by Scott Shane
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In a much-debated 2007 report, the New York City Police Department’s intelligence division had tried to break down the radicalization process for Western Muslims to a series of four predictable stages. Some civil libertarians objected to the whole emphasis on radicalization, which they thought shifted dangerously away from violent acts to extreme ideas. The vast majority of people who embraced radical ideas never did anything illegal, they pointed out. Viewing religiosity as a step toward terrorism was just to invite the pointless profiling of Muslims.
But with the opposite goal, Al Qaeda itself showed this same desire to break down the inchoate evolution of militants into easy-to-understand steps. In early 2009, the group posted on the web its own guide to radicalization, called “A Course in the Art of Recruitment,” describing five stages that bore a rough resemblance to the NYPD’s. The police department and the terror network were both driven to try to find the hidden secrets that turned someone into a terrorist.
Without being so systematic about it, Awlaki had devised a particularly potent formula for captivating and motivating young people. Part of his effectiveness was his mastery of both the Arabic sacred texts and of the English in which his main audience lived their lives. Part was his warm and disarmingly informal style of speaking. Part was his skill in negotiating, with the help of more technically expert advisers, the shifting communications technology between 2001 and 2008, moving from audio cassette, to CD, to Paltalk, to his own interactive website and blog, and finally to Facebook and YouTube.
But those were just the medium. Underlying his success were two fundamental human drives: first, the motivating power of religion; and second, the universal quest of the young, young men especially, for identity, companionship, and adventure in pursuit of a cause. Like Osama bin Laden in the Arab world and charismatic radicals in other Muslim subcultures—or European Christians who went to fight in the Crusades—Awlaki in his English-speaking sphere tapped those two deep wellsprings of human action and combined them into a single, intoxicating message.
In a courageous comment on the 9/11 attacks, a Roman Catholic priest who had witnessed the assault on the World Trade Center paid grim tribute to the staggering force of religious faith. Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, a theologian and physicist, was asked by the PBS show Frontline a few months after the attacks for his initial reaction on that day and gave an arresting answer:
From the first moment I looked into that horror on Sept. 11, into that fireball, into that explosion of horror, I knew it. I knew it before anything was said about those who did it or why. I recognized an old companion. I recognized religion. Look, I am a priest for over 30 years. Religion is my life, it’s my vocation, it’s my existence. I’d give my life for it; I hope to have the courage. Therefore, I know it.
And I know, and recognized that day, that the same force, energy, sense, instinct, whatever, passion—because religion can be a passion—the same passion that motivates religious people to do great things is the same one that that day brought all that destruction. When they said that the people who did it did it in the name of God, I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised. It only confirmed what I knew.
Albacete’s candor about what he called “this thirst, this demand for the absolute,” has stayed with me for more than a decade. He elevated the bitter and bewildered initial debate about the atrocities of 9/11 to a higher, more abstract plane, where the universal force of any religion to sanctify extreme violence was clear. The instinct in the West to identify Islam as the source of terrorism is understandable but provincial; it mistakes this moment in history, with its temporary array of economic and political forces, as permanent. The larger point is that religion gives life meaning for the faithful. Measured against the imperatives of faith, the killing of one or one hundred or ten thousand people is a trifle—a minor sacrifice compared to the awesome goal for which the killers imagine they are committing such slaughter.
The sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer published Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence in 2000—and revised it after 9/11, which came along the following year as if to prove his point. “Within the histories of religious traditions—from biblical wars to crusading ventures and great acts of martyrdom,” Juergensmeyer argued, “violence has lurked as a shadowy presence. It has colored religion’s darker, more mysterious symbols. Images of death have never been far from the heart of religion’s power to stir the imagination.” His analysis seems particularly apt for explaining Awlaki’s routine use of the glorious violence of the Islamic past to justify violence in the Islamic present. Juergensmeyer may fail fully to explain the slaughter motivated by modern, nominally secular ideologies such as those constructed by Hitler and Stalin—but in their utopian promises and absolutist claims, Nazism and Soviet communism clearly functioned as state religions. The point is that there must be a cause of great majesty, offering a vision of future paradise, to persuade people to commit terrible acts of violence. For someone trying to fathom Al Qaeda’s gruesome crimes, it is instructive to step back and consider the mass murders committed through the ages in the name of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and innumerable smaller sects. To recall the beheadings, the burnings at the stake, the sectarian bombings, and the pogroms of fanatics of other faiths and other eras is not to rationalize grievous violence committed in the name of Islam but to try to understand its source.
