Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.
Osama bin Laden habitually invoked “images that were deeply meaningful to many Muslims and practically invisible to those who were unfamiliar with the faith,” wrote Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. As bin Laden’s Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, (9/11) have entered their twenty-fifth anniversary year, Wright’s 2006 book and other works document how this contemporary history fits within wider Islamic history.
The Islamic invisibility noted by Wright helps explain the disconnect between the international outrage over 9/11 and Al Qaeda’s persistent popularity among some Muslims. Rohan Gunaratna in his 2002 book Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror observed that on 9/11
many Islamists rejoiced, some discreetly, others in public. Many groups—including Pari Islam Se Malaysia (PAS), Palestinian Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Lebanese Hezbollah—condemned the attacks, first because they disliked what they saw as public posturing, and second, to avoid potential retaliation from the US and its allies. No Islamist group either disagreed with, or condemned Osama or Al Qaeda’s aims and objectives. For many, only the timing was wrong.
Muslim public opinion was equally disheartening in Gunaratna’s review. PAS and Indonesian Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI) activists became notorious for displaying pro-Osama posters while tens of thousands of Muslim newborns globally received the name Osama. Gunaratna concluded:
The public reaction to Osama in the Muslim world after September 11 has been divided but increasingly sympathetic to him. Opinion polls taken in early 2002 revealed that most Muslims in the Middle East did not believe the 9/11 attacks were carried out by their fellow believers, choosing instead to attribute them to Mossad or the CIA. As the symbol of resistance to the US, bin Laden has become a hero among many Muslim communities, from Pakistan to Indonesia and from Nigeria to Egypt. Osama memorabilia—cassettes, CDs and DVDs of his speeches to posters, T-shirts, pens and sweets bearing his imprint and booklets and magazine articles about him—have proliferated.
Bin Laden’s appeal to the Muslim faithful is understandable, given his religious devotion to Islam and its prophet Muhammad. “Osama followed the tenets of Islam to the letter, whether in prayer or in his utterances. A calm and serious man, he reflected at length before he spoke on any subject,” Gunaratna wrote. “Bin Laden sometimes ate with a spoon, but he preferred to use the fingers of his right hand, because it was Sunna—the way the Prophet did it,” Wright concurred.
Muhammad’s supposedly prophetic example was particularly influential during the “nadir of bin Laden’s career,” in Wright’s words, when on May 18, 1996, international political pressure forced the Al Qaeda leader to leave his Sudan base for Afghanistan:
The Saudi was isolated, stripped of his once great wealth, dependent on the hospitality of an unknown power, and yet he was not broken or even subdued. His life was lived in two spheres, the existential and the sacred. His flight to Jalalabad and the scandal of his current circumstances must have struck him, on one level, as a nearly hopeless exile; but in spiritual terms it recapitulated a critical moment in the Prophet’s life when, in 622, ostracized and ridiculed, he was expelled from Mecca and fled to Medina. The hijira, or retreat, as the event is called, was such a significant turning point that it begins the Islamic calendar. The hijira transformed Mohammed and his demoralized followers. Within a few years, their nascent religion burst out of Medina and spread from Spain to China in a blinding flash of conversion and conquest.
“Prophet Muhammad’s hijra (flight) in the seventh century from Mecca to Medina,” Gunaratna noted, inspired bin Laden even after America initiated its massive military response to 9/11 against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Muhammad “waged a war for eight years until he captured Mecca.” Therefore, bin Laden predicted an American defeat in Afghanistan in 2004, eight years after his 1996 flight from Sudan.
“Naturally,” wrote Wright about bin Laden’s astute knowledge of Islam’s past,
he would turn to the Prophet’s example for consolation during his own period of defeat and withdrawal. However, he was also savvy enough to recognize the symbolic power of his own hijira and its usefulness as a way of inspiring his followers and beckoning to other Muslims to join his sacred retreat. He brilliantly reframed the disaster that had fallen upon him and his movement.
