Over the last ten years, bin Laden has issued a series of carefully tailored public statements, from interviews with Western and Arabic journalists to faxes and video recordings.

These texts supply evidence crucial to an understanding of the mixture of Quranic scholarship, CIA training, punctual interventions in Gulf politics and messianic anti-imperialism that has formed the programmatic core of al-Qaeda.

Newly translated from the Arabic, annotated with a critical introduction by Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence, this collection places the statements in their religious, historical and political context.

It shows how bin Laden's views draw on and differ from other strands of radical Islamic thought; it also demonstrates how his arguments vary in degrees of consistency, and how his evasions concerning the true nature and extent of his own group, and over his own role in terrorist attacks, have contributed to the perpetuation of his personal mythology.

"[1]In the book's introduction, Bruce Bennett Lawrence defends bin Laden against "widespread revulsion" towards him in the West, stating "everything he has written falls within the framework of a reaction against aggression, for which he has strong scriptural support,"[2] and that "he continues to be ... admired and even trusted by ordinary people in the Middle East";[3] but also regrets that "the word 'imperialism' does not occur once in any of the messages he has sent out," nor is there any "social dimension" or "alternative conception of the ideal society".