Was the New Zealand terrorist attack committed by a “lone wolf? “The recent attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand by a 28-year old white extremist, Brenton Tarrant, killing fifty innocent worshipers in the midst of their weekly prayers, raises the question of how to describe it. Was it a hate crime or an act of terrorism, or both? And if it was terrorism, was it part of an organized conspiracy or was it simply the act of a crazed individual—the so-called “lone wolf” terrorist?

Much of the news media and many politicians have quickly asserted that if it was terrorism, it was of the “lone wolf” type since Tarrant apparently acted alone with no connection with or active support from any organized group. This implies that we need not trouble ourselves with looking at the wider background, for this was simply a crazy act that could happen anywhere at any time for any reason. It also implies that there was no larger movement or audience to whom the killer was related, and for whom the act was intended to impress.

Yet this description is woefully inadequate to describe the New Zealand massacre, which was clearly meant to intimidate people—the basic definition of terrorism—and the racist apartheid patches on Tarrant’s jacket in his Facebook photo indicates that he identified with and wanted to impress other right-wing racists around the world, so he is hardly a lone wolf. Nor does the “lone wolf” characterization fit many of the other individual terrorist attacks in recent years.

In 2018 the vicious assault on a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh by Robert Gregory Bowers was characterized as an act of “lone wolf” terrorism. So was the 2015 massacre in a Charleston church by 21-year old white supremacist Dylann Roof and earlier that year the assault on the headquarters of a satirical magazine in Paris, Charlie Hebdo, by two Algerian brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi. Before that, there was the 2013 Tsarnaev brothers’ attack on the Boston marathon, the deadly assault on a Norwegian youth camp by Christian extremist Anders Breivik in 2011, the August 2012 attack on the Milwaukee Sikh Gurdwara by Wade Michael Page, the 2010 Times Square bombing attempt by Faisal Shahzad, and even earlier, the 1996 Atlanta Olympic park by Eric Robert Rudolph and the 1995 Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing by Timothy McVeigh.

Some of these were committed by Christians, some by Muslims, and some by those with no particular religious affiliation at all. Some had racist ideologies in mind, others were simply raging against society. In almost all cases, though, these have been instances where alienated individuals have struck back at a society that they thought had abandoned them. And they perpetrated their attacks in a way meant to impress a specific audience.

This is the most basic definition of terrorism, a public act of violence meant to be intimidating. What makes the terrorism of recent decades so striking is that they are seldom undertaken for strategic purposes—to gain territory or make demands—but are rather done for symbolic reasons. They are acts of violent meant to give the illusion of power, to intimidate one group of people and impress another.

Hence terrorist acts can be described as “performance violence.” A performance is done for an audience, or multiple audiences, to intimidate and impress. It makes no difference if someone like Tarrant or Breivik was a member of an organized extremist network or not; they were clearly trying to impress their imagined community of support, their White nationalist kinfolk, and to intimidate multiculturalists and Muslims into compliance with the idea of a society dominated by white Christians.

The comparison between Tarrant and the Norwegian terrorist Andres Breivik is relevant for a number of reasons. Like Breivik, Tarrant was part of a wider subculture of hatred. He likely thought of himself not as a terrorist but as a soldier in a great and hidden war, carrying out a mission on behalf of an imagined constituency of supporters. Like Breivik, he dressed up in military garb with militant patches—in Tarrant’s case he wore the symbol of a far-right nationalist group in Ukraine. As in the computer war games that are popular in his generation, Tarrant thought of himself as a warrior in a secret war. He even credited the computer game, Fortnite, for training him how to kill. One of Tarrant’s friends said that Tarrant had told him prior to the killings that he wanted to start a race war. This sense of mission would help to explain why Tarrant, like Breivik, thought of himself on a secret mission in an act of what he regarded as virtuous warfare and what we see as hideous terrorism. Like Breivik, Tarrant never showed remorse for conducting what he thought was a soldier’s duty in a grand, invisible cosmic war.

Then there is the matter of the message, one implicitly transmitted in the terrorist act itself, the other explicitly conveyed through a manifesto. Like Breivik, whom Tarrant openly acknowledged as a role model, Tarrant published on the Internet his own eighty-page written defense of his horrible deeds. Written in a question and answer format as if he was of sufficient importance to be interviewed by the news media, Tarrant’s manifesto winds through a twisted rambling set of comments and memes expressing Islamophobia, hatred of immigrants, and a strident right-wing nationalism. Impervious to irony, the Australian Tarrant –himself a foreigner writing in New Zealand—demands that outsiders be forcibly removed. He shows admiration for the nationalist stance of US President Donald Trump and like Breivik expects that his right-wing comrades will take a cue from his actions and his stance and rise up against Muslim and other non-white immigrants in their countries.

So it makes no difference whether or not Tarrant or Breivik were card-carrying members of racist organizations. They thought that they were part of a great social struggle in which their acts would receive approval and their roles respected as if they had been triumphant warriors. The white racist subculture of neo-nationalism around the world from the US and Europe through the Middle East, Asia, Australia and New Zealand have provided just such a social context. Despite the acceptance of multiculturalism by most people as a normal and interesting way of living in the wake of the dramatic demographic shifts in this era of globalization—or perhaps in an ugly reaction to the multiculturalism of global societies–racism and right-wing nationalism around the world are flourishing.

These communities of extreme nationalism that are punctuated with strident voices of hatred have given context and support for Tarrant’s act. Far from being a “lone wolf,” therefore, the perpetrator of the New Zealand massacre was not isolated. This terrible event was part of a sad, established pattern of xenophobic nationalism and white Christian terrorism that is as global as it is destructive.

 

 

This essay includes observations that I have made in other essays about a variety of acts of supposedly “lone wolf” terrorism in recent years.

 

Introduction to God at War, to be published by Oxford Univ Press. The picture is a detail from Picasso’s Guernica.

“This is war,” the sad Filipino man said to himself as we looked across the river at the town of Marawi. Only weeks earlier, in a five-month siege in the last half of 2017, it been flattened by a military attempt to rid the city of an ISIS-affiliated Muslim separatist movement. As we viewed it across the river, the city still lay in ruins, baring the scars of battle.

His comment startled me. Though I also was dismayed to see the extent of the destruction, I knew that there was some controversy over who was responsible, who started it, and whether the military assault was justified. Just as the cities of Mosul and Raqqa were decimated in the efforts to free the evil grip of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in those countries, this effort to drive out ISIS rebels in the Philippine state of Mindanao resulted in the cities being turned into rubble. The liberating armies had to destroy the cities in order to save them.

I agreed that these were heavy handed military operations. They might also have been misguided. But were they war? My Filipino companion repeated the phrase quietly, as if stating the obvious. What did he mean by that, and what did he see that I didn’t?

I didn’t live in Marawi, of course. But he did. His family home was in the midst of the inner city and he lived through months of bombs and social dislocation. Now he was facing the specter of a ruined city across the river.

