P1: WQS Trim: 138mm × 216mm Top: 43.5pt Gutter: 48pt IBBK097-01 Humanities Demy 216 × 138 November 19, 2014 13:15 14 Yemen’s al-Qa'ida and Poetry as a Weapon of Jihad Elisabeth Kendall Throughout history, poetry has played a central role in Arab culture, punctuating a broad range of activities, from tribal occasions and political events through to the simple get-togethers of everyday life. The power of poetry to move Arab listeners and readers emotionally, to infiltrate the psyche and to create an aura of tradition, authenticity and legitimacy around the ideologies it enshrines make it a perfect weapon for militant jihadist causes. Osama bin Laden himself composed poetry, including, perhaps most famously, his ode celebrating the destruction of the USS Cole in 2000, which he recited at his son’s wedding. Another of bin Laden’s poems was found in an abandoned safehouse in Kabul following al-Qa'ida’s withdrawal, having been distributed among trainee jihadists as a powerful propagandist exhortation to fight. 1 Over the last three decades, several Islamic extremist magazines (paper and digital) have regularly featured poetry extolling the virtues of, and rewards for, militant jihad. However, scholars and analysts alike have almost entirely neglected contemporary Arabic jihadist poetry, skipping over it in favour of more direct pronouncements, rulings and position statements. Yet poetry can carry messages to a broader audience as it plugs naturally into a long tradition of oral transmission, particularly on the Arabian Peninsula, spreading ideas through repeated recitation and chanting and through conversion into anthems (nashid, nasha'id). This 247