Our Last Best Chance Part 10

Along with veterans of Afghanistan who returned to Jordan and were linked to the so-called Prophet Mohammad's Army, we also had to cope with a group of fighters returning from Chechnya. Jordan is home to a sizable community of Chechens, and some of these, in addition to other Jordanians, went to support their kin in what they saw as a jihad against the Russians. So in the 1990s we faced a new problem in the form of highly trained mujahideen fighters who had come home from Afghanistan and Chechnya. Unfortunately, some groups knew all too well how to use their skills, and they began carrying out terrorist attacks throughout the region.

When these takfiris began to unleash a more wide-ranging campaign of terror at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we knew exactly who we were dealing with. Their brutality came as a shock to many in the West and prompted some people to lump all Muslims in with them, using terms such as "Islamo-fascism" or "Islamic extremists." But these labels insult the faith and intelligence of 23 percent of the world's population. I repeatedly tell my friends in the West, "Do not be taken in by their pretense of religion. These people are murderers, pure and simple. Be careful not to paint their deeds with such a broad brush that you would seem to include the entire Muslim world."

The first time I was personally threatened by Al Qaeda was in the summer of 2000. I had decided to take a short vacation with my family, and we had chosen the Greek islands. On June 22, 2000, I flew from Amman to Rhodes with my son Hussein, who was then five, and my daughter Iman, then three. Rania, who was pregnant with Salma, was scheduled to join us in Greece the next day. Also with me were my brother Ali, who was responsible for my personal security, and two of my sisters.

As we flew into Diagoras airport on Rhodes, I looked down at the rocky mountains and ancient buildings below. Famous as the site of one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, the Colossus of Rhodes, a gigantic statue that once stood near the harbor, this historic island had not been immune to the conflicts of the Middle East. Part of the Byzantine Empire, it was conquered by the Muslim warrior Muawiyah I in the seventh century and recaptured for the Byzantines in the First Crusade four centuries later. It was ruled after that by a fierce band of warrior knights, who were driven out in the sixteenth century by the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent. In the twentieth century the island had been the scene of peace negotiations between my great-grandfather, Abdullah I, and the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. The talks resulted in the armistice agreements of 1949 that produced a cease-fire between the newly formed state of Israel and its Arab neighbors.

We drove from the airport to the harbor, where I had arranged to borrow a yacht from a Saudi friend, a beautiful 177-foot craft with a dark blue hull and a white superstructure. We set sail that afternoon, gliding across the clear blue water of the Mediterranean, followed at a discreet distance by a Greek coast guard vessel. Since we would have to pick up Rania from the same spot the next day, we decided not to go far and sailed around the coast to the town of Lindos.

As we approached the harbor I saw a cl.u.s.ter of white houses huddled around the base of a ma.s.sive rock, with an ancient acropolis perched at the top. A few people gathered as our yacht pulled up to the dock. We spent a peaceful evening in this small island town. In the morning we went back to pick up Rania.

We had a few hours to wait, so Ali and I left the children with their aunts, rented Harley-Davidson motorbikes, and set off to explore the island. We drove around the dusty roads and small villages and got back just as Rania arrived. We set sail again not long after that, heading for Halki, a small island with just three hundred inhabitants. We had planned to sail for two days through the Greek islands, stopping at Symi, Tilos, and Nisyros before arriving at Santorini, famous for its black volcanic beaches and dazzling white houses.

Around five o'clock in the afternoon I was relaxing with my wife and young children on deck, enjoying the beautiful scenery, when a call came from Amman. I went belowdecks to the communications center and picked up the telephone. On the other end was the head of intelligence. "We have received reports that a group of Al Qaeda a.s.sa.s.sins are planning to attack your boat when you arrive in Santorini," he said. "You have to turn around immediately."

He told me that the terrorists intended to strike our yacht with rocket-propelled grenades, and said they might be planning a suicide attack, which would involve drawing up alongside the yacht and blowing up their boat to destroy the one carrying me and my family. (This technique was used some four months later, on October 12, when suicide bombers attacked the destroyer USS Cole Cole in the port of Aden, in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors.) in the port of Aden, in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors.) As a husband and father, I was furious that these terrorists had threatened my family. Although my first instinct was to fight back, I agreed with my brother Ali that it would be wisest to turn the boat around and get out of there as quickly as possible.

We did not want to cause a panic onboard, so we had to come up with a good reason for the sudden change of plan. As Rania was pregnant, we told the crew that she was having complications and that we would have to cancel the cruise and return to Rhodes. We alerted the airport, and our plane was waiting on the tarmac when we reached the harbor. Once we were airborne, I called the head of intelligence and told him to inform the Greek security services of what he knew. We never found out how Al Qaeda discovered I was in Greece; our best guess was that a local informant had pa.s.sed on intelligence. Because of Jordan's moderation and its active role in pursuing regional peace and promoting a culture of tolerance among members of different civilizations and faiths, I was viewed by Al Qaeda as a threat.

