Osama bin Laden (born March 10, 1957, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; died May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan) became the preeminent symbol of global terrorism in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Driven by a desire to avenge the many wrongs committed against the umma (worldwide community of believers) in what he viewed as a war on Islam, he supported the killing of innocents in the name of fair reciprocity (al-mu‘āmala bi-l-mithl)—in other words, appropriate retribution for the loss of Muslim lives. Frustrated at what he saw as the failure of the modern nation-state to represent Islam and counter the forces that threaten it, he built up a nonstate organization, al-Qaeda (al-Qā‘ida), to defend the honor of Islam worldwide. In so doing, he turned politics into a wholly religious affair: a battle not for international harmony or even the triumph of justice but for the victory of piety over idolatry.
Hailing from a wealthy family with close ties to the Saudi dynasty, Bin Laden proved an effective organizer of jihadist activity against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and, subsequently, of terrorist activity around the globe, including the 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and, most famously, the events of 9/11. In Afghanistan, he came under the tutelage of ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam (d. 1989), a Palestinian militant, with whom he broke ties in 1988 in order to consolidate his own jihadist stature under the banner of al-Qaeda. Following the 1989 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he unsuccessfully tried to convince the Saudi dynasty to entrust its security to his resources rather than the U.S. military. In his view, the presence of infidel soldiers in Arabia, the land of Islam’s two holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina, was the ultimate humiliation for Islam. He relocated from Afghanistan to the Sudan in 1991, at the same time sponsoring the London-based Committee for Advice and Reform, through which he sought to undermine the religious legitimacy of the Saudi dynasty for its complicity in the U.S. “occupation” of Islam’s holy land. He was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 and not long thereafter returned from the Sudan to Afghanistan. From there, he issued his 1996 declaration of war against the United States, targeting “the far enemy” as the ultimate cause of the umma’s corrupted and humiliated state.
Bin Laden cultivated close ties with the Taliban under Mulla ‘Umar, whom he recognized as the “Commander of the Faithful” (a title by which Mulla ‘Umar had been recognized within his own Taliban ranks). His willingness to join forces with the Taliban points to the parasitical nature of the relation. With a global vision, Bin Laden showed no interest in becoming master of national affairs in Afghanistan, the goal of the Taliban, but only to use it as a base from which to launch attacks against his enemies across the globe. His alliance with Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (Tanzim al-Jihad), led to the 1998 announcement of “The Global Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.” During the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Bin Laden allegedly went into hiding in the mountainous region along the northwestern border of Pakistan, but he turned out to have been residing for the last several years of his life in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a military center outside Islamabad. Al-Qaeda would mushroom into a worldwide network. Bin Laden continued to direct its activity while also serving as a figurehead of world jihadism. As such, he was able to inspire Muslim youths, even those with no formal connection to his organization, to engage in terrorist activity at both the local and global level.
Bin Laden saw the ultimate test of religious commitment as a willingness to kill and be killed—or to inspire others to do so—in the path of God (fī sabīl Allāh). His terrorism thus flowed from a religious vision wherein virtuous action on God’s behalf is possible only in battle against infidel enemies. Thus, militancy becomes the sole option for believers wherever God’s divine speech (i.e., the Qur’an) is not politically supreme. In this sense, his politics was decidedly utopian, ignoring a heritage of political thought in Islam that always balanced religious ideals against worldly realities. He opposed democracy and any form of governance that includes human decision-making in the legislative process. His conception of “the Islamic state,” however, gave no details other than the sovereignty of God, as enshrined in the first part of the Muslim declaration of faith: lā ilāha illā Allāh (i.e., “there is no god but God”). In this view, all that is needed to govern human affairs is perfect monotheism, in which society responds completely to God’s sovereign voice as articulated by the recited Qur’an: injustice in this view results from human attempts to usurp the unique sovereignty of God by ruling without adequate recognition of the oneness of God.
