there they established branches in Anatolia and
southeastern Europe. In 1925 the new republican
government of Mustafa Kemal atatUrk (d. 1938)
officially banned the Qadiri order, as well as all
other tariqas, in tUrkey. To the west, the Qadiris
spread from morocco southward into Mauritania
and West aFrica in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Among the most prominent members to arise
in that region were al-Mukhtar ibn Ahmad al-
Kunti (d. 1811), a revered teacher and saint who
inspired Usman dan Fodio (d. 1817), the founder
of the sokoto caliphate in Nigeria. The most
famous Algerian Qadiri leader was abd al-qadir
al-Jizairi (d. 1883), who led the resistance against
French colonial expansion in North Africa until
he surrendered in 1847. In the early 20th century
a Turkish Qadiri branch joined with a branch of
the riFai sUFi order to form the Qadiri-Rifai Sufi
Order, which now has branches in North America,
Bosnia, and aUstralia.
See also asceticism; hanbali legal school;
ottoman dynasty; sUFism.
Further reading: Bradford G. Martin, Muslim Brother-
hoods in 19th Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); S. A. A. Rizvi, A History
of Sufism in India. 2 vols. (New Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal, 1978–1983); J. Spencer Trimingham, The
Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971).
al-Qaida (also al-Qaeda; Arabic: the base,
foundation)
The most infamous of the radical Islamic organiza-
tions to emerge in the late 20th/early 21st century
is al-Qaida. It gained worldwide notoriety for the
suicide attacks conducted by 19 of its members
against the World Trade Center in New York City
and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on Sep-
tember 11, 2001, that resulted in the immediate
deaths of 2,974 civilians and rescue workers, plus
countless other victims in the United States and
abroad in the aftermath of the attacks. The effects
of this catastrophe were still being felt globally
nearly a decade later.
Al-Qaida’s beginnings date back to the mid-
1980s amidst the chaos caused by the Soviet
Union’s 1979 occupation of aFghanistan and
the civil war that ensued there when the Soviets
finally left in 1989. Al-Qaida’s founding members
were drawn from young arab volunteers who
wanted to assist the aFghan mujahidin in their
fight against the Soviet military and its Afghan
communist allies. They created the Arab Mujahi-
din Services Bureau (Maktab al-khadamat li’l-muja-
hidin al-Arab, MAK) in 1984, based in Peshawar,
pakistan. Its leaders were Usama bin ladin (b.
1957), one of the wealthy sons of Muhammad bin
Ladin (1906–67), saUdi arabia’s leading building
contractor, and Ayman al-Zawahiri (b. 1951), a
surgeon who came from a prominent Egyptian
family of doctors, politicians, and scholars. Al-
Zawahiri was a leader in the Jihad Group that had
assassinated Egyptian president anWar al-sadat
in 1981; in the 1980s he was seeking to recon-
stitute the group in exile after serving time in
prison. Bin Ladin and al-Zawahiri had both been
inspired by the radical Islamic ideology of sayyid
qUtb (d. 1966), a leading member of the mUslim
brotherhood who had been executed in 1966 for
conspiring against Egyptian president Jamal abd
al-nasir (r. 1953–70). Another person who had
greatly influenced the Arab Mujahidin, especially
bin Ladin, was Abd Allah Azzam (1941–89), a
charismatic Palestinian member of the Muslim
Brotherhood and an advocate of global Jihad and
martyrdom. He had first met bin Ladin while
serving as imam at the King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud
University mosque in Jeddah, saUdi arabia, dur-
ing the early 1980s. He subsequently became an
effective recruiter of Arab volunteers to fight in
Afghanistan.
The Afghan Mujahidin and their Arab allies,
funded by Saudi Arabia and the United states
through the Pakistani intelligence agency (ISI),
considered the Soviet withdrawal from Afghani-
stan a God-given victory. The Arab jihadists, whoK 564 al-Qaida