In Walters’ words, there are many "bullshit theories" about jihadism and terrorism. It’s a result of discrimination and disenfranchisement. Or, the attackers are just a bunch of mentally unstable people looking for a way to justify their pre-existent sadistic tendencies. Or, jihadists are just ordinary criminals, who hide behind a veneer of religiosity to kill and destroy. If ideology is allowed to figure in these theories, it’s seen as a flimsy pretext at most. According to the anthropologist Scott Atran, jihadists commit suicide attacks because they are following a "thrilling cause” and crave "glory and recognition", which is true of many young men, although most stick to playing football. The political scientist Rik Coolsaet claims that the root cause of jihadi terrorism is a feeling of "not belonging"; jihadists have actually "never read" the Qur’an, and "religion or politics have little to do with it." (Note that Coolsaet’s rejection of politics also conflicts with Pape's theory.)

Last year, the British anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse published a target article in the leading journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences in which he argued, like many others before him, that suicide attacks are not driven by religion or ideology. On Whitehouse’s account, the main cause of suicide terrorism is the process of "identity fusion", which occurs when a group of people go through a traumatic ordeal together with others, often in a ritual context. A typical example of such extreme self-sacrifice is that of a soldier jumping on top of a grenade to protect his comrades, after having bonded strongly with them through arduous drill exercises and prior combat experience. But what about collective suicide operations such as 9/11, where the express purpose of the mission was for the entire group to perish? Another problem for Whitehouse’s theory, somewhat opposite to the first one, is that many of the terrorists who have committed lone jihadi attacks in recent years have radicalized themselves at home in front of their computers, by watching or listening to hate preachers and other online material. Although these "lone wolves" typically swear allegiance to IS or Al Qaeda in a video message before launching their attacks, in many cases they have had no direct contact with anybody from the terrorist network, let alone undergone painful initiation rituals. So how could these people have experienced the collective trauma that is needed for Whitehouse’s process of identity fusion?

Now, I don’t want to claim that these theories are completely worthless. It is plausible that identity fusion can lead to a greater willingness to sacrifice oneself, and it is surely true that radicalization often feeds on feelings of discrimination and other grievances. But again, those factors start to make sense only when you seem them through the prism of the Manichean religious worldview, in which the world is separated into the “true believers” and an assortment of “enemies” (the kufar, the apostates, the traitors). What is the factor that connects young European-born terrorists to fellow fighters in other countries who speak different languages and come from a different cultural background? Why do many religious fundamentalist believe all sorts of conspiracy theories in which Islam is targeted, and become firmly convinced that the West is hell-bent on destroying their religion? And yet, many researchers try very hard to ignore or downplay the ideological dimension of these actions. The self-proclaimed caliph of IS has a PhD in Qur’anic studies, their theoreticians such as al-Maqdisi, al-Zawahiri, and al-Muhajir have written countless theological tracts on jihadism, and an atmosphere of religious fervor leaps out at you in every video message and from every page of the IS magazine Dabiq, but still, our Western scholars know better.

One particular anecdote has often been cited by these researchers: The case of two British fighters who bought "The Koran for Dummies" from Amazon before traveling to Syria. Aha, you see, this proves that they (and by extension, everyone who ever left to join IS or contemplated committing a terrorist attack at home) knew nothing about Islam! In any other discussion, such logic would be laughed out of the room, but some academics and pundits seem to think it constitutes a "smoking gun" that nullifies all other evidence of the terrorists’ religiosity. The obvious question, of course, is why these men felt that it might be a good idea to brush up on their knowledge of the Qur'an before traveling to Syria, rather than, say, “Arabic for Beginners,” or the user manual for an AK-47?

Not only do the tortuous efforts of these academics ignore the elephant in the room ; they also obstruct the search for a solution. In the recent edited volume Radicalization: A Marginal Phenomenon or a Mirror to Society?, published by Leuven University Press, the authors criticize policymakers who have started to pay more attention to the ideological dimension of terrorism. Of course, this is understandable from the policymakers’ point of view, since the whole point of deradicalization programs is to dismantle the extremist ideology that has taken root in the minds of jihadists. Policymakers have a more pratical mindset than academics: they want to prevent terrorist attacks. But the authors of Radicalization condemn this approach as “reductionist," "essentialist," "one-dimensional”, and a few other cardinal academic sins. Indeed, they find the whole concept of radicalization "problematic" in itself. The reason for this is obvious: it’s hard to talk about radicalization without asking, what are these people being radicalized into? And that’s exactly the question that these authors want to avoid, because it "stigmatizes" all Muslims. Simply uttering the word “Islamic” in the same breath as “terrorism” is "offensive", according to Rik Coolsaet, who wrote the preface to the book. Even when the religious fanaticism is staring them right in the face, as in the chapter in which the authors conduct a content analysis of Dabiq, they conclude that, all things considered, religion hardly plays a role here.