c. 2006 Religion News Service

NASHVILLE, Tenn. ÆÂ? Some reading groups choose mysteries, others fiction. Here at Vanderbilt University, one group of professors chose Osama bin Laden as their focus.

For nearly a year, these professors of religion, politics, history and law have gathered as a critical audience to bin Laden, a man who looms larger than perhaps any other in our country and yet who remains a mystery to many Americans.

They emphasize they do not sympathize with the al-Qaida leader, nor do they want to add academic weight to his teachings or beliefs. They merely want to understand the man, his purpose and the source of his influence and hatred.

“It’s not like you can turn on the television and hear a 10-minute press release from al-Qaida,” said Richard McGregor, an assistant professor of Islamic studies who helped start the group. “Our media is not going to give air time to these people. They’re not going to give air time to Osama bin Laden, they say, for strategic reasons. So what it means for the average person ÆÂ? you don’t know. You don’t know who is this person.”

Bin Laden’s statements are under study at other colleges and universities, too. At Emory University in Atlanta, students will study his statements this fall as part of a course on religion, violence and terrorism titled simply “Osama bin Laden.”

Vanderbilt’s reading group is comprised of about a dozen members who meet about once a month. They are on hiatus this summer but are planning a panel discussion for the public to share what they’ve learned. The group studies bin Laden’s statements, old interviews with journalists and other materials carrying his voice. After its November release, the group began studying “Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden,” edited by Bruce Lawrence, a Duke University religion professor.

The biggest challenge has been finding suitable materials, McGregor said.

“There is no official Osama bin Laden Web page. You can’t just go to the library and pick out `Osama bin Laden: My Ideas and My Life,’ by Osama bin Laden,” he said. “On the Web, it’s not standardized. No one is editing. There is stuff that is questionable.”

The studies haven’t been easy, either. The group makes light of concerns about public perceptions of their work and government surveillance of their Internet activities and phone calls. Michael Rose, an associate professor of composition in Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music, laughed at a recent meeting as he described his second thoughts about reading “Messages to the World” in the park with his dog. But the concerns are real and not unfounded. McGregor, from Canada, is not a U.S. citizen, and he is not the only unnaturalized immigrant in the group.

The materials are disturbing to read. Some faculty members invited to participate declined for visceral reasons, McGregor said.

“It is chilling to see somebody articulate so carefully these horrible, horrible acts,” he said. “These are not the ramblings of an insane, incoherent person. He’s quoting from Scripture. He’s quoting from The New York Times. And he’s talking about all of these things very coherently.”

Nonetheless, the value of their work is undeniable to the group.

“To understand,” said Melissa Snarr, an assistant professor of ethics and society in Vanderbilt’s Divinity School, “to me is really on the path to peace-building.”

The group is not unlike an informal dinner group. At a recent meeting, on campus after 5 p.m., the professors munched burritos and sipped wine and soda as their talk of bin Laden evolved into broader, weighty discussions of interreligious relations, religious history and world politics.

Drawing from each other’s areas of expertise, they remarked at similarities in the rhetoric to that of the Nazis, Aryan Nation and other such groups. Rose compared “Messages to the World” to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

“I look at the artfulness of these texts, the way Osama bin Laden crafts the language to make claims that are outrageous and hateful,” said Rose, who as a Jew has found the anti-Semitic rhetoric especially troubling. He said he has been an observer of the group, not a participant. “Fascination is what the snake does before it bites its victim.”

The readings reveal a man who believes he is fighting for the world’s salvation on two fronts, both inside the Islamic world and beyond. He targets Middle East governments ÆÂ? virtually all of them ÆÂ? that he feels are too secular or too sympathetic to Israel and the West, and he targets non-Islamic governments including, of course, the U.S.

His ambition is an idyllic society that lives out the principles of Islam. His rhetoric appeals to the poor and middle class masses of the Middle East who feel alienated and repressed by their dictatorship governments, the social elite and the West.

The rhetoric is reasoned and well informed, not irrational. In addition to Scripture, he draws from current events and even respected scholars and war theory to justify his belligerence. But the rhetoric is weak theologically, McGregor said.

“It does not have deep roots in the Quran or deep roots in Islamic law,” he said. “Yes, he quotes the Quran once in a while. But within the Islamic religion itself, this is very extreme. This is really on the edge.”

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

In between chewing burritos, the professors took turns reading from “Messages to the World.” Rose pointed to a chilling declaration bin Laden made after bombs tore apart trains in Madrid in 2004, killing 191 and wounding 1,460.

“For we only killed Russians after they invaded Afghanistan and Chechnya, we only killed Europeans after they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and we only killed Americans in New York after they supported the Jews in Palestine and invaded the Arabian peninsula, and we only killed them in Somalia after they invaded it in Operation Restore Hope,” bin Laden said in a statement offering peace to Europeans if they were to cease intervening in the Middle East. “We restored them to hopelessness, thank God.”

“To me that just says it all,” said Rose, noting the language’s chilling mix of faith and violence.

Some westerners might recognize that hopelessness, said Douglas Knight, co-director of Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Religion and Culture, especially after 9-11.

“When you get on a plane,” Knight said, “you don’t know …”

KRE/JL END GREEN

AP-NY-06-13-06 1302EDT

Editors: To obtain photos of Snarr, McGregor and Knight, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

See related sidebar, RNS-BINLADEN-TEXTS, transmitted June 13, 2006.

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