Osama Bin Laden’s Awesome Mix Tapes, Vol. 1

Published in

Homeland Security

4 min readMar 9, 2016

“Osama Bin Laden” Photo courtesy of Flagg Miller

Did Osama Bin Laden really have a collection of ’80s and ’90s mix-tapes? Well, no, but he did keep a collection of speeches, poems, conversations, and yes, some music.

In late 2001, as U.S. and coalition forces attacked Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden, along with most of the rest of al Qaeda, decided that it was time to head to Pakistan. Bin Laden had a number of homes, including several in Kandahar. Shortly after Bin Laden left, the homes and offices he abandoned were ransacked by local Afghans looking for anything they could make a buck on.

One enterprising Afghan found a collection of some 1500 cassette tapes in a former Bin Laden home and decided that he could sell these at the market. A CNN reporter managed to convince the Afghan that the tapes might be worth more if they were preserved as a collection. The tapes were saved and eventually made their way to Williams College in Massachusetts where they were translated and analyzed by Flagg Miller, a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Davis. Miller conducted an exhaustive study of the tapes and eventually wrote a book called The Audacious Ascetic.

Miller’s findings were interesting. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Bin Laden’s main beef was with other Muslims, not the U.S. Miller noted that Bin Laden was upset with Muslims who did not adhere with his interpretation of the Muslim faith, including the Shia, Baathists from Iraq, followers of the Nasser ideology in Egypt and Communists. Bin Laden also reserved condemnation for Arab leaders, especially those in the Saudi government.

By the mid 1990s, Bin Laden had changed the target of his anger. He had lost his Saudi citizenship and had been kicked out of the Sudan. Bin Laden blamed the U.S. for these things and for supporting Arab governments that he considered illegitimate. By 1996, Bin Laden was encouraging violence against Americans in a speech released that year.

After the attacks on September 11th, Bin Laden was reportedly happy about the U.S. attack on al Qaeda in Afghanistan. In an October, 2001 statement reported in The Guardian, Bin Laden stated that the United States had attacked all of Islam, not just al Qaeda. Bin Laden had forgotten about his own antipathy of Muslims who did not interpret Islam the way he did.

Miller noted in the BBC interview that “Al-Qaeda’s continued presence in Yemen, its effects in Iraq, and its ongoing devastation of Muslim lives in the Muslim world only confirms the fact that this organization, this idea, claims many bloody paths.”

Photo of wedding bombed in Afghanistan, courtesy of the New York Times

As for music, there are no awesome mix tapes. The collection does contain hours of Islamic anthems, and, perhaps most surprisingly, songs by Enrico Macias. Macias, AKA Gaston Ghrenassia, was an Algerian Jew who was popular in France, and later worldwide, in the 1960’s and 1970’s.