What would Foucault say about Psychiatry with Islamic Characteristics? -- Yoshie
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09jihadis-t.html>
November 9, 2008
Deprogramming Jihadists
By KATHERINE ZOEPF
The sunset prayer had just ended, and Sheik Ahmad al-Jilani was
already calling his class to order. When the latecomers slipped into
the front row, Jilani nodded at them briskly. "Young men," he began,
"who can tell me why we do jihad?"
The members of the class were still new and a bit shy. Jilani clasped
his hands and smiled encouragingly. Before him, sitting in school
desks, were a dozen young Saudi men who had served time in prison for
belonging to militant Islamic groups. Now they were inmates in a new
rehabilitation center, part of a Saudi government initiative that
seeks to deprogram Islamic extremists.
Jilani has been teaching his class, which is called Understandings of
Jihad, since the center was established early last year. A stout man
who makes constant, self-deprecating references to his weight, the
sheik is an avuncular figure, popular with his students. On this
chilly evening he had on a woolly, brocade-trimmed bisht, the cloak
that Saudi men wear on formal occasions or in cool weather, which gave
him a slightly imposing air. But behind his thick glasses, his eyes
shone warmly as he surveyed the classroom.
Finally, someone answered: "We do jihad to fight our enemies."
"To defeat God's enemies?" another suggested.
"To help weak Muslims," a third offered.
"Good, good," Jilani said. "All good answers. Is there someone else?
What about you, Ali?" Ali, in the second row, looked away, then
faltered: "To . . . answer . . . calls for jihad?"
Jilani frowned slightly and wrote Ali's answer up on the white board
behind him. He read it out to the class before turning back to Ali.
"All right, Ali," the sheik said. "Why do we answer calls for jihad?
Is it because all Muslim leaders want to make God's word highest? Do
we kill if these leaders tell us to kill?"
Ali looked confused, but whispered, "Yes."
"No — wrong!" Jilani cried as Ali blushed. "Of course we want to make
God's word highest, but not every Muslim leader has this as his goal.
There are right jihads and wrong jihads, and we must examine the
situation for ourselves. For example, if a person wants to go to hajj
now, is it right?"
The class chuckled obligingly at Jilani's little joke. The month for
performing hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca that observant Muslims
hope to complete at least once in their lives, had ended five weeks
earlier, and the suggestion was as preposterous as throwing a Fourth
of July barbecue in November.
"Well, just as there is a proper time for hajj, there is also a proper
time for jihad," Jilani explained.
Jilani's students, who range in age from 18 to 36, are part of a
generation brought up on heroic tales of Saudi fighters who left home
to fight alongside the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s and
who helped to force the Soviets to withdraw from the country. The
Saudi state was essentially built on the concept of jihad, which King
Abdul Aziz al-Saud used to knit disparate tribal groups into a single
nation. The word means "struggle" and in Islamic law usually refers to
armed conflict with non-Muslims in defense of the global Islamic
community. Saudi schools teach a version of world history that
emphasizes repeated battles between Muslims and nonbelieving enemies.
Whether to Afghanistan in the 1980s or present-day Iraq, Saudi Arabia
has exported more jihadist volunteers than any other country; 15 of
the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis.
But jihad can go too far. The Saudi government has condemned the Sept.
11 attacks and arrests jihadists who attempt to enter Iraq. Some Saudi
veterans of overseas jihads have adopted one form of the doctrine of
takfir, in which a Muslim is judged by another Muslim to be an
unbeliever. Because traditional Islamic law calls for the execution of
apostates, some have used takfir to justify attacks on the Saudi
state. In recent years, these attacks have raised fears that the chaos
in some of the world's conflict zones is being brought home to Saudi
Arabia by radicalized jihadists. The Saudi government thus finds
itself in the awkward position of needing to defend the principle of
jihad to its citizens while discouraging them from actually taking up
arms. One step it has taken is simply to talk to those who have proved
to be most vulnerable to the temptations of jihad, the captured
militants themselves. As Jilani put it to me, "The kingdom of Saudi
Arabia has the confidence to fight thoughts with thoughts."
