Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists
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Last annotated on August 26, 2016
I and thousands like me have forsaken everything for what we believe. —MOHAMMAD SI DI QUE KHAN, ELDEST OF THE JULY 7, 2005, LONDON UNDERGROUND SUICIDE BOMBERSRead more at location 50
I noticed tears welling up in the eyes of my traveling companion and bodyguard, Farhin. He had just heard of a young man who had recently been killed in a skirmish with Christian fighters, and the experiment seemed to bring the youth’s death even closer to home. “Farhin,” I asked, “did you know the boy?” “No,” he said, “but he was only in the jihad a few weeks. I’ve been fighting since Afghanistan [the late 1980s] and I’m still not a martyr.” I tried consoling him: “But you love your wife and children.” “Yes.” He nodded sadly. “God has given this, and I must have faith in the way He sets out for me.” “What way, Farhin?” “The way of the mujahid, the holy warrior.”Read more at location 57
The general idea is that when people consider things sacred, even if it’s just bits of a wall or a few words in a language one may not even understand, then standard economic and political ways of deciding behavior in terms of costs and benefits fall apart.Read more at location 72
“Is a person a better and more deserving martyr if he kills one rather than ten of the enemy or ten rather than a hundred?” I asked. “If his intention is pure, God must love him, numbers don’t matter, even if he kills no one but himself.”Read more at location 75
The terrorists aren’t nihilists, starkly or ambiguously, but often deeply moral souls with a horribly misplaced sense of justice.Read more at location 86
Pagan Tribes of Borneo, written by Charles Hose and William McDougall in 1912.Read more at location 96
The real gods, of passions and war, of weather and chaos, and the care and consolation of celestial cycles, are dust-dead or mummified in museums. Now, as the long, easy hegemony of the West over the world lurches to an end, the newly decadent and the exotic are left free as orphans.Read more at location 119
I came to Poso, a small town in Central Sulawesi that probably contains more violent Islamist groups per square meter than any other place on earth. I saw no blowpipes but many waists sporting the padang, a machete-like metal knife, and Kalashnikovs hanging over the shoulders and backs of numerous young men. Some groups still preyed on others, now killing them for their faith rather than for their meat.Read more at location 122
Indonesian government executed three Christian militiamen, including a cleric, for leading a mob that massacred more than two hundred Muslims in a boarding school during a previous bout of religious war that killed more than a thousand people of both faiths.Read more at location 130
The modern Balkan tribes of Europe have behaved no differently. And the greater national tribes have recently done these sorts of things on an industrial scale.Read more at location 134
It is the larger family, or “tribe,” and not the mostly ordinary individuals in it, that increasingly has seemed to me the key to understanding the extraordinary violence of mass killing and the murder of innocents.Read more at location 136
There is an extended sense of tribe similar to philosopher Jonathan Glover’s outlook in Humanity,5 his very disturbing chronicle of twentieth-century atrocities. This broader idea of tribe refers to a group of interlinked communities that largely share a common cultural sense of themselves, and which imagine and believe themselves to be part of one big family and home.Read more at location 141
the “imagined community,” as political scientist Benedict Anderson once referred to the notion of the nation,6 extends from city neighborhoods to cyberspace.Read more at location 144
Nazi Germany imagined itself in terms of a tribe, the fatherland, and pushed the Soviet Union away from pretensions of universal brotherhood and back to a Mother Russia, which, with the Stalin priesthood, in fact mobilized tribal passions for sacrifice in the Great Patriotic War.Read more at location 149
political scientists might interpret all such tribal appeals as a way of “reducing transaction costs,”7 shortcutting the need to persuade and mobilize people.Read more at location 157
“War is noble in a true cause that is worth more than life. Fighting for that is a strong feeling, strong.”Read more at location 205
It’s no accident that nearly all religious and political movements express allegiance through the idiom of the family—brothers and sisters, children of God, fatherland, motherland, homeland.Read more at location 213
whether the children of Zionist Jews raised by mujahedin families since birth would become good Muslims and mujahedin or remain Zionist Jews. Nearly all mujahedin, leaders and foot soldiers alike, answered that the children would grow up to be good Muslims and mujahedin. They usually said that everyone’s fitrah (nature) is the same and that social surroundings and teaching make a person good or bad.Read more at location 221
American white supremacists and members of the Christian Identity movement, when asked the same question, more often give a different answer: Jews are born bad and always will be bad.Read more at location 233
Glory is the promise to take life and surrender it in the hope of giving greater life to some group of genetically bound strangers who believe they share an imagined community under God (or under His modern secular manifestations, such as the nation and humanity).Read more at location 341
