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In this episode, The Changing Character of War program welcomes Dr. Elizabeth Kendall,

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a senior research fellow at Pembroke College at the University of Oxford.

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Her talk, entitled Militant Jihadi Culture Poetry as a Weapon of War,

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suggests we have overlooked the centrality of poetry as a communicative vehicle in the Islamic world

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and in doing so hampered our ability to understand or confront the messages in jihadi culture.

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Now, the first question that probably will occur to you is, you know, what on earth does poetry have to do with with war?

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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.

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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.

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I came to this from a background in modern Arabic literature and classical Arabic literature and then comparative literature and Turkish literature.

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But I felt that my own and my own path was a little removed from reality when when

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developments started happening that were subsequently came to be known as the Arab Spring.

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I really wanted to find a way of linking in to that a bit more tangibly.

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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.

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So you can see on this first slide,

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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.

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This is a typical poem and it's in a typical classical format.

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And then around that, I've just put the photos of four leaders on the top.

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At the top you can see the two leaders of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

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Both of them write their own poetry.

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Osama's poetry is fairly well known, I think, these days.

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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.

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And then at the bottom, we have two other leaders of the Islamic State group, so-called Islamic State group.

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So on the left, we have a Zarqawi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

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And he, of course, was the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, which morphed into the Islamic State.

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But he actually wrote poetry, too, which I find slightly more surprising,

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because he does have the reputation as a bit more of a thug than the top two leaders.

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Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so-called caliph, does not write his own poetry, to my knowledge,

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but he did write his Ph.D. dissertation, part of it about medieval Arabic poetry.

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So I think that just helps to highlight, you know, how central poetry actually is.

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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?

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First, I think it's very important to explain to you what the place of poetry is in in Arab culture, Arab cultures.

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It's not it's not the way that we would think about poetry.

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We tend to think of poetry as an elitist or largely elitist pursuit in the Arab world.

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It has popular appeal as well as elitist appeal.

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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.

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It's the oldest and the most revered art form in the Arab world.

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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.

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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.

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It might be the settling of a blood feud or the cementing of an alliance, something like that.

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You quite often found that poets would be appointed by tribes and they would hang out in marketplaces where caravans would cross.

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And this is a repository of history.

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But the poetic tradition continued into Islamic times, and there has been perhaps some misunderstanding about this.

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There are quite a few historians, largely armchair historians, who've written about Muhammad Reviling Poets, and saying that they're un-Islamic.

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The evidence doesn't really support that. Muhammad was in great pains to point out that he was not a poet.

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And I think that was natural because, of course, the revelations that he was receiving were coming out,

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that became the Koran came out in a rhythmic prose, something we call subject that has an assonance at the end.

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And it might have sounded a bit like poetry. He didn't want his religious sacred revelations to be confused with poetry.

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And so what he was really saying is that I'm not I'm not a poet.

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I'm a prophet. But he actually understood well the power of poetry.

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And we have a certain amount of evidence that he actively deployed poets to help to propagate the early religion of Islam.

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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,

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indeed, this group of poets inflicts more damage on the people of Mecca than a hail of arrows could do.

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So I think this is early information warfare. He had understood that this was a very powerful way of speaking to hearts and minds.

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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?

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It would help to explain how certain militant ideas spread amongst illiterate populations where there's very little Internet coverage,

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because of course, poetry is an oral tradition. I thought the best thing to do would be to go and ask.

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So I I've been travelling into Yemen now for about five years, mostly in the eastern desert regions of Hadramout and Almeria.

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And these are of course, precisely the kinds of communities where al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula was able to establish itself very strongly,

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actually, from about April 2015 until April 2016, when Special Forces moved in.

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This is the kind of community that was included in the survey work that I did.

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We didn't leave anyone out. It was carefully sampled.

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And we even when I say we had to train about 69 field workers to help with this.

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We drove around to communities that might not ordinarily be captured in any kind of survey.

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This is one such community. I asked over 2000 tribesmen and women a whole bunch of questions,

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and I had the question about poetry and a battery of other questions so as not to pre-empt a positive answer.

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Oh yes. Dr. A poetry is terribly important.

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You know, I didn't want them to tell me what I wanted to hear.

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And the result was very strongly showing that poetry continues to hold a prominent place in tribal culture.

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Today, a startling 74% of respondents said that poetry was either important or very important in their daily lives.

