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This chapter focuses on the education of Osama bin Laden from 1957 to 1979. It provides a background on bin Laden’s youth and his family, as well as the impact of his father, Muhammad bin-Awad bin Laden, on his life. It also considers bin Laden’s relationship with his mother, Allia; his ties to the bin Laden clan; his religious beliefs and passion for hard work; and his love for Islamic history and for the Muslim ummah. Finally, the chapter examines how hard work, perseverance, stubbornness, genuine religious faith, self-reliance, and risk-taking influenced the way bin Laden ran the al-Qaeda organization as well as the kind of war it waged against those they suspected to be enemies of Islam.

This chapter continues the discussion of the Islamic jus ad bellum by looking at Osama bin Laden's just war claims in three other areas: right authority, last resort, and reasonable hope of success. In setting out al‐Qaeda's case for war, bin Laden does not depend solely on faith‐based statements about good versus evil. Instead, he offers a series of sometimes intricate arguments that connect with the jihad tradition and endeavour to present al‐Qaeda's cause as authorized, necessary, and practical. Despite his best efforts, however, the legacy of bin Laden's case for the resort to war is that of innovation.

This chapter focuses on Osama bin Laden’s apprenticeship in the Afghan jihad in Pakistan between 1979 and 1989. It looks at bin Laden’s primary role in the Afghan jihad, which was to collect and then distribute funds to the mujahedin from Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries. It also considers his cooperation with Saudi Prince Turki, then chief of the Saudi intelligence service, the General Intelligence Directorate (GID); the influence of Abdullah Azzam Shaykh Abdullah Azzam (1941–1989) on bin Laden’s life; bin Laden’s establishment of an organization called the Makhtab al-Khadamat (“Services Bureau”) in collaboration with Azzam and Azzam’s son-in-law Boudjema Bounoua; and bin Laden’s construction work in Afghanistan. Finally, the chapter examines bin Laden’s training of an Arab-only unit, his belief that jihad is Islam’s only means of survival from foreign enemies, and the way he ran al-Qaeda.

This chapter begins with an overview of the development of the Islamic just war tradition (jihad). It then narrows the focus to the critical issue of just cause. Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al‐Zawahiri, consistently maintain that aggression is both wrong and illegal, and that in using violence al‐Qaeda is merely repelling America's attacks. However, since the United States had launched no invasion of bin Laden's country before 11 September, be it Saudi Arabia, Sudan or Afghanistan, it was incumbent upon him to redefine the concept of ‘aggression’. This attempt was contested a series of Muslim leaders who described al‐Qaeda as the belligerent party on 9/11.

This chapter provides a comparative analysis of visual representations surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden. In the minutes and hours after the news of bin Laden's killing broke across social media and then through President Barack Obama's brief May 1 speech to the nation, news outlets across the world scrambled to cover the story of the decade. With no immediately forthcoming photos of bin Laden's corpse, mainstream news outlets were excused from the ethical as well as moral binary decision about whether to show or not show images of bin Laden's corpse. Instead, news outlets the world over had a set of decisions to make about what kind of image to select to accompany the announcement of bin Laden's death. The choice of which visual would lead the news became a complex, even political decision. Some news outlets chose to run archival photos of bin Laden; others used iconic images of al Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. In essence, through their choices, news outlets decided how to visually “frame” the death of Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man.

This chapter charts the uses of Osama bin Laden's image in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a period marked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US military interventions, and growing resistance to global inequalities. More than any other iconic figure to emerge in the new millennium, Osama bin Laden provided a symbol for popular frustrations with the neoliberal world order in the global South. In the early 2000s people in multiple world regions used bin Laden iconography to articulate a sense of marginalization and demands for systemic change. However, few of those who wore bin Laden T-shirts subscribed to his beliefs or endorsed his tactics. Many simply perceived bin Laden as a figurative "superpower" that symbolically approximated the United States. To account for this interpretation, this chapter concentrates on the urban environments of coastal Kenya, where some young people represented various grievances through bin Laden iconography. In an effort to explain why they did so, this chapter highlights acute feelings of alienation within religious and ethnic minority communities along Kenya's Indian Ocean coast. It shows how some Kenyans perceived their experiences of marginality as part of a larger system of repression that bin Laden's actions appeared to address..

