Revisionist View Of Bin Laden As Religious Reformer Suggested

In a thoughtful, if controversial, article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, author Reza Aslan suggests that Osama Bin Laden should be understood as a radical reformer of Islam, with parallels to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Here are some excerpts:

In 100 years ... we may look back on Bin Laden not only as a murderous criminal but as one of the principal figures of ... the Islamic reformation. Indeed, historians may one day place Bin Laden alongside 16th century Christian revolutionaries ... as a "reformation radical" who pushed the principle of religious individualism to terrifying limits. ...

[A]s Muslims have increasingly been forced to regard themselves ... as citizens of individual nation-states, a sense of individualism has begun to infuse this essentially communal faith. ...[T]he authority of traditional clerical institutions over their Muslim communities has been eroding. ... Muslims now have access through the Internet (an invention whose role in the Islamic reformation parallels that of the printing press in the Christian Reformation) to the religious opinions of myriad Islamic activists, academics, self-styled preachers, militants and cult leaders throughout the world who are, for better or worse, reshaping the faith....

Like Luther, Bin Laden is concerned above all else with "purifying" his own religious community.... Bin Laden's primary target is neither Christians nor Jews (both of whom he refers to as "the far enemy"), but rather those Muslims who do not share his puritanical view of Islam and who, as a consequence, make up the overwhelming majority of Al Qaeda's victims.

Bin Laden has also deliberately placed himself in direct opposition to the institutional authorities of his religion by repeatedly issuing fatwas and making judgments on Islamic law — things that, according to Islamic tradition, only a cleric affiliated with one of Islam's recognized schools of law has the authority to do.

Even more striking is his fundamental reinterpretation of jihad: What was once considered a collective duty to be carried out solely at the behest of a qualified cleric has become a radically individualistic obligation totally divorced from institutional authority....