Tuesday, December 08, 2015

Writing to live

The Guardian is reporting on an interesting stash of papers which is portrayed as the ISIS governing strategy for their caliphate. Certainly the functional and administration orientation of the papers points to plausible authorship from within the group, consistent with the Egyptian nom-de-plume that is used. But a possibility not apparently considered by the Guardian is that sections of the papers are written by hostages. The documents translate quite well into English, which might be a sign that they were written in English in the first place. As a result, overly literal interpretations of what's in the documents might not be warranted. 

No comments: