ACLS-Funded Study of Bin Laden Tapes by Flagg Miller 'F09 Profiled in The Chronicle
1/27/2010
In 2001, CNN and the FBI acquired over 1,500 audio tapes from Osama bin Laden's personal collection. In 2009, ACLS awarded a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship to linguistic anthropologist Flagg Miller to support his work on the tape library.
Bin Laden is heard in a few of the tapes, but the majority capture everyday conversations among Al Qaeda members. Some of these conversations reveal mundane aspects of jihadi life; for example, in a tape Professor Miller shared at a recent American Anthropological meeting, several speakers struggle to prepare scrambled eggs over a kerosene stove.
However, the tapes also feature discussions on martyrdom, theology, and poetry. Professor Miller's fellowship project, "The Osama bin Laden Audiotape Library: Echoes of Legality," investigates the speakers' negotiations of new ethical and legal models, models that differ from bin Laden's own militant ideology. It also examines bin Laden’s intellectual formation.
Professor Miller explains, “Western scholarship and journalists have focused largely on bin Laden’s public statements made after September 11th, and on rare occasions have revisited earlier statements made by bin Laden in 1994 through his London-based Advice and Reform Committee. The cassettes in the collection, by contrast, offer several rare recordings from the late 1980s that shed light on bin Laden’s early concerns with fighting the Soviets, and focus on moving personal narratives of martyrdom that are later curtailed in the service of a more public, rational persona. Much of the extraordinary value of this collection lies in the more intimate, frequently extemporaneous nature of recorded speech events, including conversations between well-known militants and their audiences, celebrations after militant operations, and poetry.”
Flagg Miller F'09 is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of California, Davis. He is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. He has previously published on media and tribal poetry in Yemen.
Read more: “Before Martyrdom, Breakfast”
Flagg Miller, Program in Religious Studies, UC Davis
Categories: Fellowships