Theatre explores radicalisation
TheBelieversAreButBrothers.
he had anticipated. “As a man who’s from a Shia background, who doesn’t really practice,” Alipoor said, he “couldn’t really get anywhere trying to talk to young women who joined a violent Sunni extremist group”. So instead he decided to make the show about the radicalisation of young men.
Though surrounded by technological dazzle and eye-popping facts and figures, the heart of The Believers Are but Brothers is three stories based on real case studies. Two concern young British Muslim men.
The first is Atif, lured away from a humdrum coastal town by Islamic State’s heart-pounding recruitment videos. Upon arrival in Syria, he is deemed unfit to fight, and is essentially made to work in tech support. The second concerns Marwan, who is haunted by videos of suffering Syrian children. He goes to Syria and joins a nonIslamic State militant group there, but runs into deep trouble with the British government when he returns.
Finally, there’s Ethan, a rightwing white American character based on the writings of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014.
Alipoor said that some young people who leaned to the alt-right had been offended at the conflation of their beliefs with radical Islam and had demanded that Alipoor debate the matter with them on Reddit. (He declined.)
Alipoor said The Believers is not about ideology, but about technology and its effect on masculinity. The characters are all frustrated men who can briefly make sense of their dismal, unrewarding lives via fantasies accessed through their screens. What they believe and how sincerely they believe it is irrelevant. The medium is the message.
There is no hard evidence that social media has led to an uptick in radicalisation, said Ketan Alder of Lancaster University, a specialist in media, religion and politics who acted as a consultant in the show’s early stages.
“I don’t think there’s anything that could possibly demonstrate that there’s a quantifiable link between recruitment and the videos,” he said in an interview, in which he argued that many of the web radicals who made this propaganda were trying to convince themselves as much as others. “If you look at Islamic State activist videos, it’s not just about recruiting in the West, it’s about the activists proving to themselves that they are men.”
The Believers Are but Brothers is in essence about toxic masculinity in the internet age. But it documents it rather than explains it, and refuses to be drawn into pat explanations or false empathy. All the characters come from comfortable enough backgrounds. None of them have to do what they do. But doing it is made easier by the device that whirs away in the audience’s pockets throughout the show.