Religious Concepts—Jihad, Sharia, Shaheed, Caliphate, Kuffar And Al-Qiyamah Have Accompanied Jihadi Violence But Also Inspired Robust Counter-Narratives From Muslims
Sarah Colvin
By Sveinung Sandberg,
Sarah Colvin
The British
Journal of Criminology, Volume 60, Issue 6, November 2020, Pages 1585–1605,
https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azaa035
23 May 2020
Abstract
Powerful
narratives that invoke religious concepts—jihad,
Sharia, Shaheed, Caliphate, Kuffar, and al-Qiyāmah—have accompanied jihadi violence but also inspired robust
counter-narratives from Muslims. Taking a narrative criminological approach, we
explore the rejection of religious extremism that emerges in everyday
interactions in a religious community under intense pressure in Western
societies. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 90 young Muslims in Norway,
we argue that young Muslims suffer epistemic injustice in their narrative
exclusion from the mainstream and assess the narrative credibility they try to
maintain in the face of marginalization. We suggest that young Muslims’
religious narratives reject a mainstream characterization of Islam as
essentially a religion of aggression and simultaneously join forces with that
mainstream in seeking the narrative exclusion of the jihadi extremists.
Introduction
True to its
name, criminology has focused on people with experience of the criminal justice
system rather than on the general population. Terrorism research follows the
same pattern in offering thousands of studies addressing jihadi terrorism (Schuurman 2019), but only one in-depth account of
how widespread religious narratives challenge jihadi views and practices. In that study, Joosse et al. (2015:
827) recommend a turn to everyday narratives: rather than focusing on the
handful of Muslims who radicalize, researchers ‘should choose instead to focus
on understanding the worldviews of the vast majority who do not’. Van Es (2019:
157, 2018) has similarly begun to model a shift in focus to that ‘vast
majority’ who reject extremism. We follow their lead but focus more explicitly
on the everyday religious narratives of Muslims who repudiate extremist
violence.
Religious
narratives have been seen as a key to understanding violent extremism (e.g.
Halverson et al. 2011). The link between the broad religious belief system
called Islam and the form of contemporary violence called Islamic terrorism has
been shown to be tenuous, however (Roy 2008; Sageman 2014; Kundnani 2015: 7). Jihadi ideology and narratives interact,
in complex ways, with socio-economic marginalization, international and
national politics, individual psychological problems and social networks in
generating extremism (e.g. Nesser 2015; Hegghammer 2016; Walklate and Mythen
2016; Khosrokhavar 2017). Narratives used by jihadists to justify violence include jihad (holy war), Sharia (Islamic law), Shaheed (martyrdom), Caliphate (Islamic State), Kuffar (infidels) and al-Qiyāmah (the
Day of Reckoning). Authorities on Islam have offered high-profile rejections of
the jihadi readings, for example when
several hundred Islamic scholars signed a letter denouncing IS and its
theological views.1 Much less is known about everyday opposition to jihadi rhetoric in the religious
counter-narratives that are produced and shared within Muslim communities.
Religious
narratives are a potent element in the discourse of violent jihadism (Halverson et al. 2011). It is
not unusual for beliefs that support a narrative identity to be shored up by
violence. Butler (2005: 4), among others, has shown how violent mainstream
cultural beliefs can be. Far-right groups regularly express violent hatred
against all Muslims, and Muslim women and men have been targeted in anti-Muslim
attacks in Norway, the UK and beyond (Awan and Zempi 2019). Seventy-seven
people died because of Breivik’s anti-Islamic beliefs in 2011 and, in 2017,
Osborne’s attack near the Finsbury Park Mosque in London killed 1 person and
injured 11 more. 2019 saw further attacks on mosques in Bærum in Norway and
Christchurch in New Zealand and, in Stanway, England, a man shouted ‘kill a
Muslim’ before attacking another man with a baseball bat and knife.
Our focus
is narrative criminological in that we examine the multitude of ways in which
narratively communicated senses of self and social identity can influence
harmful acts (Presser and Sandberg 2015). Emphasizing the everyday religious
character of counter-narratives, we examine how young Muslims in Norway
construct a ‘storied rejection’ (Joosse et al. 2015: 827) of Islamic extremism,
thus potentially constraining harm perpetrated by Muslims. We go further than
Joosse et al., however, in suggesting that there is another narrative impetus
in these stories: namely to construct a ‘storied rejection’ of mainstream
prejudices about Muslims and Islam, thus potentially constraining harm
perpetrated against Muslims.
Narrative Criminology and Everyday Religion
Narrative
criminology is the study of how stories instigate, sustain or effect desistance
from harmful action (Presser and Sandberg 2015: 1). A primary interest of work
within this framework has been how narratively communicated senses of self and
social identity influence harmful acts (e.g. Fleetwood et al. 2019). Works that
preceded and influenced narrative criminology often studied desistance
narratives (Maruna 2001; Presser 2008). We shift the emphasis to everyday
stories whose impetus is to constrain or reduce harm either by supporting a
nonviolent stance within Muslim communities or by speaking to potentially
violent mainstream beliefs about Muslims.
The stories
we present here are ‘everyday’ religious narratives. We thus follow Ammerman
(2006: 3) in privileging ‘the experience of non-experts, the people who do not
make a living being religious or thinking and writing about religious ideas’
(see also Hall 1997; Dessing et al. 2013). The young Norwegians who
participated in this study invoked a peaceable Islam and denounced jihadi violence. That supports the view
that ‘the most powerful counternarratives that work against radicalization will
already be in place within communities’ (Joosse et al. 2015: 814). However, in
a cultural context where, particularly since the terrorist attacks on the
United States in September 2001, there has been a tendency to narrativize all
Muslims, and Islam itself, as violent, we argue that this also constitutes
narrative resistance to mainstream cultural narratives of an inherently violent
Islam and resistance to epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007). Peaceable religious
counter-narratives are both a response to violent religious extremists and a
way of ‘talking back’ (Smith 1993: 398; McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance 2017: 190;
van Es 2019: 142) to a discourse that reduces all Muslims to potential
extremists.