But if Awlaki, like other contemporary advocates of violent jihad, exploited the unbridled passion of religion, he also aimed his appeal at the young men who were most exploitable. The same search for identity by affiliation with a group and a cause that helps recruit young men to Al Qaeda also sends them, depending on the country and the era, to urban gangs, tribal militias, and military service. The drive to become part of a larger movement, with rules, goals, and charismatic leaders, motivates some to join the Marines, others to join the Crips or the Latin Kings, and still others to join Hamas. Sometimes, though not always, the group is united by a collective focus on a single, dehumanized enemy.
Over the years, as a journalist covering terrorism, I have struggled to comprehend what seemed incomprehensible: the worldview that not only justified but celebrated the slaughter of innocent human beings with no connection to religious or ideological conflict. I have found it instructive to consider the role of the military in the culture and values of the United States. With pride as well as trepidation, American parents send their sons and daughters off to war to fight in far-off countries. Americans speak of the military’s mission as sacred, even when it entails mass killing. American soldiers fight for their nation, and when they die for their nation they are reflexively celebrated as heroes, even if the purpose and legitimacy of the war (as in Vietnam or Iraq) are the subject of furious debate at home. To question their sacrifice is considered unpatriotic—indeed, blasphemous.
Substitute ummah, the community of believers in Islam, for nation, and the worldview of an Awlaki becomes much clearer. For Muslims who have taken a critical step and concluded that their loyalty to fellow Muslims must come before their loyalty to fellow citizens, the notion of fighting to protect the ummah takes the place of fighting to protect the nation. As a marine considers defending the United States of America to be his duty, so a young Muslim jihadi sees defending Islam and the community of believers as his duty. And if the jihadi believes the United States is at war with Islam, then killing the Americans who are fighting that war, and even the American civilians who are funding the war, suddenly becomes not monstrous but legitimate, even noble.
This is not to suggest a moral equivalence between state warfare and stateless terrorism. In the distorting mirror of Awlaki’s definition of jihad, for instance, American civilians automatically became enemies whose murder was justified and indeed celebrated. During the Iraq War, while American soldiers killed thousands upon thousands of civilians, their deliberate slaughter was officially prohibited and in some cases was prosecuted as a crime. That is a distinction of huge va
lue and significance. The point is that within the framework of any ideology or religion brutal violence can take on the presumption not only of justice but of heroism. It can be a potent lure to a young man looking for camaraderie and a cause.
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Awlaki’s lectures offered escape from the aimlessness, pettiness, and frustration of many young lives and admission to a world of seeming moral clarity, a noble cause under assault from powerful enemies. He aroused his listeners by admitting them to a club of sorts: the comforting brotherhood of brave young men who were running grave risks for their faith and looking out for one another, and who saw themselves as the righteous heirs of courageous ancestors who had stood up for Islam over many centuries. The power of his achievement is captured by the comments on Awlaki’s blog, which for its eighteen months of active operation, from May 2008 to November 2009, became an Internet clubhouse for earnest, aspiring defenders of Islam. Especially striking is the worshipful attitude that Awlaki seemed to inspire in those who wrote in, including a reader named Ibraheim: “May Allah keep Anwar and all of us on the straight path and know brother Anwar that I love you for the sake of Allah and it would be a dream of mine to meet you in person one day and learn from you!”
