Headnote:

How Osama bin Laden lucked out

There is nothing new about a charismatic old man holing up in a mountain aerie and dispatching murderers to bring civilization to its knees.

Between Hasan ibn al Sabah, the 11th Century Muslim fanatic who gave the West the word assassin, and Osama bin Laden, the differences lie more in the responses of their enemies than in their own natures.

Hasan ibn al Sabah was a warrior scholar. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, is a warrior demagogue who fobs off dogma as thought. But both of them knew how to use callow fools. Al Sabah could talk about Islam learnedly; Bin Laden knows how learnedness sounds. Al Sabah used hashish and promises of paradise to entice his followers who were called hashasheen, hashish-eaters. The word on Western lips became assassin. Bin Laden, too, envisions a paradise of honored murderers, but not much is known about whether his dupes are doped.

The more significant difference between these two monsters is their opponents. Bin Laden has had the great good fortune to have the feckless George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as his opponents. For all his early feats, Al Sabah had the great misfortune of acquiring the Mameluk Sultan Baybars and Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis, as his enemies.

And, as we know, a man is best known by his enemies.

Hulagu has something in common with George Bush. He destroyed Baghdad, too. But he did a much better job, creating a mountain of skulls, and in so doing he destroyed the Abbasid and hence the Arab caliphate and established the Mongol empire. George Bush destroyed Baghdad and then handed it over to the influence of the very nation he has described as one of the axes of evil, Iran.

Baybars (Al Malik al Zahir Rukn al Din Baybars al Bunduqdari) had nothing in common with the blinkered president. He was a superb diplomat and warrior. He crushed the Seventh Crusade of King Louis XI of France and he dealt the Mongol onslaught a memorable setback. When he set out to end Al Sabah’s reign of terror, he nearly did. It remained for Hulagu to finish off the old man, which he did with as much efficiency as he dispatched the fabled Abbasids.

Baybars and Hulagu knew who the enemy was. True, they didn’t have a contentious congress to persuade, but neither did George Bush and Dick Cheney; they had a parliament of the gullibles. And so they set their sights on the wrong man in the wrong country and set out to make their wretched cronies rich, which they did. They probably laughed all the way to the bank as fools asked what victory in Iraq might mean, because they knew they were already victorious: victory had meant plunder and spoils for their hangers-on and supporters.

I have been asked several times why I ended a volume of poems about who belongs and who doesn't with a poem about Hasan ibn al Sabah. I’m not through thinking about the answer, but I see that his and Bin Laden’s fanatics believe they belong to something. They’re high on being right. And I see that the American response to their bloody conviction instilled in me an horrific sense of alienation: our leaders were all too ready to hate instead of think. Our leaders made the case that anyone objecting to turning a famously inclusive democracy into a federal security lock-down by canceling the the liberties of dissenters did not deserve to be called an American. I had seen this before in civil society in a thousand nuanced ways, shutting out people whose origins were other than northern European.

To me, Osama bin Laden not only wantonly murdered the innocents of my beloved country, he turned it against its own ideals and best instincts. He prompted us to begin dismantling the very glory he so despises. And we did not find among us a Baybars or Hulagu to bring him down. What we found were leaders adept at stirring up fear, as Adolph Hitler had been adept, but inept at leading, as Hitler had been inept. The resulting Islamophobia and nativism stands in contrast to everything in us that Bin Laden loathes. We did our enemy’s bidding, and in the process we went a long way toward convincing Muslims that we are more against them than against terrorism. It was, moreover, a squalidly anti-historic response, because the most cursory knowledge of Islam reveals that it has suffered as much at the hands of terrorists as any other civilization.

Far From Algiers, my first book of poems, is by no means about terrorism or 9/11 or its aftermath or the American response. It is a collection of poems whose theme is the loneliness of the outsider who encounters all manner of half-hidden odds trying to fit in. It is about foreign birth, love of country, and alienation. When I collected the poems to enter the competition for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize I had at hand the makings of four or five other manuscripts, but none of them came together with the same urgency. Now, of course, with time to study these other poems, I see other themes and different urgencies.

The poem "Second Moses" is an homage to Moses de Leon, a medieval Spanish Jew who lived in Muslim Spain. He traveled widely in Castile, where he encountered Qaballah and its adepts, and it is thought he wrote the Zohar, which over time became the jewel of Qaballah. He undoubtedly was aware of the Muslim Sufis. I sense in Moses de Leon something of what I feel about Americans who love their country deeply but in some quarters are made to feel outsiders. The poet of the Zohar lived in the twilight of the Convivencia, that amazing period in Arab Spain when Jews, Muslims and Christians lived and worked together in relative peace and tolerance. Soon, in 1492, the Jews and Muslims were to be expelled by an intolerant Christian Reconquista, and with it came the noxious Inquisition.

The poem named for "Hasan ibn al Sabah" is really about high alert against the outsider, about refusing to see we’re all outsiders wanting to get in somewhere. We’re all far from some Algiers.

"Second Moses" is about the affirmation of light, man’s heroic insistence on creating beauty in the teeth of threat.