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Street Culture Meets Extremism: How Muslims Involved in Street Life and Crime Oppose Jihadism
Abstract
Many studies have examined why individuals with a background in street life and crime are drawn toward extremism. This paper examines why most people with this background reject extremism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, we found that Muslims involved in street culture were generally opposed to jihadism because they perceived jihadists as evil people who harm innocents; bad Muslims who defame Islam; and cowards who break the 'code of the street.' This opposition resulted in avoidance behaviours, criticism and, sometimes, violence against suspected jihadists. We argue that research on the crime-terror nexus has focussed too narrowly on the similarities between street culture and jihadism, contributing to a distorted image of Muslims involved in street culture as potential terrorists.
... They understood the participants' countering as a dual process in which young Muslims rejected the mainstream projection of Islam as an aggressive religion and united with the mainstream in their exclusion of jihadists. Tutenges and Sandberg (2021) also explored why Muslims in Oslo involved in street crime denounced extremism. Interestingly, they found that street culture was applied to condemn and, in some instances, use violence against jihadists. ...
... These studies demonstrate a heterogeneity of culture among Muslims who adopt or reject political violence. They suggest that different cultural resources -religion and knowledge of the street -may be important for facilitating both the adoption and rejection of political violence (Dawson and Amarasingam 2017;Ilan and Sandberg 2019;Sandberg and Colvin 2020;Tutenges and Sandberg 2021). They also indicate that culture may have different functions for Muslims who adopt or reject political violence, such as providing solutions to contextual constraints, meaning-making, or identity construction as outsiders (Cottee 2011;Hemmingsen 2015;Dawson and Amarasingam 2017;Sandberg and Colvin 2020). ...
... Furthermore, the non-radicalized participants did not use street culture to denounce radicalized Muslims. Instead, by drawing a boundary between their criminalized actions and their faith (see also Tutenges and Sandberg 2021), these participants engaged in what Swidler (1986: 277) described as 'cultural retooling' acts in which the cultural meanings and social skills necessary for success were not easily available. This boundary work required them to leave familiar cultural skills and styles or attach a negative meaning to the story of their past. ...
This article employs cultural repertoire theory to investigate how 84 Muslim men in Norway make meaning of adopting or rejecting political violence. Previous studies have addressed political violence among Muslims, but little attention has been paid to how its adoption and rejection involve self-ascription and ascriptions by others. The participants made meaning by drawing on stories about their past, exclusion and belonging, in addition to religious worldviews and political knowledge, including boundaries of class, crime, violence, race, religion and gender. Muslims are informed by mainstream ascriptions of them as extreme others and inherently radicalized in their meaning-making. This finding has important implications for how Muslim radicalization should be understood and countered.
... 3 However, radicalization processes are fluid and multi-directional, 4 and they meet opposition and resistance, 5 also in street milieus. 6 The traditional literature on the crime-terror nexus identifies several types of terrorist and criminal organization. 7 It generally views criminal and terrorist organizations as "separate organizational entities" that sometimes collaborate for opportunistic reasons. ...
Research on the new crime-terror nexus has focused on examining the confluences of criminal and jihadist milieus. This article contributes to this research, using insights from criminological theory and analyzing data from interviews with Muslim men who have been exposed to jihadism and have a background in street life and crime. We propose that the connection between street crime and jihadism can be seen in three decisive points of confluence: places, bodies, and narratives. We show how specific places (e.g. prisons) enable the encounter between particular bodies (e.g. violently competent bodies) and the engagement or disengagement with certain extremist narratives (e.g. stories of redemption through violence). The crime-terror literature emphasizes that these points of confluence are sources of radicalization. We expand upon this by arguing that they may also serve as venues for resisting or rejecting politico-religious extremism. The study demonstrates that radicalization is only one possible outcome of the confluences between street culture and jihadism.
This article looks at a sample of academic articles in the field of terrorism studies and international relations to explore the ways in which marriage, sexual activity and close relationships in jihadist groups are framed, imagined and investigated. Despite the scarcity of research being conducted on the subject, this article reveals that, in the study of terrorism, the issue of intimate relationships is the object of two trends: on the one hand, the themes of sexuality and marriage are in fact present in the field, only exclusively through the lens of sexual victimisation, violence, abuse and romantic manipulation. On the other hand, intimate relationships are often dismissed as not being worthy of in-depth investigation when not related to violence. Together, these two interdependent trends create, using the words of Butler, a “silent and melancholic discourse”, which downplays the subjectivity, banality, and vulnerability of the life experiences of subjects involved in jihadist groups. Using the learnings of queer scholarship, the article posits that the ways in which the intimate life of individuals involved in jihadist movements are portrayed and ascribed a perverted characteristic matter in how vulnerability is distributed and how the subjects are apprehended in academia and beyond.
About 300 Norwegians traveled to Syria to join various jihadist groups during the civil war. How did jihadism develop in Norway? The roots of jihadism in Norway can be traced to the period after the Kuwait War in 1991. Throughout this period, unlike Sweden, Norway had one key figure who became the center of much local attention and symbolized the jihadist movement: Mullah Krekar. To analyze key developments in the history of jihadism in Norway, this chapter first covers the early years with a focus on Mullah Krekar, the conflict in Somalia, and the Jyllands-Posten crisis. The final parts of the chapter examine the jihadist mobilization, especially by the Prophet’s Ummah, to the Syrian Civil War.
