i’m reading a book on al qaeda

specifically, the looming tower, and was reminded of a quote from the brothers karamazov. dostoevsky seems to never not be applicable. anyway, here’s the quote, which is one of my all-time faves:

… he was partly a young man of our time – that is, honest by nature, demanding the truth, seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate participation in it with all the strength of his soul; demanding an immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life. Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish – such sacrifice is often almost beyond the strength of many of them.

1. “these young men” are universal. they are not just “of dostoevsky’s time.”

2. i thought of this in reference to a section of the book talking about the cult of and obsession with death/martyrdom that flourished in camps of arab (and some non-arab) muslims who traveled to afghanistan in the 80s to fight the soviet invasion. they fought against the communists because they perceived them as advocating materialism, just a different form of materialism from the one offered by “the west.” the influence of this materialism was supposedly undermining societies throughout the islamic world, but instead of working within their societies to uphold traditions as active partakers in those traditions, these young men chose to defend their societies by abandoning them, going out of their way to make war against the materialists, hoping above all to become one more addition to the body count, naively, eagerly stamping out their own lives in self-induced death that resembles suicide more than than sacrificial martyrdom.