Dreams, visions and the videotape

Once beyond understandable rage and lust for vengeance, Americans can learn much from the smoking-gun videotape, reportedly shot in Kandahar and Ghazni (when? see last paragraph), acquired (how?) in Jalalabad, and released by our government just last week. Apart from Osama’s cold-blooded chuckles, its dialogue is decidedly strange to modern ears. Note the ubiquity of religious expression … as if God is, in fact, in His heaven and in touch with the world. Even more remarkable are the eight dreams and visions … as if the borderline between daytime wakefulness and nighttime imagining is less clear than we Westerners currently think.

First, all those references to religion. There’s much talk of mosques, sermons, caliphs, and the Prophet Mohammed. The name of God – Allah in Arabic, which means The One or, by implication, The Sole Reality – is spoken 49 times, not including human proper names like Abdullah which means Servant of God. Many of these namings are admittedly formulaic, conventional Muslim phrases said almost automatically. But note the tone: always worshipful, always respectful.

Exactly how strange is this speech to our modern, Western, secular sensibilities? Anthropology, like most honest investigation, begins at home. Try this comparative study:

Take a tape recorder (no need for video) and, unobtrusively, record any informal American conversation between two people in some hospitable context. (Bit-players, as in Kandahar, may be present and comment from the side.)

Make the time, say, 40 minutes. (This figure is hard to specify exactly because, like most of us, I have not seen the government-released videotape from start to finish and so must depend on transcript. The videotape appears to be a spliced copy of two tapings. Its sequence is odd: First comes the end of a guestroom conversation featuring bin Laden in Kandahar; then a 12 minute visit to downed US helicopter in Ghazni; and finally the start of that same guestroom conversation. Yes, quite odd.)

Then check the tape you’ve recorded and note two items: A) the number of direct mentions of “God,” and B) the tone of those mentions. The mentions of “God” should be quickly quantifiable. Tone is more subjective

Then compare your findings with what we hear on the smoking-gun videotape.

My guess, unless you’ve gone to a fundamentalist household (of whatever faith), is that the named mentions of God come less often than one a minute. Very possibly they don’t come at all. By way of contrast, Osama bin Laden, his sheikh interlocutor (precise identity still under debate), and the kibitzers off-camera pronounced the name of their God – incidentally, the same God of Abraham held sacred by Jews as Christians – 49 times in about 40 minutes.

Then there’s the subjective issue of tone. If God appears in your research conversation, was His name taken prayerfully and gratefully…or was it taken in vain? Some possibilities for the latter: “Oh, my God!” (amazement), “For God’s sake!” (indignation), “God dammit!” (anger). Not to mention “Jesus Christ!” which has been de-natured to “Jeepers” or “Jeeze.” Or this phrase which I once heard used, innocently and heedlessly, by an ex-pat among utterly astounded Afghans: “Holy s –t!” Scatology and theology are casually mixed only in so-called “developed” countries.

Beyond words themselves are the topics which they’re used to describe and discuss. Put some men together in America, and what gets talked about? Women, certainly, but what else? Whatever our topics – for men or women or mixed company – they’re nearly always confined to what could be called “consensus reality,” the stuff of shared, wakeful consciousness, the things on whose basic existence we can agree.

No so, at least not by our standards, for Osama and his sheikh companion. We talk of weather and walking the dog – both of which are out there in what we call Real Life. We get our life cues from out there. The Kandahar conversation is largely about messages from within, about what’s perceived strictly in here, about dreams and visions.

Never mind, for a moment, the content of these reveries. Far more remarkable and instructive is the very fact of their being taken seriously, taken for real, discussed in detail, foregrounded in conversation as evidence of cosmic pattern.

As with the repeated and reverent namings of God, this notion of dreams and visions as Real takes us to a profoundly different and pre-modern mindset. It is not, of course, uniquely Islamic. On the contrary, this worldview characterizes all cultures in which Revelation is believed superior or prior to Reason. Certainly it depicts what the West was like before the Enlightenment with its new gospels of human intellect and secular society.

Then came Descartes’ revolutionary dictum of what it is to be – “I think, therefore I am.” The new philosophy of Reason dismissed interior revelation as “fantasy” or, at most, “intuition.” It was a trade-off: We gained great things from the Enlightenment, but the inner light was left to fade and die.

Dreams and visions are clearly alive and well in the world of Osama bin Laden. Beginning with the vision attributed to a Sheikh Salih (not present at the gathering), accounts of what some psychologists call “imaginal” experience come thick and fast in the conversation. Most are prescient, miraculously foretelling future events. The main event, of course, is the attack of Sept. 11. Sheikh Salih “saw” only “a great hit,” but four separate stories are told of other associates who specifically dreamed and/or envisioned in advance the crashing of planes into tall buildings. Osama says that he had to tell one “brother” to keep his dream to himself so as not to attract attention and, inadvertently, blow the plot.

Whence cometh dreams and visions anyway? And who’s to say? Pre-moderns believed that they came from spirits … or God. In this regard, no world religion is as revelatory in orientation as Islam. Every syllable of the Holy Qoran – unlike Jewish and Christian scripture – is said to have been divinely revealed (to Mohammed by God [Allah] via the Archangel Gabriel). All of it came to the Prophet in what we today would call “dream” or “visionary trance.” Scriptural revelation stopped with Mohammed’s death in 632 AD, but for Muslims the imaginal world remains tinged with an aura of sanctity.

Psychologists – who, with physicists, constitute a sort of modern, secular priesthood – tell us otherwise. They speak of the unconscious, often with a capital “U.” A Freudian would call the WTC towers “phallic” and, perhaps, remark on aspects of Osama’s early life. He was the 17th son of more than 50 children.

Neither he nor his mother, reportedly one of the non-preferred wives, received much attention from the self-made billionaire father/husband. That fortune was amassed in construction with Mohammed bin Laden as the master builder par excellence. What better way for Osama to be Oedipal than by destroying an assortment of the world’s greatest buildings?

So much for psychological speculation. What’s fact, not speculation, is that this videotape reveals Osama bin Laden and his friends as partakers of a Reality quite different from our own. They can, like us, use reason…and have recently done so with awful effect. Their Reality, however, includes another dimension. We in the West have disparaged that dimension and left it behind. Now, for our own good, we need at least to recognize its lingering existence for others.

One last note. If, as we are told, this videotape was shot in “mid-November,” why is everyone in Kandahar so cheerful and seemingly confident of the future? Why is there no mention of the crucial defeat at Mazar-e-Sharif of Nov. 9 … or the loss of Kabul on Nov. 13? Taliban rhetoric notwithstanding, the writing was on the wall by then, even for Kandahar. How could video Osama be so happy-go-lucky? (Yes, as with the tape sequence, quite odd.)

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.