This paper calls for renewed consideration of the way research subjects are selected in the study of subcultures. All too often, subcultural researchers limit themselves to the use of one or two of the orthodox sampling designs, such as ‘convenience sampling’ (selecting subjects who are readily available) or ‘chain referral sampling’ (selecting a readily available subject who refers the researcher to other subjects). While these designs certainly have their merits, especially in the early research phase of negotiating access and acceptance, they may impede insight into the diversity that exists within subcultural groups. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among punks and graffiti writers, this paper introduces a supplementary design, that of ‘negative chain referral sampling’, which consists of using group members’ categorisations of subcultural anomalies as an opening to explore subcultural variation and tensions. This design is one that flips the logic of conventional chain referral sampling: if we are encouraged not to speak to certain subjects, for instance, due to their lack of authenticity or status, this forms the motivation for doing exactly that. Closer examination of subcultural anomalies may deepen our understanding of the boundary work, identity-making and social exclusion that occurs in all subcultural groups.
Following recent terrorist attacks in the US and Europe, Western Muslims have been criticized for not taking a firm stand against radical Islam and extremist organizations. Drawing on insights from narrative criminology, we challenge such assertions and reveal Muslims' narrative mobilization against violent jihadism. Based on 90 qualitative interviews with young Muslims in Norway, we show how violent extremism is rejected in a multitude of ways. This narrative resistance includes criticizing extremist jihadist organizations for false interpretations of Islam and using derogatory terms to describe them. It also includes less obvious forms of narrative resistance, such as humour and attempts to silence jihadist organizations by ignoring them. While narrative criminology has effectively analysed the stories that constitute harm, less attention has been paid to narratives that counter harm. We argue that stories that counter jihadi narratives are crucial to understand the narrative struggles of Muslim communities, whose outcomes can help determine why some individuals end up becoming religious extremists-while others do not. By distinguishing between factual, emotional and humorous counter-narratives and describing silence as a form of resistance, we show resistance to extremism that is often concealed from the public and the state. RUNNING HEADER: Narrative Resistance
Powerful narratives that invoke religious concepts—jihad, Sharia, shahid, Caliphate, kuffar, and al-Qiyāmah—have accompanied jihadi violence but also inspired robust counter-narratives from Muslims. Taking a narrative criminological approach, we explore the rejection of religious extremism that emerges in everyday interactions in a religious community under intense pressure in Western societies. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 90 young Muslims in Norway, we argue that young Muslims suffer epistemic injustice in their narrative exclusion from the mainstream and assess the narrative credibility they try to maintain in the face of marginalization. We suggest that young Muslims’ religious narratives reject a mainstream characterization of Islam as essentially a religion of aggression and simultaneously join forces with that mainstream in seeking the narrative exclusion of the jihadi extremists.
To promote early intervention strategies, Countering/Preventing Violent Extremism (C/PVE) policies internationally seek to encourage community reporting by ‘intimates’ about someone close to them engaging in terrorist planning. Yet historically, we have scant evidence around what either helps or hinders ‘intimates’ to share concerns with authorities. We address that deficit here through a ‘state of the art’ assessment of what we currently know about effective related C/PVE approaches to community reporting, based on key findings from a ground-breaking Australian study and its UK replication. The consistency of qualitative findings from nearly 100 respondents offers new paradigms for policy and practice.
Current trends in Western jihadism point to the renewed relevance of subcultural theory. This article outlines a novel subcultural perspective that synthesizes subcultural theory with recent accounts of intersectionality and argues that such an approach enables an understanding of jihadism as a collective and cultural response to a shared experience of marginalization and othering. In addition, this theoretical perspective offers a framework for comprehending the processes of bricolage central to subcultural collective creativity. This article illustrates this potential by analyzing examples of jihadi rap. Such analyses represent important contributions to studies of the broader cultural and social ecology of jihadi subculture.
Stories about sin, regret and forgiveness are fundamental in Islam and other world religions. Islamic revivalism mediates a redemption narrative tailored to street criminals who want to break with the cycle of stigmatization, imprisonment and violence. Drawing on so-called conversion narratives, this article examines the repertoire of such stories among male street criminals in Norway who turn, or ‘return’, to Islam. I have identified three narrative types: reconciliation, purification and exclusion. I explore the content of these stories and the work they do for tellers and their audiences. Arguably, these narrative types represent forms of desistance that open up and restrict particular paths into Islam and out of street crime.
This article draws on the criminological work of Gresham Sykes and David Matza as a starting point for theorizing the nature and appeal of the western jihadi subculture, defined here as a hybrid and heavily digitized global imaginary that extols and justifies violent jihad as a way of life and being. It suggests that at the centre of this subculture are three focal concerns: (1) Violence and Machismo; (2) Death and Martyrdom; and (3) Disdain of the Dunya. More critically, it argues that these three focal concerns have immediate counterparts in the shadow values of the wider society with which western jihadists are in contention. This argument has important implications for debates over radicalization and the attractions of jihadist activism.
