Numerous audio recordings from Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaida were revealed to Sacramento State students on Tuesday.

The trajectory of bin Laden’s leadership in al-Qaida was discussed and accompanied by the collection of audiotapes at the presentation.

Dr. Flagg Miller, the director of the Middle East and South Asia program at UC Davis, presented the lecture Tuesday entitled, “Revisiting al-Qaida through bin Laden’s Former Audiotape Collection.”

Miller, who has been with UC Davis since 2007, has a doctorate degree in linguistic anthropology from the University of Michigan, as well as a master’s degree in social and cultural anthropology from Oxford University.

He has spent time living and studying in many countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa and has also been an assistant professor of anthropology and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin.

“After living there for quite some time, I learned other perspectives on the group of al-Qaida,” Miller said. “We all know the Western views, or the terrorism side of the group, but they also had an intellectual side as well.”

Two large boxes filled with over 1,500 audio cassettes were found by CNN in bin Laden’s guest house in December of 2001 in Afghanistan and were handed off to the CIA and FBI which were eventually given to Miller and his colleagues at Williams College in 2003.

“Al-Qaida, to some extent, seems like history,” Miller said. “This is certainly a good thing with the death of bin Laden … there is a consensus that al-Qaida’s days are numbered.”

After listening to almost all of the tapes in Arabic, Miller realized that most of the tapes were not made by bin Laden himself, but of military leaders in the Middle East, theologians and poets.

“Out of all the tapes, only 24 of them were of bin Laden himself,” Miller said. “There were over 200 speakers in the collection, some of them being political poets, others were hard-core militants and some were even critiques of bin Laden that he would listen to.”

Bin Laden would listen to other great leaders to become more aware of ideas, guerrilla warfare tactics and movements going on around the Middle East. The latest tape discovered was April of 2001, before the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.

“Out of the 1,500 tapes only a couple of them refer to al-Qaida as a terrorist organization, or group that Americans are familiar with, and those tapes were recorded later in the year 2000,” Miller said.

Miller said he wanted to show the audience through these tapes how Americans may have misinterpreted how significant the idea of al-Qaida was for the movement before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and how militants took those understandings for violence.

Russell Preston can be reached at [email protected]