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| Parallel Lives |
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| 02/15/03 at 09:53:33 |
| Parallel lives What could the war-mongering Osama bin Laden possibly have in common with the peace-loving prophet Mohammed? A surprising amount, says Barnaby Rogerson Wednesday February 12, 2003 The Guardian I saw the face of Osama bin Laden just before Christmas. I was wandering through the market-day crowds of a remote African town on the edge of the Sahara, looking for a cafe. The place was poor beyond the conceptions of a privileged 21st-century westerner. The rope used at the police roadblock was made of knotted rags and the service station was a row of eight recycled glass bottles half-filled with petrol. A young man politely asked what I was looking for and took me to a shaded kiosk. I was astounded when he insisted on paying for the coffee, but my jaw dropped even further when I caught sight of the face of Bin Laden emblazoned on his T-shirt. As we travelled on I kept thinking back over the incident. How could such an hospitable and generous man be supporting the terrorist held responsible for the massacre of 9/11? I thought back to the video images of Bin Laden in Afghanistan. And then it dawned on me: the extraordinary way in which so much of Bin Laden's life mirrors that of the prophet Mohammed. For the first time I could begin to imagine how his supporters might see him. All young Muslims are brought up to follow the example of the prophet. He is the fountainhead of correct social behaviour, as well as the ultimate spiritual and ethical guide. A Muslim audience judges every physical gesture, every attitude, every item of clothing worn by a believer against the absolute role model provided by the prophet. Look at any video of Bin Laden and you will see how faithfully he has followed this example. Not for him the silk suits or battledress and berets sported by many Muslim leaders, with their western connotations. He wears the simple, plain-coloured, loose-fitting clothes preferred by the prophet, including a turban rather than the long head-dress of Arabia. He chose to grow a beard - again like the prophet - which in some Muslim countries (such as Turkey, Tunisia and Algeria) has become an anti-establishment badge. Like the prophet his face normally wears a serious expression, he is quiet of speech with a soft smile but seldom given to laughter. Bin Laden, like the prophet, has never shown a taste for rich decorations, fine food or the trappings of power. When Peter Bergen and Peter Jouvenal filmed him in 1997 they recorded that when "the interview came to an end, Bin Laden lingered for a few minutes, courteously serving us cups of tea". Although born into great wealth (his personal fortune has been assessed at anything between £10m and £155m), even as a young man he preferred to live in a small flat in Jeddah and insisted that his family ate and dressed simply. He has also, once again in the style of the prophet, given his daughters in marriage to his closest companions. These personal qualities are ignored in the west but they have greatly added to the respect with which he is treated throughout the Muslim world. Bin Laden, like the prophet, is a pure-blooded Arab brought up in central Arabia. He is also, like the prophet, a member of a powerful clan of merchants. His father was a millionaire businessman. The prophet's grandfather (his father pre-deceased him) was one of the great merchant sheikhs of pre-Islamic Arabia. Both these patriarchs fathered large families from a number of wives, both were intimately involved with the holy sanctuary of the Kaaba at Mecca and both were renowned for the open-handed generosity with which they cared for pilgrims. Both the prophet Mohammed and Bin Laden occupied fairly low positions within their clans: Mohammed was the orphaned child of the youngest son, while Bin Laden was his father's 17th son, born to a different mother than his powerful elder half-brothers. Although Bin Laden cannot in any way approach the prophet's harrowing experience of childhood (his father died before he was born, then his mother died, followed by his beloved grandfather), he was known to have been much affected by the death of his father when he was 13. Motivated by a strong religious sense, Bin Laden worked energetically to help the refugees that began to pour out of Afghanistan after the Russian invasion in December 1979. Throughout the 80s he built safe camps and forward bases, as well as raising funds and attracting Arab recruits to help the embattled Aghan freedom-fighters. The guest house that Bin Laden set up in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar was called Bait al Ansar - the house of the helpers. To Muslim ears this immediately brings to mind the Ansar, the men of Medina who first protected the persecuted prophet from his enemies. By the end of the decade, Bin Laden had proved himself something of a hero, though his shy, self-effacing persona, coupled with an enthusiasm for slightly techie administrative efficiency, fell some way short of charismatic leadership. So what went wrong? Bin Laden's life took an increasingly political turn after the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Rather than celebrating and working for peace, like a true Muslim, he started tinkering with the idea of starting armed rebellions against secular Arab regimes. The Yemen and Iraq were his principal targets. In the eyes of the Saudi authorities he changed, overnight, from homespun hero to wacky irritant and they started putting him under surveillance. Bin Laden was infuriated when his offer to use his fighters to defend Saudi Arabia was left on hold, while US forces were welcomed with open arms during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He publicly broke with his homeland in 1991 and fled to the safety of Sudan, just as the prophet had been forced to leave his home town of Mecca for Medina. In 1996 he moved back to Afghanistan, and his old reticence was replaced by a new taste for publicity and power. He issued a declaration of war against the US military presence in Arabia and intervened bloodily in the Afghan civil war. Indeed, without the intervention of his Arab-Afghan veterans, the Taliban would never have withstood Shah Masood's army. In 1998 Bin Laden spun completely out of control. He went "global", calling for a pan-Islamic International Front and arranged for 40 Taliban "scholars" to back a fatwa sanctioning the killing of Americans and Jews. The bombs in Kenya and Tanzania that July, with their callous disregard for civilian casualties, demonstrated that he had completely lost his grip on the principles of his religion. He began to dream of reviving the caliphate, a worldwide Islamic state, and had lost all sight of the goals of the prophet, and his life-long struggle to reconnect mankind with the divine: the prophet taught that the only way to honour God was to serve mankind. Bin Laden's assassination of Shah Masood, his principal Muslim rival within Afghanistan, and the 9/11 attack on the US was a deliberate attempt to start a new world war. He hoped the US would be humiliated in Afghanistan just as the Soviet Union had been a decade before. It appears to have been a serious tactical miscalculation. However, his long-term strategy may yet prove to be inspired - especially if the US becomes embroiled in a long drawn-out war within the lands of Islam. · Barnaby Rogerson's The Prophet Mohammed: A Biography will be published by Little, Brown on February 20. Imam Malik (rh) visited his shaykh Ibn Hurmuz ( rh) every day from morning to night for a period of about eight years and recounts: "I would come to Ibn Hurmuz, whereupon he would order the servant to close the door and let down the curtain, then he would start speaking of the beginning of this Umma, and tears would stream down his beard." [Abu Nu`aym, Hilya al-Awliya’ 6:345-392 #386; al-Dhahabi, Siyar A`lam al-Nubala’ 7:382-437 #1180; M. Fouad `Abd al-Baqi, Introduction to Malik’s Muwatta’.] |
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