In this episode, The Changing Character of War program welcomes Dr. Elizabeth Kendall,
a senior research fellow at Pembroke College at the University of Oxford.
Her talk, entitled Militant Jihadi Culture Poetry as a Weapon of War,
suggests we have overlooked the centrality of poetry as a communicative vehicle in the Islamic world
and in doing so hampered our ability to understand or confront the messages in jihadi culture.
Now, the first question that probably will occur to you is, you know, what on earth does poetry have to do with with war?
Actually, it has a great deal to do with war. Ever since ancient Greek times is, as I'm sure historians amongst you will realise.
But I'm not sure that most people would associate it with the kind of media coverage that we have today of militant jihadist groups.
I came to this from a background in modern Arabic literature and classical Arabic literature and then comparative literature and Turkish literature.
But I felt that my own and my own path was a little removed from reality when when
developments started happening that were subsequently came to be known as the Arab Spring.
I really wanted to find a way of linking in to that a bit more tangibly.
And I have noticed that there was a great deal of poetry being produced by militant groups that was going pretty much unheard and analysed.
So you can see on this first slide,
we have a poem in the middle which sort of means that the cacophony or the bubbling the of blood or the nice blood splotch.
This is a typical poem and it's in a typical classical format.
And then around that, I've just put the photos of four leaders on the top.
At the top you can see the two leaders of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Both of them write their own poetry.
Osama's poetry is fairly well known, I think, these days.
Perhaps his most famous poem was his ode to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, and that was apparently recited at his son's wedding.
And then at the bottom, we have two other leaders of the Islamic State group, so-called Islamic State group.
So on the left, we have a Zarqawi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
And he, of course, was the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, which morphed into the Islamic State.
But he actually wrote poetry, too, which I find slightly more surprising,
because he does have the reputation as a bit more of a thug than the top two leaders.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so-called caliph, does not write his own poetry, to my knowledge,
but he did write his Ph.D. dissertation, part of it about medieval Arabic poetry.
So I think that just helps to highlight, you know, how central poetry actually is.
Now, what is it that the poetry does? Why would why would terrorists spend time on writing poetry when they could be killing people or training?
First, I think it's very important to explain to you what the place of poetry is in in Arab culture, Arab cultures.
It's not it's not the way that we would think about poetry.
We tend to think of poetry as an elitist or largely elitist pursuit in the Arab world.
It has popular appeal as well as elitist appeal.
And, you know, you wouldn't really even be able to get into a taxicab in Cairo without without a driver who knew at least some lines of poetry.
It's the oldest and the most revered art form in the Arab world.
And it actually comes at the end of quite a long tradition of poetry being employed as a cultural tool for political means, for political ends.
So in pre-Islamic times we have quite a lot of poetry that's come down to us from then, and the poetry tended to accompany a political agenda.
It might be the settling of a blood feud or the cementing of an alliance, something like that.
You quite often found that poets would be appointed by tribes and they would hang out in marketplaces where caravans would cross.
And this is a repository of history.
But the poetic tradition continued into Islamic times, and there has been perhaps some misunderstanding about this.
There are quite a few historians, largely armchair historians, who've written about Muhammad Reviling Poets, and saying that they're un-Islamic.
The evidence doesn't really support that. Muhammad was in great pains to point out that he was not a poet.
And I think that was natural because, of course, the revelations that he was receiving were coming out,
that became the Koran came out in a rhythmic prose, something we call subject that has an assonance at the end.
And it might have sounded a bit like poetry. He didn't want his religious sacred revelations to be confused with poetry.
And so what he was really saying is that I'm not I'm not a poet.
I'm a prophet. But he actually understood well the power of poetry.
And we have a certain amount of evidence that he actively deployed poets to help to propagate the early religion of Islam.
There's one I'm going to give you a quick quote from an 11th century historian, Ibn Rashid, who tells us that the prophet used to say,
indeed, this group of poets inflicts more damage on the people of Mecca than a hail of arrows could do.
So I think this is early information warfare. He had understood that this was a very powerful way of speaking to hearts and minds.
And despite my interest, you could to still be true today. Is this is this still the kind of role that poetry might have today?
It would help to explain how certain militant ideas spread amongst illiterate populations where there's very little Internet coverage,
because of course, poetry is an oral tradition. I thought the best thing to do would be to go and ask.
So I I've been travelling into Yemen now for about five years, mostly in the eastern desert regions of Hadramout and Almeria.
And these are of course, precisely the kinds of communities where al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula was able to establish itself very strongly,
actually, from about April 2015 until April 2016, when Special Forces moved in.
This is the kind of community that was included in the survey work that I did.
We didn't leave anyone out. It was carefully sampled.
And we even when I say we had to train about 69 field workers to help with this.
We drove around to communities that might not ordinarily be captured in any kind of survey.
This is one such community. I asked over 2000 tribesmen and women a whole bunch of questions,
and I had the question about poetry and a battery of other questions so as not to pre-empt a positive answer.
Oh yes. Dr. A poetry is terribly important.
You know, I didn't want them to tell me what I wanted to hear.
And the result was very strongly showing that poetry continues to hold a prominent place in tribal culture.
Today, a startling 74% of respondents said that poetry was either important or very important in their daily lives.
Notes that in their daily lives, this isn't just for special occasions.
This is just an example of the survey being conducted in attentive community.
So to understand more about who the audience for poetry is.
I correlated it with some of the other questions in the survey, and we found a few interesting things.
It's more of slightly more popular in a desert location than along the coast.
Age made little difference. Presence of a TV made little difference.
And that's not surprising because we actually see that, you know,
poetry has such an oral quality that the kind of higher economic groups who might have education and TVs wouldn't,
you know, would still retain some of that oral culture. And I think that the the most important distinction was actually between men and women.
And even that wasn't great. Poetry was slightly more popular amongst men.
82% of men thought poetry was important or very important, as opposed to 69% of women.
And it is largely men who recite poetry on public occasions.
So that's also not surprising.
These results, I think, show that it is really no surprise that groups such as al-Qaida and indeed Islamic State would therefore use poetry.
Here. You can see two magazine covers.
This is from a magazine that was published by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
It came out between 2008 and 2011.
And it's called Sardar and Malayan, which means the echo of epic battles.
And you can see just from these covers, you know, that it's it's pretty militant.
This is about this this says judgement on the targeting of tourists.
You know, it's trying to justify the killing of tourists.
What people don't will what people have missed about these magazines largely is that one in every five pages contains poetry.
And this has been pretty much overlooked well, entirely overlooked by analysts.
And, you know, an anecdote I sometimes tell is that when I presented some of this work to an audience of intelligence types,
they said, gosh, yes, we always get a readout of or translation of materials which skips the poetry,
but it might say, oh, and then there are eight lines of poetry or three verses of poetry,
and then it skips back to translating the actual article again.
So it's missed out, but there's a lot of messaging in this poetry, and it's just the type of material that, you know, speaks to hearts and minds.
It's happily used right alongside quotations from Koran and Hadith.
So you'll get sacred religious texts, poetry, right alongside any news, as well as whole poems.
You get magazine articles studded with bits of poetry,
a line here and a line there that helps to clinch an argument or paper over gaps in logic through in a line of poetry that'll fix it.
Now, you know, the territory isn't included, you know, just just for fun.
It's not a space filler. The poetry resonates at a deep cultural level and it sort of plugs into a shared heritage.
It's used. It's used in many ways. But if I try to segmented into two ways, one would be using the classical poetic heritage,
directly lifting it wholesale, just copying it and quoting it.
And another way would be using the classical poetic heritage as a model and creating completely new poetry,
but which is based on the forms, rhythms, metres, rhyme schemes of classical Arabic poetry.
So it looks classical.
And the points of this, of course, is that it creates an illusion of authenticity around the messaging, and that gives it legitimacy.
It basically makes jihadist narratives that are in the poetry seem part of a
tradition of authentic mainstream culture and not just some kind of subculture.
So that's that's the most important purpose with regard to the first of the two ways in which it's used.
That's why I just mentioned lifting and quoting poetry directly from the classical poetic tradition.
