Hard sell
The Book Standard website has an interview with Duke University Islamic-studies professor Bruce Lawrence, whose book Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (Verso) hit U.S. book shelves yesterday. Lawrence says that he was initially reluctant to take on the project because he “didn’t want my epitaph to read, ‘Here lies the person who introduced Osama bin Laden to English-speaking readers.’”
However, he quickly became engrossed in the 42 translated proclamations, which, he believes, reveal that bin Laden’s real weapon of mass destruction is his poetry: “I wasn’t quite prepared for him to be literarily engaging…. Of course, he’s an engineer and a terrorist and a polemicist, but he’s also a poet. And that, along with his ascetic demeanor — the guy who dresses humbly, lives in a cave, doesn’t have meals in five-star restaurants — gives him a great emotional appeal he wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
Lest readers lose perspective, Lawrence notes that the speeches also show what he’s being trying to tell his students all along — that bin Laden’s a “lousy social theorist.”
Related links:
Click here for the Book Standard item on the Bin Laden book
