PROOF THAT ISLAMIC EXTREMISM KNOWS NO BORDERS

TO many of us it must seem an extraordinary transformation. Only two or three years ago, Abdul Raqib Amin appeared to have a lifestyle which would be recognisable to many young Musli ms growing up in Scotland.

He observed his parents’ faith but, according to those who knew him in Aberdeen, embraced western culture, too. He played football and was a supporter of Aberdeen FC. Weekends would find him in nightclubs, downing alcoholic drinks – and occasionally he would get into fights.

What on earth would drive such a young man into the ranks of an extremist Islamic organisation waging holy war in Syria? Rather disturbingly, when you think about it, a former Aberdeen schoolboy’s apparent conversion to radical Islam is not so very extraordinary at all, when the internet takes geography out of the equation.

It does not really matter where in the world impressionable people looking for a new direction in their lives happen to be sitting when they log on to their computers. The point is radical Islamic material – and much else – is there for them to view and act upon, wherever they happen to be.

It is said that eBay innovator Pierre Omidyar was inspired to create the site after watching a broken laser pointer sell on the internet for $14.83. Astonished, he contacted the buyer to make sure he understood the laser pointer was broken. The buyer explained he understood that very well. He was a collector of broken laser pointers.

With a platform as vast as the internet, there is always someone, somewhere, with whom you can do business. The question is, can you connect supplier and purchaser? ISIS, to a large extent, has clearly succeeded in doing so.

While it may seem almost incredible for a young man from Aberdeen to surface in Syria, posing next to an anti-aircraft gun and espousing the supposed glories of waging jihad, in reality this is the cruel lottery of radicalisation – and Amin is one of a small yet significant number from the West who has been sucked in.

WHO can know for sure why that happened? When we look at those who become radicalised, we often find their pathways towards extremism haphazard and resistant to categorisation. In some instances, police have reported the recovery of large amounts of pornography or other marginal material. It may seem as if they have been surfing around for The Next Big Thing for a long time, and gradually became fixated on a form of ideological violence.

Could it be instructive that Amin i s widely described as someone who used his fists to settle arguments? Could it be that, in some sense, a ‘holy war’ legitimises these violent tendencies?

In days gone by, I would have doubted it. The sort of people who joined Al Qaeda from the West were often marginalised, but rarely inherently violent. Now, when we consider groups such as ISIS – which is so extreme that even Al Qaeda will have nothing to do with it – there may be some value in exploring the relationship between people from societies such as ours who are interested in violence, and the propensity to become involved in ideological violence.

But there is another, perhaps equally disturbing, possibility – that, whatever Amin’s violent tendencies, they had nothing to do with his radicalisation – that it did not take so big a brainstorm as we might i magine f or an Aberdeen youngster to appear in an ISIS video recruiting soldiers for a civil war in Syria.

We want to believe, and are continually told, that there is a thing called radicalism, and the explanation for people taking the seemingly baffling step of going to fight for ISIS must be that they subscribe to particularly unusual and radical tenets. There may be some truth to that, but there is another way of looking at it.

What ISIS has to say can be extraordinarily stirring to Muslims. Even some scholars from Muslim backrounds are struck by the power of the propaganda which ISIS has produced – the way they weave the battle hymns into their message, the elegant, classical Arabic, rich in imagery, with which they communicate, and the myths they draw upon.

These academics, some of them agnostic, say you do not have to be a radical Muslim to find the message stirring on an imaginative level, even though they reject it intellectually. That is not so hard to believe. Every culture has its own historic myths which make hearts beat a little faster.

So the idea that recruits to a group such as this would have to come through some radical fringe organisation in Britain – such as Muslims Against Crusades or Islam4UK – is not necessarily accurate.

It is possible that, without our knowing it, an ultra-literalist, hard-line preacher is doing the rounds of Muslim people’s living rooms i n Aberdeen, actively recruiting for groups like ISIS, but that does not seem to me the most likely explanation.

A more plausible one is that Amin was simply seduced by the same language that he and his fellow soldiers from Cardiff now use to attract other young men who are also at an impasse in their lives. They talk strikingly about Taqwa, the idea of piety in the Muslim faith – and memorably declare that it is those who do not join up who are the brave ones because, clearly, they must not fear God and what will happen to them on the Day of Judgment.

Taqwa is the universal Islamic value and, although there are many different notions about what it means, it is fundamentally the process of reminding yourself of t he distinction between sin and righteousness.

VIEWED in such a context, it is perhaps not so very surprising that men such as Amin and others find themselves, at a certain point in their lives, sympathetic to a cause which promises them betterment in the eyes of God.

So perhaps, instead of asking ourselves the localised ‘why’ questions, we should be asking ourselves broader ones. How do these young men get through Turkey so easily? It is notionally a Western ally. Could it be doing more to block their passage? And why is it that some of these groups routinely involved in conflicts in the Middle East are so interested in attracting foreign fighters?

Closer to home, if Scotland leaves the UK, how would its embryonic security services weed out potential terror threats posed by radicalised individuals?

Meanwhile the case of Abdul Raqib Amin reminds us very starkly that Muslim extremism knows no borders, that minds from almost any part of the world can be turned – and that defending people against it is something no nation can do on its own.

Dr Ramsay is a lecturer at the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University.