Of all the known photographs of Osama bin Laden it is a happy, innocent, sociable picture of a group of teenagers, taken in Sweden in 1971, that has haunted news reports of his death this week. The 14-year-old Osama, smiling in a young, vulnerable way, stands second from right. The photograph in all its brittle colour glory is genuinely fascinating. In the green jumper stands bin Laden before Bin Laden, a boy whose destiny you cannot conceivably read in his face. Next to the images in our imaginations of falling towers, of lower Manhattan swallowed in deathly dust, of flames in the sky eating away so many lives the images of the new reality he made it is eerily ordinary, perversely promising. Perhaps it suggests the innocence of the world before 9/11, as well as the enigmatic life of Osama bin Laden himself. The pink Cadillac, the flares, the hair and a hat all place it unmistakably in the world of 1971. Who knows, perhaps this scene will soon be recreated in a darkly ironic biopic, for the Boogie Nights look is so flavoursome. I was five when it was taken. My generation was lucky enough to see the last years of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called the "golden age" of peace and prosperity for westerners after 1945. Better still, we saw the end of the cold war and a brief moment when a Democratic president and a New Labour government led a society whose main problem in the future looked like it might be choosing whether to lounge in Starbucks or visit an art gallery. Any idea of a golden age, a bright new century, or the simple certainty that our democracies will survive was destroyed on that day in September 2001, by the insecurely smiling boy in the photograph. But if this is the appeal of the image, it is illusory. The fascination of the picture relies on a contrast between the "ordinary" youth we seem to see here and the monster who was responsible for Al-Qaeda. Yet that would imply that later images of Bin Laden show him as a scary, deranged, inhuman terrorist. I have yet to see a photo that makes him look like that. Perhaps the CIA will find repulsive pictures of him doing bad things now that he is dead, but all the currently available photographs are of a man soft and almost feminine in his features, with gentle, even mystical, eyes. "The child is father of the man" Wordsworth's lines apply. For there is no contrast between this photograph of the teenage Bin Laden and pictures of him as an adult. No sickness, no break in his life, no withdrawal from reality he seems as natural in later portraits as he does here, with insecurity replaced by beatific calm. It was a saint, not a devil, who killed so many. To his followers around the world was a guru, a sage, a man of wisdom. He called for megadeaths with the charisma of a benevolent visionary. Why else did doctors heed his call in Britain? This photograph in fact gives the lie to those who belittle Bin Laden's influence, or see him as some post-modern construct of western narratives of good and evil. For in its ordinariness it shows what made him extraordinary out of this promising young man grew the illusion of moral authority that contradicted every stereotype of the terrorist as a pitiful, unattractive outsider. Osama bin Laden was the real thing, a leader, and that is why his death is such a necessary murder. Guardian