Why do some Muslim doctors want to kill?

The arrest of eight Muslims in Great Britain, most of them physicians or in allied medical fields, raises the obvious question of what led men and women in the healing profession to seek to maim and kill innocent civilians by the dozens if not the hundreds. Why did these men and women pack nails together with explosives in a lethal cocktail and seek to ignite them in crowded places? We may never get the full story from those now in custody; one of them has burns over 90 percent of his body from the gasoline he was pouring on the Jeep Cherokee he was trying to detonate in the Glasgow airport.

But a fascinating picture of a doctor’s conversion to radical Islam, and to membership in a terrorist organization, can be found in an essential new publication put out by the Hudson Institute’s Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World.

In the latest issue of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology one finds “The Development of a Jihadi’s Mind” by Tawfiq Hamid, a medical doctor who tells of his journey, baffling to an outsider, from an upper-middle-class childhood in Cairo—the son of an orthopedic surgeon father and a French-teacher mother, both of them secular and liberal—to the aspiration to become a shaheed, or martyr.

This desire was to bring him to Afghanistan in the 1980’s to join the anti-Soviet resistance. “We viewed both the Soviets and the Americans as enemies,” Hamid writes. “The Soviets were considered infidels because they did not believe in the existence of God, while the Americans did not follow Islam. Although we planned to fight the Soviets first, our ultimate objective was to destroy the United States—the greatest symbol of the infidel’s freedom.”

In the course of his training as a Jihadist, Hamid was to meet, among others, Ayman al-Zawahari, also a doctor—a highly skilled surgeon—and now, depending on one’s guess about whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive, number one or number two in al Qaeda. It was in this period and in this milieu that Hamid descended into a murderous ideological framework. He describes in close detail the evolution of an Islamic fanatic’s mind, namely, his own:

I passed through three psychological stages to reach this level of comfort with death: hatred of non-Muslims or dissenting Muslims, suppression of my conscience, and acceptance of violence in the service of Allah. Salafi religious indoctrination played a major role in this process. Salafists promoted our hatred for non-Muslims by emphasizing the Quranic verse that read, “Thou wilt not find any people who believe in Allah and the Last Day loving those who resist (i.e., do not follow) Allah and His Messenger” (Quran 58:22).

Salafi writings also helped me to suppress my conscience by holding that many activities I had considered to be immoral were, instead, halal—that is, allowed by Allah and the Prophet. My conscience would normally reject polygamy, for example, because of the severe psychological pain it would cause my future wife. Salafi teaching encourages polygamy, however, permitting up to four wives as halal: “Marry women of your choice, two or three or four” (Quran 4:3). I accepted such ideas—ideas that contradicted my moral outlook—because I came to believe that we cannot negotiate with God about his commandments: “He (Allah) cannot be questioned for His acts, but they will be questioned [for theirs]” (Quran 21:23).

One would expect any human being, and especially those in the medical professions, to be revolted by the thought of killing fellow human beings in cold blood. However, the difficulty is that even if our categories and concepts about human life are universal in application, they are not universally shared. To those in the grip of Islamism, physicians and everyone else, killing infidels is fair game.

During the cold war, perhaps the most important essays and books on the USSR were those which explored the Communist mind. What was the nature of the appeal which led men and women to murder their neighbors—“class enemies”—by the millions? One thinks immediately of the logic of obedience portrayed in a book like Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.

A similar body of writing is beginning to appear in response to the murderous currents flowing in the Islamic world; no great works of literature have yet to appear, but there are essays that have become vital reading if we are to understand why doctors would plant car bombs on London streets and then attempt to blow up a civilian airport. Current Trends in Islamist Ideology has performed a public service by bringing Tawfiq Hamid’s essential memoir to public attention.