Jilani and his colleagues are not just fighting a war of ideas. Though
the Saudi government tends to explain its rehabilitation program in
purely Islamic terms, as an effort to correct theological
misunderstandings, the new program also addresses the psychological
needs and emotional weaknesses that have led many young men to jihad
in the first place. It tries to give frustrated and disaffected young
men the trappings of stability — a job, a car, possibly a wife. Though
international human rights groups continue to sound the alarm about
Saudi Arabia's habit of detaining suspects without charging them and
of punishing certain crimes with floggings and amputations, these
young men seem to have become the subjects of a continuing experiment
in counterterrorism as a kind of social work.
If the Saudi rehabilitation program succeeds, it could reduce the
ranks of dangerous extremists and have a far-reaching impact: domestic
and regional stability and, though it's not a stated goal, increased
safety for potential targets in the West. Program administrators claim
that the Saudi initiative could also provide a model for other Muslim
countries struggling with Islamic militancy. They say that Saudi
Arabia — home to Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina — has an
unmatched moral authority among the world's Muslims and is uniquely
placed to find the intellectual and spiritual vulnerabilities of
organizations like Al Qaeda and to fight Islamic extremism on its own
terms.
Though the exact nature of the role that religious belief plays in the
recruitment of jihadists is the subject of much debate among scholars
of terrorism, a growing number contend that ideology is far less
important than family and group dynamics, psychological and emotional
needs. "We're finding that they don't generally join for religious
reasons," John Horgan told me. A political psychologist who directs
the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State,
Horgan has interviewed dozens of former terrorists. "Terrorist
movements seem to provide a sense of adventure, excitement, vision,
purpose, camaraderie," he went on, "and involvement with them has an
allure that can be difficult to resist. But the ideology is usually
something you acquire once you're involved."
Other scholars emphatically disagree, stressing the significance of
political belief and grievance. But if the Saudi program is
succeeding, it may be because it treats jihadists not as religious
fanatics or enemies of the state but as alienated young men in need of
rehabilitation.
In 2004, the Saudi Interior Ministry started the Munasaha, or Advisory
Committee, program, to reform prison inmates convicted of involvement
in Islamic extremism. Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, the program
administrator, says that a committee of senior Saudi clerics
interviews inmates about their beliefs before placing them in
appropriate classes. Enrollment in the Munasaha program is not
voluntary, and Human Rights Watch reports that some participants have
been in detention for months or even years without trial or access to
lawyers. But graduates of the program say the treatment is far from
harsh.
In January 2007, the Interior Ministry began renting small vacation
compounds in the Riyadh suburb of al-Thumama. Half-a-dozen adjoining
compounds now house the Care Center, a post-prison continuation of the
Munasaha program offering more intensive rehabilitation activities.
Each compound holds up to about 20 men, who study, eat and sleep
together for the duration of the program.
On arrival, each prisoner is given a suitcase filled with gifts:
clothes, a digital watch, school supplies and toiletries. Inmates are
encouraged to ask for their favorite foods (Twix and Snickers candy
bars are frequent requests). Volleyball nets, PlayStation games and
Ping-Pong and foosball tables are all provided. The atmosphere at the
center — which I visited several times earlier this year — is almost
eerily cozy and congenial, with mattresses and rugs spread on stubbly
patches of lawn for inmates to lounge upon. With few exceptions, the
men wear their beards untrimmed and their thobes, the long garments
that most Saudi men wear, cut above their ankles in the style favored
by those who wish to demonstrate strict devotion to Islam. The men are
pleasant but many seem a bit puffy and lethargic; one 19-year-old
inmate, Faisal al-Subaii, explained that they are encouraged to spend
most of their daytime hours in either rest or prayer.
In Saudi Arabia, psychological disorders are often understood as the
results of a person finding himself somehow outside the traditional
circle of family and community. Most of the counseling that the
inmates receive is focused on helping them to develop more healthful
family relationships. "We use Western psychiatric techniques together
with Islamic techniques," T. M. Otayan, the center's staff
psychologist, says, referring to the intensive religion classes. A
number of the inmates have received diagnoses of antisocial
personality disorder, he adds, but he claims serious mental illness
among the former jihadists is rare.