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Notes that in their daily lives, this isn't just for special occasions.

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This is just an example of the survey being conducted in attentive community.

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So to understand more about who the audience for poetry is.

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I correlated it with some of the other questions in the survey, and we found a few interesting things.

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It's more of slightly more popular in a desert location than along the coast.

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Age made little difference. Presence of a TV made little difference.

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And that's not surprising because we actually see that, you know,

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poetry has such an oral quality that the kind of higher economic groups who might have education and TVs wouldn't,

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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.

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And even that wasn't great. Poetry was slightly more popular amongst men.

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82% of men thought poetry was important or very important, as opposed to 69% of women.

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And it is largely men who recite poetry on public occasions.

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So that's also not surprising.

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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.

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Here. You can see two magazine covers.

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This is from a magazine that was published by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

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It came out between 2008 and 2011.

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And it's called Sardar and Malayan, which means the echo of epic battles.

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And you can see just from these covers, you know, that it's it's pretty militant.

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This is about this this says judgement on the targeting of tourists.

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You know, it's trying to justify the killing of tourists.

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What people don't will what people have missed about these magazines largely is that one in every five pages contains poetry.

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And this has been pretty much overlooked well, entirely overlooked by analysts.

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And, you know, an anecdote I sometimes tell is that when I presented some of this work to an audience of intelligence types,

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they said, gosh, yes, we always get a readout of or translation of materials which skips the poetry,

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but it might say, oh, and then there are eight lines of poetry or three verses of poetry,

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and then it skips back to translating the actual article again.

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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.

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It's happily used right alongside quotations from Koran and Hadith.

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So you'll get sacred religious texts, poetry, right alongside any news, as well as whole poems.

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You get magazine articles studded with bits of poetry,

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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.

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Now, you know, the territory isn't included, you know, just just for fun.

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It's not a space filler. The poetry resonates at a deep cultural level and it sort of plugs into a shared heritage.

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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,

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directly lifting it wholesale, just copying it and quoting it.

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And another way would be using the classical poetic heritage as a model and creating completely new poetry,

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but which is based on the forms, rhythms, metres, rhyme schemes of classical Arabic poetry.

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So it looks classical.

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And the points of this, of course, is that it creates an illusion of authenticity around the messaging, and that gives it legitimacy.

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It basically makes jihadist narratives that are in the poetry seem part of a

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tradition of authentic mainstream culture and not just some kind of subculture.

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So that's that's the most important purpose with regard to the first of the two ways in which it's used.

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That's why I just mentioned lifting and quoting poetry directly from the classical poetic tradition.

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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.

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He analysed many of the audio cassettes of Osama bin Laden that were found in the Abbottabad compound.

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And what he found was that Osama bin Laden's 1996 speech,

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which came to be known as the Declaration of War against the US or the Declaration of War Against the Jews and Crusaders.

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That speech in the original actually contained no fewer than 15 poem excerpts.

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And yet we barely even heard about that.

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And that's because when the speech was translated and disseminated and crossed analysts, desks, etc., they didn't bother to translate the poetry.

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So that element of the speech. Oh, sorry.

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Oh, there's always someone who leaves their phone on.

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Isn't that nice of.

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Yes. So we haven't heard about the poems in that speech because they're they're omitted from the translated versions.

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And yet when Flagg Miller went back to the audio cassettes, you know, they were included in the oral delivery of that speech.

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And that made all the difference as a rhetorical device,

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as cementing points is directing the line of thinking in a certain way as bonding with your audience.

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This is terribly important and all of that sort of that sort of three dimensional way of

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delivering your message once it is condensed aid in translation and therefore filtered.

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But B, by missing out all the poetry and the razzamatazz that that brings, it becomes two dimensional.

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And it means that we're missing a whole dimension of how the message is getting across.

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One interesting side observation on that speech is that if you do include the poetry, if you analyse the poetry,

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it does cast that speech that came to be known as the declaration of war against the U.S. in a slightly different light,

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the speech suddenly seems far more directed against Saudi Arabia, not against the West,

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and against the westernisation and secularisation and corruption of the Saudi monarchy,

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not America, the Americanisation of Saudi Arabia, rather than America itself.

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And so in 1996, that really was quite a different way of of focusing the jihadist message.

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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,

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by targeting U.S. Jews and crusaders directly slightly morphed his own message to fit the reality that was being perceived.

