Bin Laden, Osama

Bin Laden, Osama 1957-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Osama bin Laden was born the seventeenth of Muhammed bin Laden’s fifty-two children and the seventeenth of his twenty-four sons, in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, on March 10, 1957. Osama bin Laden was, however, the only child of Alia Ghanem of Syria, perhaps the most beautiful of Muhammed bin Laden’s many wives, but different and separate from the Saudi clan and soon to be divorced by her husband. Muhammed bin Laden began life as a poor Yemeni bricklayer, uneducated and one-eyed. He became an enormously wealthy building contractor in Saudi Arabia after crafting intimate ties with the royal family.

Osama bin Laden’s youth was spent in Hejaz, a southern Arabian province. In 1976 he graduated from private school, the Al Thagher Model School, near the port town of Jedda where he grew up. Described by former teachers and classmates as an outstanding student, bin Laden spent his extra time involved in a for-credit after school Islamic study group for exceptional students. Many believe it could be there that he first acquired a formal education in jihad. Classes were on the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization founded in Egypt in the 1920s and based on Islamic activism, political consciousness, and jihad. Bin Laden graduated from Jedda’s prestigious King Abel Aziz University with a degree in civil engineering. The stories of bin Laden as a hard-drinking partygoer in Beirut in his youth are almost certainly wrong (and probably confuse him with one of his many brothers or other family members). On the contrary, at the university bin Laden was earnest and studious. He took the Quʾran, at least his fundamentalist reading of it, to heart.

In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in what would turn out to be a disastrous war that would lead to Soviet defeat and the collapse of the empire. There immediately arose throughout the Muslim world a mythic call for jihad—embraced by the Saudi royal family itself—in defense of the Islamic peoples of Afghanistan against the godless “infidel” Russians. Osama bin Laden responded warmly to that call. At first he raised money for the cause, then in the early 1980s, with his spiritual mentor, Abdullah Azzam (1941–1989), established the Maktab al-Khidamat (services offices) in Pakistan’s University of Peshawar to direct support and resources to the fighters out in the field. In 1986 the twenty-nine-year-old Osama bin Laden added a heroic battlefield experience to his expanding mythic vita at the battle of Jaji. In his account, which is probably as much inspirational fairytale as actual history, he and the Afghan fighters were thirty meters from the Russians. He came close to being captured, but was so peaceful in his heart that he went to sleep for a while. Mortars fell around him and miraculously failed to explode. “We beat the Soviet Union,” he said (bin Laden, 2005). “The Russians fled.”

Bin Laden’s Islamist triumphalism and his insistence on the continuation of jihad made him a nuisance in Saudi Arabia, which forced him to leave the country in 1991 and finally revoked his citizenship in 1994, despite his impeccable family ties. He spent the next half-decade in Sudan, a remote and lawless land in which he could operate mostly outside of international control as he plotted his next move. One important event in these years that led to his further radicalization was the Gulf War of 1991. He was appalled that Saudi Arabia would allow American troops to be based on what he saw as sacred Saudi soil as they massed troops for an attack against a fellow Muslim country. He personally despised Iraqi president Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) but regarded Iraqis as brethren in faith. Bin Laden became so extreme in his extravagant rhetoric against the royal family that the Saudi government in 1994 finally revoked his citizenship and tried to strip him of all of his assets, though by then his considerable fortune was invested in many global enterprises and out of their reach.

But Sudan in turn eventually succumbed to pressure from the United States, and in 1996 bin Laden was expelled. A man without a country, he chose to relocate in what was by then an Afghanistan controlled by the fundamentalist Taliban. It was there that bin Laden breathed new life into Al-Qaeda, or base, for global terrorist operations, an organization founded in 1988 as the Soviets were pulling out of Afghanistan. For the next five years he operated with virtual impunity in a remote land under Islamist control. In the Afghan camps, thousands of jihadis received training in terrorism. They were committed to the ideals of global jihad and to Osama bin Laden, to whom they took a personal vow of loyalty. Most of those in the camps were foot soldiers, but some, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who devised what was called the “planes projects” or what became the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) and Mohammed Atta (the head of operations for the 9/11 attacks) were central figures in the Afghan camps.

Bin Laden’s chief lieutenant was Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian medical doctor who had been tortured in Cairo prisons. Al-Zawahiri had been inspired in the 1950s and 1960s by the writings of Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), an Islamist intellectual who was hanged in prison by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970). It was Qutb who resurrected an idea at least seven centuries old that violent jihad was at the center of the faith, that purification of Islam went along with eradication of infidels, and that the only goal worth pursuing was the re-creation of a world modeled on that which the Prophet specifically created. Bin Laden, of course, knew the writings of Qutb, though probably mostly through others inspired by Qutb, such as al-Zawahiri and Azzam. Al-Zawahiri, however, was important in other ways to bin Laden. Al-Zawahiri was not an effective leader himself, and in 1996 he merged his Al-Jihad into bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda, formally joining the long Egyptian tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood with Wahhabi fundamentalism. Al-Zawahiri proved a formidable ally, able to conceptualize a global jihad and help implement it organizationally.

