“You are with us, or you are with the terrorists," George Bush Jr famously said back in 2001. His emphasis on Manichean choices has since received praise from the most unlikely of sources – Dabiq, the official propaganda magazine of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
In a striking echo of the former American president's words, Isil – which I will call Daesh – has articulated its own vision of an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. It claims that “the world today is divided into two camps”: that of kufr, or unbelief, and that of their own warped interpretation of Islam. In between these lies the “grey zone”, inhabited by those who call themselves Muslims yet fail to join Daesh.
The grey zone, for Daesh, is a state of hypocrisy, existing not only in the West but in the Arab world. In the minds of its leaders, their declaration of a "caliphate" instantly imposed on all Muslims everywhere the obligation to join their cause. "No Muslim has any excuse to be independent of this entity waging war on their behalf," says Dabiq. "A stance of 'neutrality would doom him."
And this is what the world needs to understand about Daesh. Its goal in the West is to destroy the grey zone, and make it simply impossible to be a Muslim in the West.
Here's how Dabiq illustrates the zone: two elderly Muslim men, with long beards, their heads covered in a sign of piety, sporting traditional djellabas, and carrying signs which read: “Je suis Charlie”.
The front cover of Isil's propaganda magazine, Dabiq, indicts Muslims who object to Islamic terrorism as "hypocrites" and "apostates"
To Daesh, these men are the enemy. Inhabitants of the grey zone are threatened in its literature with "the sword", referred to as "hypocrites", and warned that they are targets. If you make any kind of accommodation with the "crusader" nations, it says, hell will be your reward.
"Their 'conversion' to a new life of 'international jihadism' was a sudden departure from a previously directionless life"
Daesh’s obsession with the “extinction" of the grey zone lies in the value of this narrative to its recruitment purposes. If it can convince impressionable and disgruntled Muslims that they cannot possibly live as Muslims in Europe, and that Daesh somehow embody the actualisation of Islamic ideals in the form of a utopian “state”, then potential adepts may feel squeezed into choosing a camp, a choice which Daesh seeks to facilitate with promises of redemption and uber-machismo and by playing on real concerns over the religious freedom of European Muslims.
From this perspective, any state repression or racist backlash provoked by acts of terrorism is just an extra boon.
It’s telling that many of Daesh’s recruits appear to have identified with this concept of an inhabitable grey zone, many having come from troubled backgrounds, in difficult suburbs, with a history of petty crime and in some cases prison. Their “conversion” to a new life of “international jihadism” was a sudden departure from a previously directionless life, and a means of escaping a broader sense of malaise.
The grey zone is epitomised by those European Muslims who find their own individual accommodation between their spiritual identity and their broader, secular national context.
Those female judges in headscarves, those labourers who skip the bacon in their “full English”, the footballer who politely declines a bottle of champagne as a prize, your colleague who nips out to pray during their lunch break.
So the grey zone isn't really grey, unless you believe that reality exists only in monochrome. Muslims live in many shades of vivacious colour, and their individual accommodation of their multilayered identities isn’t some kowtowing to a repressive system but a beautiful mosaic of life and the diverse ways in which people find their own internal balance.
But there is such a thing as a grey zone. It is a location of despair and isolation. It is characterised by unemployment, social isolation, deprivation, and a sense of discrimination by society. It fosters a deep resentment which can be exploited by smooth-tongued cult leaders.
In many ways, the profile of those involved in both the recent Paris attacks and other previous attacks, whether Charlie Hebdo, 7/7, or the Madrid bombings, is that of individuals inhabiting this latter form of grey zone. A sense of not-belonging – of lacking a place within society, a function, a direction – and a gap between aspirations and the routes open to them in society. Perhaps at a deeper level they lack the sorts of anchors which give life meaning.
It is in that grey zone that a Belgian former bar owner like Ibrahim Abdeslam transforms into a human bomb in the name of violent cult. Or a social misfit and petty criminal like French-Algerian-Portuguese Omar Mustefai, one of the attackers at the Bataclan concert hall, described “as not especially religious” by an old friend, can be brainwashed to view people who could easily have been his classmates as target practice.
It is this sort of grey zone which needs extinguishing – and, in a defiant rejection of Daesh’s simplistic worldview, the mosaic of our multifaceted identities which must be celebrated.
Myriam Francois-Cerrah is a broadcaster at TRTWorld and a writer for a number of outlets including the New Statesman and Middle East Eye. She is a Research Associate at SOAS Centre of Islamic Studies and a PhD researcher at Oxford university. She tweets @MyriamFrancoisC
Source: telegraph.co.uk
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