The Jihadi state of mind Without real prospects for social progress, modern nations will only become more vulnerable to random acts of violence by deranged misfits, writes Kenan Malik
ICOME from Manchester. I went to school there; I attended countless music gigs in the city. I have a teenage daughter who is just beginning to attend gigs herself.
So, of all the terror attacks of recent years, the suicide bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on Monday night, a concert filled largely with teenage fans, cut to my heart in a particularly distressing way. Many parents must be feeling the same.
Every terror attack is barbarous. To set out deliberately to inflict mass murder upon a group of children is truly unconscionable. The Islamic State statement claiming responsibility for the attack boasted of “placing explosive devices in the midst of the gatherings of Crusaders.” It would seem surreally absurd were it not so painfully raw.
Terrorist groups in the past, such as the Irish Republican Army, which bombed Manchester’s main shopping centre in 1996, used terror as a means to a political end. Not so with today’s jihadists. For them, terror is an end in itself, whose sole aim is to inflict pain and instil fear. What else was the Manchester attack?
I have written before about the increasingly blurred lines between ideological violence and sociopathic rage.
There is now what we might call a “jihadi state of mind”, in which some mixture of social disengagement, moral dissolution,misanthropy and inchoate rage drives some to see the most abhorrent expressions of violence as a kind of revolt.
It is a state of mind that finds its most vicious, barbaric form in Islamist terror. But it’s not only in Islamist terror that it finds expression.
Earlier this month, a 20-yearold Briton named Damon Smith was found guilty of planting a homemade bomb filled with ball bearings on a London Underground train. Police discovered in his flat shredded pages of an article from the al Qaeda-linked magazine Inspire, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” Yet there was nothing to connect Smith to any extremist network.
He did not think of himself as Muslim and had been inside a mosque only as a tourist in Turkey. He suffered from behavioural problems and reportedly had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Bombs were “something to do when he was bored,” a psychiatrist wrote in his evaluation of Smith.
Damon Smith was not a jihadist in any conventional sense, but he inhabited this jihadi state of mind.
So did the white nationalist, Dylann Roof, who shot dead nine African-american worshipers in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. According to a recently published psychiatric report ordered by the court, “The best way he has found to explain his thinking is the analogy of his being a jihadist.”
We need not just confront jihadism in the narrow sense of preventing acts of terror, but also tackle in a broader fashion the jihadi state of mind. Its causes are deep and complex.
The moral firewalls against inhuman behaviour have weakened. The influence of civil society institutions that help create social bonds, from churches to labour unions, has eroded. So has that of the progressive movements that used to give social grievance a political form.
Cracks now exist in which are spawned angry individuals, inhabiting a space beyond normal moral boundaries. There, they may find in Islamism or white nationalism the salve for their demons and a warped vindication for their actions.
We need to think more deeply, too, about our immediate responses to acts of terror.
Terrorism is a form of theatre. Particularly for contemporary Islamist terror, what matters is the spectacle. The more depraved that spectacle, the more it achieves its aim.
Murder someone on a Manchester street and it makes the local press. Slaughter two dozen people at a concert for teenagers in the name of Allah and it becomes worldwide news.
Bomb a military base, and the shock wears off quickly. Attack a school or playground and it seems to shred the very idea of safety and innocence.
Terrorism is about capturing public attention and manipulating our emotions. When TV stations run an endless loop of videos of panicked people, anguished parents and distraught children, they create the very spectacle that terrorists crave.
There comes to be complicity between terrorism and its audience. This is one thing President Trump understands.
“I won’t call them monsters, because they would like that term,” he said this week. He would call them instead “evil losers”.
The most heartwarming response, as it generally is in tragic circumstances, came from local people in Manchester. Ordinary people performing very human deeds that wove into a tapestry of solidarity. The medics who rushed to the scene. The taxi drivers who ferried people free. The residents opening their homes to anyone needing shelter. The tens of thousands that took to the city centre the day after the atrocity to hold a vigil.
Yet after every terrorist outrage there are acts of solidarity and candlelit ceremonies. There will be after the next atrocity. The danger is these become congealed into mere rituals.
There is inevitably anger, as well as love and grief. That is no bad thing. I feel angry, too. But as we see with terrorism itself, anger unchannelled, anger not given shape by mechanisms for progress, can all too easily become blindly sectarian and dangerously misanthropic.
The challenge we face is to rebuild organisations of civil society and movements for social change that cannot only pierce the jihadi state of mind, but also channel the grief, love and anger about terrorism into political hope. – The New York Times Malik is a contributing opinion writer.