CO07061 | Self-Radicalisation: The Case of Abdul Basheer Abdul Kader

There is much we do not know about Abdul Basheer, his family background, or of his experiences in school and at work. Nevertheless, the information that has emerged allows us to formulate some very preliminary observations. The first thing that jumps out is what has been revealed about his personality. Described as very smart, well-read, jovial and eloquent, we know that Abdul Basheer was a first rate debater in his JC days and was regarded as a competent lawyer, though he did not practise law for long. Furthermore, the “old” Abdul Basheer was apparently a party animal, who enjoyed the nightlife and working as a part-time bartender in a pub. While still in JC, he formed a rock band with himself as lead vocalist and drummer. He also apparently dressed like a “punk” who enjoyed wearing “big earrings”. All this is rather telling because the old Abdul Basheer would have belonged to the minority of nominal Muslims who are practically non-observant. It would seem that before he became a religious radical, the old Abdul Basheer was a “social radical” in terms of lifestyle habits and dressing, which suggests that he was a non-comformist within the generally conservative Singaporean Malay/Muslim community. In social psychological terms, this marks him out as someone who has a strong internal locus of control. That is, Abdul Basheer is obviously someone who believes that he can exercise control over external events and actively shape his life, rather than passively resigning himself to outside forces such as fate and family wishes. The sad reality is that if Abdul Basheer had continued with that kind of proactive, go-getting outlook on life, he seemed destined to achieve the Singapore Dream. Instead, he opted out.

Reacting to the Status Quo

Analytically speaking, the most likely reason for this is that at some point after starting work Abdul Basheer encountered what some psychologists would term a de-legitimating discovery, or an incident or series of incidents that caused him to lose faith in the innate rightness of the status quo. What we know is that after graduating from NUS in 2003, he joined a prestigious law firm but left after only a year and became a law lecturer at a local polytechnic. Apparently Abdul Basheer told friends that he had left the practice of law because the pursuit of wealth “distracted people from being close to God”. We could accept this at face value as the discovery that caused him to question his life priorities. We also know that by late 2004 Abdul Basheer had begun to immerse himself in radical Islamist discourse on the Internet, when he had apparently not done so before. There is no necessary logical connection between wanting to get out of the rat race to live simply before God and suddenly deciding to familiarize oneself with the hate-filled, us-versus-them Global Jihad view of the world. Something else is missing: the element of personal animus.

In the absence of more information, we can only wonder about the detailed reasons Abdul Basheer left the law firm after such a short time, and whether he considered becoming a polytechnic lecturer a severe loss of status. Given what we do know of his strongly assertive, “in-your-face” personality, we cannot rule this out. Thus one possible reason why Abdul Basheer became susceptible to the virulent, anti-status quo appeal of Global Jihad subculture was because he himself had experienced a profound personal de-legitimating discovery. This left him with a painful “narcissistic wound” and extremely upset with the status quo. At a deeper, subliminal level, he may have sought opportunities to strike back.

Personal transformation

It is at this point that Abdul Basheer could possibly have weaved his own individual “narrative” of having been “wronged” in his personal life into the wider web-based Global Jihad Story of the embattled worldwide Muslim ummah undergoing persecution at the hands of an US-Israeli cabal bent on destroying Islam. To Abdul Basheer, the Global Jihad worldview would have appealed to him intellectually and viscerally. It would have led him to emphasize his “authentic” Muslim identity whilst deliberately eliminating all vestiges of his “copycat” secular, Westernized, self. Furthermore, the Global Jihadi call to militant action would have appealed strongly to Abdul Basheer’s activist, let’s-do-something-about-this mentality. As a result, the old social radical would have gradually transmogrified seamlessly into the religious radical. This transformation was obvious by 2005, when an old classmate from law school chanced upon a completely different Abdul Basheer in town. While he was still his counter-cultural self, there was a huge difference: where only a few years earlier he had sported punk dressing and big earrings, he now wore a beard, religious clothing and even an obvious mark on his forehead caused by intense prostration whilst praying.