Al Qaeda’s Soundtrack

One of the stranger experiences I’ve had is watching several al Qaeda propaganda videos, typically of a bombing or some other atrocity, and hearing in the background sonorous, pleasant-sounding Arab music. There is something jarring about this experience: listening to lyrical and well-crafted music, most often in the classically minor key of the orient, while viewing awful images of murder and mayhem. You can listen to some of these songs here. What does Al Qaeda’s music tell us about the organization and its audience?

The music of al Qaeda should not be underestimated in importance. So-called “jihad nasheeds” are meant to inspire the listener to courage and fidelity. This is not unique to al Qaeda. Music is the language of our souls in a way more vital and direct than even the spoken word or other forms of artistic expression. Music stimulates different parts of our brain than speech or listening to the spoken word. Music is of especially supreme importance to young people. It is the soundtrack to their lives; it informs their sense of what is important and what is beautiful; the words and tunes often define how and what they love. It’s what they remember even when they claim to be unable to memorize dates for their history tests.

Music is more than a phenomenon of individual tastes. Music unites the audience in a collective experience; when that music is political, it may do more than any speech or pamphlet to create a shared worldview.

Organizations of all kinds use music to forge their members together as a single whole. Fraternities sing a song. Churchgoers sing hymns. Our own military is famous for its “jodies” to bring together recruits in boot-camp. The Nazis in Germany were notable for their use of music as a means of creating a collective consciousness–the Horst Wessel Song being the most infamous. The content and style of these different musical expressions sets the tone of the respective organizations.

Aristotle observed that music is not merely pleasant or unpleasant, an unimportant diversion, but that it instead influences our character. “But, for the purposes of education, as I have already said, those modes and melodies should be employed which are ethical, such as the Dorian, as we said before though we may include any others which are approved by philosophers who have had a musical education. . . . All men agree that the Dorian music is the gravest and manliest. And whereas we say that the extremes should be avoided and the mean followed, and whereas the Dorian is a mean between the other modes, it is evident that our youth should be taught the Dorian music.”

I am not a musicologist by any stretch. I can’t say how the tunes of al Qaeda compare to pop music or Gregorian chant or what those differences really mean. The lyrics are only part of the story. Having read a few translations, they invariably are the stuff of trash-talk: we’ll get you, we’re going to win, we’ll have our revenge, God will throw obstacles in the enemy’s path. But there is more to this music and its meaning than the lyrics.

The tunes and sounds are airy and mystical. One gets the sense of the opening of gates, of fleeing the present and loving the future. Their minor keys gives them an air of sadness and of impending judgment–think of a tune made up only by the black keys of the piano. The songs are very different in tone from the themes of western music, whether the comparison is to the earthly and sentimental celebrations of 19th Century Romantics, nor the sexual and world-centered tone and content of modern pop music. This is an important distinction; the world of Islam is a world focused not on the joy of both creation and the eternal and their coextensiveness, as in traditional Christian music. Nor does it focus on the world of the flesh as an end in itself. It’s the music of alienation from the world. Its pleasantness is not a celebration of life, but an expression of hope for the better world, paradise, that awaits a martyr on the other side.

In this sense, the music of al Qaeda, its tone, and its language are all expressions of the same basic worldview: one where this world is a journey and lacks intrinsic value, a world where our lives are to be disposed of in expressions of piety intertwined with violence, and one where the death of the enemy is not a necessary evil of which one is slightly embarrassed and loathe to celebrate, but one where any expression of Allah’s will–whether a prayer or a killing–is equally joyous and to be celebrated in the same mystical and unhurried tone.