Why, I was asked, as a theatre director and freelance imam with experience of working to prevent Muslims turning to extremism, can ISIL lure bright individuals of enormous potential just as it does aimless young men from poor, criminal backgrounds?
My response may surprise some but is inspired by a belief that the premise for the question is, in part, flawed.
In fact, the profiles of those who have fallen under the influence of ISIL, and before them Al Qaeda, cannot easily be reduced to neat categorisations.
Many analysts have reached this conclusion in recent years. However, as the co-founder of an organisation that has striven to develop resilience to extremist narratives in young people for almost two decades, I do identify underlying soft psycho-cultural factors that generate vulnerability to extremism and are common to all recruits.
These factors lie in the complex issues of multiple internal conflicts of identity and the search for significance, purpose and belonging.
Regardless of their level of academic achievement and socio-economic status and prospects, young people in the transitional phase of their lives will seek to interpret and resolve their inner clamour and tensions using a variety of negotiations and references. Most will succeed in coming to some degree of negotiated settlement using these means but others will fail and find themselves struggling, plagued by disquiet and confusion.
Devoid of the spiritual, emotional, cultural and psychological literacy or support needed for an accurate interpretation of their crisis and the means to pursue positive resolution, this group becomes vulnerable to and invariably adopts simplistic and binary external narratives that seem to mirror a polarised identity.
The resulting worldview drives them to see the conflicts in the world as legitimating their inner discord as the “natural” state of things from which then follows a misconception of jihad.
Of course, the particularities of each case can differ immensely and the non-linear nature of the human quest for inner accord and belonging defies tabulation.
Religious, political, cultural and economic polarities can serve as a relatively more tangible secondary layer of conflict through which a young person seeks to interpret and understand the intangibles of identity dynamics.
And the reason why the now burgeoning industry for countering or challenging violent extremism focuses on these issues is because they are similarly ill-equipped when it comes to these intangibles and consequently seek answers where they have the tools to find them, not where they actually reside.
As a result of our collective inability to understand the identity paradoxes disproportionally affecting Muslim youth, we inadvertently create greater vulnerability to extremist narratives and influences. We do this in the following ways.
Firstly, in the West, by designating Islam and Muslims as “the other” against which the West evasively and negatively defines itself because it lacks the courage, imagination and ethical compass to forge a positive and inclusive humanitarian definition that is postcolonial, post-imperial and more attuned to the context, demography and imperatives of a world in rapid churn and flux.
This negative self-definition generates a politics of fear that manifests in torrents of demonising headlines, draconian laws, exclusionary policies and practices and more importantly the subliminal invalidation of Muslim identity.
The West’s long-term interests would be best served by a re-examination of its professed identity and values in light of the past and present and its acceptance of the intellectual, cultural and spiritual heritage that it shares with Islam.
And secondly, within Islam: the failure of Muslims to uphold the primacy of Islam’s essentially paradox-reconciling humanitarian discourse of story and dream has resulted in its subordination to exclusive and divisive subsidiary dogmas, doctrines and legalities.
This has left Muslims, especially the young, without the necessary compass and sociocultural capital necessary for the formation of integrated identity and a positive contemporary narrative that would give them the soft currency to belong, trade and dialogue in the modern world.
Extremists exploit this vacuum with a pseudo-narrative that has been shaped by their trauma-induced misinterpretations and perversions of Islam in order to replicate their own version of imperialism.
Muslims must reinstate the centrality and primacy of their inclusive humanitarian story and dream through a revitalisation of imagination and a concerted engagement with and investment in conceptual and cultural capital and currency so that young Muslims can find belonging, purpose and significance in today’s world.
Luqman Ali is the director of the Khayaal Theatre Company in Luton, near London, which dedicates itself to “an exploration of Muslim world literature and the experience of Muslims in the modern world” for stage, radio and screen
