Jihad: Made in America

The New York Times has a worrisome story about several young Somali-Americans who traveled back home to fight with the Islamic Courts Union against the provisional government of Somalia.

This passage is key:

While Somali nationalism had initially driven the men, a friend said, their cause eventually took on a religious cast. They became convinced that Somalia’s years of bloodshed were punishment from God for straying from Islam, the friend said. The answer was to restore the Caliphate, or Islamic rule.

“They saw it as their duty to go and fight,” the friend said. “If it was just nationalism, they could give money. But religion convinced them to sacrifice their whole life.”

There is a tendency in the U.S. to treat the interplay of these two forces - nationalism and religious fervor - as distinct when discussing the threat from radical Islam. Realists and many liberals tend to dismiss the religious underpinnings of terrorism and focus on the political drivers, while neoconservatives tend to dismiss the political drivers and focus only on religious radicalism. But it's impossible to really divorce the two.