On Tuesday night in the Goldsmith Family Cinema, Lawrence Wright, an author, screenwriter, and staff writer for The New Yorker, described what kind of men join Al-Qaeda and why they do it. The answers he found in his research surprised even him.
Wright was struck by the results of a study by CIA officer Marc Sageman, which looked at the numbers of young men flooding Al-Qaeda camps in the 1990s.
“They came from intact families,” Wright said. “They were, most of them, college educated. They were not the products of religious schools…some of them spoke as many as five or six languages. They had no obvious mental disorders. Interestingly to me, many of them weren’t even very religious when they joined Al-Qaeda. In other words, they were a lot like us.”
Wright referred to another study done in Cairo, which found that many of the young men joining terrorist groups came from rural backgrounds. When the men would go to university towns, they would develop feelings of displacement and seek refuge in radical activist groups.
“They were away from home,” he said. “They were away from their roots, their families, often for the first time in their lives. These radical groups approached them in this vulnerable period and offered them the solace of their companionship, their fraternity, their religion. They were more vulnerable then they would have been if they were at home.”
Sageman’s study was in agreement.
“The most common quality that [Sageman] found in his study of the young men who joined Al-Qaeda was that they joined the jihad in a country other than the one in which they were reared,” Wright said.
Wright argued against the perception that terrorists came from immigrant communities.
“What disturbs me, if you look at the recent plots in the UK, for instance the subway bombings, last year the attempt to hijack ten American airliners and blow them up over the Atlantic, these were not first generation immigrants,” he said. “They were second and third generation British citizens of Pakistani origin.”
According to Wright, it is not a sense of belonging elsewhere that causes the problem, but rather the feeling of being somewhere in between two identities or allegiances, which has long-lasting effects.
“But the simple fact was that the feeling of displacement had perpetuated itself into the second and third generation,” he said. “That feeling of marginality that comes from not feeling authentically British or Pakistani is the quality that I am trying to get at here. What I’m trying to explain is not a clash of civilization. It’s a clash of identity within a civilization.”
Wright said that Americans are fortunate because Arab and Muslim communities are much better integrated into society in American than in Europe. As evidence of this integration, he told the audience that the average American Muslim makes a higher wage than the average American, is twice as likely to go to college, and is much less likely to go to prison.
“Compare that with the situation, for instance, in France, where seven percent of the population is Muslim,” he said. “Fifty percent of the prisons are. What a measure of alienation and marginality that is.”
He attributed the long-standing issues of Arabs and Muslims with Europe to the problems of colonial relationships. The symbiosis that Americans, Arabs, and Muslims enjoy needs to be preserved, he feels.
“When you go to the airport and they take away your contact lens solution to make you safe, that doesn’t make you safer,” Wright said. “What makes you safer is that our Arab and Muslim community is more a part of our society, and if we lose that, then we really will be in danger,” he said.
Yet Wright was careful to note that individual identity is not the only factor involved. He then posited that Arabs and Muslims feel a kind of cultural humiliation caused by several factors, one being poor economic standing.
“The Muslim world contains one fifth of the world’s population but half of the world’s poor,” Wright said.
Wright also suggested that many Arabs feel they have to rely on buying everything from other countries and cultures.
“Even terrorists, I mean, their weapons are made in China or the U.S.,” he said. “There’s a sense of being peripheral to the world.”
After the lecture, Wright signed copies of his recent book “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” which looks at the historical influences that led to the creation of the Al-Qaeda. The book recently earned Wright a Pulitzer Prize in the category of general nonfiction.
Students in the audience were intrigued by the angle Wright used to explain Al-Qaeda.
“I find it very interesting that [Wright] places an emphasis on societal despair, because that could explain why it seems there many people who are up-and-coming of the middle class, who are educated, turning radical, and killing themselves, in order to kill others,” said Ben Smyser ’08.
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