Beyond Madrasas and Mortgages

BEIRUT -- It was inevitable that one day the two worlds of the Islamic madrasa and the American mortgage crisis would meet, as happened in the story of would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. Well, he did not actually go to a madrasa -- the religion-based, community elementary school for young Muslims in many parts of Asia and the Middle East where government schools are not universally available. He lived a privileged life in Pakistan and the United States.

I’m talking here about the state of mind that madrasas represent for many observers around the world: young men and women whose religious education and associated ideological indoctrination occasionally transform them into self-designated warriors who believe they are defending the purity of their faith and society against the dangers of immoral Western despoilment. From that state of mind, it is a short step towards a radicalized world view, and from there just a gesture away from criminal terror acts.

Shahzad provides more layers of fact and confusion in the global attempt to understand what makes young men turn into criminal terrorists. He and his wife, both American citizens of Pakistani origin, are well-educated, held good jobs, and had owned a home in a pleasant Connecticut town. The real estate mortgage crisis hit them badly, forcing them to abandon their home. Western materialism and its troubles played some role in forging the mindset of despair and panic that triggered Shahzad’s journey into crime.

If it was not solely the madrasa mindset or the mortgage crisis, then what explains his terrible attempt to explode a car in Times Square during one of the day’s busiest moments? We also learn that he was influenced by the sermons of Yemeni-American religious leader Imam Anwar Awlaki. The same Awlaki had also been associated with the radicalization of the would-be Christmas day Detroit plane bomber, Nigerian national Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and US Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan who is accused of killing 13 people at an army base in Texas last November.

Other reports say that Shahzad was radicalized during more than a dozen trips to Pakistan’s northwest region that is the base for groups like Al-Qaeda, the Afghani and Pakistani Taliban, and other such militant organizations. One reason for this, we learn, is that Shahzad was angered by the repeated American and Pakistani army attacks against militants and civilians in those and nearby regions. One Pakistani Taliban group has claimed responsibility for the attempted attack.

You get the point in this bonanza of causality: The madrasa mindsets, mortgage and financial problems, militant preachers, and military assaults against fellow nationals are just four plausible reasons why someone like Shahzad would embrace mass murder. Smart people throughout the world continue to try to identify the exact sequence of attitudes and events that lead young Muslims on this journey that ends up either in their death or their imprisonment. My own hunch, from living in the Middle East region for the past 40 years and watching close-up the radicalization of individuals and entire swaths of societies, is that two critical elements should be kept in mind when analyzing this mortgages-and-madrasas phenomenon: scale and motivation.

The scale of such willing killers among the world’s population of young Muslims is incredibly small, probably proportional to the same percentage of American Christians who would blow up abortion clinics. If we focus on madrasas, militant preachers, and material pressures as drivers of terrorism, we are in fact analyzing symptoms of the stresses and fractures of our world, and not touching the underlying causes. By the time an Awlaki, Abdulmutallab, Shahzad -- or a Timothy McVeigh in the United States -- appears on the scene, the damage has been done, and the bomb fuse lit.

The harder challenge we face is to understand better the complete motivations that bring this about, in order to reduce or eliminate this problem, and here we have not done very well. The Shahzads of our world are the culmination of a personal and collective panic that ultimately prompts small handfuls of desperate, disaffected young men and women like them to turn to criminality. Indoctrination, poverty or financial stress, and charismatic leaders or preachers certainly play a role, but I suspect that political anger and a sense of dehumanization are the critical catalysts that ultimately arm and explode these human bombs.

Every society that suffers from terrorism these days also endures prolonged political and nationalist struggles, waged by local, regional and international actors. These are the arenas that better help us grasp the life transitions that produce young killers. To harness their secrets, we must summon the courage and honesty to assess the political forces at play in their totality -- well beyond madrasas and mortgages, and into the deeds of states, government, armies and other political actors that make life meaningful, or, to a very few, worthless.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.