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Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-first Century

Dangers of the group mentality

Marc Sageman
University of Pennsylvania Press, 200pp, £16.50,

Alan Judd

Wednesday, 23rd January 2008

Alan Judd on Marc Sageman's latest book

Sageman’s achievement was to start with evidence, not theory. He constructed a database of 172 terrorists and looked at what their lives had been, and particularly at whom they knew. This led to his ‘bunch of guys’ theory: essentially, that people become terrorists by joining groups and then influencing each other to commit acts of terrorism. Although religiously inspired, they are neither knowledgeable nor devout; they are certainly not theologians. Although they make politics of religion, most are politically unsophisticated and wilfully blinkered. What moves them is the intoxication of feeling part of what Sageman calls ‘the violent, Islamist born-again social movement’. That, and the intimacy of clandestinity, the self-righteous thrill of seeking justice for others, the heady sense of personal destiny and the illusion of paradise persuade them to act in groups in ways that, individually, most would never do. Unexceptional young men see mass murder as the key to unlocking the frustration of their lives and to achieve lasting significance. In most other ways they are like the rest of us.

In this book Sageman reaffirms the findings of his earlier work, adding the results of his expanded database which now comprises some 500 cases. Noting that, like most political movements, ‘The composition of the al’Qa-eda social movement is solidly middle class’, he identifies three waves of modern terrorism. The first is the old guard, companions-in-arms of bin Laden in 1980s, Afghanistan, still the core of al-Qa’eda, educated, often wealthy Middle Easterners. The second wave joined in the 1990s, seeking to avenge the sufferings of Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the Philippines. They came not only from Muslim countries but from the Muslim diaspora in the West, and trained in Afghanistan until the camps were destroyed after 9/11. Like their predecessors, they became global terrorists, of no fixed abode, guns for hire wherever the cause should need them (although most grew out of it and returned or retired to Europe and social security).

The third wave was the post-Iraqi invasion generation, mostly second-generation Muslim immigrants to the West, usually of lower social class and less well educated than the previous waves. They are not all of this pattern — last year’s London and Glasgow ‘Doctor’s Plot’ bombers had more in common with the second wave — but our home-grown 7 July 2005 bombers were more typical. For all their protestations about doing it in the name of Islam, the third wave is in fact the least religious. According to Sageman’s data, some two-thirds of the first wave came from pious families, about one-third of the second but only a very small minority of the third, with converts being over-represented compared with their numbers in the vastly larger, more peaceable Muslim communities.