the dynamic of his interaction with his intended audiences. Daniel Gressang IV recognizes that a terrorist "speaks" through his deeds, which have an impact out of proportion to the number of casualties, although they are grievious enough. I hope to present a clearer picture of the dialectic of terrorism in a messianic, revolutionary movement in the near future. Unfortunately, in very rare cases, a messiah bearing tidings of terror is embraced by his people, and his polarizing message provokes a catastrophic conflict. Bin Ladin has tried to convince a billion people occupying nearly half the world that the United States, as a symbol of secularism, materialism, and apostasy, threatens the future of Dar al-Islam, the ultimate establishment of the `abode of peace' where Islamic law prevails. Messiahs are terrifying because their message sometimes burns brighter after they die. If the message they preach is benign, a new religion may be born. If it incites to violence, the consequence may be war or recurring cycles of low intensity conflict.

The final question I hope to address in the near future is how can typologizing and understanding a new religious movement and assessing its potential for violent struggle or peaceful accommodation help us respond to the provocation of terror, a messianic message, and the insecurity posed by unpredictable assaults that bin Ladin's religion delivers. One small comfort in identifying bin Ladin as a type of messiah is that messiahs often raise expectations so high that they can never be attained. Attempting to achieve the collective salvation of a few hundred people is one thing, but attempting to achieve a new world order for the entire Muslim population is likely to set the bar too high. One hopes that these expectations of a transition to a more satisfying ultimate reality, will become routinized through the eventual rejection of armed struggle and a reinterpretation of jihad as a political, social, and spiritual struggle toward a more attainable ideal.

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A.F.C. Wallace studied hundreds of new religious movements and focused in particular on the Handsome Lake revitalization movement among the 19th century Seneca Indians that broke out after they were confined in reservations. He found that revitalization movements around the globe were engaged in changing a member's worldview, that is, his or her perception of "nature, society, culture, personality, and body image (266)." Jayne Docherty has written perceptively of the role of worldview in conflict analysis and resolution, particularly with respect to confrontations between new religious movements and the police. According to Docherty, human beings live in three worlds simultaneously:

Human beings are animals. They have a material body and they occupy a physical world. Human beings are also social or political animals. They form relationships with others, develop sophisticated patters of social behavior, and establish norms and values that re integrated into social institutions. Human beings are also creators of meaning. They create and use systems of symbols in order to construct explanations for everything they experience and everything they do.³⁴

Jayne Docherty and I both have work from the assumption that the symbolic world is a very important and neglected factor in conflicts between parties with different worldviews.³⁵ I believe that a rational understanding of the symbolic world of a religious movement may be the sine qua non for resolving worldview conflicts.³⁶ In a new paper, Daniel Gressang also focuses upon "the tone and content of symbolic and rhetorical messages" in his approach to assessing a group's propensity for terrorism. He assumes that terrorists are, "in their own fashion, rational actors," (12) that "motives drive terrorists." (11) Gressang understands acts of terror as an essential part of the interaction between terrorists' and their intended audiences. He argues for determining first, who the terrorists' core audience is, whether it is human or otherwordly. Following David C. Rapoport's studies of terrorist movements arising in the context of diverse religious traditions, Gressang notes that,

The depth, strength and source of religious beliefs, for example, speaks volumes of the degree of tolerance for violence, the shape and context of violence acceptance, and the overall willingness to consider violence as inherently justified. (14)

Following Rapoport's conclusions, Gressang argues that since not all religious traditions are alike, the form of violence a group employs differs with "belief and outlook," or what I would call its symbolic world (14). Gressang assumes that the beliefs and outlook of secular terrorists likewise predispose them to various kinds of violent acts (14). Thus, whether a terrorist movement is secular or religious, it acts purposively to further goals that are symbolically constructed and understood by its intended audience. The point I wish to emphasize is that it is the symbolic world of terrorist movements that must be rationally understood if we are to understand and accurately assess a group's motives, goals, and actions.