“There’s nothing left,” he told me, showing videos of what was left of his family home taken several days earlier on his cell phone. He was right—I could see only a pile of brick and stone rubble where once a multi-story had proudly stood.

“My mother built that home with her sweat and toil,” he said sadly. She had worked for years as a domestic housekeeper in Saudi Arabia, carefully sending the earnings back to her family in the Philippines. Part of the money was for their college education. The rest was for the house in Marawi.

Though he had been mildly sympathetic with the Muslim separatist movement in Mindanao before, he told me, his attitude had changed after the fighting. He knew now that they were in a state of war.

War—what a remarkable notion. As my Filipino companion told me, it enabled him to see everything differently. He saw the world through new eyes. He could no longer trust the government to do what was right; he now saw them as an enemy that was beyond redemption. One could only fight and attempt to conquer them in a scenario of struggle that engulfed every aspect of the social world around him.

It is a strange way of thinking, this idea of war. It turns the world upside down. It creates demonic enemies out of competitors, and brings normal civil activity to a halt. It animates ordinary people into a state of action, allowing them to kill and be killed, and cheer when the enemy—whose lives may not be all that much different than theirs, men and women with families and duties and dreams—is destroyed, sometimes viciously so.

Yet history is full of war. Perhaps more perplexing, religion is full of it. Human creativity in general revels in it. It saturates the images of popular culture—the plays and movies, novels and television stories, comic books and computer games. It is the prevailing image in the minds of those who have undertaken acts of terrorism in recent years. And it is the idea that animates those have launched their own wars on terrorism against it.

It is a powerful notion, war, and a puzzling one. For decades I have been studying the rise of religious violence around the world, including groups like ISIS and Christian militias that have been involved in acts of terrorism. Invariably war is central. All of the activists with whom I have spoken eventually get around to the subject.

“Mr. Mark, there’s a war going on,” I was told by a jihadi militant who was imprisoned for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. “We’re at war,” a Buddhist monk in Myanmar told me in justifying Buddhist attacks on the Muslim minority in his country. “We’re in a culture war,” a Christian activist in the United States explained, adding that “it’s not a metaphor, but a real war.”

So over the years it has become clear to me that war is the central image in the world view of virtually every religious movement engaged in violent acts. Behind the moral justification of using violence in savage attacks are images of great confrontations, of war on a transcendent scale. My fascination with these notions of war have deepened into a profound curiosity about what war is, and why it seems to emerge so spontaneously to situations of extreme shock, humiliation and stress. I want to understand war, to understand how this template of the human imagination can transform our view of the world around us, and what religion has to do with it.

This book is about war—the idea of war, why it is so appealing and why it is often associated with religion. I want to know why war needs religion and why religion needs war. What fascinates me is the idea of war—war in the mind. I am less interested in the actual use of lethal weapons than the world view that makes that usage possible. I know that much has been written about the strategic decisions that go into warfare, about the cold calculations to gain economic benefits or political leverage at the cost of soldiers’ lives, and about the political and moral justifications that allow for armed force in response to perceived threats. As important as these considerations are, though, they are not what I want to focus on in this book. What interests me is the quiet yearning for war that makes such calculations possible, the public acceptance of the notion that in some situations of social tension, war makes sense. It is this idea of war—this totalizing construct of the human imagination that absolutizes one’s view of the world—that I want to explore.

It is this mentality that I am thinking of when I talk about war. It is not so much the act of warfare as the idea of it, the passion for war, the war worldview. The passion for war is not a rational thing. Though the conduct of military operations certainly involves a great deal of skill and rational calculation, it seems to me that war—the idea of absolute conflict that precedes many but not all military acts—is almost an instinctual thing. It has much more to do with emotions—or a kind of inarticulated mental reflex—than with conscious reason. It is what I mean by “the war mentality,” the way of seeing things in war-like terms.

In fact, the idea of war and the actions of military forces do not necessarily go together. There are police actions and humanitarian interventions, even on an international scale, that involve deadly force, but they are seldom regarded as war. A military raid intended to locate culprits and bring them to justice is usually not thought of as war, but as a kind of police action. The Philippine government in Marawi explained that it was simply going after culprits in a violent gang. When the FBI surrounded the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, on a fateful April day in 1993, their intention was not to kill the leader or burn alive the inhabitants of the compound. The FBI agents were not at war. But the members of the movement, trapped inside in what seemed to be a desperate situation and informed by biblical prophecies about the war at the end times, clearly saw things differently, just as the Muslim separatists in the Philippines saw Marawi differently. To them it was a salvo in a war in which they were a target. Hence militant actions are seen differently from different social perspectives. For those who accept that the motives of the U.S. and Philippine governments were lawful, these are cases of police action. For those who question the motives and perceive that there is a bellicose relationship between resistance groups and the government, Waco and Marawi were skirmishes in enduring wars.

These examples show that the application of military force and the idea of war are not necessarily identical. Similarly the pursuit of the al Qaeda activists in Afghanistan after September 11 could have been justified without the absolute and totalizing language of a “war on terror.”  Moreover, the idea of war does not require constant military action. The Cold War, for example, involved various regional military encounters—in Cuba, Korea and Vietnam, for instance—but the overarching concept was greater than any of these specific military skirmishes.

For most of us who grew up in Europe or the United States in the era of the Cold War, that global tension was, in an odd way, a reassuring view of the world. We knew who the good guys and the bad guys were, and we knew what to do about them. The decade after 1990 was one of uncertainty on a global scale. The “war on terrorism” announced by President George W. Bush in 2001 presented a new image of global war. Though not necessarily comforting, it presented a template of meaning on international events. Again Americans knew who the good guys and the bad guys were, and everyone else was either “for us or against us,” as the President sternly put it.

In the public pronouncements and popular sentiment in the years that followed 9/11, the war on terror was seen in the American imagination to have been in some ineffable way blessed by God. In the United States, as elsewhere in the world when the sound of war drums is heard, the rise in the language of warfare is accompanied by religious rhetoric. Just as the Islamic terrorists themselves proclaimed a holy war against America, the US militant response was also accompanied by a religious refrain, “God bless America.” God, it seems, is always where the military action is.

This has been true throughout history. Whether it is the warfare of the Hebrew Bible or the great armies of the Hindu epics, God has marched alongside conquering armies. In our attempt to understand the idea of war, therefore, it is inevitable that we will be trying to understand what God has to do with it. Why is religion so full of warfare, and why do wars always seem to employ God as a mercenary on either side?

This book, then, is a meditation on war and religion. It is a reflection on the dark side of the human imagination, and its capacity to deal with deep discomforts and profound anomalies in what strikes me as a horribly irrational and quite peculiar way—through constructing a template of meaning that totalizes the differences between positions, satanizes enemies, and gives moral sanction to the most hideous acts of destruction. What is this terrible thing called war, why do we humans want it so, and why is God so often in command?

