Brutal verses ... Osama bin Laden is a "skilled" poet who uses his poems to win over young people / Reuters.
TERROR chief Osama bin Laden will have his poetry published next week.
As well as being head of al-Qaeda, the mastermind behind the World Trade Centre attacks once recited his poems at weddings and other feasts, an Arabic studies academic has discovered.
Prof Flagg Miller found the recitings on tapes recovered from bin Laden`s Afghanistan compound after the September 11 attacks, TheSunday Times has reported.
Prof Miller, of the University of California Davis, said bin Laden was a skilled poet and many people taped him and passed the recordings around like pop songs.
One poem begins: "A youth who plunges into the smoke of war smiling stains the blades of lances red. May God not let my eye stray from the most eminent humans, lest they fall."
It portrays bin Laden as a "warrior poet" who will lead followers to an idyllic refuge in the Hindu Kush mountains.
Prof Miller said often in bin Laden`s verse mountains were shields against secular temptations.
The poems seem calculated to win over disaffected urban youth by telling gory tales of war.
Tape extracts will be in next month`s Language and Communication jourmal.
Some Arabic specialists are outraged at the publication of the poems.
One said they were like brutal video nasties.
"Whatever else bin Laden is, he is now exposed as a disgrace to two millennia of Arabic culture," the specialist said.
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