The At Sea Burial of Osama Bin Laden: What It Means
It is my goal to begin more regular posts again in about a week and a half, emerging as I am from a rather busy period, but in the meantime, following the operation against Bin Laden, may Allah be praised for its success, I could not resist some preliminary ideas on what I might consider the broader Muslim reaction, at least in the aftermath, and how that might relate to the sea burial, the title of this post.
I think it should be obvious that beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Muslim world broadly (and the Arab world specifically) is plagued by general apathy concerning the killing of Bin Laden, or at least not really thinking it has much to do with them. The media is very good at digging up the crazies, and we do see them (Omar Bakri Mohammad in Lebanon is a favorite, combining as he does Bin Laden's distaste for the West with Trump's love for publicity, which like Trump gets him more TV time than he could possibly deserve), but for the most part, there isn't much of a reaction. This is a good thing in my view, demonstrating how far Bin Laden has fallen in the Muslim public eye. Approval levels of him were fairly high at one point after 9/11, and then Al Qaeda terrorism hit home in places like Iraq and Jordan, and the idea of this dude standing down America by bombing Shi'a schoolkids started to look like the pernicious and sadistic cant it was. We moved from celebrations at 9/11 in some places in the Arab world to nobody much having a strong opinion of Bin Laden's death, it's progress, slow but real.
This is especially so given that places in the Arab world (Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria) are venues where impassioned demonstrations have become common (if still repressed in the last two), meaning that where they might have been able to suppress 9/11 celebration in Mubarak Egypt, much less able to do that now. So if nobody's talking, it's because it really doesn't exercise them not because anyone is making them silent. This shouldn't be a surprise, that you can get hundreds of thousands of Egyptians to demonstrate against corruption in Egyptian commerce but not many re: Bin Laden, people care most about things that affect them, the Muslim world is no different than anywhere else, and Bin Laden doesn't matter to them anymore. If there was support you'd expect to have seen more reaction by now, there's been really not much. I don't expect that to change, but obviously we'll see.
But the cooling off of the extremist rhetoric, a focus on problems closer to home, the preoccupation with good governance and not with the Qaeda nonsense of far enemies and near enemies, all of the good and positive things that have led to the convulsing of the Arab world in particular, in a way that we all hope will bring positive and recognizable improvements in the area, don't mean there isn't residual, strong anti-American sentiment in a fair number of these places. You can read elsewhere about the political causes for how that sentiment managed to rise. I won't address them, other than to say that I neither excuse the United States nor the broader Arab sentiment for the semi-permanence of it all these past many decades, the one side emphasizing supposed stability even when it was evidently fomenting extremism, clinging to aging and increasingly illegitimate leaders who could not run a state while their populations seethed (a strategy to which Israel continues to desperately cling in my view), the other so preoccupied with anticolonialist and antiimperialist rhetoric that it was willing to countenance leaders varying from the sadistically murderous (Saddam) to the violently anarchic (Bin Laden) to the ridiculous (Qaddafi, popular at one point, after he was bombed in the 1980's) so long as they "stood up" to the West, as if Islam, or Arabism, or the nation states we were trying to create, stood for nothing but whatever the West was not. If that's the philosophy, economic degradation is all but assured. So plenty of blame to go around, on all sides.
My point is, it endures, it doesn't go away swiftly or silently and so while the region has turned on Bin Laden and has started not to offer reflexive support of anyone who opposes the West, still there's a feeling, a need to criticize something the U.S. has done. If you aren't inclined to criticize the operation because it was directed at a noble Muslim Sheikh, if you regard that supposedly noble Muslim Sheikh with distaste as most do, you have to find something else. And THAT'S where this burial nonsense fits in.
To be clear, the burial issue, raised by some number of clerics, including Shi'i ones in Iraq, criticize not the killing of Bin Laden (this is important, they aren't showing remorse at his death, or most aren't), but the way in which he was buried at sea. And the doctrinal case is a pretty strong one, as burials at sea are supposed to only be done if the person cannot be buried on land, as in he dies on the open sea, or no land is willing to take him. I think the U.S. claimed the latter, maybe it's plausible, though my guess is you could have found a Pakistani tribal region somewhere that would have been happy to have him and the Pakistanis would have been okay with that if the U.S. was okay with Pakistan being agreeable. And, to be fair, the issue is taken seriously enough as a doctrinal matter that the Shi'a and Kurdish led Iraqi government, staffed by folks who despised Saddam Hussein just as much as Americans despise Osama Bin Laden, did permit his body to be returned to Tikrit where there is some sort of semi-shrine for him. Absurd, risible to this Iraqi, but true.
