A Greater Triumph
Those certain that there’s no hope for committed jihadists to renounce their murderous ideology and no hope for the West but to destroy the jihadists would do well to read this fascinating piece by Johann Hari in which he interviews three ex-jihadists and one jihadist who remains unrepentant but is clearly burned by the “fire of certainty.” There’s much to digest in Hari’s writing, from the circumstances that led these people to embrace jihad to the affects of our foreign policy on their propaganda, but I was most intrigued and given hope by the small, seemingly insignificant moments that moved them to ultimately renounce Islamism.
Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikingly similar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep in because they couldn’t shake certain basic realities from their minds. The first and plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hating cardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.
Usman’s mother had moved in next door to an elderly man called Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. One day, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticed the old man watching him from across the fence. “I used to box when I was in the Navy,” he said. He started to give them tips and before long, he was building a boxing ring in their shed.
Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to help clear out his belongings. In Tony’s closet, he found a present wrapped and ready for his little brother’s birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. “And I thought – that is humanity right there. That’s an aspect of the divine that’s in every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I call him kaffir?”
We may well find that this jihad is not ultimately defeated by concentrated technological power and the killing of jihadists, which are failures more than victories, but because doubt is impressed by numerous caresses of grace and human kindness.
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Thank you for posting this, Kyle. It is long, but worth reading. Also fairly chilling.
R