What does it mean to “make history?” A certain kind of history is created when groups initiate violence in the name of a sacred ideal. In the 1990s, some hypothesized that we had reached the "end of history." On September 11, 2001, Osama Bin Laden proved otherwise. He acted to introduce himself—representing the will of Allah—into the historical process. What followed might be called the resurrection of history.

Bin Laden’s thinking grew out of the ideology of his mentor, Abdullah Azzam, the first theoretician to “turn martyrdom and self-sacrifice into a formative ethos for future al-Qaida members.” Because of Azzam, self-sacrifice became a “moral code that al-Qaida used to justify suicide missions against its enemies.” Azzam’s essay, “Martyrs: The Building Blocks of Nations,” contains a full-blown philosophy of history.

Azzam wrote that the life of the Muslim Ummah is solely dependent on the “ink of its scholars and the blood of its martyrs.” The map of 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 the “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 articulated what he believed was required if Islam and Allah were to transform societies and create history.

These passages, however, also contain the narrative that guided the thought of the Twentieth Century. Men like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mao put forth ideologies and established their reputations on a “foundation of cripples and corpses.” By creating an edifice of skulls, they sought glory for themselves, their ideologies and their nations.

David Starr Jordan discusses a painting of Napoleon called “A Scene in Hell” (Une Scene dans l’Enfer) depicting the great marshal with “arms and face unmoved.” The picture is filled with the faces of soldiers—men “sent to death before their time by Napoleon’s unbridled ambition”—expressing “every form of reproach.”

Four million there were, Jordan says, more than half of them French, youth without blemish, made “flesh for the cannon.” Over Napoleon’s career, campaign followed campaign—against enemies, against neutrals, against friends. Conscription followed victory, conscription followed defeat, again conscription and conscription.

“Let them die with arms in their hands,” Napoleon said. “Their death is glorious. You can always fill the places with soldiers. A great soldier like me doesn’t care a tinker’s damn for the lives of a million men.” Napoleon—like Azzam’s ideal terrorist--created history by building an edifice of blood and skulls upon a foundation of cripples and corpses. Napoleon dreamt of greatness for himself and France. He was one of those "rare founders of nations who became the architect of glory," creating history by generating a sea of blood.

What shall we call political leaders who generate slaughter? Conquerors, great leaders or mass-murderers?