br anding bin laden 195before—all this was in stark contrast to the conduct of the Nigerian elites,
who cultivated a luxurious lifestyle behind walls reinforced with barbed
wire. Bin Laden’s contempt for the Saudi Arabian establishment echoed
the rebellious attitudes of young hotheads toward the domestic elites,
whose privileges were believed to have been abolished when the sharia
was reintroduced. In that respect, bin Laden served as the ideal example
of a righteous Islamic leader who commits himself to the Muslim commu-
nity and uses his fortune for its benefit. Students from an Islamic school
in Kano told a journalist that they thought bin Laden was a “good leader”
because he was “uncorrupted” and did “not want anything for himself ”
(Wiedemann 2006: 7). I got a similar comment on bin Laden’s relevance
from Abubakar Aminu, the critic of the Ibro Usama movie I quoted previ-
ously above. He explained: “As you well know, Osama is rich; and yet he
has abandoned money and his pleasant life in order to aid religion and to
support people in the whole world in their struggle against oppression by
the Americans and the Jews—for example, in Palestine, Iraq, Afghani-
stan, and elsewhere” (email, August 16, 2003; my translation).
According to Murray Last (2008: 41), Muslim ideas about the Last
Days still have some currency in northern Nigeria. Such beliefs include
the appearance of the Mahdi, a messiah who is to herald the beginning of
the apocalypse and help the faithful triumph over the enemies of Islam.
At the end of the nineteenth century, this notion of the apocalypse had
a powerful impact on the Sokoto caliphate. At that time, thousands of
people who interpreted colonial conquest as an augury of the imminent
end of the world set out east toward Sudan, where the Mahdi was believed
to have made his appearance in the person of the political and religious
leader Mu ha m mad A h mad. I n conversat ions I had w it h f r iend s i n K a no i n
2003, some were pondering whether the attacks of September 11 should be
interpreted as premonitions of an imminent apocalypse. W hile bin Laden
was not explicitly referred to as the Mahdi of the Last Days, I think that for
some, he at lea st ser ved a s a “su r rogate prophet ” of sor ts (c f. Fu r n ish 2 002).
In 1999, when Olusegun Obasanjo, a “born-again” Christian from
southern Nigeria, became the country’s president, many northerners
felt politically marginalized. At the same time, there was a dearth of po-
litical icons that could adequately represent the northern quest for self-
determination (which was associated with the reintroduction of sharia)