Poetry may be a potent tool in recruiting militant jihadis, a new study by Oxford academic Elisabeth Kendall has found.

In Yemen’s al-Qaida and Poetry as a Weapon of Jihad, published in a forthcoming book, Twenty-First Century Jihad, she writes: “The power of poetry to move Arab listeners and readers emotionally, to infiltrate the psyche and to create an aura of tradition, authenticity and legitimacy around the ideologies it enshrines make it a perfect weapon for militant jihadist causes.”

Osama bin Laden composed an ode to the destruction of the USS Cole in 2000, which he recited at his son’s wedding, and a second example of his verse was discovered in an abandoned safe house in Kabul, having been distributed among trainee jihadis as an exhortation to fight.

“In the quest to understand the hearts and minds of those who practise militant jihad,” Kendall writes, “neglecting to interrogate the poetry that speaks to both would seem a fundamental oversight.”

Poetry is woven into life’s fabric for 300 million people in the Arabic-speaking world: in 2010 the language was spoken by around 4.5% of the world’s population and was the world’s fifth most-spoken language, after Mandarin, English, Spanish and Hindi. A reality TV programme, Millions Poet, broadcast from Abu Dhabi across the Arab region, has been dubbed Poetry Idol by commentators because it fills a similar role to Pop Idol in the west: the show gets more viewers in the UAE than the country’s national sport – football – and contestants are judged on the qualities of their poetry and their performance. The winner can leave with more than a million dollars.



Kendall argues that it is the Qu’ran that keeps poetry alive – even more so where the oral tradition is still strong, in areas where electricity and the internet barely penetrate such as eastern Yemen, where only 3% of the population has web access.

Kendall’s research is based partly on data collected in conversation with 2,000 people in the sparsely populated but geographically huge Mahra region. Interviewees were asked about the significance of poetry in their lives, as part of a wider socio-economic survey conducted by the Mahra Youth Unity Organisation, an independent non-governmental body.



“The survey was conducted in December 2012 by local fieldworkers, men and women, face to face, to capture illiterate respondents of both genders. A startling 74% of respondents believed that poetry was either ‘important’ or ‘very important’ in their culture today,” she writes.



“Poetry was found to be very slightly more important among the desert tribes than along the more sedentary coast, among those in the poorest economic group and among those who carry a gun (a result that was not explained simply by any greater prevalence of guns in desert locations). Surprisingly perhaps, the presence of a television and level of education made no discernible impact, and the importance of poetry was only very weakly correlated to increased age. Finally, poetry was found to be more important among men (82%) than women (69%). This is not surprising, since it is the men who mainly recite at formal gatherings.”



For her source material, though, Kendall has gone to al-Qaida’s in-house magazine Sada al-Malahim, published on the internet from Yemen between 2008 and 2011. Though it has ceased publication, she says that because jihadi leaders – including Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, al-Qaida’s former propagandist in London – have exhorted their followers to read jihadi magazines aloud, the poetry is likely to endure beyond the rest of the content, as it is easier to memorise and pass on verbally.



“The language of poetry emulates the language in which the Qu’ran was revealed … jihadist publications make liberal use of poetry from the classical heritage, which they largely fail to attribute, but which listeners might find faintly familiar from oral tradition,” she says. “The beauty of the language, solemn intonation, pattern and rhythms found in more classical poems, could not fail to impress.”

On YouTube, where some poems get large numbers of hits, the impact is reinforced by the use of images – “often of jihadists training or dead children in Iraq and Gaza, with faint background music and a ‘reverb effect’ that emphasises the monorhyme and heightens the sense of gravitas in the apocalyptic battle between good and evil that is the underlying theme running through most poems”.

She cites one poem from the end of an article predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism, due to the US’s weakness, exacerbated by the ﬁnancial crisis.

I will fasten my explosive belt,

I will shudder like a lightning bolt

and rush by like a torrential stream

and resound like stormy thunder.

In my heart is the heart of a volcano.

I will sweep through the land like a flood.

For I live by the Qur’an

as I remember the Merciful.

My steadfastness lies in faith

so let the day of the Qur’an come.

For I live by the Qur’an as I remember the Merciful.

My steadfastness lies in faith

so let the day of the Holy Book come

to demolish the thrones of the tyrant.

My voice is the loudest voice

for I do not fear false clerics.

I will live and die for Allah.



Professor Flagg Miller, who is the author of The Audacious Ascetic, about the Bin Laden tapes, praised Kendall’s “fine piece”, adding that there was an old Arab saying that “poetry is born of suffering”. He said: “Jihadis turn to poetry because they have radical visions that can’t be put into plain terms.”

In Yemen, he said, poetry was all the more valuable because of the country’s rich history of cultural pluralism. “Confronting oppressive religious and state ideologies that demand allegiance to orthodox norms, poetry asks its listener to make distinctions between what corrupt authorities say should be done and what justice demands of oneself and one’s community.”



“In times of radical conflict, when most Yemenis feel achieving justice to be a pipe dream, poetry offers solutions that emphasise profound dissidence. Jihadi poetry accentuates this dissidence through unorthodox vocabularies of religious, ethnic and tribal militancy. Their discourse not only ushers tremendous havoc into communities both at home and abroad. It also has deep historical roots.”



“Strap on a suicide vest? Join a global mission whose leaders preach hatred and acts of violence against civilians? Spurn the traditions of one’s own community in favor of radicalisation? Jihadis face a hard sell. By definition, poetry is a way to say what cannot be said in ordinary terms,” says Miller.