Epistemic Injustice, Narrative Resistance and
Counter-Narratives
Epistemic
injustice, as conceptualized by Fricker (2007: 1), is ‘a wrong done to someone
specifically in their capacity as a knower’. It is prejudice-based,
discriminatory and mostly affects people who are already marginalized. Among
other things, it leads to the narrative exclusion of individuals and
communities (Colvin in press). A turn to the philosophical concept of epistemic
injustice is evident in recent social science research (e.g. Sherman and Goguen
2019), as well as in thinking specifically about terrorism. O’Donnell (2018:
981–2) has argued that the contemporary cultural imagination that believes in
Muslims’ vulnerability to radicalization risks epistemic injustice ‘by in
effect silencing and denying credibility to [Muslims] […] and by constructing a
set of (implicitly) racialised, colonial frameworks that constitute Muslims as
a suspect community’. Fricker (2007: 44) argues that epistemic injustice
undermines people ‘in their very humanity’—and, in doing that, it causes harm.
Cultural anxiety around Islamic extremism and Islamic terrorism underpins what
Sageman (2014: 567) calls the ‘Blame it on Islam’ approach to terrorist harm.
The
accounts in this study are situated in the context of dominant Western
narratives that construct (all) young Muslims as potential violent extremists.
In that sense, the interviewees face what Presser (2005: 2070) calls narrative
defeat because they are ‘held accountable’. The idea of Islam as a religion of
war and terrorism is shared by jihadi
extremist and mainstream anti-Islamic rhetoric (Ekman 2015; Shaffer 2016). When
they locate an authority, in the context of the interview, to represent
themselves and their religion against the popular narratives of Islam’s
inherent violence, they are, we contend, practising narrative resistance.
Narrative
resistance is establishing itself as a concept across disciplines (e.g. Canham
and Malose 2017; McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance 2017; Plummer 2019; Sandberg and
Andersen 2019). Narrative resistance responds to narrative power, where some
stories ‘wield more power than others. When circulating widely in a culture
(e.g. through the media, policy documents and everyday talk), such stories can
achieve a type of “master status”’ (McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance 2017: 191).
Dominant narratives are culturally powerful not least because they are often
perceived as natural truths rather than as stories (Andrews 2004: 1;
McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance 2017: 191; Bamberg 2004: 361). Alertness to
narrative power, argues Plummer (2019: 5), ‘sensitizes us to the ways lives are
asymmetrical and can be dominated, shaped, and influenced (sometimes damaged
and exploited) by stories, and how, in turn, people resist and sometimes
empower themselves through new stories’.
Counter-narratives
respond to or resist dominant cultural narratives and can ‘support people in
telling new and more helpful stories for their lives’ (McKenzie-Mohr and
Lafrance 2017: 192; Andrews 2004: 1). Here, we define counter-narratives as
stories that challenge or oppose dominant stories either in mainstream social
or in subcultural contexts. Counter-narratives intertwine with dominant
narratives: they can appeal to or include components of dominant narratives as
part of the narrative resistance (Andrews 2002; see also Bamberg 2004). Plummer
(2019) differentiates between negotiated narratives and counter-narratives.
Where counter-narratives repudiate and argue with a dominant narrative,
negotiated narratives develop ‘weapons to resist while not challenging the
existing order’ (Plummer 2019: 15).
The
counter-narratives in this study draw on a wide set of narrative tools,
including counter-neutralizations and boundary drawing. Conventional
neutralization theory assumes an encultured standpoint: that is basic agreement
with mainstream cultural values. The key function of conventional
neutralizations is ‘to disavow deviance’ (Green et al. 2006: 304). Subcultural
neutralizations, by contrast, ‘avow deviance in the context of a mainstream
that has ‘lost its way’” (Colvin and Pisoiu 2018: 4). As a strategy of
narrative resistance, interviewees in this study used counter-neutralizations
to challenge the validity of subcultural neutralizations (such as the jihadi claim to kill in the name of
Islam). A more common strategy, however, was boundary drawing (Lamont and
Molnár 2002). Symbolic boundary work has been seen to motivate and justify
criminal and harmful acts (Copes 2016). But populations close to extremists
also mobilize symbolic boundaries (van Es 2018: 162). Our interviewees drew
boundaries that excluded religious extremists from the community of those who
understand Islam and/or are good Muslims, ‘othering’ the extremists as ‘mad’,
‘evil’ or ‘criminal’. Both counter-neutralizations and boundary-drawing tactics
work to ‘empower incredulity’ (Joosse et al. 2015: 827)—that is deliberately to
render certain stories and their narrators incredible—and, thus, to construct
what Fricker (2007: 17) calls a ‘credibility deficit’ for those who champion
violence in the name of Islam.
We focus on
how young Norwegian Muslims view central Islamic concepts and stories that have
been important for jihadists, in
particular the concepts and related stories of jihad, Shaheed, Sharia,
Caliphate, chuffer and al-Qiyāmah. In the analysis below, we give a brief
description of how these are used by jihadists
before describing the counter-narratives offered by the young Muslims who were
interviewed. The underlying aim is to understand how storytelling can resist
stigma and harm: here, both by constraining violent jihadism and by addressing prejudices about Muslims and Islam that
can lead to violence against Muslims.
Method
Our study
is based on interviews with 90 young Muslims in Norway aged 18–32, conducted over
a six-month period from January to June 2017. The main criteria for
participation were age and that the subjects defined themselves as Muslims. The
interviews were conducted throughout Norway in 20 different municipalities and
participants had backgrounds from 20 different countries. Most were Sunni, but
we also interviewed Shiites and some who declared affiliation to a smaller
Muslim group or who refused to differentiate between what they described as
‘sectarian’ affiliations within Islam.
Table 1.
Study
participants’ gender, age, occupation and ethnic and religious background
|
Participants |
90 |
Percentagea |
|
Gender |
|
|
|
Women |
45 |
50 |
|
Men |
45 |
50 |
|
Age |
|
|
|
18–20 |
19 |
21 |
|
21–23 |
19 |
21 |
|
24–26 |
23 |
26 |
|
27–29 |
13 |
14 |
|
30–32 |
14 |
16 |
|
33+ b |
2 |
2 |
|
Average age |
25 |
|
|
Occupation |
|
|
|
Student |
36 |
40 |
|
Employed |
41 |
46 |
|
Unemployed |
7 |
8 |
|
Asylum seeker |
3 |
3 |
|
Not specified |
3 |
3 |
|
Parents birth country |
|
|
|
Somalia |
21 |
23 |
|
Pakistan |
11 |
12 |
|
Norway |
6 |
7 |
|
Morocco |
5 |
6 |
|
Iraq |
5 |
6 |
|
Afghanistan |
5 |
6 |
|
Two countriesc |
12 |
13 |
|
Otherd |
25 |
28 |
|
Converts |
7 |
8 |
|
Islamic affiliation |
|
|
|
Sunni |
74 |
82 |
|
Shia |
8 |
9 |
|
Othere |
8 |
9 |
|
Place of birth |
|
|
|
Norway |
38 |
42 |
|
Other |
52 |
58 |
aAll percentages are rounded off to the closest
number.
bInterviewed because they had relevant information
about their own youth.
cEight participants had one parent from Norway.
dQatar, Algeria, Palestine, Kosovo, Lebanon,
Chechenia, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Kurds
from Iran and Iraq.
eCombination of people with other Islamic
affiliations than Sunni Shia, participants we do not have data on and
participants who would not state their Islamic affiliation.
