This month’s Prospect magazine has an article by journalist Shiv Malik, which is the result of months of interviews of the people who knew Mohammad Sidique Khan.
It will be disappointing to many in the “my simple solutions are better than yours” brigades, raising more questions than it does answers. It’s also a very long read as far as online articles go - especially long compared to some of the clever blogposts on the matter. But it’s fascinating reading for anyone who is actually interested in learning a little bit more about what could drive someone to blow up a bus full of people.
One of the most fascinating ideas is that pressure from families to submit to arranged marriages is being used as a way of separating potential terrorists from their families by offering them the freedom of marrying for love:
Butt also explained that traditional communities often inadvertently push their young into the arms of the radicals. Attitudes to jobs, dress, schooling and socialising all play their part in driving youngsters away from their parents’ generation. But one of the biggest factors that has helped the growth of British Islamic radicalism is marriage.
Islamism’s most important tenet is that Muslims should not be divided by race or nationalism—that all Muslims are one. It therefore can offer an Islamic route out of having to marry your cousin. Butt knows this because it happened to him. When, instead of marrying his cousin, Butt tried to marry his sweetheart, he found himself deploying the arguments of his Islamist recruiter against his own father—that compulsion in marriage is un-Islamic and that forced marriages were a cultural import from Hindu India. And when the forces of traditionalism refused to give consent, Butt, like many of his friends, ended up a pariah within his own community.
“When you’re cut off from your family,” Butt explained, “the jihadi network then becomes your family. It becomes your backbone and support.” He added that when you join it becomes impossible to leave because there is nowhere else to go. The network starts operating like a cult.
Yahya Birt discusses this idea, and the way in which calls for the Muslim community to “do something� are missing the fact that often, they are:
Traditional Muslim communities do seek to challenge extremism, but sometimes do so in an incompetent way that can actually exacerbate the problem. Malik’s account shows us that Khan’s father took steps to counter his rebelliousness, eventually cutting off all contact once he married outside the clan. For some British Muslims, being cast off in this way can set up a vulnerable isolation in which the jihadi network may seek to become a surrogate family. In a similar way, too many traditional mosques often chase away radical groups rather than taking them on.
Malik also points to research that suggests that suicide bombings can be better explained by reference to groups and how they behave:
Suicide bombing is not just a religious phenomenon. It is employed by many secular organisations, including the Kurdish PKK and the Marxist Tamil Tigers. In fact, until 2000, the Tamil Tigers had carried out more suicide attacks than all other groups put together. Over the years, the profiles of individual bombers have also varied, from young boys to, more recently, women. Ariel Merari, a Tel Aviv University psychologist, has profiled 50 suicide bombers and found that there were hardly any common factors. None were deranged or schizophrenic. Few had problems like depression. Merari concluded that the only factor linking all forms of suicide terrorism was the way bombers were recruited and trained. It is the psychology of the group, not the individual, that is key.
This was something that the French sociologist Émile Durkheim identified nearly 100 years ago in Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Durkheim contrasted “egotistical” suicide—caused by a person feeling disconnected from society—with “altruistic” suicide, which occurs when “integration is too strong.”
As Michael Bond writes in his response to Malik’s article, perhaps the concept of group psychology point to some effective solutions – using similar tactics to change their minds:
Ariel Merari at Tel Aviv University, perhaps the foremost expert on the psychology of suicide bombers, suggests that bombers may be more open to influence by social forces and fearful of alienation. Rohan Gunaratna, who has interviewed many “failed� bombers, says such people are easy to interrogate because they have a narrow mindset; when they see that their worldview does not hold up to scrutiny, they easily break.
This is why the conflict of identity that Malik identifies among second-generation British Muslims—am I Pakistani, am I British, what kind of Muslim am I?—should be taken seriously. You can see how suggestible young men struggling to fit into mainstream society might find it on the extreme fringe. The difficulty is that suggestibility often makes for other highly admirable personality traits, such as empathy and kindness. It is hard to get our heads around the idea that someone who is great with children might, given the right (or wrong) situation, be more easily persuaded by extremists into killing (and being killed) for a cause. But that is the extraordinary lesson that we must take on board about the 7/7 bombers: that they were ordinary.
Malik’s article also looks at the various groupings within Islam, and how they can contribute to, or fail to prevent, the radicalisation of young men:
According to Butt, the other big factor that has helped Islamist recruiters is the fact that in many communities, Islamists are winning what some have termed a “civil war” within Islam. For simplicity’s sake, contemporary Islam can be divided into four schools: traditionalists, fundamentalists, modernists and Islamists. Unlike the split between Christian fundamentalists and other Christians, both Islamic traditionalists and fundamentalists lean towards scriptural literalism. The main difference between the groups is how they regard the 1,400 years of theological innovation since Muhammad’s death.
While traditionalists will not hesitate to draw upon centuries of scholarly argument, evolution in Sharia law and changes in accepted Islamic practice, fundamentalist movements—of which the Saudi-backed Wahhabis are the most important—reject all theological innovation since the life of Muhammad and his closest companions. Muslims, they say, should pay attention only to the holy book and the collected sayings and doings of Muhammad. This is why, over the last 50 years, Wahhabi authorities in Saudi Arabia have demolished more than 300 historical structures in the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. They want to create a timeless Islam.
