Entering Religious Minds: The Social Study of Worldviews by Mona Kanwal Sheikh & Mark Juergensmeyer

Author:Mona Kanwal Sheikh & Mark Juergensmeyer [Sheikh, Mona Kanwal & Juergensmeyer, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429888878
Goodreads: 44598765
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Entering their Worlds

This brings up another point – was I really probing into his mindset, or was I simply uncovering a version of himself that he wanted to sell? The point of my informed conversations was to let the subjects reveal their perspective on the world around them, which is why I was careful not to dominate the conversations. One might object that this open-ended approach to interviews allowed the subjects to control the situation. Moreover, it would allow them to present themselves exactly as they would like to be presented. Especially, since they were eager to talk with me, as I just mentioned, wouldn’t they be eager to present a carefully choreographed image of themselves for my sake?

The answer to this question is yes, most likely. But even that is an interesting datum – it is useful to know how they would like to have themselves presented, and to contrast that with other information that I had gathered about their past and their social and political involvements. In every case, I did not come to an interview cold, knowing nothing about the subjects; nor was I gullible, accepting everything they said as fact. Quite the opposite, I tried to learn as much as I could about what they had said and written, and how they had been perceived and described by others, before interviewing them, and checking the information they gave with other sources and perspectives afterwards. This knowledge provided a corrective to what they were saying and when I knew much of it in advance, it helped to push them in certain directions. Their deliberate obfuscation of something I knew to be contrary to the way they presented it could be very informative.

In the case of Abouhalima, for instance, he never admitted to being involved in the attack on the World Trade Center even though he was tried and convicted in a US court for exactly that crime. Still, he was hoping to get out on appeal, and would not say anything that would implicate him directly in that incident. But in the course of the conversation, I found that he was quite willing to talk about the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing—after all, no one had implicated him in that crime, nor was there any possibility that he could have been involved in it since he was in prison at the time. This allowed me to ask him why some people, whoever they might be, would bomb buildings. He assured me that it was for a reason – Timothy McVeigh and his allies were not just bombing things for the sake of bombing them – they were trying to send a message. “What kind of message,” I asked him, knowing that his answer would apply to his own convicted participation in the World Trade Center bombing as well as to McVeigh’s Oklahoma City Federal Building attack. “They wanted to show you that your government is the enemy,” he answered. He paused, and then added, “and now you know.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.