“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”
— Shakespeare
Scott Atran is an American social anthropologist whose book, Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values and What it Means to be Human (Allen Lane/Penguin Press, Special Price, Rs 699) is yet another study on jihad and the wilder fringes of Islam that includes the Maghreb, Palestine, Syria, Kashmir and Indonesia. Atran has done extensive field work and has his own take on what turns people into suicide bombers and jihadis in Muslim countries. Unlike the general run of western scholars who find something awry with Islam, Atran is interested in “sacred values” and those that have been corrupted by the intrusion of profane systems because of the shock and awe of occupation, settler colonialism, and the idolatry of markets. Though few Muslims take up arms what is it that propels some to do so against an enemy so “immense?”
Talking to the Enemy is not about a collective sense of the sacred; it is about the secluded, secretive worlds where small groups of people talk about the big ideas that involve honour, martyrdom and faith; worlds where sacred is a choice rather than a set of beliefs on which a society believes. What Atran emphasises is that terrorists are social beings influenced by social connections and values that are familiar to all of us. They are members of clubs, sports teams or community organisations. But along with the association of like-minded individuals, the jihadis were leaderless; they were free-wheeling people who go with the prevailing winds.
What is important to analyse according to Atran is not who the jihadis were but their process of radicalisation. They were not mad — there was no trace of any psychological illness among them — and nor were they poor or felt humiliated. Drawing on his interviews, Atran concludes that it is the existence of a sense of community rather than any personal hang-ups that compels jihadis to take up violent extremism. As a social anthropologist, Atran dissects the various dynamics that help individuals to form groups. It is this field research that stretches from Palestine and Spain to northern Morocco that forms his world view of radical Islamic militancy as an adaptive social movement.
“The 2002 Bali bombings were largely planned and executed through local networks of friends, kin, neighbours and schoolmates who radicalised one another until all were eager and able to kill perfect strangers for an abstract cause.” Terrorist networks are generally different from ordinary social networks that guide people’s career paths.
Atran has had long sessions with Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) that has been associated with bombings in Indonesia, including the nightclub blasts in Bali in 2002 to which Atran is referring when he asks Farhin (one of the leading men of the movement) whether it is right that “people who are part of JI, friends of yours, have killed civilians… including Muslims.” Farhin ducks the issue but when pressed says that he would still join a fighting outfit “but not kill Muslims or civilians who do not fight us”, which is really not saying anything at all. You really can’t talk someone out of a belief who has not been talked into it.
Atran sees jihadi networks as mobile fighting units who play it as it comes. They were autonomous units where the key decisions on targeting and timing were taken at a very low level and often in a chaotic and unorganised way. He says that individuals find their way into small, dedicated groups via the most mundane routes, including family backgrounds. For instance, Farhin’s father was an Islamic militant of Darul Islam, originally an anti-colonial outfit that attempted to assassinate President Sukarno in the late 1950s. After his release, his sons became jihadis; one of them left to fight in Afghanistan.
What Atran says is that the belief that there is “terror central organisation” that issues commands to its cadres is a myth; it is no more than a franchise. Each group is separate and self-contained and is not even aware of other such groups in the neighbourhood. If clues are to be found they would be in the leafy suburbs, poor urban quarters and football clubs, across grids of kinship and marriage that dominate fathers and sons, cousins and in-laws.
The Bali and Spanish bombings seem to bear Atran out. It is true they were al-Qaida outfits with a hierarchy and army-command structure and the militants belonged to JI in spirit and in fact. But Atran says that it is far more important to grasp the amorphous nature of JI and al Qaida. Bali and other terrorist attacks were largely planned and executed by local networks in which individuals radicalised one another until all were eager to move in for the kill.
To sum up, Atran has described modern Islamic activism as “organised anarchy” with four key elements. First, its goals are ambiguous and inconsistent; second, its modes of action are pragmatic on the basis of trial and error; the boundaries of the group constantly change; and finally, the degree of involvement of its members varies of time. Taken together it is not a hierarchic, centrally-commanded terrorist organisation but a decentralised and constantly evolving network that is unstructured and unpredictable. Which is way it is so difficult to know who and where the jihadis are.