“Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake.”

““Poetry is the record of the Arabs”—an archive of historical experience and the epitome of their literature. The authority of verse has no rival in Arabic culture. The earliest poems were composed by desert nomads in the centuries before the revelation of the Koran.”
Why Jihadists Write Poetry

ISIS’s videos of beheadings are for foreign viewers. The movement talks to itself in verse.

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