Old School Osama

What we found while looking for bin Laden

Charles Paul Freund | September 12, 2002

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Finally, what can Hasan's legacy reveal about bin Laden's future? Hasan Sabbah may have been a puritan ascetic who terrorized his contemporaries in the name of revealed truth. Yet in the end, his career set the stage for the single most dramatic illumination of Islam's modernist potential.

Hasan's stronghold was eventually overrun by Mongol invaders, scattering the Isma'ili populace. The group lived for centuries in relative obscurity. Since the 19th century, however, Isma'ilis under the leadership of the community's hereditary Imam, the spiritual leader who bears the title of the Aga Khan, have emerged as Islam's most assimilationist and modernist community. (The current Aga Khan, 49th in the line, lives on an estate in France; his flamboyant father Aly Khan was once married to Rita Hayworth.) The Isma'ilis of the Indian subcontinent, the United Kingdom, North America, and East Africa are a remarkably prosperous and well-educated group that exhibits complete religious tolerance, supports liberal politics and economics, and is willing to invest heavily in these principles.

Indeed, Hasan's sectarian descendants have underwritten small business ventures throughout the undeveloped world. They recently established a secular University of Central Asia intended to benefit everyone in the region, including their many poor co-religionists there. The source of a long series of enlightened initiatives from agriculture to art exhibits is the Geneva-based Aga Khan Development Network, supported by investment and tithing; it may be best known in the West for its valued architecture prize.

Is such modernity also the eventual destiny of the puritan Wahabis? It may seem unlikely, but one could argue that such a transition could already be underway. Saudi Arabia's clerics originally rejected telephones and other technology until they were shown that phones could be used to transmit the Koran. The country is by now dependent on such tools of modernity, and subject to their subversions. Beyond technology, Saudi Arabia has established judicial institutions that operate outside such Koranic economic prohibitions as those involving interest and insurance. The kingdom's participation in the outside world has left it no choice; without such institutions, it could not support the economy made possible by its wealth, nor use that wealth to spread its influence. Yet it is nonetheless in a bind: The very wealth it uses to export its fundamentalist beliefs derives from institutions and tools that tend to undermine those beliefs.

Militant Islamism itself may be operating in a similar bind. As Daniel Pipes has argued, this form of Islamism is built anachronistically on such modernist analogues as fascist and communist totalitarianism. Bin Laden's own war against modernity required him to exploit his own satellite-phone using, video-producing modernity. It may be that the war against the modern can be fought only on modernist terms. It thus emerges as a futile battle that one must lose in principle even if one were to win in battle.

Osama bin Laden and the shadow of Hasan Sabbah passed each other recently. As Al Qaeda was being driven into hiding in Afghanistan, the Aga Khan pledged $75 million in tithed Isma'ili wealth for that country's reconstruction. As bin Laden's fighters took cover in the caves of Tora Bora, the Isma'ili leader cited "the right of each individual to the interpretation of his faith without coercion" and "the need to revive or create new competent, stable, transparent and accountable institutions" in a nation cleansed of Al Qaeda. Even as Wahabi believers used modernity to multiply the terror of blood that was invented by Hassan, Hassan's distant sectarian descendents were recognizing the meaning and opportunity of the modern world. Modernity, the Isma'ili Imam appeared to suggest, is a necessary foundation; it is the inevitable Assass.