Amira and Muna, like so many Muslim girls, were seen by their families as little more than incubators for sons. They had no intrinsic value and few choices. That is what lies behind the soft-focus photograph of those three little girls in jilbabs on their sofa in America.
Today most Muslims in America are unquestionably different from most Muslims who live in Europe. Because they come mainly through airports, and thus have visas, they have undergone a kind of preselection process based on their educational level, their prosperity, and their language skills. In America this process is far more critical, more attentive to an immigrant’s skills and the benefits he will bring to the host country, than in Europe, where the focus is on the benefits the immigrant will gain. Because of simple geographical proximity, Muslims in Europe may arrive illegally and in any case almost always cheaply, looking for menial jobs. This difference doesn’t necessarily keep Muslim girls from being oppressed in America, but it does mean that Muslims here are more likely to be middle-class, English-speaking professionals who have made a conscious choice to assimilate some basic American values.
In the United States, because visa requirements are so strict, it is much harder for a male immigrant to later bring in a new bride from his home country, as is commonly done in Europe. So the constant importing of docile, fresh brides from the distant countryside of Morocco or Turkey is less flagrant than in Europe. American Muslims marry other American Muslims; this is another reason why Muslim women’s position is better here.
Veiled schoolgirls are one very evident marker of the rise of revivalist, purist Islam, however. They are much less numerous in America than they are in most European cities, but their numbers are visibly growing. And it is now a common sight to see young women in full-length dresses or robes and heavy headscarves, often pushing strollers, in the streets of American cities. The increase in the number of Muslims (whether they are tourists, American residents, or citizens) determined to display their piety is both a measure of their conviction and a measure of growing attempts at social control of those Muslim women who might easily be distracted from the straight path. As more immigrants come to the United States from Muslim countries, they maintain enclaves of tradition that are far stronger than those of other, comparable immigrant groups. And as more dawa, missionary work, is done by revivalist groups financed by Saudi Arabia, Muslims in America are becoming much more hard-line.
Probably half the mosques in America have received Saudi money, and many (perhaps most) teachers and preachers of Islam have been supported by Saudi charities such as the Muslim World League. Through the Islamic Society of North America, Muslim student associations, the Islamic Circle of North America, and the Saudi-sponsored World Muslim League, the Saudis have financed summer camps for children, institutes for training imams, the distribution of Islamic literature, mosque building, lectures, and dawa work throughout the United States. According to a survey by the Muslim lobby Council on American-Islamic Relations, 33 percent of the mosques in America do not permit women on their governing boards and 66 percent seclude women behind a wall, where they can listen to the sermon through loudspeakers but cannot see the imam speaking. That last figure has actually risen since 1994, when it was “only” 54 percent.
I believe it would be a grave mistake to be complacent about Islam in America. According to the Mosque Study Project 2000, regular weekly attendance at mosques almost doubled between 1994 and 2000, and active association with mosques quadrupled. Young Muslims born or raised in the United States are often much more observant of Islamic practice than their parents are. In the United States 50 percent of Muslims age eighteen to twenty-nine say they attend a mosque every week, far more often than the older generations.
And the poll didn’t mention what kind of mosque. I suspect that, just as I once succumbed to radical Islam when I was a teenager in Kenya, young Muslims in America are drawn to preachers who are young, attractive, intelligent, who seem to echo their sense of being misunderstood outsiders, who give them a shot of self-esteem and the sense of a special purpose in life. They reject their grandparents’ Islam of jinn and mumbling imams, more folk tradition than quranic dogma, and seek the imagined intellectual purity of the Prophet’s true path. At college they join Muslim students associations, which transcend ethnic differences. They are far more likely to worship in an ethnically mixed mosque, one that is not just a kind of cultural club, but that joins together young Somalis and Pakistanis and Yemenis under the banner of the Prophet.
Europeans ignored a similar trend for decades, and young Muslim citizens of Europe were steadily radicalized without any concerted attempt to persuade them into less toxic attitudes. Now they are almost a fifth column.
Can you be a Muslim and an American patriot? You can if you don’t care very much about being a Muslim. If you squint and look away, you can avoid thinking about the very basic clashes between the submissive, collectivist values of Islam and the individualist, libertarian values of the democratic West. In a 2007 poll by the Pew Center, 63 percent of U.S. Muslims said they saw no conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society. But 32 percent conceded that, yes, there is such a conflict, and almost 50 percent of the Muslim Americans questioned in that poll said they think of themselves as Muslims first, Americans second. Only 28 percent, little more than a quarter, considered themselves Americans first.
Asked whether suicide bombing can be justified as a measure to defend Islam, 26 percent of American Muslims age eighteen to twenty-nine said yes. That is one quarter of the adult American Muslims under the age of thirty, and no matter how you count the number of Muslims in America (estimates vary from 2 million to 8 million), that is a lot of people.
