Who Gets Radicalized What I learned from
Who Gets Radicalized? What I learned from my
Interviews with Extremist Disciples?
Amra Sabic-El-Rayess, PhD
Date: June 19, 2016
Publication: The Huffington Post,
original version available at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/who-getsradicalized-what-i-learned-from-myinterviews_us_5765fddce4b0ed0729a1c5c3
In August of 1995, I watched the US-led NATO
Deliberate Forces electrify the skies over my hometown
of Bihac, hazardously poised between Bosnian Serb
positions on one side and the Serb-controlled precincts
of Croatia. Only weeks later, the long convulsive
battering of our land at last subsided. NATO’s
expedition became one of the most impeccably
executed humanitarian military interventions in history.
The Dayton Accord, while imperfect, enshrined a
peaceful Bosnian state. Bill and Hillary Clinton walked
through our crippled towns, mingling with the Bosnians
they saved, offering a passionate benediction to the war
torn state. A Bosnian hybrid of American melting pot
values seemed destined to take root in the grateful
multiethnic nation. The U.S. would ensure the inflow of
multilateral aid to rebuild the devastated country in the
image of its American saviors. Mission, as they say,
accomplished.
Or so it seemed. A radical scion of Islam, Salafism,
rolled in, quietly and unchallenged. Salafi mujahideen
trickled
in
unobstructed
during
the
1990s
bloodshed. Their ultraconservative interpretation of
Islam began to incubate amongst the historically tolerant
Muslims. During the American presence after Dayton,
Salafis hid in the shadows and then, upon the U.S.
departure, expanded their efforts to fill the moral
vacuum by building a welcoming spiritual and
ideological home for its converts.
In late April of this year, CIA Director John Brennan
made his first visit to Sarajevo, a city proudly ordained
as the symbol of a tolerant and Euro-centric version of
Islam. He flew directly from Riyad, a birthplace of the
ultraconservative Salafism, to huddle with Bosnian
officials over the growing threat of terrorism.
On April 23rd, the day after Brennan’s departure, the
official Islamic leadership announced it had attempted to
halt the work of the Salafi groups by inviting them to
unite with the mainstream congregations in Bosnia. Out
of 38 Salafi congregations that accepted to speak to the
Islamic leadership, 24 rejected the legitimacy of the
Islamic community in Bosnia, declined to become its
official members and, with that, denied the legitimacy of
Bosnian Islam as Islam at all.
Salafis do not see Muslims as a single phalanx of
religious belief and action. To Salafis, theirs is the only
one true Islam; all other Muslims are pretenders. The
differences between Salafis and other Muslims are
clearer to Salafis than the political differences between
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are to us.
To us, American values seem universal and
unimpeachable: democracy, fair play, and hard
work. We wonder how anyone cannot hungrily embrace
such obvious virtues. But to a poor, forgotten person in
a ravaged country, the simple helping hand and moral
guidance of a caring mentor can prove far more
persuasive.
One Salafi man’s experience typifies the rest: “I
turned to faith because of a few close mentors. They
introduced me to true Islam. They are caring and far
more knowledgeable than me about Islam. I trust them
the most and rely on them for information and
knowledge. Not on my family, Internet, mosques or
anyone else. What they do, guides what I do every
day. I have been learning from them for 5 years. I just
received all paperwork and a university scholarship to
study in Yemen.”
Salafis, in their initial stage of radicalization,
disregard formal education and even religious schools
and institutions. They employ the 3Ps — patience,
persistence, and persuasion — as pillars of their
initiation. They resuscitate injured souls one by one:
patiently, persistently, and with persuasion. Its
members travel by foot, house to house, speaking
humbly about sincerity and honesty. These messengers
do not cultivate converts from the center of the power
spectrum, but from the margins of the powerless. This
is how Salafis begin to stake out the foundation to their
radicalization pyramid.
Salafis first target people at the bottom of the
radicalization pyramid. As the initiate climbs the
pyramid, he surveys the panorama of Islam as it was
originally passed down by Allah and practiced in the
Middle East. Education through personal tutorials,
webinars, lays the traction he needs to climb higher.
The mentor’s authority derives from his training
amongst the true believers abroad at its source. By the
time his student reaches the highest echelon, he is now
a soldier fighting for the restoration of the original Islamic
kingdom.
Commitment to true Islam becomes
commitment to saving Islam from destruction by the
West. Terrorists become the ones who are willing to
“fall off the pyramid” into abyss for the sake of Islam.
