History had already begun to bypass the stale thinking of al-Qaeda's leader, writes MARY FITZGERALD, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
THERE’S A certain irony in the fact Osama bin Laden, the world’s most hunted man for a decade, has been killed at a time when the ideology he helped spawn is struggling to remain relevant.
It had not gone unnoticed that the Saudi-born militant and his greying, largely Arab, inner circle had been slow to react to the revolutionary wave that has swept across the Middle East and north Africa this year. When bin Laden’s cronies eventually issued pronouncements on the “Arab spring”, it was clear they had failed to understand the impulses behind it. Al-Qaeda had long railed against tyrannical rulers in the region, but in the end it played no role in the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. There was a sense that history had passed it by, and, when contrasted with the heady optimism of Tahrir Square, al-Qaeda’s thinking seemed stale and redolent of a bygone era.
This was not the awakening bin Laden had envisaged. “My life or death does not matter. The awakening has started,” he crowed in late 2001. Bin Laden and his acolytes saw the attacks of 9/11 as the ultimate “propaganda of the deed” which would inspire millions of Muslims to rally to their cause – a nebulous vision rooted in a romanticised notion of an Islamic caliphate. While a large percentage of the world’s Muslims deplored what happened that day as inimical to their understanding of their faith (still others dismissed it as a conspiracy and bin Laden a chimera dreamt up by the West) significant numbers hailed him a hero.
In Muslim-majority countries including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, I have heard people use the honorific “Sheikh Osama” as they praised bin Laden for standing up to western hegemony. They talked of him restoring pride and meaning where once they felt only powerlessness in the face of what they perceived to be an omnipotent and hostile West.
In an online forum yesterday, one Saudi compared bin Laden with Salah al-Din – known in the West as Saladin – suggesting he had “liberated Muslims from their humiliation”. Those who lauded bin Laden did not necessarily share all his ideals, but fell into what you might call the “sneaking regarder” category. Many explained his appeal partly in terms of his personal story – they admired the charismatic ascetic who had given up a life of privilege for what he believed in.
But over time, support for al-Qaeda and bin Laden – at one stage key rings and T-shirts bearing his image could be found in markets from Pakistan to Egypt – began to slip away. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that, in the eyes of erstwhile supporters, al-Qaeda and its affiliates began carrying out attacks that appeared to have less to do with grievances including the Palestinian cause, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and western support for Arab despots, but more to do with a nihilistic millenarianism and intolerance towards those who did not adhere to their particular reading of Islam.
According to the Pew Research Centre, which has been tracking public opinion in Muslim-majority countries since 2003, the percentage of Muslims expressing confidence in bin Laden and support for al-Qaeda has declined significantly since that year.
The greatest drop has occurred in Jordan, where 56 per cent of Muslims had confidence in bin Laden in 2003, compared with just 13 per cent in the most recent poll.
In Pakistan, where al-Qaeda affiliates have wrought havoc and killed thousands of civilians in recent years, the figure fell from 52 per cent in 2005 to 18 per cent in last year’s survey.
In Jordan, the fraying of support can be put down to widespread revulsion triggered by the targeting by al-Qaeda suicide bombers of three Amman hotels in one night in 2005. The simultaneous attack in the capital left more than 60 people dead, most of whom were Arabs, including guests at a Palestinian wedding and a renowned Syrian filmmaker.
Admitting responsibility, Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his organisation, al-Qaeda in Iraq, employed language echoing that used to justify similar attacks in New York, London, Madrid, Bali, Turkey, Egypt and Morocco. The intention was not to kill Muslims, they insisted, rather to target “the dens of evil that were established on Muslim soil in Amman, in order to protect the faith and raise the banner of tawhid [monotheism]”.
“Using the name of Islam to justify this violence is making the world see us Muslims as terrorists,” Nadia al-Alami, the bride who lost her mother and father in the attack, later told me. “The people who do this kind of thing are terrorists. They do not have any relationship with Islam . . . The people who killed my parents have nothing to do with my religion.”
Similar sentiments have been voiced by Muslim clerics and intellectuals, including some of al-Qaeda’s former fellow travellers, who have picked apart the flimsy theological foundations of its ideology, isolating it even further.
Reactions to bin Laden’s death in Muslim-majority countries yesterday – which ranged from cheering to mourning and from denial to a flurry of conspiracy theories – mirrored to an extent the mix of conflicting emotions and ambivalence he provoked while alive.
It would be foolish to believe that al-Qaeda, now something akin to an international franchise with a constellation of off-shoots, will disappear with bin Laden. The threat of an attack like the one that killed more than a dozen in Marrakech last week may never go away.
But bin Laden died knowing that ultimately he had failed in his major goal – to inspire the multitudes. The majority of people in the Arab world, which he once sought to radicalise and mobilise, are now aged under 30, many of them too young to think of 9/11 as anything more than a childhood memory. Among the older generations, those who may once have made excuses for him are tired of the violence which metastasised into something approaching a fetish, an end unto itself.
The recent popular uprisings have shown that protests that have been nonviolent in their inception (and have become violent only in response to brutal attempts to quash them) have been far more effective, and possess a far greater moral authority.
In Libya last month, I met several grizzled fighters who once swam in similar ideological waters to bin Laden. Some had seen him in Afghanistan, whether during the battle against the Soviets or later Taliban rule. All professed to have opposed the 9/11 attacks and argued that their fight against Gadafy never had anything to do with al-Qaeda. They talked of the exhilarating sense of possibility unleashed by the revolutions in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt, and wished the same for their home country.
“We refuse the idea that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda represent Islam,” said one. It might be way too soon to talk of al-Qaeda’s demise but the struggle against its dwindling number should not prevent us from seeing it has lost the larger battle – that for hearts and minds.