Muslims and the 'Radical Generation'

A prominent feature of opposition to the US occupation of Iraq supposes that the invasion and its aftermath, quite to the contrary of chief among the adventure's stated aims, have indeed bred anti-US sentiment and even created a fresh complaint that will, in turn, spur recruitment efforts by groups like al-Qa'ida. This concern tends to be stated like so (taking the following, for an instance, from Paglia's latest Salon column):

'We have not defeated the "Islamo-fascists" in Iraq; we have simply created more of them around the world by radicalizing an entire generation of young Muslims.'

The trouble with this statement is not that it fails to present an important phenomenon. Certainly, the Iraq adventure has bred ill-will toward the US. And yet, underlying this statement is the same predicated homogeneity that instantiates utterances such as 'the Middle East.' We need hardly mention that the categorical treatment out of which the signifier 'Muslim' is deployed in Anglophone discourse is less than fully coherent, refusing as it does the most basic contemplation of geographic, sectarian, or socioeconomic categories. Significantly, there is no analogue signified in Arabic: One simply does not hear 'the Christians,' 'the Christians.' Nationality tends to be the salient category in the Arabic media. Moreover, the notion of an entire and entirely 'radicalized' generation—a concept that never makes itself entirely known, as 'radical' is a radically emptied signifier—supposes profound credulity on the part of 'young Muslims.'

As I've learned during my time in Muslim-majority states, particularly in Syria, to suppose such credulity on the part of 'young Muslims' is to commit a serious error. While certainly—in Damascus, Beirut, Kuwait, and elsewhere—I have met Muslim students antipathetic to the US—an antipathy surely aggravated or ratified by the Iraq War—I have also met students sympathetic to the effort. I've had taxi drivers in Damascus hold forth on Israel's 'right' to use aggressive tactics against less conciliatory Palestinian factions and have heard students express Rumsfeldian confidence in the certainty that Syrians would take to the streets in celebration of a reenactment in Damascus of the Iraq adventure.

Broad antipathy toward and approval of the US is, in my experience, rare. Most often, much like students in the US, the youths whom I've met or befriended (or who are in the classes for which I'm a TA), express a wariness toward 'American power' and its more unfortunate manifestations. Where aspects of American domination often considered 'purely cultural'—films and music, for instance—are rejected, this rejection can stem from social conservatism—in other words it emanates from a permutation of the same drive motivating Christianist concern over 'family values.'

Finally, let us do away with the notion that an 'entire generation' can be so easily 'radicalized.' It is highly unlikely that the Iraq War has substantially changed the structure of high-risk group recruitment and initiation. The pool of potential recruits for groups like al-Qa'ida—with which the relatively mainstream and hence low-risk Hamas and Hizb Allah cannot be compared—will generally consist of youths with weak social ties, a factor that can indeed be simultaneously effected and affected by economic crises (which wars can certainly precipitate). The substance of the group's configuration of ideals, it should be added, is not a primary concern and will, in any event, be made by recruiters to align with already existing woes. These groups at the margin come into existence through their supposed opposition to the center/'mainstream' and are always and already part of the structure of society. They (in addition to those who seek their eradication) are mutually contingent and can never be universalized completely. The appeal tends to lie in the social, financial (and, then, of course, psychic) security justifiably promised by high-risk, high-reward groups. The point is that there's barely a text in that class.