Bin Laden’s strategy: War and the religious imagination
When the U.S. declared war on global terrorism after September 11, Osama bin Laden “must have had a sense of relief when America came attacking” in Afghanistan a month later, says the author of a suddenly popular book on the rise of religious violence. For a long time, bin Laden and his al-Qaeda followers had been trying “to take the Muslim world by the shoulders and say, ‘This is war,’” but it took U.S.