“Had he followed the path chosen for him by his father, [Osama] bin Laden could have been a respected building contractor in Saudi Arabia and a billionaire in his own right,” wrote in 1999 Yossef Bodansky. In his pre-9/11 book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, the then director of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare trenchantly analyzed how this fortunate Arabian son would ultimately become an infamous jihadist.
As we have previously examined, Bodansky accurately defined violent jihadist rage against Western societies as stemming from a sense of Western influences encroaching upon and impurifying Islamic societies. This culture clash became no more prominent than during the postwar development boom in rich Arab Gulf states propelled by petrodollar gushers. As he wrote, the
sudden increase in wealth of the ruling elite and the upper and educated strata and exposure to the West led to confusion and a largely unresolved identity crisis resulting in radicalism and eruptions of violence. Improved media access and availability throughout the region brought home crises in other parts of the world. Because of its conservative Islamic character and sudden wealth and influence, Saudi Arabia was uniquely influenced by these dynamics.
One of over 50 offspring of the wealthy Saudi building magnate Muhammad bin Laden, Osama bin Laden spent his high school and university years in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. Here, Bodansky observed,
Osama bin Laden was constantly exposed to the often contradictory trends influencing Saudi society at the time. As Saudi Arabia’s main port city on the Red Sea coast, Jedda was exposed to Western influences more than most other Saudi cities were. Sailors and experts came to Jedda, while the increasingly rich local elite, including the bin Laden family, visited the West. Coming from generally conservative and isolated Saudi Arabia, these visitors were shocked by their encounter with the West—by the personal freedoms and affluence of the average citizen, by the promiscuity, and by the alcohol and drug use of Western youth. Many young Saudis could not resist experimenting with the forbidden. When they returned to Saudi Arabia, they brought with them the sense of individualism and personal freedoms they encountered in the West.
The younger bin Laden was no exception to these trends, Bodansky wrote:
Osama bin Laden started the 1970s as did many other sons of the affluent and well-connected—breaking the strict Muslim lifestyle in Saudi Arabia with sojourns in cosmopolitan Beirut. While in high school and college Osama visited Beirut often, frequenting flashy nightclubs, casinos, and bars. He was a drinker and womanizer, which often got him into bar brawls.
Then this carouser got Islamic religion. “Ultimately, however, Osama bin Laden was not an ordinary Saudi youth having a good time in Beirut,” Bodansky observed. “In 1973 Muhammad bin Laden was deeply affected spiritually when he rebuilt and refurbished the two holy mosques” in Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest sites, Bodansky wrote. Subsequently
these changes gradually affected Osama. Even while he was still taking brief trips to Beirut, he began showing interest in Islam. He started reading Islamic literature and soon began his interaction with local Islamists. In 1975 the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war prevented further visits to Beirut. The Saudi Islamists claimed that the agony of the Lebanese was a punishment from God for their sins and destructive influence on young Muslims. Osama bin Laden was strongly influenced by these arguments.
The same year, “in the midst of the oil boom and the Islamic intellectual backlash against it,” Bodansky noted, Prince Faisal ibn Musaid, a “deranged nephew” of Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal, assassinated the monarch. The assassin, Bodansky recalled,
was also thoroughly Westernized and had visited the United States and Western Europe frequently. Both Islamists and Court insiders expressed apprehension that exposure to Western ways had caused Faisal ibn Musaid to go insane.
As Bodansky explained, this
assassination was a turning point for Saudi Arabia. For both the Saudi establishment and the conscientious elite, the assassination of the beloved king served as proof that the Islamists’ warning against the sinful and perilous influence of the West had been on target. The shock of the assassination brought home the real and communal ramifications of the Westernization of the country’s educated and affluent youth, creating a grassroots backlash and sending many of these youth, including bin Laden, back into the fold of Islamism.
As Bodansky wrote in 1999, bin Laden finally “freely elected to abandon the life of affluence and commit himself to waging a jihad under extremely harsh conditions,” a life path that would lead to 9/11. As numerous studies of jihadists since then have documented, bin Laden is not alone. Already in 1999, Bodansky wrote that
Osama bin Laden is not the only Islamist who has abandoned a good career and comfortable lifestyle in order to wage a jihad. Dr. Ayman alZawahiri—bin Laden’s right-hand man—now in his late forties, could have been one of Egypt’s leading pediatricians but gave up a promising career and affluence to fight the Egyptian government. He then refused political asylum in Western Europe (with a generous stipend) and ended up living in eastern Afghanistan not far from bin Laden.
Analyzing this “rise of the new radical Islamist elite,” a “recent phenomenon in the developing world,” Bodansky concluded:
These leaders, from the affluent and privileged segment of society are highly educated and relatively Westernized. They are not the underprivileged, impoverished, and embittered isolates who usually constitute the pool that breeds terrorists and radicals.
Bodansky compared jihadist notables such as bin Laden with past leftist revolutionaries and noticed a striking difference:
These Islamist terrorist leaders are different from the typical European middle-class revolutionaries and terrorists—from the anarchists of the nineteenth century to the Communist revolutionaries of the late twentieth century—because the Islamists have become popular leaders of the underprivileged masses, while the European terrorists remained isolated from a generally hostile population. Only Ernesto “Che” Guevara—the Argentinian doctor turned revolutionary fighter of the early 1960s—came close to being the kind of populist leader these Islamists are.
As Bodansky showed decades ago, clearly Islamic ideological rejection of the West, and not any socioeconomic inequity, drives jihadists, who draw upon Islamic canons that have broad appeal among the faithful. These jihadists are therefore even more dangerous than many past leftist revolutionaries whose failed utopian visions, more often than not, lacked popular support and relied upon totalitarian force for implementation. As a forthcoming article will examine, particularly Saudi Arabia, Islam’s heartland, has had to contend with these hard realities.
gravenimage says
Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden Between God and Mammon
……………..
Only in Islam is the only alternative to crass materialism assassination and mass murder…
Tim from Montana says
Marxists follow the same paths.
Kepha says
That’s what post-Christian ideologies have in common–a love of violence.
Walter Sieruk says
The Islamic kingdom of Saudi Arabia is actually no genuine friend of the United States of for that matter that of any other Western country
That fundamentalist Muslim nation is so very terrible with it’s jihadist hate. So much so that as one scholar of Islam, Brigitte Gabriel , had revealed in her book THE MUSt BE STOPPED on page 106. “Saudi madrasas teach hatred and condemnation of the West, non-Muslims… The Saudi government also provides free textbooks to Islamic schools throughout the world. Many of the Saudi- issued textbooks contain wording that encourages hatred and intolerance for non- Muslims.”
Furthermore in her same book on page it also exposes page 114 “Saudi Arabia is one of the leading financial contributors to terrorism worldwide. Part of of that contribution is made by funding madrassas throughout the world and the brainwashing of Muslim children with intolerant teaching towards anything and anyone non- Muslim.”
Likewise a former Muslim, Ibn Warraq, in his book entitled THE ISLAM IN ISLAMIC TERRORISM on page 353 informs it’s reader that “Saudi Arabia has spent millions on Islamic propaganda on the building of madrassas.”
In addition it should be remembered and never forgotten that most of those murderous and destructive Muslim/jihadists hijackers of September 11, 2001 were from Saudi Arabia .
That alone should tell all intelligence and thinking people something.
gravenimage says
Yes–the barbaric Saudis are no allies of ours.