Osama is dead, Al Qaeda is not

From Ed Husain’s excellent CNN.com piece:

To put it simply, Osama bin Laden is dead, al Qaeda is not…

Removing bin Laden is a colossal psychological blow to al Qaeda globally. But bin Laden was never the cause for al Qaeda: The issues that motivated him are still alive and well. Al Qaeda is a global brand, an idea, a movement. And just as he was recruited to a mind set of extremism, confrontation and violence, his death will serve as a global clarion call for another generation of jihadists.

The killing of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1949, did not end the brotherhood. The hanging of its most radical ideologue, Syed Qutb, bin Laden’s intellectual guide, gave rise to a whole new generation of jihadists inside Egypt. Indeed, when I was in Egypt last month, several of the most radical Muslims I met there had been inspired by the killing of Qutb, and remain extremists to this day. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, is a direct result of Qutb’s writings….

Osama bin Laden was produced by the religious literalism and political tyranny in Saudi Arabia. He latched on to the Arab-Israeli issue as a cause to bolster his anti-Americanism. These grievances led him to seek Islamist networks that seemingly provided action to change reality in the Arab world. Today, there are new, more hopeful developments in the Arab Spring, but no government in the Middle East will be sufficiently Islamic for young radicals in Saudi Arabia or Egypt. And so the spiral cycle of religiously justified political violence to undermine future governments in Egypt and elsewhere will give al Qaeda a breath of life.