By this time we had been fighting Al Qaeda for several years, working with our allies to stop their plots across the region, and this may have led to their plot to kill me. It was not personal; they were trying to strike at a larger target. The Hashemite lineage has always commanded respect across the Arab and Muslim world, but our traditional moderation, coupled with our openness to the West, has often made us a target of extremists. By killing me they hoped to kill ninety years of Hashemite rule in Jordan, and more than a thousand years of leaders.h.i.+p in Arabia. Part of Al Qaeda's agenda is to overthrow all Arab regimes and replace them with its fanatic and unorthodox vision of government.

The seeds of Al Qaeda's violent radicalism were planted in the region in the turbulent year of 1979, when three events took place that would echo through the decades. In January the shah of Iran fled the developing revolution and was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini, who gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran's Islamic Revolution inspired and energized radicals throughout the region. Then, on November 20, several hundred radicals seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The capture of Islam's most holy site by a group of armed extremists stunned the Muslim world. Their leader, a Saudi named Juhayman al-Otaibi, claimed that the Saudi government was corrupt and un-Islamic, and that the Mahdi, a foretold and awaited Islamic leader and descendant of the Prophet Mohammad, had returned to take over the country. The rebels were eventually driven from the mosque and Juhayman and many of his coconspirators were publicly beheaded. The rebellion was over. But its implications lingered on.

One radical Islamist inspired by Juhayman's actions was the Palestinian Isam Muhammad Taher Barqawi, better known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who would later repeat many of Juhayman's criticisms of the Saudi and other Arab governments. Born in the West Bank, Maqdisi spent time in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, and as a leading theorist he later would become a key figure in the jihadi Salafi movement in Jordan and would mentor Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leading him on the path toward using brutal violence in the name of religion.

As the siege of Mecca ended, in December 1979, the third momentous event of the year occurred: Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. This attack on a Muslim country energized fighters across the entire Muslim world. Some wanted Jordan to get involved. An American friend who recently had retired from the armed forces came to see me, saying he had just returned from Afghanistan and wanted Jordan to train a group of mujahideen fighters. I told him it was not my decision to make; I was just a junior officer. But I would pa.s.s the request on to my father.

My father said, "Absolutely not." He felt mixing religious zeal with cold war politics was a very dangerous thing to do. He also felt that getting involved in this conflict would set us up against Russia, something he did not believe would serve the interests of Jordan.

One Muslim group at the forefront of the war in Afghanistan was the Salafi movement. Mainstream Sunni and s.h.i.+a believers base their interpretation of Islam on a deep historical tradition of scholars.h.i.+p and learning and a corpus of grammatical, linguistic, and etymological a.n.a.lysis. In this tradition, Muslim religious leaders, known as imams, spend years, even decades, studying over a thousand years of Muslim scholars.h.i.+p. When they issue religious edicts or judicial opinions, known as fatwas, they generally offer a nuanced interpretation of Islamic thought, based on the wisdom of those who have gone before. But Salafi leaders disregard this tradition of learning and do not accept a plurality of scholars.h.i.+p in Islamic thought. Instead, they insist that they have a privileged understanding of Islam based on their own interpretation of the Quran. One of the problems with this approach is that it does not contain the internal judicial checks and balances of the mainstream faith, and it is not accepting of other learned opinions. In the wrong hands, this can be very dangerous.

The takfiris take this exclusivism further and use it to justify their distorted version of Islam. They believe they have the right to kill heretics, and to denounce as such those who disagree with their doctrines. They would kill whenever and wherever they can.

Early in the morning of October 28, 2002, Laurence Foley, a senior official for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), stepped out of his white limestone house in an Amman suburb, heading for work. As he walked toward his car a gunman jumped out from behind the car and shot him eight times with a 7mm pistol. The a.s.sa.s.sin fled to a waiting getaway car, leaving Foley's wife to discover his body lying in a pool of blood.

The head of the intelligence service called me and said, "There's just been an a.s.sa.s.sination of an American diplomat." I was furious that such a terrible thing could happen to a guest in our country and ordered immediate action to find the culprits.

The next day I went to the U.S. emba.s.sy to pay my condolences to Foley's widow, Virginia. I told her we would find her husband's killer. Two months later, in December 2002, Jordanian security forces arrested the gunman, a Libyan, and the driver of the getaway car, a Jordanian.

As our security forces investigated further, we found that the plot had been directed from outside Jordan and that the mastermind was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Following a lengthy investigation and trial, in the spring of 2004 a Jordanian court sentenced eight men to death for the killing of Laurence Foley, six in absentia, including Zarqawi. The two men who were in Jordanian custody, the gunman and the driver, were subsequently executed.

