the men responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks and all those who, like them, threaten the United States and the West on behalf of a larger community, the vanguard trying to establish a certain version of an Islamist utopia.
This, he says, gives him a database of around five hundred persons “linked” to the 9/11 attackers. Based on this sample, he claims, the most striking feature of the jihadist profile is that
joining the global Islamist terrorism social movement was based to a great degree on friendship and kinship … About two-thirds of the people in the sample were friends with other people who joined together or already had some connection to terrorism.
He concludes that there are two major pathways into terrorism: the bunch of guys deciding collectively to join a terrorist organization; and joining a childhood friend who is already a terrorist. Social bonds, therefore, “come before any ideological commitment.”
Sageman delves into the process by which a bunch of guys radicalizes, trying to establish what it is about the dynamics of the group that brings them to the point of supporting terrorism. He identifies four prongs to this process: first, a sense of moral outrage about a perceived injustice in the world; second, “an enabling interpretation,” such as that there is a war on Islam, which places this outrage in the wider context of a moral conflict; third, personal experiences, such as of discrimination, which become “another manifestation of the war on Islam”; and fourth, mobilizing networks.
Only other people who share their outrage, beliefs, and experiences, but who are further along the path to violence or who are willing to explore it with them, can help them cross the line from venting their anger to becoming terrorists.
Thus, a “natural and intense loyalty to the group, inspired by a violent Salafi script, transformed alienated young Muslims into fanatic terrorists.” For Sageman it is the embedding of theological radicalism within a group dynamic that is the root cause of radicalization.
He argues that the response should be a reformist approach to the war on terror: policy makers should understand that the “war against the al Qaeda social movement is basically a battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim community.” He summarizes as follows: community policing can preempt the radicalization process by reducing alienation; the American Dream of equal opportunity and individualism is the best way of integrating Muslims; and the Iraq war was counterproductive, because it fostered moral outrage. Above all, governments should work with pro-Western Muslim leaders, and assist them to convince young Muslims that the US is not engaged in a “war on Islam.”15 Sageman’s work provides an analytical basis for those who favor a managerial approach to Muslim grievances, using soft power methods to contain radical dissent and promote shared values without asking too many questions about where that radicalism comes from.
Sageman’s stress on social networks has been a major influence on how law enforcement and intelligence agencies understand radicalization, and has obvious implications for investigators. If tomorrow’s terrorists are likely to be today’s associates of terrorists, then that gives agencies a simple formula for identifying suspects: Suspicion by association has long been a staple of counterterrorism policing anyway. But claiming social bonds to be the root cause of terrorism is inadequate. Even if we accept the implication that terrorism spreads like a virus from a person already infected to his associates, all we have done is explain the process of infection; we have said nothing of why the virus exists in the first place. More importantly, Sageman’s work shares with the rest of the radicalization discourse a failure to distinguish between radical beliefs and violent methods. Despite his stated aim to explore how terrorists interpret their situation and how they decide to respond, we get no discussion of the conditions under which violence is chosen over other means. Even if his model offered a plausible explanation of how radical ideas circulate, it has nothing to say on what causes supporters of such ideas to favor violence over other means of advancing their cause. By default, then, the question of violence can only be answered by assuming certain ideologies are inherently violent. The picture is one in which the Salafi script is already a predisposition to violence that only needs a friendship dynamic to activate it. Sageman argues, with regard to al-Qaeda and the “many other terrorist groups that collaborate in their operations [that] Salafi ideology determines its mission, sets its goals, and guides its tactics.”16 In other words, as this bunching of guys intensifies their beliefs in a radical theological worldview, violence is likely to follow. For that violence to pose a terrorist threat, the only other necessary condition is that the social network is able to successfully find the “global Salafi jihad,” in order to access skills and resources.17 Thus, for Sageman, jihadi terrorism is the product of a socialization process of friendship and kinship, progressive intensification of beliefs leading to acceptance of the Salafi ideology, and a link to know-how and support.18 At the heart of his model remains an unexamined assumption that violence has its origins in dangerous theological ideas.
