Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, by Faisal Devji, Hurst & Company (London), 2005.
Osama bin Laden: more media whore than guerrilla warrior
The idea that a Yorkshireman can kill people in London as revenge for the bombing of 'my people' in Baghdad or Bethlehem brings to mind the old saying about a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world and causing a hurricane in another...
...So al-Qaeda's fanciful war is not for something tangible; it is not about making a state or an Islamic territory. Where the Islamic radicals of the past - from the Iranian revolutionaries of 1979 to that last gasp of Islamic fundamentalism in the shape of the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 1996 - were motivated by the desire to create an ideological state, al-Qaeda's actions are better understood as a pose, Devji tells me, as 'ethical gestures'. 'Their acts function as exclamation marks', he says.
The idea that a Yorkshireman can kill people in London as revenge for the bombing of 'my people' in Baghdad or Bethlehem brings to mind the old saying about a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world and causing a hurricane in another...
...So al-Qaeda's fanciful war is not for something tangible; it is not about making a state or an Islamic territory. Where the Islamic radicals of the past - from the Iranian revolutionaries of 1979 to that last gasp of Islamic fundamentalism in the shape of the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 1996 - were motivated by the desire to create an ideological state, al-Qaeda's actions are better understood as a pose, Devji tells me, as 'ethical gestures'. 'Their acts function as exclamation marks', he says.
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