openpolitics.com

The debate over Islam’s role echoes earlier arguments about ideology in human affairs.

.. In England in the Age of the American Revolution, published in 1930, the British historian Sir Lewis Namier warned about public figures who summon high moral principles to explain their own actions, and insisted that such professed ideals will be ex post facto rationalizations that have little or nothing to do with those individuals’ actual motives for acting. Indeed, for Namier, like the Marxist historians he claimed to despise, the ideals invoked by politicians were mere epiphenomena, deployed to conceal intentions of a very different and often inadmissible kind. Namier and his followers were castigated by less hard-headed historians for their cynicism. Hebert Butterfield, for example, argued that many public figures are “sincerely attached to the ideals” in whose name they proclaim to act.

.. According to Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the “ordinary men” who shot and murdered Jews or else assisted in their deportation to the death camps did so because they had internalized “a Hitlerian view of Jews, and therefore believed the extermination to be just and necessary.” Against this, Browning, in Ordinary Men, argued that German soldiers killed Jews not because they were virulently anti-Semitic, but because there were powerful “situational factors” in operation that caused them to kill Jews. For Browning, far more important than ideology was conformity to the group or peer pressure: the desire for praise and career advancement, and the fear of being seen to be weak or cowardly for not killing.

.. In this view, ideology legitimizes ISIS’s violence, but it doesn’t cause it.

.. The British journalist Mehdi Hasan, for example, has pointed outthat “it isn’t the most pious or devout of Muslims who embrace terrorism, or join groups such as ISIS.” Referring to two British men who purchased copies of Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies prior to joining a jihadist group in Syria, Hasan wrote: “Religion plays little, if any, role in the radicalisation process.”

.. I found that the perpetrators were generally motivated by a mix of factors, including militant Islamist ideology; dislike of American foreign policy in the Muslim world; a need to attach themselves to an ideology or organization that gave them a sense of purpose; and a “cognitive opening” to militant Islam that often was precipitated by personal disappointment, like the death of a parent. For many, joining a jihadist group or carrying out an attack allowed them to become heroes of their own story. But in each case, the proportion of the motivations varied.

.. Even if jihadists in the first instance are motivated by worldly goals, like fame or political grievance, they nevertheless seek to legitimize their violence through an appeal to a religious ideology that, as Graeme Wood has convincingly demonstrated, has a basis, however controversial and contested, in Islamic texts and history. If they did not have recourse to such an ideology, and if such an ideology found no support among a broader constituency, however small, their capacity for violently acting out would be restricted—or grafted on to another culturally available cause.