A certain kind of history is created when a group initiates acts of violence in the name of valorizing or defending a sacred ideal. In the 1990s, some hypothesized that we had reached the "end of history." On September 11, 2001, Osama Bin Laden sought to demonstrate that history had not ended. He introduced himself—representating the will of Allah—into the historical process. What followed in the wake of September 11 was the resurrection of history.

According to Assaf Moghadam, Bin Laden’s ideology grew out of the thinking of his mentor, Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was the theoretician who “turned 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 philosophy of history.

Azzam writes 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 “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 narrative--his philosophy--embodies the idea that guided the course of Twentieth Century "history." Leaders like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mao established their ideologies and reputations 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 people who have died—been slaughtered—in the name of glorifying a sacred ideal? Shall we call these human beings martyrs, or heroes; sacrificial victims; or simply victims?

What shall we call political leaders who generate slaughter in the name of propagating a societal ideal? Shall we call them conquerors, great leaders or mass-murderers?

What is the nature of those entities that generated slaughter? In the First World War, they were given names like France and Great Britain and Germany. Moving forward, slaughter was undertaken in the name of words such as Communism or Nazism or "the Emperor."

Names change, but the dream remains the same. Societies slaughter in the name of creating "history;" hoping that blood shed in their name will be written up with the "ink of the scholar." Historians exist to document mass-murder.

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, such prodigious expenditures of human energy and material capital? Each episode of slaughter testifies to the reality of some “thing” in the name of which violence was undertaken. Surely, that for which tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people have died could not be no-thing.