Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims' relationships with others—whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves.
So the real culprit is possibly a poisonous cocktail of Islamism and western cultural artefacts. How can this be? Let's recall the point of the 'medium is the message', and notice that any cultural artefact [and for these purposes gyms are cultural artefacts] entails and priviledges, often subliminally, certain views of the world or approaches to it or even uses of it. And this is where I think that Brendon O'Neill's article scores a possible hit.
Today's gym culture seems like the perfect vehicle for nurturing the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission. If some of these attackers viewed their own bodies as pure instruments, and everyone else as wasteful and deserving of punishment, they could just as well have come to that conclusion through absorbing the healthy-living agenda of the gym as by reading the Quran. At the gym, Atta, Khan, and the others could focus on perfecting the self, the body, as a pure and righteous thing—and hone their disdain for others.
It is worth taking the implications a bit further too. The popularity of 'body beautiful' products and services [and gyms are one such] is noteworthy enough to remind us that it represents a cultural mythology. Now link that with the fact that such things often include or connote spiritual practices or values ... It's not hard to come up with examples.
Intriguing, don't you think?
Do gyms breed terrorists? By Brendan O'Neill:
Filed in: Islam, terrorism, gym, culture, fitness
2 comments:
Andii
There are a couple of different tangents that arise from the material you discuss here.
The first is that the gym has been examined sociologically and phenomenologically for any trappings of a quasi-religious culture. William Hoverd is a New Zealander who in 2005 published his dissertation "Working Out My Salvation" (via http://www.meyer-meyer-sports.com/). Hoverd alludes to religious metaphors of those who have "the sin obesity" and who now work out to "atone" for dietary sins. He discusses many other such metaphors. Hoverd is himself a consumer of the gym and he undertook a study of fellow consumers. Basically though Hoverd did not explore the topic in association with terorist consumers of gym culture.
The other point, which does impinge on Brendon O'Neill's thesis, is that to be consistent one would have to show that all Islamized acts of terrorism reflect the narcissist/loathing he posits.
A few things seem to mitgate O'Neill's thesis.
One is that if you walk in the sandals of suicide-bombers we arrive at a key Shi'ite ideal: martyrdom for faith. The original suicide-bombers who began these kinds of acts arose from Iran (under Khomeini's regime) and then in Lebanon. Among the Shi'ites martyrdom goes to the heart of their faith with the death of the Caliph Ali, and a heritage of other martyrs down the centuries.
The Shi'ite approach on martyrdom has curiously morphed into recent Sunni contexts. The martyrdom ethos has no connection inside the Islamic world then with gym culture.
What also tends to work against this is that not all terrorists are male. In the Middle Eastern settings quite a few young slamic women have chosen martrydom by detonating body-bombs. These women are the antithesis of the obsessive female Barbie-doll figure. Indeed in several of these cultural settings you would be hard pressed to locate anything remotely approximating a gym.
If we brought into consideration the recent bombings in Bali and the attack on the Australian embassy in Djakarta, those involved who have been apprehended and tried and condemned to death are eager to die because they become martyrs for faith in their own eyes and those who empathise with their cause. The Bali bombers are linked to the militant group JI which trains its members in para-military activities. In other words no gymnasiums, but rather rugged bush-land training camps.
There is a gaoled terrorist currently held in France who came to Sydney a few years back with, it is alleged, the intention of activating plans for attacks here. He lived directly opposite where my sister lived and he had no evident affiliation with the gym culture.
Perhaps the western contexts where bombers "hung out" in gyms has had the advantage of accessibility for the regimen of physical fitness that would otherwise be obtained in a para-military camp setting. Recall that some of the bombers came to Europe and North America, while the Londoners were British-born and bred. As I understand the matter some of the UK lads did try to gain training in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I'm not sure that the testosterone factor is an adequate explanation especially since young Islamic women have also been suicide bombers.
Thanks for the tip on Hoverd -sounds useful and the kind of thing I'd enjoy.
I'm not sure that O'Neill's thesis requires the all-or-nothing treatment you give it. It seems to me that it could be one factor among many, at least in a weakened form that I think I was driving towards in the posting. I'm not sure either that he is proposing anything quite as strong as "narcissist/loathing". I could be wrong, but it didn't read as strongly as that to me.
On the other hand, the shi'ite connection you make does need more evidence, I think, simply because it is alien, really, to the sunni psyche. But that's not a really serious issue.
I think that for O'Neill's thesis to succeed, all that is needed is for some bombers, particularly west-situated ones to be involved in gym-culture. The point would be, that this could be a factor for some in making them more receptive to the bomber mentality by helping to create a cultural 'soft spot' in the individual psyche which can be exploited by messages of certain kinds.
That said, I think that you are right in highlighting the probability that gyms provide a 'domestic' ersatz paramilitary environment. However, I think that I would say that perhaps the factors that O'Neill identifies at work in the gym 'meme' are also present to some degree in the paramilitary.
I don't recall testosterone being cited in the article. The fact of women in the middle east being recruited, doesn't, I think rule out O'Neill's factors being at work in some west-situated young Muslims.
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