Isis’s Promise of Certainty Is What Lures the Likes of Mohammed Emwazi
By Jonathan Freedland
27 February 2015
Mohammed Emwazi
Maybe it was the goalpost that did it. In his last year of primary school, Mohammed Emwazi, the Kuwaiti-born Londoner exposed this week as the man behind the mask of “Jihadi John”, ran headlong into a metal post and was knocked out cold. “We didn’t see him for six weeks,” an old school friend recalled on a radio phone-in, wondering if that event was the turning point. “He was not the same ever since that brain injury. I am telling you, one million per cent: he was not the same.”
Well, it’s as good as any of the other theories in circulation – and there have been many. And not just to explain Emwazi’s transformation from a smiling child into the gleeful slicer of throats who has become the global, if masked, face of Islamic State, his alliterative, made-up name better known even than that of the movement’s leader. The same intensive theorising has been applied to Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, the three schoolgirls, two of them aged just 15, to explain why they upped and left their homes in east London for Syria.
The familiar explanations have not worked: no one can blame what used to be the first suspect in such cases – a deprived, dysfunctional background – not when the girls were A-students from solid families, and when Emwazi went to school in St John’s Wood, one of London’s plushest areas.
Cage, the group that seeks to represent those victimised by the “war on terror”, argues that Emwazi was a “beautiful young man” turned bad by the cruelties visited on him by the British state. Thwarted in his attempts to travel abroad, spurned by his fiancee once police had contacted her, he suffered serial rejection. “He desperately wanted to use the system to change his situation, but the system ultimately rejected him,” says Cage’s Asim Qureshi.
The reject narrative has an appeal. It is often deployed to explain the motives of those guilty of terrible crimes, from the perpetrators of high school gun massacres to totalitarian dictators: if only they hadn’t been spurned by those whose approval they sought, all that horror might have been avoided. (The John Cusack film Max suggests that Adolf Hitler might have taken a different path if only the Munich art scene had embraced him.)
It shifts some blame too, from perpetrator to rejecter. Note that Cage’s online post on the “Jihadi John” affair was illustrated with this quote: “The state is the only terrorist.”
The trouble is, in Emwazi’s case the story of rejection doesn’t really stack up. The chronology suggests he was already pretty radicalised when the UK authorities started showing an interest in him: that’s why they showed an interest. Only the most charitable, or credulous, would believe Emwazi’s claim that when he travelled to Tanzania in 2009 it was on “safari”. If he was on an expedition, it was not wild animals he was after.
So we need to look elsewhere, perhaps preferring politics to psychology as the key to understanding. The favoured culprit is usually western intervention in the Middle East. This is appealing in its simplicity, not least because it suggests a remedy: stop what we’re doing, and Isis will wither away and we’ll all be safe.
But the facts get in the way. Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, has interviewed scores of young jihadists. “There is no consistency of narrative,” he told me. In 2003, their anger was directed at the west for intervening militarily in Iraq; a decade later their anger was directed at the west for not intervening militarily in Syria. They wanted the US and Britain to drop bombs on Bashar al-Assad, believing that the west’s failure to do so showed contempt for Muslim lives, an echo of the fury aroused by western inaction over Bosnia in the 1990s. Put simply, there is no neat, straight line that begins in western policy and ends in “Jihadi John”.
For all that, there are some themes which recur, and which together might shed some explanatory light. The first is the role of the charismatic inspirer. For Emwazi it may have been a preacher, Hani al-Sibai; for Begum, Sultana and Abase, it might have been Aqsa Mahmood, who urged them on online. In each case they proved the truth of the wisdom taught by the late scholar Zeev Mankowitz: people don’t believe in ideas, they believe in people who believe in ideas.
Whatever evil Isis is engaged in, those drawn to it now – and drawn to the fight against Assad before – believe they are doing good. In late 2012 and early 2013, joining the fight against the Damascus regime would have seemed morally uncomplicated, the straightforward duty to defend one’s fellow Muslims from brutality.
Even now, those who behead aid workers and smash ancient statues insist they are doing God’s work, citing what they claim is justification written in holy script. The trio of London girls doubtless believes they are rallying to a flag sanctioned by the divine.
And this brings us closer to the heart of the matter. Surely the lure of such extremism lies in its certainty. Anyone who has read Catcher in the Rye will know how teenagers can crave moral absolutes, decrying all those who deviate or compromise as “phoneys”. For Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, the call of Raqqa must have seemed clear and thrillingly unambiguous.
For Emwazi, the lure of iron clarity would have been similar. Emwazi studied computer science. A fascinating 2009 study found engineers and scientists strikingly over-represented in the ranks of violent Islamism, accounting for well over half. Both Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the lead hijacker and the mastermind of 9/11, were engineers. What the study suggests is that some of those who deal in binaries and absolutes yearn for the world around them to look the same way. For men such as Emwazi, Isis – with its Manichaean vision of good and evil – meets a need.
None of this would exert any pull, however, on those who were not already susceptible. For the academic Shiraz Maher it comes down to identity. The schoolgirls and Emwazi were all, he suspects; unsure of their place in British society; and Britain itself seems uncertain. “Think of the constant handwringing about British values and multiculturalism, and contrast that with the self-assured status of Islamic State.” Maher quotes Osama Bin Laden, who used to say that if people are presented with a strong horse and a weak horse, they will choose the strong animal every time.
We cannot change the psychology of teenage girls or scientists seeking certainty, just as we will never abolish charismatic preachers. But we can make our own societies look stronger and more confident, assured in their diversity and democracy.
In the process, we have to expose the violent jihadism of Isis for what it is: ugly, frightened and weak, terrified of modernity, terrified of the past, terrified of women, and terrified of difference. So that no one, given the choice, would ever choose it over us.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/27/isis-mohammed-emwazi-islamic-state-binary-view-good-evil
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