The story you may have heardFormer British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote in 2005 that al-Qaeda really meant 'the database', the computer file of mujahideen recruits. Bin Laden himself said the name came from a training camp called 'the base', and the 1988 founding documents already use it; modern Arabic does use qāʿidat bayānāt for 'database', but nothing shows the group was named after one.