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Former Jihadist: Young Extremists Are Often Suffering from an ‘Identity Crisis’


Before offering his help to Western intelligence services, Mubin Shaikh was a Canadian citizen who went to Pakistan to join the jihad. On ABC’s This Week, he explained his own radicalization as the result of an “identity crisis” — a predicament he believes many young Muslims in the West experience, and which may help to explain why so many Muslims from Europe, and even from the United States, are joining up with the Islamic State: “You don’t know, you’re trying to navigate the space in the West: How Muslim am I supposed to be, and how Western am I supposed to be, and how much do those conflict with and contradict one another?”

Says Shaikh, these young men “may not even be discriminated against . . . but they’ll feel that ‘my people’ are under attack. You have vicarious suffering. You start to feel that their suffering is my suffering.”

Tags: Sunday Shows August 31 2014