Let me give you an example of this. This is some work that was done by a colleague of mine at Princeton called Flagg Miller.
He analysed many of the audio cassettes of Osama bin Laden that were found in the Abbottabad compound.
And what he found was that Osama bin Laden's 1996 speech,
which came to be known as the Declaration of War against the US or the Declaration of War Against the Jews and Crusaders.
That speech in the original actually contained no fewer than 15 poem excerpts.
And yet we barely even heard about that.
And that's because when the speech was translated and disseminated and crossed analysts, desks, etc., they didn't bother to translate the poetry.
So that element of the speech. Oh, sorry.
Oh, there's always someone who leaves their phone on.
Isn't that nice of.
Yes. So we haven't heard about the poems in that speech because they're they're omitted from the translated versions.
And yet when Flagg Miller went back to the audio cassettes, you know, they were included in the oral delivery of that speech.
And that made all the difference as a rhetorical device,
as cementing points is directing the line of thinking in a certain way as bonding with your audience.
This is terribly important and all of that sort of that sort of three dimensional way of
delivering your message once it is condensed aid in translation and therefore filtered.
But B, by missing out all the poetry and the razzamatazz that that brings, it becomes two dimensional.
And it means that we're missing a whole dimension of how the message is getting across.
One interesting side observation on that speech is that if you do include the poetry, if you analyse the poetry,
it does cast that speech that came to be known as the declaration of war against the U.S. in a slightly different light,
the speech suddenly seems far more directed against Saudi Arabia, not against the West,
and against the westernisation and secularisation and corruption of the Saudi monarchy,
not America, the Americanisation of Saudi Arabia, rather than America itself.
And so in 1996, that really was quite a different way of of focusing the jihadist message.
And it's quite possible that Osama bin Laden, having seen all the fuss that was made over the speech and how much traction it got by direct,
by targeting U.S. Jews and crusaders directly slightly morphed his own message to fit the reality that was being perceived.
That's also possible.
Now the choice of poetry is actually quite revealing which elements of the classical poetic tradition have been lifted by jihadists?
I did a basic content analysis of every issue of that magazine.
I just showed the main magazine of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.
Now, hardly any of the poetry is actually attributed is I mean, everyone could see it as shameless plagiarism.
They just take it and stick it in their articles and they don't attribute it.
But it would be vaguely familiar to their audiences. And of course, in an oral culture it's quite difficult to talk about Plagiarise Asian.
These traditions are handed down and passed on and reinvented.
But I did painstakingly go through all 173 poetry examples and try to work out who had originally written them.
I tried to trace it back to the classical poets of the Arab tradition.
And finally,
this is this is this is really one of the only times in which my long training in Oriental Studies at the Oriental Institute actually had a use,
because I was able to think, Gosh, that sounds familiar. I'm sure that it's come from somewhere.
And to be able to go back through some of these big volumes of classical poetry and find the poems.
And I found I managed to trace 52% of the poetry back to poets from the classical tradition.
Now, one really interesting discovery here was that almost 10% of those were actually from the Jali period,
which which means the period before Islam, they were actually pre-Islamic poems, Anjali or the Jala, as we call it.
This is a period which in Arabic translates from Arabic into the age of ignorance.
So it's the age of ignorance before Islam.
How ironic, therefore, that jihadist poets, in order to consolidate cement and reinforce their Islamist agenda for a global Islamist caliphate,
would actually be recourse in to the pre-Islamic age of ignorance to make their arguments in some cases.
And I've discussed this question in a pub in a publication that came out recently, which you can find for free online.
It's in a book called Reclaiming Islamic Tradition that's just come out.
So if you want to go into any of that in detail, I do discuss that here.
You know, there are many reasons why I think the pre-Islamic heritage does come up.
And it you know, it does seem like a contradiction.
But actually, what it tells us is, well,
it might tell us that today's jihadists aren't aware of their poetic heritage and they didn't know where it came from.
And, you know, that's quite possible because poems are handed down in oral tradition.
They're not sitting there like us with books and Google search and computers trying to work out which poems to pick.
So they might be doing this inadvertently and it could prove embarrassing.
