by KENAN MALIK
Eva Birthistle (left) and Atta Yaqub in Ken Loach’s 2004 film Ae Fond Kiss PHOTO/Film 4
What it is that draws thousands of young Europeans to jihadism and violence? What is it that has led 4000 to travel to Syria to fight for the so-called Islamic State? And what is it that leads European citizens to engage in such barbarous carnage such as that we witnessed last month in Paris?
The conventional answer is that they have become ‘radicalized’, a process through which vulnerable Muslims are groomed for extremist violence by those who champion hate. The radicalization argument consists of four broad elements. The first is the claim that people become terrorists because they acquire certain, usually religiously informed, extremist ideas. The second is that these ideas are acquired in a different way to that in which people acquire other extremist or oppositional ideas. The third is that there is a conveyor belt that leads from grievance, to religiosity, to the adoption of radical beliefs, to terrorism. And the fourth is the insistence that what makes people vulnerable to acquiring such ideas is that they are poorly integrated into society.
The trouble is that these assumptions, which underlie much of Europe’s domestic counterterrorism policy, are wrong. Many studies show, for instance, that those who are drawn to jihadist groups are not necessarily attracted by fundamentalist religious ideas. A 2008 study by Britain’s MI5 on extremism that was leaked to the press observed that ‘far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practice their faith regularly’.
There is also little evidence that jihadists acquire their ideas differently from other kinds of groups. Jamie Bartlett, head of the Violence and Extremism program at the British think tank Demos, such terrorism ‘shares much in common with other counter-cultural, subversive groups of predominantly angry young men’.
Nor is there any evidence of a straight path leading people from radical ideas to jihadist violence. A 2010 British government report concluded that the conveyor belt thesis ‘seems to both misread the radicalization process and to give undue weight to ideological factors’.
And finally, there is much evidence that those who join jihadi groups are anything but poorly integrated, at least in the conventional sense of integration. A survey of British jihadists by researchers at Queen Mary College in London found that support for jihadism is unrelated to social inequality or poor education; rather, those drawn to jihadist groups were 18- to 20-year-olds from wealthy families who spoke English at home and were educated to a high, often university, level. In fact, ‘youth, wealth, and being in education’, as the study put it, ‘were risk factors’.
In a sense, the radicalization argument looks at the jihadists’ journey from back to front. It begins with the jihadists as they are at the end of their journey – enraged about the West, and with a back and white view of Islam – and assumes that these are the reasons they have come to be as they are. What draws young people (and the majority of would-be jihadis are in the teens or in their twenties) to jihadi violence is a search for something a lot less definable: for identity, for meaning, for belongingness, for respect. Insofar as they are alienated, it is not because wannabe jihadis are poorly integrated, in the sense of not speaking the local language or being unaware of local customs or having little interaction with others in the society. Theirs is a much more existential form of alienation.
There is, of course, nothing new in expressions of alienation and angst. The youthful search for identity and meaning is cliché. What is different today is the social context in which such alienation and searching occurs. We live in an age of growing social disintegration, in which many people feel peculiarly disengaged from mainstream social institutions.
Pandaemonium for more
via 3 Quarks Daily