Was Mohammed Emwazi ‘radicalised’? Or just a sick loser?
If the testimony of his former contemporaries is anything to go by, Mohammed Emwazi (aka “Jihadi John”) appears to have mistaken the state of his social life for the state of the world. According to a former head teacher, Emwazi was bullied at school and did not have many friends. Meanwhile a man called Abu Ayman who met him in Syria described his as a “cold loner” who showed an unusual degree of taciturnity and “wouldn’t join us in prayer”.
And so for all the arguments which put Islamist violence down as a “terrible indictment” of this or that aspect of Western policy, London Mayor Boris Johnson was probably closer to the mark when he described Jihadists as “porn-obsessed losers who can’t get girlfriends”.
Put another way, bitter and socially awkward virgins are often drawn to ideologies which seek to police women’s chastity and reap violent revenge on the society that has shunned them. Ideological creeds like the IS, which seek to turn women into sex slaves and cling to a cartoonish masculinity festooned with heavy weaponry and ultra-violence, come ready-made for the Mohammed Emwazis of the world.
This is why the media’s obsession with Emwazi’s supposed “radicalisation” is myopic. Based on no evidence at all it is inferred that if only we could locate Emwazi’s grievances (British foreign policy/the brutality of the security services etc) we might safely inoculate society against further outrages. “It is our fault,” as the solipsistic argument has it; we just have to find out why the Jihadists are so angry with us.
Human beings have long been attracted by the promise of Utopia (heavenly or earthly); and in Britain at least racism has undoubtedly helped to push young Muslims into the arms of proselytising Islamists with their ready-made and all-encompassing explanations of us-versus-them. But another way of understanding the anger of a person like Emwazi — and Jihadist fanatics more generally — is to locate it within the penumbra of male, and particularly adolescent male, insecurity.
The obsession throughout Jihadist politics with the behaviour of women ought to be the giveaway. Islamism’s original theorist Sayyid Qutb concocted his politicisation of Islam partly based on disgust at political repression in his own country, but as he documented in Milestones, he was also repulsed at the freedom afforded to American women. Similarly, the British-born Islamists who plotted in 2004 to murder clubbers in the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London did not cite Palestine or imperialism as their casus belli, but instead gleefully talked about murdering “those slags dancing around”. Women ‘flaunting it’ are after all a constant and humiliating reminder of the budding terrorist’s own sexual inferiority.
This is a recurring theme within extremist politics: One man’s terrorist may sometimes be another man’s freedom fighter, but more often the contemporary Jihadist resembles a man hacking away at a tree with an axe because the apples are out of reach. They are the “jealous younger brothers in search of an abstract fraternity”, as Arthur Koestler described the Communist fanatics of the 1930s who were seduced by the promise of a utopia in which they would finally hold the whip hand.
Young men like Emwazi are not born evil, but nor is it possible to insulate them from the bruising blows to the self-esteem which occur in adolescence and adulthood. As such, we may never find the spark of “radicalisation” which turned “nice” Mohammed Emwazi into a brutal killer nicknamed “Jihadi John”. As with so many middle-class children who turn to revolution in all its various forms, the promise of a violent overthrow of civilised society may simply be another way of making up for slights suffered in the school playground.