God at War: Alternative Realities of War and Religion, is in press and will be published in Fall 2019 by Oxford University Press, New York, and in a German edition by Herder Verlag, Frankfurt. 

Marawi, Mindanao, May 4, 2018. Photo by the author.
Revised on July 27, 2018, to reflect the signing of the peace agreement. The updated version was posted on the Indian webmagazine, The Wire.

“There’s nothing left,” a former resident of Marawi told me, showing videos of what was left of his family home that he had taken several days earlier on his cell phone. He was right—there was only a pile of brick and stone rubble where once a multi-story had proudly stood.

“My mother built that home with her sweat and toil,” he said sadly. She had worked for years as a domestic housekeeper in Saudi Arabia, carefully sending the earnings back to her family in the Philippines. Part of the money was for their college education. The rest was for the house in Marawi.

Finally after forty years of domestic labor abroad, she returned to Marawi several years ago. Her plan was to spend her retirement years with her extended family in the house that she had lovingly built with her remittance funds over all those years. It had a stone façade and metal grillwork, her son told me. And it was located directly across from the main mosque in the center of the city.

That turned out to be its undoing. On May 23, 2017, a group of Muslim separatist rebels who had affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) barricaded themselves inside the mosque. Soon after they infiltrated throughout the inner city, making it virtually impossible for the Philippines army to quickly isolate and destroy them.

His mother, along with most of the residents of the city, fled as reinforcements came from both sides, and the roads were packed with terrified fleeing residents. The pitched battle between the militants and the Philippines armed forces went on for over five months. Heavy casualties were inflicted on both sides.  The official reports state that around a thousand militants were killed along with something under 200 government forces and 100 civilians. Local observers dispute those numbers, claiming many more army troops and civilians were killed, and that there were less militants involved in the standoff than the government claimed. Nonetheless, the human toll was considerable.

The physical damage to the city was equally as devastating. Not only was the mother’s house and the rest of the area immediately around the mosque destroyed, but virtually all of the inner city was left in ruins. Standing on the other side of the river from the city it appeared to me that at least a mile-long span of the heart of the city was in in ruins. It looked like the images of Mosul and Raqqa after those equally devastating attempts to scour the city of ISIS rebels.

The mother of the Marawi resident with whom I spoke was not an ISIS militant, of course. She was just a returning domestic worker. Her son, my conversation partner, benefitted from her education funds, finished college and earned a PhD. He was now a professor at Mindanao State University in Marawi. Though not a rebel, he was a Muslim and sympathetic with the goal of semi-autonomy for the Mindanao region and had played a role in the past in helping to negotiate between the government and rebel groups.

The Muslim extremists who had taken over the city of Marawi in 2017 were not, however, the usual activists associated with the main organizations of the movement, the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Both groups have entered into peace agreement negotiations with the government. In 2014, after two decades of negotiations, a comprehensive Bangsamoro Peace Agreement was signed by both Muslim rebels and the Philippine government, but four years it languished and was not ratified by the Philippine legislature. Some blame the current President, Rodrigo Duterte, for not playing a more active role in securing the agreement’s implantation. It was only after the Marawi invasion that President Duterte on July 26, 2018, finally signed the agreement.

The stalemate over implementing the peace agreement led to widespread frustration within the Mindanao Muslim community, and eroded the credibility of the moderate rebel leaders involved in the negotiation. More dangerously, it encouraged the growth of extremist elements within the Muslim movement who were never supportive of the peace talks. The government’s failure to act gave them evidence that it could not be trusted.

In the months before the Marawi standoff, two of the extremist groups had joined forces. One was the group led by Isnilon Hapilon that was based in the Sulu Peninsula of Mindanao. He had broken from the Moro National Liberation Front in 1994 and helped to form a more militant movement, Abu Sayyaf. This movement—as much a criminal gang as a political organization—became wealthy through kidnapping and holding hostages for ransom. They gained international notoriety by kidnapping foreigners and beheading those for whom ransom was not secured. In 2016 Hapilon was said to have pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, affiliating his group with the international ISIS movement.

Another group, led by two brothers, Omar and Abdullah Maute, had a history similar to Abu Sayyaf but in a different part of Mindanao. They were based in Lanao del Sur, the region surrounding Marawi, and they had broken off from the mainstream Moro movement that that was dominant in that area of central Mindanao, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Like Abu Sayyaf, the Maute Brothers Group gained their income through extortion and threats. Sometime in 2015 or 2016 the brothers joined forces with ISIS, proclaiming their movement to be a branch of this international jihadi organization, and began working closely with Hapilon and his formerly Abu Sayyaf branch of ISIS.

Both movements were fueled by the frustration over the failure of the peace agreement to be ratified. The Maute Group was especially successful in using online social media to target young people for recruitment, including students at Mindanao State University. The international connections provided by declaring themselves affiliated with ISIS allowed the Maute Group and Hapilon’s organization to gain new recruits from abroad. They were said to be preparing for something big, perhaps a takeover of a part of central Mindanao as a kind of Philippines version of the Islamic State that had conquered large sections of Syria and Iraq.

All of this preparation came to a head in Marawi in May 2017. It is not clear how the fighting began, whether by design or by accident. Some local observers with whom I spoke thought that it was a miscalculation on both sides. They suggested that the militants only wanted to seize the center of the city briefly, for a day or two, simply to demonstrate that they could, then slip away before they were engaged in a major and protracted battle. The army, for its part, thought this would be an easy win—they could slip in and destroy two sets of outlaw bands in one simple strike.

If this was their reasoning, both sides got more than they bargained for. The ISIS forces could not easily escape from the city, and it is said that after the first day when Hapilon’s wife and child were killed in the assault on the mosque where they were sequestered, Hapilon was determined to fight until the end. On the government side, they discovered that they could not easily win against an enemy that knew the city intimately and who could retreat into the shadows as soon as they were approached.

One resident of Marawi told me that on the second day of the fighting the army chased the ISIS fighters out of a school that they had occupied, and then the army unit occupied it themselves in a kind of bivouac. Unknown to them, two ISIS fighters had not been chased away but were hiding under the floor. They emerged one night when the unit was sleeping and systematically killed them all. After that, it is said, the army decided to bring in air power to attack ISIS strongholds instead of using human personnel in door to door combat.

The decision to use air power had a devastating effect on the city. Building after building became the target for military air strikes, and as the siege turned into months, the Philippine military called for reinforcements. They requested the so-called “bunker-buster” bombs from the American military to strike deeply under the surface to kill militants who were hiding in basements and deep spaces underground. And they also requested drones with night-vision cameras to track the movements of the militant groups at night.

Eventually these augmented military measures helped, and on October 16, 2017, Omar Maute and Isnilon Hapilon were killed in a military operation to rescue hostages being held by the militants.  Soon after that the Philippine army raised the national flag and proclaimed the city was liberated.