We are still at an early stage in the radicalization of Muslim youth in America, but the first symptoms of the disorder are already manifesting themselves, just as they did in Europe. There have already been numerous reports of young American Muslims—many of them Somali, others converts—leaving the United States for training in violent jihad abroad. For example, at least two dozen Somali youths from Minnesota are said to have gone to Somalia to fight in the civil war there. Nothing illustrates more clearly my point that the threat posed by radical Islam is both internal and external.
On a few occasions I was invited to speak at offices of the U.S. government about cultural aspects of Islam, what military people call “cultural intelligence.” My questioners wanted to know more about Muslim customs and habits to be able to distinguish traditional and harmless customs from the new practices of politicized Muslims, so they could detect where something dangerous to U.S. interests might be brewing.
They asked me a lot about my teenage years. When I was sixteen my religious studies teacher in Nairobi, Sister Aziza, began encouraging me and my schoolmates to reject our grandmothers’ Islam of amulets and superstitious prayers to our forefathers. She introduced us to a literal interpretation of the Quran. Sister Aziza persuaded us to wear the veil and to seek to emulate in all matters the original intention and behavior of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers. The Pentagon wanted to know more about how this movement affected the people around me, how they changed from “normal Muslims” into politically active Muslims, actively hostile toward Jews and the West. These military analysts were interested not just in jihadi combatants but also in the process that radicalizes whole communities so that they will aid, abet, support, and accommodate jihadi attackers.
First, I told them how mosques have changed. In the old-style mosques in Nairobi—in Eastleigh, in Juja Road, in Park Road—only men attended and the sermon was chanted once a week in Arabic, which almost no one understood, in a monotonous, almost soporific tone. In the 1980s a new kind of worshipper and teacher infiltrated those old-style mosques and set up new mosques in living rooms and basements. Sermons were not limited to Fridays, and study groups were set up for young people, where we read and analyzed the Quran and the Hadith. The tone of the sermons became shrill and loud, with a revivalist edge
and dramatic climaxes and whispers. And their content was political. The vocabulary of the sermons changed; the new imams would shout out words like Yahud (Jew), kaffir (unbeliever), and munafirq (hypocrite), by which they meant Muslims who did not agree with them.
I described a visit I made to Cyprus as a member of the Dutch Parliament in 2006. We visited the office of Archbishop Chrysostomos. Right next door there was a mosque, and hearing these words shouted during the sermon, I knew it was not a “normal,” traditional imam who preached there but a political, radicalized Muslim teacher. When I said this to the archbishop, he sighed and told me that the change had happened years ago. Before that, he said, the sermons were a peaceful drone, but afterward the tone became louder and more hostile.
Another feature of a revivalist mosque, I explained, is that women, who almost never attended the old mosques, now flock there. When I was growing up, women’s presence was neither necessary nor particularly desirable, unless it was a special day, such as the Eid festival after Ramadan. But in radical mosques special classes involve women in the lesser and greater jihads for the glory of the Prophet. If you see women flocking to the mosque to pray, perhaps you should be suspicious.
The U.S. government officials to whom I spoke wanted to analyze how Islam is used as a political tool to mobilize masses of young men to do harm; they wanted to understand how proselytizing, dawa, operates. Their hope was that I could help them to distinguish a peaceful, regular practice of Islam from something more harmful. It was the same kind of question I had heard in Europe many times before: How do people cross that line? How can you tell when they have done so?
My answer was that they should stop focusing so exclusively on the action of a few proselytizing radicals. By this I don’t mean they should no longer pay attention to radical individuals who are preaching Islamism. I mean that, in trying to understand why so many young Muslims are susceptible to the persuasions of the radical agents one must first study the content, the context, and the methods by which almost all Muslims are reared to become practicing Muslims: the agent utilizes an existing memory, reawakens the recollections of the classes from early childhood. At first he or she reinforces those memories, then moves on to the next stage of politicization, and only later violence or martyrdom.
If you are a Muslim, from the time you are born your mind is prepared. You are instructed to submit, not to question. Then, when preachers speak to you about returning to the pure, true path of jihad and personal morality laid down by the Prophet Muhammad, they’re not introducing you to something new or alien. They’re building on layers of a mental structure that you have imbibed from your parents, your community, your childhood Quran teacher. Thus the stage preceding radicalization in the Muslim mind, the stage when “regular” Islam is taught, is very important. Although the teachings are at first focused on prayer, charity, and fasting, the method by which Muslims learn is rote, and believers are not allowed to question the text or the sayings of Muhammad. After years of an uncritical attitude toward Islamic teachings in general and a demand for obedience, the Muslim mind is ready, prepared when the radical agent shows up. Moreover the mechanism of reward and punishment in Islamic teaching, reinforced by the tribal demand for unquestioning loyalty to the group, makes it difficult for an individual Muslim to resist or even recognize the radical agent as suspect.
All who are concerned with the relative ease with which young Muslims follow the radicals must focus on these preceding stages. Because most politicians and academic researchers define Islam as a harmless religion and view the radicals as deviant, they overlook the importance of delving into the socialization process of the Muslim.