Though it might seem out of place in a society whose religion
proscribes the representation of animal or human forms, art therapy is
practiced. Awad al-Yami, who studied the subject at Penn State, leads
the classes, and chalk drawings by former jihadists decorate the walls
of his classroom. Although the sketches — mostly ornate Arabic
calligraphy and depictions of flowers — do not especially suggest that
demons are being wrestled with, art therapy helps inmates to examine
the consequences of their actions, Yami says. "I ask them, 'If you
blow up a car, what will happen?' The paper gives them a safe place to
express some destructive emotions."
Most prisoners complete the program within two months. Upon release,
each former jihadist is required to sign a pledge that he has forsaken
extremist sympathies; the head of his family must sign as well. Some
also receive a car (often a Toyota) and aid from the Interior Ministry
in renting a home. Social workers assist former jihadists and their
families in making post-release plans for education, employment and,
usually, marriage. "Getting married stabilizes a man's personality,"
Hadlaq says. "He thinks more about a long term future and less about
himself and his anger."
Other countries have experimented with efforts to rehabilitate Islamic
extremists. In Egypt and Yemen, moderate clerics counsel prisoners
accused of militant activity. The Religious Rehabilitation Group in
Singapore has been widely praised for reducing the influence of the
Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist organization. But the Saudi approach is
unusual and, according to Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern
studies at Princeton University, "is consistent with Saudi history in
that you try through nonviolent means to cajole, to bribe, to buy off
the opposition."
Sheik Jilani likes to encourage class discussions by asking the men to
share their experiences, and on one of the occasions I visited, he
asked a student named Azzam to explain why he spent five months in
Iraq. Referring to the infamous Mahmudiyah killings of 2006, Azzam
replied that he had seen an article on the Internet about "the little
girl named Abeer who was raped and killed by the Americans."
"I felt so much sympathy for the Muslims," Azzam continued. "The
infidel rape women and kill children. I decided then that I should
join the Muslims in Iraq in order to drive the Americans out."
The desert evening was growing chilly. Jilani removed his bisht and
handed it to a shivering student. He turned back to Azzam. "Tell us,
Azzam. What did you find in Iraq? Did you feel good when you went
there?"
Azzam frowned. "To tell you the truth, I didn't find what I was
expecting," he said. "In Iraq, even the Muslims fight each other. I
was expecting them to be well organized, but they weren't."
Jilani nodded. "So did you fight?"
"I didn't have the chance," Azzam said, sounding defensive. "For
months, we went from safe house to safe house. There wasn't anything
to do — no action, no training. Finally, they asked me to be a suicide
bomber. But I know that suicide is forbidden in Islam, so I came back
home."
Many of the former jihadists seemed to feel unappreciated, their sense
of injury plain. Jilani and his colleagues encourage the former
militants to examine those feelings, even to think of themselves as
victims. Yes, they were tricked and manipulated by deviant ideology (a
favorite Saudi catchphrase for Islamic extremism), but now they have a
chance to turn back.
Of all the concepts addressed in classes at the rehabilitation center,
takfir is the one that tends to evoke the most anger among mainstream
Saudi Muslims. The idea that there's a slippery slope from jihad to
takfir comes up regularly in discussions with Saudi clerics.
"Some of our young people don't listen to the right scholars," Jilani
told me. "First they start to think that they have the right to go to
jihad at any time. After that, they start to think that we have the
right to kill any non-Muslim.
"Then they start to say that our leaders are kuffar, infidels," the
sheik continued. "After that they start to say that our scholars, too,
are kuffar. Before long, they've declared war against the whole
world."
The Saudi government has recently intensified efforts to fight
extremism and to turn public sympathy away from terrorist groups.
Several prominent clerics have taken public stands against Al Qaeda,
and late last year Saudi Mufti Sheik Abd al-Aziz bin Abdallah Al
al-Sheik issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudi youth from traveling
overseas to wage jihad. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has initiated
a new program called Serenity to fight terrorism online by drawing
terrorist recruiters into one-on-one ideological chat-room combat with
moderate-minded clerics.
