From Dostoevsky to Al-Qaeda: What Fiction Says to Social Science

Here, for once, the line between writing and the world is direct, explicit, substantial, and observable. And, we shall doubtless soon see, consequential.

—Clifford Geertz, "Which Way to Mecca?"

At midpoint in Demons—also titled The Possessed or The Devils in English translations of Dostoevsky—Pyotr Verkhovensky, the novel's master of terrorist ceremonies, expresses adoration of the mysterious Nikolai Stavrogin: "You are my idol! . . . You have the air of being everyone's equal—yet everyone is afraid of you—this is good." Verkhovensky continues: the "aristocrat [who] goes among democrats is captivating! It's nothing for you to sacrifice life, your own or some one else's."¹ Dostoevsky's novel probes fantasies that those who seek to understand terrorism now approach via social science. What can a novel of 1872—written by a "cruel talent" who, it is said, reveled in the evils he described—tell us about terror that social science cannot?²

Interrogations such as Jossef Bodansky's Bin Laden, Roland Jacquard's In the Name of Osama Bin Laden, Gilles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, Alan Dershowitz's Why Terrorism Works, Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, Faisal Devji's Landscapes of the Jihad, and Jonathan Randal's Osama: The Making of a Terrorist do not provide the inside view that a cruel talent imagining cruelty can offer.³ Social and political theory, with which government officials presumably "keep up," cannot fathom the erotically charged relations that drive suicide terrorism. As Robin Morgan insists, in The Demon Lover, "fiction writers reveal what remains a mystery to terrorism experts": "the sexuality of terror and of terrorism," "the sensualization of cruelty and death."⁴ The political discourse on terrorism lacks a way of thinking about the darkest motives of individual lives and, without that access, will produce mostly platitudes ("the struggle of Islam and the West"). Individuals who would plan or commit a terrorist act are of a complexity that requires not social science but Russian fiction to comprehend them.

So I return to Demons. Recent studies of terror overlap with Dostoevsky's analysis with respect, at least, to two of his themes. They share the idea that by means of projections and introjections individuals are absorbed into terrorist collectives impervious to impact from outside. A second theme that social theory shares with Dostoevsky is the circulation of violence around a charismatic leader. "The goal of suicide terrorism," Alan Dershowitz argues, "is to create a 'cycle' of violence—at least the illusion that the violence and counterviolence are part of the cycle of morally equivalent actions and counteractions."⁵ And literary critics describe the way in which "Dostoevsky uses three circles as structural points of reference. . . . the circle is both ideologically and structurally the source of the public events that follow. These events culminate in the murder of Shatov, the suicide of Kirillov, the murders of Liza and the Lebyadkins, the madness of the fete, with its aftermath of fire, murder, and disintegration."⁶ Women in Demons, such as Marie Shatov, attempt to break that circle (or cycle) and nearly succeed. To observe that Dostoevsky's women characters expose the male "demons" as false holy men is not to suggest that Dostoevsky was a feminist. But a theme of Demons with no significant counterpart in books on bin Laden and al-Qaeda is the importance of women to understanding terrorism properly. The "woman question" is basic to discussions of modern revolution, and with this contention Dostoevsky would have agreed.⁷ In "At Tikhon's," a suppressed chapter of Demons, the terrorist prince Stavrogin confesses to having raped a young girl.⁸ In another pivotal chapter, a woman, Maria Lebyadkina, dares to name Stavrogin a "pretender" and accuse him of betrayal. Stavrogin's response, usually cool and calculating with men, is to "push her away from him" violently (275, 278). Because the cult of personality has historically been a male preserve and useful for terrorists, women who question it tend to end up maimed or dead.

In Demons the women who once worshipped Stavrogin...