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COVERSTORY: ESSAY
The Osama Chic
The romance of Islam's Che is a deadly mix of the modern and
the medieval. And the millennial cult is born.
By S. Prasannarajan
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PROPHET OF RAGE: Bin Laden declaring his waer against US
strikes
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This is the grainy
image of the brand-new radical, talking to you from Mount Jehad, his beard
flowing in black and white, his turban intact, his camouflage jacket in
perfect harmony with the monochromatic mountain, his automatic weapon
in pointed anticipation, his thin finger wagging in the air, his sports
watch staring at the camera ... this is the moment of commandments of
revenge, delivered in sonorous Arabic. A sculpted perfection of control
and calm, the lanky prophet of apocalypse mesmerises with menacing eyes,
kills without firing a shot.
This image of Osama bin Laden, making a prerecorded
war speech from somewhere in Afghanistan hours after the first American
aerial strikes on Taliban sites, has become the defining face of the 21st
century rebellion. And his cause-America the nation of infidels worthy
of the tallest inferno, the suffering and sorrow of persecuted Muslims,
and permanent war against the tormentor-is not only reshaping the cultural
map of the globe, it is redefining the ideas of dissent and disenchantment
in a world that has been living in the cosy smugness of post-Wall triumphalism.
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CAUSE CONUNDRUM: Pro-peace demonstrators
in Rome demanding an end to US strikes on Afghanistan
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That way, this fugitive mountain prophet signals
a qualitative shift in the history of counterpoint. In the last century,
the most photogenic protest was personified by another bearded revolutionary,
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, whose martyrdom in the ravines of Bolivia
34 years ago marked the end of a romance and the beginning of a cult-Che.
In his death merged the countercultural passions of an era. That Jesus-like
visage, gazing at some secret star, was an emblematic celebration of the
freedom and fantasies of the Sixties, the follies and cultural frolics
of a generation that lived in an empire of dreams. Today, the Che mythology
is a catalogued skeleton-the Revolution is dead, long live forensic science!-preserved
in a glass case in Havana.
Today, it is not the Bolivian jungles but the
Afghan mountains. The new romance is larger and it is not ideological
but religious, maybe even civilisational. Today it is not that inanimate
image of Companero as Christ immortalised by Freddy Alborta but the image
of Jehadi as an angry Jehovah as immortalised by Al Jazeera. Bin Laden's
revolution is the post-Soviet mockery of the liberal triumphalism of the
West-not the end of history but History Part Two. Not even the clash of
civilisations, but a rage against the civilisation. For, bin Laden, despite
the rancour in his rhetoric, is not responding to the manifest outrage
of the West. He is not only denying the West a history, but trying to
create his own version of history, preferably with raw material collected
from the blasted temples of the enemy. Unlike the discredited radicals
of ideology, he has a stage larger than the streets and beaches of the
Sixties. He has the world's second-largest religion to play out his romance.
So, has Islam finally got its post-modern sword
in bin Laden, ready to destruct and redeem? Looks like Islam, in which
prophet is power and scripture is state, has been waiting for him. There
were others before him, revolutionaries and redeemers, and there were
also paradises built on graveyards. In the last century, in terms of size
and blood, the master craftsman of the Great Islamic Revolution was the
faith's most fabulous face, fire in his words and kingdom in his hallucination-and
the enemy, always the West: Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to "strike
America in the mouth", he wanted to "break America's teeth".
In his revolutionary vision, "the West has made material progress
and has brought the world up to be a fighter and a beast. Western education
has taken the humanity out of humans and created instead a murderous beast".
The West was America, the Great Shaitan, the most favoured devil of Islamic
revolt, and history was this devil's ally.
On that point, bin Laden too agrees, though
he is, in both madness and method, different from the Ayatollah. History,
in bin Ladenism, is a lie, a lie as big as the United States of America:
"America is struck by Almighty God in one of its vital organs, so
that its greatest buildings are destroyed ... America has been filled
with horror from north to south and east to west, and thanks be to God.
What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our
Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years, of humiliation
and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities
desecrated ... God has blessed a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront
of Islam, to destroy America. May God bless them and allot them a supreme
place in heaven..." (as translated in The New York Times).
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