Anatomy of a Terrorist
Scotland’s Sunday Times included within its multi-page coverage of the Mumbai terrorist attacks (11.30.08) an analysis that it called ‘anatomy of a terrorist’. An image captured of one of the attackers wearing cargo pants, a polo short, and strapped with a large duffle bag is diagramed from head to toe.
“Hair: The terrorists had neat haircuts…”
“Clothing: Attackers wore casual clothes including designer t-shirts, cargo trousers, denim jackets…”
“Pocket: Dried fruits and almonds for energy…”
First of all, this isn’t anatomy, it’s culture. But the article is evoking some older ways of linking physical traits with moral characteristics. Centuries ago scientists developed the study of skulls and bone structures and believed they could connect behavior patterns, intelligence, and moral aptitudes with racial characteristics (‘phrenology’). This was the beginning of modern scientific racism.
But what the Sunday Times reported had nothing to do with genetic traits. Their observations were restricted to clothing, diet, and hairstyles, none of which was outstanding in any way whatsoever. So much utter banality begs the question: What was the point of diagramming the anatomy of a terrorist, if the terrorists’ anatomy is exactly mine?
The benefit of the doubt that I was prepared to give to the paper (that perhaps their diagram was deliberately ironic, as it should have been) was undermined by its qualification regarding their neat haircuts that they were typical of “many Islamists preparing for martyrdom”. So it was, they really did mean to suggest that the appearance of the attackers encoded their militant intentions.
There are, I believe, two contradictory messages contained here, and each of them is based on what are thought to be key distinctions.
One of the messages is well rehearsed by now: the anatomy of a terrorist shows us the distinction between Islam and the West. Their neat haircuts are to be seen as physical signs of their Muslim distinction, evidence of how committed and devoted they are as Muslims, probably as fundamentalist Muslims who adhere to strict codes of dress and grooming. One should especially be wary of the well-groomed Muslim, because they tend to be the really dangerous ones, is, I think, the point.
There is a second message. It is the distinction between those who are really Western and those who only pose as Western. You see, there are hardcore Westerners, and there are wanna-be Westerners, and these preppy soldiers were clearly posers.
However, the easy thing to do is to imagine that while these fellows looked Western, that was actually a guise, part of a plan to blend in with the crowd, and underneath their Western costumes (which cleverly included such details as Blackberry phones and energy snacks) or hidden away in a Pakistani cave somewhere one would no doubt find authentic Muslim ‘anatomies’ complete with turbans, dark skin, dusty feet, and sore throats from all the hollering those guys do (according to any one of the Indiana Jones movies).
The idea that the attackers were pretenders is a comfy way to convince ourselves that they’re as crazy as they are in the movies, but in reality they weren’t that different from the rest of us. The Mumbai attackers were as much shaped by Western culture as the Indian tourism industry and the Western tourists they targeted.
The anatomy of a terrorist is no different than the anatomy of anyone else. Terrorism is not a conflict between ontologically distinct axes of good and evil that somehow bifurcate the human race. It’s an intra-species conflict, a form of self-destruction.
The question is not, how can we eradicate terrorists from the world, as if ‘terrorists’ were genetically degenerate cousins of the rest of us. The question is, how can we understand and reorient the self-destructive tendencies of our species? How can we understand the systemic causes of that self-destruction and overcome them?
[Cue Star Trek music]
After all, [play music] if this earth goes up in a mushroom cloud, our alien onlookers will not ask themselves which group did it to whom. They will wonder about the wisdom of such a self-destructive species.
One way to overcome those tendencies is to stop simplifying the world into dichotomies even when evidence to the contrary is staring us in the face, as was the case with the ‘anatomy of a terrorist’.
Don’t just scratch the surface: Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
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