http://www.faisalalmutar.com/2015/11/16/i-am-a-jihadist-and-i-am-tired-of-not-being-given-credit/
On more serious side (from http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-true-believers )
Harris: I just want to point out that this effort to get at root causes only ever runs in one direction. No one doubts the political and economic justifications that people give for their behavior. When someone says, "Listen, I murdered my rich neighbor because I knew he kept a pile of money in a safe. I wanted that money, and I didn't want to leave a witness," nobody looks for an ulterior explanation for that behavior. But when someone says, "I think infidels and apostates deserve to burn in hell, and I know for a fact that I'll go to paradise if I die while waging jihad against them," many academics refuse to accept this rationale at face value and begin looking for the political or economic reasons that they imagine lie beneath it. So the game is rigged
Wood: Yes. However, the countervailing current in social science is the tradition in ethnography and anthropology of taking seriously what people say. And this can lead to the exact opposite of the materialist, "root causes" approach. When Evans-Pritchard, for example, talks about witchcraft among the Azande, he's describing exactly what they say and showing that it's an internally consistent view of the world. This is something that anthropology has done quite well in the past, and it gives us a model for how we can listen to jihadis and understand them without immediately assuming that they are incapable of self-knowledge.
What I'm arguing for in the piece is not to discard either type of explanation but to remember the latter one and take the words of these ISIS people seriously. Even though at various points in the past we've ignored political or material causes, this doesn't mean that ideology plays no role, or that we should ignore the plain meaning of words.
Of course, we don't know what people actually think. Maybe they're self-deluded; maybe they don't really believe in the literal rewards of martyrdom. We can't know; we're not in their heads. But this lack of knowledge cuts both ways. Why do so many people instantly resort, with great confidence, to a material explanation—even or especially when the person himself rejects it? It's a very peculiar impulse to have, and I consider it a matter of dogma for many people who study jihadists.
Harris: Yes, especially in cases where a person meets none of the material conditions that are alleged to be the root causes of his behavior. We see jihadis coming from free societies all over the world. There are many examples of educated, affluent young men joining organizations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State who lack any discernible material or political grievances. They simply feel a tribal connection to Muslims everywhere, merely because they share the same religious identity. We are seeing jihadis travel halfway around the world for the privilege of dying in battle who have nothing in common with the beleaguered people of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Somalia whose ranks they are joining, apart from a shared belief in the core doctrines of Islam.
The other side of this coin, of course, is that even the most grotesque, seemingly nihilistic actions of the Islamic State become perfectly rational—which is to say, straightforwardly self-interested—given the requisite beliefs. Once you imagine what it would be like to actually believe in paradise, and in martyrdom as the surest way of getting there, it becomes obvious why someone would want to join the Islamic State. If a person truly believes that the Creator of the universe wants him to wage war against the evil of unbelief and that the Islamic State is the very tip of His spear, he has to be insane not to join the cause.
Harris: I now have a rogues' gallery in my mind of pseudo-liberals, both Muslim and not, who are reflexive apologists for theocracy. These people will deny, at every turn, the link between deeply held religious convictions and bad behavior. According to them, all the mayhem we see in the Middle East is "blowback." Everything is a
product of our callous meddling in the affairs of other countries. We have no enemies in the world but the ones we've made for ourselves by being bad actors and rapacious guzzlers of oil. Many of these people appear to have been bewitched by Noam Chomsky.
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