Still, the Realist in me has to dismiss this burial objection as something of a quibble. It seems to me that if you think his killing and his burial was unjustified, then you focus on the fact that someone killed the guy, not how he was buried. But if you think his killing was justified, that he deserved nothing worse than death, then I guess if you're a real stickler for the rules, you sort of think someone screwed up by not burying him the right way, maybe I suppose, I don't know, but it's hard to imagine getting that exercised about it. Maybe if his head was on a pike and being paraded through New York to cheering crowds you get exercised about the doctrinal issue, but because they buried him at sea when arguably if they tried maybe there would have been someone to take the body and so technically it should have been land? Really, no other violations of Islamic law to worry about than THAT? For this guy in particular?
But what if you want to express some disapproval of U.S. actions, if you don't want to suggest Bin Laden is a good guy or a hero but a bad guy, but still, not grant the U.S. too much credit over the matter? (Most obvious example would be a Shi'i cleric in Iraq, who wouldn't be caught dead saying a kind thing about Bin Laden after what his hideous lieutenant Zawahiri did in Iraq.) Then your choices are (i) there should have been a trial (raised, but a hard sell, it was a firefight, what would make anyone think he'd go alive) or (ii) the more doctrinally salient point, the burial was done wrong. But phrased not just as technical doctrine, but, to use Omar Bakri Mohammad's words, as "humiliation" of millions of Muslims worldwide. In other words, I don't mean to suggest the doctrine is irrelevant, but surely not enough. A Sheikh of the Azhar isn't raising the matter just because of the technical mistake, and he's obviously not condoning the attack on Bin Laden because Mubarak told him to. What he is doing is expressing distaste for Bin Laden while still leaving room to criticize the US operation as being somehow performed in a manner that isn't appropriate to Muslims. It is the doctrine, in other words, animated by the opportunity for a jab at the U.S. for being anti-Muslim that explains this particular reaction.
HAH
I think it should be obvious that beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Muslim world broadly (and the Arab world specifically) is plagued by general apathy concerning the killing of Bin Laden, or at least not really thinking it has much to do with them. The media is very good at digging up the crazies, and we do see them (Omar Bakri Mohammad in Lebanon is a favorite, combining as he does Bin Laden's distaste for the West with Trump's love for publicity, which like Trump gets him more TV time than he could possibly deserve), but for the most part, there isn't much of a reaction. This is a good thing in my view, demonstrating how far Bin Laden has fallen in the Muslim public eye. Approval levels of him were fairly high at one point after 9/11, and then Al Qaeda terrorism hit home in places like Iraq and Jordan, and the idea of this dude standing down America by bombing Shi'a schoolkids started to look like the pernicious and sadistic cant it was. We moved from celebrations at 9/11 in some places in the Arab world to nobody much having a strong opinion of Bin Laden's death, it's progress, slow but real.
This is especially so given that places in the Arab world (Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria) are venues where impassioned demonstrations have become common (if still repressed in the last two), meaning that where they might have been able to suppress 9/11 celebration in Mubarak Egypt, much less able to do that now. So if nobody's talking, it's because it really doesn't exercise them not because anyone is making them silent. This shouldn't be a surprise, that you can get hundreds of thousands of Egyptians to demonstrate against corruption in Egyptian commerce but not many re: Bin Laden, people care most about things that affect them, the Muslim world is no different than anywhere else, and Bin Laden doesn't matter to them anymore. If there was support you'd expect to have seen more reaction by now, there's been really not much. I don't expect that to change, but obviously we'll see.
