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[ by Charles Cameron — curiosity and classical music leads me on a merry chase from Bach and bin Laden via LastFM and Chorus Angelus to the heraldry of the Afridi, a Forsane Alizza video and the death of Superman ]
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I’m grateful to JM Berger (@intelwire) and Chris Anzalone (@ibnsiqilli) for their encouragement and help with this post. JM provided the screengrab above, which shows a title card from a recent al-Zawahiri video — I suspect it may have been the one he mentioned here [text now mildly updated]:

Back in the day, when Adam Gadahn was just getting started as guru to Al Qaeda’s media operations, he released a couple of fairly slick videos designed to appeal to Western audiences by mimicking Western documentaries — up to and including the presence of a musical soundtrack.

It is therefore interesting to note that the latest release from As-Sahab (which Gadahn basically runs at this point) opens with a short disclaimer. “ATTENTION: We do not permit musical accompaniment with our productions.” One second later, a nasheed (religious song) fired up, but I guess that doesn’t count.

I’m guessing this is due to input from one of Gadahn’s Al Qaeda overseers. It’s interesting that these guys can rationalize away visits to strip clubs but they can’t handle a light orchestral score.

Chris tells me that Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan has included similar notes in some of its videos. Indeed as JM put it in a tweet yesterday, “The odd thing is most of these guys would not be cool with music” — while as Chris noted, “Opposition to music with instruments, it should be said, isn’t unique to jihadis.”

So that’s the context: here’s the thing that interests me.

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I can appreciate using the Old Master’s portrait of Christ that’s on the album cover to accompany a YouTube video of Bach’s B Minor Mass performed by Philippe Herreweghe (left), I can understand using a series of “nature scenes” for the Diego Fasolis performance (middle), I can even bite my lip and remain silent when someone lays a cute graphic of a wide-eyed young thing with a white rabbit (right) on top of Ton Koopman‘s version —

But my eyes simply bug out when I find someone has posted not one but four versions of Bach’s great Mass on YouTube, on not four but 42 separate videos, with bin Laden talking — silently, his lips moving — on each one.

Amazingly enough, that’s what someone calling themselves SOMALIAAFGHANISTAN has done.

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Look, people, this is strange.

Lawrence Wright quotes Osama bin Laden [link, at p 167] as saying “Music is the flute of the devil”.

I was doing some research for this post on Google, and ran across this:

Fair enough, I thought, and went to Last.FM, where I found this artist featured:

Bullet for my bloody valentine.

I kid you not.

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See, this all started because I was looking to play myself some Bach organ music and ran across a video of Marie-Claire Alain performing Bach’s BWV 767, which is pretty terrific — Alain is a great organist, it’s a remarkable work, etc etc — and found myself staring at this:

I mean, that’s not from the Bach part of my life, that’s from the part of my life that tracks jihadist utterances and theology…

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As my friend Chris Anzalone, whose posts on jihadist graphics I always read with interest, pointed out to me, this particular video has an extensive explanation of its heraldic significance attached:

Coat of Arms Of The Famous Afridi Pashtun Afghan Pathan Tribe

Flag of the Afghan Tribe – The Afridi.

Made from historical Texts & references.

Main Circle/Islam Symbolism:

White circle: Unified, unbroken & Islam 4 stars: 4 sons of Qis/Kesh/Qais Abdur Rashid Crown: Representation of Qis/Kesh/Qais Abdur Rashid & his Bani Israel lineage which is from the Ancient Royal House of Israel Lion with Flag: The Lion of Judah/The Bravery of the Afghans & the emblem of many Afghan Kingdoms Olive Tree: Descent from the House of Israel/Bani Israel Black Background: The world in troment, pain & ignorance, showing the messianic dedication of Afghans that spread Islam through kings and Sufis throughout India.

Tribal Symbolism on Coat of Arms:

Babe Khyber/Fort: Defending the borders of Afghanistan for centuries and masters of siege warfare. They successfully held the mountain passess of Afghanistan against the counter attack of many Indian Armies. Bolt Rifle: One of the first among Afghans to master the art of local Rifle and small arms making. They were famous for their sniper marksmen skills with the 3 not 3 or .303. Camel Caravan: Afridis are skilled businessmen. AK 47: Every Afridi child is given one before passing into adulthood.
Red Background: The Traditional color of the Afridis.