A similar approach is favored by Quintan Wiktorowicz, another of the leading advocates of a combined theological and social psychological model of radicalization. Wiktorowicz spent a number of months in London in 2002 conducting ethnographic fieldwork with al-Muhajiroun, the radical Islamist group founded by Omar Bakri Muhammad. This research was published in 2005 as Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West.19 He subsequently worked at the US embassy in London at a time, after the 7/7 terrorist attacks, when the US government became keenly interested in the potential radicalization of Britain’s Muslim population. Diplomatic cables subsequently published by WikiLeaks reveal that the US embassy in London made available grants of $50,000 to support antiextremist projects among UK Muslims, including the possibility of fostering an “anti-extremist genre” of Bollywood films.20 Wiktorowicz built up a network of links in Britain and observed the impact of the UK government’s Preventing Violent Extremism policy. In early 2011, given the White House’s interest in developing similar policies, Wiktorowicz was appointed to the National Security Council and credited with developing the Obama administration’s counterradicalization policy.21
In his Radical Islam Rising, Wiktorowicz seeks to answer the question of why “thousands of young Britons are attracted to the panoply of radical Islamic movements with bases or branches in the United Kingdom, including Hizb ut-Tahrir, Supporters of Shariah, al-Muhajiroun, and al-Qaeda.” Al-Muhajiroun is taken as a case study. Like Sageman, he emphasizes the way that groups place grievances within an interpretative “frame” and on the importance of socialization into the group’s construction of reality to create a “network of shared meaning.” But his account of radicalization adds still more levels of complexity while maintaining the same underlying assumptions. He introduces the concept of cognitive opening, which refers to a psychological crisis in which previously accepted beliefs are shaken and an individual becomes receptive to other views and perspectives. This might be caused by emotional distress (such as a death in the family), experiences of discrimination, political repression, confusion over identity, or as a result of “consciousness raising” or persuasion by activists. Those who experience a cognitive opening may then attempt to find religious answers to the discontent that has prompted it, through initiating a process of “religious seeking.” Finally, exposure to networks of radicals socializes individuals into participation in the movement, as would-be activists are “cultured” into accepting the religious authority of the movement’s leaders and adopting their ideology.22
Wiktorowicz begins his study with an account of two erstwhile members of al-Muhajiroun—Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sherif—who in 2003 attempted to carry out a suicide attack on behalf of Hamas at the Mike’s Place bar in Tel Aviv. The rest of the text effectively becomes an attempt to explain how these two British citizens could possibly be willing to carry out such an act of violence. Yet the people studied by Wiktorowicz, through his interviews and participant observations, are radi
cal activists, not terrorists, a distinction that gets lost in the attempt to construct a model of radicalization. Most of al-Muhajiroun’s activities were ideological, but the group supported violence in certain contexts, and individual activists and former activists have been involved in violent actions. But Wiktorowicz offers little reflection on what factors legitimized or delegitimized the use of violence within the group. In fact, during the 1990s, Omar Bakri Muhammad made use of the Islamic concept of ‘aqd al-aman, or covenant of security, to legitimize an arrangement with the British security services in which his followers in Britain were not permitted to break the law, and he was likely a source of intelligence, in return for allowing his movement to propagate its ideology freely.23 But in January 2005, he cited the intensifying war on terror and the pressures it was putting Muslims under in Britain as reasons for saying the covenant no longer held, and for the first time he encouraged his followers to join al-Qaeda.24 What is significant is that this shift occurred not because of any theological reinterpretation or because of changes in group psychology, but because of the changed political context.
In Wiktorowicz’s study, as with Sageman’s work, the question of what causes radical religious beliefs becomes a proxy for the question of what causes violence. As Wiktorowicz himself acknowledges at the end of his study, the social psychological process by which individuals become active in radical Islamist groups is “not all that different” from moderate, nonviolent Muslim groups, or from non-Islamic social movements, even if the content of the ideology differs; it therefore becomes impossible to use his account of that process to credibly explain why violence occurs.25 Like other radicalization scholars, Wiktorowicz argues correctly that by themselves political and economic circumstances are insufficient to account for radical activism. For support, he quotes Trotsky from The History of the Russian Revolution: “The mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would be always in revolt.” It follows, he states, that the real question is “why some aggrieved individuals choose to join Islamic groups while others do not”—a question which is answered by considering psychological and theological journeys.26 This is a different inference from that made by Trotsky, who follows the above quote with these sentences, which Wiktorowicz’s text does not include:
It is necessary that the bankruptcy of the social régime, being conclusively revealed, should make these privations intolerable, and that new conditions and new ideas should open the prospect of a revolutionary way out. Then in the cause of the great aims conceived by them, those same masses will prove capable of enduring doubled and tripled privations.27
Wiktorowicz’s rejection of a mechanical model of grievances directly causing revolutionary action is convincing. But whereas this leads him to turn to the individual religious and cognitive trajectory, he ignores the other possibilities suggested by Trotsky’s text, which emphasize the perceived legitimacy of the present state of affairs and the plausibility of alternatives—in other words, politics. From this perspective the question would be, What kinds of political circumstances, combined with what kinds of political narratives (even if expressed in religious terms), are necessary for particular kinds of violence to be seen as legitimate within a given movement? This is a question Sageman and Wiktorowicz are unable to address with their models.