This chapter focuses on Osama bin Laden’s travels from one country to another between 1989 and 1996. It begins by describing bin Laden’s stay in Saudi Arabia and his support for the movement called Islamic Awakening (Sahwa), as well as his decision to leave the Kingdom because of his feeling that he was betrayed by the regime and its scholars. It then considers bin Laden’s return to Pakistan, where he worked to mediate the political chaos and violence among the Afghan insurgent groups. It also comments on bin Laden’s animosity toward Britain, the United States, and the United Nations before concluding with a discussion of his life in Sudan where he prepared to use al-Qaeda to intensify the war on America.

This chapter focuses on Osama bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan, from which he prepared his al-Qaeda fighters in the war against the United States between 1996 and 2001. It considers the support received by bin Laden from the Taleban and vice versa, the assassination attempts on bin Laden, and his official declaration of war on the United States that was followed by a fatwa ordering and authorizing “jihad against the Crusaders and Jews.” It also looks at al-Qaeda’s bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and of the USS Cole in Yemen two years later, along with the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The chapter concludes by discussing bin Laden’s media campaign in South Asia based on the American model of “shaping the battle space”, the deterioration of his reverence for Islamic scholars, and his strengthened ties to Taleban leader Mullah Omar.

This chapter focuses on media coverage of bin Laden and how it depicted his relationship with his wives, particularly the sixth one, Amal Assadah, who was rumored to have shielded bin Laden when the American commandos shot him. It argues that the main difference between the coverage in Arab media versus Anglo-American news media is that the former focused on the issues surrounding bin Laden and his family, foregrounding the wives' support of bin Laden as part of their duty as virtuous Muslim women. Anglo-American media, however, chose to focus on the image of bin Laden as a sexual being, thereby contributing to the myth of bin Laden as a neurotic evil. Both regions focused on these wives as mainly emotionally or religiously motivated to follow bin Laden rather than on their political and ideological motivations. The chapter begins with a brief discussion about the role of myth in the news-making process, focusing on the myths surrounding bin Laden's sexuality. It then presents examples of pan-Arab and Anglo-American coverage.

In the 1990s, Osama bin Laden observed proudly that the Afghan jihad against the Russians was unstained by the blood of innocents. Yet, since 1993, civilians have been al‐Qaeda's chosen targets. This chapter explores issues raised by al‐Qaeda's conduct during its war against the United States in the light of Islamic ideas about jus in bello. The first section of this chapter briefly introduces the jus in bello tradition in Islam. The second section discusses the legitimacy of suicide attacks and the place of martyrdom in the Islamic tradition. The final section examines bin Laden's attempts to overturn the robust Islamic protections for civilians in war. Bin Laden himself subscribes to the principle of non‐combatant immunity and employs it in levelling virulent criticism against the US's policies—yet his acceptance of the principle leads him into an unclear and uncomfortable moral position with regard to al‐Qaeda's attacks.

In a globalizing world, members of the same religious community, anchored in different parts of the world, have greater capacity to increase their cultural, social, and economic links with one another. Ironically, this chapter points out how the rise of religious pluralism amid globalization has also strengthened the hand of Muslim leaders such as Osama Bin Laden, intent on destroying pluralism altogether. Al-Qaeda preaches peace but glorifies violence. Bin Laden’s view that violent jihad is an obligation on individual believers isolates him from leading Muslim scholars and jurists. Still, he has been able to gather and hold a sizable following, through dramatic actions, but also through the very same communications technologies that drive religious pluralism and create soft power in world affairs.

This chapter examines five narratives, each offering a portrait of Osama bin Laden. The first is the “old hands” narrative, attributed to traditional terrorism analysts who consider bin Laden and his allies as just new iterations of the same old terrorism. The second is the “former comrades” narrative, ascribed to former mujahedin who have fallen out with bin Laden, including Boudejema Bounoua, Hashim al-Makki, and Abu Musab al-Suri. The third is the Riyadh narrative, the origin of which can be traced to Saudi Arabia’s spokesmen. The fourth narrative, the imperialist narrative, comes from pro-Israeli writers and their colleagues in the United States. Finally, the “bin Laden experts” narratives are offered by Western experts who do not rely on the primary sources about the al-Qaeda chief.

This chapter considers the question of why Osama bin Laden's death did not seem to have the impact that was expected from the largest and most expensive manhunt in history. It looks at the debate about Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the film that chronicled the hunt and killing of bin Laden. The film's perspective is unmistakably American and Western, with assumptions that audiences would already know the back-story about who bin Laden is, why the U.S. government invested so much in finding him, and why his death should be an event for celebration. What is remarkable about the debates, the reviews, and the discussions about Zero Dark Thirty, however, is that they mimic cultural discourses that arose in the decade since 9/11 in an elusive dance with Osama bin Laden.