Terrible as this act was, it was simply the prelude to a much larger wave of violence that was soon to crash over the Middle East. In early April 2004 in Irbid, a town close to the Syrian border, Jordanian security forces intercepted three trucks filled with explosives. The intelligence services scrambled to uncover who was behind the s.h.i.+pment and what their intentions were. We were fortunate to discover that one of the plotters, a Jordanian named Azmi Jayousi, was still in the country, hiding out in a flat in the Marka neighborhood of downtown Amman with an unknown number of coconspirators. I ordered a Special Forces team to get Jayousi and, if possible, take him alive. We had to know if his cell was acting alone or if there were others waiting to strike.

Jayousi was holed up in a residential area next to a school. The team decided to operate at night to reduce the risk of civilians getting caught up in the fight. At two in the morning on April 20, 2004, a team from Battalion 71 a.s.sembled in the street below the flat. Highly trained counterterrorist soldiers, they were accompanied by regular police.

One of the policemen knocked on the door and was greeted with a volley of machine-gun fire. Six commandos stormed into the apartment, returning fire and killing the terrorist who was shooting at them. A second team rushed into the flat after that and captured the heavily armed Jayousi alive, along with his wife and three children. They found explosives, thousands of dollars and Jordanian dinars, and several fake pa.s.sports.

Under questioning, Jayousi revealed that the ringleader was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom he first met when they were fighting in Afghanistan. He revealed that there were two more cells still in Amman, planning more attacks. Jayousi did not know where the second cell was, but a quick-thinking Special Operations commander asked him to call its leader and set up a meeting. The Special Forces team set off to intercept the leader of the second cell. They grabbed him in broad daylight, and he led them to his safe house, where they captured the leader of the last cell.

A few days later, Jordanians watched in disbelief and horror as the terrorists revealed the details of their plot in a televised confession. They had planned to mix conventional explosives with deadly chemicals and attack the U.S. emba.s.sy, the prime minister's office, and the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department (GID), the internal intelligence service. Trained in explosives in one of bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan, Jayousi had developed a technique for mixing concentrated oxygen with ground-up black c.u.min seeds to create a substance with greater explosive power than TNT. He hoped to kill many thousands of people.

A few days later, on April 29, around one hundred thousand Jordanians, including my wife, Rania, marched on the streets of Amman to protest. Chanting, "No to terrorists in Jordan," and beating drums, the demonstrators marched to the gates of Parliament, where they burned pictures of bin Laden, Zarqawi, and Jayousi and his accomplices.

The subsequent trial was chaotic, with the terrorists disrupting the proceedings and refusing to recognize the authority of the court. At one point Jayousi took off his slippers and threw them at the judge, yelling that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would chop off his head and calling those a.s.sembled "G.o.d's enemies."

When the trial concluded, Jayousi and his fellow plotters were sentenced to death, and Zarqawi was once again sentenced to death in absentia. When the verdict was read aloud, one of the terrorists shouted out, "Bin Laden's organization is rising, and we will be back!"

Chapter 22.

Jordan's 9/11 November 9, 2005, was supposed to be the happiest day of Nadia Alami's life. That evening she was to marry her longtime sweetheart, Ashraf Da'as, at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman. The young couple had met three years before while working at a local hospital, and had quickly fallen in love. Their families and friends had come from around the globe and gathered at the hotel for the wedding. At around nine o'clock, the bride and groom walked through the lobby, past the cheering and clapping guests. Nadia wore a beautiful white dress with a flowing veil, and Ashraf a dark suit and red tie.

They had been married less than an hour and were about to celebrate the beginning of their life together. But Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had other plans.

Two Iraqi suicide bombers, a husband-and-wife team wearing explosive vests packed with ball bearings under their clothing, had infiltrated the wedding party and were mingling with the guests, each in a different corner of the room. As Nadia and Ashraf approached the door, the band struck up a tune.

Then the male bomber detonated his vest. The ball bearings shot across the ballroom with deadly force, killing the father of the bride outright and mortally wounding the father of the groom. The female bomber tried to detonate her vest, but it failed to go off, and she fled.

Twenty-seven guests were killed, including sixteen of Ashraf's relatives. Both the bride and groom lost their fathers.

At exactly the same time, suicide bombers struck at two other nearby hotels, the Grand Hyatt and the Days Inn, killing thirty-three more people. In all, sixty people lost their lives that night, thirty-six of them Jordanian. Among those killed was Moustapha Akkad, a prominent Syrian-American filmmaker who produced the movie Mohammad: Messenger of G.o.d Mohammad: Messenger of G.o.d, depicting the early days of Islam, though he is probably better known to U.S. audiences for producing some of the Halloween Halloween horror movies. horror movies.

