ABSTRACT
Al-Qaeda not driven by ideology' is the conclusion reached by a Pentagon intelligence team, whilst according to Stephen Schwartz, 'Osama bin Laden and his followers belong to a puritanical variant of Islam known as Wahhabism, an extreme and intolerant Islamo-Fascist sect that became the official cult of Saudi Arabia'. In contrast to the territorial struggle against a specific enemy that underlies, for example, the reality of Palestinian rejectionist movements, al-Qaeda's mission is first and foremost transnational, neither limited to any specific nation-state context nor driven by the needs and aspirations of specific peoples. The horrors inflicted upon New York and Washington had scarcely unfolded before the United States quickly moved to declare an open-ended 'war against terrorism'. Terrorism at the hands of Islamists is thereby transformed into the terminal stage of a general Muslim malady with al-Qaeda a particularly malignant development of the condition.