It was liberated but destroyed. The mother of the Mindanao State University Professor who had lost her home in the fighting was heartbroken. “She doesn’t want to return to see what remains,” he said, adding that she was in a state of deep depression, staying with one of her children and refusing to talk with anyone about her experience.

Much of the other residents in Marawi felt the same way, even months after the end of the fighting when I visited the city and talked with them. They still seemed to be in a state of shock and anger, though it was not clear to them to whom the anger should be directed.

Some blamed ISIS. “They drew the army into our city,” one former resident told me, adding that they had used the whole city as a hostage. He pointed to the widely circulated rumor that during the first days of the fighting Isnilon Hapilon notified the Philippine government that if they provided the ISIS rebels with $10 million US dollars and safe passage from the city they would leave. Apparently the Philippine government was not willing to provide ransom for a whole city, nor did it want to lose the opportunity of destroying Hapilon’s Abu Sayyaf and the Maute Brothers Group for good.

So the army stayed and fought, increasingly employing the kind of missiles and air power that would destroy most of the buildings in the older part of the city. For this reason, an even larger percent of the former residents with whom I spoke blamed the army for the destruction. They were bitter about the physical damage to their buildings, and even buildings that were not destroyed were often looted. Some of the looting was undoubtedly done by the ISIS militants, but some residents told me that even in areas that were not controlled by ISIS but where the army had required a mandatory evacuation there was looting that they blamed on the army. “We lost a computer and two televisions,” one Malawi resident told me.

It is not clear what will happen next. The professor at Mindanao State University said that it was up to the Philippine government. Regardless of who one might blame for causing the conflict it was clear that the damage to the property was inflicted primarily by army missile attacks. Several citizen committees were demanding immediate restitution. They were frustrated by the slow response of the government to the enormity of the devastation.

One of the professor’s colleagues was even angrier. He was actively engaged in protest movements and investigative reporting into what he claimed was widespread corruption among the fledgling restitution efforts that the government had provided. Very few people who lived in the destroyed areas of the old city had access to the documents that would prove their property rights—and in many cases they had passed on their property from generation to generation without any documentation. For this reason the government had provided funds to anyone who claimed to have lived in the city. This approach, the professor told me, was subject to abuse as the government officials were giving the money to friends of theirs who would give them a kickback. The professor wanted to know why the government didn’t use earlier versions of Google maps to identify properties that could be verified by the witness of neighbors if not by government documents to diminish the possibility of corruption.

Hence many residents resented the government—both for being the agent of destruction of their property and for what they felt was an inadequate response to their loss and their demands for restitution. But a deeper problem also lay in the wake of the army’s destruction of the city: the rise of a new militancy.

Already many young Muslims in the region were turning to a more militant expression of Muslim political power due to the frustration caused by the stalemate in the peace process. Now the destruction of Marawi by the military gave a new impetus to the anti-government sentiments and stoked the fires of radicalism. Not all of the members of the movement were killed in the encounter, and stories were circulating about how they had retreated to the mountains where their numbers were expanding. They were joined, I was told, by many young men from Marawi and the surrounding region.

“Older people like me can see both sides,” the first professor I met told me, explaining that he and others could see that the army was trapped and it was a lose-lose situation for both sides in the Marawi standoff. “But younger people,” he said, with concern in his voice, “they don’t see the broader picture.” He also said that the army’s recourse to air power rather than fighting man-to-man in a house-to-house combat gave them the appearance of being weak and unmanly in the eyes of many of the young men in the city who felt that they should have fought directly rather than behind the shield of technology.

The professor told me about talking with the son of one of his neighbors, a thirteen-year old boy whose house had been destroyed in the fighting. He was angry at the army, the boy said, adding that when he was older he planned to join ISIS. He wanted to get an M-14 rifle, he said, and hunt down the Philippine tank driver who had destroyed his home and kill him.

In telling this story, the professor cautioned that this was an initial response from an immature boy and as the boy became older he might see the world through calmer eyes. He also thought that it was unlikely that the Maute Brothers Group and Hapilon’s Abu Sayyaf could survive intact without their charismatic leaders. Still, he thought it quite possible that a new extremist movement would emerge among the young people who were enraged over the destruction of Marawi. “It might be a new radical movement,” the professor said darkly, “one that is less concerned about religion and is instead fueled by a deeply anti-government sentiment.”

When I returned to Manila I had dinner with a former student who now works with the United Nation’s Children Emergency Fund, UNICEF, which had erected a number of relief camps in the area around Marawi to help the refugees. My former student had been there and met with many young people in their early teens, and in talking with them he tried to avoid any topics that were political or that would evoke traumatic memories. He would ask them about the future, what they would like to do when they grew up, he said.

“We want to join the militants,” a majority told him as my former student tried to hide his shocked look of surprise. He did not know whether this anger would last, he told me, or whether it would grow into active participation in a radical movement. But he was worried. It would appear that although the Philippines army has destroyed city, the war is far from over. It remains to be seen whether the official signing of the Bangsamoro Agreement will set a new tone and diffuse what has begun to be the stirrings of a new militancy in the region.

 

My thanks to Fr Francis Zabala OMI, President of Notre Dame University, Cotabato City, and the University’s Vice-President for Administration, Sheila Algabre, for their hospitality while I was in Mindanao and their assistance with arrangements; and for the research support from the Resolving Jihadist Conflicts Project based at Uppsala University.

 

 

 

“Do you still believe in the peace process?” a teenage boy asked cynically. He was accosting a former Muslim militant in the Southern Philippine province of Mindanao, who related this story to me when I was recently in the main town of the region, Cotabato City. The former militant had become a lawyer, and though he renounced violence he was still a member of the separatist movement, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. So he still considered himself an activist, but to the teenager, the son of one his friends, he was not activist enough.

“What peace process is there?” the young man hissed at the lawyer in what was more a judgement than a question. And then he added, “look at Marawi.”

For over six months from May to November 2017, the Philippine army attacked the city of Marawi, just north of Cotabato City, in an effort to destroy an ISIS-affiliated group of militants who had taken the city for ransom. Two militant forces, Abu Sayyaf and the Maute Brothers Group, had joined forces under the banner of ISIS and were making a stand by taking over the central mosque and adjacent buildings in the center of the city. In the ensuing battle, Marawi was destroyed and many, including the teenager, blamed the army for the destruction, rather than ISIS.

Days after the conversation, the lawyer told me, the boy disappeared. His family feared that he had joined the ISIS-affiliated rebels. The lawyer blamed himself for not doing more to try to persuade the young man that the peace process between the Muslim separatists and the Philippine government was still worthwhile.

“But would you have listened to this when you were his age?” I asked him, knowing about his past. He had joined the most militant branch of the separatist movement when he was in college and for years he was wrapped up in spirit of confrontation with the Philippine government. He was engaged in a cosmic war of absolute enemies that led to violent conflicts, guerrilla war, and a fifteen-year trail of bloodshed.

