Al Qaeda and the Avant-Garde: Towards a Genealogy of the Taliah

The emergence of the taliah

A month after nineteen men crashed four jet airliners into Manhattan's World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a clod-strewn field in Western Pennsylvania, and only hours after the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan, Al Jazeera television, the most-watched network in the Arab world, broadcast a video recording it had received through secret channels. On it, Osama bin Laden, charismatic leader of the international terrorist network Al Qaeda, condemned the invasion and praised the hijackers, glorifying them as "a blessed group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam."¹

As someone who had studied the art, history, and theory of the avant-garde for some time, my curiosity was piqued, but I was also deeply skeptical. U.S. news organizations were scrambling to find reliable translators, and cultural misunderstandings were obviously prevalent across U.S. culture. It was hard not to come to the conclusion that the transcript was a murky cocktail of sloppy translation and the uncritical, ahistorical sense of "vanguard" so common in scholarly literature, the popular press, and online marketing. Or, even if I were to presume that the translation was on target, what bin Laden was invoking was that "other" avant-garde, the military/political one of Bolsheviks and hinterland guerrillas, the kind of vanguard that we generally assume has little pertinence to the kinds of questions those in avant-garde studies generally ask. A curiosity, nothing more—a tidbit for the clippings file.

Or so I thought. I have learned since that "vanguard" is a perfectly suitable translation of the Arabic word taliah (sometimes transliterated taliyaah or talihah).² The term is used in the Arab world today with the same promiscuity as it is elsewhere and scholars study it with the same fervor. Further, as one perceptive reader of this essay noted, there is a common strain of prophetic theology and violent activism that binds East and West for centuries. Add to that the research I've been doing on the role of Saint-Simonian ideology in the colonization of Algeria and the persistent Orientalism that shaped the avant-garde into a cultural (as opposed to merely technocratic) tendency, and it's hard not to come to the conclusion that bin Laden's encomium is only the most recent artifact from a history of material, social, ideological, and cultural exchange that has intertwined vanguards across the U.S., Western Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.³

Fair enough, but what benefits are there to bringing Islamist vanguards such as Al Qaeda into the scholarly fold? First, the taliah suggests that the line drawn by most scholars between the "two avant-gardes," as Renato Poggioli puts it,⁴ between the artistic and the military/political, is hampering our ability to comprehend the history of the avant-garde more generally. While some scholars enthusiastically embrace a concept of the avant-garde that brings together the military, culinary, religious, and other traditions of cultural resistance and revolt, that number is still surprisingly low. However, as Richard Schechner writes in a recent PMLA article, "Aestheticizing and ritualizing violence, not as representations (as in the visual arts, theater, or other media), but as actual acts performed in the here and now, are widespread."⁵ He further notes that "the West and the jihadists occupy very separate spheres from the point of view of values while sharing the same global system from the point of view of techniques."⁶ Indeed, the taliah reminds us that the distinctions among these varied spheres are always culturally and historically specific.

The taliah presses us to develop a more encompassing definition of the avant-garde, one that subsumes art and aesthetic dissidence under a broader rubric of culture. While many scholars of the avant-garde have moved into a full-on cultural studies mode (Raymond Williams, Barrett Watten, and Richard Schechner coming most quickly to mind⁷), the field as a whole still privileges aesthetic analysis over historical and ideological analysis, if only by dint of its unwavering, unquestioning commitment to the arts. A broader concept of cultural...