For Muslims, Bin Laden’s Star Is Fading as Quickly as It Rose

Two months ago, his portrait adorned posters and T-shirts, and mothers named their babies after him, but Osama bin Laden’s flirtation with fame in this part of the world lasted hardly more than the 15 minutes Andy Warhol said everyone will have eventually.

Today, interest in his fate has faded, and Muslims who revered him as the reincarnation of Saladin--the 12th century Arab hero who fought the Christian Crusaders and ruled an empire from Cairo to Baghdad--feel like victims of their own illusions. His myth lingers only in grainy videos showing a gaunt, hunted man living in a cave, leading the remnants of a defeated foreign army and speaking of the deaths of 3,000 civilians as a “blessed event.”

“I think morally he has the obligation to come out of the caves and step forward,” said Imtiaz Ahmad, who sells tea in Peshawar’s teeming bazaar and admires Bin Laden’s defense of Islam but not his deeds. “Otherwise the killing won’t end in Afghanistan. If he hadn’t been there, there would have been no bombing, no killing, so I’m just as glad he’s history.”

The mosque near Ahmad’s stall was emptying after prayers, and

100 or so worshipers, followed by a platoon of policemen with shields and batons, were marching beneath banners toward Memorial Square. Twenty-five thousand demonstrators rallied there in November to denounce the United States and praise Bin Laden. But on this day, the slogans were directed against India and its policy in the contested Himalayan region of Kashmir. The United States and Bin Laden were yesterday’s news.

Quick Defeat Leaves Supporters Demoralized

“Whether Bin Laden is dead or alive now is immaterial,” Kamal Matinubim, a retired army general, said in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. “Many people like me never thought he was a hero in the first place. He let Muslims down. His appeal was to the young, illiterate masses and the mullahs who exploit them to promote a twisted notion of an Islamic revival.”

That appeal ran deep in a region awash in the paranoia that the West wants to destroy Islam. Bin Laden had put together an army of 20,000 and fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He eschewed the trappings of his ultra-rich Saudi family and lived as simply as the prophet Muhammad had. He believed that Islam was pure and that the West was spiritually crippled. He was part mullah, part soldier, and to those who think all wisdom is in the Koran and who consider the slate of world history a blank before the prophet’s birth 1,400 years ago, he seemed wise, courageous, invincible.

The restless young, without jobs, education or worldliness, and the mullahs, who had ridden bicycles before the growth of militant Islam and now drove Peugeots and carried Mont Blanc pens, had long searched for an icon. They had briefly embraced Libya’s Moammar Kadafi and Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but both had proved disappointments. They had flirted with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but one had turned out to be a secularist, the other a nationalist.

Then came Bin Laden. He was a medieval man at odds with the modern world. He believed that there were two worlds, one Muslim, one non-Muslim, and that violence carried out in the name of the former was just. He gave the disenfranchised something to believe in.

But his view of Islam, many scholars say, misinterprets the religion, a faith whose prophet originally observed the fast of Yom Kippur and led his people in prayer facing Jerusalem, not Mecca, in an attempt to keep peace with Jews--and one in which the Koran advises, “Keep to forgiveness (O Muhammad), and enjoin kindness, and turn away from the ignorant.”

“People like to back a winner in the Islamic world,” said Pakistani journalist Ashfaq Yusufzaie. “They thought Bin Laden could really stand up to the West, that he could defeat a superpower the way the Afghan moujahedeen had the Soviet Union. When his Al Qaeda and the Taliban crumbled in just weeks, sympathy for Bin Laden fell drastically. People were left feeling totally demoralized.”

At least in part, that deflation stems from a feeling shared by many that they are members of largely failed societies in which Islamic unity has been only a dream. More than 1 million Muslims died in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s; by at least one estimate, 75% of the world’s refugees today are Muslims fleeing Muslim countries. On top of that, oil did not bring prosperity, war with Israel brought neither victory nor peace, and political reforms sweeping the world from Latin America to Africa did not bring democracy to the Islamic “nation.”

A Yearning for the Golden Age of Islam

Once again, the Golden Age of Islam seems impossibly distant. It was an age, after the birth of Islam in the 7th century, when the great Arab cities--Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Cordoba in Spain--were the intellectual centers of the world, nurturing the foremost philosophers and scientists as well as the finest libraries and universities to be found anywhere. From this trove of knowledge, Muslims would introduce the techniques of irrigation, navigation and geography to Western Europe.

The end of this era still brings a stab of pain in the mosques. The Christians pushed the Arabs back, town by town, across Spain. Two North African dynasties came to battle the Europeans and ended up fighting each other. In 1492--the year Columbus set sail for America--the merged kingdoms of Ferdinand and Isabella hoisted the flag of Christian Spain over the Alhambra, and the last Muslim king, Mohammed XI, rode into exile carrying a note from his mother that read: “Weep like a woman for the city you would not defend like a man.”

Now that it is clear that Afghanistan’s defeated Taliban regime is not going to be the vanguard of anything, some scholars say Islamic liberals have been emboldened. Their voices have long been muted by fundamentalists who advocate a militancy not shared by the vast majority of the world’s 1 billion Muslims, scholars say. Al Sharq al Awsat, a Saudi-owned newspaper in London, recently accused Bin Laden of “putting the whole Islamic nation on a butcher’s block.”

“Islam became politicized, and when religions are politicized, that’s dangerous,” historian Qhwaja Massud said in Islamabad. “But our real problem is economic. Our societies are in crisis. They’re illiterate, impoverished, jobless. That makes it easy for religious leaders to exploit people at the bottom. It enables fascism to come out of the closet. What we’re seeing here is that fascism wears religious cloaks.”