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472 Pages·2015·4.428 MB·English
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THE AUDACIOUS ASCETIC FLAGG MILLER The Audacious Ascetic What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal about al-Qaʿida A A Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Copyright © Flagg Miller 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Miller, Flagg. The Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal about al-Qaʿida. ISBN 978-0-19-026436-9 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. The Message (Al-Risala) 17 2. Heart Pains 41 3. Remembering the Lion’s Den 73 4. The Genie and the Bottle: On Authority and Revelation through Audiotapes 95 5. Our Present Reality (Waqiʿuna al-Muʿasir) 123 6. Dangers and Hopes (Makhatir w-Amal) 153 7. Taking Gandhi to Jerusalem through Oslo, Norway 179 8. Dawn Anthems (Anashid al-Fajr) 205 9. I Have Scorned Those Who Rebuked Me 233 10. New Bases Near an Ancient House 267 11. An Intimate Conversation (jalasa) 283 12. A Pragmatic Base (al-qaʿida) 307 13. Listen, Plan, and Carry Out “al-Qaʿida” 327 14. ʿUmar’s Wedding 345 Epilogue 369 Appendix A 377 Notes 379 Sources Cited 429 Index 443 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many to whom I owe thanks for the development of this book. Their patience and generosity kept me aloft when lonelier paths of research seemed interminable. For their support throughout, my wife and seven-year-old son deserve special mention. They have been steady com- panions in exploring the complexities of human experience everywhere. My access to bin Laden’s former audiotape collection beginning in 2003 was made possible through collaboration with anthropologist David Edwards, director of the Williams College Afghan Media Project. I am forever indebted to his confidence in me and to Williams College for facilitating my early archival and research efforts. I conducted my first stint of fieldwork and research for the book through a grant from the American Institute of Yemeni Studies in 2005. The following year, gratefully employed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I spent a semester developing chapters one, nine and twelve as a fellow at the university’s Institute for Research in the Humanities. In 2007, I had moved to the University of California, Davis where I continued work with a new assembly of colleagues. I am especially grateful to former dean, Jessie Ann Owens, and my department chairs for allotting me the time and resources necessary to complete my work. A grant from the Hellman Foundation supplied rare funding for an Arabic research and translation assistant, Nour-Eddine Mouktabis, without whose labors my archival efforts would have been far less thorough. UCD staff members proved as adept in addressing my professional anxieties as they were convivial. They include members of the university’s news and media relations team, Karen Nikos and Claudia Morain. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The book’s organization, thesis and relevance would have been more modest were it not for invaluable support from beyond UC Davis. In 2009–10 I joined fellows at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. for a year of earnest discussion about pressing issues at home and abroad. Chapters eight and thirteen are indebted to my interactions while at the center. Two subsequent years of fellowship allowed me to refine the book’s contributions. They were secured through support from the American Council of Learned Societies’ Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship in 2010–11, and through a University of California President’s Faculty Research in the Humanities Fellowship in 2013–14. During this period, I had the privilege of submitting my research for consideration to a range of audiences both within academia and beyond. Host institutions included, roughly in order, the Modern Orient Center (ZMO) in Berlin, the University of Michigan’s Near Eastern Studies department as well as its Linguistic Anthropology Group and Islamic Studies Program, Oxford University, Emory University’s departments of anthropology and religion, George Washington University’s Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Qatar University, New York University, the Foreign Service Institute (Arlington, VA), Cornell University’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, the University of California, Davis’s anthropology department and militarization research cluster, Wesleyan College’s Middle East Studies department, Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago’s Middle East History and Theory Graduate Workshop, the National Defense University, Stanford University, Florida State University’s department of religion, Harvard University, and most recently Yale University’s anthropology department and Council on Middle East Studies. Special thanks are due to a range of interviewees, readers, co-transla- tors and facilitators. Paramount among them are Hurst’s two anony- mous readers as well as Michael Dwyer, without whose perspective and assiduous labor none of this would have been possible. To others’ enor- mous generosity I can only gesture: ʿUmar bin Laden, Abdullah Anis, Alexander Knysh, Zaina Bin Laden, Valerie Billing, Jean Sasson, Deputy Commissioner John Miller, Massa, Joe Brinley, Deborah Grosvenor, Katherine Zimmerman, Friedhelm Hoffman, Neil MacFarquhar, Henry Schuster, Esther Whitfield, Alex Strick van Linschoten, the Institute of Education (London), faculty colleagues in UC Davis’s religious studies viii

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