The third and smallest group are the theological modernisers—two figures well known in Britain are Tariq Ramadan and Ziauddin Sardar—who say that Muslims should look beyond the literalism of the Koran and seek out the meaning behind the words. What counts in the modern world is not the actions of Muhammad in 7th-century Arabia, but the principles that inspired those actions. Most liberal Muslims belong to this group, but they are a small minority, both within Muslim societies and in Europe.
The fourth school, Islamism, is a relatively recent offshoot of fundamentalism. It emerged in response to the final demise of Islamic authority with the fall of the Ottoman empire after the first world war, but harks back to the early days of the caliphate, when the Koran was the basis for law-making. It sees Islam not just as a religion, but as a socioeconomic system. The Koran is God’s version of Das Kapital. Islamists pick and choose teachings from across the ages, and while they read script literally and share a religious zeal with the fundamentalists, they are more akin to an ideological movement than a religious one. Their style of work is often compared with the student far left of the 1960s and 1970s.
Butt says that the war between these schools, which has been playing out across the Muslim world for decades, has ripped into Britain’s generation gap—and that the Islamists are winning.
In ten years of recruiting, Butt says that he always wanted a theological clash, but it never came. “The traditionalists and the modernisers just wanted to run their own study circles without interference.” On the other hand, if the jihadi network see someone with strong Islamic tendencies, “the moment he leaves his house in the morning, they’re there until he returns to his house in the evening.” Butt also says that unlike the traditionalists, the network won’t judge a potential recruit on his actions. “If the network see a drug dealer or someone from a gang, they will not condemn him like the traditionalists and say ‘oh brother haram, haram [forbidden].’ What they’ll try to do is to utilise his energy.”
Lastly, there are the issues that are all too common in all cultures and societies: a failure to imagine that someone you know could ever do something as horrific as blowing up a bus full of people; the belief/ hope that the person you know and love is just going though a phase, that he’ll grow out of it:
When I asked Gultasab why he didn’t try to prevent his kid brother from going down the path of jihad, he gave a similar answer. No one had expected him to become a suicide bomber. Why would Sidique kill himself barely a year after his wife had given birth to a baby girl—on whom he apparently doted? This question was never really answered, but most people in Beeston were pleased that the kids were becoming more religious. “Better them being Wahhabi than on drugs,” said Gultasab. “People appreciated the kids running a bookshop because they were peers to the younger generation—who were no longer listening to the elders.” The elders thought that the kids would come back to their roots. As Gultasab told me, when marriages took place without family consent, people thought that eventually everything would just be reconciled, as things usually are between children and their parents. And why would Sidique, the moderniser of his community—and “the kindest member of our family”—end up committing such a barbaric act?
As Malik writes - his discoveries seem only to confuse the issue, making the problem of Islamist terrorism seem “depressingly intractable”. But efforts like this one may well be the key to finding those seemingly non-existent solutions. At the very least, they may assist in spotting the “solutions” that aren’t in the least bit helpful.
Of course, it’s possible that the article is simply 9,000 words about Mohammad Sidique Khan. As blogger Dal Nun Strong writes at “A Muslim Think-tank�:
Perhaps I am simply ignorant, and there are plenty of mainstream articles that treat the core topics in Malik’s account – intergenerational conflict between British-born ethnic minority children and their traditionalist first-generation parents; the chronic issues of poor skills and unemployment leading to young people finding it hard to find material success; the under-utilisation and frustration of talented youth; the twin but contrary escape-routes of drugs or rejectionist identity-politics; the replacement of real family support structures among young people with surrogate families in the “Islamic movement�. Perhaps these are all out there – but I don’t think so.
And the reason they aren’t any is because almost all articles about Muslim anger have an obvious journalistic intention to work backwards from terrorism to find a chain of causality. Very few work forward from the sad and mundane realities of Muslim youth in the 1980s and 1990s to see what a multiplicity of outcomes there have been, and what a diversity of experiences the emerging Muslim generations now have under their belts.
Shiv Malik’s article falls into the same trap of looking for causality in Sidique Khan’s terrorist actions and then seeing if there’s any “wider messages for society�. It also looks for lowest common denominators and then tries to work up.
And so the questions continue to arise far more frequently than answers ever do. It’s nearly impossible to find any simple threads, or answers, in the web of ideas presented here. The idea that some of the Islamists are in fact rebelling against tradition raises problems with the idea that this is simply a clash between “moderate” and “radical”.
But I think one important point must be taken from this article: the fact that this story is being told only now - two years later. While we’d like to think that evil is clearly identifiable, that it’s easy to explain, the unfortunate truth is that it is never that simple. Not even with religious fanatics. While the search for a quick fix is understandable, people - and societies - are complex.
But Strong is optimistic:
I’d be a fool to conclude from this that we’ve reached the end of the story of Muslim political violence in the UK. There are still plenty of children of the 1980s and 1990s who haven’t found their place in this society, and haven’t succeeded in establishing their respect and honour even among the mosque-committees in their own area.
But other models of political engagement have clearly started bearing fruit. Muslim participation in successful demonstrations and rallies has shown the intelligent, articulate face of Muslim political engagement in new ways to the wider society. There is no more bloc-vote for Labour. Muslim professionals now abound in even the most traditional parts of the Establishment.