-------
A team of
five researchers, three women and two men, from different cultural and academic
backgrounds and with different religious affiliations and beliefs (including
Muslim), carried out the interviews. Because the aim was to research the
everyday religious narratives of ‘ordinary’ Muslims, we tried to avoid
activists, imams or other religious experts and leaders as interviewees. The
interviewees were recruited using social networks, referral by university
students and social media, such as Facebook, by contacting mosques and Muslim
youth organizations and seeking out Muslim events. Interviewers followed a
semi-structured interview guide on themes, including positive Islamic
narratives, marginalization and discrimination, jihadi narratives, extremist organizations and de-radicalization.
The interviews lasted between one and two hours and were held in cafés or
participants’ homes.
The
interviews were designed to capture the everyday religion of the young Muslims
interviewed (Sandberg et al. 2018). We asked about their everyday beliefs,
issues such as God, the Prophet, faith, and conversion, and religious
practices, such as prayer, fasting, clothing and sexuality. We also asked where
they got their religious knowledge and what they thought about different
religious affiliations in Islam. Here, we analyse in detail the part where we
asked the participants about Islamic concepts and stories important in jihadi rhetoric. As opposed to the other
parts of the interview, where we asked relatively open questions, in this
section we were interested in their versions of particular religious
narratives.
The
socio-economic background of the participants is important, given a posited
link between socio-economic background and vulnerability to criminogenic
narratives (Ehrlich and Liu 2002). While our sample looks relatively privileged
(36 students and 41 employed) it needs to be seen in the context of the
Scandinavian welfare state. In Norway, 34 per cent have higher education (SSB
2019a), which is free. There were seven unemployed participants and three not
specified in the context of a general employment rate of 3.8 per cent (and c.
10 per cent for youths; SSB 2019b). Our sample includes participants from
relatively poor backgrounds who were currently students or in work and several
with a criminal background. It is, therefore, relatively representative of the
general population.
The sample
also includes seven to ten participants with a history of engagement with
extremist milieus or rhetoric who now no longer supported the use of violence
for political or religious reasons. Most of the other participants had friends
or acquaintances who had been involved in extremist groups and/or travelled to
Syria to fight as foreign fighters. This reflects the relatively high
percentage of Norwegian foreign fighters in Syria (between 120 and 140 in a
country of about 5 million people). This means that, for our participants,
discussions about jihadism and Muslim
extremist groups were not something abstract or theoretical but directly
relevant for their own lives and part of their communities. This was reflected
in the great interest they showed in participating in the research and their
high levels of engagement with the issues.
Young Muslims’ Narrative Resistance
There are
many ways to characterize counter-narratives. They can be formally
distinguished by their use of factual rebuttal, emotional gestures or humour
(Sandberg and Andersen 2019) or by the shape they take as tropes or full
narratives (Sandberg 2016). Here, we explore a more content-based categorization
of counter-narratives. We describe religious counter-narratives offered by
young Norwegian Muslims that challenge jihadi
master narratives. They resist, react and respond to violent extremist
narratives that these young Muslims have been exposed to either through their
social networks or in the media.
Jihad (Holy War)
In Islamic
theology, it is common to distinguish between the greater jihad (the inner struggle to become a better Muslim) and the lesser
jihad (the military struggle). The jihad ‘of the sword’ is in the
traditional meaning of Islam a defensive war that should be waged only on
Muslim territory. Armed struggle is part of the classical interpretation of jihad—but as a duty of the state when
under attack, not as an individual responsibility (Cook 2015). Radical
political Islam and Salafi-Jihadism
enabled a global jihadi movement that
foregrounded military struggle and extended the concept to include offensive
wars, attacks on non-Muslim territories and military and revolutionary warfare
against regimes believed to be opposing Islam (Wagemaker 2016). This jihad narrative is at the core of
Al-Qaida and IS propaganda (Halverson et al. 2011).
The young
Muslims in this study did not share the Salafi-Jihadi understanding of jihad.
A number of participants in our study linked jihad to defensive war. Melody explained:
Jihad is when you are being attacked for being a
Muslim and you defend yourself in God’s name and for yourself. It’s not about
you invading another country without them having done anything to you and
saying that it’s in the name of God. It can get tiresome, the fact that they
put out a lot of negativity about Islam in the media. As long as the West
doesn’t attack you for being a Muslim in your country, you have no reason to
attack them. It is completely wrong. It’s just bullshit. It’s propaganda as
well.
Self-defence
is recognized in most legal systems as a justification for harm. Melody’s
account is thus a clear appeal to mainstream values and inscribes her as
narrator—and implicitly all Muslims like her—in mainstream culture. Melody was
clear on the boundaries between her interpretation of jihad and the kind of warfare IS was involved in. She explained:
Jihad is not about going to another country as IS
have done. They go to another country to attack, say it’s in God’s name, and
that’s what people have started to think is jihad.
People misunderstand and it’s so bad because that’s what’s being shown in the
media. (...) When 0.000005% of Muslims in the world do something terrible they
show it as a representation of all of Islam.
Melody
weaves a critique of the Western media into her counter-narrative. It is not
only the jihadists who are acting
wrongly but also a mainstream media that actively furthers epistemic injustice
by spreading the jihadi
misrepresentation of what Islam says. She points to how jihadi rhetoric and the mainstream media’s anti-Islamism
paradoxically coincide in their view of Islam (Ekman 2015; Shaffer 2016). Both
see Islam as a war of religion, and both are challenged by a counter-narrative
that defines Islam as a peaceful religion and IS’s terrorism and warfare as
wrong according to Islam.
For many
interviewees, however, jihad meant
something different again. Houda explained:
Jihad is an inner war in a way. Inside you. When you
want to achieve something that you need to struggle for. For example, I had
inner jihad with myself last year in
order to manage to read the Quran. The whole Quran. It was a challenge because
I had to read a whole page every day. I do not work well like that but I have
to show God that I am struggling to achieve paradise. The same when I get up to
‘fajr’. Morning prayer, it is so good. I cannot get up at five a.m. But oh, I
have to do some jihad to get to
paradise. It’s an uphill, it’s not a downhill path to get to paradise. So yes,
to worship God more, that is jihad.
Houda’s
reply chimed with many participants’ description of jihad: as an inner struggle. Jihad
meant not stealing, not being rude, avoiding pornography, controlling anger,
reading for exams, being nice to their parents or generally being a better
Muslim and a good person. Jihad in
this sense is the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ jihad,
the battle with yourself as opposed to the ‘jihad
of the sword’ (Post 2009).
Among
participants in this study, the understanding of jihad as an inner struggle dominated, but they also acknowledged
the reputation jihad now has in the
West. Mona had to think a little before answering our question:
What does jihad mean? In a strange way, I have a
bad connection to it. The definition of jihad,
I would say, is written in Hadith in relation to the war between Islam and
non-Muslims, where people should sacrifice themselves for their religion. But
yes, what does jihad mean? I do not
think jihad says you should drive a
truck into a crowd. I do not think it is right to kill in the name of religion.
Mona
immediately associated jihad with
terrorism. She then offered a counter-neutralization that discredited—as
theologically incorrect—the jihadi
claim to kill in the name of higher loyalties (religion).
Her
narrative simultaneously, and perhaps more importantly, ‘talks back’ to the
prejudice that all Muslims ‘think it is right to kill in the name of
religion’—a prejudice that is itself potentially criminogenic if it neutralizes
hate crime against Muslims (in a ‘denial of the victim’ mode, where to harm
Muslims is virtuously to protect the dominant group). Mona’s account shows an
impetus to avert harm by correcting any misunderstanding of Islam and Muslims
as aggressively violent. It both discredits contemporary jihadist aggression and offers a corrective to cultural prejudices
that construct Islam and individual Muslims as aggressive.
The idea
that jihad is an inner struggle has
been fronted by Sufism (Cook 2015), arguably as a counter-narrative to the
coincidence of jihadi and
anti-Islamic depictions of Islam as a religion of war (van Es 2018). Systematic
theological interpretations of the role of jihad
in Islam are not our emphasis here. We are concerned with the everyday
interpretations of Islam that exist among young Muslims. These clearly leaned
towards understanding jihad as a
personal, inner struggle focused on worldly temptations. Their narratives
countered both jihadi narratives of
the importance of armed struggle and anti-Islamic or mainstream news media
stories of Islam as a religion of war.
Shaheed (Martyrdom)
Many jihadi narratives glorify
self-sacrifice—Shaheed or martyrdom.
Cook (2007) suggests martyrdom was introduced to motivate Muslim soldiers in
wartime; it has certainly been an important jihadi
narrative in the context of war (Halverson et al. 2011). The Quran does not say
much about martyrs, but some hadiths (stories of Mohammed’s life that came
later) describe how martyrs will have a ‘direct’ road to heaven and will not
have to go through Barzakh, the stage
between this world and the hereafter sometimes described as the ‘life in the
grave’ (Eidhamar 2017).
When asked
about Shaheed, Karim launched
directly into an argument against suicide terrorists:
It is not
written anywhere in the Quran that it is allowed to kill anyone, someone who is
innocent. It is even said in the Quran; ‘killing a person is equivalent to
killing all of humanity’.2 This is to show the extent of how killing is a big
sin in the Muslim faith. Every human being has a soul and every soul is holy in
the religion. So to say that they want their sins forgiven or washed away is
just nonsense. It’s a joke because, in the end, they only create criminals.
The young
Muslims in this study commonly quoted that verse from the Quran. Its use
challenges the credibility of terrorists as narrators on the grounds that they
do not know the true meaning of Islam. Karim is empowering incredulity when he
presents the jihadi claims as ‘just
nonsense’ and ‘a joke’.
Karim is
explicit that jihadi narratives are
criminogenic (‘they only create criminals’). Extremists were given the label
‘criminal’ in many participants’ narratives. Harnessing the symbolic power that
lies in state definitions of harmful activity, the label excludes religious
extremists from the community of those who know what is right. It can be seen
as a powerful trope for boundary drawing. Sarah defined the extremists as
savages and ‘ignorant idiots running around with a shotgun’. She asserted that
‘Shaytan is their god’—offering
boundary work from a more explicitly moral and religious standpoint. If they
worship Satan, Jihadi narrators lose
the ‘moral authority’ that White (1981: 26) diagnosed as essential for
narrative credibility. Other interviewees characterized the extremists as
‘crazy’ or ‘brainwashed’, invoking mental impairment, another powerful category
of social and epistemic exclusion. All of these familiar tropes—criminality,
evil and insanity—draw a boundary between the Muslims interviewed and Muslims
who are extremists and function to exclude violent jihadists from the community of credible narrators.
Most of the
participants associated Shaheed
negatively with extremism but some offered positive counter-narratives of
‘true’ Shaheed. LouLou started out in
the same vein as Karim, rejecting suicide terrorism as martyrdom in the
derogatory terms of incredulity but developed her story to define ‘real’
martyrs in a way that exposed the terrorists as not just not-shihad but
anti-shihad:
You will
not get to paradise if you kill people. Those who are ‘Shaheed’ (martyrs) are those who walk in the street and suddenly
get bombed because they have not done anything. I think they may be Shaheed because they do not know
anything and they did nothing wrong. They are innocent. Not those who bomb –
they are not Shaheed.
The Jihadi narrative is thus turned on its
head. The jihadists emerge not as
martyrs but as the kind of despots who make martyrs, and their credibility is
radically undermined.
Rejections
of Shaheed were often combined with
the assertion that suicide is a grave sin in Islam. Asked about martyrdom,
Rahmatulla immediately rejected its association with suicide terrorism:
The ugliest
or craziest thing next to killing someone is to commit suicide, because you
choose the foulest way out of this life. There is nothing in Islam that says
that you can blow yourself up in London like what happened many years ago. The
idea that sacrificing your life is the best way to promote Islam, through jihad for example, is completely wrong.
As I said, Islam says that is a very wrong and immoral way forward. Islam does
not support it. If you do commit suicide, you go straight to hell.
It is
widely accepted in Islam and indicated by verses in the Quran (6:151, 4:29)
that suicide is a sin. Rahmatulla’s counter-narrative discredits suicide
bombing by defining it as sin, not martyrdom or glory. He also brings the
exclusionary trope of mental impairment into play (‘craziest thing’). People
who are both crazy and have not understood the basic precepts of Islam cannot
possibly be credible narrators, his story implies.
