ABSTRACT
Al Qaeda (‘The Base’) was founded in 1989 by Osama bin Laden and Abdallah Azzam.1 Bin Laden is the seventeenth son of a wealthy building contractor who made a fortune carrying out major construction contracts in Saudi Arabia. Azzam was a teacher of Islamic Law at King AbdulAziz University, Jeddah, who exerted considerable influence on Osama bin Laden while he was a student at the same university. Azzam followed in the footsteps of Sayyid Qutb, an influential Egyptian Islamist, and taught that the world is divided between those who live according to the shari’a (Islamic religious law) and those who do not submit to Islamic law.
