Diary of a nobody

Alongside other figures associated with Al-Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah possesses no worked-out ideology of a kind familiar since the last century with communism, liberalism or fascism. When, in 1990, on his way to Pakistan, he hears news of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and writes about the American mobilization of forces against Iraq, Zubaydah makes no further comment. There is no attempt to fit what he recognizes is an important event into some teleological account of Islamic history. Instead of an all-embracing ideology, what we get are fragmentary arguments and disconnected phrases about the caliphate, the importance of individual jihad, recovering Palestine or defending the Muslim "ummah," or global Muslim community.  What else to expect from the cosmopolitan and polyglot society of a training camp that included American converts to Islam and North African migrants to Europe, men who shared little if anything by way of background or culture?

Like the Saudi Arabia in which Abu Zubaydah grew up, with its enormous population of migrant workers, the camp that appears so regimented from the outside represented, in reality, a cultural microcosm of the globe. For however repressive they might otherwise be, these supposedly uniform spaces are very likely more cosmopolitan than, say, those of Anglo-American urban life. After all, Saudis are not only exposed to mass culture from Europe, America and Asia, but must inevitably speak Hindi, Urdu and English, and other languages, if only to speak to their servants, doctors, waiters and shopkeepers.

However secretive his life will become, Abu Zubaydah, like many other militants, exhibits no cultic behavior in his diary. There is no hidden knowledge or tradition here, no cloistered world in which young men can be "brainwashed" in the old-fashioned way by which religious cults and clandestine organizations are meant to work — by separating inductees from their previous lives or family to create an entirely new environment and fictitious kin for them. And yet we see that Abu Zubaydah remains in touch with his relatives, while other figures in Al-Qaeda, most famously Osama bin Laden himself, lead ordinary family lives in the camps, which were indeed places where women and children came and went. Yet without an ideology there can be no radicalization of the laborious kind we have come to know from the Cold War, in which individuals are "indoctrinated" into the communist or capitalist way of life by "re-education," propaganda or even consumerism. And because there is no single doctrine, but instead some overlapping if incomplete lines of argument, there cannot be a militant personality either.

Rather a number of role models exist, with militants free to adopt first one kind and then another. After all, Zubaydah himself was initially a jihad tourist who returned to his studies in India. Whether or not it is biographically accurate, therefore, Abu Zubaydah's melodramatic narrative offers us a greater insight into his behavior than some standard-issue account of radicalization. It tells us how the commonplace themes and sentiments of mass culture, perfectly innocuous in themselves, might be of more consequence to global forms of militancy than traditional ideologies. Emerging as it does from the structures and sentiments of everyday life, in which we all make decisions on the basis of half-reasoned arguments, militant behavior draws upon an almost inexhaustible source and is highly flexible within the limits it sets for itself.   

As he sinks into the life of jihad, of course, Abu Zubaydah's narrative also changes, and while remaining sentimental, comes to include newer themes having to do with battle, martyrdom and the hatred of Jews. And yet he never quite gives up on his previous persona, as we see when a generic phrase in the diary, about India being the land of Hindu polytheists, is written down and then crossed out. For we already know from his earlier entries that Abu Zubaydah liked India and had only good things to say about his Hindu acquaintances there — his disagreements, in fact, being only with Muslim friends, who he thought had taken financial advantage of him. As a fair-skinned Arab in India, he is not only presumed to be attractive but rich as well, and thus a target for fraud. So his diary describes how a Muslim family Abu Zubaydah had befriended suddenly left town, because of rumors that he was paying for sexual favors from the man's beautiful wife. But Zubaydah's shift from one kind of role to another — from the gullible foreigner in India to the virtuous militant in Afghanistan, for example — in each case remains mysterious. And this is so because there is no "cause" for radicalization outside the quotidian themes of mass culture in a global arena where militancy operates as an open secret.