The
narrative of martyrdom is important for jihadists
as it is for many other groups engaged in armed battle (Hatina 2014). It can be
seen as a straightforward example of how stories can motivate harmful acts.
While there has been a strong focus in narrative criminology on how narratives
can inspire harm (Presser and Sandberg 2015), the interviews in this study show
how criminogenic stories also can be effectively rejected. The interviewees
discredit the jihadist stories as
crazy, naïve, evil or criminal and thus work towards the narrative exclusion of
jihadi storytellers in Muslim
communities. They simultaneously distinguish their own accounts from extremist
narratives, seeking a counter-status for themselves as credible narrators.
Sharia (Islamic Law)
In Islamic
theology, Sharia is the road to Jinnah (paradise). It literally translates as
‘the way’ and refers to Islamic laws that govern religious rituals and everyday
life (e.g. prayers, hygiene and diet). Sharia law is a controversial concept
both within Muslim communities and in meetings between Muslims and other groups.
Under Sharia law, severe penalties, called Hudud punishments, are incurred for
crimes against God, such as adultery, drinking alcohol and some forms of theft
(Dupret 2018). In the jihadist
conception of an Islamic state, these punishments also apply to non-Muslims.
For contemporary jihadists, and for
the IS in particular, the implementation of Sharia law and the reinstatement of
the Caliphate form a ‘powerful source of narrative satisfaction’ (Halverson et
al. 2011: 21).
Sharia was
another concept that triggered engaged counter-narratives, as well as
negotiated narratives as conceptualized by Plummer (2019). Reflecting on the
views of mainstream Norwegian society, many of the interviewees immediately
associated Sharia with Hudud punishments and responded to our question about
what Sharia was by explaining that it was much more than Hudud. Abbas for
example said that Sharia was ‘Islamic law’,
a set of
rules, but there has been too much emphasis on the punishment part, Hudud,
which is really misunderstood. I have some ideas about this. If you read the
Quran then we can see verses that say: cut off the hand. But parts of the Quran
are valid and other parts are not. We have a rule in Arabic that is called
naser. That means that some verses do not apply and should be replaced by
others. (…) It was a different time. Now there is no cutting off of hands or
killings, because it turns out that those methods don’t give good results. So
then it’s replaced by a modern system, for example the Norwegian one.
Abbas’s
understanding was a liberal one, emphasizing Ijtihad (independent reasoning).
He went on to explain that certain verses in the Quran were no longer valid in
the light of developments in scientific knowledge. Other verses now had to be
seen as more relevant. Western cultural beliefs do not usually associate this
kind of pragmatism with Islam, but our study suggests that it is an important
part of everyday Islam, as well as part of ordinary Muslims’ responses to jihadist literal readings of the Quran.
Magnus was
one of the few interviewees who declared support for Hudud punishments. Even
he, however, pragmatically relativized their applicability in the contemporary
Norwegian context:
As a Muslim
I’ll have to support them, of course. But in the same way as in Norway you need
proofs to punish, in Islam you need proofs to punish. I want sharia here, but
not like that; I doubt that it will ever come. Because we’re a non-Muslim
country. We have to respect that this law does not apply here. But in a Muslim country
then that is the law. If you commit adultery you know you’ll be punished for
it. In the same way as you will be punished for using drugs here.
Magnus’s
narrative displays his understanding and acceptance of contemporary Norwegian
mores; he thus situates himself in the epistemic mainstream and distances
himself from the extremist standpoint. The comparison with how things are done
in Norway seeks reciprocal understanding and acceptance from his implied
audience for Hudud practices in Islamic states: if people know the law, they
only have themselves to blame.
More
commonly, the interviewees presented Sharia as a set of rules for Muslims.
Fatima, for example, described Sharia as a combination of the five pillars of
Islam and being a good person. Her narrative foregrounded the five
pillars—‘praying, fasting, travelling to Mecca, respecting each other and
respecting all people’—behind which the punishments of Hudud had only a
background presence. Maryam rather similarly explained that Sharia was ‘what we
follow, for example how to pray, that’s Sharia, hijab is Sharia, treating other
people well is Sharia’. Rather than consigning Hudud punishments to the
background, however, her narrative discounts them by insisting that they
cannot, in practice, be applied:
No one can
deny that they exist, but the thing is that if you read Sharia law and try to
get some knowledge about how this will happen, then you learn that it applies
to a particular time. It must be under Muslim rule and there must be four
witnesses. It takes a lot! It’s not usually the case that four witnesses are
outside a window and watch people commit adultery. It takes a lot for these
punishments to be executed.
Maryam’s
account does not directly reject the existence of Hudud punishments within
Sharia but provides a negotiated narrative that tones down their importance and
(like Abbas’s) denies them contemporary relevance. Negotiated narratives
(Plummer 2019) were observable when the young Muslims interviewed did not feel
that they had the authority to dismiss or relativize a narrative founded in
strong Islamic traditions but still wanted to mark some distance.
The
association of Sharia with its interpretation and application by extreme jihadists triggered engaged resistance.
Interviewees provided negotiated narratives around the contemporary relevance
of Hudud penalties, in which they consigned them to a particular historic
period, explained why they were primarily of symbolic value or obscured them
behind a five pillars-based Sharia for contemporary society. Such storytelling
enables the negotiation of difficult and existential issues without necessarily
requiring a clear-cut conclusion (Bauman 1986). This flexible or negotiable
attitude to Sharia enables ‘culturalized citizenship’ (van Es 2019), making it
possible to combine Islam (and living in Muslim communities) with belonging in
Norwegian society. Similarly, values that were felt to transcend religion or
cultural background, such as ‘being a good person’, were often emphasized.
The Caliphate (Islamic State)
The
Caliphate is an Islamic state, lead by a caliph who is believed to succeed the
prophet Mohammed. Like many religious concepts, the concept of the Caliphate
fluctuates in different historical and societal contexts (Kennedy 2016: 3).
Living in a perfect Islamic state is a central idea in contemporary Islamic
revivalism and closely related to the Pharaoh, one of jihadism’s key narratives (Halverson et al. 2011). Some schools of
Muslim theology believe that there will be a new Caliphate before al-Qiyāmah
(the Day of Reckoning). A key distinction between Al Qaeda and IS was the
importance of apocalyptic propaganda and the creation of a territorial Islamic
state (Gerges 2016). The Caliphate narrative has thus been more important for
IS than for other jihadi
organizations.
