Shadid - Legacy Of The Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam

HIS WORDS CAME SUDDENLY , delivered with righteousness. His concern was Osama bin Ladin. A hero, thats the feeling of the people right now, that hes fighting to save the Muslim world, Mohammed Abdullah said. When he dies, hell be a martyr. His sentiments, unadulterated by sensitivity, left me with a sense I had felt often as a journalist in the Muslim world. In October 2001, as smoke continued to rise from the rubble of the World Trade Center and the ugly gash in the Pentagon lay bare, I traveled to Cairo, one of the Muslim worlds greatest cities, to cover one aspect of a story that, by then, had become sadly familiar to me. Off and on, for nearly ten years, I had reported and written about the attacks, the strife and the bombings that had come to define, for much of the world, the face of political Islam. Similar circumstances brought me here again, and much remained familiar. There was grief at the shedding of innocents blood in the attacks of September 11 and over the death of more innocents in the war that followed in Afghanistan. There was disbelief at the spectacle that terrorism can unleash. And, no less troubling, there was the same misunderstanding, the same yawning gulf in perceptions that seemed to follow the scars left by the attacks.

Abdullah, I soon learned, was not alone in his beliefs. To the young men that had gathered around me at a sprawling bus stop in Cairo, their beards suggesting a fervent devotion, the Saudi militant exiled in Afghanistan was a symbol of an embattled religion, the very personification of the mens own frustrations at a faith overwhelmed by an omnipotent West. Their issue was justice, or a lack of it. Bin Ladin, they said, spoke of defending Palestinians, of ending sanctions on Iraq, of curtailing near-total U.S. sway over the region. An older man in a white peasant gown spoke up, raising his voice over the squares circus of vendors hawking fruit and buses barreling down the street, their exhaust stirring the dust carried by Egypts desert winds. Hes a man who defends his rights, the man insisted, as others nodded in agreement. If someone tries to hit me, I have to defend myself. Hes defending his land, his religion, his rights and himself.

How had we reached this point? As I stood amid Cairos thriving chaos, I began to think about the divide that made two cultures, both defined to a great extent by religion, almost incomprehensible to each other. Many Muslims, whose disenchantment with the United States evoked an almost nihilist disdain, seemed to cast bin Ladin as militant rather than terrorist, dissident rather than executioner. His defiance of the West had assumed the mantle of heroic resistance. The worlds affairs here were defined not by liberty, nor by freedom, but instead by justice, a concept that takes on greater importance to those without it. To the men at the bus stop, the United States and, by default, the West were the instruments for depriving justice across the Muslim world, a vast territory embracing one billion people who make up a majority in some forty-five countries.