Why do Young Europeans Wage
Jihad?
Why have more than 5000 youngsters
gone from Europe to Syria to join Isil?
Perhaps Medieval History might offer an
answer
In a speech at National Prayer Breakfast February 2015, President Obama, called attention to the
atrocities committed by Christians during the Crusades and the Inquisition, reminding us all not to get on
our high horse, when condemning the horrors witnessed by the PR-videos spawned by ISIS.
This immediately ignited a firestorm on television and social media about the roots of the Crusades 8-900
years ago and whether or not Christian slaughter in that period was preceded by prior Muslim
aggressions. And whether it makes sense in any way to compare what happened in the Middle Ages with
what is happening right now.
Nuno Gonçalves was a 15th-century Portuguese court painter for King Afonso V of Portugal. He is
credited for the painting of the Saint Vincent Panels. The man kneeling in front at the second but
last panel is believed to be Henry the Navigator (1394 – 1460). Henry was the third child of the
Portuguese king John I and responsible for the early development of Portuguese exploration and
maritime trade with other continents through the systematic exploration of Western Africa, the
islands of the Atlantic Ocean, and the search for new routes. As usual for “third” sons, he died
without having married and without any (known) progeny.
This is not the place – nor do I have the inclination – to try and justify this or that opinion of what the
crusades were all about and which religious groups started the religious wars in the Early Middle Ages!
Neither is it the place to point out that after crusading in the Middle East became increasingly wrought
with losses, the crusaders turned on the Cathars, Christian “heretics” in South-Western France as well as
on the heathens in the Baltics! Or that crusading as a matter of fact continued well up into the 17 th
century. Or that the modern “idea” what crusading is all about has been forged more in the crucible of
the romantic notions of the 19th century than by history proper. Or that it is these romantic notions which
have fuelled the Islamic ideological platform, which frames the current war in the Middle East as a fight
against a Western Crusade! Anyone familiar with the history of the Crusades will know there is a huge
scholarly literature touching upon these and myriads of other questions. Suffice it for me to point to the
seminal overview presented in the slight, but very illuminating book by Crusade-scholar par excellence,
Jonathan Riley-Schmit: The Crusades, Christianity and Islam (Columbia University press 2008).
What may be appropriate, however, is to remind us all of a specific phenomenon, which perhaps
characterised crusading in the Middle Ages, which might help us to explain why more than 5000 young
men from Europe are believed in the last three years to have travelled to the Middle East in order to take
part in the vicious fighting going on there.
From: James L. Boone: Parental Investment and Elite Family
Structure in Preindustrial States p. 865. By kind permission of
the Author
This is the question, which is currently hotly debated in Europe, where everyone are desperately trying to
understand why brainy and some-times even well-educated youngsters embark on this perilous journey;
often forsaking not only their future but also their life in the process.
It is exactly this question, which a comparison with what happened in the Middle Ages may help us out.
More specifically we may get wiser perusing an old study by an American Anthropologist, James L.
Boone, who in nearly 30 years ago published an intricate piece of research of what happened in Portugal
in the later Middle Ages, AD 1380 – 1580.
From: James L. Boone: Parental Investment and Elite Family
Structure in Preindustrial States p. 867. By kind permission of
the Author
The background was the Portuguese war with Castille in AD 1383-85 and the new dynasty, which was
established by D. João I, an illegitimate half-brother of the former king. After he gained power, he
established a very centralist and nearly absolutist kingdom, in which nearly all land formerly controlled
by the old elite was redistributed to a small group of his followers. Over the next 200 years these new
elite lineages were able to hang on to this wealth by implementing a series of different procreative
strategies, combining the accretion of a series of sons, while at the same time furthering primogeniture.
Soon the elite population rapidly began to outstrip the number of existing estates and other titles
available for their progeny to succeed.
Basically, this meant that if you were firstborn and belonged to the highest echelons of the Portuguese
society you had access to reproduce yourself nearly twice as often as the least privileged younger sons of
the lowest status group in the Portuguese society (not counting peasants or burghers). However, it also
shows that all in all no more than 60 – 65 % of the young males had access to a woman aka the possibility
to procreate themselves.
What happened to the females? Well, they were either married abroad or locked up in nunneries (this
happened to app. 68% of those available). Or – if they belonged to the low-status nobility they were
endowed in order to push them socially upwards. Just to make it clear, a male belonging to the top elite
and who had access to marry several times had on average 22.6 children (counting both legitimate and
illegitimate). However, if you belonged to the lowest quartile you got on average no more than 10.3
children, even if you had access to marry more than once. The winner simply took it all and left the
younger brothers and the low riffraff without a chance of procreating.
