Ismail Royer, the American Islamist who plead guilty to criminal charges related to his activities in the Virginia Jihad Network, appears to have asked a compatriot to pass on a letter he wrote to a "brother." I won't link to the original post (because the blogger is an Islamist), but you can copy and paste the URL in order to read it for yourself. You may be surprised:
http://umarlee.com/2007/06/17/letter-from-ismail-royer-to-a-brother/
You raise some interesting points in your letter. I’ll begin by saying, it’s very heartening to hear of a Muslim majoring in English, which is really an aspect of the study of the soul of man. Walt Whitman said, “Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion & growth of every dialect, race & range of time, and is the culling & composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, & is really the greatest of all studies.” This sounds politically incorrect now, but there’s a lot of truth in it - excepting, of course, classical Arabic’s role as the master key to our religion.
Royer then offers some (standard, but good) writing advice:
Some advice: declare bad writing your enemy. Read Orwell’s “Politics & the English Language” & Strunck & White’s booklet. Read good writing, like Hemingway, Mark Twain, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, etc. Eliminate jargon & excess words. Avoid words of Latin & Greek origin if an Anglo-Saxon word will do.
He goes on to offer reading suggestions:
I would start with Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, Crime & Punishment, Brother Karamazov) & Kierkegaard (The Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Anxiety), they are key.
Then, Balzac (Pere Goriot, etc.), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Turgenev (Fathers & Sons), Melville (Bartleby). Certainly Kafka & Orwell, & Nietzsche.
I realize most of that is not originally English. They are some of my favorite examples. And beyond them, if you read any of the good writers writing from the early to mid 1800’s to the early 1900’s (i.e. Dickens, James), you will gain insight into how society was beginning to change.
Too much 19th century literature on the list. His thinking shows the influence of that glorious and depressing age; there's the cynicism of modernity, and the despair of its lukewarm Deism.
He ends with this flourish:
Modern man’s distance from God, & its effect on the individual soul & society, was also a central theme of Dostoevsky. He wrote in Crime & Punishment of a young man, a political radical who commits a horrible crime, his “heart unhinged by theories”. In Brothers Karamazov, he wrote: “Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, & the roots of our thoughts & feedings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from the other worlds & sowed them on this earth, & raised up his garden, & everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives & grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, & even come to hate it.”
You asked about how the existentialists’ thought has influenced the modern world, & I would say not much. They recorded their observations & we continued on our course. (An exception may be Nietzsche, who may have hurried us along.) What we must do now, in the Age of Despair, is study these authors to become intimately familiar with ourselves & modern man. I believe this is much more fruitful, from the point of view of “fiqh al-waaqia,” then obsessing over distorted “shadows on the wall” cranked out by the news media.
How many Royers are being made in our humanities departments? Where they train students to recognize despair, but not to declare beauty. Perhaps a little more Chaucer and Wordsworth and a lot less Nietzsche would have helped guide Royer on a path different from the one he chose, one that was leading him to fight against fellow Americans in Afghanistan.
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BTW: Here's an old blogspot blog that carries the his name. Was it his? I have no idea.
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