The Violent Brutality of Growing Up in A Shame Honor Culture by Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.
First Published in Mentalities Journal | Volume 33, Number 1, 2019
Download Full Article Here ⇓Violent bonding is a sign of a major maternal attachment problem or traumatic bonding.1 The jihadis bond violently to us. The jihadi becomes the terror and projects it into us. Unconscious projection is not a concept well known to military, police or counter terrorist experts (henceforth m/p/ct). Yet it is precisely this psychoanalytic knowledge that helps explain and facilitates processing the toxicity of jihadi behavior—and it is this which the m/p/ct’s experience on a daily basis. I have been told that such new knowledge has helped them understand the disorganizing and terrorizing effect that terrorists elicit, thus helping them fend off their own burn out, an occupational hazard. The first significant bonding experience for the infant is the parmaternal attachment. In this way, one could see in the horrific and graphic imagery of the Islamic suicide attack the mental projection where the suicide bomber bonds or fuses concretely with his or her victim. The maternal disturbance in Islamic terrorism demonstrates an “attachment effect”.2 Political violence reflects cultural practices normalizing the use of violence as punishment in the home. When the Hezbollah suicide truck bombs went off in Lebanon, I knew that Hezbollah and the Shia jihadi culture were psychologically bankrupt. All the more so when, during the Iran Iraq War, the Ayatollah sent children as mine sweepers. He would hang a plastic key made in Taiwan around their necks telling them that it would unlock the gates to paradise.3
In such a protracted conflict, it remains hard to see the forest from the trees. The practitioners value the importance of maternal attachment but cannot see it mapped out visually with specific regard to Islamic terrorism. Here is the connection between the imposition of fantasy on a child by hanging a key around his neck for suicide terrorism. This is a concrete fusion or attachment to a symbolic object that is supposed to sustain a child who is hardly aware of the meaning of death yet is sent out to purge the group of its toxic needs through scapegoating. It remains difficult and challenging to delve below the behavior into the fantasy the realm where the mother’s body is mutilated and the mental image cloaked by the violent ideologies of the jihadi group. Political ideologies gain power by tapping into the violent sadistic fantasies of a shame honor group. But the plastic key around the child’s neck like an umbilicus is only one cultural practice inflicted on a Shia child. Another is called tatbir. The Jihadi Dictionary states: “During their passion plays and the Ashura (day of mourning for the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad at the Battle of Karbala on 10 Muharram in the year 61 AH297), the Shia engage in cutting of the forehead called Tatbir.”4 Flagellation is defined as “a masochistic or sadistic act in which the participants receive erotic stimulation from whipping or being whipped,” it is also another form of cutting the skin on the ritualist’s bak. The practice of female genital mutilation is still another form of cutting, as well as khitana, male circumcision. While it may be argued that brit milah could qualify as a form of body cutting, the major difference is that the Jewish practice is performed within the first eight days after birth. While undoubtedly the brit is remembered somatically, for the Muslim child the ritual circumcision carried out between the ages of three to the early teens, is remembered much more vividly. It is more traumatic because of family dynamics, the son being emotionally tied to the mother. The cultural practice of female genital mutilation―which has been grafted onto Islamic religious practices, especially among the ultraconservative and extremist jihadis―falls well within the category of terrorism. These practices of somatic cutting normalize psychopathological behavior seen in borderline personality disorder where the sufferer engages in self-cutting. This symptom is a concretization of a primitive mental state seeking to “purify” the contamination felt in shame– honor cultures in which emotional needs are regarded as dirty.
Breiner a psychoanalyst who wrote Slaughter of the Innocent: Child Abuse Through the Ages and Today5 and a classic essay on Arab Muslim child rearing practices showing the importance of child rearing practices and how they differ from western practices.6 What goes on behind closed doors in immigrant homes is rarely considered, yet that is where child rearing practices involving corporal punishment are to be found. The justification is Sura 4 of the Quran which permits wife beating, signalling the religion’s institutionalization and use of shaming. Even if the beating is alleged to be gentle, psychologists know that the child witnessing it experiences it as an attack on the self because he/she is still attached to and in need of the mother. In many instances the practice is also accompanied by child corporal punishment as well.
