Al-Qaeda’s Virtual Reality in the Media

Spiked-Online reviews a new book on al-Qaeda by Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad. Devji, like Olivier Roy, repudiates the notion that al-Qaeda is a territorial entity that seeks territorial aims (e.g., the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or even the caliphate).

Instead, al-Qaeda must be understood as a fluid, non-national movement whose aims are to get recognition in the global theater created by the media:

In short, the disparate individuals who are part of al-Qaeda, or who claim to be part of al-Qaeda, are not bonded by any common experience of oppression (many of them are well-to-do and Western-educated) or by shared political visions, but rather by fleeting and fluid relationships, often forged in the planning and execution of a one-off spectacular event rather in the pursuit of a future-oriented programme of ideas and tactics.

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.

And so, they’re acts of “martyrdom” are for the recognition they get for seeing their own names and faces in the newspapers and on TV:

In these post-political circumstances, al-Qaeda fights its battles in the media: its attacks are aimed at making global headlines rather than winning incremental victories towards some definable end. In his book, Devji argues that al-Qaeda’s acts of martyrdom only achieve meaning ‘by being witnessed in the mass media’. He describes one video obtained by Time magazine, which showed martyrs reading their last testaments and bidding farewell to their families before blowing themselves up in various parts of Iraq, as ‘the closest the jihad has come to creating its own form of a reality television show’. The video is ‘replete with scenes straight from Hollywood’, he argues: for example, one martyr dramatically kisses goodbye his beloved through her veil, which is ‘hardly an acceptable public spectacle for any Muslim tradition’ (7). Just as the media has increasingly become the place where politics happens across the West - a new political arena that has superseded crisis-ridden or sluggish parliaments - so it is also the ‘landscape’ in which al-Qaeda fights its weird war, or at least imprints its exclamation marks.

In short, they’ve tapped into the new voyeurism created by globalized media.

Their thuggish desire for recognition by the media reminds me of a scene in the 2002 Brazilian movie, City of God, which is about the drug wars in Rio’s slums. Li’l Zé, the leader of the most powerful group, is jealous that his rival gets his picture in the paper, so he gets a photographer, Rocket, who’s also the star of the movie, to shoot a picture of him and his gang, which gains him instant notoriety and, of course, satisfaction. Happily, it gets Rocket an internship with the Rio newspaper. Happily, it eventully leads to Li’l Zé’s death. Unhappily, violence of the slums continues.