March 08, 2015
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Indeed, it is more probable that an absence of large-scale grievance was his real grievance, because large-scale grievance, when justified, at least has the virtue of explaining plausibly one’s sense of dissatisfaction with life. That is why, as the author of the article puts it, “no matter how many grievances we address, and no matter how much effort we make to encourage inclusiveness… Islamist ideologues will always seek to manipulate any complaint for the purpose of recruitment.” And since life is always unsatisfactory in some way or other, there will always be complaints for the ideologues to exploit. It is the ideology that must be confronted directly, head-on as it were.
An interesting question then arises as to why and how a headline and standfirst so misleading and contrary to the drift of the article beneath should have been written and published. The author was not responsible for this, and probably not even consulted about it. It is certainly not uncommon in my experience for misleading headlines to be appended to articles, and yet the direction in which this particular headline and standfirst were misleading was, I think (or suspect), not entirely random, though not necessarily deliberate.
It seems to me likely that whoever fashioned the headline and standfirst assumed that a Muslim who was writing about these matters must, almost ex officio, believe that the root cause of Islamism (how intellectuals love roots!) must be some original sin practiced in or by the West. This is because only the West is capable of sin, the rest of the world not being fully human and therefore incapable of sin, in the same way as animals are incapable of sin. The fact that the author was specifically not saying this escaped him, because in his opinion all Muslims must be fixated on their supposed grievances to the exclusion of all other considerations.
Moreover, this peculiar blindness”a false attribution of a supposed group characteristic to an individual”coincided with, and no doubt reinforced, the prejudices of the readers, thirsting for a collective but not personal guilt that served and serves various functions: which is where I came in.
