You know the dream you have, where you’re up in front of heaps of people and suddenly you realize you’re in your underwear? Or there’s Homer Simpson, imagining the audience in their underwear, only to look down to see that he’s fantasized himself into his underwear too. Then Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab went and put a bomb in his underwear. Underwear will never be as embarrassing again.
After years of apparent calm, terrorism is again an immediate and serious threat on American soil. To stay this threat, we must better understand where its beginnings lie, from where it draws its strengths, and finally, and most importantly, what causes its decline. In this spirit, I submit three points which, in interaction, may create the conditions for the radicalization of young Muslim men. (But that’s no guarantee: We have to leave space for free will, personal circumstance, and a host of other variables.)
The first point: radicalism is most likely to emerge from zones of overlap. By this I mean the people, places or other contexts where Western and Islamic perspectives come together in negative contrast. Say, the African Muslim student who travels to Europe to study, finding himself alienated by the lifestyle around him, the hateful comments about Islam in the public discourse and the undeniable pain of war and poverty in so many Muslim lands. Or the British Muslim who’s angry at his government’s foreign policy and tired of not being considered part of his country. (No wonder the pining for future Caliphates: it’s somewhere one’s passport might imply belonging.)
The second point: these material contrasts between Muslim-majority and Western societies are real, in many places accelerating, and cannot be wished away by zeroing in on a specific individual or blaming an abstract cultural difference. Colonialism happened. But it’s not poverty so much as the awareness of it, not the impoverished circumstances so much as the narrative framework within which material disparities are experienced and processed, that lead into radicalization. The radicals have narratives that explain reality in attractively absolutist ways, placing blame wholly on the West or wholly on insufficiently prayerful Muslims. These narratives create impossible—even soul-crushing—demands of the self and society, in such contradiction to reality that they can only be resolved through spectacular violence.
The third: the great divisions across Islam, the intellectual and actual battles for hearts and minds, are also the great unity of the modern Muslim world. The radical narrative is a symptom of a larger disagreement within the Muslim world, a fracture whose primary cause is the absence of consensus on the moral responsibility of the individual in modernity and the relationships between individuals and their societies. (Muslim political thought hasn’t said enough about the need to check, as opposed to capture, state power.) The disagreement keeps Muslim states—a number of them egregious human rights violators, some supported by the West (i.e., Uzbekistan)—unstable and materially inferior, a feedback loop in the radicals’ favor.
Together, these three points imply a fledgling theory: radical terrorism will threaten us so long as 1) “the great divergence”—to borrow Kenneth Pomeranz’s term—exists between Islam and the West, 2) it is processed through absolutist narratives to be solely the fault of the West or the moral failure of Muslims (both populations then become legitimate targets), and 3) the profound disagreements over self and society produce schizophrenia in young Muslim men and paralysis in Muslim societies.
Umar vs. Umar
In his online postings, Abdulmutallab reported confusion over what he considered contradictory priorities. (A topic I have explored in my first novel, an imagining of the sympathetic pains and nostalgic fury that lights a path to Muslim militancy.) Studying Arabic in Yemen, he was excited by the availability of fast food like KFC, but concerned, I suspect, as to why he so cared.
He was also attracted to women, but unsure how to square his lust with the piety he aspired to. His loneliness surprises us for its adolescent rawness: a sexually frustrated teenager, a rich kid idealizing a severe piety, and all the while unsure how to unite himself. It was the radical narrative that created the fiction of incompatible life choices, between wealthy and westernized or an inflexible religious ideal, which appeared to break Umar and push him down the bomb-in-his-underwear path.
A materialist bias would like us to believe that human flourishing negates the baser aspects of the self, an assumption undermined by someone such as Saddam Hussein, who despite his wealth was still a predator upon his people. People who are deeply mired in poverty can be attracted to extremist causes, and can and do commit acts of terror. But the founding leaders of al-Qaeda, and those who would attack us within Western territories, are generally well-educated and well-off citizens from the non-West, persons who are themselves zones of overlap. We hear the struggle in Abdulmutallab’s words. It’s not that poverty doesn’t move them, but more correctly it is an interpretation of poverty that radicalizes (and is itself radical).
Tags: bomber, islam, nigeria, radical islam, terrorism
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