The declaration of a Caliphate in June 2014 by an al-Qaida offshoot implied a strong sense of political–religious unity, but, in reality, the announcement reflected deep division at the heart of radical Islam. This article critically assesses al-Qaida’s progress on its four main objectives over the course of the 9/11 decade, and suggests that its principal setbacks were due to the fragmentation of Islamic authority. In particular, Osama bin Laden’s inability to reverse the misguided focus, by some affiliated groups, on the ‘nearer enemy’, began to portend al-Qaida’s downfall. However, after the Arab Spring, in the chokeholds of strong states and the chaos of weak states al-Qaida found advantage. Furthermore, with the rise of groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a new pattern of radicalism emerged, in which the threat to ‘far enemy’, ‘near enemy’ and ‘nearer enemy’ were combined.

This chapter looks back to the time before Osama bin Laden's death and then reflects on the period after his death. In particular, it examines bin Laden's video and audio appearances after the September 11 attacks in order to scrutinize both the means by which these appearances have allowed bin Laden to continue to intervene in the War on Terror, and the terms in which they have shaped perceptions in the West of the nature of the enemy faced in this conflict. Although bin Laden functioned “as a metonym for al Qaeda and the enemy more broadly in the War on Terror,” his death did not eliminate the threats posed by al Qaeda. Indeed, the West can be said to have “exorcised” Osama bin Laden by shifting the narrative from that of hunting for the world's leading terrorist to that of “Obama got Osama.”

Tere Bin Laden (2010), an Indian independent film in Hindi, written and directed by Abhishek Sharma, is a madcap comedy about an ambitious Pakistani journalist, Ali Hassan, who stages a fake video of Osama bin Laden as his golden ticket to immigrate to the United States. The film provides a trenchant critique of global media, the War on Terror, and the capitalist aspirations of lower-middle and middle-class Pakistanis. This chapter focuses on how Tere Bin Laden articulates a critique of the War on Terror. It first considers how the opening segments of the film set up its dual concerns with the nature of the U.S. national security state as a racial formation and with an idealized version of the American dream that constitutes the desire for upward mobility in the imagination of elite Pakistanis such as Ali. It then turns to the film's representation of the War on Terror and U.S. foreign policy to analyze how it draws on the speeches of the actual Osama bin Laden and spoofs the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan by literally rendering it into a cartoon. Evaluating the filmmaker's and lead actor's claims that the film provides a generalized South Asian perspective on the War on Terror, the chapter explores Tere Bin Laden's representation of Pakistani civil society as constituted by a range of classes and aspirations that can be persuaded to cooperate with one another only in limited ways and as existing in an uneasy equilibrium with the state.

This chapter takes the killing of Osama bin Laden as a test case for considering the moral and legal status of intentionally killing individuals deemed a threat to national security, under conditions in which the object of the targeted attack is offered little or no opportunity to surrender to attacking forces. The target in such operations, in short, is treated as though he were a belligerent: a person placed on a kill list may be targeted in a way that would be legitimate if he were an enemy combatant. It is argued that bin Laden was a legitimate military target, and that the decision-makers involved in his killing had thoroughly considered the range of options available to stop bin Laden from further terroristic acts, and were warranted in the decision to lean towards targeted killing in lieu of a capture operation. Thus, those who carried out the killing were within their scope of authority and responsibility for killing rather than for capturing bin Laden.

Chapter 8 is woven around the author's trip to Saudi Arabia six months prior to 9/11. There are two faces of Saudi Arabia: Mecca, the birthplace of Islam and the prophet Mohammed, and Riyadh in the Nadj region, the home of Mohammed bin Abd al-Wahhab and the birthplace of Osama Bin Laden. The chapter explores the tensions between the two kingdoms, and the connections between Islam and Islamist extremism, especially as manifested in Saudi understandings of jihad and tawhid. It traces the pernicious Wahhabi public theology from its origins in the 13th century to its ideological covenant with the House of Saud. The author's experiences with Saudi officials, religious minorities in the kingdom, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and the State Department lead him to conclude that Wahhabism will remain a source of terrorism, and a threat to U.S. national security, until the Saudis contain or destroy it via political reform grounded in religious freedom.