The government maintains that no graduates of the Munasaha program
have returned to violence. But the program is still relatively new,
and there are unanswered questions. Is the government dealing with
captured militants while really failing to address the root causes of
extremism? Will released extremists, now counted as successes,
eventually return to jihad?
A consulting psychiatrist at the King Faisal hospital in Riyadh says
that to truly fight jihadism would mean fundamentally changing how
Islam is taught in Saudi schools and mosques in a way that the Saudi
government has until now been unwilling to attempt. "The government is
never going to say, full stop, that jihad is wrong," he explains. The
doctrine is an integral part of Islamic law, and arguing against it
would raise the ire of religious scholars and possibly call the
Islamic credentials of the Saudi government into question.
And global jihad is still a socially acceptable path for a young Saudi
man with few options, the psychiatrist says. "You have a young man
who's depressed, frustrated with life, maybe he fails an exam. He can
go from being a loser, a failure, to being a jihadi, someone with
status."
How and why violent extremists come to leave their organizations are a
fairly new focus in academic studies of terrorism. Horgan's findings —
that simple fear and disillusionment can play a major role in an
individual's decision to disengage from his group — seem to be echoed
by a recent RAND Corporation report on the demise of terrorist groups,
which found that efforts by police and intelligence agents to create
intense internal pressure within terrorist groups are more successful
at fighting extremism than military actions.
Consider Abu Sulayman, a stocky 32-year-old who spent more than three
years in prison at Guantánamo and says he fought alongside Osama bin
Laden at Tora Bora. Abu Sulayman spoke on the condition that I would
use only his old nom de guerre. He completed the Munasaha program but
was released shortly before the Care Center was established; he joked
that he envies the current batch of former jihadists their "resort
vacation."
"Getting captured and Guantánamo — it was all a good lesson," Abu
Sulayman told me. "I mean, the main idea of jihad is good — no one
disagrees with that."
His first jihad was in 1996, when he traveled to the Philippines to
fight with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. "They had guys from
everywhere, all these different countries, working together," Abu
Sulayman said. "The majority are always Saudis." In 1997, Abu Sulayman
went on to Afghanistan. Four years later, after his second trip to the
country, he grew disillusioned with bin Laden and planned to leave for
the Philippines because "Chechnya said they didn't need anyone at the
moment." Instead, he was captured.
Today he notes that the Qaeda camps where he worked as a training
instructor offered him clear professional advancement. His new life —
in a middle-class Jeddah suburb, doing shift work at an electrical
company — doesn't provide the same sense of purpose. Even so, he has
little regard for those who have followed in his footsteps.
"Most people just want to carry weapons," Abu Sulayman said. They do
not, as he put it, have especially sophisticated religious arguments.
"For me, it was always more about the feeling that I wanted to help
the Muslims. But jihad is complicated. If you're heading to
Afghanistan or Iraq, do you really have the facts you need to get
involved on the right side?
"With Al Qaeda, the training was really excellent," Abu Sulayman went
on. "These people they've got going to Iraq nowadays, they have no
training, so they're just sent to explode themselves.
"Now our government is saying: 'Don't go to Iraq. It's not in our
interests,' " Abu Sulayman continued. "Now I think, At least I did
something with my life. I went out and fought for my beliefs, and I
found that things were not as I had planned. But at least I fought for
my beliefs. God knows my heart."
The sheiks who were charged with rehabilitating him were startled by
his easygoing attitude, Abu Sulayman recalled. Even though Saudi
public opinion has largely turned against Al Qaeda, many Saudis remain
concerned that American-led efforts to fight terrorism are anti-Muslim
and are infuriated by Guantánamo. "They thought that after all this
time in Guantánamo I'd have some hate in me," Abu Sulayman told me.
