The Foreign Service Journal, April 2008

the United States. Venerating the 13th-century poet Rumi, the Gulen movement promotes interfaith and intercultural understanding, and operates 700 schools in Turkey and elsewhere as alternatives to the Wahhabi madrasas. Iraqi Kurdish leaders Jalal Talibani and Massoud Barzani are both Sufis, but they belong to dif- ferent turuq, or brotherhoods. Why Do Muslims Rebel? A recent statistical study documented a trend of rising political violence in Muslim-dominated countries since the 1990s. However, religion has been only an exacerbat- ing factor; separatism, it turns out, leads the list of causes. Mohammad Hafiz, an academic at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, hypothesizes that Muslims rebel not as a result of disproportionately great grievances but for lack of redress of the grievances they do have due to institutional exclusion and repression. In their frustration, they find justification for rebellion in Islam’s jihadist tradi- tion, and mosques provide them access to resources, a mobilizing venue and a degree of sanctuary. One of the contributing factors is the mindset of many Muslims, who see themselves as under siege. Historian R. Stephen Humphreys describes Arabs in particular as caught “between memory and desire” — the memory of the glorious past when Muslim civilization was the world’s most advanced and the desire to escape from the unsatis- factory present when their interests are disrespected internationally, they are disproportionately poor and une- ducated and they are frequently badly governed. The U.N. Development Program’s Arab Human Development Reports call many governments “black holes” in which nothing moves and from which nothing escapes. Against this historical backdrop, there are other psy- chological, political and economic factors at play. The psy- chiatrist Marc Sageman, who has analyzed the personali- ties of more than a hundred convicted Muslim terrorists from their court records, concludes that jihadists are not mentally ill but show patterns of ghettoization and alien- ation. Michael Mazaar, a political scientist at the National F O C U S A P R I L 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 19