Poetry: touchstone of an emerging society

    This New Yorker article (Battle Lines, June 8 & 15, 2015) offers an inspired perspective of jihadis' motives, context, and vision through the continuing primacy of Arabic poetry. That the legacy of a literature hundreds-of-years-old thrives in an age of YouTube is just one of the insights I gained by reading this piece.

    The authors establish that “the authority of verse has no rival in Arab culture” and that the keys to the genre (from the earliest pre-Islamic times) are “poems of praise and blame and elegies to the dead.” Importantly, they also point out that “poetry is understood as a social rather than as a specified profession.”

    Marry those facts with the easily memorized oral tradition of the form and you have a ready-made mechanism for YouTube to proselytize and celebrate a preferred version of Islam. Indeed, the authors cite an historical precedent:

“The jihadis are literalists, and they promise to sweep away centuries of scholasticism and put believers in touch with the actual teachings of their religion. The elements of this scenario closely resemble those of the Protestant Reformation: mass literacy, the democratization of clerical authority, and methodical literalism. Under these circumstances, anyone might nail his theses to a mosque door.”

    And finally, throughout the article I sensed this notion of the jihadis embracing poetry which is borderless, as is the the Internet (the voice-vehicle of their verse), as is their vision of ISIS: building a history and a new society from and with ineffable tools.