The
participants in this study were less familiar with the idea of the contemporary
Caliphate than with notions of jihad,
Sharia and even Shaheed. Most had an
understanding of the historic role of the Caliphate and some dreamed about a
future perfect Islamic state. None had given profound consideration to the
self-proclaimed Caliphate of IS in Syria and Iraq. Many, nonetheless, sought to
discredit the idea of a contemporary Caliphate and drew boundaries separating
the narrator from those who believed in it. Farid consigned Caliphates to the
past:
They were
important in previous times, during the time of the Prophet, but in today’s
society I don’t think they are important at all (…). Who is to interpret those
laws and rules that should apply in the Caliphate? Personally I don’t believe
that any human in contemporary society is capable of that. It’s maybe brutal to
say that, but it takes a lot to create a just Caliphate with laws and rules.
Within Islam today, I don’t think it is possible to create such a Caliphate.
It’s very challenging, almost impossible.
In this
view, if a just Caliphate is not currently possible, then there had better be
none. Sarah similarly saw the Caliphate as something only the ‘stupid’ would
seek to restore in the present:
It has died
out. There is no living Caliphate any more. It went down with the Ottomans (…).
But IS describe themselves as a Caliphate, and I think that’s just stupid. The
Caliphate and those things represent the golden age of Islam, but it’s nothing
that can be resurrected.
An
epistemic boundary is drawn here between the ignorant (‘stupid’) and those in
the know (that there ‘is no living Caliphate’). Nima’s account chimes with
Farid’s when Nima explains that a Caliphate must be chosen by God:
I believe
that if a state is to be perfect then it needs to be Islamic. Because Islam is
perfected and then society becomes perfected. But the Khalifa system is created
by humans and a Khalifa cannot be chosen by humans. A Khalifa should be chosen
by God.
For Nima,
as for Sarah, the Caliphate is associated with an idealized Muslim past. Farid
agrees, though, for him, the coming of the Caliphate simultaneously belongs in
a very distant future. None of them accept it as a legitimate justification for
waging war or claiming territory now. Their insistence that human beings cannot
resurrect the Caliphate in the present represents a solid negation of jihadi propaganda. Ahlam’s account of
the Caliphate tackled IS in particular:
I’ve read
some of the rules they have in that state. Those aren’t Islamic rules – in
Islam you shouldn’t be forced to do anything. If you pray you should do it of
your own free will, and if you practise Islam you should do it of your own free
will; if you’re forced then you don’t do it for God, but for the person that
forces you. Then you won’t get any rewards for those actions. Cause you don’t
do them for God. If you listen to ISIS that’s wrong, it’s not Islam. That state
or Caliphate there is very wrong.
This was a
position supported by many: if the population of an Islamic state was forced to
follow particular rules, rather than following them for God, they were
skeptical. The distinction between right and wrong Caliphates was further
pursued by Mustafa, who described a Hadith story that
talks about
the Caliphate; where there are young men with long hair who claim that they are
going to join the Caliphate, but that’s not part of the real Caliphate. When
they recite the Quran, they recite only from the mouth, not from the heart.
They don’t feel anything in the heart.
The
departure of foreign fighters to Syria, he insisted, is the result of a
misreading of holy texts:
Many have
read and misunderstood, so some believe that that time is now and that’s why
they (Syrian foreign fighters) go to Sham. Sham is the Syrian neighborhood;
Lebanon, Egypt and so on, where foreign fighters go to join the Caliphate.
Again, the
extremists are discredited as naïve readers of religious stories and purveyors
of wrong knowledge. Mustafa’s depiction of the false Caliphate resonates with a
story told by Farid about ‘imposters’ (see also Joosse et al. 2015) and a
Hadith that mentions a group of false Muslims. Both narratives echo an
important story in Islam about the hypocrites (Halverson et al. 2011), or the
enemy within, and refer to contemporary religious extremists, implicitly to IS
in particular, who used the idea of the Caliphate to justify and motivate
aggression and state-building in Syria and Iraq. The dream of a perfect Islamic
state has widespread appeal also for Muslims who are not associated with
extremist groups; but the interviewees emphasized that the Caliphate is
something to be introduced by God, not by people. That perfect state,
therefore, belongs to a distant past or to the future, and those who do not see
this are excluded, in their accounts, from the community of credible knowers.
Kuffar (Infidels)
Jihadi narratives use the term infidel (Kafir in the singular, Kuffar in the plural; Kufr describes disbelief) frequently.
Part of the reason for having a Caliphate is to isolate the believers from the
infidels and create a perfect state. Extremist rhetoric is characterized by
definitions of who is a righteous believer and who is not. The condemnation of
unbelievers is closely related to what Halverson et al. (2011) describe as the jihadi master narrative of infidel
invaders. The threat of the Kafir can
also come from within, and describing other Muslims as Kuffar is a widespread strategy of jihadi groups.
The young
Muslims interviewed tried to avoid the word Kuffar—they
were clearly uncomfortable with it. When they did use it, they chose the plural
form Kuffar, even when speaking in
the singular (where one might expect Kafir); Kuffar was the everyday religious term in use for infidels in all
numbers and forms. Loulou explained that ‘a Kuffar
is someone who does not believe in God’, but then added that ‘Christians
believe in God, and it is not for us to decide who is a Kuffar’. She thus negotiated the narrative of non-Muslims as
infidels with a more inclusive version of the believer that embraces everyone
who believed in a God. Placing emphasis on God, not humans, as the deciding
authority is a narrative negotiation familiar from the interviewees’ rejections
of the contemporary Caliphate. Giving God the ultimate and sole authority in
these issues effectively dismisses the authority of Muslim extremists and
simultaneously implies that they are usurping the rights of God—a double
disqualification of their stories
Some
interviewees resisted fundamentalist interpretations by insisting that Kuffar was a purely neutral or objective
description. Salam, for example, defined a Kafir
as a ‘non-believer person. One who does not believe in Islam. Kuffar is used as a derogatory term
today, but it’s not. It’s just a term for someone who does not believe Allah.
It’s just that’. Others said that Kuffar
referred to particularly bad people who opposed God. To be an infidel, it was
not enough not to believe; one had to actively go against God’s work or be
evil. Some turned the tables on the jihadi
stories in the way observed in the context of martyrdom. Ifrah expressed the
view that infidels were ‘those who kill people for no reason’, flipping the
rhetoric around to damn violent extremists.
Sana
initially took a clear-cut view: ‘Kuffar
means that you are Christian, eat pork, drink, do not pray and do not fast.