While continuing to study Islam and Arabic, its diverse political movements and terrorist organizations I was also trained in psychoanalysis. This gave me an opportunity to revisit historical and political events in light of the cultural practices so that I could see the violence of Shia Ashura, the commemoration of the martyr’s death. By coincidence, beginning in the 1990s, a large influx of Somali Muslims began to be resettled as refugees in the Twin Cities where I was living. In fact, Minneapolis-St. Paul had become home to the largest diaspora outside of Somalia. After 9/11, the local police woke up to the fact that a minority of Somalis were deeply involved in Al Shabaab and Al Qaeda. They realized that the Twin Cities had become the United States center for recruitment to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS).
In all my doctoral years (1978-1984) studying Islam, what had never been discussed was violent jihad, the holy war. It is as if violence and aggression were totally disavowed. The main focus of the program was convivencia, the supposed co-existence of the three Abrahamic faiths on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. 7 I felt duty bound to undertake the study of Arabic and aljamía i.e., Old Spanish in Arabic script, after having studied Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Ladino (Old Spanish in Hebrew script) as well as the other pertinent romance languages. Why was I drawn to this notion of convivencia, this period of allegedly harmonious living? If it had really existed the way it was claimed in academic circles, then I wanted to find out what it really was. I began to feel that a similar question might be posed in the clinical setting where couples and siblings found themselves unable to live and work together. How could a family composed of incompatible individuals live peacefully under one roof? Would this be an example of domestic convivencia? Something was very rotten in this state of affairs.
In order to prepare for the Human Rights Seminar on Islamic Suicide Bombing, I sent an email to the Interdisciplinary Center for Counter Terrorism in Israel, with some questions on suicide bombing. Yoram Schweitzer replied. Schweitzer is credited with being the first in the West to identify Osama bin Laden when OBL was in the Sudan in the mid 1990s.8 Like other specialists in the field, he had limited knowledge of psychoanalysis. When Schweitzer called my theory of maternal attachment “The Mother’s Sour Milk Theory” it was obvious maternal attachment would be a hard concept for counter-terrorist experts to accept. The concept arouses deep feelings of vulnerability and an unmanly lack or need. Continue reading . . .
1 Donald G. Dutton and Katherine R. White, “Attachment insecurity and intimate partner violence,” Journal of Aggression and Violent Behavior, 17 (2012) 475-481 and Donald G. Dutton and S Painter, “Emotional attachments in abusive relationships: A test of traumatic bonding theory,” Violence and Victims, 8 (1993) 105–120.
2 Peter Lovenheim, The Attachment Effect: Exploring the Powerful Ways Our Earliest Bond Shapes Our Relationships and Lives (New York, NY: TarcherPerigee 2018).
3 Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, Children Khomeini’s Cannon Fodder, 18 January 1988, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1988/01/18/children-khomeinis-cannon-fodder/8b7673b3-c701-484c-955c-0bd4c3ea1d70/?utm_term=.2e960bb9b368, (accessed 2 November 2018).
4 Nancy Kobrin, The Jihadi Dictionary: The Essential Tool for Military, Law Enforcement, Government Policy Makers and Concerned Citizens (New York: MultiEducator Press 2016).
5 Sander Breiner, Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse through the Ages and Today (New York, NY: Plenum Press 1990).
6 Sander Breiner, “Some Interesting Child Rearing Practices in the Arab Moslem World” in Historical and Psychological Inquiry, ed. by Paul Elovitz, (New York: International Psychohistorical Association 1990) 121-139.
7 Anwar Chejne, Muslim Spain: History and Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1974).
8 Yoram Schweitzer and Shaul Shay, The Globalization of Terror: The Challenge of Al-Qaida and the Response of the International Community (Edison, NJ: Transaction Press 2003). I am acknowledged in his book.
Mentalities/Mentalités Volume 33, Number 1, 2019
ISSN- 0111-8854
@2019 Mentalities/Mentalités
All material in the Journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
Dr. Korbin is a fellow of the American Center for Democracy. She holds an appointment as an external expert at La Universidad de Granada concerning Jihadese. She is also a senior analyst at the Islamic Theology of Counter Terrorism think tank, London. Her books are: The Banality of Suicide Terrorism (also in Hebrew), Penetrating the Terrorist Psyche, The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadi, The Jihadi Dictionary: The Essential Tool for Military, Law Enforcement, Government and the Concerned Public, (French translation in progress), The Last Two Jews of Mogadishu Living Under Al Shabaab’s Fire and Children Who Kill Children: Before and Beyond Brainwashing (in press), and Cultural Terrorism: The Obliteration of the Cultural Object. She is also a contributing author here at AWCR. Read more . . .
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