Romain Caillet got a lot of attention in the media when he suggested that Islamic State had made al-Qaida “untrendy”. And this is key. Islamic State transforms jihad into a product of globalisation loaded with strong Western connotations.
Islamic State’s power is spreading the idea among our lost youth that “jihad is cool”.
While al-Qaida followers are steeped in a Middle Eastern culture, with strong regional references, Islamic State members are products of Facebook and Twitter.
The way they hijacked the hashtag #Ferguson during the riots in the United States, to spread (not unironically) the message among Afro-Americans that the Koran stands for racial equality, shows their skill in manipulating social networks. They are also very adept at subverting attempts at counter-narrative. They like challenging the US State Department’s Twitter account (@Thinkagain_DOS), showing up its contradictions, often clumsily but sometimes with real humour.
Islamic State jihadists are fans of LOLcats. They call themselves the Fanboys. They all have watched Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Several told me that they see parallels with their own struggle in the movie The Matrix. Some have trained for combat by playing the videogame Call of Duty. One of my most sadistic jailers, who was British, was also a Simpsons fan. Others even see in the way beheadings are lmed allusions to the reality TV show Top Chef.
To justify violence, they point out on social networks that we are not living in a world of fairy tales and teddy bears (or, in the case of English-speaking Islamic State militants, Tellytubbies). Mehdi Nemmouche, who murdered four people in Brussels’ Jewish Museum, whistled the theme from the French children’s programme Club Dorothée. This is all the stranger when you consider that once in Syria or Iraq with Islamic State, ghters are prohibited from watching TV and listening to music, activities considered haram and forbidden by religion. The result is that most devote themselves to singing nashid, hymns remixed with special effects, with an undeniably hypnotic effect. I remember listening for hours to Dawlat al-Islam Qamat (The Islamic State has been founded) or Nahnu ansar ash-Sharia (We are the companions of Sharia), played over and over on my captors’ computers or mobile phones… These obsessive tunes are designed to stick in your head.
Many jihadists are mediocre Muslims and many are fresh converts, or recent returnees to the faith.
They compensate for being newcomers to the faith with extraordinary radicalism. The French parliamentarian Patrick Menucci explained that ‘from work conducted by the state, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE, French foreign intelligence) and NGOs, we know that across a group of 120 families whose children left for jihad with Daesh, 70 per cent are atheists and 80 per cent have no link, even a distant one, with immigration. Out of 650 calls received by a French hotline for reporting radicalised people who have been radicalised as part of a government anti-jihad programme, 55 per cent are from families of Arab-Moslem origin, and 45 per cent are from families of different cultures and religions.’
Maha Yahya, a researcher at the Carnegie Middle East Center, is the author of an article entitled ‘The Ultimate Fatal Attraction: The Five Reasons People Join ISIS’. She lists, in order of importance, (i) the failure of school systems, (ii) the lack of economic opportunity, which is related to (iii) the population pyramid and poor economic growth, (iv) bad governance of states in the region, linked finally to (v) the loss of people’s trust because of dictatorship and authoritarianism.
~~~
Many aspects of French sociologist Olivier Roy’s analysis of the social and psychological reasons for the commitment of Islamic State jihadists are worth heeding. In an interview with the French weekly L’Express, Roy explained after the publication of his book En quête de l’Orient perdu (In Search of the Lost Orient) that ‘we are facing generational nihilism, a youth fascinated by death. This phenomenon is expressed through risky behaviours, overdoses, an attraction to Satanism … In some cases a pathological breeding ground for morbidness. In the case of Islamic State, as with globalisation’s lost children, who are frustrated or on society’s margins, they feel invested with a sense of omnipotence, because of their own violence, which in addition they see as legitimate.’
Roy adds that “Islamic State provides them with a real battle ground where they can find fulfilment. That is their stroke of genius. They can take in many more volunteers than al-Qaida, which recruits secretly. Now, jihadists can fight openly to defend a territory as part of a jihadist battalion. They feel like heroes in pre-planned videos in which they explain why they are happy to die as martyrs.” This scholarly view was put more prosaically by an American intelligence source (nicknamed “Richard”), who, in an interview with Michael Weiss, described these young volunteers for jihad as “knucklehead nineteen-year-olds looking to do something in their life because they don’t have shit to do back in Belgium”.
