Beyond Bin Laden Read Online Free

Laden and his followers.
    For as Khaled Saghieh observed, Osama bin Laden himself may have died at the hands of U.S. naval commandos, but Al Qaeda, the movement, died at the hands of the Arab popular uprisings. 15 Osama bin Laden and his followers had struggled for years to topple the regimes in Cairo and the Gulf, but nonviolent protest movements—not armed insurrection—won the day. "What we noticed in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Yemen was the opposite of what Bin Laden stood for," the Saudi political analyst Jamal Khashoggi told the
Financial Times
. "The people want change but their vision is nonviolent and inclusive of all segments of society." 16
    A few months ago, I returned to Egypt to witness the revolution that had swept Hosni Mubarak from power after three decades and saw firsthand the pluralism on display that would have disgusted either Osama bin Laden or his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. There were posters in Tahrir Square demanding the release of the radical Islamist Omar Abdel-Rahman from a U.S. prison in North Carolina, but they were carried by few, as with other posters lionizing Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Most Egyptians carried their national flag as their banner. Christian and Muslim Egyptians, who had spent the days of the revolution pausing to shield each other as they prayed, continued to gather in the square alongside secular leftists and activists from the Muslim Brotherhood. Eventually, the competing visions of these various groups must be resolved through what are hoped to be democratic processes. But for now, they still exult in their shared victories.
    Going forward, the challenges facing the Arabic-speaking world are as diverse as the region’s peoples and states. Lisa Anderson, president of the American University of Cairo, has noted the important ways in which the uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt vary and challenge the publics there differently. 17 In Egypt, as Mona El-Ghobashy so eloquently put it, "The genius of the Egyptian revolution is its methodical restoration of the public weal. The uprising restored the meaning of politics, if by that term is understood the making of collective claims on government. It revalued the people, revealing them in all their complexity—neither heroes nor saints, but citizens." 18
    The challenge for Egypt, then, is to create accountable public institutions that represent the collective policy preferences of the Egyptian people and effectively administer and redistribute the resources of the state. No matter who is elected president, any Egyptian government that reflects the policy preferences of its people will almost certainly be a government more sympathetic to the stateless Palestinians than was the government of Hosni Mubarak, meaning rocky shoals for U.S.-Egyptian relations ahead. But as far as structural reform is concerned, for the most part, as in Tunisia, Egypt’s challenge will be to reform existing institutions rather than to create new ones from whole cloth.
    In Libya, by contrast, the challenge will not so much be one of reform but of state formation
ex nihilo
. Against the backdrop of a state whose old Ottoman bureaucracy the Italian colonizers did their best to dismantle and a Gaddafi regime whose pie-in-the-sky ambitions always meant that institutions meant to serve a Libyan state were never constructed, the task of building a Libyan state in the aftermath of both Gaddafi and a brutal civil war will be immense. 19
    Elsewhere, in Syria and in Yemen, for example, the final act of the play remains to be staged. And in any of these countries, of course, the political process going forward will involve Islamist parties and factions. But these Islamists are not likely to prove as extreme as Al Qaeda, and they will be resisted every step of the way by younger, secular activists as well as remnants of
l’ancien régime
. The rival visions of the heirs of Muhammad ‘Abduh will continue to compete for primacy.