Al-Qaeda was structured along the lines of a multinational corporation. Bin Laden was the CEO, and each unit, which could thrive apart from the other divisions, was headed by the equivalent of a vice president. It was a structure intended to survive attack and disruption. Funding came in part from bin Laden himself, though his personal fortune was far less than most imagined and probably not more than a million or so dollars a year. Most funding came from donations and a global network of “charities.” Until 9/11 bin Laden did not seem short of funds.

It was his ideology of jihad that made bin Laden remarkable in these years. He was a religious fanatic and a well-organized businessman, a mystic and master of bureaucratic detail, a man plotting mass destruction and death, and a soft-spoken dreamer who reinvigorated an Islamist movement in ways that have not been seen in the Muslim world since Saladin in the twelfth century. On August 23, 1996, in his “Declaration of Jihad” bin Laden called on all his “Muslim brothers” to help him share in the jihad against the “enemies of God, your enemies the Israelis and Americans” (bin Laden 2005, pp. 23–30). And on February 23, 1998, in his declaration of the World Islamic Front, bin Laden declared a kind of universal declaration of war against “Jews and Crusaders” and declared it was an “individual duty incumbent on every Muslim in all countries” to kill Americans and their allies (bin Laden 2005, pp. 58–62). This declaration of war took the fight outside of the sectarian battles in the Middle East and into the very heart of the enemy lands. Bin Laden wanted concrete political things: American troops out of Saudi Arabia, the defeat of Israel and the liberation of the Palestinians, and the overthrow of corrupt secular Muslim rule in the Middle East. But he also harbored millennial dreams involving the annihilation of American, Western, and Jewish culture in a forge of violence that was redemptive and purifying.

On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda struck New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., in an extraordinarily successful terrorist attack. That the attacks worked as well as they did was also in large part due to pure luck on bin Laden’s part. The World Trade Center collapsed in an inferno of fire mainly due to failures in the architectural conception of the buildings themselves. The whole operation cost well under half a million dollars, and it has caused several hundred billion dollars in direct and indirect damage.

But the spiritual and political costs of 9/11 are incalculable. The 2,749 people who died that day in New York lingered in the air, literally, and many were inhaled by New Yorkers with dust from the collapsed towers. It all made for incomplete mourning that certainly lasted through the months of clearing away the debris but also into the two wars that soon followed, the second of which is the extended war in Iraq. Many live with a special dread from that day, and it serves to symbolize the malevolence of contemporary history. Most Americans believe, if asked in the right way, that if Osama bin Laden had possessed nuclear weapons before 9/11 he would have placed one on a plane crashing into those towers.

Thankfully, Osama bin Laden did not possess such a weapon. As of 2007, he was hiding somewhere, probably in the mountainous border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, basically out of commission, though by remaining alive he inspires others to act in his name and may even continue to direct some actual operations. Bin Laden’s legacy is mixed. There is no question he has changed the world and the violence he directed may occasion a realignment of power in the relationship between the West and the Muslim Middle East. It also energized the new terrorism for many years and disrupted advanced economies in ways few could have imagined possible before 9/11. On the other hand, the violence of bin Laden and Al-Qaeda may backfire for the Muslim world, leading to disruption and civil war and further isolation, rather than renewal along the lines of Islamist fantasies. It may be many years before we will know with any degree of certainty whether the twenty-first century will be relatively free of terrorism and violence.

SEE ALSO Central Intelligence Agency, U.S.; Fundamentalism, Islamic; September 11, 2001; Terrorism; Terrorists

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anti-Defamation League. Osama bin Laden: ADL

Backgrounder.

http://www.adl.org/terrorism_america/bin_l.asp.

Bergen, Peter L. 2001. Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. New York: Free Press.

bin Laden, Osama. 2005. Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, ed. Bruce Lawrence. London: Verso.

Coll, Steve. 2004. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin.

Hoffman, Bruce. 2003. The Leadership Secrets of Osama Bin Laden: The Terrorist as CEO. Atlantic Monthly 291 (3): 26–27.

Hoffman, Bruce. 2006. Inside Terrorism. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

Jacquard, Roland. 2002. In the Name of Osama bin Laden: Global Terrorism and the Bin Laden Brotherhood. Trans. George Holoch. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2003. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kepel, Gilles. 2002. JIHAD: The Trial of Political Islam. Trans. Anthony F. Roberts. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Randal, Jonathan C. 2004. Osama: The Making of a Terrorist. New York: Knopf.

Scheuer, Michael. 2006. Through Our Enemies Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America. 2nd rev. ed. Washington, DC: Potomac Books.

Stern, Jessica. 2003. Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. New York: HarperCollins.

Weaver, Mary Anne. 2005. The War on Terror: Four Years On: Lost at Tora Bora. New York Times Magazine. September 11: Sec 6: 54.

WGBH Boston, with New York Times Television. 2003. Frontline: Chasing the Sleeper Cell.

Williams, Paul L. 2004. Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11, What the Media and the Government Haven’t Told You. New York: Prometheus.

Charles B. Strozier
Renee Cummings