Implicit in Bin Laden’s outlook is a rejection of the nation-state, the emblem of secular (i.e., worldly) power, as intrinsically evil. The jihad he called for may speak of defending the umma but ends as a battle of eschatological proportions, destined to climax in a divinely promised victory over all forces that fail to conform to the way of God. The task of Muslims is therefore to separate themselves from and fight all that is not unequivocally subordinate to divine authority. The real risk for Muslims, according to this view, is to jeopardize their standing in the next world by compromising themselves through submitting to worldly interests in this one. In Islam, the concern for keeping one’s religious integrity (piety) relatively untarnished is not normally accompanied by such a universal condemnation of the ways of the world. As a result, in Bin Laden’s view, to display one’s piety in a world where all that falls short of perfect religion is idolatrous; one must battle the forces of idolatry (ṭāghūt), whether those forces are infidel powers or apostate leaders who collaborate with them. In this sense, one is a Muslim (i.e., submissive to God) insofar as one risks one’s life (al-mukhāṭara bi-l-nafs) in battle against God’s enemies. Politics, as a result, is read through the lens of a religious narrative of conflict. God invites Muslims to sacrifice themselves to preserve His interests (one’s life in exchange for paradise), fighting against the world even to the point of self-destruction. In this view, the true believer avoids being implicated in the ways of the world, which would compromise God’s ways and contribute to the humiliation of His religion. Suicide attacks are thus meant to serve as a powerful witness (martyrdom) to the glory of Islam. Ultimately, then, Bin Laden’s goal was to witness the power of Islam, a perverse sort of missionary who hopes to draw the world’s attention to God through acts of violence. There are no clear political objectives, only the desire to demonstrate the might of God over the world and its tyrannical rulers who mistakenly believe that they have power over who lives and who dies.
The idea that the Muslim “abandonment” of religion has caused a state of “weakness” in relation to other nations is hardly new, but Bin Laden gave it a further spin, placing the blame on non-Muslims. Jews especially were singled out as scapegoats, somehow responsible for Muslim “sinfulness” before God. In this odd twist of logic, it was the Jews who seduced Muslims from religion, causing them to sell their religion for paltry recompense in this world. This, in turn, left the umma in a weakened state, unable to achieve the political success that serves as evidence of divine favor.
Bin Laden saw the umma to be in peril. Jews and Christians have taken control of the abode of Islam, either directly or through the agency of Muslim apostates who willingly compromise the supremacy of God’s interests for worldly gain. The result is the humiliation of the umma at the hands of what he called Zionists and Crusaders who possess Muslim lands, plunder Muslim resources, and make light of Muslim lives; thus the action of the West today vis-à-vis the abode of Islam is no different from—but simply the ongoing extension of—the Crusades and colonial conquests of the past. Bin Laden believed the most heinous actions committed by these infidel forces is the pollution of Islam’s holiest sites: the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem (under Israeli control) and the two shrines of Arabia, Mecca and Medina (under the control of the apostate Saudi regime in alliance with the Crusader West). This wretched state prevails throughout the abode of Islam—Chechnya, Somalia, Kashmir—literally everywhere Muslims are ruled by worldly calculations rather than otherworldly governance.
As Bin Laden saw it, the only way to restore the integrity of the umma has been to fight for the cause of God rather than live in ignominious shame, subjugated to the forces of idolatry. Indeed, the divine punishment currently inflicted on the umma is the result of its neglect of jihad as a paramount religious duty. Only a renewed willingness to fight and die against the enemies of religion will liberate the umma from the forces of idolatry and restore its standing before God. Fortunately for Bin Laden, righteous Muslim youths who prefer death over life have responded to the call, sacrificing themselves in total war against infidels and apostates until Judgment Day. Fighting the agents of idolatry is cast as emulation of the first Muslims. Violence thus becomes ritualized—in other words, a way by which Muslims can please God by reenacting what the first Muslims did to please God. It is for this reason that religious education, especially the study of the Qur’an, is central to al-Qaeda military training, serving as a way to “purify” operatives of any stain of worldliness and making them worthy soldiers (and sacrificial victims through martyrdom) for God, just like the first Muslims before them.
