It is difficult to forget the names,
or the images, of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning
and Peter Kassig. The barbaric beheadings between August and November 2014, in
cold blood and on camera, of these five jumpsuit-clad western hostages by the
self-styled Islamic State, or Isis, provoked widespread outrage and condemnation.
However, we should also remember the
name of Didier François, a French journalist who was held by Isis in Syria for
ten months before being released in April 2014. François has since given us a
rare insight into life inside what the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood, in a recent report for the magazine, has called the “hermit kingdom” of Isis, where “few have
gone . . . and returned”. And it is an insight that threatens to turn the
conventional wisdom about the world’s most fearsome terrorist organisation on
its head.
“There was never really discussion
about texts,” the French journalist told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last month,
referring to his captors. “It was not a religious discussion. It was a
political discussion.”
According to François, “It was more
hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Quran. Because it
has nothing to do with the Quran.” And the former hostage revealed to a
startled Amanpour: “We didn’t even have the Quran. They didn’t want even to
give us a Quran.”
The rise of Isis in Iraq and Syria
has been a disaster for the public image of Islam – and a boon for the
Islamophobia industry. Here, after all, is a group that calls itself Islamic
State; that claims the support of Islamic texts to justify its medieval
punishments, from the stoning of adulterers to the amputation of the hands of
thieves; and that has a leader with a PhD in Islamic studies who declares
himself to be a “caliph”, or ruler over all Muslims, and has even renamed
himself in honour of the first Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr.
The consequences are, perhaps, as
expected. In September 2014, a Zogby poll found that only 27 per cent of
Americans had a favourable view of Islam – down from 35 per cent in 2010. By
February 2015, more than a quarter of Americans (27 per cent) were telling the
pollsters LifeWay Research that they believed that life under Isis rule “gives
a true indication of what an Islamic society looks like”.
Yet what is much more worrying is
that it isn’t just ill-informed, ignorant or bigoted members of the public who
take such a view. “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very
Islamic,” wrote Wood in his widely read 10,000-word cover report (“What Isis
really wants”) in the March issue of Atlantic, in which he argued, “The
religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even
learned interpretations of Islam.”
Bernard Haykel of Princeton
University, the only scholar of Islam whom Wood bothered to interview,
described Muslims who considered Isis to be un-Islamic, or anti-Islamic, as
“embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own
religion”, and declared that the hand-choppers and throat-slitters of Isis
“have just as much legitimacy” as any other Muslims, because Islam is “what
Muslims do and how they interpret their texts”.
Many other analysts across the
political spectrum agree and have denounced the Obama administration for
refusing, in the words of the journalist-turned-terrorism-expert Peter Bergen,
to make “the connection between Islamist terrorism and ultra-fundamentalist
forms of Islam”. Writing on the CNN website in February, Bergen declared, “Isis
may be a perversion of Islam, but Islamic it is.”
“Will it take the end of the world
for Obama to recognise Isis as ‘Islamic’?” screamed a headline on the Daily
Beast website in the same month. “Which will come first, flying cars and
vacations to Mars, or a simple acknowledgment that beliefs guide behaviour and
that certain religious ideas – jihad, martyrdom, blasphemy, apostasy – reliably
lead to oppression and murder?” asked Sam Harris, the neuroscientist and high
priest of the “New Atheism” movement.
So, is Isis a recognisably “Islamic”
movement? Are Isis recruits motivated by religious fervour and faith?
The
Analyst
“Our exploration of the intuitive
psychologist’s shortcomings must start with his general tendency to
overestimate the importance of personal or dispositional factors relative to environmental
influences,” wrote the American social anthropologist Lee Ross in 1977.
It was Ross who coined the phrase
“fundamental attribution error”, which refers to the phenomenon in which we
place excessive emphasis on internal motivations to explain the behaviour of
others, in any given situation, rather than considering the relevant external
factors.
Nowhere is the fundamental
attribution error more prevalent, suggests the forensic psychiatrist Marc
Sageman, than in our navel-gazing analysis of wannabe terrorists and what does
or doesn’t motivate them. “You attribute other people’s behaviour to internal
motivations but your own to circumstances. ‘They’re attacking us and therefore
we have to attack them.’” Yet, he tells me, we rarely do the reverse.
Few experts have done more to try to
understand the mindset of the young men and women who aspire to join the
blood-drenched ranks of groups such as Isis and al-Qaeda than Sageman. And
few can match his qualifications, credentials or background. The 61-year-old,
Polish-born psychiatrist and academic is a former CIA operations officer who
was based in Pakistan in the late 1980s. There he worked closely with the
Afghan mujahedin. He has since advised the New York City Police Department on
counterterrorism issues, testified in front of the 9/11 Commission in
Washington, DC, and, in his acclaimed works Understanding Terror Networks
and Leaderless Jihad, closely analysed the biographies of several
hundred terrorists.
Does he see religion as a useful
analytical prism through which to view the rise of Isis and the process by
which thousands of young people arrive in Syria and Iraq, ready to fight and
die for the group?
“Religion has a role but it is a
role of justification,” he tells me. “It’s not why they do this [or] why young
people go there.”
Isis members, he says, are using
religion to advance a political vision, rather than using politics to advance a
religious vision. “To give themselves a bit more legitimacy, they use Islam as
their justification. It’s not about religion, it’s about identity . . . You
identify with the victims, [with] the guys being killed by your enemies.”
For converts to Islam in particular,
he adds, “Identity is important to them. They have . . . invested a lot of
their own efforts and identity to become this ‘Muslim’ and, because of this,
identity is so important to them. They see other Muslims being slaughtered [and
say], ‘I need to protect my community.’” (A recent study found that converts to
Islam were involved in 31 per cent of Muslim terrorism convictions in the UK
between 2001 and 2010.)
Sageman believes that it isn’t
religious faith but, rather, a “sense of emotional and moral outrage” at what
they see on their television screens or on YouTube that propels people
from Portsmouth to Peshawar, from Berlin to Beirut, to head for war zones and
to sign up for the so-called jihad. Today, he notes archly, “Orwell would
be [considered as foreign fighter like] a jihadi,” referring to the writer’s
involvement in the anti-fascist campaign during the Spanish civil war.
Religion, according to this view,
plays a role not as a driver of behaviour but as a vehicle for outrage and,
crucially, a marker of identity. Religion is important in the sense that it
happens to “define your identity”, Sageman says, and not because you are “more
pious than anybody else”. He invokes the political scientist Benedict
Anderson’s conception of a nation state as an “imagined political community”,
arguing that the “imagined community of Muslims” is what drives the terrorists,
the allure of being members of – and defenders of – the ultimate “in-group”.
“You don’t have the most religious
folks going there,” he points out. Isis fighters from the west, in particular,
“tend to have rediscovered Islam as teenagers, or as converts”; they are angry,
or even bored, young men in search of a call to arms and a thrilling cause. The
Isis executioner Mohammed Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John” – who was raised
and educated in the UK – was described, for instance, by two British medics who
met him at a Syrian hospital as “quiet but a bit of an adrenalin junkie”.
Sageman’s viewpoint should not
really surprise us. Writing in his 2011 book The Black Banners: the Inside
Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, the Lebanese-American former FBI
agent Ali H Soufan, who led the bureau’s pre-9/11 investigation into al-Qaeda,
observed: “When I first began interrogating al-Qaeda members, I found that
while they could quote Bin Laden’s sayings by heart, I knew far more of the
Quran than they did – and in fact some barely knew classical Arabic, the
language of both the hadith and the Quran. An understanding of their
thought process and the limits of their knowledge enabled me and my colleagues
to use their claimed piousness against them.”
Three years earlier, in 2008, a
classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by MI5’s behavioural
science unit, was obtained by the Guardian. It revealed: “Far from being
religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not
practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be
regarded as religious novices.” The MI5 analysts noted the disproportionate
number of converts and the high propensity for “drug-taking, drinking alcohol
and visiting prostitutes”. The newspaper claimed they concluded, “A
well-established religious identity actually protects against violent
radicalisation.”
As I have pointed out on these pages
before, Mohammed Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar, the two young British Muslim men from
Birmingham who were convicted on terrorism charges in 2014 after travelling to
fight in Syria, bought copies of Islam for Dummies and The Koran for
Dummies from Amazon prior to their departure. Religious novices, indeed.
Sageman, the former CIA officer,
says we have to locate terrorism and extremism in local conflicts rather than
in grand or sweeping ideological narratives – the grievances and the anger come
first, he argues, followed by the convenient and self-serving ideological
justifications. For example, he says, the origins of Isis as a terror group lie
not in this or that Islamic book or school of thought, but in the “slaughter of
Sunnis in Iraq”. He reminds me how, in April 2013, when there was a peaceful
Sunni demonstration asking the Shia-led Maliki government in Baghdad to
reapportion to the various provinces what the government was getting in oil
revenues, Iraqi security forces shot into the crowds. “That was the start of
this [current] insurrection.”
Before that, it was the brutal,
US-led occupation, under which Iraq became ground zero for suicide bombers from
across the region and spurred the creation of new terrorist organisations,
such as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
Isis is the “remnant” of AQI,
Sageman adds. He believes that any analysis of the group and of the ongoing violence
and chaos in Iraq that doesn’t take into account the long period of war,
torture, occupation and sectarian cleansing is inadequate – and a convenient
way of exonerating the west
of any responsibility. “Without the invasion of Iraq, [Isis] would not exist.
We created it by our presence there.”
