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| Image: Saif Ali |
By the time Osama bin Laden was killed in his Pakistani hill-station retreat, this 54-year-old son of a Saudi-Yemeni billionaire had become an iconic symbol of religious obscurantism. To be sure, bin Laden was respo nsible for killing 2752 people in the attacks of 11 September 2001 – and so, inevitably, his death would be a violent one. The only surprise was that he lived nearly a decade after claiming credit, in a video clip, for the massacre of so many innocents. That he lived so long is a credit only to the genial incompetence of President George W Bush – and, it seems, the complicity of some members of the Pakistani intelligence services.
But bin Laden was always essentially an irrelevant, messianic political figure in Arab society, and the Muslim world more generally. This was true in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when he first embarked on his terrorist campaign to strike out at America – the ‘far enemy’ – because his near enemy, the House of Saud, was seemingly impregnable. Bin Laden was an anachronism. In the context of Arabia, he came from a long Hadramauti (South Yemeni) tradition of rebellion against colonial infidels. His rebellion against the Saudi princes harkened back to the rebellion of the Ikhwan tribal militia in the late 1920’s. The Saudi kingdom’s founder, King Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, had relied on these fanatical Wahhabi tribesmen to conquer the peninsula during the early 20th century. But to save his kingdom in 1929, he was forced to massacre hundreds of the Ikhwan – using Western-made machine-guns.
Like the Ikhwan’s, bin Laden’s rebellion was a futile rebellion against modernity. But in the 21st-century era of rapid globalisation, he was in the end a pathetic figure. He killed many innocents in the name of religion; this is always a sign of lunacy. At least the Ikhwan of the 1920s came from a Bedouin culture that they could still touch and smell all around them. By the end of the 20th century, however, that world existed only in the discombobulated psyches of bin Laden and a few hundred of his followers. He literally represented the past – and he had no future.
Bin Laden’s Salafist, anti-establishmentarian religious message could resonate only insofar as young Arab men and women saw no place for themselves in modernity. And even then, even during the worst decades of Arab political stagnation, it was only a tiny minority who embraced this religiosity. Most still recognised it as a joyless and reactionary way of life. The Islamist message could help some to vent their anger and frustration, particularly over the plight of the Palestinians, but the vast majority of Muslims recognised that religiosity in the 21st century was not going to feed and educate their children.
Bush’s Bin Ladenism
The extent of this rejection became manifestly clear with the recent Arab Awakening. Bin Laden had nothing to do with the Arab spring. He did nothing to inspire it, and the young men and women who overturned the Arab dictators have a secular agenda totally divorced from his reactionary religiosity. His audio message, released in mid-May, in praise of the Arab revolutions notwithstanding, even bin Laden must have understood at the end of his life just how irrelevant he had become.
The upheavals in Egypt and elsewhere mark the demise of two generations of stagnation in the Arab world that began with the Naksa (setback or amputation), the Arabic word to describe the disastrous defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. That loss ushered in a cynical era of autocracy, corruption, repression and fatalism. It also marked the defeat of the secular Arab project and profoundly humiliated Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, the last Arab leader who could plausibly claim to reflect the broad popular will.
Nasser’s defeat was also the defeat of any notion that the Arab world had a progressive, modernist future. In the wake of the 1967 war, Egyptian pundit Mohamed Heikel punned that power had shifted in the Arab world from thawra (revolution) to tharwa (wealth). Not incidentally, the defeat of secular Arab nationalism created an intellectual vacuum that was filled by religiosity. As Syria’s Yale-trained philosopher Sadik al-Azm wrote, ‘At the same time, the political regimes responsible for the military defeat began utilizing religion in general and Islam in particular in a campaign designed to protect them from the aftermath of the defeat.’
This cynical manipulation of religion worked for decades to sustain the dictators. And it eventually gave bin Laden his small window of opportunity to recruit a handful of frustrated young Saudi men to carry out the fantastically improbable suicide attacks of 9/11. But as Sadik al-Azm wrote soon after 9/11:
Despite current predictions of a protracted global war between the West and the Islamic world, I believe the war is over. There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline, and the opposition by other Muslim groups will surely grow. September 11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge.
Needless to say, the Syrian philosopher was right and George W Bush and his neo-conservative acolytes were wrong. If anything, President Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ and the subsequent Iraq war helped to sustain, for a short time, the notion that bin Laden’s worldview had some currency. Ironically, the ‘war on terrorism’ gave bin Laden his only bit of relevancy. By turning what should have been a concerted criminal manhunt for a mass murderer into a global military operation, the Bush administration massively inflated bin Laden’s political credentials – and not incidentally, allowed him to escape into Pakistan. (That’s another irony: if Bin Ladenism has any afterlife, it is not in the Arab world, but in Pakistan.)
Washington’s policymakers seemed blithely unaware that, throughout history, the single-minded tactic of any terrorist has been to force the state to overreact, to commit excesses in the name of the state, and thereby to undermine the political legitimacy of the state. The US is still a democratic entity. But George W Bush acted cavalierly, and his administration managed to tarnish the country’s reputation abroad and shame its citizens. This too is part of bin Laden’s legacy, his other despicable achievement. He lured insecure American politicians into ordering the ‘water-boarding’ of terror suspects. He gave us Abu Ghraib. He gave us Guantanamo. He gave us targeted killings by remote-controlled drones over the skies of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He forced Americans to sully their hands. And along the way, he convinced many Americans that it was necessary to bankrupt the treasury by spending upwards of USD 3 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Foolishly, the country has wasted much blood and treasure.
As an American citizen, I can only hope that bin Laden’s death will now allow US politicians to close this chapter. Americans today need to invest in their homeland and beware of foreign expeditions. They also need to see that something else is happening in the Arab world, and that it has nothing to do with Bin Ladenism. They need to embrace the Arab Awakening, to embrace the democratic street, to end America’s alliances with kings and dictators. And that means also insisting on democracy in Osama bin Laden’s Arabian homeland. That would be ironic justice: to see the House of Saud finally morph into a constitutional monarchy. When that happens, Osama will be spinning in his watery grave.
~ Kai Bird, Pulitzer-prize-winning author, spent his childhood in Arabia and is the author of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of age between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978. He has lived in Kathmandu for the last four years.
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Comments
" The Islamist message could help some to vent their anger and frustration, particularly over the plight of the Palestinians, but the vast majority of Muslims recognised that religiosity in the 21st century was not going to feed and educate their children." This line, in fact, underlines that there are also thousands of families who are at present unable to feed or educate their children, and thus, feel an anger towards the perceived ills wreaked upon them by the West. Osama the person may be dead, but his legacy is alive and kicking.