Friday, March 21, 2008
EMPTY
Take a moment to read this relatively brief comment on the recent spate of ex-jihadi memoirs. This item holds some very important insights about what these works tell us by what they say and don't say. The main point of the piece is to draw attention to the extreme shallowness of the ideology to which the authors fell prey:What is striking here is the utterly marginal place given to politics, to history and ideas. Nobody – well, nobody serious, anyway – would have dreamed of “explaining” the actions of, say, IRA or Ulster Volunteer Force militants purely in terms of their psychological instabilities, sexual frustrations or warped childhoods. No doubt many such people did have all those but it was always known that, nonetheless, their actions were motivated, and must be explicated, in political, ideological, historical terms. For jihadists, though, crude psychologistic or reductive culturalist “explanations” seem far more often than not to be thought adequate – and most disconcertingly, that seems to go for the published self-analyses of former Islamists themselves, not just for hostile or ignorant outsiders.
Perhaps still more astonishing is the ex-militants’ apparent total lack of intellectual inquisitiveness outside the narrowest of politico-religious tracks (though Husain’s book is a partial exception here). Reference to “the West” or indeed, among the British Islamists, to British society itself is limited to a few weary clichés, whether about sexual promiscuity or about racism and Islamophobia. Time after time, it is exposure to the horrors of Bosnia, Chechnya or Gaza which is claimed to explain conversion to jihadist Islamism, or at least to initiate sympathy for it. But this “exposure” seems almost always to have been limited to viewing gruesome videos of Bosnians, Chechens or Palestinians murdered or mutilated – and all in their turn are seen simply as Muslims victimised by others.
I think the intellectual poverty of the jihadi world-view is actually a key element of its appeal: It's simple, it's easy and it provides quick, clear solutions to all the world's problems, from a global level down to the individual young jihadi's personal sexual frustrations. Those who advocate that war against Islamism be limited to only combat of ideas often fail to realize that a more rational and humanistic alternative will always suffer from being the more complex and less clear-cut alternative. To the hormone-inflamed mind of the "humiliated" young male jihadi, complexity and nuance are most certainly not appealing. The kind of intellectual patience and reservation of commitment required by the liberal world-view is the last thing a passionate young man seeks. As the young, male Jim Morrison said, "We want the world, and we want it now!" Now that's appealing to a young man.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:11 AM