The result was of course that a highly volatile society developed beneath the surface. Seen from afar the
Portuguese Society from 1360 – 1580 looked stable and prosperous. By subordinating and controlling the
access of younger males to procreate themselves, the elites were able to maintain their individual family
fortunes and stabilize succession. Beneath the surface, however, a very unstable and violent situation
developed, characterised by competition for the few available females on the “market”, which
accordingly were “jealously hoarded, sequestered, restricted, abused and worshipped” (Boone p. 863).
Jorge Afonso: Madre Deus. National Museum of Art
Lisbon. Source: Wikipedia
But what about the younger scions born with low expectations, imbued with military values and nowhere
to go? They were of course exported elsewhere to partake in conflicts, some of which were probably
created in order to get them out of the way. In the Portuguese example these conflicts took place first in
Morocco and later India and South America. Here they fought and died. In the last generation more than
25% of the young noble males died in wars, while more than 40 % of their sisters died in nunneries.
Boone proved these mechanisms back in 1986 through diligent statistical investigations of a unique
genealogical source, which yielded precise information about the careers of 1959 men and 1630 women
belonging to the late medieval Portuguese nobility.
However, some have also believed that the background for the Vikings and their aggressive moves into
Europe and further abroad was the same, while others (Georges Duby) have voiced the opinion that the
Crusades were nothing but church-state strategies to control domestic violence in a situation were
younger sons were kept kicking their heels, while watching their elder brothers get all the damsels and
progeny.
Why is this important to remember right now? The reason is of course that the plight of the young men
going abroad to wage Jihad as Islamist warriors might in fact be much the same as that of the early
medieval Arabs in the 8th century, the Vikings in the 9th and 10th centuries, the Crusaders in the 11th – 13th
centuries and that of the adventurers from the 15th and 16th century Portugal.
Here we have a number of children growing up in families bent on furthering the success of the family
more than the success of the individual children. Accordingly interest is lavished on the first-born son
plus the daughter(s). If you are just part of the younger male-reserve in such a family you are not first in
line, when interest and care is doled out.
Secondly access to proper Muslim girls is not that easy. As often as not the available girls are simply
expected to marry a cousin from the old homeland to enable his family to migrate to the “new world”. Or
she is highly educated in order to entice the firstborn next-door, on whom his parents has lavished
attention. At the same time not that many “Western” girls are available as they are busy getting an
education or finding a partner able to secure them in a world more and more controlled and dominated
by what is de facto a very small group of meritocrats and political mandarins. For the younger generation
of Muslim boys this situation will even get worse as the practice of aborting female fetuses spreads and
lack of girls get even worse.
In a world where you cannot get a job, nor a woman and a life, the question is of course: why am I here?
And the idea may even crop up: perhaps I might be better off seeking an adventure, where I can get
“lawful” access to some slut or slave as promised in the Qur’an? Perhaps it is as simple as that!
When Obama compared the present-day war in the Middle East with the events in the Middle Ages, his
object was clear: he wanted to point out that even though religious arguments are fielded every day by
Islamists, so have Christians or for that matter Jews been busy in another time justifying horrendous acts
by referring to their “God”.
However, the main reason why we should make such a cultural historical comparison to these ancient
wars is of another order: it might simply lead us to a better understanding of what we should do about all
the testosterone-rich young men, frustrated by their meagre chances of getting an ordinary life.
Perhaps the problem simply has to do with the way in which Muslim girls are treated. If we speak up and
liberate them from their fate as marketable goods in odious systems of marriage transactions, all these
youngsters – boys and girls – may simply end up getting an education and marrying for love. And yet
another young fellow might be redeemed from a bleak fate.
Would that history would work out in this way!
Karen Schousboe
SOURCES:
Parental Investment and Elite Family Structure in Preindustrial States: A Case Study of Late MedievalEarly Modern Portguese Genealogies
By James L. Boone III
In: American Anthropologist, 1986, Vol 88 No. 4, pp.859 -876
Obama, Trying to Add Context to Speech, Faces Backlash Over ‘Crusades’
By Michael D. Shear in New York Times, 06.02.2015
FEATURED PHOTO:
National Monument of Discoveries in Lisbon, 1960