We’ve still got a long way to go, but the fate of the 3rd generations should not be to repeat the dilemmas and mistakes of the 2nd.
Fascinating stuff, Anna. Though…
…I’ve always though such a liberal definition of ‘cult’ would include a lot of workplaces, and a lot of rather common peer-pressure behaviours amongst ordinary groups of people. If demanding self-inflicted death as the price of inclusion or exclusion, a lot of country towns in NSW I’ve known people from would fit the bill.
As was sectarianism in the UK and Australia between Catholics and Protestants less than thirty years ago. Democracy survived that, I tend to think we’ll do fine with enough water under the bridge.
On a more controversial note (spoiler warning): I’ve just rented and watched, with a couple of beers, the Steve McQueen classic Hell Is For Heroes on DVD. It’s about as glorious a Western-style war movie you can get, with the Siegfried line, ingenious and inventive NCOs, Nazis shouting in black helmets, an unassailable German pillbox/machinegun nest, class tension between soldiers and officers, the whole Paramount box of widescreen cliché. The climactic scene involves what can only be classed as an All-American suicide bombing.
Hoorah, I cheered.
I know I sound like a broken record, but what I’d like to know is why so many of these terrorists are such screwups.
To make something explode rather than just burn, you either need something that decomposes on its own, or you need to mix fuel with oxidiser (hence ANFO, for instance). But these idjits didn’t even manage that, based on media reports on the contents of their cars (and the fact that none of the cars actually exploded is further evidence to that effect).
Therefore, while what attracts people in general to Islamic extremist terrorism is of interest, figuring out why so few of those attracted seem to have any organizational savvy, and whether this is likely to continue into the future, would seem important questions as well.
Yes I guess that explains why one of the Glasgow bombers was a doctor in the hospital and which he is now being treated and I believe another one arrested is a doctor too. All these unemployed, aggrieved, alienated youth.
Not.
Thanks for reading the post, saint.
I have wondered about this too, Robert. One of the attackers at Glasgow Airport is reported to have doused himself with petrol and set himself alight before he turned to attack the security officials who came to respond to the attack. An elementary understanding of chemistry and biology should have indicated to him that this was not going to turn out well for him and would pretty quickly bring his role in the attack to an end.
One has to wonder about the English education system. (Scotland has a different system which is well regarded.) I suspect that its curriculum is crammed full of airy-fairy post-modern politically correct “discovery experiences” and students are not getting a proper grounding in the hard sciences such as chemistry, physics and mathematics and so go out into the world ill-equipped for the challenges life brings them.
“Rohan Gunaratna, who has interviewed many “failedâ€? bombers, says such people are easy to interrogate because they have a narrow mindset; when they see that their worldview does not hold up to scrutiny, they easily break.”
I understand that in Yemen a program exists whereby Islamic Scholars chat to imprisoned Islamists and use their knowledge of the Koran and sayings of Mohammed to defeat the arguments the Islamists use to defend terrorism. Apparently it works, and many wannabe terrorists have been released back to their communities without incident.
So let me see if I got this straight. People try to incinerate a night-club full of women because they’re trying to escape… those evil Hindu-influenced arranged marriages. I just want to make sure I understand your point correctly.
If Hindu arranged marriages are the root cause of terrorism, shouldn’t we be seeing scads of distressed young Hindu men blowing shit up all over the UK?
“He added that when you join [the jihadi network] it becomes impossible to leave because there is nowhere else to go.”
Well clearly these young holders of EU passports are men of stunning imagination, since they find there is “nowhere else to go.” What about that Islamic paradise down Saudi Arabia way? Plenty of jobs there, so I’m told, and apparently they’ve got more Islam than the locals know what to do with. Knock yourselves out, boyos!
“Khan’s father took steps to counter his rebelliousness, eventually cutting off all contact once he married outside the clan.”
Yep, that’s the way to counter rebelliousness. Works like a charm every time. And these are the folks who wish to impose their brilliant ways on the rest of us.
“This is why the conflict of identity that Malik identifies among second-generation British Muslims—am I Pakistani, am I British, what kind of Muslim am I?—should be taken seriously. You can see how suggestible young men struggling to fit into mainstream society might find it on the extreme fringe.”
Aha, yes! That terrible, unbearable conflict of identity, which no other group of second generation immigrants has ever wrestled with before. Why, if they had, then we’d quite naturally see wave upon wave of Chinese, Russian, Polish, Irish, Vietnamese, Italian, Puerto Rican, Costa Rican, Mexican and Korean suicide bombers positively lighting up the night sky, every night, all the way from the Liverpool docks to the Hollywood Bowl. But maybe they just don’t have to flee Hindu marriages. Or something.
Anna, I certainly hope you’re going to stand by this stuff, because I’ve got some swamp land in Georgia that I need to sell quick, and I think you’re really gonna love it…
Excellent post Anna though the deeper concepts appear to have eluded some.
One point re the history of suicide bombing is that in Lebanon there was a group of women Christian bombers. Can’t remember the conflict as I have to rush off to work. It was documented in The Cult of the Suicide Bomber.
I suppose, if you try hard enough, any argument can be twisted out of all recognition.
A fair reading of the argument quoted by Anna would acknowledge that the hypothesis is that the generation gap between first and second generation British Muslims is being exacerbated by an increased consciousness of “unislamic” practices being foisted on the young in the shape of arranged marriages. This breach breaks down family and thrusts the alienated young into the arms of Islamists.
