Virtual terrorism – radicalization in the West
by Infosphere AB One of the most persistent notions of today’s kind of radical international Islamist terrorism is that it is mainly a product of the Middle East. A question of ‘angry young Men’ being radicalized around the Middle East (in particular the Arab Middle East), leaving their countries to wage a war against the West in Europe and the US. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was at least partially explained and defended by arguing these points and the consequent necessity to ‘take the war to the terrorists’ and to stop them from coming to the West. This picture, however, was never really completely true. Instead, a considerable number of Islamist activists – and certainly a majority of the known cases to date – were either born here or late arrivals on our western shores, as immigrants or students. In some case, they were converts, like the so-called ‘shoe-bomber’, Richard Reid. The radicalization took part in the West, before these individuals started their decent into activities that would eventually land them in jail or dead in an attack against the global enemy, the West, which they see as a threat to Islam and their universal Ummah. It is after their radicalization they these individuals seek out the radical preachers or Islamist networks to get the necessary training and weapons to continue on their chosen path. This is not to underestimate the importance of the existing violent Islamist networks; they do indeed constitute a threat, especially for the countries in which they operate. But the lone individuals that quite often give face to Islamist terrorism are acting on an individual basis outside the usual communal bonds.
As Professor Olivier Roy wrote in International Herald Tribune (IHT) on January 11: they never refer to traditions or to traditional Islam; they don’t mention fatwas from established clerics….they are first of all globalized young people identifying with a virtual and imaginary Muslim ummah. Terrorism for these activists becomes an individual effort, where the focus is on the individual to perform a righteous deed to protect the ummah. But it is a virtual ummah, a community not in the real world, but in the minds of these people. And in this lies the strength of the global, Islamist violence that has come to the fore in the first decade of the 21st century. It is a decentralized, even democratic, way of looking at the world were the individual, not he traditional collective, is in the foreground. This is a clear break with traditional Islam, where Jihad was decided by the collective, even if it also could be an individual duty. The various networks and training camps around are used when necessary.
The picture that emerges is one of a diffuse landscape that is held together by a religious ideology easing the way for these itinerant terrorists to travel from one battle-front to the next (a process started with the islamists that went from the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980’s to various other ‘wars’ were Islam were deemed to be in peril from the perfidious West). Theirs is a global struggle against the West (and in particular the US), much more than any emphasis on a ‘traditional’ caliphate in the Middle East (or anywhere else). This has clear implications for how these Islamists (be they individuals or loosely connected in smaller groups or networks) are to be fought. Professor Roy writes in his IHT-article that The threat comes not from some soil that can be invaded or occupied, but from within the globalized Web in which we are all entangled. But that is only part of it. The threat does indeed come from certain ‘soils that can be invaded or occupied’ as well. It is just that that is not enough, and these invasions, however necessary they might be, are only a part of the solution.
The ‘struggle for the soul of Islam’ as for example Salman Rushdie labeled it, is an equally important part. In fact, it can be argued that that domestic Moslem struggle is even more important since the underlying religious excuses for the Islamist violence is based on religious edict and reasons, even if those edicts and rulings, as Professor Roy points out, doesn’t come from traditional authorities. And that is probably why the more ‘traditional’ way of trying to confront the violent Islamists ideology with more traditional religious reasoning will not work; it is very often precisely those more conservative and traditional authorities on Islam that the activists are rebelling against. Hence; these attempts often runs up against various arguments about whose God is the ‘real’ one. And as long as that conflict remains, this picture of a global struggle between the Jihadists and the West is also likely to remain.
