The other day I read an article on Slate by Brendan O’Neill that asked whether gyms are the breeding ground for Islamic terrorists. Apparently the terrorists who carried out the 7/7 London bombings were radicalized at a local gym and the people responsible for the 3/11 Madrid bombings and the 9/11 attacks were all “fitness fanatics.” O’Neill says:
Today’s gym culture seems like the perfect vehicle for nurturing the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission. If some of these attackers viewed their own bodies as pure instruments, and everyone else as wasteful and deserving of punishment, they could just as well have come to that conclusion through absorbing the healthy-living agenda of the gym as by reading the Quran. At the gym, Atta, Khan, and the others could focus on perfecting the self, the body, as a pure and righteous thing—and hone their disdain for others.
I guess the article is supposed to burst your bubble about the wholesome goodness of gyms (it’s filed in a section called “Conventional wisdom debunked”). But it’s one thing to say that going to the gym can nurture disdain for others, like the obese, and another to say that absorbing the “healthy-living agenda of the gym” can lead you to think that everyone else is wasteful and deserves to be punished.
I suppose the author wanted to point out something he found to be “ironic” (not unlike half the objects that make up hipster bingo), which is probably why there isn’t much follow-through at the end of the article in terms of answering the “so what” question. I think there might be something more to this story, but I don’t know how far it’s worth going into.
The Body and Group ID
First, the article calls to mind the general phenomenon of the body being used to signal group membership. This can probably be filed under “human universals.” There’s a long list of body modifications and ornamentation, including any fashion you can think of, that send messages announcing affiliation with a particular group. When I see a mullet in Berlin, I know I’m probably looking at someone from the countryside or former East Germany. Likewise, veils, turbans, bindis, tattoos, piercings, monster muscles, etc. can all symbolize group identity to members and nonmembers alike.
Whether, or under what circumstances, these physical symbols take on additional spiritual significance or promote condescension is beyond me. I do know that tight-rolling your jeans in junior high became a clear social marker with definite rewards…and costs if you couldn’t get the roll just right. The issue wasn’t the tight-rolling, but the social dynamics of junior high. Likewise, the Muslim extremists may have viewed their efforts to get buff with special spiritual significance (like these folks) or as a point of distinction between themselves and infidels, but I doubt it actually contributed to their ideology that much.
(Oddly enough the article reminded me of the instructor in Making the Corps, Thomas Ricks’ account of U.S. Marine boot camp, who referred to brownies and other junk food as “nasty civilian food” while calling salads and other healthy stuff “warrior food.” He clearly wasn’t just giving the recruits pointers on nutrition; he also wanted to distance them from their civilian habits as well as shape their identities as soldiers.)
Second, I was reminded of the young guys I met in Jordan who were into bodybuilding and martial arts (not that these guys were extremists in any way). Jean Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenager were gods, and so many of the films at the theaters were American action flicks starring these guys and always advertised by homemade movie posters featuring (1) big guns and (2) big muscles. I wonder how much of an effect Hollywood had on these terrorists?
Well, I’m not sure how important this article is. At the end of the day it just left me thinking, “Eh.” Then again, remember the scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 about the FBI investigating a guy who made some anti-Bush comments at the gym? Maybe O’Neill tapped into a staple of homeland security.
2 comments ↓
Fascinating. Here in Rio many gyms are breeding grounds for “pitboys”– gangs of bullies who practice jiu-jitsu, own pitbulls, and go around starting fights to show their “masculinity. They’re pretty harmless compared to al-Qaeda terrorists, but it’s easy to a parallel with narcissism and resentment, plus the physicality of the training and comraderie.
That’s really interesting. I also just heard about an ethnography called Turkish Power Boys that might touch on the same kind of thing among Turkish youth in Germany. I’ll have to seriously brush up on my German to read it, but it looks cool.
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