"But I never look back. I said, 'O.K., now I'll start a new life.' "
Katherine Zoepf, who writes regularly for The Times, is working on a
book about young women in the contemporary Arab world.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09jihadis-t.html>
November 9, 2008
Deprogramming Jihadists
By KATHERINE ZOEPF
The sunset prayer had just ended, and Sheik Ahmad al-Jilani was
already calling his class to order. When the latecomers slipped into
the front row, Jilani nodded at them briskly. "Young men," he began,
"who can tell me why we do jihad?"
The members of the class were still new and a bit shy. Jilani clasped
his hands and smiled encouragingly. Before him, sitting in school
desks, were a dozen young Saudi men who had served time in prison for
belonging to militant Islamic groups. Now they were inmates in a new
rehabilitation center, part of a Saudi government initiative that
seeks to deprogram Islamic extremists.
Jilani has been teaching his class, which is called Understandings of
Jihad, since the center was established early last year. A stout man
who makes constant, self-deprecating references to his weight, the
sheik is an avuncular figure, popular with his students. On this
chilly evening he had on a woolly, brocade-trimmed bisht, the cloak
that Saudi men wear on formal occasions or in cool weather, which gave
him a slightly imposing air. But behind his thick glasses, his eyes
shone warmly as he surveyed the classroom.
Finally, someone answered: "We do jihad to fight our enemies."
"To defeat God's enemies?" another suggested.
"To help weak Muslims," a third offered.
"Good, good," Jilani said. "All good answers. Is there someone else?
What about you, Ali?" Ali, in the second row, looked away, then
faltered: "To . . . answer . . . calls for jihad?"
Jilani frowned slightly and wrote Ali's answer up on the white board
behind him. He read it out to the class before turning back to Ali.
"All right, Ali," the sheik said. "Why do we answer calls for jihad?
Is it because all Muslim leaders want to make God's word highest? Do
we kill if these leaders tell us to kill?"
Ali looked confused, but whispered, "Yes."
"No — wrong!" Jilani cried as Ali blushed. "Of course we want to make
God's word highest, but not every Muslim leader has this as his goal.
There are right jihads and wrong jihads, and we must examine the
situation for ourselves. For example, if a person wants to go to hajj
now, is it right?"
The class chuckled obligingly at Jilani's little joke. The month for
performing hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca that observant Muslims
hope to complete at least once in their lives, had ended five weeks
earlier, and the suggestion was as preposterous as throwing a Fourth
of July barbecue in November.
"Well, just as there is a proper time for hajj, there is also a proper
time for jihad," Jilani explained.
Jilani's students, who range in age from 18 to 36, are part of a
generation brought up on heroic tales of Saudi fighters who left home
to fight alongside the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s and
who helped to force the Soviets to withdraw from the country. The
Saudi state was essentially built on the concept of jihad, which King
Abdul Aziz al-Saud used to knit disparate tribal groups into a single
nation. The word means "struggle" and in Islamic law usually refers to
armed conflict with non-Muslims in defense of the global Islamic
community. Saudi schools teach a version of world history that
emphasizes repeated battles between Muslims and nonbelieving enemies.
Whether to Afghanistan in the 1980s or present-day Iraq, Saudi Arabia
has exported more jihadist volunteers than any other country; 15 of
the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis.
But jihad can go too far. The Saudi government has condemned the Sept.
11 attacks and arrests jihadists who attempt to enter Iraq. Some Saudi
veterans of overseas jihads have adopted one form of the doctrine of
takfir, in which a Muslim is judged by another Muslim to be an
unbeliever. Because traditional Islamic law calls for the execution of
apostates, some have used takfir to justify attacks on the Saudi
state. In recent years, these attacks have raised fears that the chaos
in some of the world's conflict zones is being brought home to Saudi
Arabia by radicalized jihadists. The Saudi government thus finds
itself in the awkward position of needing to defend the principle of
jihad to its citizens while discouraging them from actually taking up
arms. One step it has taken is simply to talk to those who have proved
to be most vulnerable to the temptations of jihad, the captured
militants themselves. As Jilani put it to me, "The kingdom of Saudi
Arabia has the confidence to fight thoughts with thoughts."