That’s a kuffar for me’. But she
marked her distance from fundamentalist narratives by following her opening
statement on infidels with a declaration of Islamic tolerance:
Islam says
that we should respect all religions whether we agree or not. So it’s not like,
‘if a person is a Christian, kill him’. No, try to understand him, and if you
don’t agree, respect that he thinks like that and he will respect that you
think differently and then we can get along much better. Cause you can’t change
everything. You can’t get everyone to agree with you. Everyone has different
opinions about what is right and wrong.
Pleas for
the acceptance of people with different beliefs featured in many accounts.
Anniken, a convert, spoke of her family who were not Muslim. Her story pointed
to the personal suffering fundamentalist thinking can cause:
I hear many
friends who say, ‘Oh my God, that’s Kuffar!’
I don’t like to use that word – it means my whole family are that. I love my
father and he died one year ago. If you hear that he’s a Kuffar, you don’t want to think about it. That’s not how I
experience Islam. In Islam you should be nice to everyone, whether they are
believers or non-believers, or Christians.
Other
narrators cited traditional stories to illustrate the acceptance of other
religions in Islam. Stories about the Prophet Mohammed were particularly
popular. Mustafa, for example, integrated into his narrative a story about how
Mohammed treated individuals from other religions:
For
example, there is a story of a lady who threw garbage at the prophet when she
saw him walking in their streets. Every day when she saw him she threw her garbage
at him. One day she got sick. When he saw that she was not throwing rubbish any
more, he knocked on her door with food and took care of her. After that she
became a Muslim.
Such
stories do different kinds of work: they counter the notion that Islam is a
religion that cannot respect other religions, they negate the claim that it is
a violent religion and they contradict the notion that Muslims treat
unbelievers badly. The climax of Mustafa’s narrative—that Mohammed moved
unbelievers to convert by his patience and kindness—repudiates both Islamic
fundamentalist intolerance and Western narratives of an inherently aggressive
Islam.
Mentioning
the word kuffar/kafir to the young
Muslims provoked various forms of narrative resistance, counter-narratives and
negotiated narratives. They ranged from interpretations of the word as a
neutral descriptor for those who do not believe to powerfully metonymic
accounts of how Mohammed always treated unbelievers well and more personal
stories about struggling with the negative labelling of other people. All
agreed that the term was being used in the wrong way by Muslim extremists.
Al-Qiyāmah (The Day of Reckoning)
Revival and
mobilization in many religions are associated with the belief that one is
living in the last days. According to McCants (2015), the main reason why IS
was so successful was its capacity to convince its followers that the
apocalypse was close. In more conservative Muslim traditions, predictions
related to the Day of Reckoning or doomsday (al-Qiyāmah) are of minor
importance. However, like authoritarian rule and the regional wars in the
Middle East since the 1970s, the growth of Islam among young people has been
fuelled by doomsday prophecies (Filiu 2012). Seeing signs of the final days
everywhere and even staging them (when IS conquered Dabiq, for example) has
been part of extremist rhetoric and recruitment. Believing that the world is
coming to an end makes it more important to be ‘on the right side’ and less
threatening to sacrifice one’s life.
The young
Muslims interviewed for our study had a relatively relaxed attitude to the Day
of Reckoning; few were convinced that al-Qiyāmah was just around the corner.
Some, however, did refer to signs of living in the last days. Alima, for
example, declared, ‘It is clear that what is happening now is written in the
Quran. The signs are there. Clear signs. It is not only in Islam but in
Christianity that judgment day is on its way, and in Judaism. And they are the
central religions’. The second part of her statement distances her from the
fundamentalist standpoint: by connecting the coming of the last days to other
monotheistic religions, she broadens the base of her narrative authority and
simultaneously signals that she is tolerant of these religions and feels a connection
to them.
Ismail,
too, described signs that the last days were approaching but with a more overt
anti-jihadi twist.
Ismail:
Before the Day of Reckoning people will hate each other, people will trust
those that lie and will not believe in those that tell the truth. You can see a
son killing his own mother, cruel stuff.
Interviewer: Do you think this has already happened?
Ismail: Yes, of course, it has happened. For example,
IS is a sign of the Day of Reckoning, that it is close.
In a
familiar move, Ismail turns the story of al-Qiyāmah against the extremist
groups, who in his narrative are themselves a sign that the last days are
coming. They become the representative of the devil rather than his opponents.
The
majority of the interviewees did not claim to see signs of the last days, but
the Day of Reckoning was nonetheless part of their religious beliefs. For many,
it was an important motivation for living as good Muslims, but their
theological knowledge of and personal engagement with the idea varied. Most
knew the general history of al-Qiyāmah, in greater or less detail, and some
also had personal versions of it. Esra for example described a recurring dream:
I have
dreamt about it a couple of times. I had a dream when we were in the living
room, me and my cousins. Then some big people came and knocked on the door and
said that it was the Day of Reckoning. We had to get up and there were flames
everywhere. And we have heard that on the Day of Reckoning everybody rises from
the graves and becomes sand. They weigh what is positive and negative and if
you have done a lot of bad things you go to hell.
In these
accounts, the ideas of judgment, heaven and hell give meaning to death and
motivate the narrators to live as good Muslims.
There were
few signs of the extremist narratives of the last days, except where the
narrators wove rejections of the jihadi
stories of the Day of Reckoning into their accounts. Some repudiated the
judgmental approach of the jihadists,
declaring that it was for Allah or God to punish evildoers and not for human
beings. Afrah, for example, opined:
I think the
only person who should judge someone is God. It’s between you and God, or
Allah. That’s why there is the Day of Reckoning. That’s where good and evil get
weighed up against each other. We are not Allah, really, so we can’t judge
people by what they have done.
Aisha took
a similar view: ‘it is God who punishes, it is not people who should punish
each other’. The attribution of final authority to God echoes the narratives of
kuffar and the Caliphate. It
effectively discredits Muslim extremists’ assumption of the right to judge who
is and is not a righteous Muslim and to punish.
Another
familiar technique was turning the narrative tables on extremist rhetoric in
predictions about who would be punished. Sahra, for example, told a story about
judgment day similar to Sandra’s but concluded:
Account is
taken of everything you have done. For example Hitler or ISIS or what
Al-Shabaab does, even though they manage to get away with it in this world,
then they won’t be able to get away with it in the next, on the Day of
Reckoning. Because everything you have done will come up again.
Hitler is a
clear and powerful trope of criminal leadership. Equating IS and Al-Shabaab
with Hitler and emphasizing that they will all be held equally accountable not
only implies that justice will prevail but also that it is already clear (via
the historic example of Hitler) that IS and Al-Shabaab will be judged
negatively.
