Spiegel Online, Germany
Aug 23 2012
How Young German Men Are Lured into Jihad
By Özlem Gezer
Young Muslim men in Germany are systematically trying to recruit their
peers for jihad using sophisticated rhetoric and psychology and by
targeting vulnerable youths who are searching for direction in life.
Two men who have quit the scene tell their story to SPIEGEL, providing
a rare look into a dangerous underground.
He worked at his uncle’s falafel stand and read Immanuel Kant, and
later Plato and Nietzsche. In the end, he became a radical Islamist,
recruiting new talent for a Muslim holy war in the middle of the
German city of Hamburg. Djamal was the hunter.
Djamal is sitting on a cushion in the dim light of a basement bar in
Hamburg. He sucks on a plastic tube, causing the water to bubble in
his hookah, a water pipe made of delicate glass decorated with gold
paint. His head is shaved, he has the broad back of someone who lifts
weights, and he keeps his beard neatly trimmed. He blows the smoke
from the orange-mint tobacco into the air above his head and passes
the tube to Bora, a quiet young man sitting next to him.
Bora, 23, grew up on the Reeperbahn, a street in Hamburg’s
entertainment and red-light district. His parents are from Turkey. His
mother sells Tupperware and his father has a store. For a long time,
Bora didn’t know what to do with himself. He wanted to have fun, but
he was always searching for something meaningful. Then he met radical
Islamists. Bora was the prey.
The basement bar where they are now sitting was their common territory
for about a year. It was a place where hunters could find their prey.
The bar used to be a hangout for radical leftists called
“Hinkelstein.” First-year students would go there to listen to radical
leaders, and it was a gateway of sorts on the path to the left-wing
extremist milieu.
By the time Djamal had hit upon this basement bar as a place where he
could do his work — namely separating his prey from German society —
the leftists were long gone. The bar’s new clientele were also looking
for answers, but in the Koran instead of in the writings of Marx and
Lenin.
‘The Perfect Moment’
The dartboard was replaced with Arabic calligraphy. There are Persian
rugs on the floor. The old “Hinkelstein” is now a hookah café, only a
few meters away from the Hamburg State Library.
“It’s the perfect place to chill with friends,” says Bora.
“When they’re chilling, it’s the perfect moment to catch them,” says Djamal.
When asked how he did it, Djamal responds: “First you have to catch
them. But then they’re like rechargeable batteries: Charge, discharge
and recharge.”
Djamal and Bora left the scene 20 months ago. They often ran into each
other in this basement bar, even though they never actually met.
Although Djamal was a hunter, Bora was never his prey. But the stories
the two men relate from that part of their lives, each from his own
perspective, offer very precise insights into a world in which German
law doesn’t apply. In this world, life on earth is a punishment, a
test for the afterlife. Those who move around in it are yearning for
the afterlife, not an apprenticeship in an engineering company. This
world divides society into the Ummah, or Islamic religious community,
and the Kuffar, or infidels. Its denizens don’t even use toothbrushes
to brush their teeth, just tooth-cleaning twigs known as miswak.
Reading Kant and Nietzsche
Those who enter this world are continually charged until their
batteries are full enough for holy war. The German soldiers of jihad
are the most radical members of a youth movement that has German
domestic intelligence experts worried.
Djamal arrived in this world three years ago, when he was 19. He was
reading Kant and Nietzsche at the time, but he felt frustrated,
because they hadn’t written anything that could guide him in a society
in which he often felt confused. He had studied their works for
months, writing down sentences that appealed to him, hoping that they
would help him overcome a difficult time. His father had left his
mother and he wasn’t doing well in school, but the philosophers’
clever words were useless.
Djamal kept searching for meaning: at high-school parties, on the
Reeperbahn and sometimes in a bottle of vodka.