Bin Laden was by no means the architect of jihadism, nor did his voice command uncontested scholarly respect within jihadist circles. ‘Abd al-Qadir b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (better known as Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the Egyptian doctor who helped found the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and went on to become a key ideological architect of al-Qaeda, imprisoned in Egypt) and ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Mustafa Halima (better known as Abu Basir al-Tartusi, a London-based Syrian scholar of a jihadist bent) have disagreed with Bin Laden on key issues, such as suicide attacks and the targeting of innocents. In contrast, Abu Jandal al-Azdi, Saudi jihadist scholar in prison since 2004, declared Bin Laden to be “the renewer of the age” (mujaddid al-zamān), an extraordinary title used to designate those understood to be Islam’s saviors for ensuring the continued existence of the religion in pristine form. Indeed, jihadism itself is only a small segment of a larger development, the so-called Islamic awakening (al-saḥwa al-islāmiyya), a contemporary trend in which social and political activism—but not necessarily violence—is understood as essential to the valorization of Islam. The goal is not to wait for the judgment of God in the world to come but to execute it in this world, by force if necessary, in order to redeem the umma from its “disgraced” political state.
With no scholarly status of his own, Bin Laden nevertheless was able to manipulate key elements within this broader “Islamist” discourse to excite Muslim youths to partake in terrorist activity. The religious prestige that Bin Laden sought to garner would not have been possible without the prior development of Salafism and its dismissal of traditional religious authority in favor of intense individual engagement with the Qur’an and sunna, apart from mediation of their meaning by traditional experts, as a way to inspire an activist response in believers rather than servile emulation of their religious elders. This religiosity was articulated in radical form by the likes of Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), key figure in the Muslim Brotherhood after Egyptian independence, and ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj (d. 1982), author of the text The Neglected Duty that inspired the assassins of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Religion in this case is guaranteed not by the ability of scholarly masters to derive correct rulings from revealed texts but by the willingness to fight—hence the title Bin Laden bore (along with many others): al-shaykh al-mujāhid (the fighting shaykh). It is the jihadist, not the scholar, who ensures the integrity of religion; war against the enemies of religion becomes the key element of religious devotion, turning Islam in the view of such advocates into a singularly militaristic affair.
Bin Laden’s quest for divine justice may have resonated not only with those who tie the validity of Islam to political success but also with those who have experienced marginalization in the world in one way or another. In the end, however, he was a terrorist with limited religious understanding. His enthusiasm for his own glory following the jihadist victory against the Soviets in Afghanistan (made possible by U.S., Saudi, and Pakistani support) gave him an exaggerated sense of invincibility. As a result, he underestimated the resolve of the international community in the face of the threat he posed. More tragically, his deficient religious knowledge left him ignorant of the well-established reasoning processes of shari‘a that Muslim scholars carefully crafted over the centuries to limit, or even eliminate, violence in the name of religion. As a result, his jihad was motivated more by sentiments of tribal honor and revenge rather than by religious truth, bringing the umma not glory but intra-Muslim strife (fitna) and engendering a perplexing image of Islam for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In the final analysis, Bin Laden is the true heir of early Kharijism, calling the umma to rise up (khurūj) against any force that would keep it from living in the shadow of the Qur’an alone. In an age in which injustices are immediately broadcast to international audiences, his defiance of the global powers that claim to be defenders of justice garnered him popularity in some circles, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Some have likened him to Che Guevara (d. 1967). His actions, however, brought no benefit to the umma or the world. His manner of struggling against tyranny deployed violence indiscriminately, targeting innocents (including fellow Muslims) while inflaming sectarian strife within the umma itself. It is for this reason that his brand of piety has been rejected by the vast majority of Muslims. Bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011, by U.S. Navy Seals in a covert operation. After identification, his body was buried at sea according to Islamic ritual.
See also fundamentalism; Mulla ‘Umar (b. 1959); al-Qaeda; Sayyid Qutb (1906–66); suicide; Taliban; terrorism; al-Zawahiri, Ayman (b. 1951)
Further Reading
‘Abd al-Rahim ‘Ali, Tanzim al-Qa‘ida, ‘Ashrun ‘Amman . . . wa-l-Ghazu Mustamirr, Markaz al-Mahrusa li-l-Nashr wa-l-Khadamat al-Suhufiyya wa-l-Ma‘lumat, 2007; Raymond Ibrahim, ed. and trans., The Al Qaeda Reader, 2007; Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, translated by James Howarth, 2005.
PAUL L. HECK