I would say so!

Regarding Osama bin Laden, one could argue that his entire worldview was shaped by imperialism.

His dream was to unite all Muslims into an Islamic nation, and he felt that the possibility of this was destroyed by Western imperialist governments, more specifically saying that they ‘divided the Nation into small and little countries and pushed it, for the last few decades, into a state of confusion’ (Hashim, 2001: 24).

That division about which he spoke was when the Ottoman Empire was dismantled primarily by the British and French governments under the Sykes-Picot Agreement (which drew the modern borders of the Middle East) and the Treaty of Sèvre, which dissolved the Empire. Osama saw this as eighty years of humiliation (Fisk, 2006: 1,059).

Israel formed a large part of this both because it was established by imperialist governments and because of its governments’ imperialist policies.

He believed that the only way to fight against imperialism was holy war.

In 1979, the Soviet regime invaded Afghanistan and Osama went there because he wanted to protect fellow Muslims, in part out of disgust that no Saudi prince did so (the Saudi monarchy being the custodians of Islam’s holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, were expected by many like Osama bin Laden to lead men to the war against the Athiest Soviet government) (Fisk, 2006: 4).

When the Iraqi regime invaded Kuwait in 1990, he wanted to do something similar. Amid fears that Saudi Arabia would be invaded, Osama wanted to fight the Iraqi army. He had a meeting with the Saudi Defence Minister, Prince Sultan bin Abdelaziz al-Saud, and laid out his plan: that he’d take 100,000 fighters into Kuwait and push the Iraqi military back. He was adamant that the Saudi government shouldn’t request US government military assistance because, if anyone were going to defend the land in which were Mecca and Medina, it had to be Muslims and not non-Muslim foreign troops, especially not from the US (Jehl, 2001; Fisk, 2006: 4).

The Defence Minister refused his help and the US government was invited instead. This led Osama to see the Saudi monarchy as a tool of Western imperialism, especially when US troops remained in the country after the Gulf War which he believed was blatant colonialism. He was exiled for criticising the monarchy during the war and in 1995 wrote an open letter in which he accused them of being un-Islamic, wasting money, and unable to defend Muslims. He also accused King Fahd of creating unemployment and attempting to Westernise the country, not to mention making his subjects pay high taxes. He also called for attacks to be made against US military targets in Saudi Arabia, which led to the deaths of US servicemen. In 1996, he declared war on the US (Bapat, 2007: 279; Hashim, 2001: 23).

I mentioned Israel earlier, and boy did he hate Israel. The occupation of Palestine and Jerusalem particularly obviously played a huge part in this, as did massacres of Palestinians such as at Sabra and Chatila camps in 1982 during the Lebanese Civil War, when Israeli government-backed militiamen murdered anywhere from hundreds to thousands of Palestinian refugees; there was also the Qana Massacre in 1996, where the Israeli military bombarded a UN compound filled with Lebanese civilians. During the 1990’s, when US President Clinton condemned the violence of Hamas and Hezbollah but not the Israeli government, that was taken as an insult by Osama bin Laden (Fisk, 2006: 22).He also hated Israel because he was simply an anti-Semite, believing the conspiracy theory that Jewish people control the world.

The Iraqi people were seen by Osama as victims of Western imperialism because of the heavy death toll and hardships which followed the Gulf War, especially from UN sanctions. Operation Desert Fox in 1998, when the US and UK governments launched a bombing campaign with the justification that Saddam wasn’t complying with UN Resolutions, was seen by Osama bin Laden as another example of imperialism against his idea of the Islamic Nation. He believed that Desert Fox was launched because the world-controlling Jewish Cabal (or whatever his ridiculous conspiracy theory was) wanted to enslave and loot the Muslim world. To him, this was a crusade against Islam launched from bases in Saudi Arabia which was, to him, proof again that the Saudi monarchy had allowed the land of Mecca and Medina to be colonised (Yusufazi, 1999).

Desert Fox was a turning point for him in many ways. Since 1991, he had been calling for attacks against US service members in Saudi Arabia. From 1998, he called for attacks against ALL Americans. Anywhere and everywhere, civilians too, thinking this was the only way to liberate the Islamic Nation he wanted to build from Western imperialism (Post, 2002: 8; 13). This led to hundreds of people being murdered, from the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya to the USS Cole in Yemen and, of course, led to thousands being murdered in America in September 2001. So imperialism certainly played a large part in his religious fundamentalism.

To take another example, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, we can see the same pattern. One of the major underpinnings to the Islamic Revolution was anger at Western imperialism in the country, especially in recent decades. After a new monarch took power in a coup in 1921, for example, he implemented “modernising” social reforms heavily influenced by Western society, which ran contrary to Islamic laws, religiously conservative practices like sex segregation, and banned women from wearing veils (something which was often brutally enforced by the police) (Mackey, 1996: 206). There was also anger at the invasion and occupation by the Soviet and British governments in 1941, as well as the power and wealth held by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In 1946, a religious fundamentalist group known for its attacks and assassinations, Fadayan-e Islam, was established in response to the increasing Westernisation and imperialist control in the country.

Then there’s 1953. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and was overthrown by the British and American governments in a CIA/SIS-orchestrated coup. The monarch at the time, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose regime was extremely brutal, was widely regarded as a puppet of Western imperialism and his reforms seen as an attempt to further Westernise Iran.The 1979 Islamic Revolution got rid of the monarch, and was quickly under threat from Saddam Hussein’s imperialism when, in 1980, he invaded Iran, which helped the Iranian regime to rally the people. Saddam’s imperialism was a good propaganda tool because defeating it became a crusade to defend and spread the Islamic revolution (Takeyh, 2010: 367). The Iranian regime moved to spread its revolution across the Middle East by supporting groups like Hezbollah in the Lebanese Civil War.

One of the driving factors behind this conflict was the political marginalisation of Lebanese Muslims in favour of Lebanese Maronite Christians - a system implemented by the French imperialist government following the First World War. In 1982, the Israeli government invaded Lebanon. That year, Hezbollah was established with the support of the Iranian regime - many of its founders being followers of Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution - to fight back against the invasion, seeing Western imperialism as an enemy of Islam (Kane, 2018: 67).

There’s more to say, but this is getting very long! Hope it helped!

Sources:

Fisk, Robert (2006) The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. London: Harper Perennial

Hashim, Ahmed S. (2001) The World According to Usama bin Laden. The Naval War College Review, Vol. 54 (4), pp. 11-35

Kane, J. Robert (2018) A Life Cycle Analysis of Hezbollah. American Intelligence Journal, Vol. 35 (2), Counterintelligence and the Insider Threat, pp. 67-73

Jehl, Douglas (2001), A Nation Challenged: Saudi Arabia; Holy War Lured Saudis as Leaders Looked Away. The New York Times, December 27, Available at: A NATION CHALLENGED: SAUDI ARABIA; Holy War Lured Saudis As Rulers Looked Away - The New York Times (nytimes.com), Last Accessed: 10/06/2021

Mackey, Sandra (1996) The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation. New York: Plume

Post, Jerrold M. (2002) Killing in the Name of God: Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Montgomery: Air University, Counterproliferation Papers, No. 18

Takeyh, Ray (2010) The Iran-Iraq War: A Reassessment. Middle East Journal, Vol. 64 (3), Summer, pp. 365-383

Yusufzai, Rahimullah (1999) Conversation With Terror. Time Magazine, January 11, Available at: Conversation With Terror - TIME, Last Accessed: 10/09/2021