Twenty years on from 9/11, Osama bin Laden is still viewed as the ultimate evil outsider. The foreign enemy who brought death and destruction to America. The implacable foe of the West, and of modernity more broadly. The footage of him in modest dress and humble surroundings in some holdout in Afghanistan, belying his Saudi origins and his vast wealth, contrasts with the gleaming opulence and swagger of the city he sent his men so savagely to attack on 11 September 2001. And yet the truth about bin Laden, and about 9/11 itself, has always been more complicated than this. In many ways, bin Laden was as much a product of the West, and in particular of its politics of grievance, as he was its most feared terroristic enemy. His reign of terror can be seen as a violent manifestation of what has since come to be known as wokeness.

[...]

Al-Qaeda and bin Laden in particular were keen followers of the fads and thinking of Western opinion-formers, particularly radical and liberal ones. Of course bin Laden’s speeches were peppered with the thoughts of Islamist ideologues and Muslim Brotherhood leaders. But these seemingly religious declarations sat oddly alongside quotations from Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky, a feverish embrace of Western conspiracy theories, concerns about climate change, and a bristling against ‘Big Media’ and ‘bloodsucking’ corporations. Bin Laden was an ideological magpie, always seeking the on-trend woke concern through which his desire to manifest his ‘intensely personal feelings’, to give voice or violence to his movement’s culture of grievance, might be most aptly and impactfully expressed.

At times he sounded indistinguishable from Michael Moore. The war in Iraq is ‘making billions of dollars for the big corporations’, he said. He spoke in a self-consciously therapeutic style, even on manifestly political issues like Palestine. So in 2004 he spoke of the need to ‘raise awareness’ about the ‘justice of our causes, primarily Palestine’. Bizarrely, he implored the ‘scholars, media and businessmen’ of Europe to assist in this raising of awareness. (1) Most notable was his fascination with Western environmentalism. At times he sounded like an ageing hippy. His plea to Americans to ‘save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny’ would not sound out of place at an Extinction Rebellion gathering.

Bin Laden’s XR-style declarations, his imbibing of woke fears for the future of the planet, initially appeared incongruous. He kills thousands of people and then worries about the deaths of thousands of people in a future climate catastrophe? And yet the fact that al-Qaeda was an environmentalist outfit as well as an Islamist one actually makes sense. It revealed much about both the form and the content of this strange and modern movement. In terms of form, as Devji has controversially argued, what al-Qaeda and other modern movements, including environmentalism, share in common is a post-nation worldview, a self-consciously globalist approach: ‘The issues of concern to them are strictly global. They cannot be dealt with by solutions at [the] national level.’ In common with ‘global movements like environmentalism’, al-Qaeda had ‘no coherent political programme’, says Devji. And in terms of content, the temptation of the green outlook to bin Laden seems clearly to have lied in what environmentalism fundamentally facilitates: an expression of disdain for contemporary society, especially industrialised society. If bin Laden was anti-Western, which he undoubtedly was, his view appears to have been shaped as much as by the anti-Westernism that is central to woke thinking in the West itself as by traditional Islamist hostility to the West as infidel.

Lmao.