I’m delighted to publish here the thoughts and arguments of Doyle Quiggle, PhD., whose writing speaks for itself. This is a masterful combination of cogwar and honor-shame analysis that lays out the way in which the FBI unknowingly recruits for ISIS. But then, should not the FBI (just like all the other own-goalers like journalists, philanthropists, politicians, academics) become aware of this?
FBI Recruiting for ISIS?
Hallal-Haram, Disgust, and Triggering Honor-Shame Emotions
Three months after Omar Mateen massacred fifty patrons of a gay nightclub in Orlando, the FBI have still not revised that part of their counter-terrorism methodology wherein their low-level agents troll the internet looking for potential ISIS recruits.
We know now that Mateen chose a gay nightclub specifically because he wanted to cleanse his sullied Islamic identity from his own experiments with homosexuality. Mateen’s massacre was motivated in large part by self-revulsion. But what and who provoked this lethal self-revulsion in him? We know that both his wife and his Mullah made him feel violently disgusted by his prior bodily commingling with Kuffir. We know that his coreligionists — inspired by and in contact with ISIS — encouraged him to cleanse himself of the haram contaminants of homosexuality by shedding the blood of gay Kuffir.
Now, we are also beginning to understand exactly what role the FBI played in exacerbating Mateen’s sense of shame about having allowed his hallal Islamic identity to be sullied with the body fluids of gay Kuffir. We know that the FBI troll the internet for ISIS sympathizers. Working under tremendous pressure from higher echelons in the Justice Department to zipcuff homeland terrorists, lower level FBI aggressively seek out contact with Muslims in social media who fit the profile of a potential extremist, which is basically any Muslim male under the age of 40.
These FBI agents then engage their target as if they themselves are ISIS recruiters. They deliberately push psychological buttons that pretty much all Muslims possess by virtue of being Muslims, like the fear of becoming contaminated in their Islamic identity by too-close contact with the haram realm of Kuffir. In some operations, the FBI have even helped these targets acquire weapons and explosive material. Harkening back to the era of Al Capone, the FBI call these operations “stings.” Civil rights lawyers call them “entrapment.” No matter what you call the FBI operation that involved Mateen, it did NOT prevent fifty US citizens from being murdered in cold blood by an American-born Muslim. I call that a major FBI goatope, a colossal failure to serve and protect US citizens.
When the FBI troll social media looking for extremist recruits, they are playing a potentially deadly game, especially when they do not fully understand how Muslims have been primed by the symbolism of their religion to respond to honor, shame, and disgust triggers. Seeking out the extremist tendencies of their target, the FBI deliberately push the shame and disgust buttons of their Muslim targets. Then they evaluate the target’s response to this “extremist” language. What the FBI do not understand is that ALL Muslims adhere to varying degrees to an identity forming narrative that tells adherents what it is “safe” to eat, to wear, to do, and which thoughts are safe to think and which identities are safe to develop. This identity-forming narrative his hallal/haram.
The Islamic hallal-haram construct activates and shapes disgust as a motivational system in Muslims that, in turn, structures daily behavior. This construct gives both structure and motivation to the religious and social identity of Muslims worldwide. This hallal identity narrative gives its narrative community extraordinary volitional control over identity maintenance, which, in turn, fosters self-esteem, especially within a broader Western societal context in which Muslims generally lack control over their social-identity and, therefore, risk succumbing to low self-esteem. Although the hallal-haram sub-narrative possesses high “survival value” for a distinctly Western-based Islamic identity, this symbolic construct ultimately makes adherents vulnerable to the persuasive ploys of Islamic extremist recruiters and FBI trolls.
We know from Paul Rozin’s extensive, groundbreaking research into the psychology of disgust that it is “a basic biological motivational system.”[1] We also know that, as Rozin explains, “Core disgust is qualitatively different, in terms of meaning, from distaste.”[2] Disgust is one of our most powerful physio-emotional responses. It is involuntary and contagious. We are disgusted by what disgusts other members of our in-group. Once that pre-adaptation has been activated and then linked via symbols to a specific object, group, or idea, it is almost impossible to undo the association, no matter how arbitrary (culturally bound) that association might be.
As Rozin notes, few of us (less than one percent) can drink water from a sterile, never-used toilet bowl without feeling disgust. Even thinking about that act triggers mirror neurons that trigger disgust responses. It is even difficult for most people to drink coffee from a cup shaped like a toilet bowl. As Rozin notes, “Disgust evolves culturally and develops from a system to protect the body from harm to a system to protect the soul from harm.”[3] The hallal-haram disjunction in all variants of Islam is a superlative example of a body-protection system being narrated into a soul-protection system. Islamic identity narratives activate an inborn, evolutionarily inherited disgust-detection system, link that system to specific symbols of haram like homosexuals in a nightclub, effectively transforming biological disgust into a hallal-haram antagonism that serves as an Islamic identity-protection system.
What begins as a relatively simple set of dietary rules is narrated by normative Islamic leaders in a Mosque community into a complex set of sumptuary laws that regulate the entire life of an individual, determining what an adherent wears, what and where and how he reads, and with whom and where and when he affiliates with other human beings. Normative Islamic teaching in Europe, in America, worldwide constructs the primal disgust of communal members within a combatively exclusive hallal-haram dichotomy. Even within non-violent Islam, what begins as a body-protection system becomes an identity-protection system. Any thing, group, person, sets of beliefs, or behaviors that normative Islamic authorities symbolize as haram will provoke an involuntary visceral response of disgust Muslims who have become captivated by this identity-forming narrative. That’s what the psychology of disgust teaches us.
What specifically gets perceived as a haram contaminant of the identity of the believer is determined by the disgust symbolism of a Muslim’s local Islamic community. Whether or not a narrative captive’s disgust-detection program becomes a total and totalising motivational system to which he subjugates his entire identity and lifestyle largely depends on how the specific haram projections and teachings of his respective Islamic community. Mateen’s Mullah narrated symbols of disgust/haram directly onto homosexuals. This disgust/haram honor/shame psycho-drama is precisely where the FBI should be focusing its attention, in order to generate insights intelligently useful to developing counter-radicalization operations. Instead, they use these psycho-dynamic insights to activate extremist proclivities in their targets.
To iterate, because American and European Muslims are effectively surrounded by an unselfconsciously profane society that abounds in identity possibilities, European and American Muslims must keep their disgust-detection system hyper-sensitive to contaminants from Kuffir culture. By pushing Kuffir contaminants to the outer parameter of their Islamic identity, they can eliminate the cognitive torments that might arise from contact with competing sources of identity formation, Kuffir women, the plays of William Shakespeare, the music of Bach, the paintings of William Turner, or theo-political debates with Jews, Christians, or atheists, or gay relationships.
Terrorism expert, Dina al Raffie describes this process, “Coupled with steady demonization of other social identities (for example, Britishness), Muslims are steadily radicalised as religious frameworks – perceived and real – belonging to their Islamic social identity become dominant frames of reference in their daily interactions.” (90-91).”[4] My own bio-cognitive analysis of the social-identity dynamics of Islamic extremists reveals that the cultural mechanics of the “demonization” process derive PRIMARILY from disgust/haram plots, which are akin to “honor/shame” identity narratives.
Plotted within a hallal-haram antagonism, a Muslim is made empoweringly dependent on his own ability to keep his Islamic identity un-contaminated. This is the secret psycho-social strength of the disgust/haram construct: identity control. What makes the hallal-haram construct especially adaptive (and therefore “sticky”) in today’s European or American Muslim enclave is that it gives adherents a great deal of personal control over the maintenance of their Islamic identity. That identity control, or illusion of control, creates a powerful sense of self-esteem.
Crudely put, the hallal-haram construct empowers an American Muslim, like Mateen, to be his own identity cop. The power of identity self-policing equates to self-esteem in a broader European or American society in which avenues to consumerist-based self-esteem may be obstructed. Exploiting the bio-cognitive resources of digust, the hallal/haram narrative gives the narrative captive a strong feeling of control over environmental contingency (luck) and a strong feeling of successful agency, empowering the European Muslim to stave off what Martin Seligman calls learned helplessness. [5]
For example, securing gainful, meaningful employment in today’s Muslim enclaves is largely dependent on luck. Unemployment, a primary trigger for the loss of self-esteem in Western society, largely remains outside of the volitional sphere of many Muslims today. Because social identity (and self esteem) in secular American society largely equates to what you consume, you effectively do not have a social identity if you do not have gainful employment. Therefore, social identity and self-esteem fall outside the volitional sphere of many American Muslims.[6]
The hallal-haram antagonism performs the psychosocial task of making luck in identity formation and maintenance irrelevant, thereby granting identity control and bolstering self-esteem. Within a broader environment of under- or non-employment, the survival value (what makes it attractive to adherents) of the hallal-haram construct increases, because it serves as an identity-preserving system for warding off low-esteem, yet another psycho-social strength of the hallal–haram construct.
All variants of normative Islam activate the primal disgust programs of adherents by constructing the religious identity of followers within a hallal-haram antagonism. However, specifically American Muslim identity narratives, like that of Mateen’s Mullah, keep adherents hyper-sensitive to the threat of identity contaminants, which abound in Kuffir society and promiscuously infiltrate the Muslim enclave. Moreover, the disgust-detection program compels loyalty among narrative captives when it provides a sense of identity control and fosters self-esteem–pride in being an uncontaminated Muslim.
Analysing disgust and identity formation, Martha Nussbaum has noted,
And even in contemporary terms, it appears that a firm and overgeneral bounding off of the self from the disgusting serves to reassure the self about its own solidity and power. [7]
Thus, American Muslims will remain committed to the hallal/haram construct precisely because it’s a cognitive balancer that makes narrative captives (enclave Muslims) feel like they have personal control over the development and maintenance of their Islamic identity within a broader liquid haram society in which they have little or no control over their social identity, self-esteem, or group attitudes.
Analysing hallal-haram as a narrative activator of the disgust-detection motivational system should enable FBI counter-terrorism experts to perceive how a distinctly American Islamic identity is formed: Along a plotline that moves from disgust activation to identity border policing (identity control) to self-esteem to group identification. As an adherent begins to externalize the hallal-haram distinction, after his disgust-detection system has been activated and is vigilantly on-the-lookout for haram toxicants, he is prepared for further identity formation, to strengthen his Islamic identity. Demonization of non-hallal, non-Islamic identities is nearly inevitable within the field of haram symbols, which represents a powerful psychological resource awaiting the exploitation of extremist recruiters.[8] Mateen’s wife, his Mullah, and the FBI ruthlessly exploited this psycho-symbolic dynamic.
I wonder if the FBI’s trolls gave further “plotting” to Mateen’s Islamic social identity by activating his pre-adaptation of altruism (a group-protection motivational system). Did they titillate him with the contemplation of “hero plots,” such as martyr and sword narratives, that channelled altruistic instincts into protecting his hallal community from that which is haram, Kuffir contaminants? Did the FBI trolls push Mateen’s Islamic identity from disgust-detection to altruism/”group protection?” This is where non-violent, enclave-level Islamic identity narratives make adherents especially vulnerable to the recruitment ploys of extremists, priming them both for disgust reactions and for altruistic, heroic community “cleansing,” i.e., terrorism. And the FBI trolls certainly know this socio-cultural fact: “Ground floor” Islamic identity narratives prime adherents to extend identity maintenance from an individual level of self-policing in Dar al-Haram up and out to a social level of combating “haram” in Dar al-Harb.[9]
For example, ISIL masternarratives effectively exploit that vulnerability by hacking into disgust programs already activated in most Muslims by their formative, normative Islamic community. ISIL communicators seek to activate or reactivate the same disgust-detection system in potential recruits that their primary communal MN had activated. But ISIL recruitment rhetoric gains access to primal disgust through the psychic doorway of self-esteem. They reverse the traditional, normative Islamic social-identity-formation plotline.
Most Western ISIL recruits are educated by and semi-integrated into their “host” cultures. They have had frequent contact with haram pollutants. Typically, recruits have arrived at or are beginning to arrive at an “identity crisis” marked by vague feelings of self-disgust, a common psychological denominator among ISIL’s European recruits. The self-esteem of, say, an under-employed, but highly literate post-university student of Muslim background living in Wuppertal, Germany is likely to be very low, especially where joblessness and cultural isolation from mainstream culture are inordinately high, and especially if he has grown lax about keeping himself unpolluted by Kuffir toxicants.
To iterate, even normative Islamic MNs typically seek to eliminate “ambiguity and uncertainty from individual souls in society.”[10] Normative Islamic discourse exploits the crises in individual souls that is created by what the sociologist Zygmunt calls “liquid life.” Normative Islam offers something solid to clot up the bleeding soul of the liquid Muslim who “flows through life like a perpetual traveller, changing locations, jobs, partners, values and even sexual and political orientation.”[11] Islamic narrative masters in Europe and America, like Mateen’s Mullah, know full well that “liquid life is typified by ceaseless change, uncertainty, and lack of trust in general.”[12] And they know that Islamic identity becomes a means by which the “losers” in liquid life can build an alternative “successful” identity. These “losers” do not have the ability to participate in Western “freedom,” the freedom to construct your identity through styles of consumption and political participation that confer dignity, a social identity. The FBI trolls also know that psycho-cultural fact.
Further applying Zygmunt’s terms, normative Islamic identity narratives offer Muslims the freedom to construct a counter-identity. Even better, Islamic identity narratives transform the socially marginalized individual’s greatest weakness into his greatest strength. Now, instead of feeling “stripped of human dignity and feeling humiliated…and watching with a mixture of envy and resentment the consumer revelry”[13] of the winners of liquid modernity, his active rejection of modernity and other, haram identity possibilities is placed within the sphere of his own volition. [14] His position as an outsider living within the haram realm of Kuffir now becomes a psychic asset, a master-narrative resource highly vulnerable to exploitation by an extremist recruitment narrative or an FBI troll.
