The internet age has allowed for the uncompromising demystification of all sorts of public archetypes. Sectors once held in high regard, or at least intense intrigue, have suffered from a dramatic drop in prestige as more comes to be known about the true nature of those who fill their ranks. Social media is awash with people from once-respected professions like academia, journalism, or law repeatedly making fools of themselves, exposing their intellectual vacuity for all to see, and being humiliatingly dunked on by random nobodies with anime profile pictures and usernames best not repeated. In doing so, they have been shorn of the high social status that they were once deferentially afforded on the assumption that most members of these professions were fundamentally interesting, capable, or at least replete with stories and opinions worth listening to. The more we see of who they truly are, the more banal and petty these figures appear.
But perhaps the archetype that has suffered the greatest collapse in perceived stature from unfiltered online exposure is the jihadi.
The first cohort of jihadis were characterised by a relative intellectual sophistication and cosmopolitanism
Attempts to crudely caricature the early cohort of jihadis from the 1990s and early 2000s as crazed fanatics, motivated by an irrational lust for violence and destruction in the name of the antediluvian views they recited unthinkingly, fell flat, as the jihadis that came to prominence were clearly anything but unthinking. As the investigative work of former CIA officer Marc Sageman showed, the majority of al-Qaeda jihadis were university educated, and the group was mostly made up of recruits from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, not society’s rejects.
The first cohort of jihadis were characterised by a relative intellectual sophistication and cosmopolitanism. It was easier for us Westerners to dismissively typecast them as being driven by resentment borne of their marginalisation, poverty, and exclusion, but the truth was perhaps more concerning. These were not men driven by ignorance or exclusion; these were men whose views were internally coherent, who had often benefitted from a high level of education, and whose plans were not mad but methodical.
The first jihadis showed that the End of History was not assured, not in the crude sense that events would still take place, but as an ideological refutation of liberal capitalism as the culmination of History. Nor was this a refutation the result of prejudice and unfamiliarity; what marked out many of the early jihadi leaders was their personal experience of the Western way of life, followed by a profound disillusionment with its hubris as the endpoint of human development, and a strong set of moral and historical grievances that built into a murderous resentment.
Common to the biographies of many of al-Qaeda’s original top brass, including leader Osama Bin Laden, his secretary Wadih el-Hage, 9/11 chief planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, was a relatively comfortable — if not outright wealthy — upbringing, followed by time spent living and studying in the West. It was from this close contact with Western civilisation and society that their hatred of it grew, not because of marginalisation, but because of perceived moral decline and disagreements over foreign policy. Their views were undoubtedly reprehensible and their actions barbaric, but their motives were nonetheless intriguing. Here were men who had seen what Western life could offer, but found that offer to be unfulfilling and unappealing, and became engaged in its total refutation by stretching their religion to its most extreme endpoint.
They resembled the many other revolutionary vanguards of the last century that justified violent attacks as legitimate acts of revolutionary struggle. The terroristic activities of the early global jihad reflected this vanguard character, with targets chosen for their symbolic potency, as well as the possible scale of death inflicted. The methods employed were also technically sophisticated, a product of both the training undergone as well as the engineering background of many of the jihadis. The attacks of 9/11 represented the zenith of this symbolic and technical sophistication, to tragic and dramatic effect, and cemented their status as the chief global outriders of Western hegemony.
Gone are the engineering students and surgeons, now replaced by the dropouts and petty criminals
But that type of jihadi — educated, intelligent, calculating — has been thoroughly replaced by the new wave of jihadi recruits. Gone are the engineering students and surgeons, now replaced by the dropouts and petty criminals. With the emergence of the internet as the primary font of radicalisation, overtaking the in-person cells that had previously operated as the primary means of jihadi radicalisation and induction, the motivations of those devoting their lives to global jihad have shifted. Intellectual justifications for jihad have grown increasingly sparse, replaced by shallow interpretations of jihadism received through charismatic online videos that serve to satiate the quest for meaning among otherwise directionless lives.
As the focal point of radicalisation moved online, the shallowness of the new jihadis became apparent for all to see. By the 2010s, the online calls for jihad were no longer coming from religious ascetics quoting Qutb and were replaced by a coarse Multicultural London English calling on fellow “bruvvers” to do jihad. Online recruitment took the form of pestering potential converts to “put the chicken wings down n come to Jihad bro” through social media. Unsurprisingly, the type of individual this attracted was as crude as the messaging.
The last decade therefore saw a spate of attacks by jihadis who fit a rather different profile: ideologically shallow, often criminal, and from the social peripheries of Western societies. The likes of the 2015 Paris and 2016 Brussels, Nice, and Berlin attackers came from the criminal underclass, were radicalised either online or in prison, and displayed a distinct lack of piety in their personal lives. Jihad became less and less motivated by coherent ideological grievances, instead functioning as a marker of identity and an opportunity for redemption from their personal failures and criminal pasts.
The archetype of the jihadi in Britain today is no longer the disillusioned engineering student or NHS doctor, like the perpetrators of the 2007 Glasgow Airport attack that fortuitously failed to kill any innocents. Instead, it is of Ahmed Alid, a Moroccan asylum seeker dumped into Hartlepool by the British state, who stabbed a roommate before murdering a pensioner at random and standing gormlessly as armed police apprehended him. Or it is of Mohammad Farooq, a personal and professional failure who wanted to blow up a hospital after being radicalised by “anti-West propaganda on TikTok”.
The status of the jihadi has thus declined precipitously, from the professionally and educationally successful drawn to a revolutionary vanguard, to society’s dregs, drifting aimlessly through a life of petty criminality and personal dissatisfaction, drawn to becoming a jihadi by rudimentary online propaganda and the chance of redemption from their otherwise meaningless lives. In the end, jihadism proved a weak adversary to History, with any fears that it could inspire a genuine counterweight to liberal modernity now seeming increasingly ridiculous. What once struck terror into the heart of the West has now been reduced to the stuff of grim quickly forgotten news stories, of erratic men stabbing a few bystanders at random, or ploughing their vehicle into some pedestrians, or accidentally blowing themselves up in car parks.
For those caught in the wake of these attacks by the socially and psychologically maladjusted, jihadism’s danger remains very real and tragically deadly. But intellectually and culturally, its cachet has collapsed. Jihadis no longer represent a real threat to Western hegemony, but a tragic living consequence of decades of social and immigration policy that has filled the West with directionless men of foreign origin overtaken by resentment towards societies they feel no connection with. They have lost their aura of revolutionaries, as the more we see of who these men really are, with their stilted multicultural vernacular and TikTok-thin ideology, the clearer it becomes that they are not holy warriors, but bored men broken by meaninglessness.
