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PUNDITS and politicians of all stripes are quick to offer their wisdom explaining what fuels Islamist terrorism. It just so happens that much of what they say is wrong. Poverty doesn't produce terrorists, a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem isn't a cure-all, and young Muslim men aren't the ones most likely to turn to terror. If we are going to fight a war on terror, at first we have to recognise who we are to fight.
Future terrorists? Most madrasas are in no position to provide the skills that international terrorist groups look for in recruits.
That madrasas are terrorist factories" is an exaggeration. Do madrasas (ultra-conservative religious schools) produce students who are less tolerant towards other religions, opposed to the rights of women, and more likely to support militant means for resolving disputes between Muslims and non-Muslims? Definitely, they do. But this is not tantamount to training for terrorism. None of the 9/11 hijackers attended a madrasa. And there is no evidence that any of the terrorists involved in major international terror attacks during the last four years ever enrolled himself as a regular student in a madrasa, though he may have passed through a madrasa on the way to a terrorist training camp.
Given their total lack of Western education, madrasa students are not particularly useful to any modern day employer, including terrorist groups. They cannot blend themselves into a Western nation or mount sophisticated terrorist operations requiring technical expertise. They lack linguistic ability and competence in even basic forms of technology because such skills are not generally taught at madrasas. Some madrasa students do not even have basic mathematical skills, necessary for mounting even moderately sophisticated terrorist operations. The media and policy-making community's obsession with madrasas began with the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan. Their rise and fall may have drawn international attention to the culture and curriculum of madrasas, but such schools are nothing new.
Madrasas have existed throughout the Muslim world since the 12th century. Their core curriculum in South Asia, to take one example, has not changed since the 19th century. Nor are they widely popular. In Pakistan, for instance, less than 1 percent of all students enrolled in schools attend madrasas. Some suggest the number could be as low as 0.7 percent of all school going children. Officials in the Arab world exaggerate the significance of madrasas possibly to deflect attention from the real problem: public school curriculums that inspire young men to jihad and focus on victimisation of Muslims. Studies of public school curricula in Saudi Arabia, for example, confirm that incitement of hatred against the West, Jews, and non-Muslims is hardly limited to madrasas.
"People support terrorism because they are poor and lack Opportunity"? Doubtful. Little work thus far has been done on the effect of socio-economic factors upon breeding terrorism and upon the support that it enjoys among the people on whose behalf terrorists claim to operate. In other words, no one knows why some people support terrorism and others do not.
The survey of 14 Muslim countries found that respondents who reported having inadequate money for food were the least likely to support terrorism. By contrast, the study found that individuals with cell phones or computers (who are presumably more affluent) are more likely to support terrorism than those who do not own these items.
It is possible, of course, that addressing socio-economic concerns such as poverty and education in Muslim countries would decrease the support that terrorists enjoy there. It is also possible that support for terrorism might hinge more upon differences in economic status through time than upon the level of poverty at any given moment. Either way, it is too early to draw conclusions. Development agencies and advocates should collect more data on the support for terrorism among the poor.
"Perceived threats to Islam create support for terrorism?"
Absolutely. There is tremendous hesitation to admit that Muslim populations, on whose behalf terrorists claim to operate, have grievances or concerns that need to be addressed as a means to minimising public support for terrorism. For some, this is the moral equivalent of negotiating with terrorism. This is unfortunate, because these grievances matter.
In some countries, including Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, and more than 70 percent of the population believes that Islam is under threat. Support for terrorism feeds on the belief that large segments of the Muslim world are victims of ongoing injustices. Some experts argue, with justification, that the perception of threats to Islam is deliberately cultivated by Islamist political groups and authoritarian Muslim governments to generate support for their agenda. But support for terrorism is unlikely to decline without addressing that perception, whether or nor the perception is the product of propaganda or the result of legitimate political grievance.
"Disenchanted, angry Muslims in Europe and North America are potential terrorist recruits" Increasingly. Muslims living in North America and Europe are attractive to international terrorist organisations because they already possess language skills, western passports, and are at ease working and interacting in these countries. And terrorism is attractive to some among these diasporas. The reasons for this phenomenon are numerous and varied. Many North American and European Muslims found Islam while spending time in prison. The "prislam" (prison Islam) phenomenon disquiets analysts on both sides of the Atlantic. Although there are just 2.0 million Muslims living in Britain - 2.5 per cent of the total population - more than 8.0 per cent of Britain's prisoners are Muslim. Prisons have proven to be a recruiting and training ground for a variety of criminal activities, including organised crime and terrorism. Moreover, radical Islamist teachers have long had access to Britain's incarcerated Muslims. Diasporas have long been a source of ethnonationalist extremism and activities. Something about the state of diasporas motivates people to understand their identities in new and sometimes disturbing ways. Examples of that abound: Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, India's Mohandas Gandhi, and Pakistan's Mohammad Ali Jinnah all began to reformulate national identities when they were abroad.
The freedom of speech and association allowed in Europe and North America enables radical Islamists to publish and organise without government intervention, a right they are denied in most Muslim countries. Western countries are going to have to try harder to understand why it is that some populations do not integrate into society and why it is that some engage in violence. Increasingly, people who are born and raised in one country, seek militant training in another, and carry out terrorist attacks in a third country on behalf of people they are likely to have never met.
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(C. Christine Fair is a senior research associate at the United States Institute of Peace. Husain Haqqani is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and teaches international relations at Boston University)
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