But I think more likely is, is that it's simply that these poems from the pre-Islamic heritage resonate with
strong tribal traditions and codes of conduct that are still important today.
And because the poetry exemplifies that the poetry is used.
And I think what that therefore tells us is that, you know,
pre-Islamic tribal codes are perhaps not equally important, but but important and not just Islamic religious ones.
So it tells us that the kinds of priorities and value systems that the jihadist groups
are trying to plug into and popularise themselves with are not just religious.
They're tribal. So I'm going to give you an example now of a kind of use of the poetry.
This isn't it. This is the kind of thing that we might see coming out of Islamic State or even al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Put up billboards like this all around Mukalla last year.
I took some photos of them and they were basically big billboards along the side of the road telling your women how they ought to dress.
This I got from an Islamic State website.
This basically is how you should dress.
I mean, this gives all the instructions, but I think the picture makes it pretty clear.
It's I'm not sure how many instructions are required to explain how to dress like that,
but this is the kind of messaging that we might think goes down well.
And that might be, therefore, how we would we, as in Western governments who are trying to fight these groups,
might want, might, might think that we should position our counter messaging like this.
But actually, you know, there's a deeper level at which this might work. So as well as issuing instructions like those on this image,
the the actual wisdom of why women should dress like this and why female modesty
is wrapped up with issues of honour is actually encapsulated in poetry.
Here's one excerpt that I translated from a jihadist publication.
Ideal female behaviour. You know, it's drummed home by quoting the poetic tradition, not by quoting the Koran.
So here's the poem that I've translated how much she pleased me when she walked about
not letting her veil fall or being spoken of in disapproval as she makes her way.
It is as though her eyes search for something she's dropped on the ground, and when she talks to you, she does not say much.
So that poetry makes three basic points.
It says to women, Cover up, keep your gaze lowered and don't talk too much.
So that's how we would think of that message. But, you know, we're not talking about a bullet points culture.
That's not the way to get your message across. Actually encapsulating it in a beautiful language that's framed in a classical
way with a modern rhyme that's catchy and that can be repeated and passed on.
And that chimes with your tradition is far more effective.
That's actually a longer part of a poem which I managed to trace to a pre-Islamic desert poets called Ashton Farrar,
who was actually a firebombed poet. Now, the original version of the poem, which I think is on the undergraduate syllabus,
still the original version mentions in other verse, is it the same poem?
It mentions the poet's yearning for this woman, his desire for her, and it actually describes her body.
These verses are, of course, absent, but I think this tells us something really interesting.
It tells us how selectively manipulated the poetic tradition is and that, you know,
there's a certain understanding that playing on contemporary nostalgia for the lost purity of the desert environment is actually quite powerful.
And people look around themselves today and it's all looking such a chaotic mess.
We want to get back to that pure desert environment as they perceive it or as it's presented to them.
That was very unlikely as it was actually like that. But but of course, it's all and it's all in your selective reconstruction.
Anyway, that was just a small example amongst many examples that I found.
This kind of selective reconstruction also happens with the modern poetic heritage.
So, for example, when Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula leader NASIR Ohashi was droned in June last year,
he was remembered in a video and the video was transcribed.
But of course, again, at the end of that ten minute video,
what wasn't transcribed was a long lament poem, which probably took up about a fifth of the video.
It was a toughie. One of today's ideologues actually still alive.
I think he he he basically lamented the loss of their leader in a in a long poem.
And the poem I managed to trace to a famous Yemeni poet, Abdullah al Baghdadi, who just died at the end of the last century.
But what was really interesting is when I went back to that poem, the original one by Baghdadi,
I noticed that half of the verses in the Al Qaida version had been taken out.
Only half of the verses really appeared. And it wasn't as though they took the first half and left the second half.
No, they selected the verses that they wanted to use.
And that's very telling, because ElBaradei, the original poet and al-Qaida, shared a vehement dislike of the Yemeni government.
And this was very much part of the poem. The Yemeni government in cahoots with the Western infidel.
But the poet al-Baghdadi was also an outspoken champion of democracy and women's rights.
That, of course, didn't come across at all. Now, what are the effects of this?