Reference Material:

* The Pathans 55O B.C.-A.D. 1957 By Sir Olaf Caroe
* History of the Afghans by Bernhard Dorn
* History of the Afghans Original by Neamet Ullah (active 1613-30) in the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569-1627)
* Tareekh i Farishta
* History of the Afghans edition X by Fut’h Khan in 1718
* The Works of the Pashto Academy Peshawar University and The Pashto Dept. Islamia College Peshawar through countless publications, both online and offline, and may writers including Dr. Yusafzai, much of which you can find at Khyber.org
* History of Kohat -Gazetteer of the Kohat District
* History of Peshawar -Gazetteer of the Peshawar District
* Afghan Poetry: Selections from the poems of Khush Hal Khan Khattak., Biddulph, C.D., Saeed Book Bank, Peshawar, 1983 (reprint of 1890 ed.)
* A Grammer Of The Pukhto, Pushto: Or Language Of The Afghans, Raverty, H.G., London, 1860
* Poems from the Diwan of Khushâl Khân Khattak, MacKenzie, D.N, London, Allen & Unwin, 1965
* Notes on the Tarikh-e-Murassa, Plowden, Maj.
* Settlement Report of Bannu, Thorburn

This text, in turn, comes from a Wikipedi page on the Afridi Tribal Flag posted by a user named Afghan Historian. Who has an enviable library.

Sadly enough, Wikipedia notes “The factual accuracy of this description is disputed” — although it’s not clear by whom.

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There are interesting references in the scholarly footnotes to the Afridi flag to “Qais Abdur Rashid & his Bani Israel lineage which is from the Ancient Royal House of Israel” and to “the messianic dedication of Afghans that spread Islam through kings and Sufis throughout India”…

The idea that the Afghans are descendants of the “lost tribes” of Israel is explored in the Jewish Virtual Library here. As to the Afghans’ “messianic dedication” — I’m not clear exactly what the word messianic means in this context, but it’s an interesting word choice in any case.

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When I first looked up this image on TinEye, my image-search engine of choice, the only version it reported was from the site of Forsane Alizza, a now-disbanded group in France whose leader claims to preach only non-violence:

Je vous préviens dès maintenant que je n’ai ni armes, ni explosifs, ni drogues, ni même quoi que ce soit d’illégal. Si cela venait à arriver, soyez intelligent réfléchissez et souvenez vous que depuis sa création et jusqu’à la fin, Forsane Alizza use et n’usera, que de sa liberté d’expression et son droit à manifester contre des lois injustes et illégal au vu des droits de l’homme. D’ailleurs toutes nos actions sont non violentes et elles le resteront.

while the security police claim to have found weapons in his house.

The Forsane Alizza video, from which the snazzy image directly above was taken, shows members practicing martial arts and painball games…

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And how’s this for an illustration of Bach’s BWV 566, the C Major Toccata and Fugue — and the death of American pop culture?

To sum up: what’s all this about? Why pair Bach with bin Laden, the Afridi, the demise of superman and all the rest?

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I don’t want to leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.

If you want to see what it’s like to hear Gustav Leonhardt conducting the Kyrie from the B Minor Mass juxtaposed with images of bin Laden, you’ll find that here. You may, of course, prefer the Herreweghe version, with another variant of his album cover with the face of Christ as the accompanying visual…

And for Marie-Claire Alain performing Bach, sans the Afridi, may I recommend this hour long recital, which I just happened upon myself thanks to this post?

From blogfriend Cheryl Rofer as well as Molly Cernicek and Susan Voss at Nuclear Diner, – an event for those interested in nuclear weapons, science, Cold War diplomatic history, national security, strategic theory and American strategists:

Nuclear Diner Teams With Santa Fe Institute To Bring You Legacies of the Manhattan Project 

An excellent opportunity for students, grad students, historians and practitioners in various fields to participate here via twitter.

