Why Do Western People Join Terrorist Movements Like ISIS (Islamic State/Daesh)?
He Islamist State has recently published another horrible video in which a new beheading is seen, once again perpetuated by a jihadist with Western roots. As often happens, I have received messages asking for an explanation.
Twenty years ago I left my Catholic high school in upstate New York to study at a Saudi-funded madrassa in Pakistan. As I recently said, I had the opportunity to live in a mosque and study the Koran all day
This happened in the mid-1990s, during the escalation of violence between Chechen resistance militants and Russian military forces. After class, we turned on the television and watched broadcasts full of suffering and pain. The videos were terrible. So terrible that I soon found myself thinking about abandoning my religious upbringing to pick up a gun and fight for the freedom of Chechnya.
It was not a verse that I read in our Quran study circles that gave birth to the desire to fight in me, but my American values. I had grown up in the Reagan eighties. I learned from the GI Joe cartoons to (according to the lyrics of its theme song) “fight for freedom, wherever it is in danger.” I adopted the idea that individuals have the right – and the duty – to intervene anywhere on the planet where threats to freedom, justice or equality are perceived.
For me, the fact of wanting to go to Chechnya was not reducible to my condition as a Muslim or “hatred of everything Western.” This may be hard to believe, but I thought of war in terms of compassion. Like many Americans who join the military out of love for their country, I longed to fight oppression and protect the safety and dignity of others She thought this world looked bad. I put my faith in somehow magical solutions and claimed that the world could be fixed through a renewal of authentic Islam and a truly Islamic system of government. But I also believed that the fight for justice had more value than my own life.
Finally, I decided to stay in Islamabad
And the people who managed to convince me not to go to fight were not the type of Muslims who can be labeled by the media as liberals, Western-friendly reformists and so on. They were deeply conservative, some would call them “intolerant.” In the same learning environment in which I was taught that my mother, because she was not Muslim, would burn eternally in hell, I was also taught that I would contribute more good to the world as a student than as a soldier, and that I had to fight to be more than a body in a ditch. These traditionalists reminded me of Muhammad’s quote about how the ink of schoolchildren is more sacred than the blood of martyrs.
The media often draws a clear line separating our categories of “good” and “bad” Muslims. My brothers in Pakistan would have made that division much more complicated than many can imagine. These men, whom I regarded as pious superheroes, speaking to me as the legitimate voice of tradition itself, said that violence was not the best I had to offer.
Some kids in my situation seem to have gotten very different advice.
It’s easy to assume that religious people, particularly Muslims, simply do things because their religions demand it. But when I think about the impulse I had as a 17-year-old about going far away and becoming a fighter for the cause of the Chechen rebels, I consider more than just religious factors. My imagined scenario about liberating Chechnya and turning the country into an Islamic State was a purely American fantasy, based on American values and ideals. When I hear news about Americans flying across the planet to engage in struggles for freedom that are not their own, I think “what an American action.”
And that is the problem
We are raised to love violence and see military conquest as a benevolent act The American boy who wants to intervene in another nation’s civil war owes his worldview as much to American idiosyncrasy as it does to fundamentalist interpretations of scripture.
I grew up in a country that glorifies military sacrifice and is empowered to rebuild other societies according to its own point of view. I internalized these values before even thinking about religion. Before I even knew what a Muslim was, much less concepts like “jihad” or “Islamic State,” my American life had taught me that this is what brave people do.
