Here’s a 28-year-old son of immigrants, born and raised in the United States, a working stiff, a husband and a father, who graduated college with a degree in Environmental Science, and now holds a job at a government agency in San Bernardino, California, that pays him well over $70,000 a year (Dh257,460), not a mean salary in today’s job market for a millennial in his 20s.
Here’s a man, you say, with a bright future, a beneficiary of all the rewards that the ‘American Dream’ bestows on those first-generation immigrants diligent enough, and smart enough, to pursue it. Yet, he gets up one morning, hops in his car, drops his toddler at his mother’s house and, with his wife sitting next to him, drives to his place of employment where he massacres 14 of his colleagues and injures more than 20 others. Then the couple engage the police in a shootout where they are both killed.
Curtain fall? No, this is mere prologue, for this is a case that cries out for answers to puzzling questions that, at first blush, go against one’s immediate expectations, that lie just beyond the limits of one’s comprehension, that bedevil — and cut deep into — the locus of one’s sanctified beliefs.
Why did they do it? And, in the name of mercy, what possible cause, if cause it was, were these two individuals promoting when they slaughtered 14 people mingling at an office Xmas party?
These were not two unhinged folks with a screw loose here and there, say, like James Holmes, responsible for the Aurora, Colorado, theatre massacre in 2012 during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises, where 12 people were killed and 70 others injured, or like Nidal Hassan, the US Army Major who was convicted of fatally shooting 13 people and injuring more than 30 others at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas — to name but two cases among countless others in the US where records show that, on an average, a mass shooting (defined as involving four or more people killed) occurs once a day.
In fact, not only were Syed Farook and Tasfeen Malek, the husband-and-wife team behind the San Bernardino killings, two seemingly educated, rational and, to fall back on Freudian terminology, “adjusted” individuals, in full control of their mental faculties, but it appears they had meticulously, not to mention callously, planned their assault months earlier, knowing full well what dread would be loosed by their act of mayhem.
Maybe the question we should raise is not why this couple did what they did, but rather why, like them, hundreds, indeed thousands, of young men and women have gravitated to Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and pledged allegiance to this reactionary and murderous group, often leaning home and homeland, career and family, to join its ranks. Does it all, in any way, have anything to do with Islam, as Daesh propagandists want us, and the rest of the world, to believe?
Muslims reject — forgive me, resent — how what we might call the “essentialism of Islam” somehow always insinuates itself into the public debate whenever and wherever killers who happen to be Muslim commit an atrocity, as if Islam is to be held accountable for every act of violence committed individually or collectively by people born to the Muslim faith. This would be as facile a posture as holding Christianity accountable, let’s say, for the excesses of the campaigns that went against Jesus’s pacifist doctrine of turning the other cheek. And, lest we forget, it was Walt Whitman who exclaimed: “Oh, Bible, what follies and monstrous barbarities have been committed in thy name.”
Rather, we happen to be living at a time in our history when young Muslims, whether in the diaspora or at home, are alienated from their objective reality — their dreams unrealised, their ambitions impeded and their spiritual needs unfulfilled. They yearn for what Ibn Khaldun called “assabiya”, that social and cultural elan that at one time in history had defined our civilisational core, a time, let’s say, when Muslims did not go to some capital in the West, with hat in hand, to plead that its leaders solve our problems in Palestine.
The lashing out by these lost souls, who glory in being Daesh Caliphniks, is not propelled by Islam, nor by what westerners often attribute to Islam, but by the craving to belong to a muscular social ideology that is able to present itself as a source both of identity and power, an ideology that leaves no question unanswered, no answer in doubt. Daesh is seen by its followers as a “movement”.
Consider how, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, hundreds, indeed thousands, of young men and women from the entire Euro-American world flocked to Russia to be part of the Eden of the classless society, with incandescent hatred in their eyes for the dastardly tzarists and the blood-sucking capitalists, and to Spain between 1936 and 1939 to be part of the Civil War that pitted progressive idealism against fascist autocracy. Or that is how, at any rate, they all saw it — only to bemoan it later.
All well and good, but why do your seemingly peaceful neighbours, an affluent couple with a child to raise, become mass killers? What toxic cocktail of ideas, or delusions, was behind it all? Alienated killers abound. In real life, we have people like Arthur Bremer, the then 22-year-old bus boy who wanted a place in history by trying to kill the segregationist presidential candidate, George Wallace, in 1972, and in cinematic art, we have Travis Bickle, the alienated protagonist in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, who wanted to rid the world of phony, hypocritical politicians.
Or Maybe we do not have the answer because we are asking the wrong question.
But certainly, and most decidedly, the answer we seek will not be given by the likes of Donald Trump or worse (yes, worse) Jeb Bush, who recently proclaimed, with oracular profundity, on Fox: “The idea that somehow there are radical elements in every religion is ridiculous. There are no radical Christians that are organising to destroy western civilisation. There are no radical Buddhists that are doing this. This is radical Islamic terrorism”. And so it goes.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