American agencies and academics and social psychologists make a big mistake when they try to understand a brainwashed mind only from the time it becomes radical. Radical Islam is sold in steps, and this is true in America too. At first it is marketed as a program for virtuous behavior, for goodness. Then you are encouraged to seek out other Muslims, to befriend only each other. The whole rancid subject of violent jihad is broached only in the later stages. But the prehistory of radicalism is a soft brainwashing in submission—the real meaning of the word Islam—from birth.
In early November 2009 I was in New York for a series of meetings. It was exactly five years since the murder of my friend Theo van Gogh by a jihadi youth in Amsterdam. On Thursday of that week I was on my way from a lunchtime meeting when the news came through on the car radio of a shooting at an army base in Texas. American soldiers had been killed in America. There was confusion about the killer’s identity: Was he a psychiatrist or a psychiatric patient? Was he killed or still alive? I was intrigued by the combination of his name, Nidal Malik Hassan, and his military rank of major.
As soon as I was done with my meetings I hurried to go online, eager for more details of the story. The television reports I saw clarified a good deal. The killer had been captured and was in the hospital; he was a psychiatrist and not a mental patient; the number of victims was thirteen. As I watched the clips I couldn’t help thinking, Islamic martyrdom has come to America. Not only that, but it has penetrated the U.S. Military itself.
The story of Nidal Malik Hassan is in many ways similar to that of Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo van Gogh. There are also some glaring differences, to be sure. Bouyeri was born in Amsterdam; his father had moved from Morocco to the Netherlands as a guest worker, initially intending to go back home after he earned enough money. Morocco is a poor country but relatively peaceful. Malik Hassan, by contrast, was born in the United States to parents of Palestinian origin, who settled in Virginia and opened a restaurant. The Palestinian territories are in perpetual war, and families are exposed to the upheaval of that war. Malik Hassan’s parents had chosen to begin a new life in America and to become Americans.
Bouyeri was only twenty-six when he embarked on his martyrdom mission, while Malik Hassan was thirty-nine. This difference is interesting because it challenges the well-accepted theory that men of Malik Hassan’s age are more likely to enable a suicide mission than to take action themselves. Bouyeri’s career did not go beyond demanding a government subsidy for a community center where he volunteered, while Malik Hassan made it all the way to the rank of major and earned a degree in psychiatry. Malik Hassan killed thirteen people; Bouyeri poured all his homicidal passion into killing just one man, though he also declared his intention to kill me.
The similarities, however, were uncanny. Both men were introduced to radical Islam not in a Muslim country (Morocco or the Palestinian Territories or Jordan) but in secular democracies: America and the Netherlands. Both came to detest their home nation, to the extent that they wanted to kill their fellow citizens. Both invoked the name of Allah as they killed and said that they were motivated to kill as a service to Allah. Both thought they would be killed in the process and become shaheed, or martyrs. But both men woke up in hospitals in the hands of the infidel. One is now in a Dutch prison for the rest of his life, and the other will likely end up on death row.
An even more striking similarity between the two is the astonishing reaction to the incidents in both the Dutch media in 2004 and the American media in 2009—astonishing because it seemed as if all explanations were plausible except the one explicitly stated by the killer, namely his religion.
In both countries the murderers were presented as being fed up with offensive discriminatory behavior. Bouyeri was said to have been compelled to act by Theo van Gogh’s reference to Moroccan youth as “goat fuckers.” In America a similar significance was attached to the military slang terms for Arabs in Iraq, such as “camel jockeys.” In both countries analysts sought answers in the psychological imbalance of the killers. Serious meaning was attached to the fact that just days before Bouyeri committed the murder his mother had passed away of natural causes; the shock and grief he felt at her death were seen as possible motivations to kill van Gogh. Similarly, in the case of Malik Hassan, allusions were made to posttraumatic stress due to combat
, until it emerged that he had not been anywhere near combat.
In both countries the debate then turned to whose fault it was that the murderer was not prevented from killing. In Holland the Dutch Intelligence and Security Agency was investigating a radical Islamic cell called the Hofstad Group, but the investigators overlooked Bouyeri’s role in that group. It transpired only after the murder that he was in fact the leader. In America there was information that the FBI had intercepted e-mails between Malik Hassan and his mentor, Imam Al Awlaki, but no action had been taken.
Why, I asked myself, was there such a conspiracy to ignore the religious motivations for these killings? And then I began to understand. First, there is a desperate need for intelligence agencies to recruit Muslim agents and sources in order to penetrate the radical Islamist networks. As all Muslims are offended by the charge that Islam is a violent religion, it is official policy not to say so. The same applies to the military: American and allied soldiers do not go into places like Iraq and Afghanistan simply to fight men in uniform whom they can easily identify as the enemy. Their mission is now a complex mixture of fighting, policing, social work, and “nation building.” They too are in desperate need of cooperation from the locals, and that overwhelmingly means Muslims. Thus the military takes the same line as the intelligence services: It is not Islamic scripture, the Prophet, or the Quran that presents a coherent argument and activism for jihad, but a misguided few who have usurped the pure and peaceful teachings of Islam.
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