[LINK] "How Osama bin Laden Relegated Himself to the Post-Colonial Past"

[rfmcdonald]

Hopeful, this Globe and Mail article by Doug Saunders. Plausible, too.

If you talk to the kids wearing [Osama bin Laden] on their T-shirts, you find they admire him as an Arab who took on the United States, who ran his own show, and who wouldn’t bow to anyone else’s agenda. It’s the way many blacks admire Malcolm X, as an icon of self-sufficient resistance, without any interest in the Marxist-tinged racial separatism he sought. Mr. bin Laden will long be remembered, but bin Ladenism is already forgotten.

And so we saw small protests on Friday in the squares of Cairo and in his final hideout in Pakistan, but those protesters were expressing formulaic anger at Americans, not support for al-Qaeda.

[. . .] What is the authentic voice of Muslim frustration? In the early weeks of the revolutions, it was popular to exclaim that the movements in the city squares had rendered al-Qaeda obsolete. “Osama bin Laden died in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, months before he died in Abbottabad,” several scholars said this week.

“The demand for freedom and democracy in a national context has displaced the imaginary umma, the world community of Muslims, in its struggle with the West,” Olivier Roy, the French scholar who’s probably the world’s most reliable chronicler of Islamic politics, writes in an essay to be published this weekend. “Charismatic authoritarian personalities such as bin Laden no longer exert any fascination on an individualistic and rather pragmatic younger generation.”

Al-Qaeda was a post-colonial movement: It spoke to the anger of communities that had won their national independence in the years after the Second World War but that still had a relationship of dependence and ugly subordination to their former colonial masters in the West. The African and Arab dictatorships, with their attempts to withdraw from the world into a closed economy of one man’s personality, were one post-colonial response. A retreat to a mythic past of theocratic purity, and a grandiose theatre of martyrdom, were another.

Al-Qaeda, according to studies of its membership, was almost exclusively a movement of disenchanted Muslim men from the educated upper-middle classes. Osama bin Laden’s warriors were the angry children of prosperous Muslim families who found themselves without the opportunities or hopes of their fathers, forced to the periphery or to foreign migration by the corrupt regimes and growth-starved closed economies of post-colonial countries that had fallen into the shadow of the West.