The Poetry of War

'All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.'--Oscar Wilde

 

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.

While Mohammed had little use for the poetic tradition it eventually began to adore him so he put up with it. It is now a quality of Arab life and is a banner of jihadist life.
Of all jihadi poets, bin Laden was the most celebrated. 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.”

Ahlam al-Nasr is the current poet laureate of militant Islam. Her first book, “The Blaze of Truth,” consists of a hundred and seven poems in Arabic—elegies to mujahideen, laments for prisoners, victory odes, and short poems that were originally tweets. Almost all the poems are written in monorhyme—one rhyme for what is sometimes many dozens of lines of verse—and classical Arabic metres. Ancient styles with ancient topics, they describe a world as fanciful and romantic as Sir Walter Scott with heroic knights, arrows, sacrifice and suffering for a cause.

Allusions, recondite terms,  baroque devices, acrostics (in which the first letters of successive lines spell out names or phrases) are especially popular. The poetry often contains the rejection of the nation-state. Shiites, Jews, Western powers, and rival factions are, of course, relentlessly vilified and threatened with destruction. Jihadi poems often use the conceit of a child speaker; it provides them with a figure of innocence and truthfulness. (One of bin Laden's famous poems has two-parts, 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.) The Hadith states “Islam began as a stranger, and it shall return as it began, as a stranger. Blessed are the strangers” and, expectedly, the idea of stranger and isolation are common jihadi themes. 

Muhammad al-Zuhayri, a Jordanian engineer whose Web alias is “the Poet of Al Qaeda,” illustrates some of these whimsical themes in a poem dedicated to Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, the first head of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The lines are addressed to an unnamed woman:

Wake us to the song of swords,

and when the cavalcade sets off, say

farewell.

The horses’ neighing fills the desert,

arousing our souls and spurring them

onward.

The knights’ pride stirs at the sound,

while humiliation lashes our foes.

(from The New Yorker)