Notes on Freedom

After the terror attacks of the past two weeks (gays in Florida, police officers in France), the primary response has been to assert that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam.

French and American leaders studiously avoided the word ‘Islamic’ or ‘Islam’ in their condemnation of the attacks. It is strange: both attackers left theatrical dedications to the leader of Islamic State. The killer of the French police officers recorded a 12-minute discourse in which he urged the Muslim community to attack unbelievers by any means possible and to ‘make France tremble’ (Allah would inflict painful punishments upon them if they did not ‘march forth into battle’). Yet the attack cannot be called an Islamic terrorist attack, and Islamic State cannot be called Islamic State but instead must be called Daesch or ‘so-called’ Islamic State.

The attackers are described as evil, homophobic or disturbed, as if the violence is a result of mental disorder or prejudice. Some lefties see Islamic terrorism as a twisted form of protest or politics, the result of historic foreign intervention or segregation within French society (for which they apologise). While the terrorists are obsessed with drawing lines (you and us, believers and unbelievers), there is a great effort to avoid any lines whatsoever – to, as they say in France, avoid any ‘amalgame’ between terrorists and Islam.

Of course, the attacks are not the result of Islam per se; this is not the faithful rendering of the teachings of seventh-century caliphs. And yet this religion is not incidental either. Radical Islam is at present playing a particular historic role: to provide a guise for tendencies towards destruction and collapse, which in this religious form appear as something substantial and transcendent. It is thanks to the Islamic guise that commonplace nihilism appears to be on the other side of a line: to be for something else, for another people, another place.

In their actual content, the recent Islamic attacks are relatively indistinguishable from attacks such as the US school shootings. The attackers are largely frustrated no-hopers, some of whom failed in their attempts to get into the police or army. There is a rage against the world and a desire for a great explosion. ‘I’m going to make everything explode’, was the way two of the Paris attackers independently described their actions. There is a stated desire to humiliate, to make things pop or burn, to make France or Europe or America tremble.

The attacks have the vanity of the school shootings: the videos, the desire for notoriety and to show that they have done something big. The murderer of the French police officers streamed his testimony live while still in the couple’s house, while the Florida shooter phoned 911 before he had finished shooting. Militarily these are not sensible actions, but narcissism overrode practical considerations. There was a desire not just to act but to have their act recognised: to take ownership of it and say ‘look what I did’, and this was as important as any actual results. There is not a concern with killing great numbers of people, only to commit an act of destruction that you can make a speech about before you die.

There also appears to be the death wish of the school shootings – terrorists want to go out anyway so may as well take others with them, make it a party. And yet this nihilistic content appears in quite a different guise to that of the school shootings. Islamic nihilism appears in the form of a war, a battle; the attacker is a soldier. His acts are shown on videos overlaid with nasheed warrior songs and galloping horsemen. He stands on another side of the line from the people he is attacking, or the place he has grown up. He stands outside Europe and condemns it as a place of ‘nonbelievers’: the fantasy world of Islamic history has become another place to belong.

The murderer of French police officers addressed his video to his ‘dear brothers’ in the worldwide Islamic community, and gave instructions for how they can follow up his glory: he gave a list of targets, including prison officers, police, journalists, politicians, and rappers, as well as a list of particular public figures who he believed deserved to get it. His personal gripes are announced as a political programme. His death wish is also universalised and made transcendent: ‘It’s enough to throw yourself forward, to die, and you will arrive in paradise. At that moment there will be no more worries, no more tests, only an enjoyment.’

Some observers of Islamic terrorism have insisted that it is not merely nihilistic, that it also idealistic and transcendent: it aims at sacrifice for a cause, at serving something bigger than yourself. Yes, it has these two elements of destruction and transcendence, hence the insignia of Islamic State, the black flag and the finger pointed skywards. But the transcendent element is merely a delusion: it does not point towards something about to rise from the ashes, or to any mystified will or wellbeing of Muslim people.

We are now seeing a desocialised brand of Islam, stipped of relations with Muslim communities or schools of Muslim thought. Previous forms of political Islam provided a religious guise for particular social interests and forces. Political Islam had a social content, whether that was anti-colonialism, or the mobilisation of civil society against corrupt elites. The Iranian revolution translated Marxist concepts such as civil society and party into pseudo-Islamic terminology: Islam acted as a veil for social forces, a means by which they could be articulated.

Similarly, the Islamic duty of jihad is a mystified expression of one’s duty to defend one’s community (1). Every Muslim has a holy duty to defend his community when it is being attacked; he has a provisional duty to join his community’s wars for expansion. This collective duty of self-defence would have been familiar to members of a Greek city state or indeed modern Christian nations. It took a particular priority in Muslim lands, as a means of welding disparate desert peoples into a unified fighting force.

Now the Islamic duty of jihad has been stripped of its collective meaning, and has become reduced to the immediate whim of each person. Anything they want to do is immediately raised into the divine obligation of ‘jihad’. Similarly, ‘ummah’ has become an abstract, fantasy construct, to be chucked around in your own self-justification. The will of Allah seems to always precisely coincide with terrorists’ own: Allah is an imaginary friend, giving his blessing and urging them on. Faisal Devji notes how Islamic concepts have lost any systematic or established content, and are ‘available only in fragments’ (2).

The ground for this desocialised Islam has been prepared by recent neofundamentalisms such as Salafism, which are set against all existent forms of Muslim communal life as well as European and Western culture. Whereas the political Islamists of the 70s were modernist and socialist, neofundamentalists seek to build an Islam from scratch: they are firmly opposed not only to Western influences, but also to local Islams and practices as well as to schools of Islamic theology or jurisprudence and existent religious authorities. Theirs is the purity of asociality, the setting of religion against culture and intellectual inheritance.

Islam in its globalised form becomes a detached‘marker’ (in the words of Olivier Roy (3)), a free floating transcendent element to be used for any purpose. The role of Islam in terrorism is not because of anything specific about Islamic history or the situation of Muslim communities in Europe (around 25% of European jihadis are converts). Instead, it is by taking an Islamic form that nihilism can be pursued as if it were a universal cause.

So the attacks are not the result of Islamic theology or doctrine, and yet Islam is playing a particular historic role at the moment, quite unlike that of any other religion or cultural principle. It is only this religion – the only rival universalistic monotheism to Christianity – which provides the means by which internal tendencies towards collapse and destruction appear as an oppositional principle and a revelation.

(1) L’Islam et La Guerre, Jean-Paul Charnay, Fayard, 1986

(2) Landscape of the Jihad, Devji, Hurst and Co, 2005

(3) Holy Ignorance, Olivier Roy, Hurst, 2010