Usama bin Ladin’s “Father Sheikh”:

Khalis’s involvement in print journalism marked an important shift in his professional
life, but he was not a newcomer to other print media and would return to publishing
repeatedly in the years after he left his job at The Message of Truth. Around 1954 he
published a book of his own called Religious Pearls and a translation of a book by the
19th century French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon under the title Religion and
Human Society. 51 Khalis’s publication credits would eventually include works in a large
variety of genres. He published books for use by students such as The Spirit of Islam and
The Explanation of the Creed of al‐Tahawiya, and he apparently developed a system to help
young children learn to read the Qur’an. 52 He also wrote volumes of poetry, 53 and at
least one translation of Sayyid Qutb’s work. 54 Of course, it is hard to know how widely
circulated these books really were. They were generally printed in small runs, 55 but this
tells us almost nothing about their possible impact since popular books disseminated in
hand‐written copies to the right readers can have an enormous influence compared
51 See Muhammad (2007), 5. Khalis’s work on this translation is especially noteworthy because of the
well‐known influence of Gustave Le Bon’s ideas of crowd psychology and racial theories on European
Fascism. Khalis is known to have held extreme views about Shi’a, but there are few textual clues that
offer insight into this part of his thinking. In general we find none of the rabidly anti‐Shi’a polemics in
Khalis’s written works that many accounts ascribe to him based on face‐to‐face interactions, and it is not
known if the racially charged portions of Le Bon’s work were what primarily interested Khalis. If a copy
of Khalis’s translation of Le Bon is ever found, however, it could offer some clues to the intellectual
underpinning of Khalis’s stance against the Shi’a. Part of the obstacle to this line of inquiry is that the title
given for Khalis’s translation does not match any of Le Bon’s known titles. It could be a rendering of
either LʹHomme et les Sociétés, Leurs Origines et Leur Histoire or La Civilisation des Arabes. Ahmadzai gives
the author of the book as Muhammad al‐Bahi al‐Khuli, a Muslim Brotherhood ‘alim, and says that Khalis
translated the book from Arabic. See Ahmadzai, 109–111. Possibly the book was written in French by Le
Bon, translated into Arabic by al‐Khuli and then translated into Pashto by Khalis. In any event, it would
make some sense if Khalis read this work in Arabic, since otherwise there is no evidence that Khalis knew
French.
52 The Spirit of Islam is undated, but appears to have been published around 1979, and The Explanation of
the Creed of al‐Tahawiyah was published in 1987. Din Muhammad briefly mentions Khalis’s work on
materials for early childhood education in reading the Qur’an. See Muhammad (2007), 7.
53 The most recent of these was published in 2002 and is a collection of his other previous publications in
verse.
54 He published a translation of Islam and Social Justice in 1960. Ahmadzai claims that a mutual
acquaintance told him that Khalis also wrote a translation of Qutb’s monumental work In the Shadows of
the Qur’an. Unfortunately, as of Ahmadzai’s publication in 2006, this translation was still a rumor. See
Ahmadzai, 111–112.
55 Ahmadzai conveniently includes notes about the publication run of Khalis’s books where he knows the
numbers. See Ahmadzai, 81–114.
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