Chk Chk Chk

I like to think of myself as an inquisitive person, but even I am unlikely to wade through the entirety of a document (PDF) that bills itself as an English “Translation of [a] Major al-Qaeda Book that Outlines Its Plan for Defeating [the] U.S. and Its Allies.” (The translation, incidentally, was commissioned by the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, a subsidiary, in some complicated fashion, of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. The Illuminati are probably in charge of both.) The book, entitled, wonderfully, The Management of Savagery (shades of To Serve Man), seems to offer a kind of Page Six take on the jihadi movement — way too insular and jargon-heavy for me to vibe on. But I couldn’t help but notice the teenage exuberance that flares up in the introduction:

If we fail — we seek refuge with God from that — it does not mean end of the matter; rather, this failure will lead to an increase in savagery!!

And a bit later on:

We said above that if one contemplates the previous centuries, even until the middle of the twentieth century, one finds that when the large states or empires fell — whether they were Islamic or non-Islamic — and a state did not come into being which was equal in power or comparable to the previous state in its ability to control the lands and regions of that state which collapsed, the regions and sectors of this state became, according to human nature, subservient to what is called “administrations of savagery.” Therefore, the management of savagery is defined very succinctly as the management of savage chaos!!

Just an idiosyncrasy of translation? Maybe. But Wikipedia indicates that Arabic does in fact use the exclamation point, so the MySpace-style punctuation could certainly have been present in the original text. And some poking around and reverse–poking around on LexisNexis turns up 298 occurrences of the phrase “exclamation marks as published,” all of them from BBC Monitoring Reports on the Middle East, which seem to pass along, in good orientalist fashion, the full texts of certain foreign, and especially Iranian, press clippings: a letter from the Ayatollah Makarem-Shirazi, for instance, begins, “I would like to inform you that certain famous world media organizations have reported that the Shaykh of Al-Azhar, Mr Tantawi, has commented on Muslim women’s Islamic dress code in foreign countries, saying that not only the French government, but also all non-Islamic countries, have the freedom to pass legislation for their own countries and that Muslims in those countries must obey the rules!! (exclamation marks as published).” An Afghan newspaper editorial can scarcely believe that “there are suggestions that: ‘They [Taliban prisoners] should have been released two years ago or even earlier, because they were innocent!!!’ (Exclamation marks as published).” I know that Iranians and Afghans are probably not writing in Arabic, but the broader point is clear: exclamation-point scruples do not burden the Other as they do us. Certainly not as much as they burden the defensive-ass BBC, which feels the need to insert the “exclamation marks as published” disclaimer even when only a single slender bang shows up for the party.

And what’s with this whole bizarre “management of savagery” theme anyway? Not so much Wahhabism as wha? Hobbes!–ism, right, doggies?

<liveblog>I’m going to go brush my teeth now.</liveblog>

Trawling through this freaky little document, what’s most remarkable may be the lobotomized bizspeak of it all. I mean, is this how you’d imagine hardline “Islamists” patting themselves on the back?

By the grace of God, the organized Islamic work is beginning to be managed on the highest administrative level in our Islamic world, especially the jihadi organizations. However there still needs to be more mastery, general training, and advancement…

See, this is why the Muslims will never prevail in the clash of civilizations. Sure, they may reach ever higher “administrative level[s],” but there’s a limit to the quality of your management-consulting services when you’re always beholden to that big Management Consultant in the sky; McKinsey wouldn’t be McKinsey if it had to deal with the cosmic red tape of winning divine approval for its every strategy session.

We must make use of books on the subject of administration, especially the management studies and theories which have been recently published, since they are consonant with the nature of modern societies. There is more than one site on the Internet in which one can obtain management books.

Forget what I just said. The terrorists are reading Who Moved My Cheese? We are officially fucked.