The lawyer smiled at my question, and then began telling me the story of how he began to change his point of view. In time he began to see the negotiations with the government as trustworthy.

“How did that happen?” I asked him. How did he turn from thinking in terms of cosmic war to civil engagement that could lead to a peace agreement?

When he was in college, he said, studying at Mindanao State University in Marawi, recruiters came to campus to tell Muslim students about the oppression against Muslims around the world. At that time, in 1992, it was the conflict in Bosnia that attracted global attention, and he volunteered to join the struggle. As luck would have it, the recruiter failed to show up at the appointed time, so the lawyer never ended up going to Bosnia, where, he said, he likely would have been killed.

Instead, he said, he joined the Muslim separatist movement at home. He was at first attracted to the Moro National Liberation Front, but when a new and more strident movement was formed, he joined this movement instead–the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. What attracted him about the movement, he said, was that it was more militant and more directly religious in its ideology. It also appealed especially to people from his area of central Mindanao, so he felt that he was fighting in a struggle for his own community.

It was a life and death struggle, he said. When he was young and most active in the movement, he said that he was willing to die and to kill on behalf of movement. He saw himself as a soldier in a war, a conflict of absolute right versus absolute wrong, against an enemy that did not deserve to live.

I asked him what changed, how he began to see the situation differently. He did not change his basic attitude about the need for self-government for Musim Mindanao, he said, and he continues to be a leader in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front to this day. He is one of its leading thinkers and a negotiator in the peace process with the Philippine government.

Two things changed his attitude towards violence, he told me. One was simply the domestic demands of life later in his 20s as he got married, began to raise a family, and was busy with law school and an emerging career as a lawyer. Though not a combatant at this time, his basic outlook had not changed. He was still emotionally at war with the Philippine state.

This view changed after he met a remarkable leader, Brigadier General Victor Corpus, a Philippine army official who had defected from the army and joined the Communist militants who were fighting the Philippine government early in the 1970s. In 1976, however, he soured on the Communist insurrection and surrendered to the army. After a period of prison detention, he was allowed to rejoin the army. Hence when the lawyer met him in Mindanao the general could speak to him and other militant Muslim separatist leaders with the credibility of a former militant who had been reformed.

He understood us, the lawyer said. He could see how we would mistrust the government and want to embrace a new way of looking at politics. Yet he also was realistic. He could explain the futility of guerrilla warfare, and he told us how many of our goals could be met by negotiating a settlement with government officials.

When the lawyer and other Muslim separatist leaders accepted General Corpus’ offer to meet with government officials, the lawyer said he was surprised at how sensitive they were to the Muslim separatists concerns. “They treated us with respect,” he said.

This attitude of respect threw him off guard. It made it difficult to see the other side as the evil enemy that deserved to be killed, and the image of intractable absolute war began to dissolve.

A somewhat similar story was related to me by a general in the militant Muslim forces. When I talked with him recently in Cotabato City, he was still nominally the head of the combat forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the region. These days, however, his main role was to be the spokesperson for the militants in the joint militant-government organization, the Coordinating Committee for the Cessation of Hostilities, which is a key component of the peace process.

The militant general told me that several years ago when the leaders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front told him that they were going to stop fighting the government and begin to negotiate with them, he couldn’t believe it. “We didn’t trust them,” he said.

Still, he obediently followed the orders of his militant leaders. But for a year, he said, he had difficulty sleeping at night. He was constantly on edge, not knowing whether the negotiations would suddenly break off, and again they would be in a war mode. He was emotionally prepared for that possibility.

In time, however, his attitude changed. What made a difference, again, was respect. He felt that the government negotiators were genuinely concerned about the Muslim concerns, and trying to come to an agreement that would benefit them within the framework of the existing structure. He now says that it is too late to turn back. He is committed to a peaceful resolution.

Even so, however, the general says he understands the hot-headedness of the young people who are frustrated with the slow pace of the peace process. After the ISIS-army conflict that destroyed the nearby town of Marawi, he thinks that many young people will join the extreme militant side. He said that many already have.

For this reason, the mainstream Moro Islamic Liberation Front has tried to use counter measures. Accompanying the former general when we met in Cotabato City was a young college-age man who had joined the Liberation Front with the explicit task of trying to talk down his fellow young Muslim militants and keep them from joining ISIS.

“I try to talk to them about the future,” he said. He pointed out that Muslim morality does not sanction indiscriminate killing. He told them that defending the community is better carried out by negotiations rather than militant confrontations that often end in even more violence against the community, as it did in the case of the destruction of the town of Marawi. He also talked about the individuals’ own future, and how they could be more effective leaders as spokesmen for the community rather than as soldiers in a fruitless suicide struggle.

I asked him whether he had persuaded anyone. “Some,” he said quietly. He went on to say that he was engaging in these conversations not just for the sake of the goals of the Liberation Front, but also as attempts to save their lives.

The sad truth is that many of the brave warriors never return. Alas, it was a message that did not arrive soon enough, or was not heeded, by the teenager who challenged the formerly militant Muslim lawyer to abandon the peace process. Though the teenager has disappeared from view, his fate is still unknown.

 

            Hospitality and arrangements for my recent visit to Mindanao were provided by Fr Francis Zabala OMI, President of Notre Dame University, Cotabato City, and the Vice-President for Administration, Sheila Algabre; research support came from the Resolving Jihadist Conflicts Project at Uppsala University.

 

 

When the Iraq government announced the end of ISIS control over its territory on December 9, 2017, there were a few celebrations in Baghdad. December 10 was proclaimed a public holiday, and a military parade marched down the main streets.

But that was about it. The event was scarcely reported elsewhere. In the New York Times the report about the event was a small item obscured by more salacious reports related to Trump-dominated domestic politics.

ISIS was over. But no one seemed to notice.

Perhaps part of the reason is that few people are persuaded that ISIS is really over. They know that pockets of ISIS control have survived along the Euphrates River border between Iraq and Syria, and that sporatic violence continues in formerly ISIS-controlled regions; that areas in both countries that have been liberated from ISIS lie in rubble and their angry and restless residents are susceptible to returning to ISIS or turning towards other radical ideologies; and that individuals and groups self-identified with the movement are actively engaged in violent acts throughout the world, from Nigeria to Indonesia, and from Belgium to Manhattan.

The reason why ISIS survives in these different forms is that it was never a single thing. As I have argued elsewhere, ISIS has been both an organization and a movement, a network of political control as well as a decentralized popularist uprising.

The collapse of the political network associated with the geographic control of the Islamic State has liberated those areas of Syria and Iraq that it held. People who lived in Mosul are able to move freely, but they don’t have anywhere to go. The city is in shambles, and those trying to go elsewhere are herded into massive camps housing tens of thousands of refugees set up by the UN High Commission for Refugees in neighboring Kurdistan.

