and the quality is bad, it will usually need a translator from the same area as the speaker to be relied on to catch every meaning and nuance. More, it is often a flowery language, using much imagery, flattery, exaggeration, simile and metaphor. Add to that, it can be very elliptical, with meanings inferred rather than openly said. It is quite different from one-meaning-only English.
“We are down to two last documents,” said the head of Arabic translation. “They seem to be from different hands. We believe one may well be from Ayman al-Zawahiri himself and the other from al-Qur. The first seems to have the word patterns of al-Zawahiri as taken from his previous speeches and videos. Of course, with sound we could be positive to one hundred percent. “The reply seems to be from al-Qur, but we have no text on record of what he writes like in Arabic. As a banker, he mainly spoke and wrote in English. “But both documents have repeated references to the Koran and passages therein. They are invoking Allah’s blessing on something. Now, I have many scholars of Arabic, but the language and subtle meanings contained in the Koran are special. Written fourteen hundred years ago. I think we should call on the Koran Committee to take a look.”
The commanding general nodded.
“Okay, Professor, you got it.” He glanced up at his ADC. “Get hold of our Koran scholars, Harry. Fly them in. No delays, no excuses.”
CHAPTER 2
There were four men in the Koran Committee, three Americans and a British academic. All were professors, none were Arabs, but all had spent their lives steeped in the study of the Koran and its thousands of attendant scholarly commentaries.
One was resident at Columbia University, New York, and following the order from Fort Meade a military helicopter was dispatched to bring him to the NSA. Two were respectively with the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution, both in Washington. Army staff cars were detached to collect them. The fourth and youngest was Dr. Terry Martin, on secondment to Georgetown University, Washington, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Part of the University of London, SOAS manages to enjoy a worldwide reputation for Arabic scholarship.
In terms of the study of matters Arabic, the Englishman had had a head start. He had been born and raised in Iraq, the son of an accountant with a major oil company operating there. His father had deliberately not sent him to the Anglo-American school but to a private academy that schooled the sons of the elite of Iraqi society.
By the time he was ten, he could, linguistically at least, pass for an Arab boy among the others. Only his pink face and tufty ginger hair made plain that he could never completely pass for an Arab.
Born in 1965, he was in his eleventh year when Mr. Martin Senior decided to leave Iraq and return to the safety of the UK. The Ba’ath Party was back in power, but that power truly resided not with President Bakr but with his vice president, who was carrying out a ruthless pogrom of his political enemies, real and imagined.
The Martins had already lived through the tumultuous times since the balmy days of the fifties when the boy king Feisal was on the throne. They had seen the massacre of the young king and his pro-Western premier, Nuri Said, the equally gory murder on camera in the TV studio of his successor General Kassem, and the first arrival of the equally brutal Ba’ath Party. That in turn had been toppled, then returned to power in 1968. For seven years, Martin Senior watched the growing power of the psychotic Vice President Saddam Hussein and in 1975 decided it was time to leave.
His elder son, Mike, was thirteen and ready for a British boarding school. Martin Senior had obtained a good post with Burmah Oil in London, thanks to a kind word from a certain Denis Thatcher, whose wife, Margaret, had just become leader of the Conservative Party. All four of them-the father, Mrs. Martin, Mike and Terry-were back in the UK by Christmas.
Terry’s brilliant brain had already been noted. He walked through exams for boys two and even three years his senior as a knife through butter. It was presumed, as it turned out almost rightly, that a series of scholarships and bursaries would carry him through senior school and Oxford or Cambridge. But he wanted to continue with Arabic studies. While still at school, he had applied to the SOAS, attending the spring interview in 1983, joining as an undergraduate that same autumn, studying the history of the Middle East. He walked through a First-Class degree in three years, and then put in two more for his doctorate, specializing in the Koran and the first four caliphates. He took a sabbatical year to continue Koranic studies at the famed Al-Azhar Institute in Cairo and on his return was offered a lectureship at the young age of twenty-seven, a signal honor because when it comes to matters Arabic SOAS is one of the toughest schools in the world. He was promoted to a readership at the age of thirty-four, earmarked for a professorship by forty. He was forty-one the afternoon the NSA came seeking his advice, spending a year as a visiting professor at Georgetown because that same spring of 2006 his life had fallen apart.
The emissary from Fort Meade found him in a lecture hall, concluding a talk on the teachings of the Koran as relevant to the contemporary age. It was plain from the wings of the stage that his students liked him. The hall was packed. He made his lectures have the feeling of a long and civilized conversation among equals, seldom referring to notes, jacket off, pacing up and down, his short, plump body radiating enthusiasm to impart and share, to give serious attention to a point raised from the floor, never putting a student down for lack of knowledge, talking in layman’s language, keeping the body of the lecture short with plenty of time for student questions. He had reached that point when the spook from Fort Meade appeared in the wings. A red-plaid shirt from the fifth row raised a hand. “You said you disagreed with the use of the term ‘fundamentalist’ to refer to the philosophy of the terrorists. Why?”
Given the blizzard of publicity concerning matters Arabic, Islamic and Koranic that had swept across America since 9/11, every question session swerved quickly from theoretical scholarship to the onslaught on the West that had occupied so much of the previous ten years.
“Because it is a misnomer,” said the professor. “The very word implies ‘back to basics.’ But the planters of bombs in trains, buses and malls are not going back to the basics of Islam. They are writing their own new script, then arguing retroactively, seeking to find Koranic passages that justify their war.
“There are fundamentalists in all religions. Christian monks in a closed order, sworn to poverty, self-denial, chastity, obedience-these are fundamentalists. Ascetics exist in all religions, but they do not advocate indiscriminate mass murder of men, women and children. That is the key phrase. Judge all religions and all sects within those religions by that phrase and you will see that to wish to return to the basic teachings is not terrorism, for in no religion, including Islam, do the basic teachings advocate mass murder.” In the wings, the man from Fort Meade tried to attract Dr. Martin’s attention. The professor glanced sideways and noted the young man with the short-barbered hair, button-down shirt and dark suit. He had government written all over him. He tapped the watch on his wrist. Martin nodded.
“Then what would you call the terrorists of today? Jihadists?” It was an earnest young woman farther back. From her face, Dr. Martin judged her parents must have come from the Mideast: India, Pakistan, Iran perhaps. But she did not wear the hijab scarf over the head to indicate strict Muslim. “Even ‘jihad’ is the wrong word. Of course jihad exists, but it has rules. Either it is a personal struggle within oneself to become a better Muslim, but in that case it is completely nonaggressive. Or it means true holy war, armed struggle in the defense of Islam. That’s what the terrorists claim they are about. But they choose to airbrush the rules out of the text. “For one thing, true jihad can only be declared by a legitimate Koranic authority of proven and accepted repute. Bin Laden and his acolytes are notorious for their lack of scholarship. Even if the West had indeed attacked, hurt, damaged, humiliated and demeaned Islam and thus all Muslims, there are still rules, and the Koran is absolutely specific on these. “It is forbidden to attack and kill those who have offered no offense and done nothing to hurt you. It is forbidden to kill women and children. It is forbidden to take hostages, and it is forbidden to mistreat, torture or kill prisoners. The AQ terrorists and their followers do all four on a daily basis. And let us not forget that they have killed far more fellow Muslims than Christians or Jews.”
“Then what do you call their campaign?”
The man in the wings was becoming agitated. A full general had given him an order. He did not wish to be the last to report back. “I would term them ‘the New Jihadis,’ because they have invented an unholy war outside the laws of the holy Koran and thus of true Islam. True jihad is not savage, but what they practice is. Last question, I
