Landscapes of the Jihad by Devji Faisal

Author:Devji, Faisal.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8014-5949-8
Publisher: Cornell University Press

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MEDIA AND MARTYRDOM

The jihad is defined not by its various local causes, nor even by the individual biographies of its fighters, but as a series of global effects that have assumed a universality of their own beyond such particularities. Indeed the dispersed and disparate acts of the jihad provide proof enough of this, dispensing as they do with the traditional orders and genealogies of Islamic authority, as well as with an old-fashioned politics tied to states and citizenship. Perhaps the most important way in which the jihad assumes its universality, however, is through the mass media. As a series of global effects the jihad is more a product of the media than it is of any local tradition or situation and school or lineage of Muslim authority. This is made explicit not only in the use of the mass media by the jihad, whose supporters refer to it constantly, but also in the numerous conversion stories that feature media. Here, for instance, is an account of the martyr Suraqah al-Andalusi’s conversion to the jihad:

One day he came across an audio cassette called In the Hearts of Green Birds. After hearing this cassette, he realized that this was the path that he had been searching for, for so long. This was shortly followed by various videos showing the Mujahideen from Bosnia. To him, it was as if he had found a long lost friend, from whom he could not depart. In the Hearts of Green Birds deeply moved him as it narrated the true stories of men who personified the message that they carried, men who were prepared to give up their most precious possession (life) in order to give victory to this Message.1

What is interesting about this passage is not so much Suraqah al-Andalusi’s inspiration by audio and videotapes, but the fact that for him these seem to have been unrelated to any local group or particular school of thought. The future martyr’s encounter with the jihad through mass media appears to have been entirely abstract and individual, allowing him to break with locally available forms of Islamic authority. This process, whether real or rhetorical, is common enough in the biographies of the jihad’s supporters, for instance that of Omar Sheikh, the Anglo-Pakistani kidnapper convicted for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who also claims to have been inspired by a documentary on the Bosnian war.

But the role of mass media in the jihad goes further than mere influence. Instead the jihad itself can be seen as an offspring of the media, composed as it is almost completely of pre-existing media themes, images and stereotypes. Like the murderous Freddy, in the Hollywood horror film Nightmare on Elm Street, the jihad appears simply to bring to life and make real the media’s own nightmares. Slavoj Zizek, for one, has written about the strong sense of déjà vu accompanying the attacks of 9/11, which had as it were been foretold by Hollywood—to the degree that many viewers tuning in

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