Sexuality and death in the Fundamentalist-Terrorist Theology: A Psychoanalytic Perspective -Part one

Peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-‘Abdallah, who said
“I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure
that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah, who put my livelihood
under the spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those
who disobey my orders.”’
—Usama Bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, Abu Yasir Rifa’i
Ahmad Taha, Mir Hamzah, & Fazlur Rahman,
Jihad against Jews and Crusaders

‘To establish God’s rule means that His laws be enforced and that
the final decision in all affairs be according to these laws. . . . The
peace which Islam desires is that the religion . . . be purified for
God, that the obedience of all people be for God alone.
—Sayed Qutb, “Jihad in the Cause of God,” Milestones

According to the psychoanalyst Piven, ‘religion is a complex psychological system invented to deceive awareness of the motives to deify tyrannical yet protective authority, evacuate terror, shame, and misery, disgorge illicit erotic conflict, inflate the grandiose narcissistic self into a God whose vengeance is sanctified, and satiate the yearning for death and fusion via the masquerade of piety and justice’ (P. 231).
Piven rightly indicates that there is considerable debate regarding what motivates terrorist religious acts. There is a diversity of explanations. The focus here is on the question of whether terrorism emerges from obedience to sacred text, doctrine, and social indoctrination, or whether terrorist theology reflects a deeper psychological orientation toward violence and the reenactment of torrential psychological conflicts.
For indeed there are messages of violence in the Qur’an: “slay the infidels wherever ye find them” (2:191). “Give tidings (O Muhammad) of a painful doom to those who disbelieve” (9:3). “If ye go not forth He will afflict you with a painful doom” (9:39). When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads till ye have made a great slaughter among them, and of the rest make fast the fetters” (47:4).
One can argue that that terrorists are fulfilling social roles that win them admiration, virtue, and apotheosis through martyrdom and relinquishment of infidels. The terrorist thesis is enshrined in The Qur’an, which assures them of Alla’s love in paradise:
“And repute not those slain on God’s path to be dead. Nay, alive with their Lord, are they richly sustained; Rejoicing in what God of his bounty hath vouchsafed them, filled with joy for those
who follow after them. . . . Filled with joy at the favors of God, and at his bounty” (3:163–5). “Lo! Allah loveth those who battle for His cause in ranks” (61:4).
One can certainly, however, agree with Piven’s thesis that texts do not kill people. They don’t force people to annihilate one another. It is not simply that terrorists are blindly following religious commandments, confusedly but loyally carrying out terrorist acts because they wish to be faithful servants, or struggling against the horror of murder, or their compassion, in obedience to a coercive God. If indeed a person reads a text and subsequently decides to murder people, this is also psychologically far more complicated than simple obedience. Hence, we must ask why a person instead of another finds select words so divinely mandated that he is ready to slaughter others. Even if there are messages to kill in a text, one must still ask why devotees adhere to such passages and interpretations while excluding others, especially when copious statements in the text may seem to be unequivocally opposed. The Qur’an states unambiguously that “Allah loveth not aggressors” (2:190), that Allah is Forgiving, Merciful” (2:192).
“Why does one ignore messages that demand nonviolence, compassion, humility, or love’ (Piven, P. 231)?. Blaming the text or the religion ignores the fact that persons are absorbed by certain aspects of their religion that ennoble and sanctify their own psychological needs. One could also make the argument that those most religious devotees believe what they are told by religious authorities, strive for guidance, and can be manipulated by leaders who can exploit their credulity and the fundamental need for answers to the problems of life, suffering, and death.
Also, one can argue that individuals are taught by a community, and that specific values are culturally inculcated from infancy onward.
Arendt claims that evil is banal because people follow authority and do whatever is socially moral or acceptable. While this is clearly the case some times, Psychoanalysts believe that authority is obeyed and violence is often enacted and socialized because it satiates the psychological function of displacing interpersonal, intracommunal, and intrapsychic rage and terror.
The terrorists acts, as the incidents of the Baghdad’s black Wednesday indicate, confirm Arendt’s assertion that Evil is banal. ‘because people are capable of inflicting the most terrible atrocities so long as they are socially acceptable, ever more so if made a sacred categorical mandate and imperative. One need not be deranged or even fanatical to murder. When one has been acculturated to believe that an enemy is wicked, that they threaten one’s freedom, or that one will be beloved and noble for destroying the enemy, then one may joyfully massacre the other. One may even rapturously hurl oneself into death for fame, martyrdom, and immortality’ (Pevin, P. 234).
As Taqi al-Din ibn Taimiya writes, “It is in jihad that one can live in die in ultimate happiness, both in this world and in the hereafter. The death of a martyr is easier than any other form of death. In fact, it is the best of all manners of dying” (in Laqueur, P. 393). An ideology that defends against death itself is sacred, intoxicating, and precious, and the mere existence of other competing ideologies or theologies is often enough to arouse fear, hatred, and the urge to humiliate and destroy heretics or infidels (Becker).
The resistance by terrorists and religious fanatics to modernity, which has become such a pervasive discussion, is not based merely on anxiety or hostility towards new, confusing, and revolting ways of life. Reality and immortality, the existence of a God who loves and guides his people, the heroic portals to divine benefaction, virtue, and afterlife, are disrupted (Esposito; Huntington; Lewis).
The shame and violence that indoctrinate one into the group also reinforces the continuance of such values, for one is likely to inflict the same violence on others as a way of avenging one’s own submission and sacrifice (Gruen). There is nothing so contemptible to a person who has quashed his own joy, as to see another so unfettered by rage, shame, guilt, fear, misery, and obedient defeat. Hence indoctrination can be so psychologically destructive. that victims will brutalize others into the system to punish their
own desires and prevent anyone from escaping the pain they were forced to endure. Such envy as we see now in the prohibitions of every life-celebrating trend in Iraq (life here is seen as inseparable from its energetic source of sexuality)- As we see in today’s Iraq, in which religious parties, following the envy and selfishness-motivated doctrine, quash any life-celebrating experience with its energetic colliery of feeling sexuality (a feeling sexuality, rather than the mechanical, pornographic sexuality of tubes and pumps as seen in the equivalents of sex-for sale in religiously sanctioned entertainment marriage and the like), in all its manifestations, such as the imposition of veil (Alrubaie), honor killing, female genital mutilation, killing and mutilation of people of different sexual and gender orientation. Their ideologies are infused by such envy which can breed hatred so torrential that condemnation becomes a moral imperative, a sacred commandment, a sanctimonious decree that those unencumbered by such coercion are so depraved they deserve to die (Becker; Klein).
As Piven rightly indicates ‘As much as individuals are indoctrinated into belief systems, they also invent and reinvent beliefs, rework their shared realities to conform to their own wishes, create gods and the sacred to feel powerful, important, and defended against terror and death, evil and catastrophe. To consider individuals only victims of indoctrination thus ignores the subtle means by which groups manipulate religion’ (P.237). Thus history may be seen in terms of the shifting modes of death transcendence and immortality ideologies (Becker; Lifton; Rank)
If we take the example of Bin Laden, we can see how his biography has contributed immensely to his terrorist doctrine. Bin Laden and the likes are wrongly described merely as people who represent their societies, are only in the right place at the right time, and could be replaced by virtually any other person within that culture who shared the same views.
‘Osama bin Laden has his unique biography. To give only a few illustrative details: The seventeenth child of some fifty-four siblings, bin Laden was ceaselessly teased and humiliated as the Ibn al {Abda} (son of the slave) because his mother Hamida was Syrian. Estranged from her husband Mohammed and his other wives because of her heritage and reprehensible independence, Hamida was forcibly ostracized from the central home in Jedda. Osama was thus torn from Hamida and raised without a mother. Mohammed wanted her out of his sight, and Osama barely knew her until they were reunited a decade later. Enraged by this deprivation
and alienated by his sadistic siblings, Osama could hardly receive any solace or mirroring from his father either, so populated was the household with other kindred and concubines.
His father died in a helicopter crash when the boy was
roughly ten years old (Bergen, 2001; Robinson, 2001). Are these
unique events not traumatic and decisive for the formation of
one’s personality? This is only the briefest pre´cis of bin Laden’s
childhood, and it is meant to underscore just how much the individual
life story plays into one’s motivation, religion, and ideology,
rather than assuming it was all learned from society, or that
the actor is merely a “social self.”6 The fact that there are innumerable
Muslim communities not comprised of terrorists demonstrates
that we are dealing with a different mode of fanatic
theology, not the ineluctable consequence of indoctrination into
Muslim society’ (Piven, P. 239).

References
Alrubaie, T. (2008). The epidemic of the veil and the plights of the Phallic discourse in Iraq.
http://www.ahewar.org/eng/show.art.asp?aid=665.
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New
York: Penguin.
Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. New York: Free Press, 1976
Bergen, P. L. (2001). Holy war, inc.: Inside the world of Osama bin Laden. New
York: Free Press.
Bin-Ladin, Usamah, et al. Jihad against Jews and Crusaders (http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm (accessed 26 August 2009.)
Esposito, J. L. (2002). Unholy war: Terror in the name of Islam. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Gruen, A. (1987). The insanity of normality: Realism as sickness. Toward understanding human destructiveness, trans. H. & H. Hannum. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.
Huntington, S. (1993, Summer). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs: 72(3):22–49.
Klein, M. (1975). The writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 3: Envy and gratitude and other works. 1946–1963. New York: Free Press.
Laqueur, W. (1977). Terrorism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Lewis, B. (2002). What went wrong? Western impact and Middle Eastern response.New York: Oxford University Press.
Lifton, R. J. (1973). The sense of immortality: On death and the continuity of life. In Explorations in psychohistory (pp. 271–287). New York: Simon & Shuster, 1974.
Pickthall, M. M., trans. (c. 632) The Glorious Qur’an. Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike
Tarsile Qur’an. 1999.
Piven. J.S.(2006). Narcissism, sexuality, and psyche in terrorist theology The Psychoanalytic Review, 93(2); 231-266. also; http://www.atypon-link.com/GPI/doi/pdf/10.1521/prev.2006.93.2.231 (accessed 26 August 2009).
Qutb. S. (2006). Jihad in the Cause of God. Islamic Book Service. India.
Rank, O. (2003). Psychology and the soul (G. C. Richter & E. J. Lieberman, trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Robinson, A. (2001). Bin Laden: Behind the mask of the terrorist. New York: Arcade.

Rate the article
Bad	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Very good
Result : 89%							Participated in the vote : 8