Why Westerners Join Groups Like ISIS

This text is a translation of the originally written article here for Michael Muhammad Knight on 09/03/2014.

The Islamist state recently posted another gruesome video showing a new beheading, once again perpetrated by a Western-rooted jihadist. As is often the case, I have received messages asking for an explanation.

I am the jihadist who never became one

I was one step away from being part of ISIS.

Twenty years ago I left my Catholic high school in upstate New York to study at a Saudi-funded madrassa in Pakistan. As I recently converted, I had the opportunity to live in a mosque and study the Koran all day.

This happened in the mid-1990s, during the escalation of violence between the Chechen resistance militiamen and the Russian military forces. After class, we would turn on the television and watch broadcasts from there full of suffering and pain. The videos were terrible. So terrible that I soon found myself thinking of giving up my religious education to pick up a gun and fight for the freedom of Chechnya.

It was not a verse that I read in our study circles from the Koran that gave birth to the desire to fight, but my American values. He had grown up in the Reagan eighties. I learned from the G.I. Joe to (according to the lyrics of his main theme) "fight for freedom, wherever it is in danger." I adopted the idea that individuals have the right - and the duty - to intervene in any part of the planet where threats to freedom, justice or equality are perceived.

For me, the fact of wanting to go to Chechnya was not reducible to my condition of Muslim or "hatred towards the western". This may be hard to believe, but I thought of war in terms of compassion. Like many Americans who join the military out of love for his country, I longed to fight oppression and protect the safety and dignity of others. I thought this world looked bad. I put my faith in somehow magical solutions I claimed that the world could be fixed through a renewal of authentic Islam and a truly Islamic system of government. But I also believed that the fight for justice was worth more than my own life.

Finally, I decided to stay in Islamabad

And the people who convinced me not to fight were not the kind of Muslims who may be labeled by the media as liberals, Western-friendly reformists, and the rest. They were deeply conservative, some would call them "intolerant." In the same learning environment where I was taught that my mother, because she is not Muslim, would burn eternally in hell, He also taught that he would do more good to the world as a student than as a soldier, and that he had to strive to be more than a body in a ditch. These traditionalists reminded me of Muhammad's phrase about how the ink of schoolchildren is more sacred than the blood of martyrs.

The media often draw a clear line that separates our categories of "good" and "bad" Muslims. My brothers in Pakistan would have made that division much more complicated than many can imagine. These men, whom I regarded as pious superheroes, speaking to me as the legitimate voice of tradition itself, said that violence was not the best I could offer.

Some guys in my situation seem to have received very different advice.

It is easy to assume that religious people, particularly Muslims, simply do things because their religions require it. But when I think of the impulse I had as a 17-year-old to go far and become a fighter for the cause of the Chechen rebels, I consider more than religious factors. My imagined scenario on the liberation of Chechnya and turning the country into an Islamic State was a purely American fantasy, based on North American values ​​and ideals. When news reaches me about Americans flying across the planet to engage in struggles for freedom that are not their own, I think "what an American action."

And that is the problem

We are raised to love violence and view military conquest as a benevolent act.. The American boy who wants to intervene in another nation's civil war owes his vision of the world both to American idiosyncrasy and to fundamentalist interpretations of the writing.

I grew up in a country that glorifies military sacrifice and is empowered to rebuild other societies from his own point of view. I internalized these values ​​even before thinking about religion. Before even knowing what a Muslim is, much less concepts like "jihad" or "Islamic State", my American life had taught me that this is what brave people do.

• Fountain: The Washington Post