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That's also possible.

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Now the choice of poetry is actually quite revealing which elements of the classical poetic tradition have been lifted by jihadists?

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I did a basic content analysis of every issue of that magazine.

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I just showed the main magazine of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

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Now, hardly any of the poetry is actually attributed is I mean, everyone could see it as shameless plagiarism.

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They just take it and stick it in their articles and they don't attribute it.

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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.

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These traditions are handed down and passed on and reinvented.

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But I did painstakingly go through all 173 poetry examples and try to work out who had originally written them.

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I tried to trace it back to the classical poets of the Arab tradition.

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And finally,

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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,

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because I was able to think, Gosh, that sounds familiar. I'm sure that it's come from somewhere.

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And to be able to go back through some of these big volumes of classical poetry and find the poems.

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And I found I managed to trace 52% of the poetry back to poets from the classical tradition.

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Now, one really interesting discovery here was that almost 10% of those were actually from the Jali period,

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which which means the period before Islam, they were actually pre-Islamic poems, Anjali or the Jala, as we call it.

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This is a period which in Arabic translates from Arabic into the age of ignorance.

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So it's the age of ignorance before Islam.

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How ironic, therefore, that jihadist poets, in order to consolidate cement and reinforce their Islamist agenda for a global Islamist caliphate,

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would actually be recourse in to the pre-Islamic age of ignorance to make their arguments in some cases.

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And I've discussed this question in a pub in a publication that came out recently, which you can find for free online.

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It's in a book called Reclaiming Islamic Tradition that's just come out.

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So if you want to go into any of that in detail, I do discuss that here.

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You know, there are many reasons why I think the pre-Islamic heritage does come up.

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And it you know, it does seem like a contradiction.

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But actually, what it tells us is, well,

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it might tell us that today's jihadists aren't aware of their poetic heritage and they didn't know where it came from.

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And, you know, that's quite possible because poems are handed down in oral tradition.

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They're not sitting there like us with books and Google search and computers trying to work out which poems to pick.

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So they might be doing this inadvertently and it could prove embarrassing.

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But I think more likely is, is that it's simply that these poems from the pre-Islamic heritage resonate with

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strong tribal traditions and codes of conduct that are still important today.

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And because the poetry exemplifies that the poetry is used.

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And I think what that therefore tells us is that, you know,

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pre-Islamic tribal codes are perhaps not equally important, but but important and not just Islamic religious ones.

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So it tells us that the kinds of priorities and value systems that the jihadist groups

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are trying to plug into and popularise themselves with are not just religious.

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They're tribal. So I'm going to give you an example now of a kind of use of the poetry.

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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.

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Put up billboards like this all around Mukalla last year.

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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.

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This I got from an Islamic State website.

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This basically is how you should dress.

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I mean, this gives all the instructions, but I think the picture makes it pretty clear.

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It's I'm not sure how many instructions are required to explain how to dress like that,

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but this is the kind of messaging that we might think goes down well.

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And that might be, therefore, how we would we, as in Western governments who are trying to fight these groups,

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might want, might, might think that we should position our counter messaging like this.

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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,

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the the actual wisdom of why women should dress like this and why female modesty

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is wrapped up with issues of honour is actually encapsulated in poetry.

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Here's one excerpt that I translated from a jihadist publication.

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Ideal female behaviour. You know, it's drummed home by quoting the poetic tradition, not by quoting the Koran.

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So here's the poem that I've translated how much she pleased me when she walked about

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not letting her veil fall or being spoken of in disapproval as she makes her way.

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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.

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So that poetry makes three basic points.

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It says to women, Cover up, keep your gaze lowered and don't talk too much.

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So that's how we would think of that message. But, you know, we're not talking about a bullet points culture.

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That's not the way to get your message across. Actually encapsulating it in a beautiful language that's framed in a classical

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way with a modern rhyme that's catchy and that can be repeated and passed on.

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And that chimes with your tradition is far more effective.

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That's actually a longer part of a poem which I managed to trace to a pre-Islamic desert poets called Ashton Farrar,

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who was actually a firebombed poet. Now, the original version of the poem, which I think is on the undergraduate syllabus,

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still the original version mentions in other verse, is it the same poem?

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It mentions the poet's yearning for this woman, his desire for her, and it actually describes her body.

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These verses are, of course, absent, but I think this tells us something really interesting.