I propose that the conventional labeling of terrorist groups as "bizarre," their messages as "rambling," and their acts as "random"³⁷ be abandoned in favor of the thesis that their movements are socially constructed; that their worldview is meaningful and it is symbolically congruent with that of their intended audience; and that their acts are directed toward achieving an ultimate concern. I have defined ultimate concern as "that which a community lives by and professes a willingness to die for." Ultimate concern is also what sets religious violence apart from ordinary criminal behavior. Ultimacy, or ultimate concern, is also a general characteristic of most, if not all religions.³⁸

Catherine Wessinger identifies ultimate concern as the "religious goal or religious commitment...expressed within a belief system." (8) Ultimate concern is a significant feature of a group's shared symbolic world. It often is expressed as a utopian rule enjoyed by an elect group that will replace the unsatisfactory present order of things. Wessinger calls the utopian rule the "millennial kingdom" or a "collective salvation."³⁹ Because it organizes itself to achieve an ultimate concern, religious parties may tolerate a higher degree of suffering and a greater number of casualties than other types of adversaries.⁴⁰ By rationally understanding the ultimate concern of stigmatized or violent groups, outsiders can avoid unnecessarily provoking or persecuting them, or can, with sufficient time and patience, anticipate their shocking or violent actions.

The rational understanding of the destructive behavior of Jonestown, the Solar Temple, and Aum Shinrikyo by Maaga, Moore, Mayer, Introvigne, Melton, Watanabe, and Reader was achieved through their study of the material, social, and symbolic worldview of these unusual new religious movements. Jacqueline Stone and Ian Reader have concluded that a religious group that turns to violence to achieve its ultimate concern may primarily be motivated by the fear of failure to achieve the collective salvation they value above all other things.⁴¹ I have searched the symbolic expressions of religious groups to discover what archetypes they identify as their role models and what specific myths, or stories, they may choose to re-enact in their social and material worlds. Working with colleagues, I have attempted to understand the symbolic features of groups that have been tagged as potentially violent. In these cases a correct understanding of the group's intentions and ultimate concern helped defuse any potentially violent confrontation with civil authorities. Prof. Lonnie Kliever assisted the Garland, Texas, police department in understanding the worldview of Chen Tao, a Chinese messianic community, in order to determine whether or not the community planned to commit suicide on a date set by their messiah.⁴² In these cases where violence was avoided or where fear of violence proved groundless, scholars used categorical features derived from historical cases of violent movements to assess a new group's potential for violence.⁴³

Although these cases are few in number, they tend to confirm Wallace's observation that "events or happenings of various types have genotypical structures independent of local differences"⁴⁴-by which he meant that groups unconnected with one another share categorical features that can indicate how benign or dangerous a religious group may be.⁴⁵ He postulated that these features, or patterns, were based on "generic human attributes."⁴⁶ Wallace's finding conforms to the fundamental assumption of Mircea Eliade that human beings should be called homo religiousus.⁴⁷ Wallace, the skeptic, and Eliade, the grand theorist, differed in their methodologies but used a vast database of information compiled by ethnologists over time and from around the world. Based on their conclusion, it seems logical to regard religion a primary object of study, not as a subset of society or culture. The primacy of religion continues to be affirmed when one studies communities like the Muslim Brotherhood who proclaim that,

"Islam is `Creed and state, book and sword, and a way of life"

Hassan al-Banna ⁴⁸

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded was founded in 1928 as a peaceful Islamic revitalization movement, but after members suffered a state persecution in the 1960s, it split into several violent revolutionary organizations including the Islamic Group (Gama'a al-Islamiyyah) and Egyptian Jihad. They recruited among young, educated and disaffected men and were united in "the conviction that the use of force to push Egyptian society towards Islamic rule is a religious duty of Jihad."⁴⁹ Members of Egyptian Jihad and Usamah bin Ladin met during the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and united in the common cause of sending their message of obligatory jihad to the entire Muslim world.⁵⁰

The transnational jihadist religion of Usamah bin Ladin has similarities with historical movements of holy terror that have been elucidated by David C. Rapoport in his 1983 study of first century Jewish Sicarii, medieval Shi'a Islam Assassins, and nineteeth century Hindu Thugs, "Fear and Trembling in Three Religious Traditions." All three regarded terror as an imperative. The Assassins deliberately exposed themselves to martyrdom by killing with knives. All three groups terrorized populations by the boldness and unpredictability of their attacks. Although different from one another and from Al Qa'ida, these terrorists, unlike ordinary criminals, seemed not to fear death and may have even invited it.