Well, by using poetry in this way gives gravitas, authenticity.
The poetry is sort of faintly recognisable to people who might not know where it came from, but they might just vaguely recognise it.
And that makes it trustworthy. And that familiarity makes it more trustworthy.
But jihadist framing of the discourse, however, swallows up the original poetry, and it sort of guides the interpretation.
I'd like to give you some more examples, but I don't have time. So let me move on now to new poems dressed up as old poems.
So this is a new poem and it's called as Adelina.
This is the most mighty of our men. And it's a poem in praise of Osama bin Laden.
And you can see that it follows the traditional pattern, the verse.
This is a verse, by the way. Like this verse goes across like that.
And what would be a second verse? So this doesn't rhyme.
The rhyme comes at the end of the second verse, and you can probably see it.
And I'm not expecting to read Arabic, but you can see that there's this rap.
Well, what you call it a sort of line at the end of each verse.
That's the letter RA and that's the Molly rhyme that you have in the most noble form of the classical casita, the ode.
So this actually encapsulates many of the many of the elements that you find in the old classical tradition.
Nearly all of the new poems that are composed by jihadist groups are in classical Arabic.
They are not in dialect. Nearly all of them in classical Arabic.
That's important because classical because the language of the Koran, it gives it, again,
authenticity, history, tradition, and nearly all in this format, 89%, to be precise.
Of the poems that came out of Yemen, at least in this format.
And. This kind of poetic format, it slightly emulates the language of the Koran.
It's, as I said, highly classical. But the sort of solemn intonation of these classical patterns is very impressive.
Again, it never works. If you just read in a book in translation, you have to hear it, and then you'll then you'll understand how it resonates.
So you have to ask yourself, you know, is it understood because it's just Arabic and it's quite difficult.
And most, you know, most people don't really know classical Harbeck that well.
But did you see that's not really the point.
You don't have to understand every word you have to their stock phrases that people can grab hold of and that they get.
And then there's the rhyme that carries you on. It's not like the Koran itself.
You don't have to understand every word in order to be able to be impressed and carried along by it.
And of course, the poetry endures when websites are taken down, when Twitter feeds disappear.
The poetry is you can't get rid of it because it's there.
It's in the collective memory. It's passed on. My own experience on the ground in Yemen, at least,
is that people have phenomenal memories and they can remember enormous amounts of what we would call text.
And of course it spreads.
Therefore, because it is an oral it is still an oral culture, this kind of material, it can jump checkpoints because it's classical Arabic.
It can be relevant in 23 Arabic speaking countries across the Arab world.
So what are the top functions? What does it do? What does the poetry actually do?
This, by the way, is a poem, a new poem again.
But you can see again, it's written in the old style.
This bit at the beginning names a few martyrs who have just died for the cause.
And it's called Malcolm X during the battle or even massacre, actually, of Treme, which is a place in Hunter Mt.
The first thing it does is the poetry legitimates acts of terror.
So I've already mentioned this to some extent.
You know, it plays on the classical tradition and, you know, the language in the form.
Images of a suicide bomber might be placed alongside natural natural images reminiscent of the desert poetry of old.
It sort of links the new in the old, makes it sound, makes it sound authentic.
Next to provoke outrage, it's very emotive.
This poetry gets you going. It's does the heart.
And of course, we know that grassroots recruits are inspired as much by passion as they are by ideology.
I'm going to read you a couple of lines of a poem I translated to show how Al
Qaida can appeal to entrenched tribal values of honour and shame in a poem,
but then situate those tribal values inside the broader loyalty framework of Islam.
Where are you? As Muhammad's community burns in flames.
Where are you? As Jerusalem lies, captured and is raped time and time again.
Where are you and where are you? Stops. Five separate lines now, right alongside that poem I've just quoted.
I'll try to put out a call for skilled professionals, doctors, engineers, those with a knowledge of chemistry, physics or journalism.
You know, with the question, where are you? So it was a very powerful call.
It was much better than a job advert or a tweet. This is a very powerful call.
Thirdly, the poetry is absolutely essential in reassuring current and future recruits.
They want to know they're going to be glorified.