I visited some of these camps in recent months. I talked with a group of young men who were hanging out in front of their tents, smoking cigarettes in an act of defiance against the ISIS regime that would jail anyone caught smoking. They told me that they were relieved to be free from the region’s control—it was like “living in a prison,” they told me. At the same time, however, they were concerned that their city has been destroyed and their own futures were uncertain.

They were bitter towards the Iraqi government and its Shi’ite militia that were at the forefront of the military actions against Mosul. They felt that the liberating military forces did little to try to preserve the city in their eagerness to destroy ISIS, and that the Shi’a liberators treated the local Sunnis like “dirt.” “They think that we are all ISIS sympathizers,” they told me.

Many were, especially at the beginning of ISIS control, when they were seen as a Sunni vanguard that would provide dignity and jobs for the largely Sunni population of Mosul and other parts of western Iraq. Even now, the young men told me, there were many ISIS sympathizers embedded among the refugees, ready to reorganize and rise up when the time was ripe.

The time could become ripe soon if the Iraq government and international relief agencies do little to help repair and restore the city. Elsewhere in Iraq, in the Sunni-dominated cities of Fallujah and Ramadi that were liberated from ISIS control over a year ago, the movement has regained influence as the voice of Sunni protest against the Shi’a dominated Iraq government. It may be only a matter of months before an ISIS-influenced resistance movement rises in Mosul and in the large refugee camps nearby.

Then there are the ISIS-related incidents elsewhere in the world. Shortly after New Year’s Day in 2018, a suicide attack in a market in central Kabul, Afghanistan, killed 20. The Amaq News Agency of ISIS said that the movement claimed credit.  They also gave ISIS credit for attacks in Nigeria and in Egypt a few days before. Earlier in the year a group of Muslim separatists said to be associated with ISIS took over a town in Mindanao, the insurgent region of Southern Philippines, and controlled it for months in a stand-off with the Filipono army. In November, 2017, a rented truck veered down a bicycle path in lower Manhattan, killing eight; the driver, as he abandoned the vehicle, left behind a note in Arabic that said, “ISIS lives!”

Whether or not ISIS lives is a debatable point. The fact that various groups and individuals around the world have identified with the ISIS brand name and its extremist ideology does not mean that there is an organizational connection between the old ISIS infrastructure and these various individuals and entities. When I interviewed Muslim resistance leaders in Philippines’ Mindanao, they told me that the groups using the name of ISIS were all local Filipino activists who were using the ISIS brand to make themselves look more formidable.

There is a fear that escaping ISIS operatives from Iraq and Syria might be headed to Mindanao and other parts of the world to continue their mischief, but there is no indication that they were involved in any of these recent incidents in the Philippines, Nigeria, and Egypt. So far these far-flung terrorist acts have all been linked with groups and individuals that have been well established in these local regions for some time, and the ISIS brand simply gives them a kind of extremist credibility.

What gives the illusion of a continuing global ISIS command is publicity. The Amaq News Agency has survived the downfall of Raqqa and Mosul, the main two centers of ISIS control. Since the agency exists in cyberspace, its creators could live anywhere—in France or California, for example. The agency continues to deliver press reports as if there were a continuing ISIS central command, and claims that all these disparate acts of violence are related. The glossy online magazine, Rumiyah, continued to be published as recently at September, 2017, and in January 2018 a new video posted by ISIS called on assassinations of world leaders from Putin and Erdogan to Trump and the Pope. My student assistants who have been monitoring ISIS-related chats in Twitter and Telegram tell me that the postings are as frequent and dedicated as ever, vowing to continue the struggle against the kafir anywhere in the world.

So in that sense, ISIS lives, since it never really died. It is the label for a virulent movement of resistance and unrest throughout the world, and will live as long as its brand name continues to inspire activists and strike fear in the hearts of those who oppose it.

 

Just when we thought the Islamic State was dead, Sayfullo Saipov drove his rented Home Depot truck down a bicycle path in lower Manhattan, killing eight and injuring far more. When his truck ground to a stop after ramming a school bus and Saipov fled on foot, only to be caught moments later, a note left inside the truck cab said that the Islamic State “would endure.”

What was jarring about this note, aside from the link it made with radical Islamic ideology, was its proclamation of the movement’s endurance. This is precisely what seems to be challenged by recent events. Given the military collapse of ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or al Sham, greater Syria, commonly known as the Levant)—in Syria and Iraq in recent months, the movement does not seem to have much endurance left. After a long siege and a horrific house-to-house battle, the largest city controlled by ISIS, Mosul, was retaken by a combination of Iraq and Kurdish forces along with U.S. military air power. More recently the capital of ISIS, Raqqa, has been liberated by Syrian and Kurdish forces, and soon after the last remaining town held by, Deir ez-Zor, has fallen. There remain pockets of resistance along the Iraq-Syrian border, but in general it is fair to say that ISIS days of territorial control are over.

But ISIS has never been a movement that is defined solely by territorial control. The enormous cyber network of participants in online chats on Twitter and Telegram, and the global audience for the slick online publications such as Inspire, Dabiq, and Rumiyah have constituted an alternative movement rivaling the size and significance of the Arab Sunni-based Caliphate in Syria and Iraq. The global network was nourished in part to gain recruits to come to the Middle East battlefields where they provided a stockpile of suicide bombers willing to destroy themselves in savage attacks against ISIS’ imagined enemies.

Some 30,000 young fighters came from all over the world to Syria and Iraq during the movement’s heyday in 2015 and 2016. But a much larger group were also involved, though primarily on line, on the animated chats of the online social networks and as readers of the online ISIS literature.

This online network constituted a separate movement. In the Twitter chats they often would call themselves baqiyah, a term that means something that survives or endures, and in this case refers to the enduring online ISIS community. In one of a series of tweets from a teenager in Canada, he said that his parents found some of his messages and were trying to take his computer away, but that they would not be successful, he said. He had other ways to get on line. Besides, he confessed, he had no other friends than the ISIS baqiyah, the online community, and without them, he said poignantly, he was nothing,

It is this cyber network that endures, and will continue to endure, long after the territorial control of the movement has been obliterated. Some journalists and pundits have commented that ISIS is now metastasizing and changing. But in fact it was always a diverse and decentralized organization, loosely organized around two different kinds of movements, one on the ground in Syria and Iraq and the other in cyberspace throughout the world. Though the headquarters in Raqqa were important–since someone had to produce the glossy online magazines somewhere, presumably there–nonetheless the social networks on twitter and Telegram, which are the real locations for the cyber community to exist, can continue indefinitely with no center organization needed.

The way these social networks lead to actions is illustrated by the recent Saipov attack in New York City. Saipov was Muslim of Uzbek ancestry, but had lived in the United States since 2010 and did not appear to have any direct contact with the ISIS organization. He did talk with other Uzbek Muslims about religious and political matters, it appears, and he likely had connections with the ISIS online community, the baqiyah, through Twitter and Telegram. He likely read the online magazines. In fact, an article in one of the online ISIS magazines, Rumiyah, had some months ago given specific instructions on how to carry out a truck-based attack on a crowd of Westerners. The attacker need not seek or receive ISIS approval, the article said, indicating that it could be conducted by anyone who believed in the ISIS cause. And it said a note should be left to indicate that the attack was being conducted in the name of ISIS.