Jilani and his colleagues are not just fighting a war of ideas. Though
the Saudi government tends to explain its rehabilitation program in
purely Islamic terms, as an effort to correct theological
misunderstandings, the new program also addresses the psychological
needs and emotional weaknesses that have led many young men to jihad
in the first place. It tries to give frustrated and disaffected young
men the trappings of stability — a job, a car, possibly a wife. Though
international human rights groups continue to sound the alarm about
Saudi Arabia's habit of detaining suspects without charging them and
of punishing certain crimes with floggings and amputations, these
young men seem to have become the subjects of a continuing experiment
in counterterrorism as a kind of social work.
If the Saudi rehabilitation program succeeds, it could reduce the
ranks of dangerous extremists and have a far-reaching impact: domestic
and regional stability and, though it's not a stated goal, increased
safety for potential targets in the West. Program administrators claim
that the Saudi initiative could also provide a model for other Muslim
countries struggling with Islamic militancy. They say that Saudi
Arabia — home to Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina — has an
unmatched moral authority among the world's Muslims and is uniquely
placed to find the intellectual and spiritual vulnerabilities of
organizations like Al Qaeda and to fight Islamic extremism on its own
terms.
Though the exact nature of the role that religious belief plays in the
recruitment of jihadists is the subject of much debate among scholars
of terrorism, a growing number contend that ideology is far less
important than family and group dynamics, psychological and emotional
needs. "We're finding that they don't generally join for religious
reasons," John Horgan told me. A political psychologist who directs
the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State,
Horgan has interviewed dozens of former terrorists. "Terrorist
movements seem to provide a sense of adventure, excitement, vision,
purpose, camaraderie," he went on, "and involvement with them has an
allure that can be difficult to resist. But the ideology is usually
something you acquire once you're involved."
Other scholars emphatically disagree, stressing the significance of
political belief and grievance. But if the Saudi program is
succeeding, it may be because it treats jihadists not as religious
fanatics or enemies of the state but as alienated young men in need of
rehabilitation.
In 2004, the Saudi Interior Ministry started the Munasaha, or Advisory
Committee, program, to reform prison inmates convicted of involvement
in Islamic extremism. Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, the program
administrator, says that a committee of senior Saudi clerics
interviews inmates about their beliefs before placing them in
appropriate classes. Enrollment in the Munasaha program is not
voluntary, and Human Rights Watch reports that some participants have
been in detention for months or even years without trial or access to
lawyers. But graduates of the program say the treatment is far from
harsh.
In January 2007, the Interior Ministry began renting small vacation
compounds in the Riyadh suburb of al-Thumama. Half-a-dozen adjoining
compounds now house the Care Center, a post-prison continuation of the
Munasaha program offering more intensive rehabilitation activities.
Each compound holds up to about 20 men, who study, eat and sleep
together for the duration of the program.
On arrival, each prisoner is given a suitcase filled with gifts:
clothes, a digital watch, school supplies and toiletries. Inmates are
encouraged to ask for their favorite foods (Twix and Snickers candy
bars are frequent requests). Volleyball nets, PlayStation games and
Ping-Pong and foosball tables are all provided. The atmosphere at the
center — which I visited several times earlier this year — is almost
eerily cozy and congenial, with mattresses and rugs spread on stubbly
patches of lawn for inmates to lounge upon. With few exceptions, the
men wear their beards untrimmed and their thobes, the long garments
that most Saudi men wear, cut above their ankles in the style favored
by those who wish to demonstrate strict devotion to Islam. The men are
pleasant but many seem a bit puffy and lethargic; one 19-year-old
inmate, Faisal al-Subaii, explained that they are encouraged to spend
most of their daytime hours in either rest or prayer.
In Saudi Arabia, psychological disorders are often understood as the
results of a person finding himself somehow outside the traditional
circle of family and community. Most of the counseling that the
inmates receive is focused on helping them to develop more healthful
family relationships. "We use Western psychiatric techniques together
with Islamic techniques," T. M. Otayan, the center's staff
psychologist, says, referring to the intensive religion classes. A
number of the inmates have received diagnoses of antisocial
personality disorder, he adds, but he claims serious mental illness
among the former jihadists is rare.