Will McCants, a Princeton-trained scholar who was closely tracking the online jihadi world in 2008, was struck by the central position that Awlaki occupied. “The sun in that solar system was Awlaki,” McCants said. “All the others linked to him.”
In January 2009, when Awlaki posted a piece very much in the spirit of the web—what would later be dubbed a “listicle”—called “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad,” it drew 737 comments in ten days. Most of them expressed gratitude for the imam’s advice. Awlaki placed violence at the center of jihad but offered an expansive set of options for the eager but inexperienced to get involved: supporting the mujahideen, the fighters, with money; helping the family of a shaheed, or martyr, or the family of a prisoner; “Fighting the lies of the Western Media”; or engaging in “physical fitness” and “arms training,” presumably as a step toward joining the actual fight. At No. 29 on the long list was “WWW Jihad,” an area in which Awlaki himself now was setting the example. “The internet has become a great medium for spreading the call of Jihad and following the news of the mujahideen,” he wrote.
It is not hard to picture the Muslim teens and twenty-somethings reading this latest missive from Awlaki in basements or bedrooms in Muslim neighborhoods in Dearborn, Michigan, or Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park, or East London, where the challenges of Muslim communities might connect with his vision of embattled Islam. Here, on the web, away from the sharp eyes of their parents or wary local imams, they could engage in fantasies about their own roles or ask questions about their doubts and concerns. In the erratically spelled comments on Awlaki’s “44 Ways,” among the usual juvenile high jinks (“lol maybe you should open your own blog just learn english first”) and earnest requests (“Ya sheikh can you please download the video lecture you gave at the East London Mesjid here on the website…all of us our dieing to hear it inshallah”), there are darker posts. A British reader calling himself Abu Maryam begins with hero worship:
Shaykh, That was an awesome document tackling questions about Jihad from almost every angle. Already your name sprawls all over google, muslim sites around the globe wait eagerly for you to publish your articles so that they can convey the truth to the masses. Here in the UK you’ve got a massive following of youth that are questioning the islam that they have been brought up upon against the Islam they see before them conveyed through teachings from yourself and other pious scholars on the right path.
Abu Maryam apologizes to “the brothers and sisters here for taking up space more than necessary” as he reaches out for counsel to Awlaki and to others reading the blog. He has immersed himself, he explains, in reading the likes of Ibn Taymmiyah, the fourteenth-century scholar whose work enthralled Awlaki in prison. As a “next step” Abu Maryam is wondering how to reach certain Saudi sheikhs he believes have the right ideas “so as to strictly stay away from the innovations practiced by friends and family.” (“Innovations” in Salafi terminology are a negative: heretical departures from the ways and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and his early followers.) He is “frustrated” by the “flurry of articles” he’s seen on the Internet from Saudi scholars who claim that “there is no justification of Jihad in places like Iraq or Gaza in current times.” If radicalization is a path, Abu Maryam is clearly on it: “I am struggling to understand how if Jihad is valid in its physical form, how can it be carried out without inflicting physical casualties on surrounding innocents against the saudi fatawas [rulings by religious authorities] that say that suicide bombings and martyrdom operations killing innocents are haram [forbidden]. Please can you clarify for me, I don’t have a great deal of understanding.”
For every young Western Muslim who crossed the line and began plotting violence or traveled to Yemen or Pakistan to join Al Qaeda, there were hundreds or thousands more like Abu Maryam, intrigued by the battle with the supposed enemies of Islam but too fearful or ambivalent to act. By sweeping huge numbers of people into that recruiting pool, Awlaki added new recruits to the small minority who would take the next step and join the battle. Again and again, his devotees turned up in criminal cases.
