Osama bin Laden's bookshelf: Noam Chomsky, Bob Woodward, and jihad

Osama bin Laden was an avid reader with varied interests, including relations between religious communities in early medieval Spain, the economics of France in the 1930s, recent blunders by US intelligence agencies and the Vietnam war.

But he had one overriding fascination: his own organisation.

The list of books and other publications seized by US Navy Seals during the May 2011 raid in which the al–Qaida leader was killed reveal an eclectic range of reading material including works by Noam Chomsky, Yale history professor Paul Kennedy, and journalist Bob Woodward, as well as books suggesting that senior US officials deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed.

The presence of some of the works on the “shelves” of Bin Laden – many are thought to be PDFs, so the bookshelves may be largely virtual – was predictable. Several are classics of modern extremist literature.

There are two works by Bin Laden’s mentor, Abdallah Azzam – Join the Caravan and The Defence of Muslim Lands – both of which were written in the 1980s and remain hugely influential among radical Islamists today.

Bin Laden, who was 54 when he died, also had a copy of The America I Have Seen, a vitriolic memoir of a short trip to the US by the Egyptian thinker and activist Syed Qutb, considered the godfather of modern jihadi thinking and hanged in 1966.

The presence of Democracy: A Religion, by extremist scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, is also unsurprising. Bin Laden’s own oft-repeated argument that voters in democracies are responsible for the acts of the governments and are thus legitimate targets for violence is close to that once made by the Jordanian Palestinian cleric.

There also appear to be a dozen or more books published by Hizb ut-Tahrir, the international Islamist organisation.

But much of the reading appears to be more secular, with a large numbers of works critical of US foreign policy, including Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, by Chomsky. There is also a handbook to international law.

Some works on Bin Laden’s shelves could conceivably have been for professional use.

Both Profiles of Bishops in the Church of England and a Map of Iran Nuclear Enrichment Sites might conceivably have furnished important details of potential targets.

There is a notable interest, too, in conspiratorial theories of world power, with several volumes which claim to expose the secret societies and cabals that run the world and the evils of financial capitalism. Bizarrely, the library includes one book – New Pearl Harbor – which argues that the government of George W Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks.

However, the bulk of Bin Laden’s English-language library is devoted to specialist publications by thinktanks on al–Qaida and related groups.

These included lengthy analyses of the future of the group, its composition, and its place in the fragmented ideological movement of Islamic extremism. Bin Laden had downloaded a collection of al–Qaida’s own documents that were painstakingly compiled and translated by the US-based Combating Terrorism Center, part of the US military academy at West Point, in New York. Other works were published by the respected US-based Rand Corporation and by Chatham House, in London.

Bin Laden also had a Qur’an, copies of key Islamic texts including volumes of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, Arabic to English dictionaries, and a book on Arabic grammar.

US authorities have not given any information about where the books were found in the Abbottabad residence – so quite what lay on Bin Laden’s bedside table, in the room in which he was shot and killed, remains unknown – nor have they divulged any details of any marginal notes the onetime civil engineering student might have made.