Excerpted with permission from Jihad Academy: The Rise of Islamic State, Nicolas Hénin, translated from the French by Martin Makinson, Bloomsbury.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
Islamic State’s power is spreading the idea among our lost youth that “jihad is cool”.
While al-Qaida followers are steeped in a Middle Eastern culture, with strong regional references, Islamic State members are products of Facebook and Twitter.
The way they hijacked the hashtag #Ferguson during the riots in the United States, to spread (not unironically) the message among Afro-Americans that the Koran stands for racial equality, shows their skill in manipulating social networks. They are also very adept at subverting attempts at counter-narrative. They like challenging the US State Department’s Twitter account (@Thinkagain_DOS), showing up its contradictions, often clumsily but sometimes with real humour.
Islamic State jihadists are fans of LOLcats. They call themselves the Fanboys. They all have watched Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Several told me that they see parallels with their own struggle in the movie The Matrix. Some have trained for combat by playing the videogame Call of Duty. One of my most sadistic jailers, who was British, was also a Simpsons fan. Others even see in the way beheadings are lmed allusions to the reality TV show Top Chef.
To justify violence, they point out on social networks that we are not living in a world of fairy tales and teddy bears (or, in the case of English-speaking Islamic State militants, Tellytubbies). Mehdi Nemmouche, who murdered four people in Brussels’ Jewish Museum, whistled the theme from the French children’s programme Club Dorothée. This is all the stranger when you consider that once in Syria or Iraq with Islamic State, ghters are prohibited from watching TV and listening to music, activities considered haram and forbidden by religion. The result is that most devote themselves to singing nashid, hymns remixed with special effects, with an undeniably hypnotic effect. I remember listening for hours to Dawlat al-Islam Qamat (The Islamic State has been founded) or Nahnu ansar ash-Sharia (We are the companions of Sharia), played over and over on my captors’ computers or mobile phones… These obsessive tunes are designed to stick in your head.
Many jihadists are mediocre Muslims and many are fresh converts, or recent returnees to the faith.
They compensate for being newcomers to the faith with extraordinary radicalism. The French parliamentarian Patrick Menucci explained that ‘from work conducted by the state, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE, French foreign intelligence) and NGOs, we know that across a group of 120 families whose children left for jihad with Daesh, 70 per cent are atheists and 80 per cent have no link, even a distant one, with immigration. Out of 650 calls received by a French hotline for reporting radicalised people who have been radicalised as part of a government anti-jihad programme, 55 per cent are from families of Arab-Moslem origin, and 45 per cent are from families of different cultures and religions.’
Maha Yahya, a researcher at the Carnegie Middle East Center, is the author of an article entitled ‘The Ultimate Fatal Attraction: The Five Reasons People Join ISIS’. She lists, in order of importance, (i) the failure of school systems, (ii) the lack of economic opportunity, which is related to (iii) the population pyramid and poor economic growth, (iv) bad governance of states in the region, linked finally to (v) the loss of people’s trust because of dictatorship and authoritarianism.
~~~
Many aspects of French sociologist Olivier Roy’s analysis of the social and psychological reasons for the commitment of Islamic State jihadists are worth heeding. In an interview with the French weekly L’Express, Roy explained after the publication of his book En quête de l’Orient perdu (In Search of the Lost Orient) that ‘we are facing generational nihilism, a youth fascinated by death. This phenomenon is expressed through risky behaviours, overdoses, an attraction to Satanism … In some cases a pathological breeding ground for morbidness. In the case of Islamic State, as with globalisation’s lost children, who are frustrated or on society’s margins, they feel invested with a sense of omnipotence, because of their own violence, which in addition they see as legitimate.’
Roy adds that “Islamic State provides them with a real battle ground where they can find fulfilment. That is their stroke of genius. They can take in many more volunteers than al-Qaida, which recruits secretly. Now, jihadists can fight openly to defend a territory as part of a jihadist battalion. They feel like heroes in pre-planned videos in which they explain why they are happy to die as martyrs.” This scholarly view was put more prosaically by an American intelligence source (nicknamed “Richard”), who, in an interview with Michael Weiss, described these young volunteers for jihad as “knucklehead nineteen-year-olds looking to do something in their life because they don’t have shit to do back in Belgium”.
Excerpted with permission from Jihad Academy: The Rise of Islamic State, Nicolas Hénin, translated from the French by Martin Makinson, Bloomsbury.