Stories
about the last days, fear of the final judgment and an apocalyptic worldview
have long fuelled jihadi rhetoric and
have been especially important for IS (McCants 2015). The everyday religious
beliefs of the young Muslims in this study included a certain tendency to see
signs that the final days are approaching (Cook 2005), but their
interpretations and expectations of the Day of Reckoning explicitly ran counter
to extremist rhetoric. They presented it primarily as a call to be a better
person and a better Muslim and not as a call to arms against infidels (Sandberg
et al. 2018). Sometimes stories of al-Qiyāmah were used to discredit violent
extremists: they were characterized as the ones who would be punished in hell
or seen as a sign of the cruelty of the last days.
Discussion
Asking
young Muslims about jihadi narratives
risks framing them as a suspect community and thus perpetuating epistemic
injustice (O’Donnell 2018). There is a danger of contributing to a perception
that they are somehow responsible for jihadi
terrorism or peculiarly vulnerable to extremist rhetoric. As some young Muslims
in a British study put it, ‘Why should we have to prove we’re alright?’ (Mythen
et al. 2013). Our experience, nonetheless, was that young Muslims in Norway
were keen to talk about the issues—they wanted a voice to present another image
of Islam than the one they faced daily in the mainstream media and popular
discourse. Of the different research projects we have run over the years, this
was by far the easiest to recruit participants to. When interviewed, the
participants were emotionally engaged and voiced their opinions with great
commitment.
Given the
groups of young Muslims travelling to Syria from Norway, this was not an
abstract or theoretical matter for them. Most knew or knew of someone who had
been fascinated by or drawn to jihadi
narratives. The Salafi-Jihadi
interpretation of jihad emphasizes
the duty of armed struggle against anyone opposing Islam. Embedded in an
apocalyptic narrative, the promise of eternal life, or of life in a perfect
Muslim State, motivates sacrifice and justifies violence. The impetus of the
everyday religious narratives—jihad,
Sharia, Shaheed, Caliphate, kufr and
al-Qiyāmah—that we encountered in this study was to limit crime and harm. Some
interviewees said explicitly that they were averting harm by telling these
stories in their communities and social networks (Mohamed and Sandberg 2019).
Additionally, their accounts showed an impetus to limit hate crime against
Muslims perpetrated by anti-Islamists or xenophobic members of the majority
population.
While the
formal teachings of Islam have been thoroughly addressed, there is little
systematic knowledge about what young Muslims actually believe in. That is part
of their narrative exclusion (Plummer 2019; Colvin in press). Attending to
everyday stories can counter, or at least help reveal, narrative exclusion and
epistemic injustice. The young Muslims in this study used the strategy of
empowering incredulity (Joosse et al. 2015: 827) to redraw symbolic boundaries,
mobilizing their everyday religious knowledge to achieve the epistemic
exclusion of extremists, whose claims about Islam they discredit as wrong,
stupid or sometimes even satanic. The moral and credibility deficit that
attends narrative exclusion is thus shifted on to jihadi narrators, while the interviewees are positioned on the side
of the (peaceable) mainstream as acculturated citizens. The boundary is
implicitly no longer between the mainstream and all Muslims but divides a
mainstream that includes peaceable Muslims from violent jihadi extremsts. Interestingly, the Western media is often seen to
be narratively in league with the extremists in its persistent presentation of
Islam as a religion of war and violence.
Young
Muslims’ counter-narratives ‘talk back’ both to subcultural jihadi narratives of justified violence
and to cultural prejudices about the intolerance and violence of Islam.3
‘Talking back’ is generally regarded as subversive (of the dominant narrative),
but it can simultaneously be normative if the speaker is seeking inclusion in
the dominant discursive community. The young Muslims in the study offered
narrative resistance to an excluding mainstream, rejecting its characterization
of Islam as a religion of aggression. They simultaneously joined forces with that
mainstream in seeking the narrative exclusion of jihadi extremists. They thereby reinscribed themselves into a
religiously tolerant, peaceable mainstream community, disavowing membership of
the subcultural community of values invoked by the jihadi fighters and imputed to all Muslims by cultural
stereotyping.
Conclusion
Criminological
research and theory can benefit from going beyond the more familiar variables
and explanations, such as poverty, criminal networks, dysfunctional families or
individual pathology, to explore the details of specific ‘criminogenic’
cultural (Ferrell et al. 2015) or narrative (Presser and Sandberg 2015;
Fleetwood et al. 2019) universes. This study shows, for example, how
criminology can learn from studies of everyday religion (Ammerman 2006),
especially when trying to understand how everyday religious narratives can
arouse, but also counter, violence and harm. Criminological research on
political and religious extremism is necessarily interdisciplinary and must put
criminology into dialogue with religious studies, the sociology of religion,
terrorism scholarship and political science.
Narrative
criminology has emphasized the particularities of stories that motivate and
constrain crime and harm. Here, our underlying aim was to understand how
storytelling seeks to resist both violent jihadism
and the prejudices about Muslims and Islam that can lead to violence against
Muslims. The young Muslims interviewed for this study offered founded
rejections of jihadi stories and
rhetoric. Within Muslim communities, everyday beliefs and narrative resistance
to violence seem likely to influence behaviours. One must hope that the
mainstream is also listening.
--------
Funding
This work
was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd (Norwegian Research Council)
(research grant 259541)
Acknowledgements
We would
particularly like to thank the research team for the Radicalization and
Resistance project at the University of Oslo: Idil Mohamed, Samah Shokr,
Tiffany Gasser, Jan Andersen, Marius Linge and Sébastien Tutenges. The ongoing
discussions during the two years when we were conducting interviews, coding and
writing a book (in Norwegian) were of great value for this paper. We are also
grateful to Levi Geir Eidhamar and Marius Linge for sharing their broad
knowledge of Islam when commenting on this paper. Finally, we would like to
thank the two anonymous referees for British Journal of Criminology for their
insights and input.
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Footnotes
1 http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com/.
2 Referring to verse 5:32 of the Quran.
3 See also van Es, cited in European
Commission 2018.
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by
Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
(ISTD).
This is an Open Access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted
reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work
is properly cited.
A correction has been published:
The British Journal of Criminology,
Volume 60, Issue 6, November 2020, Page 1694,
https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azaa061
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Original Headline: ‘ISIS is not Islam’: Epistemic Injustice,
Everyday Religion, and Young Muslims’ Narrative Resistance
Source: The British Journal of Criminology
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