Why're young Malay men enamored by 'JIHAD': No need to achieve in life, fight & you'll die a MARTYR?

Some of you might have seen the video on YouTube: around ten young men at the back of a lorry, dressed in camouflage uniforms with beards, assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

They were gawking at a rumbling tank, and were hyped that they were finally being shipped to the front-lines, like giddy kids on a school trip... glad to be out of class even if only for a day.

“All of us will be martyrs ... Our friends are already heading to fight. They are not afraid and will not quiver,” said the one holding the camera, in northern Malaysian accent. His other friends cheered as he spoke, proclaiming themselves “Malayan heroes” and “handsome jihadists.”

Hauntingly, just the day before, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement that they were informed 15 Malaysians had been allegedly killed after participating in terrorist and jihadist activities in Syria.

Together with Shiah-majority Iraq, Syria is being torn apart by strife thanks to the occupation of Sunni militant group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and other similar militant groups carving out the territory.

Did the 15, if the news is indeed true, include the men seen in the video? We may never know.

Azahari Husin, the technical mastermind behind the 2002 Bali bombing which killed over 200 people, was a Malay.

So was Noordin Mohammad Top, the explosive expert believed to be responsible for at least four bombings in Indonesia, including the 2005 Bali bombings which killed over 20 people.

In the Global Peace Index 2014 released last week, increased terrorist activities caused Malaysia to drop four places in the ranking to 33rd spot from 29th last year and 20th in 2012.

We are also ostensibly supportive of Muslim separatist movements in southern Thailand and southern Philippines.

When I try to understand what could have driven these men to willingly volunteer their lives in the service of God, I am almost always reminded of the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, co-written by the controversial evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa.

The book itself has since received bad reviews for its political incorrectness, and Kanazawa himself has been branded a racist for several of his ideas, some published in the book.

It was nonetheless an amusing read, and in it Kanazawa blamed the involvement of Muslims in suicide bombings to polygamy.

According to Kanazawa, in a Muslim society where polygamy is allowed, mathematically the men will have a lesser chance to mate.

Subsequently, young single Muslim men get involved with violent causes because they have little to lose and much to gain by doing so, compared to men who already have wives.

“For young, low-status Muslim men who are excluded from any mating opportunities because of polygyny among older, higher-status men, even such a vague promise in the afterlife begins to be appealing in light of their bleak reproductive prospect on earth,” wrote Kanazawa.

Admittedly, this was slightly prejudicial, as polygamists themselves are not that common among Muslim communities.

Despite that, we cannot discount the fact that martyrdom has been very romanticised, and this is particularly unique to Islam.

The promise of a massive reward in the afterlife for Muslim martyrs is prevalent across Islamic cultures, including the now often-mocked promise of 72 virgins awaiting a martyr mentioned in lesser hadiths.

(On a side note, a popular joke described the promise as a mistranslation of Christian-Aramaic texts used to proselytise Islam to Arabs. The martyrs were actually promised just 72 “raisins”, instead of “virgins.”)

Regardless of the promise of sexual pleasure in the afterlife, martyrdom also has been a recurring measure of a Malay-Muslim man’s conviction.

For example, it is not hard to find detractors of conservative Malay rights or Islamist groups to challenge the latter to actually go and fight in Middle East war zones to prove their mettle.

Martyrdom, or dying for a cause, is seen as the ultimate test and proof of one’s manliness. And what bigger cause is there than Islam’s sovereignty?

Furthermore, joining an armed struggle can offer devout Muslims who are desperate to prove themselves in the eye of God a clear-cut objective.

In a war, there are only the good guys and the bad guys: the ones shouting “Allah is great” at your side are your allies. The ones on the other side — even if they too shout “Allah is great” — are your foes and spilling their blood is permitted, they might be told.

This is in stark comparison to the realities back home. In Malaysia, there are the Muslims, the good guys. But there are also Muslims who they think and act like the bad guys: the “liberal” ones, the ones fighting for the gays, the ones who are into pluralism, the ones who do not want to see hudud implemented.

Similarly, there are the not-so-good guys to them: the infidels and the apostates. But can the non-Muslims be all that bad when they have done no harm and can be so kind, they ask?

In reality, one cannot escape the fires of Hell despite a lifetime of good, due to the sinful world he is living in. With jihad, what you do in life does not really matter, you will die a martyr, and martyrs go to Heaven.

You can see how this can make for a very attractive proposition to young Malay men.

even this is contingent. they have to die in battle, AND not be afraid/cowardly. it isn’t a certainty for them and they know it.

and if allah never liked/favored you in the first place it doesn’t matter at all. and none of them have any idea if allah likes them or not before death.

Islam has a very primitive approach to life. I just saw Dinesh D’Souza’s America, and he points out that the development of a capitalist, entrepreneurial society was the great achievement that shifted wealth-creation from conquest and theft to production and exchange.

Islam, because it fundamentally rejects that (well, among other reasons), is stuck in its 7th century mentality of wealth through conquest. And the wealth goes to the leader of the tribe, so the foot soldiers know they will never get anything and thus have to be given a promise that they’ll get everything they want after they die for the leader. Why they’re stupid enough to believe this is a little hard to understand.

Even for its time Islam was primitive, since Mohammed’s tribe lived by raiding the caravans of people involved in peaceful trade and essentially Islamic countries have been converted into one giant caravan raiding tribe. Some of them are beginning to come out of it, but the return of hard-core Islam will take care of that.

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