You know, you have to take the time to praise your martyrs, their virile qualities, celebrate their achievements,
mourn their loss, tell them they've gone to a great place or they're about to go to a great place.
And, you know, the poetry actually can turn even something that's actually quite glorious,
like being killed in a drone strike or being killed in a shootout with the police.
Yeah, there's nothing glorious about. Haven't taken anyone with you. You know, you've not really done anything.
You've just been killed. And that still has to be then recast through the poetry as a glorious battle between good and evil.
And, you know, you you die in your own epic battle. Even though the reality was really quite different, the poetry is able to recast that.
This poem itself actually is a very good example of that, because the teenagers whom it glorifies,
who the martyrs actually died in a shootout with police in the safe house when they were rumbled by the security services.
So I'm actually dancing. Yes, they were very young.
The band achieved anything, and yet the poem puts them right there alongside the companions of the Prophet Muhammad himself,
and saying they died in a glorious battle.
And it evokes battles of early Islam, like the battle of Odin, the battle of Badr, really famous battles of early Islam.
Every Muslim would know and basically situates are being killed by police in a safe house with these glorious battles of ancient Islam.
So that's very powerful stuff. Also, you'll find that the poem does a couple of clever things.
It takes the images from classical poetry and equates them with the modern tools of jihad.
So the gun or a bomb or a suicide vest might be might appear in the poem as a sword.
The motorbike would appear as a trusty steed.
The jihadis themselves are lions.
And the image of the knight dismounting his steed, his horse would be pressing the pressing the button on your suicide vest.
That's dismounting your steed. So it's a very emotive way of making your deed seem glorious.
So to present an alternative reality, I sort of mentioned that in terms of the glorious battle.
But you also think about it.
The reality is a massive exploded limbs in a suicide bomb that's probably, you know, quite different from the reality painted in the poem.
The poem will say, know that they are enjoying the virgins of paradise, not a massive exploded lens.
The bomb site. No, it's not. It's green meadows and sweet water.
Mutilated, blackened body. Note The body is whole and fresh.
And instead of dying, sweating and, you know, scared, he had a smile on his lips and he smells of musk.
And this is all very important for ensuring a steady stream of recruits paints a completely different reality.
And then finally, of course, you have to construct a coherent enemy.
Political world is very complex and the poetry is just a really good way of boiling it all down into bite sized chunks,
which are easy to memorise and pass pass along.
It's almost like the sound bites of modern PR, so countries in the West,
the infidel countries, are sort of blurred together and they're all stigmatised.
Is so a complicated alliance just becomes crusaders, Jews, Americans or even English.
And the regimes that collaborate with them, say especially Arab regimes, are denounced as allies,
clients, dogs and this complex political landscape that is sort of telescoped into just good versus evil.
And this appears throughout the poetry good, evil, East-West jihadist, infidel light,
dark day, night lions, ants, drought, rain, you know, very, very simple binary oppositions.
And it's worth actually pointing out, of course,
that the US did this as well when it came up with ideas like the war on terror or the axis of evil, us good than evil.
You know, it's the same type of idea. Now.
I think I've got time just to show a couple of clips.
I showed these two little clips actually before at what was it, Oxford's Strategic Studies Group.
So if there's anyone who was there and who's also here, I hope you won't mind seeing them again.
This is really to point out the power of poetry.
This first clip, it's just a minute, is from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula celebrating having a party to celebrate,
having broken out 29 of their colleagues from a maximum security jail in Sana'a.
They all met in the desert. Celebrate. And and it was a pretty bold celebration there.
About 400 of them gathered there eating fruit, drinking water.
And this is how they did it.
SONG Though it was about how not to do it was there's not a great guy is a guy that our dialogue one of those guys like oh my god think about it.
I'm not I'm not looking to the government is a guy that I never would have gotten involved with.
La de la la la la la la. God, I love that.
So I want to see how many people are that.
And in fact, the guys who were doing the leading that two of the main, they were two of the main parts, poets of al Qaeda.
Actually, the two the two have been drones subsequently.
I mean, this is this is sort of how powerful I felt.
It's like sadness to know that they'd been killed because, you know, I've been listening to their poetry,
waiting for their next releases and hanging on their tunes for several years.
