Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (8 page)

“Zinedine who?” a boy of about twelve asked.

“Zinedine Zidane,” I said, “the greatest soccer player in all the world.”

I knew that would do the trick because immediately one of the young men who had been in a corner of the plaza with others eyeing my behavior the whole time walked over and scolded the children. “Zizou, Zizou,” repeated the young man, using Zidane’s nickname. Even more puzzlement on the faces of the kids. “Zinedine Zidane is an artist, a great artist.” One of the younger kids poked his friend next to him. “Yes, Zidane. I remember Zidane. He’s good.”

The young man, Malik was his name, invited me to sit with the other young men. We talked soccer a bit, and then I turned the conversation to what I hoped would become a discussion of jihad. We spoke in a babel of Spanish, Arabic, and French that everyone around understood:

“I guess Zidane just couldn’t take that insult to his family, so he butted that Italian, even if it meant losing the World Cup.”

“Qué lástima
[it’s a shame], yes,” said Malik, “but some things are more important than all the fame and money in the world. Some things a man can’t take.”

“What do you mean? What things are more important? Your family? Your religion? What?” I asked.

Malik gently put a hand on the shoulder of his son, who was standing next to him. “My son is six years old. I don’t want him to live the life I’ve had. Look around here. This is no life. The Spanish authorities treat us like we were all criminals. Our people have been here for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years, but even the Hindus get better treatment. We are always looking for work, and when we find it, the children are left to themselves, to drugs. The twelve-year-old leads the ten-year-old around, who takes the eight-year-old, who takes my son. Our women work when they can, but if they wear a headscarf, then they’re out, no matter what education or experience they have.”

In fact, I’d found several young women who’d shown me their professional diplomas and said this is what happened to them.

Malik continued, “We all want a better life, a home, a safe place for our children. But some people want to be on top of others, to be rich, and so there are drugs. People are understanding this now. They are starting to become
multazim,
engaged in religion. That’s when ambitions become humble, and then no one wants to exploit another, and then you can’t help but feel the suffering of your people, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan.”

Suddenly he closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and sputtered: “I swear, if George Bush were here in front of my son, I would shoot him and gladly die. And if I had the means, I would strap a bomb on myself and blow up American soldiers in Iraq even if my son, whom I love more than life, were to grow up without a father. But I have no means to get there. How can we just sit and watch the children at gunpoint with their hands in the air, terrified? Have the Americans no pity on children? I know, not all Americans support George Bush’s war, but he’s the worst criminal in history, he wants the whole world to obey him. It’s a matter of economics—the high-up Jews are behind the war against Muslims. Palestine is the Mother of All Problems. There the people are pure, fighting evil. Some Iraqis allowed the Americans to come in; now look what they have. Sometimes we say that the Iraqis who let in the Americans are
hufiyum,
they deserve what they got. We never say
hufiyum
about the Palestinians.”

The others in the park nodded their heads in agreement.

The muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer, and all excused themselves. All across the Muslim world, from Morocco to the Celebes, this haunting call stirs even the spirits of infidels, especially toward evening and in the cities. The clang of daily conflicts quiets into calm, and pointless worries fade. This surface comfort facilitates a deeper and sometimes more disquieting searching of the soul, which the messengers of jihad have learned to piggyback.

“Don’t go away,” said Malik. “I’ll be right back after prayer.”

But first he took me into the Barça Café, sat me down, and ordered tea for me. Al Jazeera was reporting on Iraq. The camera fixed on a man, his eyes wild, his distorted mouth silently screaming, his legs running frantically with no direction, a little girl in his arms, blood and brains streaming from her head. It was not the Fox or CNN video game of the Iraq war, where, in Orwellian fashion, body bags had become even more sanitized “transfer boxes” that no one was ever allowed to see except for the family just before the burial.

“Some things a man can’t take.”

The Café Chicago on Mamoun Street, Mezuak’s main thoroughfare and market street, had fallen on hard times. The old owner had died, and the manager—who also looked as though he had known far better days—groaned that the cheapskate sons who inherited the place won’t pay for supplies and so he can’t offer even his best customers milk for their coffee. He shuffled the empty chairs around the table, muttered something incomprehensible at the television, and moved to where a dozen or so young men were playing a board game called parche, several smoking large hashish cigarettes. Outside, the street was bustling with hawkers selling their wares, people chattering and bargaining over anything and everything, cars beeping everything else that moves to get out of the way, and donkeys hee-hawing in protest. The smell of cumin, the sight of so many women and men dressed in formless cloth, and Arabic music blaring from radios in every other shop, all indicated that this is unmistakably the Orient, albeit its westernmost edge, the Maghreb.

The Café Chicago was a monument to having nothing else to do. Inside, the mood was languorous. The parche players glanced from time to time at the big TV screen over the bar, which was always switched to Al Jazeera. Yusef, a chain-smoking cabbie, was in the café having tea with me. He knew the martyrs of Mezuak, those who blew themselves up in Madrid and those who went to blow themselves up in Iraq. He says he left for Spain around the same time El Chino did. El Chino, though, fled Morocco to escape a murder rap and began dealing drugs in Spain. Yusef just wanted to find a decent wage. He wound up an assistant cook in Andalucia, just across the Strait of Gibraltar in southern Spain.

“The only time I ever thought I was going to kill someone was in Spain,” he said. “I had been working at the same place for months, and everyone just kept calling me Moro, especially when they wanted me to clean out something especially dirty or when I did something they didn’t like. They laughed at me when they called me that. I was fed up with them calling me Moro, and I blew up. I started screaming and pushing people: ‘Use my name! It’s Yusef! Yusef, do you hear me! I have a name. I’m not an animal! I’m a person, a human being!
Racistas!
When you come to my country, to my neighborhood, I treat you well, the neighborhood treats you well. You treat us like shit!’”