Anyone with any understanding of the generation gap of the West in the 1960s will see clear parallels. There are still tens of thousands of American exiles in Canada who may recognise many aspects of these intergenerational conflicts. And have the Weathermen been entirely removed from the world’s memory banks?
These tensions ore products of people adjusting in different ways to rapid and threatening cultural change.
saint
[link]
Sounds like an ideal target group, although they might have hoped that, as Robert said, they weren’t such “screwups”.
Them being doctors is an interesting point though but it would be wrong to rule out ostensibly intelligent people from being involved. One of the puzzles for the Japanese after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin and hydrogen cyanide attacks was the involvement of some of the best and brightests of their education system. Becoming a cult seems a matter of applying technique but the real challenge is cleaving people from friends and families. If there’s a cultural phenomenon that’s making this easier, then it deserves attention and consideration.
“he found himself deploying the arguments of his Islamist recruiter against his own father—that compulsion in marriage is un-Islamic and that forced marriages were a cultural import from Hindu India.”
A cultural ‘import,’ eh. Funny how forced marriages are ‘Hindu’ and ‘un-Islamic,’ and yet apparently there was nothing ‘un-Islamic’ about invading India in the first place. Funny, too, how compulsion is ‘un-Islamic,’ except of course whenever it is Islamic, which is pretty often. I wonder what Lina Joy would say.
But then again, the poor fellow never needed to employ ‘Islamist arguments’ against his father; it would have been simpler, and far more solid, for him to point out that his rights as a British citizen precluded such foreign things as being forced into marriage. His father lost the right to force marriage choices on his son, the day the father immigrated to Britain. Multiculturalists take note.
– j_p_z, wandering with a bag of chips in the multicultural hall of fun-house mirrors
Shaun: “though the deeper concepts appear to have eluded some.”
Maybe the deeper concepts didn’t ‘elude’ some. Maybe ’some’ fully understood the ‘deeper concepts,’ mulled them over, and found them ludicrous. This never occurs to lefties, as naturally they are correct in advance; merely to disagree makes one prima facie wrong and stupid.
Katz: “the hypothesis is that the generation gap between first and second generation British Muslims is being exacerbated by an increased consciousness of “unislamicâ€? practices being foisted on the young… This breach breaks down family… Anyone with any understanding of the generation gap of the West in the 1960s will see clear parallels. …These tensions ore products of people adjusting in different ways to rapid and threatening cultural change.”
Katz, you’re making my argument for me. Never mind that it seems never to have occurred to these families that their centuries-old marriage practices were un-Islamic back when they were in Pakistan, an overwhelmingly Islamic country. How did they not notice that a foundation-stone of their Islamic country was un-Islamic? (We’ll also forget for the nonce about forced marriages in, say, Kurdish and Algerian and Turkish immigrant groups, y’know, with their rich Hindu heritage and all.)
But let’s for a moment treat the hypothesis as a general principle. If we grant that there are such things as ‘generation gaps,’ ‘cultural gaps,’ and family breakdowns and tensions within groups of 1st- and 2nd-generation Muslim immigrants, and if this is a broad sociological process, then we can reasonably expect there to be similar cultural gaps and tensions and identity crises, etc etc within other immigrant groups. And if modern Britain is anything, it’s packed to the gills with different immigrant groups we can study. So why won’t you grant my objection: that if the ‘deeper concepts’ of this post have any worth at all, we should expect to see similar clusters of suicide bombers and car-bombers among the ‘alienated’ second-generation immigrant youth from Hindu, Caribbean, and Eastern European groups.
About a third to a half of the kids I knew growing up in New York were the children of immigrants; and as we can readily see in my cohort, those guys have been blowing shit up all over Amerika ever since. Right?
Besides, I thought you lefties were all supportive of “rapid… cultural change.” But then, when it produces people blowing up buses and trying to incinerate women in a nightclub, you stroke your chins and blame it on… rapid cultural change.
Well, I guess to make the multicultural omelette, ya gotta break a few eggs. And fry a few hundred chicks, as it were.
j_p_z, I don’t know why anymore, but I am genuinely surprised at your dumb response. For starters, I challenge you to actually find where I “blamed” it on anything at all. If you’re not interested, there are plenty of other posts here.
Anthony -
It seems the whole cell may have consisted of doctors.
I’d rather lean towards fugitive here.
When all else fails, call people dumb. Worked in the second grade, don’t see why it shouldn’t work now.
I didn’t call you dumb, I called your response dumb. You certainly weren’t treating my intelligence with much respect. I posted a wide range of interesting ideas for people to discuss. You chose to cherry pick one bit and turn it into a joke.
Saint, none of the ideas raised here go against some of the terrorists being doctors. For instance, it was suggested that the people who could be convinced to become suicide bombers could also be extremely caring and compassionate.
If you aren’t interested in reading all of it, then I’d appreciate it if you could just not comment at all.
That’s easy. According to the argument, these young folks didn’t notice until it was pointed out to them by Islamists in Britain, who were propounding a new and radical view of Islam under the guise of tradition. [Note here that I am repeating the argument rather than necessarily endorsing it. I don’t know whether it is true or not, I’m merely trying to understand the argument on its own terms.]