When the attack took place I was in Kazakhstan on an official visit. We had just finished dinner when a call came in for me from Amman. As soon as I heard the news, I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. In our battle against the takfiris I had always feared that, sooner or later, we would be attacked. But nothing could have prepared me for this.

I excused myself and immediately called for my plane. It was an agonizing trip home. We arrived in Jordan around five o'clock the next morning, and I went directly to the sites of the attacks. When I saw the chaos and devastation, my sadness turned to anger. "How could they do this to us?" I thought. I was furious. These murderers had killed innocent people at a wedding, and as the head of state it was my duty to protect them. I was determined to find those responsible. I paid my condolences to grieving family members and went to several hospitals to visit the wounded. One of the victims was the son of a close friend of mine.

To a large country like the United States, sixty people may not sound like very many, but to Jordan it was a devastating blow, the equivalent of losing three thousand people in a single attack on America. The psychological impact on average Jordanians was dramatic. It turned the population decisively against Al Qaeda and their like. In Jordan, and across much of the rest of the world, when we write a date, we write the day before the month. So the date of the attack, November 9, was 9/11. And in many ways it was as much of a watershed for Jordan as 9/11 was for the United States.

The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, issued a statement taking responsibility for the bombings. "After studying and observing the targets," he said, "the places of execution were chosen to be hotels which the tyrant of Jordan has turned into a backyard for the enemies of Islam, such as the Jews and Crusaders." But far from targeting the enemies of Islam, as the terrorists claimed, they had indiscriminately murdered dozens of innocent Jordanians and other innocent people of different nationalities.

The people of Jordan did not accept Zarqawi's hateful attack. That afternoon, a group of angry protesters gathered outside the Radisson Hotel waving Jordanian flags and chanting, "Death to Zarqawi!" For nights on end young Jordanians held vigils and said prayers.

I was extremely angry and said in an address to the nation on November 10, "Let it be clear to everyone that we will pursue these terrorists and those who aid them. We will reach them wherever they are, pull them from their lairs, and submit them to justice." We had a policy in Jordan of not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, but that was about to change. I resolved that from now on, if we learned about a terrorist group that was planning to target us hiding in another country, we would hit them before they hit us. I gathered together our intelligence service, the military, and the political leaders.h.i.+p and said, "We're going on the offensive. What Zarqawi did was reprehensible. The gloves are off, and I want you to get him." We reached out to the Iraqi tribes to see if we could get more information. If the Iraqi government was willing to help us, fine. But if not, we were prepared to act alone.

Iraq was a closed country under Saddam Hussein, and our intelligence services had not been able to operate easily there. After the U.S.-led invasion, when things started to fall apart, it took us a little while to get our people inside. We knew Zarqawi was in Iraq. But initially we did not have the capability to move against him. Now we began aggressively to move into Iraq. We began to attach teams of Jordanian officers to American Special Forces units. Jordanians had a better understanding of the mannerisms of takfiris and were thus able to identify suspects more efficiently. Many takfiris have a distinctive manner of dress and behavior, and we helped the Americans understand what to look for.

Zarqawi had said that this was an attack against the Jordanian regime. But it was not, and people in Jordan clearly saw that killing guests at a wedding was an act of savage barbarity, not a political gesture. What Zarqawi had done was to declare war on Jordan. Now we were coming for him.

Zarqawi was born Ahmed Fadil Nazzal Khalaylah and grew up in the town of Zarqa, seventeen miles northeast of Amman. He was a thug and petty criminal and drifted until his early twenties, when he headed to Afghanistan to join the war against the occupying Soviet troops. Arriving just as the Russians were leaving in 1989, he adopted the nom de guerre of "al-Zarqawi," literally meaning "the one from Zarqa," and met Osama bin Laden and other radicals. On returning to Jordan in the early 1990s he set up a local terrorist group called Bay'at al-Emam, but before he could carry out any attacks he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In prison, Zarqawi met the leading thinker of the radical takfiri movement, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who encouraged his violent desires. But Maqdisi later started to criticize Zarqawi and the two men fell out. In what would prove to be a costly mistake, Zarqawi was released from prison in 1999, as part of a general amnesty declared shortly after I became king. It was not long before he headed back to Afghanistan, where he received further funding and encouragement from bin Laden. Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, he returned to the Middle East to continue his plotting.

Zarqawi settled into the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, where he linked up with a local terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam, with strong ties to Al Qaeda. Working with this local group and with a gang of Al Qaeda fighters who had come with him from Afghanistan, he and his men began experimenting with poisons, including cyanide and ricin, testing them on animals to make sure they worked. He began sending terrorists from his camp on missions to attack targets throughout Europe, including Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Many were subsequently arrested and confessed to Zarqawi's involvement. Zarqawi wanted to expand his reach and influence. Little did he know that a much larger opportunity was about to present itself.