Americans instead build schools and train teachers
in places likes Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We build
institutions to propagate our values. But these buildings
and institutions are hollow compared to the heart-toheart pedagogy of the Salafi educator.
Salafi teachers do not walk out the door when the
bell rings. There is no bell and education is never
ending. The Salafi teacher is a personal ally, confidant
and guide. He becomes the sole conduit of all
knowledge drawn from Allah’s original well of
wisdom. Salafi education is the refined hunger for Islam
in its earliest incarnation. To return to the greatness of
Islam requires stages of self-purification, and eventually
sacrifice to achieve the final restoration of the faith.
One Salafi woman exemplifies how Salafis
deliberately cast themselves outside the circle of
Western values and education: “To learn about
democracy is the greatest evil. Democracy pretends
that power belongs to the people, but the only true
power in the world rests in Allah.“
Eventually, Salafis fracture population. This is a
tipping point in their radicalization effort. It destabilizes
regions and devalues billions of dollars we invest to
build socially cohesive nations. Our response to them is
an engineered military attack, but that alone, without a
more adept strategy to re-capture radicalized youths
around the globe, only pushes these at-risk populations
to societal peripheries where Salafis wait to embrace
them.
In its public announcement, the official clergy in
Bosnia admitted it had no research, either theoretical or
practical, on Salafi teachings and practices. Nor did it
therefore have a strategy to re-educate and de-
radicalize Bosnian Muslims lost to Salafism. Bosnia is
not alone in this. We face a global problem of not
understanding how Salafis “educate” people into their
beliefs that ultimately drive violent extremism today.
The West, in particular, has much to learn from the
Salafis. To win this complex ideological game with
Salafism, we need a new perspective on education.
We instruct foreign elites in the hope they will return
and propagate our values in their homelands from the
top of the social pyramid. But we neglect the peripheral
populations, whose “education” Salafis have perfected
at the pyramid’s base.
To reverse this highly personalized radicalization,
we must join forces with more moderate Islamic
communities, like the one in Bosnia, to jointly develop
our own de-radicalizing education model. We cannot
wage this “hearts and minds” battle with bombs and
bombast from on high. Or we will continue to fight an
un-winnable war for we have failed to decode the
mindset of our common enemy.
Interviews with Extremist Disciples?
Amra Sabic-El-Rayess, PhD
Date: June 19, 2016
Publication: The Huffington Post,
original version available at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/who-getsradicalized-what-i-learned-from-myinterviews_us_5765fddce4b0ed0729a1c5c3
In August of 1995, I watched the US-led NATO
Deliberate Forces electrify the skies over my hometown
of Bihac, hazardously poised between Bosnian Serb
positions on one side and the Serb-controlled precincts
of Croatia. Only weeks later, the long convulsive
battering of our land at last subsided. NATO’s
expedition became one of the most impeccably
executed humanitarian military interventions in history.
The Dayton Accord, while imperfect, enshrined a
peaceful Bosnian state. Bill and Hillary Clinton walked
through our crippled towns, mingling with the Bosnians
they saved, offering a passionate benediction to the war
torn state. A Bosnian hybrid of American melting pot
values seemed destined to take root in the grateful
multiethnic nation. The U.S. would ensure the inflow of
multilateral aid to rebuild the devastated country in the
image of its American saviors. Mission, as they say,
accomplished.
Or so it seemed. A radical scion of Islam, Salafism,
rolled in, quietly and unchallenged. Salafi mujahideen
trickled
in
unobstructed
during
the
1990s
bloodshed. Their ultraconservative interpretation of
Islam began to incubate amongst the historically tolerant
Muslims. During the American presence after Dayton,
Salafis hid in the shadows and then, upon the U.S.
departure, expanded their efforts to fill the moral
vacuum by building a welcoming spiritual and
ideological home for its converts.
In late April of this year, CIA Director John Brennan
made his first visit to Sarajevo, a city proudly ordained
as the symbol of a tolerant and Euro-centric version of
Islam. He flew directly from Riyad, a birthplace of the
ultraconservative Salafism, to huddle with Bosnian
officials over the growing threat of terrorism.
On April 23rd, the day after Brennan’s departure, the
official Islamic leadership announced it had attempted to
halt the work of the Salafi groups by inviting them to
unite with the mainstream congregations in Bosnia. Out
of 38 Salafi congregations that accepted to speak to the
Islamic leadership, 24 rejected the legitimacy of the
Islamic community in Bosnia, declined to become its
official members and, with that, denied the legitimacy of
Bosnian Islam as Islam at all.
