On a hot summer's day in 1996, a plane carrying Osama bin Laden and a few friends and family landed at a runway just outside the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. The Saudi-born Islamic activist had little equipment, few followers and minimal local support. Yet within five years he had built an organisation that was to carry out the most shocking and devastating terrorist attack in history. 'Al-Qaeda' is now the most overused and misunderstood word in the media - a term imposed on a wide variety of Islamist groups by the FBI in the early 1990s. In Arabic, it is simply an abstract noun, its meanings include 'pattern', 'formula' and 'base'. In the West, it symbolises the greatest threat to global security: though its Afghan training camps have now been reduced to dust, no one believes that al-Qaeda was destroyed with them. But what is al-Qaeda? Is it a disciplined, motivated, structured terrorist group led by a single criminal mastermind or something far more complex, diffuse and sinister? Bin Laden's aim to provoke conflict between militant Islam and the West appears closer to fulfilment than ever. But is al-Qaeda the catalyst for this conflict, or merely a symbol of it? The author shows how the threat from Islamic terrorism comes not from one man, nor even one group, but from a broad movement with profound roots in the politics, societies and history of the Islamic world. Using hundreds of interviews and htousands of documents, he demonstrates that 'al-Qaeda' is a convenient label applied misleadingly to a broad, diverse and disorganized global movement dedicated to fighting a cosmic battle with the West, and that Osama bin Laden, far from being the world's most dangerous criminal, is, in practical terms, a peripheral figure in modern Islamic militancy. Eradicating any single terrorist or terrorist group will do little to end the threat. The volunteers and terrorists who sought out bin Laden and his associates wanted to help in realising their own dreams of destruction. The reasons they did so persist throughout the Islamic world. Failing to understand al-Qaeda means failing to address those reasons. We do so at our peril.

Acknowledgements --Maps -- Introduction : the shadow of terror -- 1. What is al-Qaeda? -- 2. September 11th, terror and Islam -- 3. Radicals -- 4. Mujahideen -- 5. Heroes -- 6. Militants -- 7. Terror -- 8. Seekers -- 9. Home -- 10. Flight -- 11. Struggle -- 12. Global Jihad -- 13. The millennium plot -- 14. The Holy War foundation -- 15. September 11th -- 16. The war on terror -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.