e-CMES sits down with Flagg Miller, a religious studies professor at UC Davis whose fascinating study on contemporary Arab street poetry, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen, was published by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in conjunction with Harvard University Press in 2007. Now, his interests have led him to a study of never before released tapes of Bin Laden. The tapes, from Bin Laden’s Kandahar compound, were procured, through CNN and the FBI, by Williams Afghan Media Project. The project called Professor Miller.

e-CMES: How did you come to study the tapes?

Flagg Miller: My training was in linguistic anthropology, and most of my fieldwork was on political poetry … so basically I had a great interest in how people generally use audiocassettes, for political reasons. Most of my work had been on progressive Muslims, people working for social justice … [and] outbreaks of violence and unrest as they relate to poetry. In 2003, I got a call from a colleague at Williams Afghan Media Project [WAMP], and that project had acquired a set of 15,000 audiotapes from CNN. [The news station] had got them from Bin Landen's residential compound  … in 2001. As soon as Edwards [David Edwards, director of the WAMP project] knew about the boxes of tapes he called me and I began working on cataloguing the tapes.

The tapes are of interest to me because my personal experience with the aftermath of the Afghan Arab returnees I'd seen through the 1990s, thousands returning to Yemen from conflict and creating havoc in southern Yemen. There was something very familiar with the kind of ways people drew on verbal culture to try and find a solution extremist ideology.

e-CMES: Why do you think these groups turn to verbal culture?

FM: That there’s an oral/verbal culture taps into long traditions of conflict through conversation and arguments, and that argument draws upon Islamic tradition, law, ideas of tribe as community and citizenship. Poetry was really the most eloquent form of verbal culture. In Yemen today, poets are tremendously revered spokespeople.

On these tapes, I hear a range of the verbal genres … poetry and songs … Bin Laden himself is a poet.

e-CMES: Can you talk about the process of working with the tapes so far?

FM: The tapes arrived at Williams, covered in dust, jumbled together with no organization. We began with unpacking them, reading the names and titles on cassette, alphabetizing them by name. Some of the figures were well-known people, many others were not well-known, so to begin, my first tasks was to identify, who's in the tape collection, what is the intellectual history, are they preachers, militants?

e-CMES: And what did you discover?

FM: All those types of people represented. One of my main aims in that process was to find tapes by Bin Laden, kind of identify ... who are the intellectual heavyweights, what do they tell us about al-Qaida that we didn't know?

One of the important aspects of this methodology is to recognize and find a way to write about the difference between people, how much disagreement and outright confusion there is. It's not as if every figure in this tape collection is in agreement about al-Qaida's objective or even what al-Qaida is. Most of them are conservative reformers, but others are very moderate; basically, Bin Laden was listening to a wide array of voices, including his critics, and he built his campaign in response to his critics.

Part of it's been reading what's on the cassette cartridge, listening to the tapes. That's been a very difficult process because some of the tapes are in poor condition.

e-CMES: So these tapes were mostly speeches?

FM: There are a lot of songs ... anthems ... people singing. Basically, the tapes are very musical. That's very odd because at the time you heard about the Taliban cracking down on songs, what's interesting is that Bin Laden's guys were listening to these tapes in private. I've picked up quite a bit of poetry on the tapes. Some are surprising tapes, amateur, ad hoc recordings of militants and others who just happen to have a tape recorder. Sometimes they’re riding in a taxicab across the Afghani countryside, we catch these conversations on tape that are unscripted.

Bin Laden's statements in public are always very scripted, on these tapes people are talking in ways that are absolutely unscripted. Bin Laden's there, he's at a wedding, there’s lots of joking and revelry. One of the tapes I've talked about is a tape made in the kitchen one morning, people making breakfast, and there's a joke about how cooking eggs is good training for jihad, and the whole sixty minutes of tape is impromptu joking between guys, cooking breakfast and stumbling through it as good training in raids.

e-CMES: And what about Bin Laden as a poet?

FM: I would say he is a very able poet. His poetry, though, is fairly didactic. His poems always sort of speak to his political points. If he's talking about combat against Americans and Somalis, he'll come up with a poem that is about a bombing. Nonetheless he turns to poetry when his descriptions about strategy start to become overly staid or dry. He comes up with poetry to illuminate links between gritty aspects of militancy and combat and put them into a larger historical and ethical framework.

People have asked, isn't there a risk of romanticizing Bin Laden's aims if you focus on the poetry, it's a dangerous thing to be giving these people a mouthpiece. The fact is that we want to understand how people like that who are militant…we have to understand how they recruit, how they move people. We've got to build a set of critical tools to examine the deep problems of emotional appeals.

e-CMES: When can the public expect to read your findings?

FM: My first book will probably appear in 2011, but these tapes will be made available to the public in 2010 at Yale. They will be digitized and available to anyone who wants to go and listen to them. The tapes are often … 98% are in Arabic. Translating these materials will be a bigger enterprise; my own work will be focusing on the differences between ... basically the styles of argument and the ways those differ between militants and established military specialists. In the process will be doing some translating, Bin Laden's speeches.

The tapes — there are about 20 so far — that are by Bin Laden, there are 12 that contain all new material. Several of the tapes are from the late 1980s, a good 5 years before we usually have access to. They'll allow us to see the changes in platform.

e-CMES: And what are the political implications of your study?

FM: It very much has policy implications. It's kind of charting a responsible policy towards U.S. involvement in the Middle East, it requires us to understand the depth of intellectual thought in the area, to be able to develop a better vocabulary for the nuances of intellectual thought.

It's very clear, for example, that with the situation with al-Qaida. most Americans, including policy makers, are poorly equipped to understand that al-Qaida was largely a Arabian peninsular thing, much like the 9/11 was largely Saudis and a few Yeminis. It exposes the extent to which we failed exactly where the center of militancy against Americans originated.

So, basically, these tapes are a huge educational resource for people to understand many different centers of intellectual production inform al-Qaida, that makes it a much more controversial and decentralized project than is often portrayed.

Photo of Flagg Miller courtesy Karin Higgins.