Osama Bin Laden By Nushin Arbabzadah

What will they think of my hat in Poland in a hundred years?" wondered Pablo Neruda in The Book of Questions. A curious question, but not as queer as the one I have been asked: how will historians remember Osama bin Laden? The answer depends on whose history, what sources, and which language we're talking about. We can easily imagine future American commemoration of Bin Laden. So instead of tales of heroic firefighters and their bearded nemesis, this essay draws on stories from little-known places of even lesser-known people. In 100 years, were she to sift through Afghan materials, an imaginative historian might come across these stories and write a history of what Bin Laden meant to those other partners in the tale, the Afghans.

Let's start with Zazi, the district in eastern Afghanistan where Bin Laden first found fame fighting Soviet troops in 1987. (Type in Zazi to YouTube and you get a 37-second amateur shot of the district.) Future historians may note that Bin Laden's formative jihad years were spent under a pale open sky, in a valley ringed by snow...#8209;capped mountains and hills of fern trees. Here he set up his first regiment, with the name al-Masada: "the Lion's Den".

Since then, his Arab fighters have moved further north, to Korengal in Konar province, where they married local women. They are fighting US troops stationed nearby, flinging to the fog of war the chance that memories of their old commander will reach future historians. US troops have placed a bounty of $350,000 for the fighters' current commander, Qari Ziya al-Rahman. He doesn't mind being photographed, showing off his taste for cream-colored pakul flat caps. In 100 years our historian might link his photo to those of American soldiers, posing for souvenirs in the same local headgear.

We are moving among the obscure places and people whose lives have been touched by Bin Laden. One of them, Sher Akbar from the village of Bagh-e Metal, had his life ruined by another photograph when a Peshawar magazine noticed his striking resemblance to Bin Laden. The result was massive manhunts, twice resulting in Akbar's arrest. He still crosses the border to Pakistan for business and fears the Hellfire missiles used against vehicles believed to transport al-Qaida leaders.

Future historians may also come across Jan Ali Zaki's account of his trip to Indonesia, published in Kabul in October 2008. The Afghan journalist wrote: "The majority of the Indonesians I met believe Bin Laden is a hero, which is why some of them print his picture on T-shirts. When I tell them Osama's jihad is causing suffering to Afghans, that his actions have killed more Muslim children than infidels, they're surprised and say: 'But he is Islam's hero. How can he do such things?'" Like many other Afghans, Zaki despairs that Bin Laden has become to Afghanistan what Che Guevara was to Cuba: a revolutionary internationalist coupled with a country not his own. "They ask me where I am from. I say: 'Afghanistan.' They say: 'Oh, Bin Laden's country!' I tell myself, what a strange country! Our whole history has been lost to a foreign Arab!"

? Nushin Arbabzadah grew up in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. She has edited an anthology of Islamic journalism, No Ordinary Life: Being Young in the Worlds of Islam