#61 — The Power of Belief
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Summary
Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has written many works of nonfiction, including a book that won the Pulitzer Prize, Going Clear. His most recent book is The Terror Years, which is a compilation of all his writing on al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that he did for the New Yorker. He also writes plays and is a screenwriter and a playwright. In this episode, we discuss the power of belief, and the role of religion in shaping our ideas, and how it intersects with a variety of other ideas, including those that have become ascendant in some context or another, like Jonestown, a cult-like phenomenon that took place in the late 19th century in Guyana, Guyana. He is also the author of the book Remembering Satan: The Looming Tower, which won a Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a documentary that was made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Spacey, Amy Poehler, and Martin Scorsese, among other things. He is a writer, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, and he is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the Los Angeles Times, as well as a frequent contributor to The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. He has a wife, a daughter, a son, and a daughter-in-law, who is also a writer and a friend. . This episode was produced by Sam Harris and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser, and produced by Rachel Ward, and is edited by David Fincher, who also writes for The Huffington Post and The Atlantic, and The Weekly Standard, and has a blog called The Making Sense. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron of the Making Sense Podcast by clicking the link below. The podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our sponsorships, which helps us make sense of what we re doing here. We don t run ads on the podcast. We re made possible by the support we're doing here, and we re making sense of it. Thanks to you, listener support is much appreciated, and it helps us improve our lives, and helps us create a better listening experience for you, the listener gets a better sense of the world, too. We can t do more of this, more of it, too, and more like it, we can help us build a better world, more listening experience, more like that.
Transcript
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Lawrence is a journalist and an author and a screenwriter and a playwright.
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He is very well known as a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and he has written
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many works of nonfiction, a book called Remembering Satan, The Looming Tower, for which he won
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the Pulitzer Prize, Going Clear, the revelatory work about Scientology that was made into a
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And his most recent book is The Terror Years, which is a compilation of all his writing on
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al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that he did for The New Yorker.
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So needless to say, our interests on a variety of topics here overlap.
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I've never gotten a chance to speak with him before, so it was great to have an excuse to
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That's one of the amazing things about having this podcast as a forum.
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I can send someone I admire an email, I ask them if they want to have a conversation,
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So without further ado, I introduce you to the great Lawrence Wright.
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So, I will have introduced you before we got on here, but tell people how you describe
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Do you think of yourself as a journalist first, or are you an author more generally?
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I write, in addition to journalism, I write plays and movies, and I've written a novel.
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Yeah, well, that's actually one of the things I most admire about what you're doing.
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I'm a huge fan of your work, but the quality of the work aside, I love the way you use so
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many different platforms to communicate your ideas.
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It often starts with a New Yorker article, but your articles often become books, and some
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of these books become documentaries, and one became a stage play and then became a documentary.
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And so, it's very creative, and you're like the king of media at this point.
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But mainly, I think the hardest thing as a writer is finding the ideas that you want to
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And there's such a paucity of ideas that you want to devote your life to.
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And so, when I hit on something that I'm really intrigued by, then I sometimes try to work
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Well, is there a primary concern or set of ideas that unifies all of your work?
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How do you decide what sorts of topics to address?
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You know, it's very intuitive, but now that I'm older, I look back and I see that I've
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had a lifelong interest in religion and why people believe one thing rather than another.
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It seems to be a thread that goes through much of my work.
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It seems to me that you and I share a common interest in the power of belief, and in particular,
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the power of bad beliefs, you know, bad ideas that become ascendant in some context or another.
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And we'll get into specifically these different topics, but you spend a lot of time thinking
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about Islamic extremism and Scientology and other cult-like phenomenon like Jonestown.
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And what's interesting to me, and this has been a point of frustration, but it's something
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I really admire about how you've treated these topics, is that many people actually don't
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And it's very common to meet people who think that good people will do good things and bad
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people will do bad things, and that ideology is more or less always just a pretext for good
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and bad people to do whatever they were going to do anyway.
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But one of the most refreshing things about your discussion of these aberrant belief systems
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is that you make it clear how much beliefs matter and that bad beliefs can get even very
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I would limit that mainly to, at least in our era, to religious beliefs.
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I think the notion that beliefs are discountable mainly comes from observing the hypocrisy of political
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figures and people who hold strong political views but then act completely differently in
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Whereas what intrigued me as a journalist, religion has very little status in the world of journalism.
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It's seen as like covering cooking or something like that in your daily newspaper.
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You know, it's a religion beat would be off in the back section.
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But I observe somewhere along the line that people can have very strong political views
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But people who have strong religious views, that tends to determine their behavior in a very
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Well, so let's get into, first I'll name the books.
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There's really three books I want to focus on here.
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The Looming Tower, which is your amazing book about Al-Qaeda.
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And we could also throw in here the stage play and documentary, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, which
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is also fascinating and connected to that book.
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And then you have your most recent book, The Terror Years, which again is also on the same
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And then there's Going Clear, which is your book and the subsequent documentary on Scientology.
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And if we have time, I'd like to touch on your book, Remembering Satan, because that is
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Now, you were on this topic, at least to some degree, before most people were aware of
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these issues, because you wrote this film, The Siege, which came out in 1998, which depicts
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jihadist terrorism in New York, and then kind of the attendant infringements of civil liberties
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Do you remember at what point you were aware of jihadism as a global issue and not just a
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local problem that was narrowly focused on Israel?
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Well, you know, I had lived in Egypt as a young man, and I was there when Nasser died
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And one of Sadat, who succeeded him, one of his first actions was to let the Muslim brothers
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And, you know, one of our professors had a brother who got out.
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And I was aware, you know, this stirring inside Islam, I suppose, before a lot of other Western
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people were, and then when I was working on The Siege, this is in the middle 90s, and, you
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know, Egypt was in tumult at the time, but my producer had asked me to write a movie about
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a woman in the CIA, and that was the whole idea.
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It wasn't really, it was just a notion, really.
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And I was trying to think about, well, this Cold War is over, who is the enemy?
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And finally, I realized that the CIA did have a real-life antagonist, and it was the FBI.
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And what they were struggling over was who was going to control terrorism in the United
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Denzel Washington played the FBI chief, and Annette Bening was a CIA woman that had, you
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And as I began researching that, I turned up the information about bin Laden and about,
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you know, of course, there was Omar Abdul Rahman, who was known as the blind sheikh, who had a
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plan afoot to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel and the Statue of Liberty.
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And, you know, there were a lot of terrorist plots that were going around at the time.
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And then the movie, the trailers in the movie appeared in August of 98.
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And that, of course, was the same month that the American embassies in East Africa were blown
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There was another bombing that same month in Cape Town, South Africa, that people don't
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And it was an Islamist, a radical Islamist group claimed credit for blaming the trailers
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that were for the movie, The Siege, as their provocation.
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And the reason they struck Planet Hollywood is that Bruce Willis, one of the co-stars of
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So, you know, it was a real shock to me because two people were killed and a little girl lost
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And all of this came about because I had written this movie.
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So I was affected by terrorism, I guess, earlier than most Americans.
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I think you talk about that, at least in my trip to Al-Qaeda.
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And that's always been why I have resisted offers to translate some of my more hard-hitting
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criticisms of Islam into the relevant languages.
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Because I remember Salman Rushdie's experience of, you know, apart from his experience of
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having to go into hiding, just his experience of finding out that his translators and foreign
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Did you feel there would have been very little basis, or at least most people wouldn't have
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formed an expectation that anything like that would happen in response to a film like
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Were you just blindsided by it, or did you feel...
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Of course, now, you know, at the same time, when the movie came out, there were protests.
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Muslims were angry at being depicted as terrorists.
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They thought that was a stereotype of Hollywood.
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It was a big box office failure until 9-11, when it was the most rented movie in America.
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Where were you on 9-11, and what were you working on?
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At that time, I was having breakfast with a group.
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Every Tuesday morning, we'd get together and speak Spanish.
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And at the time, I was planning to get out of journalism.
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I had the idea that I'd become a movie director.
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And, you know, I realized I was going to get back on the fire truck.
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And in all the work you have done since on jihadism, what would you say you've learned about it?
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Well, I've learned, for one thing, that belief is very powerful in affecting even violent behavior.
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But one of the things that intrigued me about the origins of this movement, especially in Egypt, is that a lot of the people who went into al-Jihad, which was the Egyptian organization, and then later al-Qaeda, weren't really very religious.
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You'd have to understand that living in Arab countries, most Arab countries at the time, was a very stifling experience.