And there were. I happened to live in Britain during the upsurge of Afro-Caribbean violence in the early 1980s. At that point the moral panic merchants were asking why these black folks weren’t as well-behaved and law-abiding as their Pakistani neighbours! Culture is a quicksilver thing. Muslims have been copping heaps in the western world for some time. A minority of them behaving like loonies is quite predictable, from an epidemiological point of view.
To understand the phenomenon is not to endorse its existence. Otherwise every ebola expert would now be in gaol.
I’m not your common or garden social democrat or marxist, but I do share something with the Left. We lefties like progress.
Right wingers, on the other hand, tend to love reactionary, religious obscurantism. RWDBs and Islamists have much in common.
Katz, I can’t remember any car bombings by the Afro-Caribbeans in the UK in the 1980s. Do you mean the Irish?
GregM, I assume you aren’t being otiose.
I mean the Toxteth and Brixton and Notting Hill, and Bristol (St Paul) Riots, among others.
You can find them included in a list here.
Anna, if you have found yourself taking personal offense from what I wrote, then naturally I apologize at once. You are perfectly right that the post is full of interesting data and ideas to chew on. I merely bit off a piece of it, and began to chew. The matter is a serious one, and all points of view should quite rightly be considered, including the views you’re giving air to. But consider it I did, and I simply happen to have drawn contrary conclusions, based at least in part on data-points that seem to have been omitted from initial consideration. (for instance, to paraphrase: “the lad was upset at his father’s wishes, and his Islamist recruiter told him…” which could lead one reasonably to the thought, Why has all the emphasis been placed on the lad’s being upset, and so little placed on the very presence of ‘his Islamist recruiter’ to begin with?)
My manner may be (perhaps characteristically) a bit too breezy for some tastes, but this is more a species of intellectual punctuation for emphasis, than an indicator of frivolity. If you look back at what I wrote, I think you’ll find, absent the stabs at humor, that I was not at all making your post into a joke: I was engaging it with full intellectual seriousness, and I merely happen to rather disagree with some of the assertions. My “blame it on” remark was directed, in the first instance, at Katz’s comments, not at your own. All the same, if you were annoyed, then I do apologize for, if not the intellectual substance of my remarks, then at least their flippant delivery system. (Though I still think some of it *is* kind of funny
)
Katz — well, that’s an interesting riposte. I do tend to think you’re at least partly misreading the data (for instance the difference between youth joining violent ethnic gangs, which is the most common thing in the world, and youth forming international terrorist cells, which is not), but the response is a reasonable one, all the same. I’ll have to think about it a bit, and get back to you about what’s the matter with it.
These Afro-Caribbean chaps burned down several suburbs, which is a bit more ambitious than your Jets and Sharks, Officer Kopke.
The hallmark of these Islamist British terror attacks is how small-scale they are, not to mention inept, as noted by Robert.
An interesting counterpoint to this story: it appears that the people responsible for the most recent attempted terrorist attacks are all doctors, about as far away as you can get from alienated youth.
One can only surmise that they had other reasons.
Alienation isn’t only related to opportunity and money - I think the surprise evinced just shows that the categories in which these things are usually discussed aren’t all that rigorous.
I always thought that trouble from the alienated usually had its roots in the kind of nihilism that either makes you alienated or descends upon you once you are. Being a doctor is kind of the opposite of nihilism, as per that Nurses’ Union secretary quoted in Robert’s link: the general sense of surprise is about the fact that doctors are supposed to want to do the opposite of hurt and kill people.
That’s right - it is frequently a wilfully self-inflicted condition among the emotionally immature, who can find a basis for it in anything.
To be fair to the moral panic merchants they were, at the time, at pains to point out the menacing takeover of the nation’s corner shops.
“which is a bit more ambitious than your Jets and Sharks, Officer Kopke.”
That’s Krupke, Katz; Officer *Krupke.*
Heavens to Murgatroyd, what’s next?
“Attend the tale of Suibhne Todd…”
or maybe, “Where are das Klauns? There ought to be Klauns…”
“To be fair to the moral panic merchants they were, at the time, at pains to point out the menacing takeover of the nation’s corner shops.”
Not to mention the concomitant soaring rate of curry-munching, if my yoof in Muswell Hill is recalled accurately.
My first taste of postcolonial identity politics was seeing a bunch of boys abusing a Hindu Indian kid outside the East Finchley tube, calling him a Paki. “I’m not a Paki, I’m British like you!” was the comeback, predictably received with derision from the lads and utter confusion from me. Poor sheltered Perth boy.
Ah memories. How well do I recall Enoch Powell prophesying “rivers of Bovril” soon to flow from those festering sores of convenience retail?
The BBC (I think) doco Cult of a Suicide Bomber (I think, something similar) looked at research into the part group dynamics plays in these scenarios, that they get so intense even if a potential suicidee has second thoughts, he would not want to let his “group of mates” down and so goes ahead with it. Obviously the actual research was more detailed that that …
Even better than the BBC documentary (which was pretty good), I have in my hands a copy of:
Eamon Collins with Mick McGovern, Killing Rage, Granta, London, 1997.
It’s the autobiography of an ex-Provo who turned supergrass against his IRA colleagues. Cut a long story short, Bismarck’s comment nails it. Emotional immaturity mixed in with a welcoming fraternity of ideologues, baked by a significant minority support for acts of violence.
