The mass killers next door

Maybe the question we should ask is not why the couple in San Bernardino did what it did, but rather why so many are gravitating to Daesh

Here’s a 28-year-old son of immigrants, born and raised in the United States, a working stiff, a husband and a father, who graduated college with a degree in Environmental Science, and now holds a job at a government agency in San Bernardino, California, that pays him well over $70,000 a year (Dh257,460), not a mean salary in today’s job market for a millennial in his 20s.

Here’s a man, you say, with a bright future, a beneficiary of all the rewards that the “American Dream” bestows on those firstgeneration immigrants diligent enough, and smart enough, to pursue it. Yet, he gets up one morning, hops in his car, drops his toddler at his mother’s house and, with his wife sitting next to him, drives to his place of employment where he massacres 14 of his colleagues and injures more than 20 others. Then the couple engage the police in a shootout where they are both killed.

Why did they do it? And what possible cause, if cause it was, were these two individuals promoting when they slaughtered 14 people mingling at an office Christmas party?

These were not two unhinged folks with a screw loose here and there. In fact, not only were Syed Farook and Tasfeen Malek, the husband-and-wife team behind the San Bernardino killings, two seemingly educated, rational and, to fall back on Freudian terminology, “adjusted” individuals, in full control of their mental faculties, but it appears they had meticulously, not to mention callously, planned their assault months earlier.

Maybe the question we should raise is not why this couple did what they did, but rather why, like them, hundreds, indeed thousands, of young men and women have gravitated to Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and pledged allegiance to this reactionary and murderous group?

Muslims reject — forgive me, resent — how what we might call the “essentialism of Islam” somehow always insinuates itself into the public debate whenever and wherever killers who happen to be Muslim commit an atrocity, as if Islam is to be held accountable for every act of violence committed individually or collectively by people born to the Muslim faith. This would be as facile a posture as holding Christianity accountable, let’s say, for the excesses of the campaigns that went against Jesus’s pacifist doctrine of turning the other cheek.

Rather, we happen to be living at a time when young Muslims are alienated from their objective reality — their dreams unrealised, their ambitions impeded and their spiritual needs unfulfilled. They yearn for what Ibn Khaldun called “assabiya”, that social and cultural elan that at one time in history had defined our civilisational core. The lashing out by these lost souls, who glory in being Daesh Caliphniks, is not propelled by Islam, but by the craving to belong to a muscular social ideology that is able to present itself as a source both of identity and power. Consider how, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, hundreds, indeed thousands, of young men and women from the Euro-American world flocked to Russia to be part of the Eden of the classless society; and to Spain between 1936 and 1939 to be part of the Civil War— only to bemoan it later.

Or maybe we do not have the answer because we are asking the wrong question. But certainly, and most decidedly, the answer we seek will not be given by the likes of Donald Trump or worse (yes, worse) Jeb Bush, who recently proclaimed, with oracular profundity, on Fox: “There are no radical Christians that are organising to destroy western civilisation. There are no radical Buddhists that are doing this. This is radical Islamic terrorism.” And so it goes.