Arabic culture of the classical period—roughly, the eighth to the thirteenth century—was centered in the caliphal courts of Damascus, Baghdad, and Córdoba. Although most poets now lived far from the pasture grounds of the tribal bards, and written texts had replaced oral compositions, the basic features of the art lived on. Poetic metres were essentially unchanged. The key genres—poems of praise and blame and elegies for the dead—were maintained, and new modes grew out of the old material. In the urbane atmospheres of the courts, the wine song, which had been a minor element in the old poetry, became a full-fledged genre.

Contemporary poets writing in Arabic both read and translate a wide range of verse from abroad, and for many of them free verse and prose poetry are the norm. But, though the old models have lost some of their force, there is still a remarkable continuity of poetic expression. For educated Arabic speakers, the language of the classical period is relatively easy to enjoy. The humblest bookseller in Cairo or Damascus will stock editions of medieval verse, and pre-Islamic poems are assigned to high-school students.

Furthermore, the old poetry is alive and well in the popular sphere. Among the most successful television programs in the Middle East is “Sha‘ir al-Milyoon” (“Millionaire Poet,” but also “Poet of the People”), which is modelled on “American Idol.” Every season, amateurs from across the Arab world recite their own verse in front of a large and appreciative studio audience in Abu Dhabi. Winners of the competition receive up to 1.3 million dollars—more than the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the show’s boosters are fond of pointing out. Last year, the program had seventy million viewers worldwide. The poems recited on “Sha‘ir al-Milyoon” are highly conventional in form and content. They evoke the beauties of the beloved and of the homeland, praise the generosity of local leaders, or lament social ills. According to the rules of the show, they must be metered and rhymed, and the judges’ comments often zero in on contestants’ technique. The show has produced a number of literary celebrities. In 2010, a Saudi woman named Hissa Hilal became an audience favorite after reciting a poem criticizing hard-line Saudi clerics. During the Arab Spring, an Egyptian man, Hisham Algakh, appeared on a spinoff show reciting several poems in support of the demonstrators at Tahrir. He became a media star, and soon his poems were being recited in the square itself.

The views expressed in jihadi poetry are, of course, more bloodthirsty than anything on “Sha‘ir al-Milyoon”: Shiites, Jews, Western powers, and rival factions are relentlessly vilified and threatened with destruction. Yet it is recognizably a subset of this popular art form. It is sentimental—even, at times, a little kitsch—and it is communal rather than solitary. Videos of groups of jihadis reciting poems or tossing back and forth the refrain of a song are as easy to find as videos of them blowing up enemy tanks. Poetry is understood as a social art rather than as a specialized profession, and practitioners take pleasure in showing off their technique.

It may seem curious that some of the most wanted men in the world should take the time to fashion poems in classical metres and monorhyme—far easier to do in Arabic than in English, but something that still requires practice. And these are only the most obvious signs of the jihadis’ dedication to form. The poems are full of allusions, recherché terms, and baroque devices. Acrostics, in which the first letters of successive lines spell out names or phrases, are especially popular. One of al-Nasr’s poems, a declaration of her commitment to ISIS, is based on the group’s acronym, Daesh. (“Daesh” is generally a derogatory label, and al-Nasr’s embrace of it is a gesture of defiance.) The militants’ evident delight in their virtuosity turns their poems into performances. The poets are making sure that we know they are poets—laying claim to the special authority that comes with poetry’s status in Arabic culture. Yet behind the swagger there are powerful anxieties: all jihadis have elected to set themselves apart from the wider society, including their families and their religious communities. This is often a difficult choice, with lasting consequences. By casting themselves as poets, as cultural actors with deep roots in the Arab Islamic tradition, the militants are attempting to assuage their fears of not really belonging.

The raid, in May, 2011, on the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden was killed also uncovered a trove of correspondence. In one letter, written on August 6, 2010, bin Laden asks a key lieutenant to recommend someone to lead “a big operation inside America.” In the very next sentence, he requests that “if there are any brothers with you who know about poetic metres, please inform me, and if you have any books on the science of classical prosody, please send them to me.”

Of all jihadi poets, bin Laden was the most celebrated, and he prided himself on his knowledge of the art. The name of his first camp in Afghanistan, al-Ma’sada (“The Lion’s Lair”), was inspired by a line of Ka‘b bin Malik, one of the pagan tribal poets who converted and became a companion of the Prophet. A large part of bin Laden’s charisma as a leader was his mastery of classical eloquence.

One of bin Laden’s most emblematic poems was written in the late nineties, sometime after his return to Afghanistan, in 1996. It is a two-part poem, forty-four lines long: the first half is in the voice of bin Laden’s young son Hamza; the second half is the father’s reply. Many jihadi poems use the conceit of a child speaker; it provides them with a figure of innocence and truthfulness. Hamza begins by asking his father why their life is full of hardship and why they can never stay in one place. The rhetoric and the mood of this opening section are borrowed from a pre-Islamic genre called the rahil, in which the poet evokes the difficulty of his journey, complains of solitude and danger, and compares his lot to that of a series of desert animals:

Father, I have travelled a long time among

deserts and cities.

It has been a long journey, Father,

among valleys and mountains,

So long that I have forgotten my tribe, my

cousins, even humankind.

Hamza goes on to recall the odyssey of bin Laden and his family: their exile from Saudi Arabia, their stay in Sudan and their subsequent expulsion, and, finally, their arrival in Afghanistan, “where men are the bravest of the brave.” Even here, though, the militants find no peace, for America “sends a storm of missiles like rain” (a reference to the cruise-missile strikes of Operation Infinite Reach, in 1998). Hamza ends with a request for fatherly wisdom.