When the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, Al Qaeda was dancing in the streets. Osama bin Laden was delighted, because he knew that with the instability that would inevitably follow, his supporters would be able to parachute into the heartland of the Arab world and set up a base. But bin Laden was not the only one to spot the opportunities for mayhem. Seeking to step into the vacuum created by the invasion, Zarqawi expanded his own activities. He became increasingly vicious in the methods he used and began to break all boundaries, seeking political influence through extreme violence.

On May 11, 2003, a video t.i.tled "Sheikh Abu Musab Zarqawi Slaughters an American Infidel with His Hands and Promises Bush More" was posted on a militant Web site. The video showed a young American civilian contractor, Nicholas Berg, wearing an orange jumpsuit and kneeling in front of five men dressed in black, their faces covered by ski masks and head scarves. The men read a statement, and then one of them beheaded Berg with a knife, yelling, "G.o.d is great!"

That was the moment when Zarqawi and his men moved from being barbarians to animals. It was outrageously disgusting, and I could not see how they could pose as defenders of anything, let alone Islam. Zarqawi continued his atrocities, bombing s.h.i.+a holy places in an attempt to stoke the flames of civil war and beheading several more unfortunate civilians.

In October 2004, in a statement posted on an extremist Web site, Zarqawi proclaimed that he was merging his terror group with Al Qaeda, saying, "We announce that the One G.o.d and Jihad group, its prince and its soldiers, has pledged allegiance to the sheikh of the holy warriors, Osama bin Laden." After that he increasingly targeted Jordan. In 2004 and 2005 our security services foiled over 150 attempted attacks by Zarqawi's Al Qaeda group and other takfiri extremists. But we could not stop them all. In August 2005, members of Al Qaeda in Iraq crept into Jordan and from the southern port of Aqaba launched a rocket attack against an American wars.h.i.+p. And in November Zarqawi's suicide bombers struck the three hotels in Amman. In addition to being an atrocity, this was a major tactical blunder.

In many other capital cities in the Middle East, luxury hotels are used mainly by foreigners, Western businessmen, and visiting government officials. And so by bombing a hotel, Zarqawi probably aimed to kill Americans or Israelis. But in Jordan, five-star hotels are frequented by our own people much more than by foreigners. Even the waiters are likely to be Jordanians rather than foreign workers. So the attacks provided a wake-up call. Stung by the outpouring of rage, Zarqawi decided to change tack. In an audiotape released the following week, he threatened me personally, saying, "Your star is fading. You will not escape your fate, you descendant of traitors. We will be able to reach your head and chop it off."

That winter and the following spring of 2006, Jordanian intelligence operatives and agents flooded into Iraq, searching for information that might lead us to Zarqawi's hideout. They soon developed a network of sources and informants. While looking for clues, we exchanged information with a Sunni tribe with links to the insurgents. In April 2006, Zarqawi released an online propaganda video, and our a.n.a.lysts were able roughly to identify his location inside Iraq by a.n.a.lyzing the background scenery. We also recruited an informant in Zarqawi's inner circle, who would in time reveal a crucial detail. He was in contact with three of Zarqawi's most trusted couriers, who would meet the terrorist in person to receive and deliver secret messages.

Working closely with the Americans, we came tantalizingly close several times. On one occasion, Zarqawi was alerted by the sound of approaching Bradley armored vehicles and fled on a moped as American troops arrived. Another time, he jumped out a window and escaped. But we were getting closer.

In May 2006, we learned from the Americans that Zarqawi was planning to meet with his spiritual adviser, Sheikh Abdel-Rahman. We began to monitor the sheikh's movements, hoping he would lead our men to Zarqawi.

On June 7, American forces tracked the sheikh to a house outside Baqubah, thirty miles northeast of Baghdad, and placed a team of Delta Force commandos in the undergrowth nearby, watching. We had asked our informant to be extra vigilant, and he sent a message that Zarqawi and one of his couriers were inside.

Dusk was approaching and, afraid that he would escape yet again, one of the commandos called in an air strike on the house. Shortly afterward, two U.S. F-16 fighter aircraft dropped two 500-pound bombs on the house. American and Iraqi troops pulled Zarqawi from the rubble, still breathing, but he died shortly after.

The families of his victims finally had justice. Zarqawi would never harm anybody again. His wife and family were caught crossing into Jordan from Syria in June 2009, and, demonstrating the difference between violent extremists and the civilized world, we allowed them to go free.

