scary

John Rosenthal, writing at Policy Review, considers jihadis and their motivations, drawing from a series of interviews conducted between 2001 and 2003 by Farhad Khosrokhavar of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales:

If Americans were able to consider the portrait of Moussaoui that emerges from his own words, what they would discover is a figure who is neither so familiar as the sympathetic psychotherapeutic accounts in the old media suggest nor so alien as the theories of the new media pundits would lead one to assume.
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Virtually all the interviewees at some point express their concern that Khosrokhavar might be working for the French domestic intelligence service, the Renseignements généraux. Nonetheless, they make no secret of their adherence to a radical or “rigorist” practice of Islam, nor of their acceptance of violent jihad as a legitimate — and, under certain circumstances, even obligatory — aspect of it. In more unguarded moments, some admit their own participation in jihad: either implicitly and without entering into details or explicitly in relation to actions — for instance, fighting with foreign mujahideen forces in the Bosnian civil war — that will not complicate their legal situation in France. Others reflect openly upon joining the jihad — in order, most often, to fight against the U.S. and Israel — upon their release. Still others seem indeed to have merely had casual contacts with jihadist circles, a fact that under France’s remarkably broadly written statute on “criminal associations” was sufficient to earn them prison time. Even the members of the latter group, however, do not hide their admiration for the jihadists whose friendship or acquaintance has landed them in jail.

Perhaps the scariest part is that this is a cultural political movement of homegrowns:

The subjects of the Khosrokhavar interviews defy the stock image that many Western observers will have of Islamists as highly exotic Arabic-speakers from the Middle East. On the contrary, they are, in effect, “Western” or at least “nearly Western.” They all speak fluent French, and French for the most part — not Arabic — is their mother tongue. The learning of Arabic — in order to be able to read the Quran in the original — is indeed frequently mentioned in the interviews as a crucial stage in the process of the inmates’ Islamic radicalization. Several of the inmates — perhaps as many as half — were born in France, including the convert. The rest come from the Maghreb, the formerly French-controlled territories of the southern shore of the Mediterranean, with the largest contingent from Algeria. All but one, however, have lived for extensive periods in France. (The one exception is “Mohammad,” the veteran of the Bosnian war, who astonishingly claims never to have set foot in France prior to his extradition.) Most are French citizens; some have earned advanced degrees from French universities; and even if they happen to have grown up in the Maghreb, French culture, as their testimonials make abundantly clear, has been a constant point of reference in their lives.

Khosrokhavar places these new Islamist revolutionaries in the same category as the Marxist-Leninists who came before them: they are ideologues.

While Khosrokhavar’s sample of Islamists may not be “typical,” in light of this strong French connection, the fact is that Islamism as a self-consciously transnational ideology — in this respect, as in so many others, resembling twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism — draws its adherents from widely different parts of the globe: both from the Dar al-Islam, the traditional Islamic lands, and from the Dar al-Dawa, the lands of Islamic proselytism. In contemporary Islamist discourse — in the fatwas of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, for example, or in the writings of Qaradawi’s admirer Tariq Ramadan — Europe precisely represents a privileged terrain for Dawa: for proselytism.5 It is thus distinguished from, say, Russia or Israel or, for that matter, the United States, all of which, as judged by the practice of the jihadists, clearly fall within the Dar al-Harb: the lands “of war” targeted for military defeat.