Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 38

34 Popular Culture Review “intransigent hatred” against the West. The doctrine of hatred is intrinsically tied to invisibility where it converts modem day Jihadists into cold, ruthless and covert killing machines. Ernesto Che Guevara’s exposition of this doctrine is a precursor of the Jihadi manifesto: Hate is a factor in the struggle . . . We must carry the war as far as the enemy carries it: into his home, into his places of recreation, make it total. He must be prevented from having a moment’s peace . . . Attack him wherever he may be; make him feel like a hunted animal wherever he goes (1987, 357).1 If the jinn provide a cultural category for understanding the “bogeyness” of Al- Qaeda, it is the Chimera which evokes the hyperbole of Jihadism. Warner’s analysis is insightful here. Warner’s attention to Chimera as a prime embodiment of “protean elusiveness” (243) is symptomatic of the West’s fascination with the fantastic (Desprez 1998, 243).2 According to Greek myth, the Chimera was a female hybrid monster: part lion, part goat and part snake. Although she is finally killed by the hero Bellerophon astride the white magical steed Pegasus, it is the metaphor of Chimera as a “monstrous embodiment of illusion itself’ (Warner 1998:18) which encapsulates the contemporary western mindset of Jihadists. Probably nowhere has the elusive quality of Chimera been more cogently expressed in modem times than by the ideology of Jihadism. Jihadism, as espoused by Bin Laden, embodies the phantasmagoric powers of Chimera. Drawing from an ancient Islamic paradigm which divided the world into two distinct domains—Dar-ul-Islam (domain of Islam) and Dar-ul-Harb (domain of war)—Bin Laden has reconstrued the latter to mean the domain of apostates (munafiqun). In this way, even pious Muslims living in non-Muslim countries are considered as being complicit with the “evil Westerners”; therefore, they too are worthy targets for Al-Qaeda. It is now clear why the Al-Qaeda terrorists who demolished the World Trade Centre were so indifferent to the prospect of Muslim casualties. Yet the sheer scale of this wanton act of carnage was so unimaginable, so grotesquely diabolical, that it could only have been committed by a modem day Chimera. To some degree, Al-Qaeda draws its inspiration from the ancient sect of terrorists called Nizari. The Nizari saw themselves as purifiers of Islam which they believed was becoming increasingly corrupted from within. To support their actions, the Nizari professed the Prophetic tradition which obligated all Muslims to fight injustice through either physical or verbal means. The Nizari took this one step farther by using terror as an instrument for accelerating their desired objective. Terror was considered as a legitimate form of arbitrary power that was capable of eradicating unwanted denizens in order to restore the social status quo. Terror provided a logical prescript for ushering ambivalence by