Why do Westerners join terrorist movements like ISIS (Islamic State/Daesh)?

The story of Michael Muhammad Knight, a former ISIS fighter.

• This text is a translation of the article originally written here by Michael Muhammad Knight on 03/09/2014.

The State Islamist has recently released another horrific video showing yet another beheading, once again perpetuated by a jihadist with Western roots. As happens frequently, I have received messages asking for an explanation.

I am the jihadist who never became a jihadist.

I was one step away from joining ISIS.

Twenty years ago I left my Catholic high school in upstate New York to study at a Saudi-funded madrassa in Pakistan. As a recent convert, I had the opportunity to live in a mosque and study the Koran all day long..

This happened in the mid-1990s, during the escalation of violence between Chechen resistance militiamen and Russian military forces. After class, we would turn on the television and watch broadcasts from there full of suffering and pain. The videos were terrible. So terrible that I soon caught myself thinking about abandoning my religious upbringing to pick up a gun and fight for the freedom of Chechnya.

It wasn't a verse I read in our Koran study circles that sparked my desire to fight, but my American values. I had grown up in the Reagan eighties. I learned from the G.I. Joe cartoons to (according to the lyrics of their theme song) "fight for freedom, wherever it's in danger." I embraced the idea that individuals have the right - and the duty - to intervene anywhere on the planet where there are perceived threats to freedom, justice or equality.

For me, wanting to go to Chechnya was not reducible to my being a Muslim or "hating the West". This may be hard to believe, but I thought of the war in terms of compassion. Like many Americans who enlist in the military out of love for their country, I longed to fight the war against the West, I longed to fight oppression and protect the safety and dignity of others.. I thought this world looked bad. I put my faith in somehow magical solutions and claimed that the world could be fixed through a renewal of authentic Islam and a truly Islamic system of government. But I also believed that the struggle for justice was worth more than my own life.

In the end, I decided to stay in Islamabad

And the people who came to convince me not to go fight were not the kind of Muslims who might be labeled by the media as liberals, Western-friendly reformers and so on. They were deeply conservative, some would call them "bigots." In the same learning environment where I was taught that my mother, for not being a Muslim, would burn eternally in hell, I was also taught that I would bring greater good to the world as a student than as a soldier, and that I had to fight to be more than a body in a gutter. These traditionalists reminded me of Muhammad's saying about how the ink of schoolchildren is holier than the Blood of martyrs.

The media often draws a clear line separating our categories of "good" and "bad" Muslims. My brothers in Pakistan would have made that division far more complicated than many can imagine. These men, whom I held up as pious superheroes, speaking to me as the legitimate voice of tradition itself, said that violence was not the best I had to offer.

Some guys in my situation seem to have received very different advice.

It's easy to assume that religious people, particularly Muslims, simply do things because their religions demand it. But when I think about the impulse I had at 17 about marching away and becoming a fighter for the cause of the Chechen rebels, I consider more than religious factors. My imagined scenario of liberating Chechnya liberation of Chechnya and turning the country into an Islamic state was a purely American fantasy, grounded in American values and ideals.based on American values and ideals. When I get news about Americans flying across the planet to launch freedom fights that are not their own, I think "what an American action."

And that's the problem

We are raised to love violence and see military conquest as a benevolent act.. The American boy who wants to intervene in another nation's civil war owes his worldview to both American idiosyncrasies and fundamentalist interpretations of scripture.

I grew up in a country that glorifies military sacrifice and sees itself as entitled to rebuild other societies according to its own point of view. I internalized these values even before I thought about religion. Before I even knew what a Muslim was, let alone concepts like "jihad" or "Islamic State," my American life had taught me that this is what brave people do.

• Source: The Washington Post