Thread by @HusseinAboubak

20 years later, we may, indeed we must ask ourselves; what did Bin Laden achieve? Did he succeed in defeating the United States? Annihilating Israel? Establishing a thousand-year caliphate? The answer to these questions is a decisive no, but we should not indulge ourselves in /1

a delusional sense of victory that hides our true defeat. When the great terrorist entrepreneur sat on his way through the establishment of his organization, “The Global Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders,” the medium was the message. He was seeking to /2

re-wrap our world with the political mysticism of the symbols of the 10th century. Like the good heroes of a good Greek tragedy, the stars were aligned for a perfect tale of the folly of the gods behind which human autonomy recedes into non-being. In Muslim societies in the /3

Middle East, a gradual and systematic social, psychological, and intellectual regression have not just stopped, but entirely reversed the projects of modernization that had started a century earlier forcing entire societies to fall into a deeply neurotic and pathological view /4

of the self, the others, and reality. The bombastic rhetoric of Arab nationalists of the 1950s against “Western imperialism” and the “Zionist entity,” had descended into outright paranoia, conspiratorial existence, pathological antisemitism, and sexual neurosis of the most /5

terrifying kind. “Palestine” became not merely an objective political issue, but an allegory of eternal victimhood, masochistic humiliation, and a pathological symbol of a deeply wounded identity. In mainstream Arab and Muslim discourse, an unprecedented process of time and /6

concept collapse merged Judaism, Israel, the Crusaders, the United States, capitalism, and feminism into perennial cosmic evil, “satan” in the Iranian version. The autocratic Arab republics, themselves founded on the original sin of Arab nationalism, could do nothing but watch /7

their populations descend rapidly into madness. In Western society, different subterranean changes of the cognitive structure were also underway; a systematic and gradual rejection of modernity and all its achievements. From the critical intellectuals of the Frankfurt school /8

to the postmodernist paranoia of Michel Foucault, Western academics and intellectuals collaboratively constructed the greatest polemic against the Western age that dwarfs those of the USSR and early communists. Every corner of modernity, be it medicine, gender relations, /9

democratic practices, and even knowledge itself turned out to be a decorum for aggressive and predatory power. Power was discovered to be, “interwoven” in Foucauldian terms, in everything we do or we say even in these very words. Generations of highly educated Americans and /10

Europeans received critical training to heighten their sense of suspicion of themselves. In the wider populations, the acceleration of the normalization of the individual, the gradual de-conversion from religion, and the predominance of the consumerist aspirations meant that /11

the onset of the new anti-modern, and anti-social, ideologies became either attractive or unimportant. Those are the conditions of the perfect storm that Bin Laden rode to infamy. The CIA uncovered that he, after all, didn’t only read Sayyed Qutub but also Noam Chomsky. The /12

rock which he threw in the pond of our modern world uncovered the boiling waters coming from the deep and brought back the weight of entire human history onto our shoulders, forcing us to assume all old and new dichotomies of our history; Greece vs. Persia, Rome vs. the /13

Barbarians, Islam vs. the infidels, Crusades vs. Jihad, the Ottomans vs. Europe, colonial powers vs. noble savages, and neoliberal economics vs. local development as if we are destined to lead symbolic lives in which every generation reenacts the neverending story. In the /14

Middle East, what seemed like a lunatic fantasy of Bin Laden, a Caliphate built on conquest and sexual slavery, turned out to be a real fantasy of a young generation of Muslims. In Western societies, what was thought to be a temporary academic fad after which modernity will /15

resume its course turned out to be the whole identity perception of young generations of anti-American Americans. In short, Bin Laden won, we lost. The origin of our failure can be found nowhere but in the personal moral failure in the personal life of each of us.

*nomadization of the individual