At first I was pretty skeptical. Reprogramming jihadists through therapy ? Did the Saudi’s really intend to handle radicals as though they were whiny, navel-gazing westerners? “Amir, when your little brother was born, how did that make you feel? Did you worry that your parents didn’t love you anymore? When you smuggled guns through Frankfurt, were you hoping to impress them?” Ridiculous.
But there may be something to this initiative. What the RSS-feed summary called “therapy” seems to be a combination of reasoned theological argument about the real meaning of jihad and application of this immemorial bit of commonsense: Aimless, alienated young men are, at all times and places, the most prone to cause trouble. But they also are, at all times and places, civilized by a wife, kids , a job, and a sense of responsibility to a community. The Saudi government is basically just helping these young men “get their act together.” The new program “addresses the psychological needs and emotional weaknesses that have led many young men to jihad in the first place. It tries to give frustrated and disaffected young men the trappings of stability—a job, a car, possibly a wife.”
Because the participants get a lot of goodies (starting with Snickers galore at the rehabilitation center, and possibly culminating in a wife), some think this is just a typical case of the Saudis’ using “nonviolent means to cajole, to bribe, to buy off the opposition.” If so, it’s probably not sustainable, even for the oil-rich House of Saud.
But I suspect that this is a winning strategy for minimizing all sorts of pathologies in any society, including our own. America doesn’t need government-issue bourgeois identities, though, just support for (which may often mean noninterference with) families and churches, the primary socializing and civilizing institutions, which social conservatives have been defending for years. A certain reputedly pragmatic President-elect would do well to take note.