Though it might seem out of place in a society whose religion
proscribes the representation of animal or human forms, art therapy is
practiced. Awad al-Yami, who studied the subject at Penn State, leads
the classes, and chalk drawings by former jihadists decorate the walls
of his classroom. Although the sketches — mostly ornate Arabic
calligraphy and depictions of flowers — do not especially suggest that
demons are being wrestled with, art therapy helps inmates to examine
the consequences of their actions, Yami says. "I ask them, 'If you
blow up a car, what will happen?' The paper gives them a safe place to
express some destructive emotions."
Most prisoners complete the program within two months. Upon release,
each former jihadist is required to sign a pledge that he has forsaken
extremist sympathies; the head of his family must sign as well. Some
also receive a car (often a Toyota) and aid from the Interior Ministry
in renting a home. Social workers assist former jihadists and their
families in making post-release plans for education, employment and,
usually, marriage. "Getting married stabilizes a man's personality,"
Hadlaq says. "He thinks more about a long term future and less about
himself and his anger."
Other countries have experimented with efforts to rehabilitate Islamic
extremists. In Egypt and Yemen, moderate clerics counsel prisoners
accused of militant activity. The Religious Rehabilitation Group in
Singapore has been widely praised for reducing the influence of the
Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist organization. But the Saudi approach is
unusual and, according to Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern
studies at Princeton University, "is consistent with Saudi history in
that you try through nonviolent means to cajole, to bribe, to buy off
the opposition."
Sheik Jilani likes to encourage class discussions by asking the men to
share their experiences, and on one of the occasions I visited, he
asked a student named Azzam to explain why he spent five months in
Iraq. Referring to the infamous Mahmudiyah killings of 2006, Azzam
replied that he had seen an article on the Internet about "the little
girl named Abeer who was raped and killed by the Americans."
"I felt so much sympathy for the Muslims," Azzam continued. "The
infidel rape women and kill children. I decided then that I should
join the Muslims in Iraq in order to drive the Americans out."
The desert evening was growing chilly. Jilani removed his bisht and
handed it to a shivering student. He turned back to Azzam. "Tell us,
Azzam. What did you find in Iraq? Did you feel good when you went
there?"
Azzam frowned. "To tell you the truth, I didn't find what I was
expecting," he said. "In Iraq, even the Muslims fight each other. I
was expecting them to be well organized, but they weren't."
Jilani nodded. "So did you fight?"
"I didn't have the chance," Azzam said, sounding defensive. "For
months, we went from safe house to safe house. There wasn't anything
to do — no action, no training. Finally, they asked me to be a suicide
bomber. But I know that suicide is forbidden in Islam, so I came back
home."
Many of the former jihadists seemed to feel unappreciated, their sense
of injury plain. Jilani and his colleagues encourage the former
militants to examine those feelings, even to think of themselves as
victims. Yes, they were tricked and manipulated by deviant ideology (a
favorite Saudi catchphrase for Islamic extremism), but now they have a
chance to turn back.
Of all the concepts addressed in classes at the rehabilitation center,
takfir is the one that tends to evoke the most anger among mainstream
Saudi Muslims. The idea that there's a slippery slope from jihad to
takfir comes up regularly in discussions with Saudi clerics.
"Some of our young people don't listen to the right scholars," Jilani
told me. "First they start to think that they have the right to go to
jihad at any time. After that, they start to think that we have the
right to kill any non-Muslim.
"Then they start to say that our leaders are kuffar, infidels," the
sheik continued. "After that they start to say that our scholars, too,
are kuffar. Before long, they've declared war against the whole
world."
The Saudi government has recently intensified efforts to fight
extremism and to turn public sympathy away from terrorist groups.
Several prominent clerics have taken public stands against Al Qaeda,
and late last year Saudi Mufti Sheik Abd al-Aziz bin Abdallah Al
al-Sheik issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudi youth from traveling
overseas to wage jihad. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has initiated
a new program called Serenity to fight terrorism online by drawing
terrorist recruiters into one-on-one ideological chat-room combat with
moderate-minded clerics.
