A MAN WHO ONCE vowed to liberate the Arab world was reduced, with his death in Pakistan on May 2, to a footnote in the revolutions and uprisings remaking a region that he and his men had struggled to understand.

Predictably, the reactions to Osama bin Laden’s death ran the gamut. 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, dictatorship and powerlessness.

Only Arab strongmen were still invoking Osama Bin Laden’s name before his death . Bin Laden images for sale in Pakistan, May 2.

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, Colonel 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 attacks on September 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.” Farah Murad, a 20-year-old student at the German University in Cairo, said of the attacks, “I have a vague recollection, but it was so long ago.”

Doubts did emerge over the timing of Bin Laden’s 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.

Bilal al-Baroudi, a Sunni Muslim preacher in the conservative Lebanese city of Tripoli, said: “We dislike the reactions and the celebrations in the United States. 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.”

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.

“They consider Osama bin Laden a model for fighting American hegemony,” he said.

At the same time, Mr. Shehadeh argued that in the Muslim world, Bin Laden’s death might come to symbolize 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 called his foes acolytes of Bin Laden, whatever sympathies might 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, said the news of the killing hardly caused a ripple. 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.

Bin Laden’s death will inevitably be seen as another signpost in the evolution of political Islam’s relationship with the Arab state. In 2001, Bin Laden was seen as a symbol of an embattled religion, the personification of people’s frustrations at a faith seemingly overwhelmed by a Western power. A corollary was the Islamist activists’ own repression within the Arab world; many have noted that Ayman al-Zawahri, Bin Laden’s deputy, was radicalized in the jails of authoritarian Egypt.

Some insisted the battle Osama bin Laden represented would go on. Pakistanis watched President Obama announce the killing.

A sense of helplessness, be it in Cairo’s poorest neighborhoods or the most traditional quarters of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, appeared to underline his support.

“After the cold war was over and America was the only power, he was the only one counter-balancing 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 politics, one in which Islamist currents may have a stake and shed the sense of powerlessness that pushed them toward Bin Laden in the past.

While anger remains over American policy and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, attention has largely turned inward, as activists deliberate what kind of state will emerge.

Radwan Sayyid, a professor of Islamic studies at the Lebanese University in Beirut, said, “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.”

By ANTHONY SHADID
and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK