The Adventures of Chester: THE GOD COMPLEX I

He was a loner obsessed by guns and explosives. A social outcast, he developed a "lurid fascination" with Columbine High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. And on February 13, 24 year-old Robert Bonelli, Jr. entered the Hudson Valley Mall in Kingston, New York, and fired 60 rounds from a Hesse AK-47 into crowds of shoppers. Miraculously, no one was killed.

People in Iraq were not so lucky. Last weekend, suicide bombers murdered over 60 people, most of them Shia worshippers observing Ashura. These attacks were but the latest in an ongoing series of homicidal martyrdoms carried out by Arab Muslims in places ranging from Iraq to Israel to lower Manhattan.

Despite their geographic and cultural distance, killers like Bonelli, Harris and Klebold share numerous characteristics with suicide bombers. They choose death over life; attention over anonymity; the ecstasy of violence over the frustrations of daily life—and view other human beings as stage props in a drama in which they play the starring role. In short, they exhibit a narcissism so malignant it seems to consume their egos in a monstrous will-to-power. Rejecting human limitations, they desire instead the infinite, the omnipotent, the transcendent. Seeking the unlimited, they embrace death.

Take, for instance, the shaheed. He or she belongs to a culture, as Syrian scholar Sadik Al-Azm wrote in a recent essay, which has not come to grips with its decline and fall.

[A]s Arabs and Muslims, we continue to imagine ourselves as conquerors, history-makers, pace setters, pioneers and leaders of world-historic proportions.

When this grandiose self-image collides with the “impotence, frustration and insignificance” of the actual Arab-Muslim world

a host of problems ensues: massive inferiority complexes, huge compensatory delusions, wild adventurism, political recklessness, desperate violence and, lately, large-scale terrorism.

We have heard much about the Muslim-Arab sense of inferiority; few observers, however, consider the flip side of this complex: feelings of superiority. And indeed, deep within the Muslim-Arab weltanschauung lurks a sense of grandiosity fueled by oil wealth and the parochial nature of tribalism. Recently, Hasan Mahmaud, a member of the Muslim Canadian Congress told me “Arabs have been made to live an unreal existence by their leaders. They give us a picture that we are still the center of the world.”

Exacerbating this self-aggrandizement is Islam—a religion that stresses its spiritual and doctrinal superiority, while enjoining its followers to “kill the infidels wherever you find them.” As Sayyid Qutb wrote in his salafist manifesto, Milestones,

Islamic society is, by its very essence, the only civilized society, and the jahili [infidel, ignorant] societies, in all their various forms, are backwards societies. It is necessary to elucidate this great truth.

And to kill those who won’t accept it.

For most of Islam’s existence, cultural bonds - music, food, customs, family ties—ameliorated this grandiosity and rooted Muslims in everyday life. Beginning with the rise of Wahhabism in the late 17th century, however, radical strains of Islam began to attack traditional culture as ignorant and deluded. These assaults increased as the Muslim world fell further behind the West. Islam was not responsible for this backwardness, many argued: rather, it was secular society. “Islam is the solution,” claimed intellectuals like Qutb, Maududi and Al-Banna. “Islam is the answer.”

Over the last 25 years, Muslim immigrants have spread across the globe, particularly into Western countries. Surrounded by alien cultures often at odds with their traditional ways of life, many rely on Islam to provide the main organizing principle of their identities. But a new kind of Islam, argues French scholar Olivier Roy in his recent book Globalized Islam: the Search for a New Ummah—a radicalized, “deculturalized” religion freed from specific ethnic and national customs. An Islam that particularly appeals

to an uprooted, disaffect youth in search of an identity beyond the local cultures of their parents and beyond the thwarted expectations of a better life in the West.

Promulgated in cyberspace, this 21st century Islam is a “dream that finds on the internet its virtual existence. Websites and chat rooms compensate for the lack of real social roots.” Recruiters of suicide bombers look precisely for these young men and women: confused but secretly grandiose souls who find fulfillment in a never-never land of pure Islam—or an Islam realizable only on the web, where the boundary between the limited self and infinite cyberspace identity is increasingly blurred. Add to this the supremacy complex and it makes for some an irresistible temptation to slip the bonds of ego for the paradise of immortality.

But why violence? Because without limits, channels, cultural and traditional restrains, narcissism turns to power, power to domination and violence. When Bonelli stood in that New York mall, armed with an assault weapon—did he not feel for a moment like God, bestower of life and death? When a suicide bomber sits on a crowded bus and contemplates his soon-to-be victims, does he not feel an exhilarating power over the fate of so many people? What sense of godhood flitted through Mohammad Atta’s mind as the World Trade Center came into view? That the Bonellis, Klebolds and Harrises act out of a sense of resentment while the shahadah justifies his or her actions in the name of Allah makes no difference. In the end, both extremes meet in the void beyond the human ego. The Arabs, in fact, have a word for this: haram. It means at once the divine and the obscene, and implies the worst possible of all desires: to become God.

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[Starting today, author Steven Vincent returns to The Adventures of Chester on a more regular basis -- once or twice a week. Don't miss his blog In the Red Zone, or his book by the same name, in the sidebar.]

Posted by on February 21, 2005 6:48 AM to The Adventures of Chester