Film sheds new light on young jihadists’ journeys

Sholto Byrnes underscores the need to produce counter narratives to ISIL's recruitment efforts

Iraqi soldiers hold an ISIL flag they found in Hajj Ali, Iraq. Alice Martins / AP Photo

A dispute is raging between two of France's – arguably Europe's – most eminent scholars of Islam and radicalism. And it's personal. Olivier Roy, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and author of The Failure of Political Islam, now calls his former friend Gilles Kepel "a madman". Mr Kepel, who is a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris, returns the favour by calling Mr Roy "an ignoramus".

Their disagreement is about the nature of Islamic extremism in Europe. Mr Roy thinks many of the terrorists who have recently struck on the continent are “on the margins”, often petty criminals who alight upon ISIL’s creed only as a justification for the violence they wish to inflict. Mr Kepel, on the other hand, sees radical religion as the gateway to action, and that failure to integrate has led to a generation of French-born jihadis fuelled by “the intellectual resources of Salafism”.

The old joke about academic disputes – why are they so bitter? Because so little is at stake – plainly does not apply here, as the subject could hardly be graver. What is plain to many, however, but evidently not to the two learned professors, is that both could be right. Moreover, the suggestion that there is one path, or one model, to explain radicalisation, is increasingly rejected by experts.

Some programmes based on that assumption may in fact be counterproductive. In April, the United Nations rapporteur Maina Kiai observed of the United Kingdom’s “Prevent” strategy to target extremism: “By dividing, stigmatising and alienating segments of the population, Prevent could end up promoting extremism, rather than countering it.”

France's monolithic view of the place of religion in the public square is another case in point. Last week that resulted in the burqini full body swimwear being banned on the beaches of Cannes and then two other cities, which even Britain's conservative Daily Telegraph described as "a foolish act of fanaticism" which was "more likely to alienate and upset moderate Muslims".

The more the subject is delved into, the less able we are to come up with a consistent pattern of radicalisation. There are so many, and so varied, that given the right circumstances almost anyone could potentially “be radicalised” – which implies some loss of agency – or freely choose to adopt and act on a radical agenda. Even there, there is not one uniform mode of transition from normal, law-abiding citizen to bloodthirsty extremist.

But there are more down-to-earth approaches, some of which were outlined by Noor Huda Ismail at a screening of his yet-to-be-released documentary, Jihad Selfie, in Kuala Lumpur earlier this week. Mr Huda is the founder of the Institute for International Peace Building in Indonesia. He began to devote his life to researching radicalism after covering the 2002 Bali bombings for The Washington Post. During this time, he discovered that one of the bombers had been his roommate at the pesantren, or Islamic Boarding School, they both attended.

In Jihad Selfie, Mr Huda traces the journey of Teuku Akbar Maulana, a young Indonesian studying at a college for imams in Turkey. One of Akbar's friends leaves to join ISIL and is soon sharing photos of himself as a newly minted militant. Leaner and sporting an AK-47, he looks "cool" through the eyes of a 16-year-old going through a mood swing. Akbar decides he's going to join his friend, as do others who they connect with through social media.

In the end, Akbar doesn’t go. But it’s not because he decides that he cannot square the barbarities of ISIL with his faith, or because he has been identified and warned off by the authorities. “I can’t bear the thought of hurting my mother,” he explains later. “I didn’t leave because I remembered the love we have for each other.”

Akbar's friends do not have similarly happy endings. They all die, one of them as a suicide bomber. There are other disturbing points raised by the film. How is it that Akbar, a bright teenager and a leader to his peers, is not halted in his tracks by the conviction that terrorism is wrong and definitely not Islamic? Another character talks jovially and proudly of how he has raised his small boy to leave for jihad (not the good kind) when he grows up. But Jihad Selfie is an important documentary that I hope will be seen widely, precisely because Mr Huda "doesn't judge". We are not confronted with evil fanatics whose crimes and evident viciousness absolve us of the need to understand them. We see ordinary people, frequently raised to believe in a pernicious ideology that they are taught to see as morally correct.

We see remorseful ex-militants returning to tell others not to make the same mistake as them. As well as explaining the brutal reality of life under ISIL, this sometimes involves the seemingly trivial. “We tell them, you won’t be able to get ikan bilis over there,” said Mr Huda in the discussion afterwards, referring to the tiny fried anchovies prized as a condiment in Southeast Asia.

One former fighter for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front now works in a cafe set up by Mr Huda to rehabilitate extremists. Today, runs the voice-over, “Yusuf’s jihad is to be a loving father to his family”. And we see a tearful teenager, saved from joining ISIL because he missed his mum. These are deeply human stories, by turns amusing, chilling and moving. And they may just have more effect on putting off would-be ISIL recruits than the battles over radicalisation fought by two French intellectuals – or the daft demands of French mayors for women to expose their skin.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia