Daily Star (Beirut) - February 5, 2004
Explaining the addiction to jihad By Jessica Stern
Why do religious terrorists kill? I have been asking them and their supporters this question for the last five years. My interviews suggest people join religious terrorist groups in the belief that they can make the world a better place for the population they aim to "serve." But over time, terrorism can become a career as much as a passion. Leaders harness grievances, humiliation and anomie, turning them into weapons. Jihad becomes addictive. Violence turns activists and mystics into evil men. Grievances end up as greed - for money, political power, status or attention.
For the leaders, perpetuating the movement becomes a central goal. What starts as moral fervor becomes a sophisticated organization. Organizational survival demands flexibility, especially in terms of the mission. Terrorist organizations alter their missions in many ways. Some find a new mission when the old one is completed. Some broaden the mission to make it attractive to a wider variety of potential recruits. Some form alliances with other groups whose missions are different from their own; transform their missions into profit-driven enterprises whose principal goal is enrichment; or form strategic alliances with organized criminal groups. Some groups have sticky missions, but only the spry survive.
Osama bin Laden has changed his mission repeatedly. His first goal was to force Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. After achieving that goal (with help from the US, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others), he found himself with a band of warriors in search of a new holy war. He offered to help defend the Saudi kingdom after Iraq attacked Kuwait in 1990, but King Fahd turned instead to US troops. Bin Laden then began a new mission, articulated in a 1992 edict: to force US troops out of Saudi Arabia, the Horn of Africa and Somalia.
With each successive fatwa, bin Laden altered his mission. His third fatwa, issued in February 1998, urged followers for the first time to deliberately target American civilians, rather than soldiers. Although it mentioned the Palestinian struggle, this was only one among a litany of Muslim grievances. His fourth, in October 2001, emphasized Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands and the suffering of Iraqi children under UN sanctions - concerns broadly shared in the Islamic world. Bin Laden was actively seeking to turn the US "war on terrorism" into a war between Islam and the West. The Sept. 11, 2001, "events," he said, had split the world into two camps: the Islamic world and "infidels," and the time had come for "every Muslim to defend his religion." A mastermind of Sept. 11, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, would later describe violence as "the tax" Muslims must pay "for gaining authority on earth."
Individually, the terrorists I interviewed cited many reasons for choosing a life of holy war, and I came to despair of identifying a single root cause. But the variable that most frequently came up was not poverty or human rights abuses - as has been posited in the press - but perceived humiliation. Humiliation came up at every echelon of terrorist group members - leaders and followers.
For example, the founder and former leader of a Kashmiri group, the Muslim Jambaz Force, told me that the primary factor that led him to start the group was a sense of cultural humiliation. "Muslims have been overpowered by the West. Our ego hurts. We are not able to live up to our own standards for ourselves. It felt to me at the time I was involved in militancy like a personal loss," he said.
But the militant despaired at what had happened to the jihad movement, saying: "The first generation of fundamentalists - Qutb and Maududi - was focused on daawa - education. We focused on freedom. This generation is much more rigid, stricter, than my generation. They are focused on hate. Hate begets hate. You cannot create freedom out of hatred."
Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, observed that the "new world order" is a source of humiliation for Muslims. He has argued that it is better for the youth of Islam to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity than to submit to humiliation. Violence, in other words, restores the dignity of humiliated youth. This is similar to Franz Fanon's notion that violence is a "cleansing force," which frees oppressed youths from an "inferiority complex, despair and inaction," making them fearless and restoring their self-respect. Fanon also warned of the dangers of globalization for the underdeveloped world.
The purpose of terrorist violence, according to its advocates, is to restore dignity. Its target audience is not necessarily the victims and their sympathizers but the perpetrators and their sympathizers. Violence is a way of strengthening support for the organization and the movement it represents.
The terrorism we face today is a response not only to political grievances, as was common in the 1960s and 70s, and which might, in principle, be remediable. It is a response to the "God-shaped hole" in modern culture about which Sartre wrote, and to values like tolerance and equal rights for women that are supremely irritating to those who feel left behind by modernity. Extremists respond to the vacuity in human consciousness with anger and with ideas about who is to blame. In their view, arrogant one-worlders, humanists and promoters of human rights have created an engine of modernity that is stealing the identity of the oppressed. The greatest rage, and danger, comes from those who feel they can't keep up, even as they claim superiority over those who can.
The answer to the question: "Why do they hate us?" is not only envy, engendered by US military and economic might, but also American policies and, more importantly, how these are perceived by potential recruits to terrorist organizations. It is not just who they are (those who see themselves humiliated by globalization and the "new world order"), and not just who we are (an enviable hegemon) but also, in part, what we do. We station troops in restive regions, engendering popular resentment. We demand that other countries adhere to international law, but willfully weaken instruments we perceive as not advancing our needs. Despite our belated recognition that weak states may threaten us more than strong ones, we allow failed states to fester. There is, for example, a danger that we may have today created the preconditions for a failed state in Iraq.
The US needs to take into account the inevitable trade-offs in policymaking between domestic policy objectives, such as the desire for cheap oil, and long-term counterterrorism goals. In short, it needs to take into account how its policies play into the hands of its terrorist enemies, assisting them with mobilization.
The religious terrorists the US faces are fighting on every level - militarily, economically, psychologically and spiritually. Their arms are powerful, but spiritual dread is the most dangerous weapon in their arsenal. Perhaps the most evil aspect of religious terrorism is that it aims to destroy moral distinctions themselves. Its goal is to confuse not only its sympathizers, but also those who seek to fight it.
By the same token, the adversaries of terrorist groups need to respond not just with guns, but also by sowing confusion, conflict and competition among terrorists and between terrorists and their sponsors and sympathizers. They should encourage condemnation of extremist interpretations of religion by peace-loving practitioners. They should change policies that no longer serve their interests or are inconsistent with their values, even if these are policies the terrorists demand.
In the end, what counts is what we fight for, not what we oppose. We need to avoid giving into spiritual dread, and hold fast to the best of our principles and values by emphasizing tolerance, empathy and courage.
Jessica Stern is a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and author, most recently, of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (2003). She wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR