How Analyzing ISIS’s Recruitment Tactics Helped Liberate Me from Psychological Captivity
The following is my literary response to Islam & the Future of Tolerance by Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz. The short non-fiction book is in the format of a dialogue between Harris, one of the four horsemen of the new atheist movement, and Navid Nawaz, a Muslim and active spokesperson against radicalism.
It’s not hard to find heavily biased opinion pieces on hot topics in the news media. Such polarized rhetoric is tiresome and foments misunderstanding and the banal psychological reaction common to humans when their delusions of an orderly universe are challenged — digging in.
Despite my admiration of Harris’ philosophical commentary, in the early years of his public career, he admittedly contributed to the philosophical tit-for-tat of the Religion vs. Atheism debate. However, by his own admission, in recent years Harris has taken a step back from the more inflammatory elements of his rhetoric. Islam & the Future of Tolerance represents an olive branch to progressive Islam (a sentiment symbolized by the image of a literal olive branch on the front of the book).
Harris’s interlocutor is Maajid Nawaz, a one-time radical Islamist who now seeks to reform Islam towards universal humanitarian principles. He represents the voice of an often silent secularized population in the Islamic community. His politicizing (and I mean that with no judgment) affords him continued acceptance in the Islamic community while actively campaigning for humanitarian progress; a stance that feels very familiar to my own work as a critical insider of a High Demand Religious Group (HDGR).
Harris and Nawaaz’s dialogue was published in 2015 and followed by a documentary film of the same name in 2018 that I initially discovered on Amazon Prime. Regretfully, as of the publishing of this article, Amazon shows only 119 reviews of the title from users. Given its pragmatic approach to discussing the conflict between Islamic and Western culture, I wish it had a higher viewership.
Studying Islam As a Jehovah’s Witness
While the world unraveled in fear over the murderous aggression of the Islamic State from 2014–2018, I watched interestedly from the sidelines. My evangelizing work with Jehovah’s Witnesses often brought me into contact with Sunni Muslims living in the United States who had emigrated from Pakistan over the past three decades. Face-to-face dialogue with this subset of the population and my efforts to convert them to my own religious organization sent me down the psychology of Islam rabbit hole.
Growing up in a captive organization, my only insights into the Islamic faith came from my religious propaganda. As a Jehovah’s Witness, I grew up with weekly discussions of an internal publication called Our Kingdom Ministry which occasionally discussed how to overcome objections to our proselytizing work from religious minority groups in the US. One such discussion at congregation meetings around the world in 1999 was entitled “What Will You Say to a Muslim” which encouraged us to find common ground with Muslims by speaking about our mutual belief in the one true God and “all the prophets”¹. This approach was a bit duplicitous, however, since it would be interpreted by Muslims as an admission of faith in the prophet Mohammed which was obviously not the case. But such duplicity was not an uncommon strategy during our loosely-veiled marketing efforts.
I memorized all of the prescribed responses for conversing with Muslims while proscelytizing. I became quite the subject matter expert in the practice of debating Islam.
Fascinated with the phenomenon of Western teenagers converting to radical Islam and traveling thousands of miles to fight with an outrageously violent political movement in the name of Allah, I ventured to read literature written by non-Jehovah's Witnesses. I read Glen Beck’s It Is About Islam, The Looming Tower — Al Qaeda & the Road to 911 by Lawrence Wright, and Black Flags — The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick. I watched every Netflix documentary about radical Islam. I even accepted a copy of the Quran from a Muslim in my ministry and read it in secret.
I needed to know how radicalism happened. How could God-loving persons turn so violent? I didn’t find a satisfactory answer in the Quran, in Jehovah’s Witness literature, or in library books. I found it in myself.
In Aayan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel, there is a moving scene where she calls a spiritual advisor to ask how her Islamic brothers could have caused such violence in the name of an all-loving God. Soon, I found myself asking a similar question of my own religion: How could the one true religion and God’s visible manifestation of God’s organization on earth cause so much trauma for disillusioned members by disfellowshipping them and coercing their family to shun them indefinitely?
As many journalists and commentators observed at the time, ISIS’s recruitment efforts involved using passages from the Quran, Hadith, and Sunna to provide a compelling theological argument for the violence they were proliferating. Second-generation European children of Muslim immigrants who felt disconnected from greater society saw their parent’s version of moderate Islam as a dilution of true Islam. This argument sounded a lot like the message I preached daily to nominal Christians in my door-to-door ministry: “You’ve been taught a lie. Jehovah’s Witnesses are true Christianity. Please read this book called What Does the Bible Really Teach?”³
As my cognition bifurcated away from the infantile spiritual fantasies of my religious upbringing, I saw more and more connections between the culture and theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses and that of my Muslim neighbors. I began to realize that religious extremism (either my own or that of any other group) is about fear, escapism, and the emotional support of an intimate community of fellow-believers. It’s about prejudice. It’s about ideological totalism. It’s about the comfort that comes from finding cosmic purpose amidst universal entropy.
In fact, if you have substantially elegant defense mechanisms for the momentary cognitive dissonance that results from causing human suffering, radicalism feels pretty comfortable.
Key Insights from Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz
I would be remiss if I did not highlight the most profound insight of Islam & the Future of Tolerance. It is a diagram based on Harris’s understanding of the ideological landscape of the global Islamic community as “several concentric circles”³ (an excellent visual representation appears in the documentary film). In the bullseye of the circle is a relatively small group of violent jihadi’s who actively seek martyrdom and aggress against infidels. Beyond that is a larger circle of political Islamists “who desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam on Society”. Proceeding beyond this band is an even larger circle of religiously conservative Muslims who do not “whole-heartedly subscribe to contemporary liberal human rights”. Finally, in a thin band surrounding the larger circle, is a small subset of “citizens who happen to be Muslim”; individuals who “don’t identify primarily as Muslim when interacting with Society.”
I wholeheartedly support the direction of Harris & Nawaaz’s commentary. It is more nuanced than the majority of religious and political debates and shows a healthy evolution towards complexity.
As a physically-in-mentally-out (PIMO) Jehovah’s Witness, I cannot help but draw connections to my community. I wonder what this stratification looks like in the 1 million-plus Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States. How many other “citizens who happen to be” Jehovah’s Witnesses exist; silenced by the coercive policy of shunning enforced by The Christian Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses? This is a sociological phenomenon that I seek to explore further.
References:
Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of Pennsylvania (1999) What Will You Say to a Muslim, Our Kingdom Ministry, November 1999, page 8.
Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of Pennsylvania (2014) What Does the Bible Really Teach.
Sam Harris, Maajid Nawaaz (2015) Islam & the Future of Tolerance. Harvard University Press.