Trouble with that psychologising of the causes, you’d expect a random background of terrorist violence to arise uniformly from different groups.
But as we all know, that doesn’t happen.
Sooo, we need to look beyond the disordered mind for sufficient causes of terrorism, or any other form of social outlawry.
This was certainly the conclusion of Richard Pape.
Sorry.
Robert Pape
FWIW, Katz, I was not intending to psychologise terrorists, but to point out that a lot of the people who are ‘alienated’ are just self-indulgent jerks. Pavlov’s Cat (who may not agree with my description) made the distinction more elegantly.
Fair point Bismarck.
I got on the end of a chain of Chinese whispers.
Indeed, Pape’s research suggests that his suicide bomber subjects were the opposite of alienated.
Has anyone read Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect? I hear a podcast recently of him and Michael Shermer of the American Skeptics assoc, sounds like it might be appropos in some way.
Of course he totally looks like The Master so I have a hardish time taking him seriously …
I are elegant cat. This is elegant thread.
However, what I’ve noticed all the way through this thread is an inelegant absence of any clear distinction between analysis and judgement, ie between understanding and blaming, and the further distinction between understanding and condoning, which the blamers seem to think are synonyms.
Anna’s terrific post was about trying to understand the situation better, which it seems to me is the only possible basis for dealing with it. I’ve been bemused by the way that many people’s responses (and I’m sorry to say this includes Bismarck in this instance), as so often IRL, show more interest in judgement and blame than in actually understanding what the hell is going on, in a culture so unfamiliar to most of us.
Trying to get one’s head around the reasons for something is always more difficult and less fun than picking up one’s sabre and rattling it. The first systematic study of Islam I ever made was as part of a senior high school History subject; it frightened and repelled the tripes out of me then and it still does now, on feminist and other grounds (as does most organised religion), but I’m still a lot more interested in understanding why it works the way it works — as a means of dealing with it — than I am in self-righteously waving the flag and uttering howls of execration.
And the same is true of the alienated in general, whether they’re Evil Muslim Terrists or not. Which is why I’d like to thank Anna for such a thoughtful, useful post, thanks to which I’m a lot better informed than I was this morning.
Thank you, elegant Cat.
self-congratulation and testosterone boosting, cyber pretence and bullshit are one thing. Pavlov’s Cat is another.
Heartening to see there is a Pavlov’s Cat on LP (though she will probably be the first to protest there are others). There aren’t - posting that is. Which doesn’t mean she is unrepresentative.
Meanwhile, here’s looking at the PCs of the world: generous, tender, cunning, wise, funny, silly, idiosyncratic furry female kit-cats.
Couldn’t have said it better, j, though I’d like to point out that there’s nothing wrong at all with the former. Everybody’s gotta speak with their own voice.
PC, surely that’s a matter of good or bad praxis, not inelegant lack of distinction. A decent analysis of many things, and a proper understanding ought to involve attribution of causes to effects, and for lack of a better word for it, blaming. I’m sure Marx scribbled something typically anodyne about the principle.
jinmaro (and Fiasco), thank you. Mind you, it may get you into trouble with the many who do not agree with you.
Meanwhile, I believe when cats are embarrassed, they wash. *Licks paw furiously*
Fiasco sez:
Possibly, but (a) I regard inelegant lack of distinction as bad praxis in itself, and (b) in most cases the analysis has been bypassed and the blamers have gone straight to the blaming. My point here is that they are not the same thing. Saying ‘He drowned because his parents had never taught him how to swim’ is a bit different from saying ‘His parents are irresponsible, evil arseh*les, let’s crucify them.’
It’s far more edifying (and far more interesting) to see someone give a dispassionate account of cause and effect than it is to see someone trashing you because you refuse to ‘loudly denounce’ whatever it is. I used to get into fights about this with my late and much-loved Ma, where she’d be criticising something and I’d conversationally offer what I thought was a reason for whatever it was, and she’d say sternly ‘That’s no excuse’ and I’d say (through my teeth) ‘It wasn’t meant to be an excuse; it’s a reason.’
Possibly. Personally I am in thrall to the memory of a Patrick Cook cartoon in which a bearded man in a claw-footed bathtub is frantically scribbling page after page of exposition, the bathroom floor adrift with soggy pages and a mad gleam in the bather’s eye. The caption: ‘Marx makes it all up.’
Fiasco Da Gama, goddam it, there is nothing wrong with the former. Let many flowers bloom, etcetera.
Perhaps it come down to a matter of taste. The heart is a lonely hunter and often times it wants more of what is the usual fare on offer - including in intellectual discussions on line with a line-up ominously reflective of what is on offer face to face, day to day.
But this is woman’s talk. And this is not a women’s cultured space.
Well said indeed, Dr. Cat. Returning to this thread now after some time away, brings me to it in a different temper. As a bit of a (perhaps unnecessary) gloss to your point, I’d say that generally people don’t do these dreadful things unless they’re in the grip of *some* species of something terrible, distress or something other; and that because of it they require not only our understanding, but our compassion too. But to try and generate a genuine understanding, or a genuine compassion, as best we can, we probably need to keep the two things separate as much as we can. Mixing an easy or mawkish compassion with our intellectual investigation risks clouding an honest attempt at understanding; on the other hand compassion is generally more absolute, but also probably more helpful the more clearly we can bring ourselves to see things, if that makes sense.
