To The Bat Cave!

And thus it begins.

Today marked the first step toward developing my thesis--a two year long process that will entail the consumption of vast amounts of knowledge, paper, and coffee. This morning, Ryan, Huoshin, and myself went on campus to start doing research for the first of ten papers.

The MAMEH program has its own library for us to barricade ourselves inside--the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. It's not particularly big, but it is full of thousands of books, articles, and periodicals in various languages for us to dig through.

After placing our bags in a cubby, the two women operating the front desk were eager to find out what topics we were interested in and what we needed to get started. Ryan is apparently doing a biographical piece for our Islamic History seminar on Saladin. One of the women, apparently a huge fan of the story of Saladin, literally talked Ryan's ear off as she started to pile books his way.

Huoshin, unsure of what he was going to try to tackle, perused through copies of the Koran. I was about to join him, until a red book caught my eye. My first paper for Modern Middle Eastern History is going to deal with the history of radical Islamic movements.

"What's this?" I whispered as I approached the shelf.

The title was Beyond Al-Qaeda: The Global Jihadist Movement. It had been compiled by the RAND Corporation in 2006. As I started to flip through it, I realized it had been compiled for use and consumption by the U.S. Air Force and Special Operations Command. After I found charts and graphs denoting complete breakdowns of dozens of global Islamist organizations, I realized I had just hit jackpot. This book had everything in it: leadership biographies, areas of operation, ideological positions, financial activities, goals, shared values with other groups, relative strength to their opponents in their area of operations.

"Can I help you with anything?" the second woman asked as she appeared at my elbow.

It took a concerted effort to tear my eyes away from a section dubbed The Al-Qaeda Nebula: a sort of Venn Diagram of affiliated groups displaying the ideological and tactical strength of their relationship with Al-Qaeda Central.

"Yea...yea," verbally stumbling over the words. "I'm doing a paper on Islamic radicalism. What do you have on Mohammed Abduh?"

"Abduh? Abduh," she repeated as she spun on her heel. "Was he in the Muslim Brotherhood?"

"No, he was a disciple of Afghani in the late 19th and early 20th centuries," I clarified.

"Oh, right. Try this one," she said as she handed me what looked to be a book that could have been written by Abduh himself; it was in such a deteriorated condition. "And I believe the Oxford catalog on Islam will be useful to you."

By the time I walked away toward the desks, I had a half dozen books in hand. Ryan was already seated, flipping through what looked to be a recent biography on Saladin. He looked busy scribbling notes down on his paper.

"Where's Huoshin?" I asked.

Ryan looked up and around.

"I think the books got him," he deadpanned ominously.

"A moment of silence for our fallen comrade," I thought.

Scanning through the RAND Corporation's impressively detailed opening salvo on Al-Qaeda's ideological heritage and aspirations, I couldn't help but be fascinated by a wandering thought--the thought of the reaction of a radical Islamist knowing there was an American "infidel" sitting in their backyard dissecting them from within the confines of a center named in honor of an Israeli war hero.

I grinned as I started to delve deeper.

"Among the common themes of jihadist-salafist ideologies is the notion of America and the West creating injustices, oppression, immorality, and seeking to plunder...," I read before coming to a halt.

"Plunder," I mouthed with an escaped grin. I looked over at a copy of the Koran sitting on our table. It was written in English.

It was all I could do not to laugh aloud at the irony.