Pundits continue to agonize over the Boston bombers’ motive, yet no pursuit could be more futile. For jihadists, it’s not the motive, it’s the narrative.
From Chechnya or Chattanooga, the forces driving Islamists toward violent infamy remain the same. The narrative that has seduced them the world over is the idea of reclaiminga mythic Golden Age of Islam, a “glory” that can be “restored” onlythrough violent jihad. Both their “Islam” and the narrative are utterly fictional, yet the consequences of their make-believe are diabolically real.
Jihadist ideology provides the Islamist recruit his sole raison d’etre, the pursuit of violence. Whether disaffected boys struggling to fit in (the Boston bombers), or wealthy men breaking loose (Osama bin Laden), it is the all-encompassing jihadist role that so captivates them.
Muslims, including observant Muslims like me, know them all too well because we, above all, have been the main victims of their violence. Pakistan alone has lost over 49,000 lives to cumulative jihadist attacks since 9/11.
Recently, I traveled to the NorthWest Frontier Province to meet such jihadists in person at a rehabilitation center outside of Malakand and in Mingora. Discovering I was fluent in Urdu, they recounted to me their journey from schoolboy to jihadist — the very same narrative that plainly inspired the Tsarnaev Brothers.
For sure, Islam clearly defines jihad: It can be either the “Greater Jihad” (the internal struggle for self-improvement) or the “Lesser Jihad” (an explicitly defensive war, waged only in retaliation against warfare launched expressly to deny the Muslim the right to worship).
But the Islamist distorts all jihad into spontaneous, pre-emptive, indiscriminate violent assault on civilians and military combatants alike. No one, not even the unarmed (even women, children, the disabled, elderly), is exempt.
The ideology allows no rules of engagement for war, though Islam is explicit about such rules. The jihadist dispenses with such principles and his entire purpose is to wage preemptive violent assault.
Violent jihad is not a motive, but his sum raison d’etre. Without it, there can be no existence for the jihadist. Until he commits violent jihad, he doesn’t truly exist — to feel real, he becomes a jihadist. And if he truly succeeds, his realized existence both births and extinguishes him simultaneously.
Even thinking about violent radical Islamists as “terrorists” is falsely reassuring, for even terrorists can have some achievable goal, such as the liberation of Northern Ireland. But the jihadist can never be appeased, for his jihad is not the means to an end, but the end itself.
Only a violent end can provide him with the meaning-making he craves; only the execution of violence will win him the (fictional) honors in his (fictional) after-life. He has no real political demands, no disputed borders, no cries for political representation. His only demand is nihilistic jihad.
The Islamist ideology is transnational, borderless and totalitarian, confronting liberal democracies everywhere but also seriously destabilizing not-so-liberal democracies such as Pakistan. Nationalities and naturalizations matter not a jot.
I have no doubt that we’ll find that the Boston bombers, like so many others, were seduced into jihadism with repeated doses of Internet feedings, ripened by on-the-ground interactions in Dagestan. They found meaning in a fictional universe, and chose their own ultimate disconnection. They chose their alienation.
Take it from a Muslim, political Islamism can’t exist in a vacuum. It needs Islam. Involuntarily, we Muslims are at once vector, host and prey for this unique brand of totalitarianism. Without the cloak of a grand religion rich in language, image and history that can be vividly distorted, Islamist ideology would be about as seductive as crumbling Communist-era architecture.
Political Islamism steals from Islamic customs and practice origins, corrupting the building blocks of the faith into a lethal “religionized” politics. And if we deny this relationship, as many American Muslims insist on doing, we only shield the political Islamists.
The bombings in Boston make no sense because they were intended as senseless. There is no motive to be found, only narrative. Yes, we’re told that the surviving bomber bleated from his hospital bed that “defending Islam” was his motive; he doesn’t realize his own seduction by the Islamists’ narrative.
These young men, sheltered by an America that afforded them asylum, were no more disaffected than any average teen caught between cultures. Nor were they especially humiliated, or primed to have been “radicalized.”
What appealed to them — what appealed to the young jihadis I met in Pakistan — was a story rather like child’s play, a story in which the role of violent jihad brought new meaning to their existence.
Make no mistake, it wasn’t motive, it was narrative — and a uniquely Muslim one at that.
Dr. Qanta Ahmed practices medicine in New York. She is the author of “In the Land of Invisible Women.”