Burying Jihadis by Kastoryano Riva; Schoch Cynthia;

Author:Kastoryano, Riva; Schoch, Cynthia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Europe: A Global or Regional Entity?

The nineteen jihadis behind the 9/11 attacks had travelled to all continents for their studies and to meet other members of their networks. The seven young men who blew themselves up in Leganés one month after planting bombs in Madrid suburban trains—five Moroccans, one Tunisian and one Algerian—are recognized as “martyrs of Europe.” They had settled in Madrid as migrant workers or students and had formed networks generally based on ties of friendship made in their native country, even their neighbourhood. They had made contact with other networks developed in the Spanish capital, such as in the M-30 mosque and cafés and shops run by friends. They had travelled mainly in Europe to visit family members who had made their homes in Belgium or the United Kingdom or to meet with members of Al-Qaeda in Europe as well as in Turkey, a stopover destination on the way to Iraq. They also often went to Morocco, where their families lived. Thus, despite militant discourse advocating global jihad and a non-territorial attachment to the ummah, trips between Spain and Morocco constituted their principal itinerary.

Monographs on local communities have shown the density of ties between migrants and their families who have remained in the home country.56 In Europe, transnational relations not only connect departure and arrival spaces, but they also transcend the borders of member-states as well as those of the various nationalities of immigrant populations, following the web of former solidarities or those reconstituted in immigration. European transnational networks thus integrate the home country into the vast European space.

For the “global nation” that is the United States, the enemy was not entitled to burial in the slightest parcel of land either in America or elsewhere. For Spain, even if the enemy revealed his attachment to his homeland by travelling from the southern to the northern shore of the Mediterranean, his act finally made him an enemy in his own country, Morocco—an ally of Spain and the United States. Repatriation of the bodily remains to the homeland falls within the same transnational logic as transfers of goods or ideology between receiving countries and countries of origin. In the case of these citizens who died abroad, the reasons for death are “unspeakable” in the eyes of the public authorities, the local community and the family.57 Censorship and silence, which echo the political and religious values upheld by the Moroccan state, as well as its solidarity with its allies, are not tantamount to a rejection of “children of the nation.” The burial amounts to “restoring” their citizenship, even though it was called into question by the non-territorial attachment they claimed.58 The ambiguity of statements concerning burials to some extent helps to “denationalize” the event, despite attempts to “renationalize” and “reterritorialize” the Islam observed by Moroccans living abroad through the ministry created for this purpose.59 Given the growing interdependence between questions that are internal and external to nation-states, the burial—or absence thereof—of the young Leganés suicides reflects an affirmation of national

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