[ by Charles Cameron — poetry in time of war, symbolism / semiotics of blood and martyrdom, analogies with Jefferson and St Augustine, sacramental nature of reality ]
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Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten’s book The Poetry of the Taliban (Hurst, Columbia UP) contains a remarkable poem composed in the 1990s by one Bismillah Sahar:
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Change

The spring of change needs blood to rain down,
It requires the irrigation of the gardens with blood.
Valuing the blood of the people of the past
Requires the price of human blood.
Each drop of it has become a Nile of the dawn’s blood;
The Pharaohs want to fill the Nile with blood

Sitting here in California seven thousand miles and many cultures distant and more than a decade later, the phrase “spring of change” has an interesting ring to it – but it was likely not the not-yet-deposed Mubarak that Sahar was thinking of when he penned his lyric about the Pharaoh, but “the Oppressor” — whomever that might be. The imagery of the Pharaoh is a common enough trope, in fact, used for instance by the Taliban to describe President GW Bush in their magazine Al-Sumud [ link is to preview, relevant chapter of Master Narratives of islamist Extremism.

And while it is true that, as Asim Qureshi notes, “poetry links the ancient past with the modern day”, neither the trope itself nor the reference to the plight of the Jews in Egypt is exclusive to Afghanistan in specific or Islam in general. Indeed, Martin Luther King explicitly views himself as what theology would term a “type” of Moses when he says:

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.

These sacramental bleedings of the past into the present as in a palimpsest are native to the imagination and powerful in their poetic impact, as MLK’s life, final speech and death eloquently testify.

But there is a second layer of sacramental reality at work in the poem, and it lies in the repeated mention of blood. – the transition between past an present itself being presented in terms of blood spilled in the lines:

Valuing the blood of the people of the past
Requires the price of human blood.

The past requires a price from the present, then, and that price is paid in blood.

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The poem is six lines long, and there is not a line of it that does not contain the word blood. Again:

The spring of change needs blood to rain down,
It requires the irrigation of the gardens with blood.
Valuing the blood of the people of the past
Requires the price of human blood.
Each drop of it has become a Nile of the dawn’s blood;
The Pharaohs want to fill the Nile with blood.

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Zeus “poured bloody drops earthwards, honoring his own son, whom Patroklos was soon to destroy in fertile Troy far from his homeland”, Homer writes in the Iliad, 16.459, and the associations of rain with tears, and of spilled blood with spilled life, are ancient and pervasive.

Blood lust, blood sacrifice – the word blood is as powerful as any in the human vocabulary, so much less abstract that birth or death yet richly associated with both, while the sight or thought of blood stirs us at some archaic level of primal imagination. And what of the “irrigation of the gardens with blood”?

The gardens, first, are paradise. Next, they are paradise on earth, perhaps in one’s own village. I have written before of my memories of:

one small white-walled mosque way out on a dry stretch of road between Herat and Kandahar and its small, lush, green garden, all these years later: whatever it was to the inhabitants of that small village, to me it was “oasis” and “paradise” in perfect miniature, and it remains so in memory.

The rivers of Islam’s paradise flow with water, milk, honey and wines: so what place has blood there?

One answer would be found in the hadith, “Know that paradise is under the shade of swords”.

In his book The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict Between Islam and Christianity, named after the hadith in question, the noted journalist MJ Akbar writes:

The only reason why a person could ever want to leave paradise for this earth would be to get martyred again. Death was only a welcome release; there was no possible deed in this life that could equal jihad in reward after death. The Prophet urged Muslims to seek Firdaus, the best and brightest part of paradise, just below Allah’s throne. Allah had reserved one hundred grades of paradise only for the martyrs. The blood of the wounded would smell like musk on the day of resurrection; and nothing could interfere with Allah’s reward.

The blood of the wounded would smell like musk…

For more on musk, blood, martyrdom and the “odor of sanctity”, see my Of war and miracle: the poetics, spirituality and narratives of jihad.

And so blood is linked to paradise by martyrdom.

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The spring of change “requires the irrigation of the gardens with blood” the poet tells us, much as Thomas Jefferson told William Stephens Smith in a letter of November 13, 1787:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.

