ANY researcher of religiously-denominated radicalisation and Islamist militancy today is often faced with the temptation to exceptionalise such violence, or in other words, to treat such impulse and method of violence as original, applicable to, and contained within Muslims only.

Nevertheless, for such a judgement to even be qualified, frameworks of analysis are needed. My preferred framework is a comparative one.

Comparisons help us to escape our tendency to exceptionalise the common (i.e. everyone thinks their heartbreaks are objectively more heart-breaking than everybody else’s), while at the same time buttressing any findings of uniqueness with empirical soundness. After all, one can’t determine what is unique without knowing what is shared, to begin with.

While I am not the first one to say so, the importance of reconciling the humanities with social science research cannot be stressed enough, perhaps now more so than ever.

Thus, in order to look for an account of a milieu of widespread radicalisation, identity-based political consciousness, and anti-state violence for comparison, I turned to literature.

Reading for immersion

My case study came from Chinese-Flemish author Han Suyin’s And The Rain My Drink. I wouldn’t go into the details behind the controversial “semi-autobiographical” novel but suffice to say, first published in 1956, it tells a story of the Malayan Emergency still at the heart of its darkness.

Unlike typical novels, the story does not follow the classic three act (beginning, middle, and end) structure, with the reader often left sympathetic yet ambivalent towards the motivations of its many characters. And, it is at such ambivalence the story ends.

Written with no hindsight of how the Emergency would end, Han’s description of radicalisation and violence of a different time and age is actually quite close to how we feel about jihadist extremism today, the ending of which also feels distant and unattainable.

What makes Han’s And The Rain My Drink relevant to radicalisation studies is that her immersive and highly picturesque writing extricates us from our present preconceptions and fears about jihadist terrorism and helps us imagine a time when the ‘terrorist’ was presumed to have a Chinese face.

Despite the book’s poetic title, war isn’t romanticised by Han. What Han did was a redirection of war from a focus based on solid group- and ideology- based divisions onto fluid human relationships. In the novel, the quick shifts from one viewpoint to another facilitates a relational view of the ‘battlefield’, weaving together a large cast of characters with their fates intertwined but inner lives separated.

In short, war entraps and is waged by those who believe and (initially) do not believe in it.

While set in Malaya, I imagine its account of an insurgency is relatable to what is happening in the Middle East, while the situation of a perceived hostile, ‘untrustworthy’ minority mimics, though with some differences, what is happening in European countries, such as France, England, and Belgium.

Reading for similarities

On the part of the Communist militants, one can observe similarities where it is a case of blinding commitment to ideological purity by some, with push factors such as poverty, marginalisation, and state0perpetrated violence filling in the blanks for the rest.

Like the Islamic State (IS) today, the Communist militants would behead any betrayers to the cause, with the assumption that their in-group comrades—then the Chinese, now the Muslims—would be natural allies to their cause.

As is the Iraqi Sunnis today, the rural Chinese poor were, as Han would describe, stuck at a place between “fire and water”, with both sides (the police and the militants) equally eager to win their hearts as well as to subject them to coercion and violence.

Also, one can notice that the backgrounds of those going Inside (read: joining the insurgency) were as variegated as their motivations. While most of its members came from the politically and economically marginalised (so is the case for Islamist militancy), there were also interesting outliers.

The character of Sen, the scion of a tycoon who ditched a life of dynastic wealth and comfort to become the Movement’s most committed and senior figure reminds one of Osama bin Laden of the billion-dollar construction empire of Saudi, the Bin Laden Group.

On the part of colonial security forces, one can see a complex situation where the many functionaries of the state were not only unsure of the driving force behind the militants, but also the effectiveness in their own strategy in combating them.

There were enough men (with exceptions of course) that were committed as there were those that were conflicted. The most committed ones often ended up being the most conflicted as well.

The depth ascribed to one such character, a security officer by the name of Luke Davis, helps to illustrate the dilemma faced by modern day counter-terror professionals where the threat is real but the ‘enemy’, is at best cloudy (coincidentally, a similarly captivating character is named Small Cloud).

Even as the policing of the person is possible (through surveillance and incarceration), the policing of the mind, which is where radicalisation occurs, is much, much difficult.

The effort to perform the latter, especially conducted with little understanding of the life-worlds of the subjects of policing, resulted in simplistic categorisations with dubious correlations established.

In the novel, curled hair, for example, would mean a girl has cross-overed to the British’s side. Laughable maybe, but not so different from today’s treatment by some who measure the level of radicalisation of Muslim women by the type of clothing they wear.

Such arbitrary assignment of the level of dangers associated with preventive policing could have tragic consequences, too. This is seen in the case of Neo, whose sullenness and non-cooperation to the authorities due to him wrongly detained as a terrorist caused further injustice to the poor man, ending with his wife dead and him being deported to China.

Reading to locate the present in history

Personally, I would think any effort to categorise Han’s work as being pro-Communist or pro-British is a bit missing the point. The usefulness of literature, unlike policy-orientated or even academic writings, is that it allows neat binaries, logics, and categories to dissolve in the organic richness of plot, characters, and atmosphere.

Good historical fiction provides us with a window to immerse ourselves in the macro- and microscopic changes the characters experienced. Radicalisation in the 50s happened within the interstices of the aftermath of war, the rise of race- and class-based anti-colonial consciousness, and the indeterminacy before the eventual deliverance in of a post-colonial nation.

Neither is today’s radicalisation happening in a vacuum; geopolitical instability, transnational religious revivalism, state and religious-denominated authoritarianism, and widening socio-economic inequalities form the vortex all of us—radicals and non-radicals, and everyone in between—are sucked into.

But Han’s tale need not be read as a depressing one. If the memories of the jungle are no longer suspended on, nor even remembered by the Malaysian Chinese today, the stereotype of a Muslim terrorist might pass one day as well.

The bigger question is this; knowing that anyone could be the next target for identity-based profiling, do we want to be the accomplices of such systemic violence ourselves? – August 16, 2017.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.