What makes a terror movement so perplexing is that its members do not seem to act like you and me. Its message and behavior seems completely other. Yet, those who have encountered members of these religious groups before they commit mayhem describe them as ordinary, even exemplary, people (Moore, Balch, Mayer, Usher). Those who have met bin Ladin describe him as shy, soft-spoken, hospitable, concerned about the welfare of others, charitable, pious, and an otherwise exemplary person.⁵¹ Recently, terrorism experts confessed their surprise that the cells that carried out the suicide missions on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were composed of highly educated, middle class Muslims, some of whom like Muhammad Atta, the presumed mastermind of the plot, had not previously been active in Egyptian jihadist organizations.⁵² Experts had presumed that those who took on "suicide missions" were unemployed, unskilled, and probably depressed young men. Their profile of "suicide bombers" was belied by a Hamas videotape aired on CNN of a 23-year old "martyr" from the West Bank who was married, had three children, and appeared focused, happy, and economically comfortable. Clearly, members of Hamas and like organizations have succeeded in creating a parallel world in which normal people live normal lives, while exemplary members sacrifice themselves for the good of the community by volunteering to become a delivery system for bombs. This parallel world is tangible and real, but it is the deliberate and pious enactment of an even more real symbolic universe.

Jean-Francois Mayer coined the term, religiosite parallele to describe a violent movement's innovative use of selected elements from its parent religion for its own purposes. The Solar Temple, for example, claimed to inherit the mission of the medieval Order of the Knights Templar. Similarly, I believe that the jihadist leaders that joined bin Ladin to organize Al-Qa'ida's transnational network of holy warriors, claim to inherit the mission of the seventh-century followers of Muhammad. Aum Shinrikyo legitimated violence after adopting a tenet of Buddhism called poa and reinterpreting it as a mandate to kill non-members in order to bring about their salvation. Similarly, a fundamentalist Christian group called Zerephath-Horeb adopted a deviant interpretation of Genesis from the Christian Identity movement to justify the killing of homosexuals and minorities (Noble). So many cases of similar dynamics in divergent groups culling from various and unconnected parent religions and parallel traditions cannot be a coincidence, but a pattern. It is this pattern or genotype that bin Ladin's religion belongs to, rather than to Islam.

Often the earliest and most valuable information we can gain about a new religious movement is its use of symbolism, which is found in its pronouncements, practices, liturgy, sectarian documents, and semantics. It is this material that is most often dismissed by civil authorities as ancillary to the "hard information" they value. The "bible babble" of David Koresh, was disparaged by negotiators, but utilized by two religion scholars as a means of coaxing the Davidian messiah out of his fortified complex. Sometimes officials sequester or discard symbolic data. Jean Francois Mayer was at the site of Solar Temple deaths when a policeman approached him with an armful of documents and asked him if he knew what they meant. By chance, he was given access to the material and was able to analyze it. The police shared sequestered material on Heaven's Gate with Robert Balch after they learned he had studied the group several years earlier. But a group of scholars who were asked to advise the FBI about the Freemen's propensity for violence were given only selective briefings and had to obtain primary data on the armed group through other channels. The most recent statements of Al Qa'ida leaders have been removed from or heavily edited by the press after the National Security Advisor requested they not be aired. What is accessible to researchers may be only a small part of the group's symbolic world, but because they are gaining a little more knowledge with each breaking case, they are beginning to better understand the semantics of religious violence.

An empirically-derived taxonomy of new religious movements, has been proposed recently by Catherine Wessinger. Wallace divided movements into "millennial," "messianic," and "nativist," admitting that the types overlapped. Indeed, one could argue that Wallace really spoke of three aspects of one genotype, which is led by a messiah and attempts "to construct a more satisfying culture" for a people who have lost control of their destiny.⁵³(265) Wessinger calls revitalization movements "millennialism." She defines millennialism as "belief in an imminent transition to the millennial kingdom," which is also identified as the community's " collective salvation." Salvation can be attained in a progressive manner by working "in harmony with a divine or superhuman plan"(9). Or, collective salvation may be attained catastrophically by a transformational event, "often caused by a superhuman agent." Progressive millennialists may try to achieve their goal peacefully or through violence, but they are optimistic that over time the plan will prevail. Catastrophic millennialists, like the Seneca messiahs, receive a message from a deity that the transition to the collective salvation is imminent.