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It tells us how selectively manipulated the poetic tradition is and that, you know,

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there's a certain understanding that playing on contemporary nostalgia for the lost purity of the desert environment is actually quite powerful.

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And people look around themselves today and it's all looking such a chaotic mess.

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We want to get back to that pure desert environment as they perceive it or as it's presented to them.

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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.

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Anyway, that was just a small example amongst many examples that I found.

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This kind of selective reconstruction also happens with the modern poetic heritage.

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So, for example, when Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula leader NASIR Ohashi was droned in June last year,

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he was remembered in a video and the video was transcribed.

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But of course, again, at the end of that ten minute video,

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what wasn't transcribed was a long lament poem, which probably took up about a fifth of the video.

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It was a toughie. One of today's ideologues actually still alive.

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I think he he he basically lamented the loss of their leader in a in a long poem.

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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.

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But what was really interesting is when I went back to that poem, the original one by Baghdadi,

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I noticed that half of the verses in the Al Qaida version had been taken out.

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Only half of the verses really appeared. And it wasn't as though they took the first half and left the second half.

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No, they selected the verses that they wanted to use.

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And that's very telling, because ElBaradei, the original poet and al-Qaida, shared a vehement dislike of the Yemeni government.

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And this was very much part of the poem. The Yemeni government in cahoots with the Western infidel.

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But the poet al-Baghdadi was also an outspoken champion of democracy and women's rights.

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That, of course, didn't come across at all. Now, what are the effects of this?

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Well, by using poetry in this way gives gravitas, authenticity.

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The poetry is sort of faintly recognisable to people who might not know where it came from, but they might just vaguely recognise it.

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And that makes it trustworthy. And that familiarity makes it more trustworthy.

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But jihadist framing of the discourse, however, swallows up the original poetry, and it sort of guides the interpretation.

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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.

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So this is a new poem and it's called as Adelina.

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This is the most mighty of our men. And it's a poem in praise of Osama bin Laden.

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And you can see that it follows the traditional pattern, the verse.

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This is a verse, by the way. Like this verse goes across like that.

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And what would be a second verse? So this doesn't rhyme.

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The rhyme comes at the end of the second verse, and you can probably see it.

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And I'm not expecting to read Arabic, but you can see that there's this rap.

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Well, what you call it a sort of line at the end of each verse.

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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.

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So this actually encapsulates many of the many of the elements that you find in the old classical tradition.

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Nearly all of the new poems that are composed by jihadist groups are in classical Arabic.

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They are not in dialect. Nearly all of them in classical Arabic.

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That's important because classical because the language of the Koran, it gives it, again,

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authenticity, history, tradition, and nearly all in this format, 89%, to be precise.

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Of the poems that came out of Yemen, at least in this format.

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And. This kind of poetic format, it slightly emulates the language of the Koran.

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It's, as I said, highly classical. But the sort of solemn intonation of these classical patterns is very impressive.

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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.

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So you have to ask yourself, you know, is it understood because it's just Arabic and it's quite difficult.

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And most, you know, most people don't really know classical Harbeck that well.

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But did you see that's not really the point.

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You don't have to understand every word you have to their stock phrases that people can grab hold of and that they get.

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And then there's the rhyme that carries you on. It's not like the Koran itself.

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You don't have to understand every word in order to be able to be impressed and carried along by it.

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And of course, the poetry endures when websites are taken down, when Twitter feeds disappear.

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The poetry is you can't get rid of it because it's there.

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It's in the collective memory. It's passed on. My own experience on the ground in Yemen, at least,

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is that people have phenomenal memories and they can remember enormous amounts of what we would call text.

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And of course it spreads.

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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.

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It can be relevant in 23 Arabic speaking countries across the Arab world.

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So what are the top functions? What does it do? What does the poetry actually do?

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This, by the way, is a poem, a new poem again.

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But you can see again, it's written in the old style.

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This bit at the beginning names a few martyrs who have just died for the cause.

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And it's called Malcolm X during the battle or even massacre, actually, of Treme, which is a place in Hunter Mt.

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The first thing it does is the poetry legitimates acts of terror.

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So I've already mentioned this to some extent.

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You know, it plays on the classical tradition and, you know, the language in the form.

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Images of a suicide bomber might be placed alongside natural natural images reminiscent of the desert poetry of old.

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It sort of links the new in the old, makes it sound, makes it sound authentic.

