You probably didn’t know it, but Osama bin Laden was a poet. In fact, according to Yale’s Robyn Creswell and Princeton’s Bernard Haykel, “Of all jihadi poets, bin Laden was the most celebrated, and he prided himself on his knowledge of the art.”

Professors Creswell and Haykel further report that a wide range of Islamist groups are now producing “a huge amount of verse.” This art is an expression of the “the culture of jihad” which, they say, we should regard as a “culture of romance. It promises adventure and asserts that the codes of medieval heroism and chivalry are still relevant.

As you might imagine, this essay has provoked some controversy. Should the prosody of terrorist masterminds, suicide bombers and head-choppers really be approached with seriousness and even respect? My answer is yes. Let me tell you a brief story to explain why.

The other day I participated in a panel discussion, before an audience of business executives, on developments in the Middle East. One of my fellow panelists was from the White House. She insisted on referring to the militants now in control of larges of Syria and Iraq only as “ISIL.” She would not use the term “Islamic State” ― the name the militants themselves use. And she seemed uncomfortable when I noted that ISIL is simply an acronym for Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (a geographical term for the eastern Mediterranean).

You’re probably familiar with her reasoning: The Obama administration’s policies have been based on the theory that the conflicts raging in the Middle East, Africa and Asia ― and occasionally erupting elsewhere from Paris to Garland, Texas ― are precipitated by “violent extremists” who are, if anything, un-Islamic and whose theology should be regarded as bogus and irrelevant.

The Creswell-Haykel scholarship on jihadi poetry and culture can only lead to the conclusion that this approach is fundamentally flawed. They make clear that it is not without justification that the mass murderers emerging from the Islamic world view themselves as representatives of an ancient tradition, as “knights of jihad” (albeit armed with modern weaponry) and “the only true Muslims.” As for the young Muslim men and women leaving London, Paris and Minneapolis to join the Islamic State, they “do not imagine they are emigrating to a dusty borderland between two disintegrating states but to a caliphate with more than a millennium of history.”