But the cooling off of the extremist rhetoric, a focus on problems closer to home, the preoccupation with good governance and not with the Qaeda nonsense of far enemies and near enemies, all of the good and positive things that have led to the convulsing of the Arab world in particular, in a way that we all hope will bring positive and recognizable improvements in the area, don't mean there isn't residual, strong anti-American sentiment in a fair number of these places. You can read elsewhere about the political causes for how that sentiment managed to rise. I won't address them, other than to say that I neither excuse the United States nor the broader Arab sentiment for the semi-permanence of it all these past many decades, the one side emphasizing supposed stability even when it was evidently fomenting extremism, clinging to aging and increasingly illegitimate leaders who could not run a state while their populations seethed (a strategy to which Israel continues to desperately cling in my view), the other so preoccupied with anticolonialist and antiimperialist rhetoric that it was willing to countenance leaders varying from the sadistically murderous (Saddam) to the violently anarchic (Bin Laden) to the ridiculous (Qaddafi, popular at one point, after he was bombed in the 1980's) so long as they "stood up" to the West, as if Islam, or Arabism, or the nation states we were trying to create, stood for nothing but whatever the West was not. If that's the philosophy, economic degradation is all but assured. So plenty of blame to go around, on all sides.
My point is, it endures, it doesn't go away swiftly or silently and so while the region has turned on Bin Laden and has started not to offer reflexive support of anyone who opposes the West, still there's a feeling, a need to criticize something the U.S. has done. If you aren't inclined to criticize the operation because it was directed at a noble Muslim Sheikh, if you regard that supposedly noble Muslim Sheikh with distaste as most do, you have to find something else. And THAT'S where this burial nonsense fits in.
To be clear, the burial issue, raised by some number of clerics, including Shi'i ones in Iraq, criticize not the killing of Bin Laden (this is important, they aren't showing remorse at his death, or most aren't), but the way in which he was buried at sea. And the doctrinal case is a pretty strong one, as burials at sea are supposed to only be done if the person cannot be buried on land, as in he dies on the open sea, or no land is willing to take him. I think the U.S. claimed the latter, maybe it's plausible, though my guess is you could have found a Pakistani tribal region somewhere that would have been happy to have him and the Pakistanis would have been okay with that if the U.S. was okay with Pakistan being agreeable. And, to be fair, the issue is taken seriously enough as a doctrinal matter that the Shi'a and Kurdish led Iraqi government, staffed by folks who despised Saddam Hussein just as much as Americans despise Osama Bin Laden, did permit his body to be returned to Tikrit where there is some sort of semi-shrine for him. Absurd, risible to this Iraqi, but true.
Still, the Realist in me has to dismiss this burial objection as something of a quibble. It seems to me that if you think his killing and his burial was unjustified, then you focus on the fact that someone killed the guy, not how he was buried. But if you think his killing was justified, that he deserved nothing worse than death, then I guess if you're a real stickler for the rules, you sort of think someone screwed up by not burying him the right way, maybe I suppose, I don't know, but it's hard to imagine getting that exercised about it. Maybe if his head was on a pike and being paraded through New York to cheering crowds you get exercised about the doctrinal issue, but because they buried him at sea when arguably if they tried maybe there would have been someone to take the body and so technically it should have been land? Really, no other violations of Islamic law to worry about than THAT? For this guy in particular?
But what if you want to express some disapproval of U.S. actions, if you don't want to suggest Bin Laden is a good guy or a hero but a bad guy, but still, not grant the U.S. too much credit over the matter? (Most obvious example would be a Shi'i cleric in Iraq, who wouldn't be caught dead saying a kind thing about Bin Laden after what his hideous lieutenant Zawahiri did in Iraq.) Then your choices are (i) there should have been a trial (raised, but a hard sell, it was a firefight, what would make anyone think he'd go alive) or (ii) the more doctrinally salient point, the burial was done wrong. But phrased not just as technical doctrine, but, to use Omar Bakri Mohammad's words, as "humiliation" of millions of Muslims worldwide. In other words, I don't mean to suggest the doctrine is irrelevant, but surely not enough. A Sheikh of the Azhar isn't raising the matter just because of the technical mistake, and he's obviously not condoning the attack on Bin Laden because Mubarak told him to. What he is doing is expressing distaste for Bin Laden while still leaving room to criticize the US operation as being somehow performed in a manner that isn't appropriate to Muslims. It is the doctrine, in other words, animated by the opportunity for a jab at the U.S. for being anti-Muslim that explains this particular reaction.
HAH
Comments