Reply #6: Here's some informed opinions

[Fredda Weinberg]

Al Qaeda is a revanchist organisation, which holds the West in general and the US in particular responsible for all the evils afflicting the Islamic world and for the decline of the political power of Islam since the end of the Ottoman Empire. It wants to avenge the wrongs allegedly committed against the Muslims since the end of the Ottoman Empire, re-write history and restore an Islamic Caliphate from which Western influence would be totally excluded. It is comparable to the Nazis of Germany in its revanchist ideas and actions. The Nazis blamed the rest of the Western world for the decline of Germany since the First World War and for all the evils afflicting Germany. They wanted to restore the pre-eminent position of Germany in the world. If the world leaders of that time had said "Let us address the root causes of Nazism first, before we fight the Nazis and Adolf Hitler", where will the world be today? The call to address the root causes of the Al Qaeda today is as short-sighted as a call to first address the root causes of Nazism would have been in the early 1940s.

http://www.observerindia.com/analysis/A480.htm

The vision of any kind of new caliphate, shared by Muslims worldwide, is a distant one. Right now, even talk of bringing down trade barriers and free flow of people across Muslim states seems radical. But it is a vision that is needed, and one that should actually be supported by the US and Britain if they are sincere about the development of the Muslim world. The revival of a strong Muslim civilisation would be for the betterment of the whole world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1605653,00.html

Osama bin Laden claimed in one of his tapes, in a phrase that passed practically unnoticed, that the Arab world had been in decline "for 80 years". Why 80 years? That takes us back to the early 1920s, to the end of the first world war, the collapse of the Turkish Ottoman empire and the British and French takeover of the region. The Arabs were then released from four centuries of Turkish rule, only to be governed by infidels. That explains why Bin Laden said there was "no salvation outside Muslim rule" (by which he means the restoration of the caliphate).

http://mondediplo.com/2003/04/02arabworld (subscription required)