I am currently working on a book project that focuses on an audiocassette collection formerly owned by Osama Bin Laden. Currently held at Yale University, the audiocassette collection represents the most important archive for understanding Bin Laden’s intellectual formation. My book will explore the contents of the collection and its implications for our understandings of Bin Laden’s militant movement, but will also situate these insights in relation to a broader consideration of the role of Arabic language studies for contemporary Muslim reformers.

After the fall of the Taliban in December of 2001, Cable News Networks acquired the audiotape collection of Bin Laden, from his personal compound in Qandahar, where he lived from 1997-2001. The collection contains over 1500 recordings of over two hundred leading Islamist preachers from around the world. In the summer of 2007, I was invited by Yale to annotate the collection, and have been to sole researcher on the collection to date. An article on the ways speakers in the collection differ over their understanding of the term al-qa`ida (“the base”) has appeared in the Journal of Language and Communication in October, 2008. Divergent approaches to the qa`ida 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, I argue, 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. My article is devoted to identifying how moderate jurisprudents in the collection employ such an ethics differently than militants, including Bin Laden himself. The article focuses, more broadly, on contributions that area studies scholars have made to sociolinguistics, and suggests that Western studies of Arabic could benefit from approaching language through Muslim religion and culture.

To date, scholars and journalists have debated about influences on Bin Laden’s thought by relying on statements made by Bin Laden largely after 2001, and also on second-hand accounts by those who personally met him. Some argue that Bin Laden’s radical orientations stem from contemporary Egyptian Islamists, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, while others argue that Bin Laden’s background experiences with Saudi Wahhabism are more important. Still others argue that Bin Laden’s primary intellectual formation needs to be situated in political currents outside the Middle East, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Africa (where Bin Laden lived between 1990-1996), and Southeast Asia. The cassettes in this collection suggest that while these narratives all contain some element of truth, Bin Laden was principally informed by a more disparate range of intellectuals than has heretofore been acknowledged.

Material in the collection offers invaluable resources for understanding the political and intellectual project that has come to be known as “al-Qa`ida.” The majority of the cassettes feature Saudi intellectuals and clerics, many representing the Wahhabi establishment, but many others its’ critics. Other speakers are Peninsular Arabs (especially Yemen, Kuwait, and Qatar), Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, Palestinians, and Algerians, among others. Of twenty-three cassettes featuring Bin Laden, I estimate that twelve recordings are unique, and contain material previously unpublished in any language. Western scholarship and journalists have focused largely on Bin Laden’s public statements made after September 11th, and on rare occasions have revisited earlier statements made by Bin Laden in 1994 through his London-based Advice and Reform Committee. The cassettes in the collection, by contrast, offer several rare recordings from the late 1980s that shed light Bin Laden’s early concerns with fighting the Soviets, and focus on moving personal narratives of martyrdom that are later curtailed in the service of a more public, rational persona. Overall, speakers in the collection employ a wide range of verbal genres, foremost among them sermons and political speeches. Much of the extraordinary value of this collection lies in the more intimate, frequently extemporaneous nature of recorded speech events, including conversations between well-known militants and their audiences, celebrations after militant operations, and poetry.

I have several book projects that explore this material. One book, tentatively entitled The Armament of Verse: Osama Bin Laden's 1996 Declaration of War Reconsidered, focuses on Bin Laden's 1996 speech from Tora Bora. This work focuses on the way Bin Laden maneuvers between seven prominent genres of Muslim political discourse in the Arab world. Delivered at a formative juncture of Bin Laden’s career, his speech mobilized young audiences by deploying key themes in Muslim homily, while also venturing in new, more secular directions. Through re-translation and analysis of the Declaration, I show how Bin Laden skillfully negotiates each genre as he crafts his message for listeners. I argue that Bin Laden’s final recourse to poetry in the last third of his speech reveals both the power, and the limits, of his formula for global jihad. The effects of the speech are explored through chapters on the history of Bin Laden’s militant initiatives both before and after the speech, and on his use of media to achieve his aims. A second, longer book will situate Bin Laden’s cassette collection amidst debates occurring in and beyond Qandahar over the nature of Islamic activism and ethical reasoning. I will focus, in particular, on the role of Arabic in helping participants build consensus about Muslim knowledge and historical memory as they imagine new forms of global sociality and dystopia.