Of greater relevance to the religion of bin Ladin, the religion of jihad is a type Wessinger calls "revolutionary millennialism." Revolutionary millennial movements "are motivated by a sense that they are persecuted. They believe that revolutionary violence is the means to become liberated from their persecutors and to set up the righteous government and society"(33). I have described an American revolutionary movement called the Freemen movement that engaged in an 81-day standoff with he government in Jordan, Montana in 1994 (Wessinger 323-344). Revolutionary millennialists expect the world to change or to change the world by their actions. These actions may be symbolic and magical and intended to set up a parallel society according to the laws of a divine lawgiver. Or they may be physical and violent in order to attain the same goal of establishing a purified world governed by divine laws. The jihadist movement began in 1928 with the establishment in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood, who conceived of a righteous society that would follow the laws of shari'a Islamic jurisprudence based on the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet. The Brotherhood interpreted jihad as a struggle to revive a pure Islam on which a new society could be based. Only after the Brotherhood was brutally repressed and its members endured martyrdom under secular governments did a leading theorist, Sayyid Qutb embrace violence as a mandate for all Muslims who were not labeled apostates by the movement.

Qutb, a prolific writer and scholar, influenced subsequent generations of educated and underemployed youth in Egypt who formed new revolutionary groups devoted to a holy war against the secular state. Among the groups that split from the Muslim Brotherhood to take up violence was Gama'at al-Islamiyyah and Egyptian Jihad, both of which are probably aligned with bin Ladin's Al Qa'ida network. One Egyptian jihadist group, the Vanguards of Conquest, may have conceived of and executed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The leader of the Vanguards is one of bin Ladin's closest associates, al-Azahiri. In his first televised video address to the world after the attacks, bin Ladin referred to the perpetrators as martyrs and vanguards of Islam.

Within the parallel tradition or cultic milieu of the jihadist movement of the last 80 years, the most important innovation has been the emergence of a global jihadist network It was inspired by the life and actions of Abdullah Azzam, an expatriate Palestinian scholar-revolutionary. Azzam became disillusioned with the relatively loose morals of Palestinian militants and sojourned in Egypt and Jordan, teaching religion and recruiting committed young men for the war to repel the infidel Soviets from A. d young revolutionaries was Usamah ibn Mohammad bin Ladin, whose unique contribution to the Afghan cause was his enormous fortune of some $300,000,000 that he generously used to finance the MAK, Azzam's recruitment center for a multinational force of mujahidin. Because most mujahidin came from the Mideast, they are known as Arab Afghans.

Among the Arab recruits, the members of the Egyptian jihad movement were most committed to overthrowing their existing government. They broke with Azzam and bin Ladin joined them, but remained friendly with his mentor, Azzam, until he was assassinated in 1996 by an unknown faction among mujahidin residing in Pakistan.

In 1987, bin Ladin reputedly experienced a "vision" of a global Islamic nation and in 1988 he set up a training camp for the Arab Afghans in Afghanistan. According to a later interview, bin Ladin says he was concerned that after the Afghan War ended and relative peace was achieved in Israel, a generation would grow up without experience of jihad.⁵⁴ As a result of this fear, he intensified his efforts to inspire his fellow Muslims to fight to achieve his version of collective salvation, the transnational Islamic nation ummah he envisioned. According to bin Ladin, Muslims have suffered eighty years of humiliation and repression under post-colonial secular regimes, who are exponents of American cultural and military hegemony over the Muslim nation. Like the early Caliphate established by Mohammad's Companions, the millennial Caliphate of bin Ladin will rule by the Qur'an and sharia. In this righteous kingdom all apostates, hypocrites, and infidels will be eradicated. The Land of the Two Mosques and the Dome of the Rock will be cleansed of the presence of "the Crusaders and the Jews." This kingdom will be achieved progressively over generations, just as the first transnational Islamic civilization was achieved through holy war and the defeat of two empires, the Byzantine, which he calls "Rome", and the Persian. According to bin Ladin, the mujahidin in his holy war have already conquered the present-day analogues of the Romans, whom he identifies with the Soviets. Next, they will conquer the Persians, whom he identifies with the United States, which is the symbol of the Western world and their clients the Jews.⁵⁵ The war over an enemy with superior technology will be won by the superior moral power of the mujahidin, who are willing to endure martyrdom-indeed, they long for it. Abd-al-Bari Atwan, the editor of the London-based press, al-Quds al-Arabi, speculates that Bin Ladin also longs for martyrdom.⁵⁶

