Happiness in the proximity of faith and death

August 1st, 2016 by Charles Cameron

This impulse toward self-destruction is actually seen as selfish by some fellow insurgents. In his co-authored 2014 memoir The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, Mustafa Hamid, a former high-ranking Egyptian volunteer with the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, described his own frustration with many of the later waves of volunteers arriving to that conflict. “One of the negatives that emerged from the jihad, and which continues to have severe consequences today, was the tendency for the youth to focus not on success and achieving victory and liberating Afghanistan, but on their desire for martyrdom and to enter paradise,” Hamid wrote. This overriding preoccupation with becoming a martyr meant that participation in the conflict, “became individual instead of for the benefit of the group or the country where the fight for liberation is taking place.”

That’s one of the more striking of Hamid’s observations in The Arabs at War in Afghanistan — itself an astonishing book, product of the collaboration between Hamid (aka Abu Walid al-Masri) the man who brought bin Laden‘s oath of allegiance to Mullah Omar, and Farrall, a respected scholar-analyst who was the Australian Federal Police al-Qaida subject matter specialist at the time of the Bali bombings.

It is an extraordinary book, and one I cannot recommend too highly.

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Posted in abu walid al masri / mustafa hamid, al qaida, book, Charles Cameron, christianity, cognition, emotion, france, IS, ISIS, Islam, leah farrall, martyr, monasticism, movies, syria, Uncategorized | 6 comments

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  1. Lexington Green:

    August 2nd, 2016 at 2:39 pm

    This desire for a glorious death is perhaps The decisive factor in the current struggle against terrorism. I wonder how much attention the United States military is paying to it. Psychological operations director that ridiculing and mocking suicide bombers, or finding other ways to undermine their religious fervor, could be more effective than bullets and explosives.

  2. Charles Cameron:

    August 2nd, 2016 at 3:05 pm

    I just finished a piece for LapidoMedia on the latest issue of Dabiq, which is mainly taken up with an attack on Christianity, with particular attention to the Crucifixion (on which the Quran takes a docetic view) and Trinity (seen as polytheism or shirk).
    .
    The magazine couldn’t be clearer that the various political reasons for the jihad are secoindary to the religious driver:

    What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this articular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you.

    As you say, we can only hope that the power of this sort of motivation is or becomes evident to those in charge of counter-measures. Whether ridicule would prove successful, I am far from sure — but at least knowing what it is we face would be a significant step.

  3. Grurray:

    August 2nd, 2016 at 9:27 pm

    PSYOPs usually work when they induce fear. It has to be shown that the result of violence for the terrorist isn’t ecstasy but woe and misery and humiliation. See all the awful pictures and videos of captured Turkish rebels from the failed coup for examples.

  4. Lexington Green:

    August 3rd, 2016 at 3:07 am

    The Daesh propagandist writes in a very clear, forceful English style. Is there anyone in the west who can articulate our position with that degree of brevity and lucidity? Vapid platitudes will motivate less than this call to arms. Regrettable.

  5. Charles Cameron:

    August 3rd, 2016 at 3:42 pm

    Hi Lex:
    .
    Good question about articulating our position. I’m working on a book — the reformulated prosdpectus should be back out to our agent in a couple of weeks — that will attempt something of the sort. Bear in mind that that particular quote comes along with some pretty interminable detailed commentary on various biblical topics, many of them minor, and all pretty commonplace.
    .
    I have the first half of a new piece out at LapidoMedia on Dabiq 15, dealing with the magazine’s apporioach to the crucifixion, and will be announcing it in a separate ZPO post shortly:

  6. Lexington Green:

    August 3rd, 2016 at 4:21 pm

    “I’m working on a book” — Good news.