Table Of ContentTHE AUDACIOUS ASCETIC
FLAGG MILLER
The Audacious Ascetic
What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal
about al-Qaʿida
A
A
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Copyright © Flagg Miller 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Miller, Flagg.
The Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal
about al-Qaʿida.
ISBN 978-0-19-026436-9
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. The Message (Al-Risala) 17
2. Heart Pains 41
3. Remembering the Lion’s Den 73
4. The Genie and the Bottle: On Authority and Revelation
through Audiotapes 95
5. Our Present Reality (Waqiʿuna al-Muʿasir) 123
6. Dangers and Hopes (Makhatir w-Amal) 153
7. Taking Gandhi to Jerusalem through Oslo, Norway 179
8. Dawn Anthems (Anashid al-Fajr) 205
9. I Have Scorned Those Who Rebuked Me 233
10. New Bases Near an Ancient House 267
11. An Intimate Conversation (jalasa) 283
12. A Pragmatic Base (al-qaʿida) 307
13. Listen, Plan, and Carry Out “al-Qaʿida” 327
14. ʿUmar’s Wedding 345
Epilogue 369
Appendix A 377
Notes 379
Sources Cited 429
Index 443
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many to whom I owe thanks for the development of this book.
Their patience and generosity kept me aloft when lonelier paths of
research seemed interminable. For their support throughout, my wife and
seven-year-old son deserve special mention. They have been steady com-
panions in exploring the complexities of human experience everywhere.
My access to bin Laden’s former audiotape collection beginning in
2003 was made possible through collaboration with anthropologist
David Edwards, director of the Williams College Afghan Media Project.
I am forever indebted to his confidence in me and to Williams College
for facilitating my early archival and research efforts. I conducted my
first stint of fieldwork and research for the book through a grant from
the American Institute of Yemeni Studies in 2005. The following year,
gratefully employed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I spent a
semester developing chapters one, nine and twelve as a fellow at the
university’s Institute for Research in the Humanities. In 2007, I had
moved to the University of California, Davis where I continued work
with a new assembly of colleagues. I am especially grateful to former
dean, Jessie Ann Owens, and my department chairs for allotting me the
time and resources necessary to complete my work. A grant from the
Hellman Foundation supplied rare funding for an Arabic research and
translation assistant, Nour-Eddine Mouktabis, without whose labors my
archival efforts would have been far less thorough. UCD staff members
proved as adept in addressing my professional anxieties as they were
convivial. They include members of the university’s news and media
relations team, Karen Nikos and Claudia Morain.
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The book’s organization, thesis and relevance would have been more
modest were it not for invaluable support from beyond UC Davis. In
2009–10 I joined fellows at the Woodrow Wilson International Center
in Washington, D.C. for a year of earnest discussion about pressing issues
at home and abroad. Chapters eight and thirteen are indebted to my
interactions while at the center. Two subsequent years of fellowship
allowed me to refine the book’s contributions. They were secured through
support from the American Council of Learned Societies’ Charles
A. Ryskamp Fellowship in 2010–11, and through a University of
California President’s Faculty Research in the Humanities Fellowship in
2013–14. During this period, I had the privilege of submitting my
research for consideration to a range of audiences both within academia
and beyond. Host institutions included, roughly in order, the Modern
Orient Center (ZMO) in Berlin, the University of Michigan’s Near
Eastern Studies department as well as its Linguistic Anthropology Group
and Islamic Studies Program, Oxford University, Emory University’s
departments of anthropology and religion, George Washington
University’s Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, Georgetown University’s
School of Foreign Service, Qatar University, New York University, the
Foreign Service Institute (Arlington, VA), Cornell University’s Judith
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, the University of
California, Davis’s anthropology department and militarization research
cluster, Wesleyan College’s Middle East Studies department, Dartmouth
College, the University of Chicago’s Middle East History and Theory
Graduate Workshop, the National Defense University, Stanford
University, Florida State University’s department of religion, Harvard
University, and most recently Yale University’s anthropology department
and Council on Middle East Studies.
Special thanks are due to a range of interviewees, readers, co-transla-
tors and facilitators. Paramount among them are Hurst’s two anony-
mous readers as well as Michael Dwyer, without whose perspective and
assiduous labor none of this would have been possible. To others’ enor-
mous generosity I can only gesture: ʿUmar bin Laden, Abdullah Anis,
Alexander Knysh, Zaina Bin Laden, Valerie Billing, Jean Sasson, Deputy
Commissioner John Miller, Massa, Joe Brinley, Deborah Grosvenor,
Katherine Zimmerman, Friedhelm Hoffman, Neil MacFarquhar, Henry
Schuster, Esther Whitfield, Alex Strick van Linschoten, the Institute of
Education (London), faculty colleagues in UC Davis’s religious studies
viii