And it was it was an even even though I'm not remotely supportive of these groups,
but even I should have felt some kind of dignity or sense of loss when they got drone.
This is ridiculous, really, but it just shows you how powerful the poetry is.
The guys are actually singing it. Nakamura's Kathrada McCord is the sort of refrain that you heard.
And that's that means it's based on the old tradition of lampoon hijra in Arabic, which is, you know, making fun of your enemy.
An email comment was the head of the state security apparatus in Yemen, and they're saying if they'll come, it's got Adam.
He has been defeated, he has been vanquished. And that really delighting in it.
And so they're just having a, you know, a little a little celebration to in the age old tradition of song, poetry and lampoon.
Now, contrast that with this this this Islamic state in Yemen.
Did you know that those Islamic Islamic State.
Oh, you don't have to say the name of the quality of the, you know, the idea of a the value of, you know, you know, the you know.
All. You know, Islamic State hasn't really got anywhere in Yemen compared to al-Qaida.
And, you know, one of the reasons is it hasn't really got under the skin of the tribal culture in the same way that al Qaeda has.
It has launched some very dramatic attacks. But actually that has the opposite effect, I think, on winning over the population.
Now, you can see that this looks far more powerful, doesn't it?
This Islamic State video looks far more powerful to us through our western eyes.
It's much slicker. It's better produced.
But as I said to the Strategic Studies Group when I showed the videos to tribesmen on the ground in eastern Yemen,
they they were much more gripped by the first one than the second one.
They found it far more compelling, very even found them humming along to it, whereas the second one, they just felt was quite foreign.
And they complained about the, you know, the sort of matching uniforms and sandals and the choreographed moves,
and it didn't seem very authentic to them.
That said, the Islamic State in Yemen, having produced that, that was its first video that came out in Yemen.
Its second and fourth videos did actually include a bit more poetry at the beginning,
but it was it was almost like it was tacked on a couple of song purchase.
Jeff Sessions Right now we'll get to the killing and then immediately the video is switched
into drive by motorbike shootings and killing people hiding behind containers or asleep.
It was not anything like the kind of tribal traditions of warfare that one might have expected.
And they didn't resonate well, according to people I've spoken to on the ground.
But, you know, Islamic State does have its own poets.
It had a female poetess who is been reasonably well lauded, schooled Ahlam Nasser, who published a volume called The Flames of Truth.
She was a basically a spokeswoman for the Islamic State.
And I picked up a couple of poems that were sandwiched on two tweets, one called I've Just Selected These,
because I think that they're very indicative of how the poetry is used to reinforce a militant agenda.
One was called Calls of the Knife, which celebrated the beheadings,
and another was called Massacre as a as an imperative verb massacre, exclamation mark, go, evils and massacre.
And that's actually that poem came out just three weeks before the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris and was spread around.
Now, final just to wrap up, in case you think it's no longer relevant today, I've slipped in this slide, which on the 15th anniversary of 911.
So just last month I found this picture doing the rounds.
And of course, it's a picture of the Twin Towers coming down.
But the caption on it I found fascinating the caption of It's actually a verse of poetry.
And you can trace it to what? Let me tell you what it says first.
So when you get perhaps the builds as well as well, a reminder because Olof Borgia had her well over an hour because we're a lot long,
Yasmin, that means Allah held you through you at her towers and destroyed her.
Had anyone except for Allah held you at them, he would have missed.
So what they are saying is that,
you know that the attack on the Twin Towers was very much the work of God and the work of God here as enshrined in poetry.
These verses can be traced to a ninth century, a [INAUDIBLE] poet called Abu Tamar.
And actually the towers were being talked of with the Towers of memoriam, which were destroyed by kind of a war tested in 838.
But, you know, that's a very good example of plucking choice elements out of the poetic heritage and making them work for you today.
So I think on that final note, you can see that, I mean, especially in this example, poetry really is a vessel and it carries it carries history,
it carries religion, it carries culture,
it carries tribal values and mixes them all up into a very powerful cocktail, which speaks to hearts and minds.
Happy to answer any questions.