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Next to provoke outrage, it's very emotive.

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This poetry gets you going. It's does the heart.

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And of course, we know that grassroots recruits are inspired as much by passion as they are by ideology.

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I'm going to read you a couple of lines of a poem I translated to show how Al

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Qaida can appeal to entrenched tribal values of honour and shame in a poem,

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but then situate those tribal values inside the broader loyalty framework of Islam.

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Where are you? As Muhammad's community burns in flames.

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Where are you? As Jerusalem lies, captured and is raped time and time again.

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Where are you and where are you? Stops. Five separate lines now, right alongside that poem I've just quoted.

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I'll try to put out a call for skilled professionals, doctors, engineers, those with a knowledge of chemistry, physics or journalism.

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You know, with the question, where are you? So it was a very powerful call.

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It was much better than a job advert or a tweet. This is a very powerful call.

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Thirdly, the poetry is absolutely essential in reassuring current and future recruits.

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They want to know they're going to be glorified.

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You know, you have to take the time to praise your martyrs, their virile qualities, celebrate their achievements,

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mourn their loss, tell them they've gone to a great place or they're about to go to a great place.

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And, you know, the poetry actually can turn even something that's actually quite glorious,

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like being killed in a drone strike or being killed in a shootout with the police.

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Yeah, there's nothing glorious about. Haven't taken anyone with you. You know, you've not really done anything.

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You've just been killed. And that still has to be then recast through the poetry as a glorious battle between good and evil.

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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.

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This poem itself actually is a very good example of that, because the teenagers whom it glorifies,

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who the martyrs actually died in a shootout with police in the safe house when they were rumbled by the security services.

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So I'm actually dancing. Yes, they were very young.

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The band achieved anything, and yet the poem puts them right there alongside the companions of the Prophet Muhammad himself,

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and saying they died in a glorious battle.

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And it evokes battles of early Islam, like the battle of Odin, the battle of Badr, really famous battles of early Islam.

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Every Muslim would know and basically situates are being killed by police in a safe house with these glorious battles of ancient Islam.

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So that's very powerful stuff. Also, you'll find that the poem does a couple of clever things.

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It takes the images from classical poetry and equates them with the modern tools of jihad.

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So the gun or a bomb or a suicide vest might be might appear in the poem as a sword.

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The motorbike would appear as a trusty steed.

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The jihadis themselves are lions.

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And the image of the knight dismounting his steed, his horse would be pressing the pressing the button on your suicide vest.

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That's dismounting your steed. So it's a very emotive way of making your deed seem glorious.

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So to present an alternative reality, I sort of mentioned that in terms of the glorious battle.

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But you also think about it.

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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.

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The poem will say, know that they are enjoying the virgins of paradise, not a massive exploded lens.

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The bomb site. No, it's not. It's green meadows and sweet water.

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Mutilated, blackened body. Note The body is whole and fresh.

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And instead of dying, sweating and, you know, scared, he had a smile on his lips and he smells of musk.

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And this is all very important for ensuring a steady stream of recruits paints a completely different reality.

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And then finally, of course, you have to construct a coherent enemy.

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Political world is very complex and the poetry is just a really good way of boiling it all down into bite sized chunks,

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which are easy to memorise and pass pass along.

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It's almost like the sound bites of modern PR, so countries in the West,

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the infidel countries, are sort of blurred together and they're all stigmatised.

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Is so a complicated alliance just becomes crusaders, Jews, Americans or even English.

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And the regimes that collaborate with them, say especially Arab regimes, are denounced as allies,

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clients, dogs and this complex political landscape that is sort of telescoped into just good versus evil.

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And this appears throughout the poetry good, evil, East-West jihadist, infidel light,

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dark day, night lions, ants, drought, rain, you know, very, very simple binary oppositions.

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And it's worth actually pointing out, of course,

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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.

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You know, it's the same type of idea. Now.

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I think I've got time just to show a couple of clips.

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I showed these two little clips actually before at what was it, Oxford's Strategic Studies Group.

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So if there's anyone who was there and who's also here, I hope you won't mind seeing them again.

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This is really to point out the power of poetry.

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This first clip, it's just a minute, is from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula celebrating having a party to celebrate,

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having broken out 29 of their colleagues from a maximum security jail in Sana'a.

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They all met in the desert. Celebrate. And and it was a pretty bold celebration there.