Usamah bin-Ladin's vision of collective salvation for the Muslim ummah is categorically messianic. Messianic movements that have turned to terrorism in recent years include that of Asahara Shoko, which called itself Aum Shinrikyo, or Aum Supreme Truth. Shoko's movement legitimated the killing, poisoning, and gassing of non-members in order to save them, according to his special interpretation of a Tibetan Buddhist doctrine.⁵⁷ Another messianic group called Heaven's Gate carried out a "transit" to a space vehicle following the Hale-Bopp comet in March, 1997, by killing themselves. For purposes of analysis, a messiah may arise out of any religion or cultic milieu that teaches that this world or age will end and a new age will replace it. A messiah is one chosen to renew the world of his or her particular people. Islam began with Muhammad's institution of the word of Allah in his Constitution of Medinah, which means `new city'. The Qur'an speaks of the struggle of Muhammad against unbelievers, scoffers, and hypocrites, who sought to perpetuate the corruptions of the past. Muhammad, whom Muslims revere as God's ultimate Messenger, is a type of messiah. Since the advent of the Prophet, Islam has experienced many movements of renewal, incited by scholars who like Muhammad have struggled to purify the ummah and lead it back to the straight path of collective salvation. They include the eighteenth-century Arab reformer, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who struggled against the ignorance and idolatries that he believed had corrupted the holy land of Makkah and Madinah where Muhammad lived and established Islam. This geographical region is regarded as sacred space and foreigners are forbidden to trespass in the homeland of the Hijaz in Arabia. Bin Ladin is committed to cleansing the Arabian peninsula and Jerusalem of foreign trespass, because these are the lands of Makkah and Madinah and the Dome of the Rock, the holiest of all Muslim shrines. The radical monotheism of the Wahhabi renewal movement is taught in the schools of Saudi Arabia, where bin-Ladin grew up, but bin-Ladin believes that the Saudi rulers have become hypocrites, which the Qur'an identifies as the false followers of Mohammad in Madinah who plotted against him. Like Mohammad, bin-Ladin believes he must struggle against the Saudi rulers, as did the true followers, whom the Qur'an identifies as the "vanguard" or the Ansar.⁵⁸ Thus, we see these names used in the titles of jihadist groups in Egypt and Palestine and of institutions and training camps in Afghanistan. Bin Ladin's closest associate is rumored to be an Egyptian who founded a jihadist group called the Vanguard of Conquest in Egypt. In a televised video statement aired on the day American forces began bombing in Afghanistan, bin Ladin pays tribute to the September eleventh hijackers, saying: "God has blessed a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America [emphasis added]."⁵⁹ In the same statement he denounces the "hypocrites" who denounced the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Although the House of Saud institutionalized the Wahhabi branch of Islam in Arabia, bin Ladin identifies them as infidels because they admitted the presence of foreign troops during the Gulf War, an American military contingent that remains.

Bin Ladin's stated purpose is "to liberate the land of Islam from the infidels and establish the law of Allah."⁶⁰ As a type of purifying messiah, bin Ladin follows in the footsteps of the Prophet, as well as al-Wahhab.

In fact, bin Ladin's messianic vision encompasses potentially a world Islamic rule. Another close associate from Kuwait, Sulaiman abu-Ghaith, reportedly preached a sermon in Kuwait that predicted the arrival of "a new leader named Mohammed, who would usher in a new era of peace. That leader would be called a terrorist by the world's rulers,"⁶¹ according to Abu Ghaith.

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