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November 17, 2005
The Sheikh of Things to Come…
Despite making light of it in a leader that parodies the diary he might currently be keeping in some remote cave dwelling in a far off land, the report in today’s Daily Telegraph that Verso Books has just brought out, in a specially commissioned new English translation, a collection of all statements made by Osama bin Laden between 1994 and 2004 is no laughing matter.
For the same week has also seen reports, not only that the Queen is now an Al Qaeda target, but that Islamic web-sites have recently been showing a video made by the British-born July suicide-bomber, Mohammed Siddique Khan, shortly before he blew himself up along with fellow passengers on the London Underground, in which he calls on his fellow British Muslim brothers and sisters to join him in the jihad that the Saudi Sheikh declared on the West some years ago, whose text Verso Books has now so responsibly and obligingly brought to the nearest bookshop of every university campus in the country, where, doubtless, many an impressionable confused and alienated young man and woman will have ample opportunity to read it at leisure, doubtless impressed by the apparent veneer of legitimacy the new imprint has given his views.
The publishers are quick to claim that, in publishing them, they are not implying their agreement with them. Rather, they claim on their web-site that they have decided to published bin Laden's statements to ‘demythologise the terrorist network’.
‘The idea is to have an annotated, scholarly collection of bin Laden’s words. Until now, his words have only been available in poor translations or sound-bites’, so one of Verso’s editors is reported to have explained.
According to the report in the Telegraph , one of the things the book makes clear is that, among the terms of surrender on which the Sheikh is apparently insisting before being willing to call off his war against the West, is that it discontinues ‘alcohol and gambling’ as well as displaying adverts that contain photographs of women who, apparently, are also required to step down from all jobs in which they serve ‘passengers, visitors, and strangers’.
While being, therefore, most unlikely to attract to his cause any chavs or Essex boys and girls, the views of bin Laden contained in the book are unlikely to be nearly as off-puting to any disaffected young British Muslims who might stumble upon the book, many of whom seem especially vulnerable at the ,moment to being drawn into the more fundamentalist and intolerant versions of their faith such as that which are espoused in it.
In light of this undoubted fact, it was arguably the height of cynical irresponsibility on Verso’s part to decide to commission and publish the book.
Only one thing, perhaps, can be said in favour of the book. This is that it is a vast improvement in terms of intelligibility, if not coherence or cogency of argument, on the often almost incomprehensible jargon-ridden and theory-laden rubbish by the likes of such authors as Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno, Enest Mandel, Robin Blackburn and Terry Eagleton that, in its former incarnation as New Left Books, Verso churned out by the dozen in the seventies and eighties on a generation of hapless undergraduates who were required to read them by the fellow-travelling leftist lecturers who insisted on their inclusion on reading-lists.
Doubtless, since the collapse of demand for such Marxist gobbeldy-gook as it formerly spewed out, Verso are banking on the new book finding its way onto the readings lists of countless media and cultural studies courses throughout the land to keep it out of the red where it well and truly belongs and where, had it had an ounce of integrity, the publishing house should have been content to remain.
Posted by David Conway at November 17, 2005 02:40 PM
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