On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 MEMRI's interpretation of OBL's speech was quoted:
> <http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41211>
To which Juan Cole has this rejoinder:
http://www.juancole.com/2004_11_01_juancole_archive.html#109938356137329197
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Bin Laden's Audio: Threat to States?
A complete English transcript of the Bin Laden audiotape released last
week has now been posted by al-Jazeera.
The Arabic text, for those who can use it, has also been posted.
A re-interpretation of the speech, put in motion by the
neoconservative organ, MEMRI, has been flying around the web,
suggesting that Bin Laden is threatening individual American states if
they vote for Bush.
At the end of his message, Bin Laden said this:
In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in
the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida. No. Your security is in
your own hands. And every state [wilayah] that doesn't play with
our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.
MEMRI is claiming that the word used for "state" in this sentence
means state as in Rhode Island and New Jersey.
But while they are right to draw attention to the oddness of the
diction, their conclusion is impossible.
Bin Laden says that such a "state" should not trifle with Muslims'
security. He cannot possibly mean that he thinks Rhode Island is in a
position to do so. Nor can he be referring to which way a state votes,
since he begins by saying that the security of Americans is not in the
hands of Bush or Kerry. He has already dismissed them as equivalent
and irrelevant, in and of themselves.
Moreover, the way he uses "wilayah" is strange if he meant a Rhode
Island kind of state. He should have said "ayy wilayah min
al-wilayaat," "any state among the states" or some such diction.
Since MEMRI's conclusion is impossible given what else Bin Laden says,
then we must revisit their philological point. It is true that in
modern standard Arabic, wilayah means "state" or "province" and that
al-Wilayaat al-Muttahaddah is the phrase used to translate "United
States." A state in the sense of government or international Power
would more likely nowadays be "dawlah" or "hukumah."
But there are two possible explanations for Bin Laden's diction here.
The first is that he regularly uses archaicisms. He has steeped
himself in ancient, Koranic Arabic and the sayings of the Prophet, and
he and his fellow cultists in Qandahar had developed a peculiar
subculture that rejected much of modernity. The Taliban state
characterized itself as an Emirate (imarah) ruled by an Amir in the
sense of a caliph or Amir al-Mu'minin ("Commander of the Faithful").
In the contemporary Gulf, in contrast, an "amir" is a prince. The amir
(emir) of Kuwait is not claiming to be a caliph! Bin Laden and Mulla
Omar went back to the classical meaning of amir.
In classical Arabic, a ruler is a wali, who then rules over a wilayah
or walayah. Wilayah can have connotations even in modern Arabic (see
Hans Wehr) of sovereignty and it can mean "government." Bin Laden is
attempting to revive ways of thinking he maintains were common among
the first generation of Muslims, and to slough off centuries of
accretions.
So the first possibility is simply that Bin Laden is using a
fundamentalist archaicism. It would be like a Christian fundamentalist
wedded to the King James Bible who insisted on using the word
"charity" to mean a form of selfless love, with the Greek word caritas
in mind, rather than in its contemporary meaning of "philanthropy."
The other possibility is that Bin Laden has lived most of the past 25
years in Persian, Pushtu and Urdu-speaking environments and that he
occasionally lapses into non-standard usages. In Hindi-Urdu, I noticed
that one meaning of vilayat is "the metropole." At least in past
generations, people going from British India to the UK said they were
going to "vilayat." More important, there is some evidence for
fundamentalist Muslims using the word "wilayah" or "walayah" to mean
"country." The Pakistani radical group Hizb al-Tahrir locates itself
in "Walayah Pakistan", i.e., the country of Pakistan.
I think archaicism is a more likely explanation than what linguists
call "interference" from other languages for Bin Laden's diction here.
But I am quite sure for the reasons of logic given above that he means
"government" by the word, not state as in province, in this speech.
MEMRI was founded by a retired Israeli colonel from military
intelligence, and co-run by Meyrav Wurmser, wife of David Wurmser.
David Wurmser is close to the Likud Party in Israel and served in
Douglas Feith's "Office of Special Plans" in the Pentagon, where he
helped manufacture the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction
and was linked to al-Qaeda. David Wurmser, who wants to get up
American wars against both Iran and Syria, then moved over to Vice
President Dick Cheney's rump national security team.
MEMRI is funded to the tune of $60 million a year by someone, and is a
sophisticated anti-Arab propaganda machine. The organization cleverly
cherry-picks the vast Arabic press, which serves 300 million people,
for the most extreme and objectionable articles and editorials. It
carefully does not translate the moderate articles. I have looked at
newspapers that ran both tolerant and extremist opinion pieces on the
same day, and checked MEMRI, to find that only the extremist one
showed up. It would sort of be as though al-Jazeera published
translations of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush
Limbaugh, and Jerry Falwell on Islam and the Middle East, but never
published opinion piences on the subject by William Beeman or Dick
Bulliet.
MEMRI is enormously popular with strong Jewish nationalists in the
United States, who often subscribe to it by email, and are being given
an unbalanced view of the region as a result. In some instances the
translations are not very good, but the main objection is the
selectiveness of the material. MEMRI is one of a number of public
relations campaigns essentially on behalf of the far rightwing Likud
Party in Israel that tries to shape American perceptions of Muslims
and the Middle East in a negative direction. Think tanks like the
"Hudson Institute" are another (it is run by . . . Meyrav Wurmser).
The Benador talent agency, which books a lot of talking heads on US
television, is another. (Google it).
It would be just as easy to set up a translation service that zeroed
in on racist and "Greater Israel" statements in the Hebrew Israeli
press and made the articles available in English, while ignoring more
liberal newspapers like Haaretz. If most educated Americans heard the
raving against "ha-aravim" (the Arabs) that goes on among West Bank
settlers, they'd be completely taken aback by the bigotted terms of
reference. Much of such Likudnik discourse is not different in kind
from what one hears from the Ku Klux Klan about minorities in this
country.
Anyway, I am not suggesting that the MEMRI report was an attempt on
behalf of the Likud Party to intervene in the US election. I suspect
they just didn't think through the issue and depended on a surface
reference to modern standard Arabic.
Ramona Smith at the Philadelphia Daily News has a good survey of
reaction to the MEMRI interpretation, which is generally as critical
as I am:
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/breaking_news/10075425.htm?1c