Jihadist ‘evils’ a product of times
Geopolitical landscape in which Islamists operate offers clues to barbarism behind their assaults on West
The day before the Paris carnage, two suicide bombers killed at least 40 people in a Shia district of Beirut. The week after, two suicide bombings in Nigeria killed 49 people. Faced with such atrocities, we can often do little but reach for adjectives such as “barbarous”, “depraved” — even “evil”. But what is it that makes people act in such depraved, evil ways?
Marc Sageman, once a CIA case officer in Afghanistan, now an academic and counterterrorism consultant, says about today’s jihadis: “It’s comforting to believe that these guys are different from us, because what they do is so evil. Unfortunately, they aren’t that different.”
But how are people “who aren’t that different” from you and me able to commit the most brutal of mass murders? When we talk of an act as depraved or evil, we are not merely describing something particularly abhorrent. We are making a claim about the boundaries of morality itself.
What makes the actions of jihadis so inexplicable is that they seem to take place beyond the moral universe most of us inhabit.
The vast majority of Muslims abhor the actions of Isis (Islamic State). And from Buddhist monks in Burma organising anti-Muslim pogroms to Dylann Roof shooting worshippers in a Charleston church, inhumanity is widespread in the non-Muslim world too.
To understand why jihadis have been drawn into a moral universe that allows them to celebrate inhuman acts, we have to understand why political rage against the West takes such nihilistic, barbaric forms, and why radical Islam has become the primary vehicle for such rage. Jihadis view themselves as warriors against Western imperialism. Yet few antiimperialists of previous generations would recognise jihadis as ideological kin.
Over the past few decades these anti-imperialist traditions have unravelled. The new movements that have emerged in their place are often rooted in religious or ethnic identity, and are sectarian or separatist in form. This shift is linked to the wider decline of progressive social movements, the loss of faith in universalist values, and the replacement of ideological politics with the politics of identity. Moral norms have increasingly become tribal rather than universal. Political struggle for a better world has given way to identity-driven rage. Why has radical Islam become the lightning rod for such rage? In part because of the conditions that have allowed Islamism to flourish; and in part because of the nature of fundamentalist faith in an age in which political ideals have eroded. The failure of secular regimes in Muslimmajority countries, and their degeneration into brutal authoritarianism, has led many to associate secularism with repression, giving greater credibility to Islamist opposition. The cynicism of the West in backing authoritarian regimes when it suited them has inflamed antiWestern passions. Misguided military interventions have helped destroy civil society, creating the space for Islamists to flourish, while also stoking hostility towards the West.
If the actions of local rulers and the consequences of Western action have helped create one kind of void that Islamism has filled, the retreat of progressive politics has created another. The demise of traditional opposition movements has led many to look for alternative forms of struggle, and created a yearning for God-given moral lines. The illusion of divine sanction has allowed jihadis to justify their acts, however grotesque they may be.
Jihadis imagine that they are waging war against the West. But the West has become, in their eyes, not a set of specific nations but an almost mythical, allencompassing monster, the source of all manner of horror. And against such a monster, almost any act becomes “acceptable”. Shorn of the moral framework that once guided anti-imperialists, shaped by black-and-white values that in their mind possess divine approval, driven by a sense of rage about non-Muslims and a belief in an existential struggle between Islam and the West, jihadis have come to inhabit a different moral universe, in which they are to commit the most inhuman of acts and view them as righteous.
None of this is to “excuse” jihadis, or their actions. It is to suggest that the “evil” expressed in the kind of terror visited on Paris, Beirut, Nigeria and Mali is not merely some eternal aspect of human nature, but the product of our times.