Radicalization Models as Policing Tools
The view shared by Sageman and Wiktorowicz—that radicalization is essentially a theological-psychological process in which dangerous religious beliefs and identities, activated by group dynamics or cognitive openings, transform individuals into terrorists—has been influential among law enforcement agencies. In 2007, the Intelligence Division and Counter-Terrorism Bureau of the NYPD published a study, entitled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” that outlined a simplified version of this kind of radicalization model. It was the first time the NYPD had chosen to publish a document that claimed any kind of scholarly credentials; it did so, it stated, in order “to contribute to the debate among intelligence and law enforcement agencies on how best to counter this emerging threat.” The report is backed by outside experts, such as Brian Jenkins Mead of the RAND Corporation, and strongly influenced by the work of Sageman and Wiktorowicz; it identifies “jihadist ideology” as the key driver of radicalization and suggests four phases an individual passes through in going from being “unremarkable” to a person “quite likely to be involved in the planning or implementation of a terrorist act”: preradicalization (before they are exposed to “jihadi-Salafi Islam”); self-identification (they begin to explore Salafi Islam as a result of a cognitive opening, which leads to the breakdown of an existing identity and to associations with like-minded others); indoctrination (the progressive intensification of their beliefs which, as a result of group socialization, leads to the complete adoption of the ideology); and jihadization (their acceptance of their individual duty to participate in jihad). These four stages are described as a “funnel” through which ordinary persons become terrorists, as their religious beliefs become progressively more radical. The NYPD study argues that each of these four stages of radicalization has a distinct set of indicators that allow predictions to be made about future terrorist risks. For example, stage two of the radicalization process has “typical signatures” that include:
• becoming alienated from one’s former life; affiliating with like-minded individuals;
• joining or forming a group of like-minded individuals in a quest to strengthen one’s dedication to Salafi Islam;
• giving up cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes;
• wearing traditional Islamic clothing, growing a beard;
• becoming involved in social activism and community issues.
The study acknowledges that these behaviors are “subtle and non-criminal,” but nevertheless, the need “to identify those entering this process at the earliest possible stage” means that intelligence gathering based on these indicators is “the critical tool in helping to thwart an attack.”28
The NYPD’s study bases its analysis on eleven actual and alleged plots that took place in the US, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia, each involving a handful of perpetrators. Not only is this too small a sample upon which to base positive knowledge claims about the relationship between religious behaviors and terrorism, it also lumps together individuals in widely varying social and political contexts. Additionally, there is no control group of individuals who fit the pattern of religious behaviors associated with radicalization but do not become terrorists. In order to show a correlation between a set of religious behaviors and terrorism, it would be necessary not only to show that terrorists are statistically likely to have passed through a process in which those behaviors were manifest, but also that nonterrorists are statistically unlikely to show the same behaviors. In fact, the behaviors the NYPD study associates with radicalization are common to large numbers of people who never become terrorists. Likewise, the study does not consider cases of terrorism that are not carried out by Muslims, for example, terrorist activity carried out by individuals in far Right movements. By failing to compare across cases of terrorism with different ideological motivations, the study ignores the possibility of indicators of risk that are not specific to Muslims but have a general applicability to terrorism in general. The claim that terrorism carried out by Muslims is driven by a radicalization process different from other forms of terrorism should, if made, be derived from whatever case-based evidence is available to support it rather than assumed as a given in the design of the study. Finally, even constraining ourselves to the small number of cases the NYPD study actually describes—and ignoring the absence of a control group and the absence of comparisons with other forms of terrorism—the study offers weak evidence for any correlation between religious behaviors and terrorist activity, because its assertions linking religious behaviors and terrorist acts are generally impressionistic, arbitrary
, and lacking in any analytic rigor.
Following Sageman and Wiktorowicz’s emphasis on the group dynamic in radicalization, the NYPD considers it crucial to identify the venues where socialization into radical ideology is occurring, what it refers to as “radicalization incubators.” These the study describes as “places where like-minded individuals will congregate as they move through the radicalization process.” They can be mosques but are more likely to be “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores [or] extremist websites and chat-rooms.”29 Thus, in the hands of the NYPD, Sageman’s and Wiktorowicz’s radicalization scholarship becomes a prospectus for mass surveillance of Muslim populations.
An investigation by the Associated Press, published in a series of articles beginning in August 2011, revealed that the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, headed by thirty-year veteran of the CIA David Cohen, has considered every aspect of Muslim life in and around New York worthy of observation and infiltration. More than 250 mosques in New York and New Jersey and hundreds more “hot spots,” such as restaurants, cafés, bookshops, community organizations, and student associations, have been listed as potential security risks for reasons that included endorsing conservative religious views or having devout customers. A secret team known as the Demographics Unit has dispatched undercover officers (known as “rakers”) and recruited informants (“mosque crawlers”) to eavesdrop at these “locations of interest” to listen for “hostility to the United States.”30 The unit invested resources in mapping “residential concentrations” of different ethnic groups within the tristate area, seeking to “gauge sentiment” and identify locations “where community members socialize.” The communities to be monitored were identified on the basis of their origins in twenty-eight majority-Muslim countries, as well as those described as “American Black Muslim.” Staff of the NYPD’s Moroccan Initiative have watched Moroccan restaurants, gyms, barbershops, meat markets, and taxi companies—and compiled a list of every known Moroccan taxi driver.31 Muslims who changed their names to sound more traditionally American or who adopted Arabic names were investigated and catalogued in secret NYPD intelligence files.32 One of the architects of this surveillance program was CIA analyst Larry Sanchez, who worked within the Intelligence Division from 2002 to 2010 while remaining on active duty with the CIA. He reportedly told associates that its methods were modeled on Israeli techniques used in the military occupation of the West Bank.33 It is clear that none of this activity was based on investigating reasonable suspicions of criminal activity. According to a deposition by Assistant Chief Thomas Galati of the Intelligence Division, the work of the Demographics Unit produced no criminal leads between 2006 and 2012, and probably did not before then either.34
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 16