After that, for about a year, Yusef said, he was in a rage: “If someone had asked me to bomb Spanish trains to make people aware of the abuse Muslims have to take, I might have done it. Yes, God knows, I might have. But there was no jihad back then, in the nineties.”

“So why aren’t you part of the jihad now?” I asked.

“Because now I have less rage. Because I have responsibilities, I have small children. But you know, when I talk about these things with people, with my friends, I forget this. Well, almost.”

In Spain, in France, in Britain, in Germany, in Italy, in Holland, in Belgium—in Denmark even—there is traffic in information and people to weave the web of jihad in Europe. In all of these countries, second-and third-generation children of immigrants feel personal rage at the police who are hostile to them, at the majority culture that is suspicious of them, and at their inability to find decent jobs even if they have a good education. They witness the day-to-day humiliation of their elders by bureaucrats who treat them as idiot children too slow to complete the forms.

People who are humiliated generally don’t take the path of violence (as studies I present later show). But those who do may seek to avenge the humiliation of others for whom they care. Marc Sageman argues that people radicalize along the path to violence when personal rage resonates with moral outrage. They act on it if their peers do. And action groups, like soccer buddies, are already primed. Can we help to offer these young people other heroes, different dreams? But just as important, can we offer them some hope to realize them? Can we offer adventures of the heart able to conquer the countless banalities and miseries of an existence that favors drudgery, flight, or ganging for a fight?

“You see, all the young people want to go to Iraq,” explained Muhsein al-Chabab, a twenty-seven-year-old man who works with Mezuak’s youth to keep them from drugs and violence. “In their daily lives they are thinking about it. If the governments of Muslim countries asked for volunteers, many thousands would go. It’s a religious obligation to help fellow Muslims. But Muslim governments are not for Muslims; they’re for themselves.”

“If it’s an obligation, then why don’t you and the others go to Iraq or Afghanistan?” I asked.

“There’s no organized network to get there. If there were, everyone would know, even the police. It’s difficult to get there. It costs money, for one thing, about five thousand euros for Iraq, more for Afghanistan; it’s expensive.”

I had gotten much the same story from Muslim fighters in Sulawesi and Azad Kashmir, who said they would prefer to fight Americans in Iraq rather than local Christians or Hindus, but had no organized way or means to get to Iraq or Afghanistan.

“But you seem to know something about it,” I pointed out, “how to get to Iraq or Afghanistan, at least what it costs.”

“Yes, I know that if I really wanted to, I could go. Everyone can find a way. But you also need a lot of courage. Maybe I’m not so courageous.”

“And those who went. You think they were very courageous?”

“They gave courage to one another. Friends encourage and give courage to another. It depends on your friends.”

“And that’s it, just having friends who also want to go?”

“No, someone else has to guide you, to give you the money and the connections.”

“Then what?”

“And then I suppose you’re on your way to paradise,” Muhsein said with a sad smile and a shrug.

As with most forms of violent jihad in the world nowadays, the path to glory and the grave is mostly a self-organizing affair, whether in neighborhoods or chat rooms. It’s not an entirely leaderless jihad, for some people more than others are ready to take the initiative to go and others to guide, but it has no formal leadership that really matters. Al Qaeda still inspires, but has no command or control over the grass roots, where much of the terrorist action now is.

On the way down to the schoolyard soccer field for my next set of interviews, I thought,
What a simple faith. Easy to remember, easy to pass on.
A guiding thread of human history, a road to glory and to misery is this insular delusion of defending one’s own group prejudice as humanity’s high duty. As Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it, “[Muslim] religious democracy is the only path toward human prosperity and it is the most advanced type of government that humans can ever have.”
⁷

But when does high duty to defend the group become a moral imperative to kill noncombatants? Many millions of people express sympathy with Al Qaeda or other forms of violent political expression that support terrorism, but relatively few willingly use violence. From a 2001–2007 survey of thirty-five predominantly Muslim nations (with fifty thousand interviews randomly chosen to represent about 90 percent of the Muslim world), a Gallup study projected that 7 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims thought that the 9/11 attacks were “completely justified.” If one includes Muslims who considered the attacks “largely justified,” their ranks almost double. Adding those who deemed the attacks “somewhat justified” boosts the number to 37 percent, which implies hundreds of millions of Muslims. (Polls also imply that 20 percent of the American public has a “great deal” of prejudice against Muslims, two-thirds has “some prejudice” against them, and 6 percent of Americans think that attacks in which civilians may be victims are “completely justified.”)
⁸

Of these many millions who express support for violence against the out-group, however, there are only thousands willing to actually commit violence. This also appears to be the case in the European Union, where fewer than 3,000 suspects have been imprisoned for jihadi activities out of a Muslim population of perhaps 20 million. In the United States, fewer than five hundred suspects have been arrested for having anything remotely to do with Al Qaeda ideology or support for terrorism after 9/11, with fewer than one hundred cases being considered serious out of an immigrant Muslim population of more than 2 million. As we’ll see later, people usually go on to such violence in small, action-oriented groups of friends and family (with friends also tending to become family as they marry one another’s sisters and cousins). But first, let’s try to understand where competing claims to save humanity come from.

Part II
THE RELIGIOUS RISE OF CIVILIZATIONS

Human social organization is something necessary…. It is absolutely necessary for man to have the cooperation of his fellow men. As long as there is no such cooperation, he cannot obtain any food or nourishment, and life cannot materialize for him…. Nor, lacking weapons can he defend himself. Thus he falls prey to animals and dies much before his time. Under such circumstances, the human species would vanish.