Two days after the New York City attack, the ISIS weekly newsletter did indeed praise Saipov as “a soldier of the Caliphate.” Yet it is not clear what motivated the 29 year old Saipov to undertake the act. Clearly his career was not going anywhere. He was licensed as a truck driver, but recently the only work he could get was driving his own car as an Uber driver, and whatever financial problems he may have had were compounded by his wife’s pregnancy and growing economic obligations. So he might have been another example of a marginalized young man who was angry at the world and wanted to attack someone and take his own life in the process, and turned to radical Islamic ideology as a legitimating shield. These are cases in which the acts are branded with the ISIS name rather than being directed or even inspired by them.

It is not clear what ideological connection Saipov had with ISIS. But it seems clear than he had no organizational connection with the movement. And in fact the organization of the movement in Syria and Iraq is in turmoil and disorder following the destruction of their main bases in Raqqa and Mosul, and not in a position to direct attacks around the world. Yet even though the territorial ISIS has been defeated, the cyber ISIS remains as a potent network, a virtual community, across channels of cyber space. So when Saipov’s note talks about the endurance of ISIS, it is this cyber movement that truly endures.

 

Outside the lecture hall where I arrived recently to give a presentation in one of my classes I found perhaps a hundred students milling around, waiting for the previous class to be over so they could go inside. To my surprise there was an eerie silence among the crowd. None of them were talking to each other. Almost all were staring intently at the tiny screens of their cell phones, though a few were chatting away on ear-plug microphones, appearing to be oddly talking to themselves.

This has become the new normal in any crowd under, say, age 30. On campus, a student sent me a text message that required a long and complicated response, one that my inept thumb-typing could not easily master. Perhaps, I texted back to the student, we could meet sometime, and wondered where he was at the moment. “In the next room,” he cheerfully responded, and came bounding into my office. It had never occurred to him to confront me directly when a text message could easily suffice.

What, I began to wonder, is changing in the digital age? Is it simply a matter of new technology and our habits of communication that are changing or is it something more? I began to wonder whether we are witnessing some subtle transformations, not only in how we interact with each other, but also in how we think about ourselves.

After all, one aspect of the modern era was the emergence of what has been called the modern person. The all-encompassing changes of the period of modernity that dominated public life in the West from the 18th through the 20th centuries were not only technological, economic, and political. They also shaped the modern person whose traits were individualistic, inquisitive and ambitious–quite different from the communitarian and obedient patterns of the medieval masses.

If we are now living in a post-modern age, an era in which global forces are shaping our social, economic, and cultural lives, wouldn’t it be understandable if these also affected our sense of selfhood? In other words, could it be possible that we are witnessing the emergence of a digital self?

I tried to imagine what the features of this digital self might be. And what I came up with are several understandings of the self–traits that include a sense of being globally connected, informed, and confident. But as I thought about it, it seemed to me that each of these characteristics were deeply ambivalent. Though they are based on real changes there are aspects of them that are illusory, aspects of the self that are internally contradictory, or not fully realized.

This is what I mean.

The illusion of connectivity.

The ability to instantly contact and interact with almost anyone anywhere on the global is one of the most startling features of the digital age. I have seen hikers in Ladakh and adventurers in Machu Picchu who are able to connect with their cell phones to get on line and send selfies of their rare experiences to thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers around the planet.

This is connectivity. Or at least it is the appearance of it. Like the crowd of students waiting to get into my class who said scarcely a word to each other as they perused their instance communications from far-flung friends, this kind of connectivity can be strangely alienating. It is, on the one hand, a way of being in touch immediately with anyone that you know (and many that you hardly remember ever having met). But on the other hand it is a way of preventing the sustained social interactions that build friendship and trust. It is like cocktail party chatter that seems so entertaining and yet appears so vacuous when compared with a deep one-on-one conversation with an old friend. And yet there is something vibrant about these digital connections and the webs of networks that they create.

The illusion of wisdom.

Want to know who were kings in 15th century France? Want to know the quantity of beef annually raised in Argentina? No worries—the answers are as close as your hand held device or your computer tablet. You can Google virtually everything. The ubiquitous hand-held devices also provide easy access to social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, to the Internet web pages that span the universe of knowledge, and to video clips and essays representing every interest imaginable. It is a vast and extraordinary access to information, one that would have left the 18th century European Enlightenment thinkers in awe. They were the ones who first devised the encyclopedia—the idea that the universe of human knowledge could be contained in a few volumes on a library shelf. Now it turns out that their dream has come true in an even smaller receptacle, the tiny device you hold in your hand, where the infinitely expanding Wikipedia replaces the medieval shelf of stored data.

All of this knowledge at one’s fingertips gives the illusion of wisdom, of being at the crest of a great wave of information. The problem is that it is selective information. After all, we are the ones who decide what words or phrases to put into the Google search engine, and it is Google’s algorithms that determine what responses come up first. One might think that with all of the “friends” that you “like” on Facebook you would have a great diversity of points of view with which to contend. But no, Facebook has a way of reading your mind, or at least determining your political, cultural, and consumer tastes, and adjusts the feed of Facebook postings to your Facebook wall accordingly. In these ways the information that you get simply confirms and reinforces your own values and opinions.

So in a curious way, all of this avalanche of information is filtered in a way that actually makes you less informed, in the sense of seeing a variety of points of view and encouraging you to make some judgement among them. We have seen the results of this kind of silo-effect of media information in recent elections where one’s information about candidates you liked were valorized, and the competitor demonized, in a way that guaranteed a divisive and angry outcome to the elections. It also provided opportunities for media manipulation and the purveying of misleading and outright false reports that would be rapidly recirculated simply because they reinforced the biases and assumptions of the senders. And yet, the basic fact of improved information access is a part of the digital age, a resource to be channeled and potentially utilized for the improvement of human wisdom.

The illusion of personal power.

The instant connectivity and information access of the digital age leads to a third characteristic—a sense of self-confidence. This is the impression gained by individuals, with all these resources at their fingertips, that they know as much or more than anyone else.

I have experienced this directly in my role as a “terrorism expert,” as the media sometimes calls me. I put that term in quotes since I’ve never felt comfortable with that label. I am keenly aware of the limits of my own knowledge, and feel uncomfortable being described as an expert in anything. Still, religious terrorism is something that I have studied and written about over the past thirty some years, so I should know something about it. Recently, however, I have found that when people ask for my opinion, either privately or in an on-air interview, I am quickly interrupted to be given their opinion about the subject. “Well this is what I think,” the questioner will say. And then they’re off on a lengthy diatribe that often echoes comments that they have read on line, heard on radio, or seen on television. If the expert posts his or her authoritative voice on Wikipedia, it can be erased in a moment’s notice by virtually anyone who has a different take on the topic, without have to demonstrate a shred of expertise in that field.

So everyone’s an expert, as I have pointed out in a recent blog post on this topic. But it’s not just terrorism on which they have the illusion of expertise, but also politics, the economy, religion, education, international affairs—in brief, everything. This challenges the whole range of established authority, not just in academia, where we sense this mounting disrespect almost daily, but also in the social and political institutions that lead our societies. Recent elections in the United States and Europe demonstrate that the outside politician, the Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump or Emmanuel Macron, has an appeal simply by virtue of not being part of an established political party. The same phenomenon is seen in the cultural sphere, where the rise of new religious movements and demagogic preachers in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism, as well as in Christianity, are part of the anti-authoritarian mood of the global age of self-confident self-empowered individuals.

This self-confidence is illusory, since it is not based on any real power or is channeled through democratic process of social and political change. It is rebellion that has no hope of becoming a revolution, and is easily exploited by demagogues who pretend to represent the voices of the populace. The dark side of this illusion of power is anarchy, a devolution of social institutions that are felled by the rise of a deep distrust of authority based solely on one’s own imagined power. Short of that, however, is a different possibility: that the challenge to authority can create opportunities for change and empowerment that do have credibility given the possibility of mass social mobilization in the global age, a coordination of interests that can be harnessed for positive social purposes as well as for venal ones.

The digital self of the global age, therefore, is lonely but widely connected, limited in understanding but able to access vast resources of knowledge, impotent in an ability to act but empowered with a brazen self-confidence. It is a contradictory self, but one that is not without promise. After all, despite the illusions of connection, wisdom and power, there is an extent to which each of the three of these have an authentic basis in the new realities of the global era. We do have an ability to communicate with large numbers of people easily; we do have access to more information and an ability to create our own platforms of information; and we do have the confidence sense that we have the power to change things. And for these reasons, the global future is one that is open to be shaped in myriad ways. One can only hope that at least some of these will be positive.

When people find out that my research field is the global rise of religious violence they often start to ask questions. “What do I think of ISIS?” they may ask. Or, “do you think that religion causes terrorism?”

I suppose such questions are understandable, even though I hesitate to answer them. Even though I am sometimes interviewed on television or on radio with the descriptor that I am a “terrorism expert,” I’ve never felt comfortable with that label. I am keenly aware of the limits of my own knowledge, and feel uncomfortable being described as an expert in anything.

Still, religious terrorism is something that I study. And I’ve done it for over 30 years. I’ve written several books and scores of articles about the topic, and have interviewed dozens of people directly involved in terrorist acts or supporters of them. I’ve interviewed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Doctor Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, leaders of Hamas; Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the key organizers of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the anti-Palestinian Koch Party; Rev Michael Bray, convicted of bombing clinics that provide abortions on the East Coast of the United States, and Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist anti-Muslim activist whom Time magazine called “the Buddhist face of terror.”

So yes, I should know something about the subject of religious terrorism. For this reason, against my better judgement, I often try to answer these simple questions. Hesitantly, in words that I think are uncomplicated and relevant, I try to give a common sense response about what is for me a very complicated subject without sounding like I’m giving an academic lecture.

But often before I can utter more than a word or two, I’m interrupted. “Well this is what I think,” the questioner will say. And then they’re off on a lengthy diatribe that often echoes comments that they have read or seen on television.

Sometimes they have decided that a particular religious tradition is at fault, invariably Islam. At other times it is religion in general that is the cause, regardless of the degree of religiosity expressed by the perpetrators of particular terrorists acts. And occasionally they aver that the problem is political leadership and cowardice in “getting tough” with evil doers.

My attempts at correcting, nuancing, or qualifying their opinions are to no avail. They know what they know, and they want me to know it.

Why, I wonder, did they bother asking me if they were not interested in my analysis? I’ve given some thought to this interesting situation, and tried to make sense of it.

Part of the problem, I think, is the proliferation of talk-shows on radio and television—sometimes in a daily 24-hour format—that is all about opinion. Everyone has one, everyone has the right to express theirs, and talk shows are the way to do it. Real expertise is simply not a part of the talk show equation. Asking an expert something is simply an excuse to give one’s own opinion on the topic.

I discovered how this format affects conversation when, soon after 9/11, I was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly, a talk show host on Fox news. When he opined that Islam produced terrorism, I tried to politely point out that the 9/11 attackers were a minute number of a very marginal fringe of an extremist branch of Islam that virtually all Muslims would disparage what they did.

“That’s an interesting opinion,” O’Reilly said. I tried to explain to him that this was not just “an opinion,” it was a fact based on evidence and a part of my analytic judgement as someone who studies the relationship between religion and violence comparatively around the world. But then I realized that I was speaking into a dead microphone, he had already cut me off and was on to something else.

So part of the problem is that an expert is just someone else with an opinion, no better and probably worse, than opinions expressed by people whom others trust. Some of these opinion setters are media hosts like O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. Others are authors such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. They present convincing templates of reality that are difficult to penetrate by people such as me who actually study some of the things that these opinion setters have pontificated about.

Another problem is related to globalization. We live in an era in which increasingly information is decentralized and divorced from structures of authority. Encyclopedias are an example. When during the European Enlightenment, Denis Diderot produced an Encyclopédie, the idea was that the most authoritative versions of knowledge would be available in one place. In the 21st century, the most commonly consulted encyclopedia is Wikipedia, which anyone can alter and amend at will. It is only as authoritative as the last person to edit the entries.

The problem is even more pronounced in reporting on the world’s news. In the United States, as in most countries, news information was disseminated to the general public through very limited sources, usually ones in which the public had great trust. During the later decades of the 20th century the nightly news of the major networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—were the arbiters of the received knowledge of daily events. At that time, Walter Cronkite, the anchor for CBS-television news, was regarded as “the most trusted man in America.”

In the 21st century everyone is trusted and no one is trusted. We can pick our own version of the news, and viewers of MSNBC and Fox News seem to inhabit different planets. If one does not trust any of the televised variants of current events, the Internet provides abundant fora for alternate views, some of which are downright bizarre.

No wonder, then, that experts don’t count. In these media realms independent experts simply do not exist, or are deeply suspect. If they offer counter narratives they are presumed to be speaking from an opinionated position that cannot be trusted.

“Are you one of those liberal professors?” This was the question posed by a Mid-West relative of mine who admitted that her main source of information came from Fox News. No matter that I was a once-trusted relative and that I had spent years in the University presumably becoming accomplished in some arena of knowledge, the very fact that I spoke outside her media box was cause for suspicion.

So I supposed in an era of media opinions and the globalized decentralization of information, I should not feel insulted if no one trusts me to be an expert. I can live with that. I’m more disturbed, however, by what this says about the diffusion of knowledge and the lack of public consensus in the global era. That is an issue about which we should all be concerned.