“My father loved the outdoors. He very carefully laid out an orchard, planting the area with hundreds of trees, including palms and other varieties. He also created a costly, man-made oasis, cultivating reeds and other water plants. My father’s eyes would sparkle with such happiness at the sight of a beautiful plant or flower, or pride at the spectacle of one of his prancing stallions.”
This description of Osama bin Laden was given by his son Omar, for a time the son that bin Laden had greatest hopes for (according to Omar) but who left his father definitively in 1999. Omar’s description looks back some 10 years previously, when the bin Laden family was living in Saudi Arabia (roughly the same period when Khalid, the son killed with his father this week, was born).
The description of the lovingly tended garden might initially seem to be a far cry from the bin Laden the West knows, the one who declared:
“Being killed for God’s cause is a great honour achieved by only those who are the elite of the nation. We love this kind of death for God’s cause as much as you like to live. We have nothing to fear... It is something to wish for.”
But my mind went back to Omar’s description (found in the memoir, Growing Up bin Laden, co-written with his mother) when I saw the film footage of the compound where bin Laden met his death: the extensive vegetable rows, the trees... It was still the same man.
Omar’s account of his father is highly ambivalent, perhaps because of his father’s seeming duality.
He delighted his children by mentally computing any complicated sum faster than a calculator, and took pride in having memorised the Quran at the age of 10 (following his own father’s accidental death, a period he acknowledged to have been of great mental turmoil). But he also rarely smiled, forbade air-conditioners and refrigerators (even in the summer heat of Jeddah) and put his wives and children through a great deal of unnecessary physical hardship.
His own terse explanation: “Islamic beliefs are corrupted by modernisation”.
Such a statement shows how, even as he claimed to speak on behalf of Islam (he was self-taught in theology), he was alienated from the world of the vast majority of his co-religionists. The following passage, giving his description of the events of 9/11 to his followers, is striking not just for what it says about the US but also its almost offhand description of the Muslim world:
“That holy Tuesday... the American-Zionist alliance was pursuing its work among our sons and parents on the blessed land of Al-Aqsa (of Jersusalem; the third holiest shrine for Muslims). Jewish hands piloted American planes and tanks, while our sons in Iraq were dying because of the unjust embargo imposed by America and its agents. During this time, the Muslim world was living as far as possible from the true religion...”
What that last sentence shows is his matter-of-fact virtual excommunication of most other Muslims. For several years following 9/11, many pundits sought to make bin Laden’s concept of “jihad” to be simply that traditionally preached by Islam. However, this missed something important.
Bin Laden endorsed an understanding of jihad that was accepted only by some violent fringe groups in the 20th century: namely, the idea that even other Muslims could be legitimate targets (since if they were not with you, they were not true Muslims).
An insight into his understanding of belonging is given by his nostalgic description of his time in Afghanistan, in the guerilla war against the Soviet Union:
“This is how we chose the site that was later called the companions’ den. This was a magnificent time: we camped near the enemy, and at the same time we were building roads and trenches, sleeping in a single tent... We prayed together, made decisions together and ate in the same place. We would wake up at night to stand guard, fearfully, because the place was frightening, for the enemy and for us too.”
The phrase “the companions’ den” was intended to invoke the original companions of the Prophet Muhammad, who greeted him when he arrived to build a new community in Madina. Just as the Prophet had had to withdraw from Mecca, so too, extremists like bin Laden believed they had to withdraw from society.
But the community bin Laden built – and there were times when hundreds of people depended directly on him – was the paranoid universe of a sect, in which the enemy could be lurking everywhere.
It was far from the original Islamic community that was ready to engage the world – societies, science and the arts – constructively.
Bin Laden was, in many ways, a socially and cultural marginal figure who managed, for some years, to dominate media attention. But, because he was marginal, the following words, showing his assessment of 9/11, should be chilling:
“The most important positive consequence of the attacks on New York and Washington was that they showed the truth about the fight between the crusaders and the Muslims… They revealed how much the crusaders resent us, once these two attacks stripped the wolf of its sheep’s clothing and showed us its horrifying face. The entire world awoke...”
Change a few words in that description and you will find the same words with which many pundits described the entire Muslim world’s attitude to the West. Whatever else we say about bin Laden, he managed to make some of us sound like him.
ranierfsadni@europe.com