Top Thinkers - al Qaeda's Dissident

Foreign Policy magazine has a special end of year issue chronicling the top 2009 global thinkers - someof whom did not necessarily have "good" ideas (says me). Nonetheless, I was intrigued by a short feature on Sayyid Imam al-Sharif:

How the prison writings of Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, one of al Qaeda's founders now labeled a turn coat, are doing more to expose the terrorist group's hypocrisy than anyone else.

This dude is now in prison in Egypt - after first writing books justifying al-Qaeda's butcherous activities, he suddenly decided it might not be in the best interests of God to kill everyone with which they disagree:

He claims he came to realize that the haphazard use of violence by Islamist groups causes more harm than good with respect to Islamic law, an idea he had been pondering since he left terrorism in the early 1990s.

So long as al-Qaeda keeps killing other Muslims, I think we can expect support for them to continue plummeting amongst those who used to support them as a check against the power of the West.