When his mother married a German convert to Islam, Djamal loaded
verses of the Koran onto his iPod. As the son of Lebanese immigrants,
it bothered him that a German was more familiar with the Koran than he
was. He went to the former “Hinkelstein,” where he smoked hookahs, and
where someone eventually invited him into his group. Before long, he
had gained access to the inner circle.
A Real Mission
Djamal, who had no idea what to do after finishing high school, had,
for the first time in his life, a real mission: recruiting young men
for the Hamburg branch of the Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir.
The group has been banned in Germany since 2003, but its members are
still active underground. They spread Salafist Islam and want to
establish a theocracy. Hizb ut-Tahrir’s “catchers” are young, educated
and, most of all, articulate. They are people like Djamal.
It was a time when Djamal was looking for “mistakes,” as he called it,
in the Bible and the Torah. He memorized verses from the Koran. His
only rule was that he had to come across as omniscient. He was
determined to prevail over the infidels. At first, he says, sitting on
a pillow in the basement bar, his goal wasn’t to spread Islam, but
rather to silence the others.
“The Germans have no religious foundation, and yet they like to
philosophize,” says Djamal, noting that their most common argument is:
“I can’t see God; therefore, he doesn’t exist.” Then Djamal would show
up with his talk about Immanuel Kant and his conclusions about the
limitations of man. “You just have to be creative. Then you can tell
them anything.”
His listeners, young men between 15 and 25, were fascinated, even if
they didn’t understand half of what he was saying — but that too was
part of the principle. Djamal’s words conveyed the impression of
knowledge, direction and meaning.
Part of a Cause
No one instructed Djamal to become a catcher. There are no bosses in
this world, no fixed hierarchies. But those who proselytized gained
respect within the group. Djamal could feel important, part of a
bigger cause and not just a part-time falafel seller in his uncle’s
snack bar.
It was a hobby for him at first, says Djamal, a game for which he
prepared himself meticulously. He would surf the Internet for weeks,
listening to speeches by Pierre Vogel, one of the most important
preachers among German Islamists. At the hookah café, Djamal would
talk about how women are treated with even less respect in the Bible
than in Islam. The Asian tsunami, the Love Parade disaster in 2010 and
the crazy shooters going on rampages around the world, he said, were
all signs from Allah that the Kuffar were on the wrong path. It was
usually very easy, and no one asked any questions.
Sometimes, if his listeners were black, Djamal would follow his talk
about God by mentioning Malcolm X, the US civil rights activist and
idol who was also a Muslim. References to Malcolm X were always
effective.
As a rule, Djamal and the other catchers met boys like Bora. For
Djamal, boys like Bora fell into the category of “easy prey.”
‘Come and Sit with Us, Brother’
Bora liked to go to Turkish parties and enjoy himself on the
Reeperbahn, but the hookah café was his favorite place. There were no
bouncers there who would refuse to let him in because his skin was too
dark or his shoulders too wide from Thai boxing. Bora and his friends
also referred to the café as their “cave.” When they were there, they
played computer games like “Fifa” and “Counter Strike” on the
PlayStation, which was connected to the flat-screen monitors. In the
evenings, they would rent movies like “Avatar” and “Kickboxer” from
the video store and drink vodka they had brought along.
Every evening, when the bar filled up, Djamal began his shift. Bora
clearly remembers the day when Djamal’s friends showed up. It was in
January 2010. They were wearing Adidas jackets and New York Yankees
baseball caps, G-Star pants and Nike Air Max shoes. They looked like
him, but Bora quickly noticed that there was something different about
them.
They were quiet and peaceful, and they treated each other like
brothers. While his friends talked about women, sports cars and
soccer, the new guys discussed the meaning of life and the existence
of God. They used terms like the Big Bang and the theory of evolution.
Bora couldn’t stop listening to them.
“Why don’t you come and sit with us, brother?” one of the new ones
asked. He was part of a group of five men between 18 and 30. For Bora,
it seemed perfectly normal to be meeting these men, but for the others
it was a well-practiced procedure.
Targeting Santa Claus Muslims
“Our strategy was always the same,” says Djamal: sit down, start
talking about God, take a look around to see if anyone seems
interested, and invite “the brother” to join the group. Then a process
began that Djamal and his fellow proselytizers had worked out in
role-playing games in a motel room in an industrial part of Hamburg.
In the exercises, one person was always the “victim,” or infidel,
while the others would try to “catch” him. A person is considered
caught when he believes in the existence of God and starts to become
interested in Islam.
Bora, the “easy prey,” is part of a generation of young children of
immigrants who were born in German cities and grew up there. Their
parents have raised them in traditional Islamic ways, but the children
tend to work out their own version of Islam. Pierre Vogel calls them
“Santa Claus Muslims.” They know that pork is forbidden for Muslims,
but they’ve tried it anyway, perhaps at their first soccer match. They
know that drinking alcohol is a sin for Muslims, as is sex before
marriage, and yet they party every weekend.
They only go to the mosque on holidays, and when they do they
awkwardly imitate their elders, because they don’t know how to pray.
Boys like Bora always have a guilty conscience, because they sense
that they are not sufficiently serious in fulfilling their religious
obligations.
“But they believe in God, so the rest is easy,” says Djamal.
Part 2: Learning Rhetorical Tricks from Bismarck
“Brother, you work so that you can go to the disco and complete the
mating dance. Surely that’s not all there is to life?” Djamal would
sometimes ask. He had cobbled together his spiel from a manual. For
practice, he read speeches by the former Reich Chancellor Otto von
Bismarck and the Social Democratic politician Philipp Scheidemann, the
second chancellor of the Weimar Republic.
Djamal copied down phrases that he liked and kept them in his pocket.
You have to be prepared for anything, he says. And when the
conventional methods didn’t work, he would use the ace up his sleeve
— the fingerprint trick. It worked every time, says Djamal.
“One day you will be recognized by your fingertips,” he said, telling
his potential recruits that this had been stated in the Koran for many
hundreds of years, and that today it is indeed possible to identify
individuals by their fingerprints. The Koran, he said, had known this
all along. And if the truth is written in the Koran, he added, Allah
must exist.
Djamal says that the fingerprint speech worked with everyone: the boys
from the old street gangs, the pimps from the neighborhood, and those
who would have liked to be pimps. “That’s when you can start
discharging them,” says Djamal, continuing with his battery metaphor.
Then he would explain to them that their athletic bodies were like a
Mercedes that they were allowed to drive but that they would also
eventually have to get out of. Or like a nice shirt that becomes torn
or goes out of style. He told them not to rub eucalyptus oil on their
skin while practising martial arts, because it numbs the pain and
deceives your opponent. Muslims, he said, don’t use deception, because
deception is idolatrous and sinful.
It was always about the how, but never about the why.
Just Recommendations
Bora remembers the first things his catchers suggested that he do.
They wanted him to remove his good-luck charm, a leather pendant from
his dead grandmother that he wore around his neck. There was no such
think as luck, they said. Everything that happens is fate, they said,
preordained by Allah.
Bora’s star sign is Aquarius. He used to read his horoscope in the
Hamburg newspaper every morning. The brothers suggested that he stop
doing this, because only Allah knows what is hidden. He stopped using
his favorite cologne, Number One by Hugo Boss, because the brothers
told him it contained alcohol.
“They never forced us to do anything, it was all just
recommendations,” says Bora, sitting behind his water pipe in the
basement bar.
That was precisely the trick, says Djamal.
Sometimes Bora had his doubts about his new friends from the café. But
they had told him that doubt came from the devil, and that the devil
was as close to him as the soles on his shoes. He accepted what they
said, because he liked the concept of paradise. During their lives,
people collected bonus points so that they would be rewarded in the
afterlife. Bora was familiar with the principle from computer games.
