He was married and had two beautiful children; yet, he sacrificed himself for a cause he put above everything else that God or fortune had bestowed on him.He belonged to a new brand of Islamic radicals who are products of a different kind of religious interpretation of the world and faith. For them, Islamic countries are under the domination of Western imperialists who are collaborating with their domestic servants, namely national governments. Not only does this “evil coalition” exploit the people and resources of their countries, but it also defiles the values of society. Given the successive failures of socialism and nationalism in the Islamic world, the core value system that national unity came to hinge on is religion. It is also the principal identity that defines these societies because nationalism cannot deliver and hold together the masses as there is no independent national government.
This analysis led many people who feel deeply oppressed, denigrated, besieged and powerless to reinterpret religious resources in the most radical way, to legitimize their rebellion against the established national and international order and their use of violence. It could only be religion that they could agree on as the source of their motivation and legitimacy of their behavior because it is common, i.e., theirs and divine. So it could not be opposed or questioned.
Their reading of religion subverted every divine dictum and every written and oral source into a warlike, lethal arsenal of words and directives that attracted people of the same conviction or state of mind. An alternative religious indoctrination replaced the older one which had little problem with established political authorities and forms of government. This new teaching turned the umma (community of believers) into warriors ready to sacrifice themselves and their foes alike for a cause they built over everything that is human. The human self was reduced to be an instrument of the cause. Hence, their actions bore no moral boundaries, and their violence was as limitless as their hatred of their vilified targets.
If there is rationality in their mindset, it is not in line with common wisdom. It is criminal and indiscriminate, hence totalitarian. If so, how can intelligence services fight against this perverse logic and those who have adopted it?
Today the US is reported to have 16 intelligence agencies, employing some 100,000 spies and analysts with a budget of $50 billion. The numbers are impressive. But they have to monitor and counter terrorism on the land, sea, air and in cyberspace.
Take the new medium, the Internet, the global environment where al-Qaeda-like organizations and sympathizers operate with impunity. This medium serves as a breeding ground of the most effective and unhindered kind for would-be terrorists who can watch suicide bomb attacks and beheadings of the “infidel” and download volumes of sabotage handbooks online.
Al-Qaeda’s breeding grounds stretch from the madrassas for the children of the poor of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen, Somalia and Mindanao in the Philippines to suburban slums all over Western Europe. These youth are inculcated with the passion and religious duty of fighting for Islam against Christian and Jewish infidels.
But the army of radicals does not only consist of youths with no “tomorrow.” Indoctrination has created an aura of severe deprivation of self-respect and a deep sense of identity inconsistency born out of the perception of what one is and what one ought to be. A number of middle and upper-class misfits who are either bored or in rebellion against their parents’ modernist, capitalist or Western values also fall into this psychological abyss. Otherwise how could the case of the prominent Nigerian banker’s son, who came close to blowing up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, get radical enough to join al-Qaeda in Yemen and become a volunteer suicide bomber?
