Guest Post: Cameron on “A Difficulty in Translation”

We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

King is consciously aligning himself here with Moses, presenting his own story as the story of Moses receiving the commandments of God, descending from the mountain, and dying within sight of the promised land. It is a powerful rhetorical device, and one whose power we can easily understand when Dr King uses it.

It is also a rhetorical device used, mutatis mutandis, by Osama bin Laden — and our understanding of Martin Luther King’s use of it may allows us to glimpse its force when drawn on within an Islamic context by bin Laden — in words, but even more in deeds. In a post recently at  hipbone out loud, I wrote

… this level of insight then allows us to see al-Qaida to some extent as pious Muslims may see it. For though the means bin Laden uses may be critiqued from an Islamic and even a strict Wahhabi point of view – as the recent publication of  a devastating book length attack by one of al-Q’s earliest major theological supporters, Sheikh Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, shows – it is still the case that his actions can have different resonance when “read” through Islamic eyes.

When bin Laden, at the lowest point of his jihadist efforts, leaves the Yemen for Afghanistan and betakes himself to the Tora Bora caves, he will inevitably remind some Muslims of the Prophet himself, who at the lowest point of his prophetic vocation left Mecca for Medina and sought sanctuary in a cave — where by the grace of his God, a spider’s web covered the entrance in such a way that his enemies could not see him.

Our natural tendency in the west is to see Tora Bora in terms of military topography, as a highly defensible, almost impregnable warren of caves deep within some of the world’s most difficult mountain territory. What we miss may be precisely what Muslim piety will in some cases see — that bin Laden’s retreat there is symbolically aligned with the “sunna” or life of the Prophet, and thus with the life of Islam itself — in much the same way that Christians, in the words of Thomas a Kempis, may practice “the Imitation of Christ”.

Gratitude where gratitude is due: Lawrence Wright makes this very point eloquently in his book, The Looming Tower. But Wright is rare in the attention he pays to religious markers of this sort, and I am also grateful that we have such scholars as Scott Atran and Michael Vlahos to inform us. Wright’s broader point about bin Laden’s “imitation” of Mohammed fits in with Vlahos’ observations as to the coalescing of contemporary jihadist narratives with those of the sunna, the life of Mohammed and his companions, in his  Terror’s Mask: Insurgency within Islam:

Corbin describes the essential interpretive principle or hermeneutic of Islam: “Recite the Quran as if it had been revealed to you alone.” The Arabs and Persians created Hikayat — a “mystical epic genre” — to join “real” History – and one’s own actions within it — to a metaphysically prefigured History promised by Muhammad.

And this is precisely the meat of the discussion which the unnamed sheikh has with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri shortly after 9-11, the videotape of which was released by the Pentagon on December 13, 2001. The sheikh tells bin Laden

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