Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists

TALKING
TO THE
ENEMY

FAITH, BROTHERHOOD,
AND THE (UN)MAKING
OF TERRORISTS

SCOTT
ATRAN

I dedicate this work to Vasily Arkhipov, the deputy commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine off the Cuban shore who said no to his comrades and may have saved the world.

That was on October 27, 1962, around the time my father came home from his defense job and told me at the doorstep to our house that there was “only a twenty-percent chance, son” the next day would never come.

No terrorist action today remotely poses that kind of existential threat for our world, and I hope you’ll keep that in mind in reading on.

School’s out at Abdelkrim Khattabi Primary in the Jamaa Mezuak neighborhood of Tetuán, Morocco. Five of the seven plotters in the Madrid train bombing who blew themselves up attended the school, as did several volunteers for martyrdom in Iraq.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Part I: THE CAUSE

CHAPTER 1 SULAWESI: AN ANTHROPOLOGIST AT WORK

CHAPTER 2 TO BE HUMAN: WHAT IS IT?

CHAPTER 3 THE MOORS OF MEZUAK

Part II: THE RELIGIOUS RISE OF CIVILIZATIONS

CHAPTER 4 CREATION OF THE WESTERN WORLD

CHAPTER 5 SUBMISSION: ISLAM

CHAPTER 6 THE TIDES OF TERROR

CHAPTER 7 A PARALLEL UNIVERSE: THE 9/11 HAMBURG GROUP AND THE THREE WAVES OF JIHAD

Part III: WHITHER AL QAEDA? BALI AND MADRID

CHAPTER 8 FARHIN’S WAY

CHAPTER 9 THE ROAD TO BALI: “FOR ALL YOU CHRISTIAN INFIDELS!”

CHAPTER 10 THE JI SOCIAL CLUB

CHAPTER 11 THE GREAT TRAIN BOMBING: MADRID, MARCH 11, 2004

CHAPTER 12 LOOKING FOR AL QAEDA

CHAPTER 13 THE ORDINARINESS OF TERROR

Part IV: THE WILD EAST

CHAPTER 14 PRYING INTO PAKISTAN

CHAPTER 15 A QUESTION OF HONOR: WHY THE TALIBAN FIGHT AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

CHAPTER 16 THE TERROR SCARE: EXAGGERATING THREATS AT HOME AND ABROAD

Part V: WAR PARTIES—GROUPS, GOD, AND GLORY

CHAPTER 17 ALL IN THE FAMILY: IMAGINED KIN, FRIENDSHIP, AND TEAMWORK

CHAPTER 18 BLOOD SPORT: WAR MAKES MEN MEN

CHAPTER 19 BEYOND ALL REASON: THE CLAUSEWITZ DELUSION

Part VI: “THE MOTHER OF ALL PROBLEMS”—PALESTINE, THE WORLD’S SYMBOLIC KNOT

CHAPTER 20 MARTYRDOM 101

CHAPTER 21 WORDS TO END WARS: THE SCIENCE OF THE SACRED

Part VII: THE DIVINE DREAM AND THE COLLAPSE OF CULTURES

CHAPTER 22 BAD FAITH: THE NEW ATHEIST SALVATION

CHAPTER 23 HUMAN RITES: NATURAL ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

CHAPTER 24 OUR RELIGIOUS WORLD

EPILOGUE: ABE’S ANSWER—THE QUESTION OF POLITICS

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

ALSO BY SCOTT ATRAN

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part I
THE CAUSE

In the fullness of spring, in the presence of those who never really leave us, it is the life that we honor. Lives of courage, lives of sacrifice, and the ultimate measure of selflessness—lives that were given to save others.

—BARACK OBAMA, ABRAHAM LINCOLN NATIONAL CEMETERY,
ELWOOD, ILLINOIS, MAY 30, 2005

I and thousands like me have forsaken everything for what we believe.

—MOHAMMAD SI DI QUE KHAN, ELDEST OF THE JULY 7, 2005,
LONDON UNDERGROUND SUICIDE BOMBERS

People … want to serve a cause greater than their self-interest.

—U.S. SENATOR AND THEN-REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATE JOHN MCCAIN, VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY,
PENNSYLVANIA, APRIL 15, 2008

CHAPTER 1
SULAWESI: AN ANTHROPOLOGIST AT WORK

I
t was during a series of psychological studies I was running with Muslim fighters on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi about the scope and limits of rational choice that I noticed tears welling up in the eyes of my traveling companion and bodyguard, Farhin. He had just heard of a young man who had recently been killed in a skirmish with Christian fighters, and the experiment seemed to bring the youth’s death even closer to home.

“Farhin,” I asked, “did you know the boy?”

“No,” he said, “but he was only in the jihad a few weeks. I’ve been fighting since Afghanistan [the late 1980s] and I’m still not a martyr.”

