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COVER STORY: ESSAY
Encapsulated History
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Osama bin Laden's
Utopia is not conditioned by the exigencies of the state. His
journey from riches to trenches is in the radical tradition of
renunciation and rebellion.
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His anti-Americanism
is the offshoot of a picnic in the darkest province of civilisation. That
80-year reference of torment is encapsulated history for the sake of the
factfinders. Was he referring to the Sykes-Picot agreement in the aftermath
of World War II that divided the Ottoman Empire? Or was he referring to
the British mandate over Palestine that came into effect on September
11, 1922? There is even a reference to the Andalusian tragedy, by which
he means the conquest of the Islamic Granada by the Spanish. But deciphering
bin Laden's sense of history is of little use, what is useful for the
aficionados of doom is the mind.
It is a mix of the modern and the medieval.
Unlike his predecessors in the administration of terror, his Utopia is
not conditioned by the exigencies of the state. He doesn't have a nation,
he has an idea. Actually, he is the homeless, and his journey from riches
to trenches is in the true radical tradition of renunciation and rebellion,
what with the billionaire Arab leading the revolution against the white
infidels from the Stone Age comfort of a Taliban bunker. Statelessness
is his divine mandate to tap the subterranean disillusion of the Arab
states, to challenge the Western civilisation (more specifically 20 centuries
of Christ) in a game of gods. He is the man of the zeitgeist, hence the
suddenly discovered sorrows of Palestine, always a fashionable cause for
those who think Israel is a state born out of a historical conspiracy.
In bin Laden, Palestine has a crusader larger than Yasser Arafat, who
has already been "compromised" by power, and a theoretician
more effective than Edward Said: "I swear to God that America will
not live in peace before peace reigns in Palestine, and before all the
army of infidels depart the land of Mohammad, peace be upon him."
And he knows, being a beneficiary of infidels' achievements in markets
and machines, how to play with sinful gadgets for a holy cause-jet engines
to smash the tower of Shaitan, videotapes and TV screens to steal the
thunder of the Bush bombs.
The birth of an icon on Islamic placards, which
are multiplying in the streets of Cairo and Quetta, Jakarta and Gaza,
in spite of icons being rather unislamic. For drawing-room jehadis and
campus counter-revolutionaries, for streetfighting Islamists and the gun-totters
in the ghettos, he, with martyrdom a few Tomahawks away, is one man against
the only imperium-or one man for the rehabilitation of the only God, who
currently lives only in the Book, and his kingdom has been betrayed by
rulers and ransacked by infidels.
The savage seeks nobility in blood. Osama bin
Laden has taken upon himself the burden of the Book and the responsibility
of retribution. The millennial rebel has nothing to lose but a videotape
of martyrdom.
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