INTRODUCTIONintelligence community, political elites, and the general public because of their home-
grown, suburban origins,^20 gives important indications of how jihadism is a product of
globalization and its vehicles (markets, modern secularism, and media).^21 The report
makes two related claims, both of which illustrate the changing meaning of national sov-
ereignty and the redefinition—one is tempted to say the virtualization and perhaps even
profanization—of the theologico-political. First, it suggests that ‘‘in an age of globalized
communication and porous borders, there is no real distinction between domestic and
foreign threats.’’ Indeed, it continues: ‘‘Even if everyone involved in terrorizing London
turns out to have been British-born [as turned out to be the case], it is clear that the
bombers had access to sophisticated explosives, not easily available in suburban Yorkshire;
and, more important, that they were influenced by ideas, images, and interpretations of
Islam that would continue to circulate electronically, even if every extremist who tried to
enter Britain were intercepted.’’ Second, profiling the suspects of the London attacks re-
vealed a pattern: disaffection with the home country, familial authority, local community,
and mosque often preceded petty criminalization, conversion, and reterritorialization, as
it were, in what is often a merelyvirtualgroup of like-minded, radicalized individuals,
which establishes itself through the Internet and which—when effective guidance by expe-
rienced veterans from actual battlegrounds is finally found—may or may not coalesce
into an ad hoc death squad that dissolves (through suicide, arrest, or flight) after the
fateful action has been undertaken.
In ‘‘The Ideology of Terror,’’ Roy observes that what inspires this religious violence
has, in the end, little to do with circumscribed local conflicts, often of a postcolonial
nature (say, Israel/Palestine, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq, Indonesia, or
Somalia).^22 Rather, it is characterized by a process he calls the ‘‘delinking of Islam as a
religion from a given culture—from any given culture.’’^23 He stresses the striking moder-
nity—including the increasing irreality—of the ideological outlook of Islamic militancy.
It cannot, he suggests, be adequately captured in terms of ‘‘fundamentalism,’’ ‘‘Islam-
ism’’—that is, the ‘‘movement that conceives of Islam as a political ideology’’^24 —orinte ́-
grisme, but instead acquires near-phantasmatic features, which are increasingly difficult
to read, let alone respond to. Not mechanistically linked to such causes as geopolitics in
the Middle East or the publication, on September 30, 2005, of cartoons of the Prophet
Muhammad by the conservative Danish journalJyllands Posten,^25 these relatively sponta-
neous acts of violent rebellion lack a political aim that could merit the title of a strategy,
an agenda, or a concerted effort to change or reform anything in and of this world. If there
is any communitarian aspiration in militant jihadism or Islamism, it is, Roy suggests, one
of virtual belonging, a belonging without belonging, an identitarianism without identity,
a communality without community.
Pointing out that the 9/11, Madrid, and London bombers were not from regions
directly affected by the conflict in the Middle East and were often ‘‘Western-born converts
to Islam,’’ Roy makes a further observation: ‘‘What was true for the first generation of Al
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