Preface

Colette Balmain

The papers collected in this volume are expanded from papers given at the 6th Global Conference on Evil and Human Wickedness, which took place in March 2005. The chapters here represent the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of the conference itself covering topics such as historical and theological concepts of evil, media representations of evil, contemporary debates surrounding the Bosnia war and woman perpetrators in Birkenau, and the construction of the Other as evil in the face of the continuing hysteria over AIDS. In the aftermath of the events of 9/11 and those in shortly after the conference (7th July 2005), it seems that these debates have never been so timely or necessary. What I recollect most from the reports of the London bombings is the bemusement of the press and the public when the real life stories of the bombers gradually unfolded. In particular, press reports of Shehzad Tanweer, who grew up in Beeston, , showed a man well liked within his community. Indeed, on the day before the bombings, he played a pickup soccer match. In The Washington Post, Sudarsan Raghavan writes:

It was a ritual he carried out most days, if he wasn’t playing cricket. Whites, blacks, Asians - everyone in the neighborhood would come out. For a couple of hours, they would forget their races, religions and prejudices and play only as Britons.1

And yet the very next day, Tanweer would sacrifice his and others’ lives in the service of an ideology that at first seems so anathematic to this young man who appeared well adjusted at negotiating the competing demands of his Islamic faith and Western society. Of his experiences growing up in Beeston, his friend Saeed Ahmed writes, “He felt completely integrated and never showed any signs of disaffection,”2 In the aftermath of 7/11, Tanweer is reported as having become more religious, frequenting a local Islamic bookstore and visiting . Then there is the story of Mohammed Sadique Khan, a teaching assistant and youth worker, and another of the four London bombers of whom the following was written:

In Dewsbury yesterday, no one could understand what had driven him to take his own life and kill others in such obscene circumstances. They remembered him as a bearded 2 Preface ______young man, who wore Western clothes along with his religious cap. They recalled that he loved his wife, that the pair had a harmonious marriage and almost never argued. Both were pleasant and polite in the street. Proud parents, to all the world model members of their community.3

It became, then, difficult to construct any of the four young men in terms of evil, although it was agreed that their actions - the bombings - were evil. The conclusion was that these men had been indoctrinated by ideology - and it was ideology therefore that was evil. In these terms, evil was externalised and distanced, individually and geographically. The evil came from elsewhere - the East - the ultimate source of which was Al Qaeda and its leader, . In a sense it was not important whether or not Al Qaeda was actually behind the bombings, but that recourse to the extremist [evil] ideology of Al Qaeda provided a framework to explain the actions of these seemingly normal British men. On that day in July, just as in September 2001 in the United States, something wicked indeed did this way come. And while the papers contained within this volume might not have solutions to the problem of evil - evil, after all, is a shifting signifier and culturally specific - they clearly demonstrate the continuing necessity of debates in the face of acts of evil and human wickedness, as seen through multiple perspectives and theoretical landscapes.

Notes

1 Sudarsan Raghavan. “Friends Describe Bomber’s Political, Religious Evolution: 22-Year-Old Grew Up Loving Western Ways And Wanting for Little.” The Washington Post. Friday, 29 July 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072801991_pf.html, accessed 10th September 2008. 2 Saeed Ahmed, cited in Sudarsan Raghavan, op. cit. 3 Jonathan Brown, “Mohammed Sadique Khan: Expectant father whose chosen path meant he would never see his baby”, UK, online, Thursday, 14 July 2005, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/mohammed-sadique-khan- expectant-father-whose-chosen-path-meant-he-would-never-see-his-baby- 498749.html, accessed 10th September 2008.