Awash in liquid haram but still encumbered by impulses to keep his Islamic identity hygienic — that is, captive to his formative Islamic MN — this Muslim living in what amounts to an Islamic ghetto in the middle of Europe starts to re-experience the torments of his evolutionary cognitive inheritance.[15] This Muslim is, to swipe a pulpit phrase from another theological system, backslidden. To echo Fritz Heider, they are suffering from cognitive imbalance. To use the symbolism of their own MNs, they are contaminated with haram and require purification.
To sum up, both non-violent and violent Islamic discourse are responses to an identity crises that is caused by the “filthy” facts of liquid Kuffir modernity. Responding to social-identity competition (modern pluralism) as if the competition itself were a haram contaminant, Islamic narrative masters seek to establish the uncontaminated hallal identity of the Mosque. When the social realm is structured upon this antagonistic sub-narrative, it’s but a hop, skip, and jump over to the moral imperative to de-toxify not only oneself but also one’s entire Islamic community (altruistic protection) from Westoxification (Occidentosis)—by any means necessary.[16]
When considered by reference to what we know about the psycho-dynamics of honor/shame and hallal/disgust in Muslim social-identity formation, what must we concluding about the FBI trolling for Muslim extremists? FBI, knowingly or not, are effectively recruiting FOR ISIS. In order to be effective at “luring” a potential ISIS asset out in the open, they have to tap into and activate an Islamic symbolism already implanted in the target, or, in some (too many) cases, they have to implant and activate that psycho-symbolism themselves. Of course, this IS entrapment. But it’s also worse than entrapment, it’s recruitment, for ISIS.
From Dr. Baghdad’s standpoint, the FBI have done his work for him. When fifty American Kuffir are struck down by a Muslim, an American-born Muslim, in their “den of western decadence,” ISIS win yet another PR battle at the global level. In response to Orlando, J. Edgar Hoover must be in his grave turning over in his mother’s dresses.
[1] See Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman’s “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion“ in Personality and Social Psychology Review 5, 2001; also, Rozin and P. Fallon’s A Perspective on Disgust” in Psychological Review (94, 1987) as well as Rozin and R. Mandell’s “Family Resemblance in Attitudes to Foods” in Developmental Psychology(20, 1984).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] See Raffie’s “Social Identity Theory For Investigating Islamic Extremism in the Diaspora” in Journal of Strategic Security (Winter, 2013, Vol 6, n. 4).
[5] I owe these psychological insights to many long conversations with Dr. Jonathan Shay, who helped me understand the full implications of “learned helplessness” to social-identity de-formation. See Abramson, Garber, and Seligman’s classic study, “Learned Helplessness in Humans: An Attributional Anaylsis” in Human Helplessness: Theory and Applications (New York: Academic Press, 1980). For an introductory overview of Seligman’s cognitive theory of human helplessness as it relates to social-identity formation, see Martha Nussbaum’s extensive discussion of in the chapter, “The Resurgence of Intentionality: Seligman, Lazarus, Ortony, Oately” in Upheavals of Thought, see below.
[6] For a sociological examination of how luck/chance (environmental contingency) determines social-identity formation in modern society, see Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
[7] For an exhaustive analysis of how both individual and social identities get constructed out of the bio-cognitive resources of disgust, see Martha Nussbaum’s Upheaval’s of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[8] Islamic cyberactivists have already developed internet search engines whose algorithms distinguish between hallal and haram. These engines are programmed to exclude “haram” from search results. They are collectively known as Hallal Verified Engines (HVE), such as Hallalgoogling and I’m Hallal. We need field studies of who hallalgoogles and how HVE’s globalize Islamic social identity, especially among European Muslim demographics. How are HVE’s influencing normative Islam, globally?
[9] For an anthropological examination of hallal in a global context, see J Fisher’s The Halal Frontier: Muslim Consumers in Global Market (New York: Palgrave, 2011). For an updated examination of the economic implications of halal identity to global markets, see Halal Matters: Islam, Politics, and Markets in Global Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2015). Neither work investigates the centrality of hallal to Muslim social identity; they merely assume it as the enabling premise of their arguments.
[10] See Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Jonathan Matusitz, Symbolism in Terrorism: Motivation, Communication, and Behavior (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).
[16] For detailed examinations of the violence potential of our disgust motivational system, see W.I. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Paul Rozin, “Digust: The Body and Soul of Emotion” in Power’s (ed) Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1999); A.S. David et al, “Disgust—the Forgotten emotion of psychiatry” British Journal of Psychology, 1998). I owe all of theses titles to Paul Ekman, see Emotions Revealed (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003).
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