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Among the avid readers of Awlaki’s blog was a Virginian named Zachary Chesser, who signed his comments on the blog “Zakariya” and styled himself Abu Talhal al-Amreeki in his other prolific online posts. Never was there a clearer case of a young man in a frantic search for an identity. As a teenager, Chesser got deeply into heavy metal music, notably the shock-rock act Marilyn Manson, reveling in satanic lyrics. His senior year at suburban Oakton High School, twenty minutes from Awlaki’s former mosque and only a little farther from CIA headquarters, he was written up in the yearbook as “the only Caucasian member of the school’s break-dancing club” (the others were mostly Korean Americans). “I loved it so much that my parents would threaten to make me quit the club if I didn’t get good enough grades,” he was quoted as saying. Plus, he said, it was a good way to meet girls.
But by the time the yearbook was out, break dancing was passé: Chesser had met a Muslim girl, had converted to Islam, and was scaring fellow members of the school’s Muslim Student Association with warnings that they were headed for hell if they didn’t dress more modestly. The girl broke up with him, but he quickly met and married another young Muslim woman, briefly attended George Mason University, and turned his huge capacity for enthusiasm to what Awlaki had dubbed “WWW Jihad.” He created a YouTube channel under the name LearnTeachFightDie, which he alarmingly described as the proper stages of a true believer’s life. His online rants drew the first visit from a concerned FBI agent in June 2009, just a year after his high school graduation.
Predictably, by then, Chesser had become a fervent fan of Awlaki, including recorded talks on CD called “Dreams and Dream Interpretations.” Chesser began e-mailing the imam, in part to ask his help in interpreting a dream in which he had turned up in Somalia to fight with al-Shabab, the Islamist insurgency there. Awlaki wrote back twice, to the delight of Chesser, who also posted an account of his dream as a comment on Awlaki’s blog. By December 2009, he had started his own forum, themujahidblog.com, posting one article called “Open Source Jihad”—a term that Awlaki would later borrow for how-to articles in his own Inspire magazine. Soon Chesser was helping run a better-known radical site, RevolutionMuslim.com. He even pursued an online argument with Jarret Brachman, a well-known American terrorism analyst whose criticism of Awlaki had offended Chesser. Brachman wrote later that the two became “what you might call hostile friends, sparring over a wide array of topics.”
Reading back over Chesser’s early antics, one is tempted to smile at his callow superenthusiasm for whatever happened to catch his fancy. It is easy to imagine such a kid straightening out by sophomore or junior year in college and channeling the same frenetic ene
rgy into business or biochemistry. In Chesser’s case, that would not happen. In April 2010, Chesser posted at RevolutionMuslim.com an ominous warning to the makers of South Park, the irreverent animated show that had once been his favorite, because an episode had included a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad dressed in a bear suit. Chesser wrote that the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, “will probably end up” like Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004 after making a film critical of Islam. Along with the statement, Chesser posted a photo of Van Gogh’s corpse and audio clips from Awlaki’s lecture “The Dust Will Never Settle Down,” in which Awlaki argued that “our enemies have successfully desensitized us” and that the reaction to cartoons portraying the Prophet and other insults to Islam had not drawn an adequate response. “Horrendous things happened! Blasphemy to the greatest extent! But what is the reaction? Very little!” said Awlaki, who contrasted this passivity with the early Muslims’ resort to the sword to avenge offenses against the Prophet. Chesser’s menacing statement made the news and led to a final rift with his parents.
Finally, on July 10, 2010, Chesser was stopped at JFK International Airport in New York, where he was trying to board a plane on his way to Somalia to fight with al-Shabab. He was informed that he was on the no-fly list and, questioned about his online posts about Awlaki, told a Secret Service agent at the airport that he “did not necessarily disagree with Awlaki.” He was arrested eleven days later and was eventually sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for “material support” to al-Shabab, threatening Parker and Stone, and other crimes. Chesser was twenty-one. Just over two years had passed between his introduction to Islam and his terrorism arrest. In court, he expressed remorse and suggested that he was puzzled by his own swift passage. In a written statement, he said he was “ashamed and bewildered….I know that I will spend many years trying to understand why I followed the path that has led me here.”