Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 36

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Popular Culture Review
Islam; its adherents relying on militantly- and tactically-based violence and
terror with an ultimate aim of destroying the Other (Hage 2003, 126). An
interesting aspect of the West’s recent response to Jihadism has been to
consolidate a view of terrorists—i.e. Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda
terrorist network (among other terrorist organisations)—as the personification of
evil. The need to classify Bin Laden and his organisation in this way indicates
the level of trauma which the West is presently undergoing. John Carrol
poignantly states that the West has been caught unaware by a “new phenomenon
of mastermind terrorism” which has become adroit in asymmetric
(unconventional) strategies (Carrol 2002, 7).
The destruction of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, was
a formative event, prompting western nations to implement a series of strategies
for retrieving existential control. These included securing airways, stringent
border protection, and collapsing the infrastructure of global terrorist networks.
September 11 initiated a change in the scope of terrorism, from a regional
phenomenon to a global insurgency movement. While Jihadist activities in the
Muslim world predate September 11, the scale of horror of this event occupies a
special place in the Western imagination, and has promoted Jihadists, such as
Bin Laden, as the new global bogeyman. In this essay I use Warner’s notions of
the bogeyman as a trajectory for exploring Jihadism as the new global threat.
The Sublimation of Terror: Chimera Re-invented
“Imputations of evil reveal more about the accusers than the accused,”
says Marina Warner (386). Evil has often been intrinsically consigned to the
phantasmagoric. In the West, the paradigm of monstrosity is principally
informed by the Other as elusive and inscrutable. In Warner’s locution, the
bogeyman portends the disrupture of the taken-for-granted world; it is a rogue,
oblivious to the conventions of the physical and social laws of the universe, and
is, therefore, liminal.
Warner’s belief that the bogeyman inhabits a travesty of the ordered
world (89). is particularly disturbing to the western psyche which is fixated on
control. As Kathy Bail writes, “control is a nineties obsession” (1997, 38).
September 11 shattered this modernist obsession and showed how the excessive
use of force by the Other could be propagated with lethal precision in the West.
The West’s response has been two-fold: to mitigate the disabling psychological
effects of the Jihadists with claims of pursuing terrorist organisations and their
global network, and second, by recalling essentialist discourses of the Muslim
Other. This second strategy evokes the “inventive fantasy” of the West (Warner
18).
One of most influential essays of this fantasy genre is Samuel
Huntington’s work, The Clash o f Civilisations (1993). Here, Huntington
presents a potential doomsday scenario between imagined rivals along cultural
lines. While non-original, his idea of the historic schism between Islam and the