Graphic source: Language and Communication
Poetry recitals by Osama Bin Laden will be published from performances at wedding banquets and feasts from the 1990s. The performance tapes were preserved on recordings recovered from his compound in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Professor Flagg Miller, an Arabist at the University of California, Davis, reports that Bin Laden excells in a standard Arabic poetic form, hamasa--a warlike poetic tradition from Oman--that is enormously popular throughout the Islamic world. Bin Laden was so well known at the time that many people taped him and the recordings were circulated like pop songs.
Some sample lines of one poem states:
“A youth who plunges into the smoke of war smiling stains the blades of lances red. May God not let my eye stray from the most eminent humans, lest they fall.”
The FBI originally suspected that the poems may have coded messages to sleeper cells but it seems more obvious that Bin Laden simply expressed himself in a typical Islamic manner. The search for coded messages, hidden in typical Arabic poetry, is part and parcel of how the U.S. fails to grasp the obvious. Bin Laden explicitly stated his intentions, and then carried out all of his threats, all in plain sight (Cf. Michael Scheuer, Through Our Enemies Eyes). In addition, the FBI has no place, operating as it is as a fish out of water, in the brutal, cut-throat overseas world of jihad.
About 20 tapes feature the “distinctive monotone” of Bin Laden, according to Miller. Excerpts from the tapes will appear in the October issue of the journal Language and Communication, (Cf. The Abstract below).
The tapes often revealed news to family members about the deaths of their sons. According to Miller, Bin Laden's poems were calculating: “He crafts his words to excite the urban dissatisfied youth, offering them escape from their elders and villages. Instead, many just die in terrible ways.”
Miller plans to write a book about Bin Laden’s poetry while the tapes will be preserved at Yale University where they will be available to scholars.
Abstract
This article explores area studies contributions to sociolinguistics by examining Sunni reformers’ use of the Arabic term al-qācida, or a “pragmatic base.” Material is drawn from an audiocassette collection formerly owned by Usāma Bin Lādı¯n. Divergent approaches to the qācida suggest that the term functions a base for many forms of spatial, temporal, social, and ethical orientation. Much of the critical leverage of the concept stems from speakers’ sense of Arabic as a template of ethical attunement that cues language users to founding Muslim lifeways and leaders in and beyond the Arabian Peninsula. A review of Western Arabic sociolinguistics shows how scholars have hampered and also enhanced an understanding of the pragmatic resourcefulness of Arabic. Special attention is given to the ways area studies can help situate Arabic as a signifying practice that accommodates diverse textual, historical, and territorial claims.
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