Why We Become Terrorists… And How We Can Be Stopped

 

During World War II, the US army commissioned Hollywood director Frank Capra to produce a movie series titled ‘Why We Fight’. It was meant as a response to the Nazi propaganda machine and also as an indoctrination tool, which would emotionally bind American soldiers of all hue and colour to the cause of war. Simultaneously, an experimental section in the war department, headed by psychologist Carl Hovland, was asked to study the effects of the movie series and other means of motivation to gauge how useful they were, and how they could be made more potent.

 

Hovland moved to the Yale University after the war, where he continued his research. The result was his 1953 book ‘Communication and Persuasion’, in which he discussed in detail how people can be motivated to change their attitudes―to the extent of giving their lives for a cause. Six decades later, his insights can also help explain how young men and women are led to give their lives for a different sort of cause―terrorism―and, conversely, how they can be prevented from doing so.

 

Hovland’s team studied communication at three levels to understand its persuasive powers: the communicator, content of the communication, and target audience. A communicator’s most significant attribute was his credibility, which he derived from both trustworthiness and expertise. The more trustworthy a communicator was and the greater his expertise in a given area, the more credible―and therefore persuasive―he would become.

 

Content of the communication derived its impact from both the nature of the appeal being made, and how the appeal was being presented. The study found that strong “fear-arousing appeals” can lead to significant changes in attitude. In other words, it was easier to persuade people by alarming them about a “threat”, and the more vividly the threat was described, the more persuasive the communication became. Hovland also studied if the communication should be explicit in its conclusions or if they should be left implicit for deriving the maximum effect. Explicitly stated conclusions were generally found to be more effective.

 

Finally, as it was obvious that the same communication had varying effects on different people, So, Hovland also studied the relationship between the persuasive powers of communication and the nature of the audience. He concluded that people’s attitudes depended on “individual factors” as well as on the social groups to which they belonged. The more they valued the membership of such groups, the more their attitudes would conform to those of the group. Thus it was easier to change the attitudes of a person if he did not value his membership of that group. Conversely, the more closely a person identified with a group, the more difficult it would be to make his attitudes different from those of that group.

 

Terrorism’s Persuasive Powers

 

How can we use these ideas to understand the persuasive power of terrorist ideologies today? What is it that makes the terrorist message so convincing that it inspires Muslim youth to take lives―or even give their own?

 

First, the communicator. Ideologues such as Osama bin Laden, Anwar al Awlaki and Zakir Naik on a global scale, and terror cell recruiters at the local level, derive their credibility from religion. They don’t ask us to blow people up for fun―instead they ask us to do what is (supposedly) mandated by Islam. They present themselves as experts of Islam, who can be trusted to know what the religion demands. They sometimes read the Quran literally, and often interpret it selectively. And they buttress their case by manufacturing Hadees out of thin air.

 

So the communicator gains credibility by wearing the cloak of religion. Men like Zakir Naik are even more popular than bin Laden or Awlaki because they don’t just claim to know the Quran and Hadees but also the sacred texts of other religions―all by heart. The gimmick of reciting passages extempore from the Quran, the Bible and the Vedas in front of TV audiences adds to their aura of credibility. They become the experts, people who can be trusted to know what they are talking about.

 

Of course, the fact that the premise of their expertise is religious text precludes all possibility of discussion and debate even by those who can comprehend and critique. Divine knowledge must, by definition, be absolute―we challenge it at our own peril!

 

Next, the content of the message. All these ideologues appeal to our sense of fear by dividing the world into “Us” and “Them”―Dar al Islam (Abode of Islam) and Dar al Harb (Abode of War)―and then telling us that we are at war for the very survival of Islam. They use Quranic verses urging Muslims to fight―revealed at a time when a handful of Muslims were actually struggling to survive against a mortal enemy―to validate a global war at a time when Muslims form at least 20% of the global population, spread across every continent and every country.

 

“Fear-arousing appeals”, as Hovland found, are the most potent means of changing attitudes. The threat is made most vivid and explicit by the depiction of US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The fact that most Muslims have been killed by other Muslims in these wars―in particular by groups led by or allied to these very ideologues, such as Abu Musab Zaraqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq and Mullah Omar’s Taliban―is of course glossed over. We are eventually left with the image of a world divided into ‘West’ and ‘Islam’, in which the West is a rampaging bull and Islam a hapless victim, and we Muslims must strike back for the sake of ourselves, our loved ones and our religion. Doomed if we don’t, damned if we don’t.

 

The third and final element―we, the audience―is built into this narrative. I may be an Indian journalist, you may be a Singaporean businessman, and someone else may be an American engineer or a European student. But no, in this narrative, we are none of those things. We are just and simply Muslims, nothing else. We have no choice in the matter. We also don’t have any choice in the kind of Muslims we may want to be, for there can be only one kind―sworn to defend Islam against the West, ready to kill or be killed.

 

This identity and this attitude has been deftly constructed over a period of time in a wide variety of ways. One is cultural Arabisation, visible in India in linguistic shifts from Khuda Hafiz to Allah Hafiz and from Ramzan to Ramadan. Another is the obligation for men to grow beards and for women to wear burqas as necessary aspects of being Muslim. Other means include Muslims’ ghettoisation and increasing preference for madrasa education.

 

Together, these physical factors reinforce the mental divide. As more and more people live, wear, study and speak ‘Muslim’, it becomes more difficult for them to dissociate themselves from the attitudes of the group. As Hovland found, the more we value our membership of the group, the more strongly our attitudes conform to it.

 

Thus, a glocal enterprise works to create an Islamic populace, whose members think of themselves as “Muslims” and nothing else, who revel in their supposed victimhood and live perpetually in fear of physical and cultural survival. We look at the rest of the world as an enemy we are at war with, an enemy we must fight and kill―even if it means dying in the process. “Martyrdom”, in fact, is hailed as the highest virtue we can aim for.

 

Depending on individual factors, Muslims the world over are persuaded by this message to varying degrees. Most of us buy the idea of victimhood; we live in fear, talk to friends, family and children about it (thus spreading the message further), but basically get on with our lives. A few are persuaded enough to join the “war” ourselves.

 

(To be sure, there is a similar Us-Versus-Them communication being propagated in the West by credible “experts” such as social theorists Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, and popular commentators such as Glenn Beck and Daniel Pipes. It is remarkable how much the two opposing sides in this war―Islamists and Islamophobes―agree with each other, and how well they work in tandem, helping each other out by validating each other’s “fear-arousing appeals”.)

 

Persuasion for Peace

 

Hovland’s research is useful for explaining how the persuasive power of communication works. It can also be used to counter the impact of terrorist ideologies. People who want to end this never-ending “war” and desire to live in a more peaceful world can use a similar three-pronged approach.

 

First, the communicator. The credibility of “religious experts” who propagate war must first of all be challenged. They need to be exposed as untrustworthy frauds, whose reading and interpretation of Islam is not only wrong but the polar opposite of the spirit of our faith. In addition, we need our own communicators. People like Tariq Ramadan, Amr Khaled, Maulana Wahiduddin, Muhammad Yunus, Ashfaque Ullah Syed, Asghar Ali Engineer, Sultan Shahin, Irshad Manji and a clutch of other scholars have spent their lives trying to rescue the true meaning of the Quran and Hadees and present Islam as a peaceful, progressive religion. And yet, they lack the aura of expertise and trustworthiness necessary for their ideas to gain more credibility and be more persuasive for common Muslims.

 

Second, the content of the communication. The atmosphere of fear and victimhood that has been spread among Muslims the world over needs to be expelled. Despite rampant Islamophobia, individual Muslims have achieved great success everywhere and in every field. In fact, it can be argued that in recent times Muslims in supposedly Islamophoblic societies―such as the US, Europe and India―have been more successful than those in Islamic societies. Indeed, why just talk of individual success? Even Muslim communities living in mixed societies are on the whole better off than exclusivist societies such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and various parts of the Middle East, where they fight and kill each other in the absence of the “enemy”.

 

The “fear” of the “other” propagated by Ladens and Naiks is thus clearly overstated. There is no global threat to Islam, or localised threats to smaller Muslim communities living among non-Muslim majorities. If anything, Muslims are their own worst enemies. These are the facts that need to be communicated.

 

Third, the audience. The physical and mental walls that have been built between Muslims and others must be pulled down. Even a cursory glance at history shows that there really is no “us” and “them”. The so-called Western civilisation was born out of Eastern scientific and philosophical knowledge and midwifed by Arabs during the Middle Ages. Since then, both the so-called East and the Muslim world have changed completely by imbibing scientific, political and economic knowhow from the West. Substantial migrations of population in all directions, particularly over the past century, have made these boundaries even more meaningless. A year before 9/11, a Muslim opened the US Republican party’s national convention with a ‘dua’. Any notion of “us” and “them” living in civilisations at war with each other is thus utterly ridiculous.

 

Of course, all these factors overlap and none works without the others. For instance, a crucial reason why communicators of peace find it difficult to have greater impact is that the content of their communication is not “fear-mongering”, identified by Hovland as being the most persuasive. This problem can be overcome if they present terrorism not simply as a misinterpretation of Islam but as a mortal danger to Islam. Much is written on how Islamophobia encourages terrorism―the opposite is also true. We need to say more on how terrorism creates the very conditions that Muslims fear, and how this fabricated atmosphere is, in fact, driving a number of Muslims away from Islam.

 

Another way our communicators can challenge the credibility of Ladens and Naiks is by questioning the obligation for we, the audience, to see ourselves as Muslims first and Muslims last. Of course we are Muslims, but each of us has a lot of other identities at the same time―sexual, racial, regional, national, linguistic, professional, and so on. Why can’t I see myself more as a journalist, more as an Indian or more as a cricket enthusiast, and less as a Muslim?

 

If I see myself only as a Muslim, then my behaviour and attitudes in all walks of life will derive from it. As a journalist I would be most concerned with exposing “anti-Muslim biases” (as much of India’s Urdu press seems to be), and as a cricket enthusiast I would feel compelled to support Pakistan in matches with India. Thus, if I see myself as a Muslim, then I will make sure that others do so as well. I will create the “minority” box I find myself in, and then I will cry victim for the rest of my life. Communicators need to question this compulsion that Muslims feel to stifle all other identities they can have under the mask of Islam. If their audience feels “less Muslim”, they will also be lesser inclined to believe in Ladens and Naiks.

 

Initiatives that challenge the clash of civilisations theory by calling for a “dialogue between civilisations”, while well-meaning, are actually unhelpful as they psychologically reinforce the notion that we live in different civilisations. The truth is, we all live in a common and increasingly mixed global community and share a common global history. A Muslim train operator in India or Pakistan is as much a legatee of the invention of steam engine as his counterpart in England. People who write books to propagate Islam and Islamic culture today must acknowledge their debt to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press almost six centuries ago, just as the recent discovery of Higgs Boson, the “God Particle”, at CERN in Geneva, owes much to the past work of Abdus Salam and Satyendra Nath Bose.

 

While there are many cultures among us, all of us have influenced and been influenced by each other. And while we all need to talk to each other, there are simply no distinctive civilisations among us worth the name―either to wage dialogue or to wage war.

 

Saif Shahin is a research scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes regularly for New Age Islam.

 

URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/become-terrorists…-how-be-stopped/d/8284