However, men like McVeigh, Yousef and Mateen challenge the assumption that a freely willing human subject is motivated by certain desires, beliefs and perceived benefits, and has an omelette in mind – a New Man, or a New Middle East – when he breaks eggs. For them the act of violence is all; they have no vision of an alternative political reality on a global or even local scale, like the one of a classless society or an Islamic nation state offered by communist and Iranian revolutionaries in the past and cultural supremacists and ethno-nationalists in the present. As Proudhon once defined this particular kind of revolutionary:
Neither monarchy, nor aristocracy, nor even democracy itself, insofar as it may imply any government at all, even though acting in the name of the people, and calling itself the people. No authority, no government, not even popular, that is the Revolution.
Or, as Musab al-Suri wrote, ‘Al-Qaeda is not an organization, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be … It is a call, a reference, a methodology.’ Unlike white terrorists, who tend to be accused of being psychopathic lone wolves, or African-American militants charged with racial hatred, the violence of Muslim militants is commonly linked to a history of Islam that goes as far back as its seventh-century origins. But such ambitious accounts of doctrinal coherence and continuity are muddied by the fact that today’s militants, coming from different social backgrounds, fit no profile. Many of them are recent converts to Islam. Radicalized quickly, some are deradicalized just as rapidly. And all of them attest to the sheer velocity of a homogenizing globalization, which makes a settled religious tradition or politics impossible while making violence unpredictable and ubiquitous.
Even the most devout radicals remain circumscribed by their context of the worldwide Crystal Palace, mirroring or parodying, like McVeigh, their supposed enemies, but at an accelerated rate: they obey the logic of reciprocity and escalating mimetic violence rather than any scriptural imperative. The words and deeds of al-Qaeda’s chieftains clarified that the global terrorist, moving through the West’s networks of war, economics and technology, also regards the whole planet as his theatre of action, where he will, as Osama bin Laden said repeatedly, ‘kill your innocent people since you kill ours’.
The West’s ‘Just War’ then proliferated around the world, resembling global jihad in its ability to communicate through awesome violence alone and its total inability to build any political order, where war and peace are clearly defined and distinct. Its pursuit of an absolute, uncompromising enmity – along the lines specified in McVeigh’s quotation from Locke – ended up generating many more mortal enemies worldwide with a vengeful craving for emulation, such as the killers of ISIS, who dress up their victims in Guantanamo’s jumpsuits.
ISIS, born during the implosion of Iraq, owes its existence more to Operation Infinite Justice and Enduring Freedom than to any Islamic theology. It is the quintessential product of a radical process of globalization in which governments, unable to protect their citizens from foreign invaders, brutal police, or economic turbulence, lose their moral and ideological legitimacy, creating a space for such non-state actors as armed gangs, mafia, vigilante groups, warlords and private revenge-seekers.
ISIS aims to create a Caliphate, but, like American regime-changers, it cannot organize a political space, as distinct from privatizing violence. Motivated by a selfie individualism, the adepts of ISIS are better at destroying Valhalla than building it. Ultimately, a passion for grand politics, manifest in ISIS’s Wagnerian-style annihilation, is what drives the Caliphate, as much as it did D’Annunzio’s utopia. The will to power and craving for violence as existential experience reconciles, as Sorel prophesied, the varying religious and ideological commitments of its adherents. The attempts to place them in a long Islamic tradition miss how much these militants, feverishly stylizing their murders and rapes on Instagram, reflect an ultimate stage in the radicalization of the modern principle of individual autonomy and equality: a form of strenuous self-assertion that acknowledges no limits, and requires descent into a moral abyss.
The suicide killers of ISIS, who simultaneously break two fundamental prohibitions of suicide and murder, represent what Herzen, speaking of Russian extremists, called the ‘syphilis of the revolutionary passions’. In all cases, they move from feelings of misery, guilt, righteousness and impotence to what Herzl called, admiringly, the ‘voluptuousness of a great idea and of martyrdom’: a grand vision of heroic self-sacrifice in which a life of freedom can finally be achieved by choosing one’s mode of death.
A recent example is Ahmed Darrawi, one of the most visible young leaders of the Arab Spring in Egypt, who disappeared in 2013 and then resurfaced months later in Syria as a jihadist. ‘I found justice in jihad, and dignity and bravery in leaving my old life for ever,’ he wrote on Twitter before blowing himself up in a suicide bombing in Iraq. These self-overcoming men might manufacture religious sanction, as in this call to global jihad by Awlaki, who found in violence an escape from a self tainted by sexual excess:
People will say that to fight the Israelis you have to go to Filistine [Israel/Palestine] and fight them, but it is not allowed for you to target them anywhere else on the face of the earth. Now this is absolutely false, it doesn’t stand on any Shariah foundation. Who said that if a particular people are in a state of war with you that this war needs to be limited to the piece of land that they occupied? If a particular nation or people are classified as ahlul harb [people of war] in the Shariah, then that applies to them on the whole earth.
But such desperately improvised exegeses of Shariah law only show how disconnected a second and third generation of Muslim terrorists are from the Islamic faith practised by their parents and grandparents. Osama bin Laden and his deputy showed, even through their distortions, some elementary first-hand knowledge of Islamic tradition and history. Zarqawi seemed to know nothing at all about them. Almost all of the young men involved in recent terror attacks in Europe and America have no religious education, and have rarely visited a mosque. Their knowledge of Islamic tradition and theology does not exceed the pages of Islam for Dummies. Nearly all have an extensive background in petty criminality, not to mention banal but nonetheless un-Islamic levels of drunken carousing and drug-taking.