On September 11, 2001, Osama Bin Laden demonstrated that history had not ended. He introduced himself—representing the will of Allah—into the historical process. What followed in the wake of September 11 was the resurrection of history.

Bin Laden’s ideology grew out of the thinking of Abdullah Azzam. who turned martyrdom and self-sacrifice into a "formative ethos for future al-Qaida members.” Self-sacrifice became a “moral code that al-Qaida used to justify suicide mission" (see Azzam’s essay, “Martyrs: The Building Blocks of Nations").

Azzam states that the life of the Muslim Ummah is solely dependent on the “ink of its scholars and the blood of its martyrs.” History is colored with two lines: One of them black, “what the scholar wrote with the ink of his pen.” And the other red, “what the martyr wrote with his blood.” Glory, Azzam says, does not build its lofty edifice “except with skulls.” Honor and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of “cripples and corpses.”

Founders of nations and “architects of glory,” Azzam says, are few. Those who think they can change reality without “blood sacrifices and invalids, without pure, innocent souls,” do not understand. Those who wish to achieve glory must pay its price: sweat and “seas of blood.”   

Azzam’s treatise articulates what is required if Islam and Allah are to transform societies and create history.

Azzam's theory embodies the idea that guided the course of Twentieth Century "history." Leaders like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mao established their ideologies on a “foundation of cripples and corpses.” Building an edifice of skulls, they sought glory for themselves, their ideologies and their nations.

What are we to call those who died—were slaughtered—in the name of the ideologies. Shall we call them martyrs or heroes, sacrificial victims--or simply victims?

What shall we call political leaders who generate slaughter in the name of propagating an ideology? Conquerors, great leaders or mass-murderers?

What are the names of those entities that justify and generated slaughter? In the First World War, they were called France and Great Britain and Germany. Moving forward, slaughter was undertaken in the name Communism or Nazism or "the Emperor." Then came "Al Qaeda." 

Names change, but the dream remains the same. Societies slaughter in order to create "history." Blood is shed in order to be written up by the "ink of the scholar." Mass-murders and historians exist in a symbiotic relationship. You can't have one without the other.

A certain kind of history comes into being when a societal group initiates slaughter in the name of a sacred ideal. Historians (colluding with those who generate slaughter) establish the significance of historical events by “counting skulls.” The purpose of death and destruction is to confer reality upon leaders, nations and ideologies. Surely, human beings imagine, that which can generate such carnage must be real.

Dead and mangled bodies—cripples and corpses—attest to the reality of some “thing” that has produced them. What could generate such frenetic activity, prodigious expenditures of human energy and material capital? Each episode of slaughter testifies to the reality of some “thing” in the name of which the violence was undertaken. Surely, that for which millions of people have died could not be no-thing.