Jordan had long been cooperating with other friendly nations in the global effort to protect innocent people from terrorist organizations. But international cooperation against Al Qaeda has become stronger and more systematic in recent years, in response to the growing terrorist threat. Our intelligence service was the first to penetrate Al Qaeda, long before it was on the radar of the international community, and we had developed in-depth knowledge of its techniques. We have put this knowledge in the service of all our allies in the fight against terrorism. I am proud to say that we have played a major role in saving innocent lives in the region and beyond. We continue to cooperate and share information with other intelligence services in a partners.h.i.+p that is growing more effective in protecting our people and interests from terrorist organizations.

Although we had won an important victory, we cannot prevail in this struggle by just winning tactical battles, using our military and intelligence service to take down cells and disrupt plots. To comprehensively defeat terrorists, we will have to neutralize the appeal of their extremist ideology and combat the ignorance and hopelessness on which they thrive. This is not just a military battle, it is an intellectual one. And it is a battle we started a while ago.

Chapter 23.

The Amman Message In late 2004, I brought together a group of leading Islamic scholars in Jordan and asked them how we could combat takfiris and their terrible ideas. I asked my cousin and adviser Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, a highly respected Islamic scholar with a PhD from Cambridge University, to lead and coordinate their work. The scholars produced a doc.u.ment called the Amman Message, which set out what Islam is, what it is not, and what types of actions are and are not Islamic. Released on November 9, on the eve of the holy month of Ramadan, it states in part: Today the magnanimous message of Islam faces a vicious attack from those who, through distortion and fabrication, try to portray Islam as their enemy. It is also under attack from some who claim affiliation with Islam and commit irresponsible acts in its name.We denounce and condemn extremism, radicalism, and fanaticism today, just as our forefathers tirelessly denounced and opposed them throughout Islamic history. . . . On religious and moral grounds, we denounce the contemporary concept of terrorism that is a.s.sociated with wrongful practices, whatever their source and form may be. Such acts are represented by aggression against human life in an oppressive form that transgresses the rulings of G.o.d.

I knew that no statement coming from Jordan alone would be enough to combat the takfiris, who had spread their poison across the entire Muslim world. So Ghazi distilled the Amman Message down to its three most basic points, three questions that would undercut the takfiris' distortions and show them up as fraudulent from the point of view of normative Islam. The three points are: 1. Who is a Muslim?2. Is it permissible to declare someone an apostate (takfir)?3. Who has the right to issue fatwas (legal rulings)?

We sent these questions to twenty-four of the leading Muslim religious scholars across the world. Unlike Christianity, Islam does not have an official clergy. But it does have schools with famous religious scholars, known as imams, who command great respect. We included representatives from the four main schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi, and Hanbali), the two main s.h.i.+a schools (Jafari and Zaidi), the Ibadhi school, and Thahiri scholars.

In July 2005, we invited two hundred of the world's leading Muslim scholars from fifty countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt, to a conference in Amman. These scholars issued a ruling on the three fundamental issues we had raised, and their conclusions became known as the three points of the Amman Message: 1. The scholars specifically recognized the validity of all eight Mathhabs (legal schools) of Sunni, s.h.i.+a, and Ibadhi Islam; of traditional Islamic theology (Ash'arism); of Islamic mysticism (Sufism); and of true Salafi thought, and came to a precise definition of who is a Muslim.2. Based upon this definition they forbade takfir (declarations of apostasy) between Muslims.3. They set forth the subjective and objective preconditions for the issuing of fatwas, thereby exposing ignorant and illegitimate edicts in the name of Islam.

Over the course of 2005 and 2006, we took these three ideas to every major Islamic conference and inst.i.tute imaginable and had it ratified by over five hundred of the Islamic world's leading scholars. This created a consensus of Muslim scholars, which is legally binding according to Islamic law. In other words, the whole Muslim world together, for the first time in history, declared the very fundamentals of the takfiri movement to be unacceptable, illegal, and un-Islamic.

To an outsider, this may seem like an arcane debate. But these wise scholars, in putting aside their differences and seeking to define the true meaning of Islam, struck at the roots of the extremists' false ideas. In the end, this is a battle in which ideas are the most potent weapons. I am a military man by training, but I know from experience that no war on terror will neutralize this enemy. We have to convince people of the bankruptcy of the takfiris' ideology and to defeat them in the battlefield of the minds of young Muslim men and women.

Our two greatest weapons against the takfiris are education and opportunity-not only providing better schools and universities, but also improving the quality of our religious education. To make sure our young people hear the true message of Islam, we have to encourage bright and well-educated members of our society to pursue careers in religious affairs.

Of course, this debate about extremism and moderation is not limited to Islam. There are extremists in all religions. The ability of a few extremists to influence perceptions through acts of barbarity places greater responsibility on the moderates, of all religions, to speak up. If the majority remains silent, the extremists will dominate the debate.