Bin Laden, as Wright stated, called modern Afghanistan Khorasan, “referring to the ancient Muslim empire that once encompassed much of Central Asia.” A disputed hadith or canonical saying of Muhammad “states that in the last days the armies of Islam will unfold black banners (like the flag of the Taliban) and come out of Khorasan.” Bin Laden’s followers, meanwhile, adopted names invoking Muhammad’s companions or Muslim martial heroes from Islam’s founding era.
Islamic imagery surrounded bin Laden himself, as Gunaratna noted. Several posters “widely available throughout Pakistan” depict bin Laden “as a saint riding a white horse.” Although horse riding is his favorite hobby, such images remind “of the Prophet, who also fought on a white horse.”
Gunaratna detailed that bin Laden often wore a keffiyeh, a headdress appropriated in modern times for the Palestinian cause, as a nod to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest places. He also often chose “to be filmed or photographed wearing a plain white turban,” signifying “his near-clerical status.” Among his accoutrements was “a knife typical in design of the Arabian Peninsula, one that is usually the preserve of rulers and others in authority.” When making important declarations, “he sports a ring containing a black stone set in silver,” which symbolizes Mecca’s Kaaba, Islam’s most sacred site.
“The key symbol of bin Laden’s hijira, however, was the cave,” Wright noted. In Islamic tradition, the angel Gabriel first revealed Muhammad’s prophetic mission in a cave, and Muhammad hid in a cave magically concealed by a spiderweb when pursued by his enemies near Medina. Thus, “Islamic art is replete with images of stalactites, which reference both the sanctuary and the encounter with the divine that caves provided the Prophet.”
“Ever adept at image manipulation,” Gunaratna accordingly observed, “Osama usually agreed to meet visiting journalists in nearby caves, projecting the image of a pious man who had abandoned the riches of Saudi Arabia to live in Afghanistan.” Wright similarly observed:
For bin Laden, the cave was the last pure place. Only by retreating from society—and from time, history, modernity, corruption, the smothering West—could he presume to speak for the true religion. It was an act of bin Laden’s public-relations genius that he chose to exploit the presence of the ammunition caves of Tora Bora as a way of identifying himself with the Prophet in the minds of many Muslims who longed to purify Islamic society and restore the dominion it once enjoyed.
Bin Laden’s “life and the symbols in which he cloaked himself,” added Wright,
powerfully embodied the pervasive sense of dispossession that characterized the modern Muslim world. In his own miserable exile, he absorbed the misery of his fellow believers; his loss entitled him to speak for theirs; his vengeance would sanctify their suffering.
Yet Bin Laden’s depiction of a Muslim community outcast by the modern world relied paradoxically precisely upon the kind of modern technology that had made the bin Laden family captains of the Saudi construction industry. The Al Qaeda leader had made his August 23, 1996, “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Two Holy Places” from an Afghan cave, Wright noted. Thereby
bin Laden assumed the role of an uncorrupted, indomitable primitive standing against the awesome power of the secular, scientific, technological Goliath; he was fighting modernity itself. It did not matter that bin Laden, the construction magnate, had built the cave using heavy machinery and that he had proceeded to outfit it with computers and advanced communications devices. The stance of the primitive was appealingly potent, especially to people who had been let down by modernity; however, the mind that understood such symbolism, and how it could be manipulated, was sophisticated and modern in the extreme.
As bin Laden’s mixing of the modern and the medieval indicated, jihadists like him are quite sophisticated. Their individual zeal for using force in the name of Islamic faith, and their popular support base among significant Muslim communities, reflect truly radical Islamic orthodoxies in the original, literal sense of deeply rooted (Latin radix means root). Accordingly, jihadists time and again are hardly disadvantaged persons who turn to bloody fanaticism because of socioeconomic root causes of poverty and oppression, the topic for the next article in this series.
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