cover image The Audacious Ascetic: What Osama Bin Laden’s Sound Archive Reveals about al-Qa’ida

The Audacious Ascetic: What Osama Bin Laden’s Sound Archive Reveals about al-Qa’ida

Flagg Miller. Oxford Univ., $34.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-19-026436-9

Despite potentially intriguing subject matter, this book is tough going. In 2002, over 1500 audiotapes made between 1997 and 2001 were discovered at Osama bin Laden’s guest house in Kandahar, Afghanistan (only 24 of which recorded bin Laden himself) after American forces drove al-Qaeda and the Taliban from the city. In 2006, the tapes were moved to Yale University, digitized, and made available to the public. Miller (The Moral Resonance of Arab Media), a linguistic anthropologist, is the first to make a comprehensive study of the tapes. Each chapter begins with a translation from Arabic to English of one of the tapes. They range from the banal—a recording of militants preparing a group meal—to obscure theological sermons by Islamic scholars. Any reader looking for insights into bin Laden the man, or preparations for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be disappointed. There is no way of knowing whether Bin Laden listened to all of the tapes, or whether they were just a lending library for others. For a deeper understanding of the events leading up to 9/11, the reader would be better served by the congressional 9/11 Commission Report (2004), which Miller cites extensively. (Sept.)