After the Amman Message, which aimed to discredit the takfiris within the Muslim world and to bring Muslims together in protecting their faith from their distortions, we started to do what we could to bring Muslims, Christians, and Jews together in peace as religions. We called this initiative the Amman Interfaith Message. On my trips abroad we met with priests, preachers, rabbis, and imams and basically said that our religions do not require us to fight, and that if we do fight for political causes, we should not cloak these fights in religious justifications. Then, on September 12, 2006, in an academic lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, Pope Benedict XVI cited the negative comments of a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor on Islam and sparked a major global controversy. Soon afterward the Vatican expressed regrets, and Pope Benedict himself met with amba.s.sadors of Muslim countries in order to patch things up. But the situation was tense, so I asked my cousin Prince Ghazi to do what he could to defuse tensions globally.

One month later, on October 13, 2006, Prince Ghazi and thirty-seven other major Muslim figures from around the world wrote an "open letter to the Pope," politely pointing out some mistakes in his Regensburg lecture and calling for more interfaith understanding and dialogue. This open letter did not get very far, so exactly one year later, on October 13, 2007, they wrote another open letter, ent.i.tled "A Common Word Between Us and You," issued in the name of 138 major Islamic scholars, in order to show that Muslims still wanted dialogue. Proposing that Islam and Christianity, despite many irresolvable differences, nevertheless share in common two golden commandments-love of G.o.d and love of neighbor-"A Common Word" became the most successful Muslim-Christian interfaith initiative of our time. Emerging from it, in November 2008, was the first meeting of the Catholic-Muslim Forum, held in the Vatican under the auspices of Pope Benedict XVI. The second will be held in Jordan, G.o.d willing, at the Baptism Site, in 2011.

In the meantime we invited the pope to come to Jordan and he accepted our invitation. He came in May 2009. On the afternoon of May 8, 2009, Rania and I flew by helicopter to Queen Alia International Airport to greet the pope. As we flew over Amman, we saw the streets below bedecked with both the yellow-and-white flag of the Vatican and the Jordanian flag. We landed just before the pope's plane taxied up to the waiting red carpet. The honor guard, dressed in tan uniforms and wearing traditional red-and-white-checkered head scarves, stood at attention as the pope descended from the plane. I welcomed His Holiness to Jordan, endorsed his commitment to dispel the misconceptions and divisions that have harmed relations between Christians and Muslims, and expressed the hope that together we could expand the dialogue he had opened. The pope received a very warm welcome in Jordan, with tens of thousands of Jordanian citizens, Christians and Muslims alike, lining the streets in the hope of catching a glimpse of him.

Rania and I flew back home and prepared to receive His Holiness and his delegation that evening. Rania corralled the children and began to get them dressed. The girls, Salma and Iman, were well behaved, but Hussein and our younger son, Hashem, were more of a challenge. We have always brought them up to be "normal," but this was one occasion when a bit more formality would have been welcome. We persuaded Hussein to wear a suit, but Hashem, four years old, would have none of it. Part of being a parent is knowing when to pick your battles, so we dressed Hashem in a blue-and-white s.h.i.+rt and tan pants and headed off to the reception.

In our conversation that evening I explained to the pope that while Jordan had severed its legislative and administrative ties with the West Bank in 1988, we had never renounced our moral and legal responsibility as custodians of the Muslim and Christian holy sites in East Jerusalem, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Al Aqsa Mosque. In fact, the Jordanian government still pays the salaries of the civil servants who administer those sites.

"Your Holiness," I said, "we all hope and pray for peace. And nowhere do we hope for peace more than in Jerusalem, that city holy to three great religions."

Two days later, on Sunday, May 10, Rania and I drove to the Baptism Site on Bethany beyond the Jordan, where we met the pope, who had just said ma.s.s for some fifty thousand Christians gathered in and around Amman stadium from Jordan and all over the Middle East, including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and the West Bank. Sunday is the start of the workweek in Jordan, but in honor of the pontiff's visit, all Christians were given the day off. Although it is not widely known in the West, we have in Jordan a small but thriving Christian community that is perhaps the oldest in the world. Its head-or, rather, the head of its largest denomination-is the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. His church is an Apostolic church, which means that it dates back to the first Christian community in the years of the Apostles, and he is the direct spiritual descendant of Saint James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, in Jesus Christ's own lifetime. Christians const.i.tute around 3 percent of our population, and they partic.i.p.ate in all aspects of life. In fact, by law, around 8 percent of the members of our parliament are Christian.

