Transcript

(beeping)

(speaking foreign language)

I'm Robin Cresswell.

I'm Bernard Hacell

[RC] This week in the New Yorker, we've written a

piece about the poetry of Jihad,

and we set that poetry in the context of

the wider culture produced by

militant Jihadis and the clip that we're

watching right now is a pretty typical specimen

of an ISIS propaganda clip,

in which we see the militants in action, and they

are talking about their conquests and the ones

to come, and the righteousness of their cause.

A lot of the videos that we see on

the nightly news of beheadings

or burnings are really made for foreign

consumption, but there also is a lot of

internal propaganda that the regime produces

for itself, and probably the most important part,

certainly the most interesting part and

most intricate part of that propaganda

is the poetry, which is really at the heart

of this culture.

[BH] In the next set of clips,

what we see are Islamic State fighters burning

their passports, and tearing their passports up

and what's interesting to note is in the background

you do have acapella chanting

of poems and anthems.

[RC] A kind of hatred for national boundaries is

a common theme in Jihadi culture, and including in its'

poetry in which the speakers often express

empathy for Muslims who are living

sometimes very far away.

There are also videos of them actually

physically erasing national boundaries

the ones created in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

[BH] The deletion of the national boundaries

is illustrative of their desire to have a world

in which there's only one unitary Islamic State

called the Caliphate,

so the sense of the world being divided into

Nation States, which is a Western idea,

is one that they reject completely.

[RC] In this next clip you see

a number of fighters relaxing, probably after

a battle, and what they're chanting is

vernacular poetry, which is part of the entertainment

and socialization process that they seem to

engage in, and clips like this are very common

on the internet where you see them just relaxing

often in this kind of circle.

It's also noteworthy that the Social

context for poetry is not one of

a solitary reader reading off of a page,

but that it's really an occasion for sociability.

So in the piece we talk a great deal about

a woman named Ahlm Al-Nasr,

who has written a great deal of poetry which

has been published by media outlets associated

with the Islamic State, and has also

gained some sort of prominence within the movement,

not just as a poet, but as an ideologue

and the clip that we're watching now is

actually a recitation of one of her poems,

not done by her, but done by other militants

who are reciting it acapella.

[BH] The most famous of all Jihadi Poets is no doubt

Osama Bin Laden, who was particularly interested

in verse, spent a great deal of time actually

honing his technique,

and wrote quite a few poems himself,

certainly part of Bin Laden's charismatic

leadership had to do with his eloquence

and part of that eloquence was the ability to

write poetry, and to do so in a particular way

using classical meters, using classical forms,

it was a particular erudite kind of poetry

that he wanted to write,

and here he's actually reciting

not one of his own poems,

but one of another militant's.

In this last clip you have

a young militant, he's boasting about the

ability of the Islamic State to have captured

all these weapons from Bashar Al-Assad's regime,

but there's a style and a rhetorical ability

that seems very natural, but in fact

it's quite theatrical and very deliberate

as a way of describing himself and showing

himself off as a real fighter for Islam.

[RC] The culture itself is a deeply

fantastical culture, it offers I think,

a certain kind of romance that the poetry is

particularly good at conveying.

The poetry suggests that the new Islamic State

that's been set up in Syria and Iraq

is a kind of frontier space where

a new sort of state can be built and

new sort of Muslim also can discover

him or herself and create themselves anew.