Islam is the right religion, but Salafiyyah is the right route. (Nada)
The search for ‘salvation’ revealed another major theme within the conversion narratives of respondents who converted to Salafism: the significance of finding the truth, a quest symbolising not only the long-term demise of Christianity in the West (Hunt 2003:7), but also the lacking relevance of other minority religions, some of which only established themselves in Western society in the latter half of the 20th century (Barker 1995:9). Respondents’ search for meaning in an ‘alternative’ value system revealed the longing for “a sense of both belonging and of identity” that was missing in their lives prior to conversion, and this search could also be viewed as “a significant reaction to the encompassing impersonality of the often-abrasive rationalization of modern life” (Wilson 1992: v). Many perspectives offer useful theories on the symptoms of this greater search for meaning in times of ‘post’ (Lyotard 1979) or ‘liquid’ modernity which Bauman characterises as “fragility, temporariness, vulnerability … [and] uncertainty” (Bauman 2012: viii); more recently, Fukuyama’s (2018) theory on the “modern concept of identity” tries to explain why individuals have “an obsessive focus on the question Who am I, really?” (Fukuyama 2018:25).[1]
However, the deep-seated anxiety and existential angst suffered by respondents from diverse backgrounds is particularly exemplified by Giddens’ (1991/2018) theory on the self in the ‘high’ or ‘late’ modern age. His work—which focuses on the “personality, the psyche, and human nature itself”[2]—provides the “missing psychological link” in trying to understand why respondents felt the desperate need to ‘reclaim’ themselves and establish a “new sense of self, a new sense of identity” at certain points in their lives (Giddens 1991/2018:33). Specifically, Giddens (1991/2018) highlights how it is not always obvious traumas that cause a person to fall into a “cycle of endless self-questioning and introspection” (Tomley et al 2015:142). He argues that when “trust”, a “crucial generic phenomenon of personality development”, is lacking, it can hinder a person achieving ontological security as early as infancy, since “trust established between an infant and its caretakers provides an ‘inoculation’ which screens off potential threats and dangers that even the most mundane activities of day-to-day life contain” (Giddens 1991/2018:3).
The case of Aisha, one of the most socially disadvantaged of my respondents, reflects the deep disquiet connected to an individual’s social context and how it might feed into a state of high ontological insecurity. After Aisha was abandoned as an infant by her mother and placed in a children’s home, the long-term abuse from both her carers and a family member inevitably resulted in severe trust issues. More significantly, this lack of trust caused Aisha to become existentially unsure of herself. According to Giddens, this causes individuals to feel like “strangers in a world where although we were at home … we experience anxiety in becoming aware that we cannot trust our answers to the questions, ‘Who am I?’‘Where do I belong?’ … with every recurrent violation of trust, we become again children unsure of ourselves in an alien world” (Giddens: 1994/1990:66). For Aisha, this spurred a search for the truth and the desperate need to be guided to the people who practise it, who, in her eyes, were the only one’s worthy of being trusted. Aisha’s experience is also a strong example of how “a sense of belonging is a critical need” for individuals that ‘new’ religious movements often meet (Roberts and Yamane 2016:58; McGuire 2002:25), including Salafism:
I got down on the floor and said: “O God, help me. Please guide me to the truth because there are so many people who say they are upon the truth, but they’re horrible.” Then all of a sudden, my Muslim next-door neighbour invited me over. I thought: “Oh, OK.”
This line of reasoning reveals another important point of intersection for respondents across sociocultural boundaries: “personal problems, personal trials and crisis, personal relationships” cannot be separated from “the social landscape of modernity”, since it is through the struggle “with intimate problems” that individuals go through the process of “finding oneself”, which “help[s] to reconstruct the universe of social activity around them” (Giddens 1991/2018:12). As a result, it is possible to see how respondents did indeed appear to suffer the “fundamental psychic problems in circumstances of late modernity”, which Giddens (1990) describes as “personal meaninglessness—the feeling that life has nothing worthwhile to offer”. He argues that this phenomenon must be understood “in terms of a repression of moral questions which day-to-day life poses, but which are denied answers” (Giddens 1991/2018:9). However, Giddens also recognises that the “reflexive project of the self” has the potential to become a “morally stunted process”, hindering “human self-actualisation” or “life politics” once individuals recognise that they are just extensions of the “control systems of modernity to the self” that lack “moral meaning” or “authenticity” (Giddens 1991/2018:9).
The truth. I felt so lost, and I really begged Allah to guide me to what is correct, and it just kind of happened.
[1] Fukuyama argues that it is the failure of contemporary liberal democracies that has “powered aggressive nationalism” and religious fervour in current identity politics, since it “had not fully solved the problem of thymos … the part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity; isothymia is the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people” (Fukuyama 2018:xi, xiii). This has forced groups with “a history of marginalization” to feel disrespected and has produced “feelings of alienation and anxiety” (ibid: p26).
[2] Professor Dennis Wong, New York University, review excerpt on book cover, ‘Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age’, Anthony Giddens, 1991/2018.
Be the first to comment