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And the opportunities for expression are very few.
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And there's not very much alternative to either being a member of the government, a bureaucrat, you know, or a member of the army.
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And then there's a very diminished private sector.
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And then if you want to have any kind of alternative expression, you go to the mosque.
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So there were people that I think were drawn into this movement, and some of them were, you know, idealists.
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They're the kind of people that you could build a country on in other respects, but they were, you know, their dreams had been kind of perverted and drawn into these radical expressions of Islam.
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One of the problems in the Arab world is there's so few spiritual choices.
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And so what happened in Egypt was that young men who were not originally very pious would be drawn into these kind of radical groups.
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They were wanting to affect some kind of change in their country, but in the same time, they underwent changes themselves.
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And they became radicalized by the more strenuous views of Islam.
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And they began to use those views to justify the actions that they were taking.
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Yeah, I want to drill down a little bit on what you just said there, that they were not very religious.
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Because I think people can misunderstand what you're saying, or perhaps you and I disagree about the implications of what you're saying.
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Because it's true that many people don't come from madrasas, many people don't show any signs of religiosity, much less extreme religiosity in their earlier life.
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But the people who become suicide bombers, at the point they become committed, really do believe what they say they believe.
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I mean, the beliefs are operative at that point.
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And the history of how they got to that point is an interesting one.
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And I mean, you can have, you know, kids in Orange County becoming radicalized.
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But once they are actually radicalized, they do share this belief system.
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And so it's a lot of people take, I think, a false comfort in looking at the biographies of some of these people.
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And they say, well, this person didn't come out of a madrasa, this person went to the London School of Economics.
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But for the person who has an awakening experience of some kind, that gets channeled into Salafi-style Islam,
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and they take it all the way into the end zone of wanting to get into paradise, you know, right now.
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However secular they had seemed up until a year ago or 15 minutes ago, at a certain point,
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what gets them to actually act is this worldview that has gotten communicated to them somehow.
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Do you think there's a secular route to martyrdom that is equally well-subscribed in this world?
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Well, if you look at, you know, the world that we're talking about now, the radical Islam,
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there are Islamists who become radicalized, and there are radicals who become Islamized.
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You know, you can come from both of those directions and arrive at the same point.
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And then you have people like Ramzi Yusuf, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, not at all religious.
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He didn't really express them himself, but he used religious compatriots,
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and, you know, he worked with Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheikh.
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But he was not at all religious himself, and there are people like that.
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But, you know, the world of suicide bombers inside, you know, is a fairly small one.
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I guess, I mean, my issue is, I mean, I certainly don't doubt that there are some people who wage war against the West,
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in some sense, under the banner of Islam without sincerely believing all of its precepts.
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I saw that you had interviewed my friend and collaborator, Majid Nawaz, which I thought I had forgotten.
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I had seen my trip to Al-Qaeda some years ago when it, I think, first came out,
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and then watched it again in anticipation of this conversation, and then was surprised.
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I didn't know Majid when I had first seen it, obviously, because I had no recollection he was in there.
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So Majid is, when he was an Islamist, was not a budding suicide bomber.
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I mean, so there are different points of commitment on that spectrum of being organized under this banner.
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But for me, the most toxic part of the center of the bullseye here for the role of belief is,
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in particular, this sincere belief in martyrdom.
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Because it seems to me this has two consequences.
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It allows people to actually love death more than we love life.
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That becomes a sincere statement of just psychological fact.
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And therefore, to seek death, in this, they become really undeterrable.
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And you describe people like this in the Looming Tower, and particularly the early Al-Qaeda members
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who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, who were taking absolutely no steps to protect their own lives.
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And when queried about this, they said, yeah, the whole point is to get killed here, right?
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But the other thing is that it allows people, whether they're suicide bombers or not,
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Because really, by this worldview, nothing can go wrong.
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The infidels will go to hell where they belong.
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And you can blow yourself up in a crowd of children,
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and you have literally done nothing wrong, because there's no conceivable outcome that is a bad outcome,
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given that God is overseeing all this, and everyone gets what they deserve in the end anyway.
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To some extent, I think that we have people that are acting out of beliefs
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that are giving them a moral cover for actions that one can't otherwise understand.
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But there are also psychopaths in this as well.
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And I think that a lot of the phenomenon of ISIS, you know, is fed by that.
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I mean, people are excited by the carnage, and they flock to it.
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And then on the way, they pick up these beliefs, almost like garments.
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You know, a lot of the people that you see, you know,
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they don't have this extremist religious background before they get there.
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And I don't know how seriously – we're talking about there's not a single unified theory
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for why all these people arrive at the same place.
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There are many different paths to it and different personalities
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that are animated by different philosophies and longings and dysfunctions.
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You know, there's an interesting theory about –
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Stefan Hertog wrote a book called Engineers of Jihad.
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And he talked about the number of people who come into jihad from a technical,
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and even speculates that some of them are on the autism spectrum.
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you know, if you have the whole universe of people
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who are dedicating their lives to Islamic jihad,
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are going to be those kinds of engineering people
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who can use – well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a perfect example,
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But he was able to use people who had these beliefs
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to force – you know, like the hijackers of 9-11
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Yeah, I was struck in watching my trip to al-Qaeda again
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because I had first seen it before anyone had even heard of ISIS, I believe.
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from some of the stated goals of al-Qaeda at that point.
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And it was interesting to see how much ISIS had achieved those goals.
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They seemed to be in the process of losing those gains.
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But I had forgotten how explicit al-Qaeda's goal was
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to form a caliphate in Iraq and to use it as a basis
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and to draw us into – further into a quagmire there.
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and the crazy sectarian sadism that got expressed there,
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How do you view ISIS as being the same or different from al-Qaeda at this point?
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They want Islam to be the only superpower in the world.
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And they feel resentful that it has been put on the back shelf in the way.
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was something that bin Laden had in mind as a distant goal
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because, first of all, you would have to persuade Muslims
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that this is something they were going to have to implement eventually.
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he had a yin to create a civil war inside Islam,
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which he succeeded in doing by waging war on the Shiites.
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He wanted to drive the West out of Arab and Muslim lands
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and so that it could be thoroughly Islamized according to the –
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But – and then eventually, you know, you would create a caliphate.
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And Zarqawi had a – you know, just a different battle plan.
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that bin Laden and Zawahiri and the other leaders of al-Qaeda
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And this was exciting to a lot of young Muslims
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and believed in the goals that Zarqawi was espousing.
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Would you draw a line between someone like him and bin Laden
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You know, I – when I was working on the Looming Tower,
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an Egyptian organization with a Saudi head on it.
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And I realized that there was actually another training camp
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in Afghanistan at the same time bin Laden was running his.
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And he actually got money, support from bin Laden,
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although he was not formally a member of al-Qaeda at the time.
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But that was the group that went into Iraq after we invaded
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He was an international businessman, you know, college-educated,
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And, you know, sort of the – I compared him –
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I described him as Saudi Arabia's first celebrity.
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And, you know, he had a lot of – not charisma,
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And he was in some ways kind of delicate in his mannerisms and so on.
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And it was in prison that he became close to the Sheikh Mahdizi,
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who was a very influential jihadist philosopher.
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And I think, you know, he was already radical, psychopathic,
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and then in some ways emboldened by this Islamist philosophy
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that gave him a warrant to act out the way that I think
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suddenly he had absolute divine permission to do so.
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And there was something awe-inspiring about the way that he waged
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And for people that are, you know, drawn to conflict,
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I, you know, I imagine you're familiar with the Freud's term,
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I think that that's really fascinating where religion is concerned
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people that are very, very similar in most respects
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because of very small differences between the two of them.
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And the Sunnis and the Shiites are a perfect example of that.
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But for Zarqawi and many people who followed him,
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the small historical differences and the stylistic differences
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That gives me an opportunity to point out something
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that I often point out when I'm talking about Islam
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and where everything I say is more or less implicitly
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or explicitly in criticism of the doctrine here
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who doesn't want terrorism in his movie theaters.
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with this particular form of sectarian conflict.
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And, you know, now we're witnessing very likely Europe
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break apart in part as a result of this conflict
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in Syria and Iraq and the attendant migrant crisis,
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But tell me about Ayman al-Zawahiri in this context.
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I mean, so how do you view him as a personality
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Well, he was a man of science, which is interesting.
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there was not a conversion experience for either man.
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I think the experience of when Zawahiri went off
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Just think about the audacity of this young man.
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Yeah, I mean, it's always intriguing to me, Sam,