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About 400 of them gathered there eating fruit, drinking water.

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And this is how they did it.

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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.

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I'm not I'm not looking to the government is a guy that I never would have gotten involved with.

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La de la la la la la la. God, I love that.

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So I want to see how many people are that.

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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.

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Actually, the two the two have been drones subsequently.

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I mean, this is this is sort of how powerful I felt.

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It's like sadness to know that they'd been killed because, you know, I've been listening to their poetry,

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waiting for their next releases and hanging on their tunes for several years.

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And it was it was an even even though I'm not remotely supportive of these groups,

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but even I should have felt some kind of dignity or sense of loss when they got drone.

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This is ridiculous, really, but it just shows you how powerful the poetry is.

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The guys are actually singing it. Nakamura's Kathrada McCord is the sort of refrain that you heard.

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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.

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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.

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He has been defeated, he has been vanquished. And that really delighting in it.

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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.

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Now, contrast that with this this this Islamic state in Yemen.

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Did you know that those Islamic Islamic State.

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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.

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All. You know, Islamic State hasn't really got anywhere in Yemen compared to al-Qaida.

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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.

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It has launched some very dramatic attacks. But actually that has the opposite effect, I think, on winning over the population.

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Now, you can see that this looks far more powerful, doesn't it?

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This Islamic State video looks far more powerful to us through our western eyes.

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It's much slicker. It's better produced.

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But as I said to the Strategic Studies Group when I showed the videos to tribesmen on the ground in eastern Yemen,

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they they were much more gripped by the first one than the second one.

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They found it far more compelling, very even found them humming along to it, whereas the second one, they just felt was quite foreign.

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And they complained about the, you know, the sort of matching uniforms and sandals and the choreographed moves,

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and it didn't seem very authentic to them.

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That said, the Islamic State in Yemen, having produced that, that was its first video that came out in Yemen.

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Its second and fourth videos did actually include a bit more poetry at the beginning,

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but it was it was almost like it was tacked on a couple of song purchase.

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Jeff Sessions Right now we'll get to the killing and then immediately the video is switched

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into drive by motorbike shootings and killing people hiding behind containers or asleep.

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It was not anything like the kind of tribal traditions of warfare that one might have expected.

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And they didn't resonate well, according to people I've spoken to on the ground.

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But, you know, Islamic State does have its own poets.

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It had a female poetess who is been reasonably well lauded, schooled Ahlam Nasser, who published a volume called The Flames of Truth.

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She was a basically a spokeswoman for the Islamic State.

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And I picked up a couple of poems that were sandwiched on two tweets, one called I've Just Selected These,

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because I think that they're very indicative of how the poetry is used to reinforce a militant agenda.

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One was called Calls of the Knife, which celebrated the beheadings,

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and another was called Massacre as a as an imperative verb massacre, exclamation mark, go, evils and massacre.

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And that's actually that poem came out just three weeks before the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris and was spread around.

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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.

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So just last month I found this picture doing the rounds.

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And of course, it's a picture of the Twin Towers coming down.

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But the caption on it I found fascinating the caption of It's actually a verse of poetry.

391
00:45:59,990 --> 00:46:04,080
And you can trace it to what? Let me tell you what it says first.

392
00:46:04,110 --> 00:46:13,930
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,

393
00:46:13,940 --> 00:46:25,340
Yasmin, that means Allah held you through you at her towers and destroyed her.

394
00:46:27,370 --> 00:46:34,960
Had anyone except for Allah held you at them, he would have missed.

395
00:46:35,980 --> 00:46:39,790
So what they are saying is that,

396
00:46:40,060 --> 00:46:48,280
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.

397
00:46:49,390 --> 00:46:54,460
These verses can be traced to a ninth century, a [INAUDIBLE] poet called Abu Tamar.

398
00:46:55,690 --> 00:47:06,400
And actually the towers were being talked of with the Towers of memoriam, which were destroyed by kind of a war tested in 838.

399
00:47:06,820 --> 00:47:16,810
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.

400
00:47:20,780 --> 00:47:32,390
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,

401
00:47:32,420 --> 00:47:35,540
it carries religion, it carries culture,

402
00:47:35,720 --> 00:47:43,820
it carries tribal values and mixes them all up into a very powerful cocktail, which speaks to hearts and minds.

403
00:47:44,780 --> 00:47:46,400
Happy to answer any questions.