I tried consoling him: “But you love your wife and children.”

“Yes.” He nodded sadly. “God has given this, and I must have faith in the way He sets out for me.”

“What way, Farhin?”

“The way of the mujahid, the holy warrior.”

Farhin is one of the self-styled “Afghan Alumni” who fought the communists in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He was funneled by the future founder of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), Abdullah Sungkar, to the Abu Sayyaf camp near the Khyber Pass to train with other Indonesian volunteers. There he also studied “Principles of Jihad”
(fiqh al-jihad)
with Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam, Osama Bin Laden’s mentor and originator of the concept of
al-qaeda alsulbah
(“the strong base,” or revolutionary Muslim vanguard). Later Farhin hosted future 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohammed in Jakarta, and in 2000 Farhin helped blow up the Philippines ambassador’s residence. Although that operation was something of a dress rehearsal for the October 2002 Bali bombing that killed more than two hundred people in the deadliest single terrorist attack against the West since 9/11, Farhin declined to find suicide bombers for Bali and instead occupied himself running a training camp to battle Christians in Sulawesi.

Farhin completed my psychological experiments on the tradeoffs people are willing to make in pursuit of a violent cause. The general idea is that when people consider things sacred, even if it’s just bits of a wall or a few words in a language one may not even understand, then standard economic and political ways of deciding behavior in terms of costs and benefits fall apart. Farhin responded “irrationally,” as most of the others had, without regard to material advantage or utility.

“Is a person a better and more deserving martyr if he kills one rather than ten of the enemy or ten rather than a hundred?” I asked.

“If his intention is pure, God must love him, numbers don’t matter, even if he kills no one but himself.”

“What if a rich relative were to give a lot of money to the cause in return for you canceling or just postponing a martyrdom action?”

“Is that a joke? I would throw the money in his face.”

“Why?”

“Because only in fighting and dying for a cause is there nobility in life.”

In the 2004 preface to
Dreams from My Father,
Barack Obama submits that post-9/11, history is challenging us again with a fractured world, and that we must squarely face the problem of terrorism. Except that he cannot hope to understand “the stark nihilism” of the terrorists. “My powers of empathy,” he laments, “my ability to reach another’s heart, cannot pretend to penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.”
¹

In fact, the eyes of the terrorists I’ve known aren’t blank. They are hard but intense. Their satisfaction doesn’t lie in serene anticipation of virgins in heaven. It’s as visceral as blood and torn flesh. The terrorists aren’t nihilists, starkly or ambiguously, but often deeply moral souls with a horribly misplaced sense of justice. Normal powers of empathy can penetrate them, because they are mostly ordinary people. And though I don’t think that empathy alone will ever turn them from violence, it can help us understand what may.

I’m an anthropologist who studies what it is to be human—that’s what anthropologists study—by empathizing with (without always sympathizing) then analyzing the awe-inspiring behaviors alien to our culture. Terrorism awes me as much as anything I’ve known, enough to pull me back from years of fieldwork in the rain forest with Maya Indians to try to understand and convey what makes humans willing to kill and die for others.

POSO, SULAWESI, AUGUST 9–10, 2005

Sulawesi is a remote isle of the Indonesian archipelago located between Borneo and New Guinea. The older name for the island is the Celebes, a Portuguese denomination that inspired in the anthropologist I would one day become a yearning to know what it would be like to be a different kind of human being from myself. Forty years ago, most of what I surmised about that distant other world came from the colonial classic,
Pagan Tribes of Borneo,
written by Charles Hose and William McDougall in 1912.
²
It kept company on my bookshelf with another favorite, T. L. Pennell’s
Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier,
³
written three years earlier. Hose and McDougall portrayed the hunter-gatherer world of some of the Borneo and Celebes tribes as an echo from the predawn of human history: “The principal characteristics of this primitive culture,” they wrote, “are the absence of houses or any fixed abode; the ignorance of agriculture, of metal-working, and of boat-making; and the nomadic hunting life, of which the blow-pipe is the principal instrument.” Some of the tribes preyed on the flesh of others.

In the summer of 2005, I finally made it to the Celebes. Sulawesi had changed immensely from the preliterate society described nearly a century before, though afterimages of that predawn era remained. There were thatched and prefab houses for permanent shelter. Agriculture abounded, including the cultivation of cloves for kretek cigarettes and chocolate by way of the Maya and their Spanish conquerors. Motorized boats noisily plied the Gulf of Tomini with all manner of trade goods. People were shod in plastic and leather footwear made in China, wore Japanese watches on their wrists, and pressed cell phones from Finland to their ears. Some of the men sported American baseball caps and some of the women wore the
hijab,
the Arab headscarf. The night stage was a dusty parade of Pan-like shadows, half human and half machine, flickering in the spotlights of an endless succession of motorbikes.