What if Usama Bin Laden had settled down in Saudi Arabia and taken a position as a state-salaried Saudi imam? This question comes from an English-language document that circulated widely on jihadist forums in 2007, urging jihadist readers to consider two alternative histories. The first is the world in which we live, in which militant jihadists such as Bin Laden mounted increasingly lethal attacks on the United States in an attempt to provoke its ire, culminating in the catastrophically violent and destructive attack by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. The alternative is a world in which Usama Bin Laden instead cast his lot with the Saudi regime – denoted by the author using the Arabic word for tyrant (taaghoot, plural tawaagheet) – and joined the cadre of academically oriented, state-funded clerics who urge lay Muslims to avoid global jihadism. This study has examined how modern Muslim clerics navigate the choice between these two paths.

For some jihadist clerics, such as Bin Laden, it isn't obvious what events or actions could have prevented him from embarking on the course that would eventually lead him to create the most widely recognized terrorist franchise of our time (Mendelsohn 2016). Though it is interesting to imagine this alternative outcome, and it appears to deeply move the aforesaid jihadist writer, it is difficult to learn from this study what might have turned Bin Laden away from jihad.

Imagine instead a world in which Nasr al-Fahd had kept his academic post and never gone to prison as retribution for having embarrassed a Saudi royal. Would he have ever lent his scholarly expertise to al-Qaeda? Would he have penned a treatise in which he justified the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by jihadists for use against governments and civilians? It seems more likely that he would have continued with his scholarship in the tradition of his first book, a dense tome on the thinking of a medieval scholar – hardly the stuff of revolution.