Yassir Morsi Wednesday 17 December 2014
Modern Islam is a potent grammar for capturing and expressing grievance. Lone wolves like Sydney Siege gunman Man Haron Monis must tap into its symbols to sustain their fantasies
‘The siege has become an episode in a global war, announced by white calligraphy on black fabric.’ Photograph: AP
The gesture that turned the Sydney siege from a gunman’s crime into an act of terrorism was the unveiling of the Islamic flag across the Lindt cafe’s window.
The human loss was sad enough. Now the siege has become an episode in a global war, announced by white calligraphy on black fabric.
The flag’s Arabic brought into view – and again into contest – foreign Islam as a radical opposite.
The hijacker knew its impact. He banked on it. He played for it. The contrast of the black flag with Lindt’s Christmas decorations couldn’t have been sharper – celebration against disruption, festival against siege.
The initial lines from the siege have been the typical ones: there was some political motivation that explained Monis’s use of the Islamic flag. He was either an authentic representative of “radical” Islam, or a disaffected lone wolf who had no real right to the symbols of Islam.
But Man Haron Monis had no deeper “political” motivation behind his use of the flag. He did not belong to any official terror organisation.
The pack he belongs to is the group of isolated people who are brought together by a sense of alienation, frustration, a breakdown in social bonds, and their use of the symbolism and language of violence.
The lone wolf’s fantasises of returning us to the “real” of Iraq, Syria, and the Islamic State all come after the flag is flown, not before it. Before he displayed the flag, he was just another gunman. Afterwards, the symbol rewrote Monis’s violent past and gave grammar to his attack.
Hours into the siege, a second symbol emerged. Monis, a Shia who claimed a recent conversion to Sunni Islam, demanded that the flag of the Islamic State (Isis) be brought to him. This was jarring, and telling. It said everything that needed to be said: he needed the correct flag for the fantasy to continue.
The main point here is to recognise how the fantasy itself cannot reproduce itself without making an appeal to Islamic symbols as foreign and threatening. It is the flag that calls forward the fantasy; behind it, Monis went from being a desperate and haphazard captor to the authentic representative of an international radical movement.
Mainstream Muslims have typically asked for a view beyond narrow symbols and stereotypes. Take a closer look, we’re normal Australians, and so forth.
By calling for respect – even if such a call is just for our own catharsis – we hope to combat generalisations and win back our religion from the radical few. We request at least a nod to our diversity, our humanity, our moderate tradition.
It has become habitual to suggest that the stereotype of the Muslim as a violent threat comes from a distorted reading of Islam – that the lone wolf radical is a perverted version of the everyday Muslim.
Such is the power of the symbol of radical Islam, where the central testimony of the religion – the Shahada – is turned into a radical’s standard, that we might now have to concede that the reality is the opposite of our hopes. That the symbols of our religion, lost to the matrix of debates and images within global media, have a life greater than our own.
It is the stereotype that really lives, exercising a distorting influence on the everyday Muslim.
What we are fighting is the knowledge that Islam, in its modern manifestation, is a potent grammar for grievance and retaliation. Both Islam’s critics and its lone wolves understand this. Its symbols explain catastrophe, fear, departure – even as they invoke God.
Whatever Monis’s motivation, background, political readings of events, whatever ill-driven desire he had, is not somehow “hidden” behind a religious narrative. The truly scary thought is that he is a symptom of the religious narrative of today; he is part of the religious narrative, not outside it.
Religion, in its deepest anomie, is often evoked as a particular counter-culture, instead of as a substantial way of organising life. So often what legitimises it is not its truth-claims, but the rather the way it allows its subjects to express their innermost feelings against modern progressive attitudes.
The truly suffocating realisation is this: the symbol of violence itself is motivation enough to send the lone wolves into the streets, to cause violence against the modern world from which they are alienated.
Is it not that the very style of these messages repeats that Islam is the radical Other? Like automatons, those with grievances, with criminal pasts awaiting trial, have now learned the phraseology of otherness and resistance, through the employment of symbols.
Beneath that black flag lurks some unspeakably monstrous dimension, exposed through attacks like Monis’s. The spectre of the violent jihadist haunts our social imaginary. In response, that imaginary has become a place to play, and a place to redeem criminality and intolerance by turning them into a false pursuit of justice.
Monis’s use of the flag was detached from the reality the symbols of Islam ought to represent. It was detached from the communities who own these symbols. It was detached from knowledge, detached from debates, detached from Islamic law. It was detached even from his own life.
Perhaps most tellingly, it was detached from Isis itself, who would never have accepted him, and need not accept him to carry out violence in their flag’s name.
