The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists

CHARLES KURZMAN: The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 248 pp.The 2011 Arab Spring provided a successful counter narrative to the ideology of the violent radical Islamists who were intent on achieving political change in the Muslim world through clandestine and armed, often terrorist, activity. Activity aimed at the heart of different dictatorial and Western backed regimes. Just as the Arab revolutionaries took to the streets to discredit or to discard salafi-jihadism, Oxford University Press has published an important book which seeks to explain the lack of popularity of Al Qaeda's ideology in different Muslim countries.Charles Kurzman's The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists suggests that jihadism had never been a popular concept in the Muslim world, and that the idea of the war on terror to combat this barely existent phenomenon was a dangerous exaggeration which led to a world-wide counter-terrorist frenzy. According to Kurzman, Muslim terrorists have never been sufficient in number to justify this new paradigm in international relations as the relatively weak radical Islamists, including Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, were soon to find out. The author of The Missing Martyrs does not, however, wish to underestimate the terrorist threat emanating from organisations such as Al Qaeda but seeks to understand the reasons for its radicalisation and recruitment failures.Kurzman's work represents a timely contribution to the Western debate on terrorism and counter-terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 and also the British 7/7 and the Spanish 11/3. Kurzman names three issues which, in his view, undermined the radical Islamist message and saved the world from scores of missing martyrs. These are the popularity of Islamic liberalism which successfully opposes violent Islamist; the factional rivalry within the radical milieu which renders any terroristic initiatives obsolete and, perhaps surprisingly, pop-culture which channels all of the potential pro-Al Qaeda sentiment into powerful but also harmless imagery, akin to that of Che Guevara's iconic status.Unfortunately, the book's most important point is made only explicitly as the author concentrates most of it on his aforementioned and extremely selective choice of reasons for the lack of missing martyrs. Kurzman wishes to focus the readers' attention on the Muslims who are not involved in terrorist organisations. He correctly concludes that both the academic and expert communities, including right-wing think-tanks and right-wingers (much criticised by Kurzman in his book), should focus their attention not on the perpetrators, terrorists, would-be terrorists or terrorist groups but on their peers, neighbours and friends who chose not to follow them or who join other, rival, not necessarily terrorist entities. Rather surprisingly Kurzman postures that we should be able to find the answers to many of our questions and dilemmas about terrorism recruitment and motivation amongst non-terrorists.Unfortunately, Kurzman only half-heartedly makes this point while assessing global versus local jihadism, the fact that the two rarely converge, and indeed often compete with one another for relatively small resources and popularity. If Kurzman's idea is to lower the temperature of the debate on countering terrorism, he might have followed the examples of Jarret Brachman and Thomas Hegghammer whose research clearly illuminates the idea that the world is full of radical Islamists but not all of them wish to use violence in order to spread their political, religious or social goals.1 Nonetheless, many of them often find themselves on the verge of joining different terrorist organisations which recruit their members from radical Islamist circles. The question any serious researcher is likely to ask at this stage concerns not the motivations of overstudied members of terrorist organizations, but those who have chosen not to become involved in politically violent and criminal acts. …