Audacious Ascetic

In late 2002, over 1500 audiotapes were discovered in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in a house once occupied by Osama bin Laden. The Audacious Ascetic is the first book to explore this extraordinary archive. It details how Islamic cultural, legal, theological and linguistic vocabularies shaped militants'' understandings of al-Qa''ida, and, more controversially, challenges the notion that the group''s ori...