Qaeda leader’s poem taken out from syllabus

Following a big uproar the Calicut University on Thursday decided to withdraw the controversial poem Ode to the Sea written by al Qaeda leader Ibrahim al-Rubaish.

Following a big uproar the Calicut University on Thursday decided to withdraw the controversial poem Ode to the Sea written by al Qaeda leader Ibrahim al-Rubaish.

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The university board of studies has called an emergency meeting in the morning and decided to withdraw the poem from the anthology titled Literature and Contemporary Issue Studies for third-year degree students.

However a section of the intelligentsia and activists decried the decision saying it was a knee-jerk reaction.

"It is a sad day. How can you kill creativity like this? I read the poem more than once. No objectionable line is there," said well known poet K Satchidhanandan.

Ibrahim al-Rubaish, now a senior leader of the al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), wrote Ode to the Sea on the walls of his cell in the infamous detention facility in Guantanamo Bay with charcoal and toothpaste.

The Amnesty International later collected the poems of Rubaish and other detainees and published it as Poems of Guantanamo.