Declaration of Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders

Abstract

Osama bin Laden, leader of al Qaeda and the world's best-known terrorist, was born in Saudi Arabia in 1957 into a large family of wealth and privilege. His father, Muhammad bin Laden, was a self-made billionaire of Yemeni origin whose construction business held a dominant position in the kingdom and who had established close personal relations with the Saudi royal family. Osama grew up in an atmosphere marked by a religious piety rooted in the fundamentalist Wahhabist tradition that is dominant in Saudi Arabia. At seventeen, he entered the Management and Economics School of King Abd al-Aziz University, where he was a somewhat mediocre business student. While at the university, he fell under the influence of two important Islamist religious scholars, Muhammad Qutb, the brother of Sayyid Qutb, and Abdallah Azzam, a Palestinian member of the Muslim Brotherhood who played an important theoretical and practical role in the development of the modern jihadist movement.