Salafis do not see Muslims as a single phalanx of
religious belief and action. To Salafis, theirs is the only
one true Islam; all other Muslims are pretenders. The
differences between Salafis and other Muslims are
clearer to Salafis than the political differences between
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are to us.
To us, American values seem universal and
unimpeachable: democracy, fair play, and hard
work. We wonder how anyone cannot hungrily embrace
such obvious virtues. But to a poor, forgotten person in
a ravaged country, the simple helping hand and moral
guidance of a caring mentor can prove far more
persuasive.
One Salafi man’s experience typifies the rest: “I
turned to faith because of a few close mentors. They
introduced me to true Islam. They are caring and far
more knowledgeable than me about Islam. I trust them
the most and rely on them for information and
knowledge. Not on my family, Internet, mosques or
anyone else. What they do, guides what I do every
day. I have been learning from them for 5 years. I just
received all paperwork and a university scholarship to
study in Yemen.”
Salafis, in their initial stage of radicalization,
disregard formal education and even religious schools
and institutions. They employ the 3Ps — patience,
persistence, and persuasion — as pillars of their
initiation. They resuscitate injured souls one by one:
patiently, persistently, and with persuasion. Its
members travel by foot, house to house, speaking
humbly about sincerity and honesty. These messengers
do not cultivate converts from the center of the power
spectrum, but from the margins of the powerless. This
is how Salafis begin to stake out the foundation to their
radicalization pyramid.
Salafis first target people at the bottom of the
radicalization pyramid. As the initiate climbs the
pyramid, he surveys the panorama of Islam as it was
originally passed down by Allah and practiced in the
Middle East. Education through personal tutorials,
webinars, lays the traction he needs to climb higher.
The mentor’s authority derives from his training
amongst the true believers abroad at its source. By the
time his student reaches the highest echelon, he is now
a soldier fighting for the restoration of the original Islamic
kingdom.
Commitment to true Islam becomes
commitment to saving Islam from destruction by the
West. Terrorists become the ones who are willing to
“fall off the pyramid” into abyss for the sake of Islam.
Americans instead build schools and train teachers
in places likes Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We build
institutions to propagate our values. But these buildings
and institutions are hollow compared to the heart-toheart pedagogy of the Salafi educator.
Salafi teachers do not walk out the door when the
bell rings. There is no bell and education is never
ending. The Salafi teacher is a personal ally, confidant
and guide. He becomes the sole conduit of all
knowledge drawn from Allah’s original well of
wisdom. Salafi education is the refined hunger for Islam
in its earliest incarnation. To return to the greatness of
Islam requires stages of self-purification, and eventually
sacrifice to achieve the final restoration of the faith.
One Salafi woman exemplifies how Salafis
deliberately cast themselves outside the circle of
Western values and education: “To learn about
democracy is the greatest evil. Democracy pretends
that power belongs to the people, but the only true
power in the world rests in Allah.“
Eventually, Salafis fracture population. This is a
tipping point in their radicalization effort. It destabilizes
regions and devalues billions of dollars we invest to
build socially cohesive nations. Our response to them is
an engineered military attack, but that alone, without a
more adept strategy to re-capture radicalized youths
around the globe, only pushes these at-risk populations
to societal peripheries where Salafis wait to embrace
them.
In its public announcement, the official clergy in
Bosnia admitted it had no research, either theoretical or
practical, on Salafi teachings and practices. Nor did it
therefore have a strategy to re-educate and de-
radicalize Bosnian Muslims lost to Salafism. Bosnia is
not alone in this. We face a global problem of not
understanding how Salafis “educate” people into their
beliefs that ultimately drive violent extremism today.
The West, in particular, has much to learn from the
Salafis. To win this complex ideological game with
Salafism, we need a new perspective on education.
We instruct foreign elites in the hope they will return
and propagate our values in their homelands from the
top of the social pyramid. But we neglect the peripheral
populations, whose “education” Salafis have perfected
at the pyramid’s base.
To reverse this highly personalized radicalization,
we must join forces with more moderate Islamic
communities, like the one in Bosnia, to jointly develop
our own de-radicalizing education model. We cannot
wage this “hearts and minds” battle with bombs and
bombast from on high. Or we will continue to fight an
un-winnable war for we have failed to decode the
mindset of our common enemy.