The Baptism Site is Jordan's most important Christian site. It is here on the East Bank of the River Jordan ("beyond the Jordan," according to John 3:26) that John the Baptist baptized Jesus and where Jesus's mission started and Christianity began. The "Bethany beyond the Jordan, where John was baptizing" (John 1:28), is one of the most important holy Christian sites in the world, together with the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. We have preserved the site in its natural state as best we can, and at the same time have given land there for Christians to build churches. The site attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year and was visited by both Pope John Paul II in 2000 and Pope Benedict XVI in 2009. It is the most significant among many places in Jordan that are of relevance to Old and New Testament events, as well as events in subsequent Christian history. In Rihab, in northern Jordan, archaeologists have found the remains of a church that they believe may be one of the oldest in the world, dating back to the first century after Christ. There is the church in Madaba, with its important sixth-century Byzantine mosaic map of the Holy Land. And going back over three thousand years is Mount Nebo, a mountain north of Madaba that is the place where Moses saw the Promised Land and where his body was buried.

At around 5:30 p.m., Rania, Pope Benedict, some of our advisers, and I got into a large motorized buggy and rode down to the Baptism Site, where the pontiff blessed the foundation stones of two churches, one Latin, the other Greek Melkite.

Jordan's religious tolerance and diversity come as a surprise to many in the West. I remember when in July 2005, Tom DeLay, a member of a movement called the Christian Zionists, who are strong supporters of the state of Israel and oppose the creation of a Palestinian state, visited Jordan as part of a trip to the Middle East. We met in my father's old house in Amman, and DeLay, Republican majority leader in the U.S. Congress at that time, wasted no time in telling me what was on his mind. "I am very concerned about the treatment of Christians in Jordan," he said. As it happened, a few of the Jordanians who were with me in the room were Christian, and they began to smile. Oblivious to this, DeLay grabbed my hand and said, "Do you believe in Jesus?" looking earnestly into my eyes. "I believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah," I replied, freeing my hand from his grasp. In fact, all Muslims believe in Jesus as the Messiah and revere him as a Spirit of G.o.d and as the Word of G.o.d as well as a great prophet and messenger of G.o.d. "Listen," I said, "if you're worried about Christians in Jordan, you can ask around here-some of the people by my side in this room are Christian." Then I told him how Jordan takes very seriously its responsibility of protecting Christian rights within Jordan, and also in Jerusalem. I am not certain that DeLay understood or accepted my a.s.surances. I do know that his delegation included no Muslims. Just a few months after his visit to Jordan, DeLay, a vocal evangelical, was indicted by a grand jury in Texas on charges of money laundering and violating campaign finance laws. He subsequently resigned as House majority leader and later gave up his seat in Congress.

But the pope was well aware of Jordan's diversity. His visit was a joyous time, and a celebration of Jordan's religious tolerance. It came at a very good time, and the pope's message of peace and spiritual reconciliation between Christians, Muslims, and Jews complemented our efforts in the political sphere to bring about a political reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. It was hard to miss the significance of the pope's religious pilgrimage, which started in Jordan and ended in Jerusalem, by way of the West Bank. His visit helped inspire all of us who were searching for peace. And we needed that inspiration, for the path to peace had been riddled with potholes and perilous detours.

PART VI.

Chapter 24.

The End of an Era Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon had been in office for three years by the time we first met. His policies in the West Bank and Gaza had created so much tension in the region that it had been politically almost impossible for us to meet earlier. But in early 2004 I invited Sharon to Jordan in an effort to break the stalemate in the peace process. He flew into Amman by helicopter, landing at the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department.

A man with a fearsome reputation, Sharon had served in the Haganah, the Jewish underground resistance that fought Palestinians and later became part of the Hebrew Resistance Movement against the British. He led Israeli Special Forces Unit 101, conducting clandestine raids against Arab targets, and was involved in the attack on Qibya in 1953, when scores of Palestinian civilians were killed. Sharon was infamous across the region for allowing the ma.s.sacre of some eight hundred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. No Arab will ever be able to forget the searing images of the slaughtered mothers and children of Sabra and Shatila.

Extremists will always criticize me for meeting with Israeli leaders, especially those with a history of violence like Sharon, who to most Arabs is a ma.s.s murderer and a war criminal. But leaders do not have the luxury of choosing their counterparts. I do not get to choose the Israeli prime minister. Only the Israeli people can do that. But I can choose how Jordan behaves toward its neighbors and decide how to build upon my father's legacy of peace. Although there might be some emotional satisfaction in refusing to meet Sharon, it would be short-lived and self-defeating.

We had invited Sharon to Jordan because we felt it was essential to somehow reboot the peace process. I had strongly objected to many of his actions and policies, and I hoped to persuade him that the only way to ensure lasting security for Israel was to forge a peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. My father had interacted with Sharon when he was a minister in the Netanyahu government in the late 1990s and had pa.s.sed along an insight into his character. He had told me that if Sharon committed himself to something, he would stick to it. He was a man who kept his word.

Although I did not know Sharon personally, I had benefited from the respect he held for my father, and for Jordan. As I sat opposite him in a meeting room at GID headquarters, I told him that my father had said he was a man who would keep his word. So that was how I wanted to begin the relations.h.i.+p, I said.