The government maintains that no graduates of the Munasaha program
have returned to violence. But the program is still relatively new,
and there are unanswered questions. Is the government dealing with
captured militants while really failing to address the root causes of
extremism? Will released extremists, now counted as successes,
eventually return to jihad?
A consulting psychiatrist at the King Faisal hospital in Riyadh says
that to truly fight jihadism would mean fundamentally changing how
Islam is taught in Saudi schools and mosques in a way that the Saudi
government has until now been unwilling to attempt. "The government is
never going to say, full stop, that jihad is wrong," he explains. The
doctrine is an integral part of Islamic law, and arguing against it
would raise the ire of religious scholars and possibly call the
Islamic credentials of the Saudi government into question.
And global jihad is still a socially acceptable path for a young Saudi
man with few options, the psychiatrist says. "You have a young man
who's depressed, frustrated with life, maybe he fails an exam. He can
go from being a loser, a failure, to being a jihadi, someone with
status."
How and why violent extremists come to leave their organizations are a
fairly new focus in academic studies of terrorism. Horgan's findings —
that simple fear and disillusionment can play a major role in an
individual's decision to disengage from his group — seem to be echoed
by a recent RAND Corporation report on the demise of terrorist groups,
which found that efforts by police and intelligence agents to create
intense internal pressure within terrorist groups are more successful
at fighting extremism than military actions.
Consider Abu Sulayman, a stocky 32-year-old who spent more than three
years in prison at Guantánamo and says he fought alongside Osama bin
Laden at Tora Bora. Abu Sulayman spoke on the condition that I would
use only his old nom de guerre. He completed the Munasaha program but
was released shortly before the Care Center was established; he joked
that he envies the current batch of former jihadists their "resort
vacation."
"Getting captured and Guantánamo — it was all a good lesson," Abu
Sulayman told me. "I mean, the main idea of jihad is good — no one
disagrees with that."
His first jihad was in 1996, when he traveled to the Philippines to
fight with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. "They had guys from
everywhere, all these different countries, working together," Abu
Sulayman said. "The majority are always Saudis." In 1997, Abu Sulayman
went on to Afghanistan. Four years later, after his second trip to the
country, he grew disillusioned with bin Laden and planned to leave for
the Philippines because "Chechnya said they didn't need anyone at the
moment." Instead, he was captured.
Today he notes that the Qaeda camps where he worked as a training
instructor offered him clear professional advancement. His new life —
in a middle-class Jeddah suburb, doing shift work at an electrical
company — doesn't provide the same sense of purpose. Even so, he has
little regard for those who have followed in his footsteps.
"Most people just want to carry weapons," Abu Sulayman said. They do
not, as he put it, have especially sophisticated religious arguments.
"For me, it was always more about the feeling that I wanted to help
the Muslims. But jihad is complicated. If you're heading to
Afghanistan or Iraq, do you really have the facts you need to get
involved on the right side?
"With Al Qaeda, the training was really excellent," Abu Sulayman went
on. "These people they've got going to Iraq nowadays, they have no
training, so they're just sent to explode themselves.
"Now our government is saying: 'Don't go to Iraq. It's not in our
interests,' " Abu Sulayman continued. "Now I think, At least I did
something with my life. I went out and fought for my beliefs, and I
found that things were not as I had planned. But at least I fought for
my beliefs. God knows my heart."
The sheiks who were charged with rehabilitating him were startled by
his easygoing attitude, Abu Sulayman recalled. Even though Saudi
public opinion has largely turned against Al Qaeda, many Saudis remain
concerned that American-led efforts to fight terrorism are anti-Muslim
and are infuriated by Guantánamo. "They thought that after all this
time in Guantánamo I'd have some hate in me," Abu Sulayman told me.
"But I never look back. I said, 'O.K., now I'll start a new life.' "
Katherine Zoepf, who writes regularly for The Times, is working on a
book about young women in the contemporary Arab world.