Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists Read Online Free PDF Page B

cause of the most advanced and sophisticated form of cultural cooperation ever created: the moral salvation of humanity. To understand the path to violent jihad is to understand how universal and elementary processes of human group formation have played out in history and have come to this point.
Like crusade, the word jihad has many nuanced and even contrary connotations. Thinkers I respect tell me that I shouldn’t use the word jihad because it’s a notion that, in the sense of an inner struggle for rightness and truth, applies to a vastly greater number of peaceful people than to terrorists, and that is true. In Rwanda, for example, jihad is taught as “the struggle to heal,” and people in that most Christian of African countries have been converting in droves to Islam because many Muslim leaders and families there are widely seen, rightly, as having saved thousands of non-Muslims from being massacred while churches, governments, and the United Nations turned their backs during the genocide of the 1990s. 10 But the terrorism that I will talk about is called jihad by the perpetrators themselves, the jihadis. Of that there is no doubt. We’ll see that the idea of violent jihad itself covers a range of commitments. At one end, there’s the strictly nationalist (wataniyah) jihad of Hamas, which rejects any aid or association involving Al Qaeda and its ilk in the struggle for a faith-based nation. At the other end, there’s a new wave of Qaeda wannabes, like the young train bombers of Madrid: the takfiri, Muslims who would “excommunicate” fellow Muslims as lackeys of the infidel and de facto apostates, and so justify killing them, along with the infidels, to save the Muslim community from conquest and corruption.
Anthropologically and psychologically, terrorists usually are not remarkably different from the rest of the population. There are a few cruel kooks and some very bright individuals who go in for violent jihad, but most terrorists fall in between. Small-group dynamics can trump individual personality to produce horrific behavior in ordinary people, not only in terrorists, but in those who fight them.
Although there are few similarities in personality profiles across jihadi groups, some general demographic and social tendencies exist: in age (usually early twenties), where they grew up and where they hang out (neighborhood is often key), in schooling (mostly nonreligious and often science oriented), in socioeconomic status (middle-class and married, though increasingly marginalized), in family relationships (friends tend to marry one another’s sisters and cousins). If you want to track a group, look to where one of its members eats or hangs out, in the neighborhood or on the Internet, and you’ll likely find the other members.
It is possible to empathize with jihadi warriors and believers without needing to sympathize or share their conviction. This makes field study with them possible. The main goal of such study isn’t to get you to feel or justify their sentiments, but to enable you to better appreciate the origins, character, and implications of these. If appreciation of them is faulty, then efforts to do something about them are likelier to fail.

THE CRASH OF CULTURES
     
Traditionally, politics and religion were closely connected to ethnicity and territory, and in more recent times to nations and cultural areas (or “civilizations”). 17 No longer. As French political scientist Olivier Roy astutely notes, religion and politics are becoming increasingly detached from their cultures of origin, not so much because of the movement of peoples (only about 3 percent of the world’s population migrates), 18 but through the worldwide traffic of media-friendly information and ideas. Thus, contrary to those who see global conflicts along long-standing “fault lines” and a “clash of civilizations,” 19 these conflicts represent a crisis, even collapse, of traditional territorial cultures, not their