Which is to say that a strict habit of criticism is necessary to help us see as clearly as we can; but it’s also likely that this awful stuff won’t start to go away unless and until we use our understanding to deploy an effective compassion.
The tacit purpose of trying to analyse the causes of this kind of behaviour is to find some way of preventing it from happening.
Most of us sense that suicide bombing is an affront to just about every canon of civilised behaviour.
But the more empathetic recognise that condemnatory language directed at would be suicide bombers, or the causes for which they are prepared to blow themselves and others up, is insufficent to persuade them to stop.
The other extreme is to legitimise and to pander to their sense of grievance, as if grievance were a sufficient justification for any behaviour.
Clearly the fruitful approach lies between these admittedly diametrically opposed modalites.
For progressives, the danger they face is to be too generous in making allowances for persons determined to act out their grievances.
On the other hand, the greatest resource of progressives is their recognition that a sensitivity to time, place and context enable empathy. Islamists’ grievances will not be removed by violence. Mutual understanding and consensus, and a keen sense of the politically possible will be indispensible. The progressive approach is the only viable one.
Cats? Embarrassed? Your moggies must be very out of the ordinary.
I’m a Molnar fan from way back, by the way, though Cook’s pretty good as well.
JPZ, you might enjoy this one.
This post picks up on some of the issues raised in the thread:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/07/04/islamicisation-or-americanisation/
At the risk of continuing to find myself in agreement with the lefties on this site, I would like to clarify my earlier comment about alienation and self-indulgent jerks. This was not, contra Pavlov’s Cat, motivated by a rush to judgment but rather a (fairly trite) observation that a sense of alienation can have its roots in self-pity without any obvious objective justification (exhibit A: teenagers), as well as in circumstances that are more objectively explicable and that more readily invite sympathy.
In this I agree fully with Mark’s comments on the other thread that:
Most, if not all, religions and many political ideologies not only seek to appeal to the alienated but also (in their more extreme manifestations) to inculcate a sense of alienation from the surrounding society. This can be expressed across a broad spectrum to include monasticism, asceticism, mysticism, and millenarian homicidal or apocalyptic cults. Seeking to create a more inclusive society is a necessary, but woefully insufficient, measure against the more antisocial of these movements. In many cases, the inclusive society itself is a cause of grievance to adherents (exhibits B and C: the KKK and Al-Qaeda).
Damn straight. I once took the Scientologists’ “free personality test”, in a spirit of scientific curiosity, and was truly staggered by the way the questions were designed to make one feel truly dreadful about oneself: lonely, isolated and misunderstood, ie someone in desperate need of a cult to join.
But Bismarck, I think you must have either a hard heart or a bad memory. Don’t you remember what it was like being a teenager? Ew.
JPZ — while I agree with you about the virtues of compassion, my own argument was really more about the virtues of reason and knowledge. (Feeling compassionate about any member of the KKK, for example, even a teenage one, would be well beyond my own emotional range no matter how well I understood how he’d ended up there. But — to take Bismarck’s two examples — that’s partly because I understand the society that produced the KKK a great deal better than I do the one that produced al-Qaeda.)
As you and Katz are both more or less arguing, what’s required is some kind of delicate and clear-eyed balance between the mawkish and the hawkish.
Bismarck, I wouldn’t quite agree with that. Classic church/sect theory in sociology suggests that distance from social norms and tension with the environing society diminishes over time as the religious tradition becomes more powerful and institutionalised. So I think that alienation is likely to be more present where a particular religion has only a tenuous basis in a particular society (eg Islam in much of the West), but it is worthwhile noting that the process of secularisation itself increases the level of distance between religious groups and broader society - so Christian churches, whose views are no longer co-extensive with those prevailing in formerly Christian societies, have begun to register more distance, and therefore, in some instances, either be an outlet for or a source of alienation.
Mark, I am not a sociologist so I defer to your expertise on that point. However, I would have thought that established Churches in Christian societies (let’s use pre-enlightenment Christendom as a reference) had their issues with millenarian cults and hermeneutic monastic societies. Radical Islamism seems to have no trouble attracting members from mainstream Muslim societies.
Indeed, Bismarck, and that’s part of the dynamic - as social distance decreases, there’s an incentive for smaller groups to split off with a call to return the religion to its original purity.
Well, here, I think we need to be more nuanced in our analysis, first as to the number of people attracted and secondly as to other causes operating.
I don’t know what it is but people here seem to suspect my motives whenever I try to say something helpful.
I make no claims as to the number of people attracted or the operative causes. My only point is, as I’m sure you agree, that ‘alienation’ is a movable feast that can be as easily generated by those with an interest in exploiting it as it can be inflicted by a heartless society.
You’re being too sensitive, Bismarck, I’m not suspecting your motives!
Yes, indeed, I do agree wholeheartedly. Although something does have to pave the way for the susceptibility to it, which is the nub of the question really.
Is it that difficult for people to comprehend how a suicide bomber, even if a trained doctor, might think that their actions could contribute to saving lives (i.e. result in a pullout of British forces from Iraq)?
After all, we participated in an invasion which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands but was motivated from a desire to “save” the lives of Iraqis.
