The words were not uncommon in angry Arab capitals a decade ago. Osama bin Laden was hero, sheik, even leader to some. After his death on Sunday, a man who once vowed to liberate the Arab world was reduced to a footnote in the revolutions and uprisings remaking a region that he and his men had struggled to understand.
Predictably, the reactions ran the gamut Monday — from anger in the most conservative locales of Lebanon to jubilation among Shiite Muslims in Iraq, whose community fell victim to carnage committed in the name of his organization. Some vowed revenge; others expressed disbelief that the man killed was in fact Bin Laden.
But most remarkable perhaps was the sense in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere that Bin Laden was an echo of a bygone time of ossifying divides between West and East, American omnipotence and Arab weakness, dictatorship and powerlessness. In an Arab world where tumult this year has begun to refigure that political arithmetic, it often seemed that the only people in the region citing Bin Laden’s name lately were the mouthpieces of strongmen like the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the former Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, evoking his threat as a way to justify clinging to power.
For a man who bore some responsibility for two wars and deepening American involvement from North Africa to Yemen and Iraq, some say his death served as an epitaph for another era. Many in the Arab world, where three-fifths of the population is under 30, recall the bombings on Sept. 11, 2001, as a childhood memory, if that.
“The Arab world is busy with its own big events, revolutions everywhere,” said Diaa Rashwan, deputy director of the Ahram Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Cairo. “Maybe before Tunisia his death might have been a big deal, but not anymore.”
Or, in the words of Farah Murad, a 20-year-old student at the German University in Cairo, “I have a vague recollection [of the attacks], but it was so long ago.”
The United States’ pursuit of Bin Laden has long prompted suspicions in an Arab world that remains deeply skeptical of America’s support for Arab dictators and its unstinting alliance with Israel.
Doubts emerged Monday over the timing of his killing. Some suggested that his whereabouts were long known and that his killing came in the interests of some party — be it the Obama administration, Pakistan or others.
In many quarters, there were calls for revenge and anger at his death, most publicly by Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister who heads the Hamas government in Gaza, who called him “a Muslim and Arab warrior.” Others insisted that the battle Bin Laden symbolized between the United States and militant Islamists would go on, and indeed, his organization had always been diffuse enough to survive his death.
“Mr. Obama said, ‘Justice has been achieved,’ ” said Bilal al-Baroudi, a Sunni Muslim preacher in the conservative Lebanese city of Tripoli. “Let’s see how.”
“We dislike the reactions and the celebrations in the United States,” he added. “What is this great victory? What is the great thing that they achieved? Bin Laden is not the end, and the door remains shut between us and the United States.”
Even then, the denunciations of the killing were often nuanced.
Marwan Shehadeh, an Islamist activist and researcher in Jordan, argued that Arabs would see Bin Laden’s death through the lens of their antipathy to American policies — interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and support for Israel — without regard to his views. “Osama bin Laden is a popular charismatic figure for many people,” he said. “They consider Osama bin Laden a model for fighting American hegemony.”
At the same time, Mr. Shehadeh argued that in the Muslim world, Bin Laden’s death might come to symbolize a different kind of revolution — the shift from violence toward other forms of political engagement, buoyed by the hope for change that the Arab Spring represents.
As if underlining the notion of a watershed, the Muslim Brotherhood said that with Bin Laden’s death, “the United States should leave Iraq and Afghanistan.”
In Libya, where Colonel Qaddafi has relentlessly portrayed his foes as acolytes of Bin Laden, whatever sympathies may have existed seemed to evaporate in the churning of a homegrown revolt. Eswahil Hassan, a doctor in the eastern Libyan city of Darnah, one of Libya’s more pious cities and a place that felt the weight of Colonel Qaddafi’s repression, said that the news of Bin Laden’s death hardly caused a ripple Monday morning.
On word of it, he said he and a friend at the hospital had talked about the troubles Bin Laden had caused for Libyans, who suddenly had to prove that they did not belong to Al Qaeda. The friend was happy to see Bin Laden gone, Dr. Hassan said.
“To hell with him,” he quoted his friend as saying.
In Misurata, Libya, a rebel stronghold under siege by government forces, a group of armed rebels similarly expressed satisfaction at Bin Laden’s death, saying they hoped it would allow the United States to divert more military resources to their fight.
Citing reports of the gunfight that had killed the Qaeda leader, they said he had been shot twice in the head.
“Now for Qaddafi, two in the head,” said Ali Ahmed al-Ash.
“No,” said his friend, Mohammed bin Zeer. “For Qaddafi, three.”
Bin Laden’s death will inevitably be seen as another signpost in the hesitant evolution of political Islam’s relationship with the Arab state. In 2001, Bin Laden was often seen as a symbol of an embattled religion, the very personification of people’s frustrations with a faith that seemed overwhelmed by an omnipotent West. A corollary was the repression of Islamist activists within the Arab world; many have noted that Ayman al-Zawahri, Bin Laden’s deputy, was radicalized in the jails of authoritarian Egypt.
A sense of helplessness, be it in Cairo’s poorest neighborhoods or in Riyadh’s most traditional quarters, seemed to underline his support, particularly for a movement that eschewed rigorous ideology for a fetishized violence that served as an end in itself.
“After the cold war was over and America was the only power, he was the only one counterbalancing America,” said Islam Lotfy, an activist and leader of the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest mainstream Islamic group.
Though still tentative, the Arab uprisings, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia, have introduced the beginnings of a new body politic, one in which Islamist currents may have a stake. While anger remains over American policy and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, attention has often turned inward, as activists deliberate what kind of state will emerge.
“The problem now is not how you can destroy something, how you can resist something, it’s how can you build something new — a new state, a new authority, a new relationship between the public and leadership, a new civil society,” said Radwan Sayyid, a professor of Islamic studies at the Lebanese University in Beirut.
Anthony Shadid reported from Beirut, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Reporting was contributed by Mona El-Naggar from Cairo, Nada Bakri and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya, and C. J. Chivers from Misurata, Libya. An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Islam Lotfy.
This article, "In Arab World, Bin Laden’s Confused Legacy," first appeared in The New York Times.