On April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, held annually since 1897 in the capital of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on Patriots Day, killing three people and wounding 264 others. In the dramatic hunt that followed the mayhem, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with the police and his younger brother Dzhokhar was captured and later charged on thirty federal counts.
Almost exactly two years later, on April 8, 2015, he was found guilty in federal court on all 30 counts. And earlier this month, the jury recommended that Dzhokhar be sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Why did these two young Chechen immigrants commit such a heinous crime? Why did they, given the chance to pursue the American Dream, choose instead to kill and maim innocent bystanders at a sporting event? And why did they, with feet solidly held on American soil, safe from the killing fields of the Caucasus, remain afflicted with the inward preoccupations and spiritual ravages that they had brought with them from the old country?
After his sentencing this summer, the Federal Bureau of Prisons will most likely send Dzhokhar to the notorious ADX Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado, where he could easily spend a decade (perhaps even two or three) while his lawyers went through the lengthy appeals process. And trust me on this one: If those young men were fully cognizant of what awaits him there, the odds are that he would waive all appeals and call in the executioner then and there. ADX is known as the “hell hole” “the closest to hell you can get,” and “the Alcatraz of the Rockies” where violent inmates are housed. Kept in their tiny cells for 22 hours every single day, and prevented from communicating with the outside world, or even fellow inmates, they are often driven mad by isolation. In a law suit filed last year on behalf of several prisoners at ADX, we read: “Prisoners interminably wail, scream and bang on the walls of their cells. Some mutilate their bodies with razors, shards of glass, writing utensils and whatever other objects they can obtain. Others carry on delusional conversations with voices they hear in their heads ...”
In effect, ADX is where America sends you when it does not want to see you ever again, or have anyone else see you ever again. Among the facility's inmates are Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, Zacaria Moussaoui, convicted for conspiring to kill Americans as part of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Richard “the shoe-bomber” Reid, as well as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Aryan Brotherhood member Barry “the Baron” Mills and Mafia gang boss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.
Why, we wonder then, did the Tsarnaev brothers do it? In the wake of the bombings, law enforcement officials, along with media pundits, focused their attention on finding out who “radicalized” or “trained” the brothers — in other words, what Islamist organization orchestrated the terrorist attack that day. They found no such sinister organization. Truth be told, between September 2001 and April 2013, the years between the 9/11 attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing, “the number of terrorist attacks carried out on American soil by people connected to Islamic organizations numbered zero,” Masha Gissen, the respected Russian-American journalist and author, wrote in her recently published book, The Brothers, about the two young Chechen immigrants. “The idea that their actions were driven by simple ideas without any concerted outside help, that they simply ‘objected to US foreign policy’ and decided to use a bomb to express that opposition — well, this terrifyingly simple idea was never on the table.” But why did Dzhokhar, hiding in a boat as the authorities hunted him down scribble this on the boat’s interior walls: “ ... The US government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that. As a Muslim I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished. We Muslims are one body, you hurt one, you hurt us all ... Know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that? We are promised victory and we will surely get it. Now I don’t like killing innocent people, it is forbidden in Islam ...Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop ...”
Again, the American media tried, and failed, to understand how religion and politics, faith and culture, God and cosmos, are entwined in Islam. For the one billion-plus Muslims in the world today, Islam permeates all aspects of life, including that aspect we call one’s self-definitions. In the West, separating religion and politics, or “church and state,” is routine. In Muslim culture, the two have always co-inhered. When Muslims, for example, seek to invest something with value and meaning, when they existentially contemplate their human frailty and mortality, when they ponder their political and social realities, they do not, like their counterparts in the Euro-American world, look to John Lock and Karl Marx, the Bill of Rights and the Social Contract, but to religion, albeit one that embodies both their intellectual and teleological traditions.
The American media tried, and failed, I say, to understand, truly understand, the significance of what Dzhokhar said in his note.
Again, as Masha Gissen reminded us in The Brothers, “At some point someone managed to snap a picture of the note, and ABC News published it. It appears that the quoted version in the (court) filing omits the following sentence: ‘I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His messenger’...” You can translate the words, but not explain the power of what they evoke for a Muslim hearing, reading or reciting them.