It still begs the question of why nonviolent means aren’t used to contribute to saving lives in that sense, NicM, particularly since in democracies, they’re guarenteed (or should be) to citizens seeking to influence policy.
Mandatory rider: I’m not trying to justify their actions, only comprehend them.
Mark, perhaps they felt they had exhausted those non-violent means. Maybe they had participated in the antiwar marches, signed the petitions, lobbied their local MP and voted green in the last election. Still the war continues. And as doctors, they may have been well aware of the Lancet studies with the massive estimates of deaths.
I know that when I participated in the large anti-war marches in Aus, which were then dismissed out of hand by the government, I definitely felt alienated from the decision making processes of government. Especially as the opposition supported the invasion as well. Of course it didn’t cross my mind to blow myself and others up, but then it wasn’t my family and friends in Iraq.
NicM, this bloke, who from the sounds of it is a jihadi David Greason (I Was A Teenage Fascist) argues that Iraq and Afghanistan are irrelevant.
NicM the problem with your approach is that you are transferring your feelings and your logic onto the terrorists. They will have their own motivations and rationale for their behaviour. The one thing you can be sure of is that it will not be the same as yours. FdG has provided one link that argues that British engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan is not a motivator of their actions.
Here are two further links that argue the same point:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/asim_siddiqui/2007/07/not_in_our_name.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,22005648-7583,00.html
GregM, there’s more by Tanveer Ahmed on Hassan Butt here, in an interview done well before any conversion of Butt away from fundamental fanaticism.
I think the most interesting thing about all of the accounts is how important everybody stresses the role of personal contact with fellow travellers is. Butt claims not to have been influenced to fundamentalism by anyone at the mosque/masjid, but by fellow worshippers with whom he got in contact outside the official spaces and times of religion. To read between the lines—recruiters met people through religious practice that involved shallow attachment, in order to create smaller groups with very strong attachment.
That is *classic* cult behaviour.
Here is another article that addresses the issue.
It may be challenging to those who look for the easy answers.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/academicexperts/story/0,,2116732,00.html
Well, I’ll have my simple-answer say on the education.guardian article, GregM: the phenomena described as ‘multiculturalism’ in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Canada which is Sniderman’s background, and for that matter in Australia, which is ours, are generally incomparable to each other. All multiculturalisms relate to the specifics of dealing with difference in terms of public policy, which is a function of how the State is configured, which necessarily changes State to State. As he concedes, the education system in Holland is totally, universally different to that of the UK. Well, yes. Every nation’s State serves a slightly different cultural function.
He’s probably got a point about prejudice and easy, do-nothing, let-it-be ‘tolerance’, but one that means nothing towards understanding ‘multiculturalism’ anywhere else in the world.
“the phenomena described as ‘multiculturalism’ in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Canada… are generally incomparable to each other. All multiculturalisms… necessarily [change] State to State.”
Yes-indeedily, they certainly do.
EUROPEAN UNION: Well, well, after finally temporarily settling our own two thousand years of violent blood-soaked inter-ethnic political and religious quarrels, why don’t we invite in millions and millions and millions of totally new ethnic and religious types, many of whom have only been trying to kill us for only about one thousand years. What could possibly go wrong? After all, weren’t we correct about every single political guess we took during the twentieth century?
CANADA: Oh, I’m sure all these Turks and Jamaicans and Chinese have nothing but the best interests of Canada at heart. Who cares if we’ve never tried this before, let’s just roll the dice and hope it goes great. And if anything goes wrong, the United States will bail us out, right?
UNITED STATES: Que? Que? Se habla solamente espanol…
T’ANG DYNASTY CHINA: Oh, I’m sure we can trust having all these Turks in the army. What could possibly go wrong? An Lu-shan? Never heard of the bum. (ONE GREAT CIVILIZATION IN SMOKING RUINS LATER) Okay okay, so maybe that didn’t work out so great. But I’m sure these here Manchu fellas have only the best interests of China in mind…
ROMAN EMPIRE: We don’t have to serve in the army anymore. Thanks to multiculturalism, these Goths will protect us. Why, I’ve spoken with their king personally, and he’s given me his word that he won’t ever pillage Rome again. This week. I think.
So, JZP, what would you recommend instead? Isolationism? Racial purity and segregation? Brutal suppression of all traces of former national identity in the country of adoption? A world hierarchy of nations, or of races? Every country refusing to accept any of the stateless, the desperate, the terrified and the otherwise-doomed (and its corollary as recently seen off these our own fair shores, the justification of such a refusal by deliberate
rat-bare-faced lying about what they did to their children)?What would you have said to Jewish refugees desperate for asylum in 1938?
What’s your vision of a good world, in 2007?
PC is correct.
Not only is it immoral to attempt to isolate one’s self from the problems of the culturally and ethnically diverse world, it’s also impossible.
Need I remind readers that the bloodiest and most enduring of European cultural genocides was entirely internally generated? I am referrring, of course, to the Reformation and its ramifications. (One may argue that the problem started with the importation of some strange Middle Eastern religious doctrines beginning in the 1st century AD.)
Our lifestyles are impossible without globalisation. If you don’t like it, then check out some alternatives in Burma and North Korea.
There are lots of different folks around the world. We want to buy their stuff. We want t