We believe in bad!

One of the main reasons that Americans may not condemn international jihadism (radical Islam, Wahabbism, bin Ladenism, take your pick) as strongly as they should may be that we don't speak Arabic. In this article in The New Republic, Egyptian playwright Ali Salem translates testimony given by the terrorist Abu Fulan, who was involved in the Amman hotel bombings in November of last year. Abu Fulan's monologue offers some interesting insights into terrorist motivation. A few examples:

Listing his organization's recent accomplishments:

We exacted a toll of tens of souls, we made orphans of hundreds of children, we turned scores of wives into widows, we brought grief to countless mothers. We were able, with Allah's blessing, to inflict injuries on hundreds of people, some of whom lost an arm or a leg, some of whom were disfigured, and someme left paralyzed for life.

On the motivation for the attacks:

[Our enemies ask] 'What is the meaning of this particular attack? Is it aimed at the Jordanian government or the Jordanian people? Is Jordan being told to refrain from a particular policy or to adopt a position on an issue of importance: what is the message?'...[but] our enemies are given to ignorance. They refuse to admit that joy, and all that springs or derives from it, represents the greatest danger to our people. You who can comprehend things should know that joy is a contagious disease. What will happen to the sons of this Islamic community if they all catch the fever of joy?

Elaborating on this idea:

[J]oy is our enemy, that explosives are our constitution, that Zarqawi is our leader, that grief is our goal, and that destroying all manifestations of pleasure is our mission.

On why he and his group fight against nation-states:

We cannot permit the existence of a state in Palestine, or a state in Iraq. We shall strive to destroy the state in all the lands of the Arabs and the Muslims. For the state, with its modern features, with its laws and its constitution, its parliament and its human rights, and its separation of powers and its devotion to development, could lead to human fulfillment, and such an outcome we shall not allow.

Wow. "Joy is our enemy"? "Grief is our goal"? Human fulfillment can't be allowed? "Joy is a contagious disease"? Is this Abu Fulan guy A) being paid by the CIA to make jihadists look really bad, B) a meth addict on a bad day, or C) just a guy who watched The Name of the Rose too many times?

Or can it be that he's being honest? What bad guy would ever come right out and say "I'm evil"? Are we supposed to take this at face value?

My suspicion is that all this talk about joy being bad is just a cover for the real issue: a fundamentalist backlash against sexuality. As countries get richer, people start having sex a lot more, and Arab countries have been no exception. In some societies with strong religious traditions that oppose sexual promiscuity, there can often be strident and even violent backlashes against the new sexual culture (the Christian Coalition and abortion-doctor killings come to mind). In the Arab world, and to a lesser extent in the extended Islamic community, this backlash has been particularly severe.

I suspect that Islamic terrorism is more about sexuality than we've yet realized. Note jihadists' tendency to target hotels, nightclubs, resorts, and weddings - all places where one might find a lot of sexual activity in the modern style. The word "joy" in Abu Fulan's monologue is a pretty transparent stand-in for "sex". In essence, global jihadists are thinking "look at all these people around me getting it on, and I can't, because my religion tells me not to." They usually then resolve this cognitive dissonance not by turning against their religion (and thus invalidating their entire childhood!), but by turning against the sexual world around them.

This would seem to explain the particular prevalence of jihadist ideology among European Muslims; suddenly transplanted from their conservative roots into a modern sexual society, Europe's offended Muslims are striking back.

So how does this help us fight terrorism? Well, anger at sexuality is usually experienced most acutely by those who feel like there's something holding them back from joining the sexual world (ever hear the term "player hater"?). Deliver people the ability to meet and have sex with partners, and that jilted ressentiment will bleed away into the air. Thus, the very hotels and nightclubs and resorts that the jihadists are striking will ironically be their undoing, when religious Muslims finally wake to the idea that they, too, can be sexually active. But we in the West can do a lot to speed up this process by:

1. Starting and promoting an Arabic-language version of Match.com! And,

2. Encouraging our own American Muslim community (who are almost 100% non-jihadist; I wonder why!) to foster and promote a dialogue about sexuality throughout the Muslim world.

Basically, the key is to get religious Muslims acclimated to the idea of making love, not war. That was the answer for America once upon a time, and if I'm right, it'll be the answer to today's jihadist problem too.


Bonus Reading Guide:
If you like biology, anthropology, sociology, or monkeys, you'll love this extremely cool article in Foreign Affairs. The author is Dr. Robert Sapolsky, famed primate biologist, who once put my name as an extra credit question on his final exam after I explained some physics thing during class. The one point I got for knowing my own name ended up bumping me up to an A in that class...