| GEO World | | Osama's book of poems to be published soon | Updated at: 1052 PST, Monday, September 22, 2008
 DUBAI: The elusive al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden’s literary work will be published soon by an Oxford-educated academic expert in Arabic, according to media reports.
Bin Laden's recitals at wedding banquets and other feasts during the 1990s were recorded on tapes recovered from his compound in Afghanistan in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks in the US.
They were studied by Professor Flagg Miller, who teaches Arabic poetry at University of California, Davis, the report said. Bin Laden is a skilled poet with clever rhymes and metres, which was one reason why many people taped him and passed recordings around, like pop songs", Miller said.
According to the report, the first lines of one poem read: -A youth who plunges into the smoke of war smiling stains the blades of lances red. May God not let my eye stray from the most eminent humans, lest they fall."
The verse goes on to portray bin Laden himself as a -warrior poet", whose words will lead his followers to an idyllic refuge in the Hindu Kush mountains. -He frequently uses mountains as metaphors", Miller said. |  |
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