But hold on, the same trope is found in St. Augustine‘s City of God, xx.7:

Through virtue of these testimonies, and notwithstanding the opposition and terror of so many cruel persecutions, the resurrection and immortality of the flesh, first in Christ, and subsequently in all in the new world, was believed, was intrepidly proclaimed, and was sown over the whole world, to be fertilized richly with the blood of the martyrs.

And the imagery continues, in the West, into our own day. When Pope Benedict XVI visited Mexico earlier this year, he was treading on “land that was wet with the blood of martyrs” according to Mgr. Fidel Hernández Lara, Episcopal Vicar of the Mexican Archdiocese of León.

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The very earliest Christian accounts of martyrdom, indeed, have a distinctly sacramental flavor, as one sees by juxtaposing Ignatius of Antioch (quoted by Carolyn Forche in Susan Bergman, ed., Martyrs):

I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to become purest bread for Christ

with Tertullian (Apologeticum in the translation by Lewis Carroll‘s father):

The blood of the Christians is their harvest seed

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Joseba Zulaika subtitles his book Basque Violence — which Leah Farrall kindly pointed me to — with the words “Metaphor and Sacrament”.

Sacrament is a key word for me, obviously, and for the sake of those disinclined to religion, may I point to Gregory Bateson‘s comment in the first paragraph of the Introduction to his Mind and Nature:

Even grown-up persons with children of their own cannot give a reasonable account of concepts such as entropy, sacrament, syntax, number, quantity, pattern, linear relation, name, class, relevance, energy, redundancy, force, probability, parts, whole, information, tautology, homology, mass (either Newtonian or Christian), explanation, description, rule of dimensions, logical type, metaphor, topology, and so on. What are butterflies? What are starfish? What are beauty and ugliness?

The concept of “sacrament” occupies a place of honor second only to “entropy” in Bateson’s listing.

I am not arguing the pros and cons of publishing these poems, although I side firmly with the publisher on this. Nor am I attempting to assess the poetic value of the one poem I have quoted and examined. What I am trying to do is to give that poem the kind of reading I would want to give to any poem that interested me — one that seeks out its resonances in both local and world cultures as far as my wits can manage, showing, if possible, what power it gains from archetype, authority and form… If the poem were from the South English Legendary, for instance — which expresses similar sentiments — I’d have no hesitation calling its worldview “sacramental”.

But this is a poem from Afghanistan and Islam, not from medieval Christian England, so I should perhaps explain that in my view, any perspective which views the world as a series of legible “signs from God” — ayat, in the Arabic of the Qur’an — is a sacramental view, under the definition of sacrament that calls it “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”.

Blood is such a sign — of life, of its value, of its continuity by descent, and of its redemptive power even in death.

It is in sensing this semiotic / sacramental quality to Islam that we begin to grasp what translations such as these can point us to, but not directly reveal.

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Further reading:

From today’s NYT: Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry
Poetry reading in Afghan culture: Reading Poetry In Kandahar
Afghan poetics: Poetry: Why it Matters to Afghans? Understanding Afghan Culture [.pdf], NPS, 2009
Talib poetry as propaganda: Johnson & Waheed, Analyzing Taliban taranas (chants): an effective Afghan propaganda artifact, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2011
And finally, Afghans Build Peace, One Stanza at a Time

Somewhat overloaded at the moment with many small tasks so my blogging efforts are likely to be erratic this week. Here are some fragmentary efforts:

I just finished reading The Hunt for KSM and will be reviewing it, hopefully, in a few days and I’m moving on to the much talked about The Snake-Eaters, by Owen West.

Speaking of which, Carl Prine has an intense interview with Major West which follows on the heels of the one at SWJ conducted by Peter J. Munson (also a Major….guess it was a “major” interview 🙂 )

For the Boydians out there, Dr. Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney have released a newly edited version of Colonel John Boyd’s famous brief, Patterns of Conflict.

Dr. Venkat Rao has excellent observations for communicating effectively, with impact (really, for refining thought).

That’s it.

The Avengers have defeated Harry Potter.