I think there's a much more important angle to this story than "lol the guy doesn't know crypto basics". The angle you're looking for is "White, Jewish kaffirs can't make anything as pure and effective as our Muslim bretheren".<p>I did a quick search on "islam cryptography" and came up with this:<p>Cryptography in Islamic Civilization
<a href="http://en.islamstory.com/cryptography-islamic-civilization.html" rel="nofollow">http://en.islamstory.com/cryptography-islamic-civilization.h...</a><p>There's a series of howlers in this allegedly academic text:<p>"For transposition to be effective and secure, letters rather than words need to be rearranged, this effectively scrambles the message and produces an "Anagram". Transposition could be done for example by writing the order of letters in a word backwards, so that word becomes drow. It is more effective to rearrange the letters in whole sentences or the whole message rather than single words.<p>If transposition was not limited to words or a certain order the number of different possibilities for rearranging a thirty five letter message rises to 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different distinct rearrangements making the task of working out the correct rearrangement impossible even if all the people on earth were to check a single rearrangement every minute."<p>...notice the careful attention paid to frequency distribution analysis, which the author later claims is another output of Islamic civilisation. Additionally, if you preserve word boundaries cryptanalysis can include word length, which makes breaking the cipher all the more easier.<p>"Substitution is the other method by the meaning of a message may be concealed...Working with the plain English alphabet, allowing the algorithm to be any arrangement of the different letter, it is possible to generate more 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different distinct rearrangements of letters and so the same number of different ciphers, thus producing a high level of security, baring in mind that the recipient need only to keep the key safe."<p>Besides mis-spelling bearing, how, exactly, were you planning on distributing the key again? Is the distribution channel more secure than your allegedly secure cipher? What happens when you re-use the key? For the love of God...you'd have thought they didn't bother reading "Cryptanalysis" by Helen Gaines, if they even wanted to pretend to make an effective cipher.<p>No evidence for this, but I bet you the BA plotter was drinking the koolaid a bit too much and thought too highly of the 1400s.