Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the author of horror in the Christmas market in Magdeburgno, Germany’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, observed, “it takes some form“. He had acted “incredibly cruelly and cruelly, as an Islamist terrorist, although he is clearly hostile to the religion of Islam.”
Faeser wasn’t the only one confused about how Abdulmohsen understood.
Born in Saudi Arabia, Abdulmohsen ad . Germany in 2006 for psychiatric treatment before applying for asylum. Describing himself as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history”, he has urged German immigration officials to be wary of Muslim asylum seekers, becoming an advocate for the far-right AfD. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open borders policy,” he said, was an attempt to “Islamize Europe.”
How could someone so violent to Islam carry out an act of murder that smacks of Islamist terror? For many on the right, especially those who tend to regurgitate anti-Muslim bigotry, the answer was simple: whatever the argument, Abdulmohsen is an Islamist. Many accused himtaqiyyah“Or deception and authorities being “in denial”. Others saw that his opinion was worthless. From a foreignerand from the greater country of the Moslems it was enough to condemn him to a capital threat.
Perhaps the best start is an inexplicable sense of the onslaught of horror and all too predictable, like the intersection of two developments: the changing nature of terrorism and the rise of “anti-politics” – a sense that all powerful lies, wrong, and hostile to the needs of the simple; A good place to understand that intersection is in the work of the French sociologist Olivier Roy.
The primary creator of the modern religion of radical Islam, Roy has for a long time critical from conventional reasons, than young people Muslims in the west get radicalized. Abdulmohsen was not a jihadist, whatever the conspirators say; nevertheless, understanding that Western jihadism can help illuminate its actions.
To understand the roots IslamRoy insists on understanding not “vertical” but “transverse” issue; to consider it not only in terms of Islamic history or theology, but also in relation to other forms of contemporary identity movements and political radicalization.
What initially drives most wannabe jihadis is rarely politics or religion, but a search for something less tangible: identity, meaning, belonging. There is nothing new in the youthful search for identity and meaning. What is different is that today we live in more atomistic societies and in an age in which many people feel particularly deprived of mainstream social institutions.
In the past, social failure caused people to join movements for political change. Today, such institutions are mostly disbanded or seem out of touch. What shapes today’s revolution is identity politics, which invites individuals to define themselves in increasingly narrow ethnic or cultural terms. A generation ago “radicalised” Muslims could be more secular in their outlook, their radicalism being self-expressed political warfare. Many, however, vent their anger violently, often with murder, on the vision of the tribes of Israel. The key question, Roy suggests, is less about the “radicalization of Islam” than aboutThe Islamization of radicalism“.
In the process, the already degenerate ideology has degenerated even further, often transforming jihadism in Europe into “extension of the inner city flocks“And it leads to an emergence over the past decade “Tech” terrorismin which everyday objects, such as knives and carts, are practiced as parricide. The line between ideological violence and sociopathic rage has almost been erased.
This brings us to the second significant development: the rise of the “anti-politicians”.
In his influential 1989 essay, The End of HistoryFrancis Fukuyama suggested that the West’s victory in the Cold War brought an end to ideological conflicts. “idealism,” he wrote, “must be replaced by economic calculation” and “technical problems solved.”
Politics in the post-Cold War world has become less about competing ideologies than a debate about how best to manage the existing political order. This was the age of neoliberalism bound by the consensus that it was nothing but liberal democracy, free market economics and globalization.
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What Fukuyama underestimates is political meaning and collective ideals. “Economic calculation” and “infinite solving of technical problems” cannot and cannot be replaced by “ideological contention”. He also considered the ability of authorities to solve technical problems or improve the lives of citizens.
The financial collapse of 2008 gave rise to political protest and popular challenges to stabilize the authority. They were from Tunisia to Chile, from Brazil to Hong Kong, Vincent Bevins suggests If we burnits history 2010s, more protests than ever before involved people. And yet little seemed to change. Anger without change has led to a growing sense that it is a political problem.
We may never know Abdulmohsen’s reasons, or his state of mind, for committing his murder, but somewhere along his political journey, he seems to have transposed his hatred of Islam into his hatred of Germany, which is quite hostile to Islam. His sense of being neglected by the political authorities may have drawn him into an act of nihilistic violence, which, like many similar things, may be inexplicable in rational terms, but significant of the anti-political era, and based on the idea of protest. a spectacle, often a gruesome, parricidal spectacle. “Is there a way to justice in Germany without … the indiscriminate slaughter of German citizens?” and he asked fresh in the sign social media post. He had sought this peaceful way, but he had not found it.
The instance of Abdulmohsen must be an Islamist and thatThe mass of the quiver is to kill Europe“also emerges from anti-politics. It is not only Muslims who are socially disaffected and whose failure is shaped by a narrow sense of identity. Many communities in the white working class are equally disaffected and angry, and often view their problems through an identitarian lens, paving the way for advocates from far away The riots of this summer in England have shown how quickly weakness can become perverse and against itself Muslims and migrants.
Wannabe jihadism, racist populism and nihilistic acts of terror may each seem separate phenomena, but they are all very different expressions of lifeless anger while trapped within the cage of identity in the age of anti-politics.
Kenan Malik is a spy columnist
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