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link How Islamic punk went from fiction to reality | Music | The Guardian.
I guess if you think about it, why should the Muslim culture be any different? It’s not as if kids in that culture are blindly obeisant to their family dictates as perhaps portrayed by the popular media. In our culture, you can’t even get kids to make their own beds or get a haircut. Can you imagine telling Junior in the Muslim culture to strap on a bomb? As my son would say, “equals no!”
When you think of the majority of wars in the history of the world, they are started by old men, but staffed and finished by young ones. For this reason alone, youth can be skeptical of the judgement of their older generation. Youth has a natural tendency to rebel against whatever status quo they are brought up with, regardless of how benign or oppressive it may be. Think of the suburban kids in the west who emulate their rap star idols by looking ‘street’. It’s like Sean Penn or Michael Moore looking ‘Castro”. As if some white-bread kid from Connecticut is going to empathize with Rap Star X. Apparently having a stable household and family life is not preferable to being an illiterate misogynist with bad taste in clothes.
It’s easier to see the spawn of radical Muslim families rejecting their native culture since for women, it means subservience, camouflage and relegation to chattel status. For boys, it means misogyny, praying 12 times a day and the occasional suicide mission. I wonder why their response is not the opposite of kids in the west, ie turn to become family oriented, respectful and dressing properly. In the linked story, the kids featured may be a very small outcast minority, but that’s how things start. Once other kids observe that they can thumb their noses at their parents, they will too. It’s weird the things that kids find admirable.
It may turn out that the thing that turns the tide in the Muslim world is to ship all punk and rap stars from the U.S. into their midst to ferment social change. Boy that’s a win/win propostion for all.