No Time to Think
By now, his new friends were hardly leaving him any time to think. His
mobile phone was constantly ringing: before work, after work, at night
and when he was playing sports. Whenever they saw him they would
embrace him and kiss him on the cheeks. They went on walks around town
and along the waterfront together, but they spent most of their time
in the hookah café.
“You take away their everyday life and give them a new one,” says Djamal.
Djamal explained to his recruits that if they became Muslims, all of
their sins from the time of jahiliyyah, the state of “ignorance of
divine guidance,” would be forgotten. Game over. Start again.
Bora’s group included Georgians who had taken Islamic names. There was
a waiter from Sri Lanka who wore a T-shirt with the words “I love
Islam” printed on the front, and an Armenian who knew verses from the
Koran by heart. Bora wanted to participate in their discussions, and
to talk about things like the hair of the Prophet and how he parted
it. Bora, who had always avoided writing reports in school, was now
actively searching for information to impress his friends.
Now everyone in his new circle was a Muslim. Their nationality was
Islam, and their compatriots were members of the worldwide Ummah, or
Muslim community. Bora had never felt that Germany was his home. He
felt especially alienated in high school, when a teacher asked him
about the conflict between ethnic Kurds and Turks in “his homeland.”
Bora, 16 at the time, was born in Hamburg and raised near the fish
market, a boy who knew the St. Pauli neighborhood like the back of his
hand.
‘Cassette Recorders’
Bora’s new brothers also began to resemble each other physically. He
grew a beard, because he thought that beards stood for knowledge among
Islamists. “We wanted them to grow beards so that they wouldn’t get
into clubs anymore,” says Djamal.
Bora says that his speech changed within a few weeks. Instead of
calling each other “Digger,” a Hamburg slang word used to address a
male, they said “achi,” or “my brother.” The typical German slang word
“geil” (“cool”) became “Masha’Allah,” or “God has willed it.” Whenever
he walked through a doorway, he would now say “Bismillah,” or “in the
name of Allah.” “They were cassette recorders that were supposed to
spread Islam,” says Djamal.
During this time, Bora started having problems with customers in his
father’s store, because he was talking about Islam too much. The
store, which sells cheap imported goods, is on Hamburg’s Steindamm, a
busy main road where Arab shops stand next to mosques and sex shops.
Bora tried to convert prostitutes and drug dealers while they were
buying lighters and mobile phone cases. He says that all he did was
discuss things, including with his father. His new friends said that
the objections of others were a sign that he was on the right path. He
felt good about himself.
Sometimes his new life came into conflict with the old life. For
example, he had booked his 2010 summer vacation long before the new
friends had entered his life. When he arrived at the all-inclusive
resort on the Turkish Riviera, he stayed inside the hotel for six
days, determined not to encounter half-naked women and infidels on the
beach. Plagued by a guilty conscience, he would roll out his prayer
rug in his hotel room five times a day, begging God for forgiveness.
Outside, it was 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in the
shade.
A Kind of Street Gang
Back in Hamburg, he returned to the hookah café and watched videos on
YouTube. He began to hate the infidels who had allowed the Muhammad
caricatures to be shown. He watched documentaries on the flat-screen
TVs that portrayed Sept. 11, 2001 as an American conspiracy.
Then preparations began for Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. “The
month in which the devil is shackled and the mosques are full,” as
Djamal describes it. His responsibility was in fact to deliver the
prey to the Taiba mosque on the Steindamm. Regarded by authorities as
a focal point of the jihadist scene, it was the same mosque that was
frequented by some of the Sept. 11 conspirators and which has been
shut down in the meantime. Djamal chose not to accompany the recruits,
because he knew that those who spent too much time at the mosque ended
up attracting the attention of the authorities.
He enjoyed the game of hide-and-seek. He felt a little like James
Bond. Djamal sent a message to a Turk from the mosque to let him know
which recruits he was going to send. Recruiters like him were part of
a street gang of sorts, says Djamal, doing grassroots work with the
aim of building critical mass. Their job was to fill the pool from
which recruits would later be drawn for jihad. The question as to
which of the recruits would later embark on holy war mainly depended
on chance, says Djamal, noting that he had nothing to do with it.
After three months at the hookah café, Bora followed his group to the
Taiba mosque. It was the same as it had always been: The boys on
Bora’s street smoked pot, and Bora smoked pot with them. They would go
to the football pitch, and Bora went along because he didn’t want to
be considered a wimp.
Wanting Out
They went to the mosque and prayed. Afterwards, they would sit
together in small groups. “Come on, Bora, you look strong. Let’s
wrestle,” one of the older members of the group said, pointing out
that the Prophet had also exercised. Bora liked it at the Taiba
mosque. There were lots of young people and it had a nice atmosphere.
The Hamburg authorities closed the mosque in the summer of 2010. This
made Bora nervous, because he had spent so much time there. His
supposed friends often came to his father’s shop, and they would ask
him how business was going. They suggested that he stop selling
alcohol, and they told Bora that it was his duty to donate money, for
his brothers and sisters in need, and for the organization.
This made him suspicious. “If they had asked for money two months
later, maybe I would already have gotten in too deep by then,” Bora
says. “I might have ended up in a training camp,” he adds, referring
to the camps in remote areas of Pakistan that have attracted dozens of
German Islamists in recent years.
He stopped going to the hookah café. He stopped answering the phone
when his new brothers called. He didn’t want anything to do with them
anymore. He just wanted out.
Losing His Freedom
At the same time, in the summer of 2010, Djamal, the catcher, had an
experience that turned him into a prisoner himself. At the time, he
was wearing a pendant from Lebanon around his neck, a reminder of his
homeland, and one of his friends told him to take it off. Nationalism
was a sin, he said. Besides, Djamal was told, he was spending too much
time doing sports, which left too little time for Dawah, or Islamic
proselytizing. For the first time, he felt that he was losing his
freedom. He couldn’t stop thinking of one word: cult.
He started listening to sermons in English on the web, and he read the
old religious texts in their entirety. He read that people were
supposed to travel to other countries to learn from other cultures. In
essays by religious scholars, he read that it was the duty of the
Prophet to spread religion. In one text, he read: If you live in a
country that is governed by infidels, you must abide by their rules.
Djamal didn’t believe his brothers anymore. He changed his phone
number and cut off ties to the Islamists.
Nowadays, when Djamal wants to pray he goes to the Imam Ali mosque on
the Alster River, where there is a lot of peace and quiet and not much
in the way of politics, he says.
Bora and Djamal ran into each other a few months ago in a hookah café
in Hamburg’s central Schanzenviertel neighborhood. It isn’t as dimly
lit as the former “Hinkelstein,” and the patrons go there primarily to
smoke, not to talk about paradise. Bora and Djamal became friends.
‘He Would Be Easy to Catch’
On a sunny day in August, they meet a few friends for a barbecue in
Hamburg’s Wohlers Park. Djamal has made fruit salad with pomegranates.
There are two barbecues on the lawn, one for pork sausages and one for
halal meat. An Armenian, a Jordanian and a Russian are drinking vodka.
Djamal unrolls his prayer rug for evening prayers. Bora takes out some
fruit-flavored tobacco. The men wait for Djamal to finish praying,
while the meat cooks on the barbecue. “He does the best hookah,” says
Bora.
One of them knocks a spider off the water pipe. Another one says: “The
spider is sacred for us in Islam. It spun a web and saved the life of
the Prophet.”
Djamal winks at the SPIEGEL reporter. “He has a latent guilty
conscience, superficial knowledge. He would be easy to catch,” he
says. Djamal still knows how to spot prey. But now he’s searching for
a more meaningful purpose, something with more structure.
Djamal has applied to join the German military, the Bundeswehr.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan