Are U.S., UK falling into bin Laden's trap?

Malise Ruthven, Author of Islam in the World, Guardian News Service, London

As the attacks on Afghanistan gather momentum, it is impossible to avoid the feeling that the United States and Britain are blundering into a trap laid by Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies. The pro-western Pakistani regime looks increasingly precarious and its overthrow could place hardline Islamist fingers on the nuclear button. The knock-on effects could precipitate the overthrow of pro-western regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Egypt, Jordan and North Africa.

A brilliantly orchestrated feat of planning, co-ordination and execution backed by formidable religious convictions, the attack on New York and Washington exemplifies something that has come to characterize the modern world: The union of the symbolic with the actual, the mythical with the material, in a single act of destruction shown live on television.

It is a perfect example of what extremists of an earlier generation termed the "propaganda of the deed". Faced with such fiendish efficiency, liberal democracy is wrong-footed. The crucial evidence that would persuade the whole world of bin Laden's complicity is withheld on security grounds. The language, and exigencies, of war replace those of justice, confirming the Islamist argument that western justice is a godless sham.

Many find it paradoxical that people who have demonstrated such a remarkable degree of technical proficiency should hold fanatical religious views. But there is a substantial body of research which indicates that fundamentalist movements in the Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) are particularly attractive to graduates in the applied sciences, such as engineering and computer programming.

Technical specializations can discourage critical thinking. The cultural, emotional and spiritual knowledge embedded in the religious tradition has not been integrated with the technical knowledge acquired by training and by rote.

The Islamist understanding of jihad is a case in point. In classical jurisprudence, war against unbelievers may not be mounted without first summoning them to Islam. Skybombings conducted without warning obviously fail this condition. The Koranic discourse on jihad was based on the duty to fight Mohammad's Meccan opponents who rejected his message.

Their condition was one of ignorance -- jahiliya -- a word which also carries connotations of paganism and arrogance. Modern Islamic ideologues have given jahiliya a new definition: for them it refers to the present condition of Islam, in which the people are ignorant and their rulers have effectively apostasised.

The new definition was adopted by the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood's leading intellectual executed by Nasser. In his prison writings, Qutb provided the rationale later used to justify the assassination of Nasser's successor, Sadat, as well as Islamist attacks on nominally Muslim governments in other countries, western personnel and tourists.

Though Qutb never explicitly advocated violence, the myth of the jahiliya state, supported by the west, sustains Islamist militants from Algeria to the Philippines. Yet before his "conversion" to Islamism, Qutb had been a member of the Egyptian intellectual elite. A protege of leading lights in Egypt's liberal western-oriented intelligentsia, he attended universities in Washington, Colorado and California.

It was exposure to western (particularly American) culture, not ignorance, that led to his revulsion. His is the paradigmatic case of the "born-again" Muslim who, having absorbed many foreign influences, discards them in search of cultural authenticity.

Bin Laden, once a Saudi playboy, seems to have followed Qutb's path (one of his mentors was Muhammad Qutb, Sayyid's brother). For the culturally and physically dispossessed, from Palestine to Kashmir, Algeria to Malaysia, the CIA-trained bin Laden has become the new Saladin destined to liberate Islamdom from the western crusaders. While Muslim leaders, fearful for their positions, join in the chorus of denunciation, bin Laden's status as the archetypal hero gains popular momentum.

As a figurehead he is in a win-win situation: if he is captured or killed, he becomes a martyr, like Qutb, whose menace increases posthumously; if he remains at large, his heroic status is enhanced. Already he may be credited with something no other Muslim leader has achieved: the eruption of a damaging public row between the U.S. and its closest ally, Israel.

His biggest prize -- the fall of the Saudi dynasty -- is already in his sights. Demonization by the western media perfectly serves his purpose. He is a remarkable political operator who could prove to be the nemesis of George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair -- and much more besides.