The Audacious Ascetic: What Osama Bin Laden's Sound Archive Reveals About al-Qa'ida by Flagg Miller (Oxford University Press, 2015). Professor of religious studies, Miller uses Bin Laden’s recordings to detail how Islamic cultural, legal, theological and linguistic vocabularies shape militants’ understandings of al-Qa’ida.

Flagg Miller is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Davis.  Trained as a linguistic anthropologist, Dr. Miller’s research focuses on cultures of modern Muslim reform in the Middle East and especially Yemen. Drawing primarily on an archive of over 1500 audiocassettes formerly deposited in Bin Laden’s house in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the book explores how Islamic cultural, legal, theological and linguistic vocabularies shaped militants’ understandings of al-Qa`ida.  Contesting the idea that al-Qa`ida’s primary enemy was, in fact, America and the West, the book argues that Western intelligence and terrorism experts collaborated with global media networks in managing Bin Ladin’s growing reputation in ways that were exploited by Osama and those who supported his militant vision.  His first book, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen (2007), examined how Yemenis have used traditional poetry and new media technologies to envision a productive relationship between tribalism and progressive Muslim reform.  Along with publications in a variety of professional journals including the American Ethnologist, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Language and Communication, and the Journal of Women’s History, Dr. Miller has written the preface to Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (University of Iowa Press, 2007), a collection of translated poems written by detainees at Guantánamo Bay.  

View the book at the Oxford University Press