The Life Cycle of a British Islamist: A Jungian Perspective

Edward Edinger, in 'Ego and archetype: Individuation and the religious function of the psyche,' designates as "unconscious religion" the psychological role played by political movements when religious institutions cease to provide containers for the spiritual strivings of individuals. I include Islamism as a political movement. Edinger's description of unconscious religion closely resembles the experience of a young British-born Muslim, Ed Husain, in 'The Islamist: Why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left.' Husain follows a path from being a traditional Muslim to a fanatical Islamist to a spiritual Muslim. Edinger applies Jungian psychology to describe four alternative consequences for persons whose religious institutions respond inadequately to their "religious instinct." These alternatives are: Adherence to an unconscious religion, psychological inflation, alienation, and individuation. In the case study, surprisingly, Ed Husain experiences all four of these alternatives in sequence, constituting a life cycle. The article concludes, optimistically, that this may be a natural sequence for those who embrace fanatical Islamism.

The loss of a meaningful connection to a religious tradition, under favorable conditions, may be followed by a reconnection to a source of spirituality. Along the way, however, a substitute secular movement may respond to the spiritual needs of the person. This is what Edward Edinger, a Jungian analyst, calls "unconscious religion". C. G.
Jung believes that the individual needs to feel related to a supra-personal force, usually called "god". Jung calls this the "religious function" (Jung, 1968, para. 14, p. 12). If this need is not met by an organized religion, the psyche seeks an alternative because the function itself cannot be eliminated.
In his book, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, Edinger uses the term, "unconscious religion", to designate such an alternative. This may be the psychological role played by political movements when religious institutions cease to provide containers for the spiritual strivings of individuals (Edinger, 1973, p. 68). Political movements include, for instance, communism, socialism, colonial independence, fascism, Nazism, and more recently, environmentalism, feminism, anti-globalization. I include Islamism, also called "political Islam", as a political movement.
In the Muslim world, the fusing of religion and nationalism is called 'Islamism.' Developed primarily in postcolonial Egypt and India, Islamism is a political philosophy that seeks to establish an Islamic state-either through grassroots social and political activism or through violent revolution-built upon a distinctly Islamic moral framework (Aslan, 2010, p. 23).
Aslan considers Islamism to be a political ideology of Islamic religious nationalism (Aslan, 2010, p. 180). He distinguishes Islamism as a political ideology from Islam as a faith. Aspects of Islamism include: enforcement of sharia law, pan-Islamic political unity, elimination of non-Muslim political, military, economic, social, or cultural influences on the Muslim world. If Islamism is a political movement, not a religion, it may yet be an "unconscious religion", in the words of Edinger.
In a recent autobiography, a young British-born Muslim tells of his transition from being a traditional Muslim, to a fanatical Islamist, and finally to a spiritual Muslim. Ed Husain's (2007)  "Fanaticism" takes on a specific meaning within the scope of Jungian psychology and relies on two key processes, repression and projection. Repression is the process by which the psyche protects the ego, making unconscious any beliefs that are incompatible with one's self-image. Projection is the counterpart of repression, a process that or convinced. However, the viscious circle continues because the further repression of doubts brings about projection onto opponents and so on (Alschuler, 2009, p. 65).

Edinger's Views on the Failure of Religious Institutions and the Rise of "Unconscious Religion"
Edinger employs a set of concepts to articulate his model of the psyche: ego, Self, ego-Self axis, and individuation.
These concepts require clarification in order to understand his views on unconscious religion. For him the entire psyche consists of consciousness and the unconscious. The ego is the center of consciousness, the locus of bodily sensations, time and space, memory, and the self-image. The Self (capital S) is the center of the entire psyche, of both consciousness and the unconscious. The Self gives the ego strength, durability, and meaning and guides the ego toward individuation. The ego-Self axis is the dynamic channel of communication between the ego and the Self, exemplified by dreams from the Self and prayers from the ego. Individuation is the life-long process in which the ego moves toward wholeness by making more and more repressed elements conscious. In this process the ego becomes partially conscious of the ego-Self axis and accepts the subordination of the ego to the Self, the image of the deity in the psyche (Edinger, 1973, pp. 3-7).
Inspired by ideas of C. G. Jung (1990, pp. 15-17;1938, pp. 104-105), Edinger offers his own views on unconscious religion. Jung's ideas begin with deploring the socialist dictatorial State for usurping the role of religious institutions and becoming sanctified in the mind of the masses as a substitute vehicle for religious aspirations. To paraphrase Jung, in the mind of the masses the State takes the place of God, State policies are creeds, the leader is a demigod, his votaries are apostles, and disbelievers of the "one truth" are heretics. The parade of State power replaces ecclesiastical processions to ward off demons and to give the masses a feeling of security. The State, like the Church, demands self-sacrifice and devotion. Both the State and the Church ensure that their demands be met: the State by terror; the Church by the "fear of God" (Jung, 1990, pp. 15-16).
Edinger, in contrast, coins the term, "unconscious religion", to understand the role of social and political movements when religious institutions fail to respond to popular spiritual needs.
When the collective psyche is in a stable state, the vast majority of individuals share a common living myth or deity. Each individual projects his inner God-image (the Self) to the religion of the community.
The collective religion then serves as the container of the Self for a multitude of individuals… As long as it is functioning adequately, the church protects the society against any widespread inflation or alienation. Personal, secular, or political actions become charged with unconscious religious meaning. This is particularly dangerous because whenever a religious motivation is acting unconsciously it causes fanaticism with all its destructive consequences. (Edinger, 1973, p. 65, italics mine) Something happens in the individual psyche when "the outer church loses its capacity to carry the projection of the Self … All the psychic energy and values that had been contained in the church now flow back to the individual, activating his psyche and causing serious problems" (Edinger, 1973, p. 65). According to Edinger, the loss of a projected religious value has four possible consequences: 1. The projected supra-personal value which has been withdrawn from its religious container will be reprojected onto some secular or political movement… When religious energy is applied to a secular object we have what can be described as idolization-which is a spurious, unconscious religion. (p. 68, italics mine)

2.
The individual may take on himself, on his own ego and personal capacities, all the energy previously attached to deity. Such a person succumbs to inflation (italics mine). Examples of this are seen in the hybris that over-values man's rational and manipulative powers and denies the sacred mystery inherent in life and nature. (pp. 65-68)

3.
With the loss of the god-projection into the church, the individual will at the same time lose his inner connection with the Self. The individual then succumbs to alienation and all the symptoms of the empty meaningless life that are so common today. (p. 65, italics mine)

4.
If when the individual is thrown back on himself through the loss of a projected religious value, he is able to confront the ultimate questions of life that are posed for him, he may be able to use this opportunity for a decisive development in consciousness (italics mine)… he may discover the lost value, the god-image, within the psyche... The connection between ego and Self is now consciously realized. In this case the loss of a religious projection has served a salutary purpose; it has been the stimulus which leads to the development of an individuated personality. (p. 68) I believe that Ed Husain experienced all four of these possibilities in sequence! Before documenting my view by quotations from Husain, I will to give a brief biography to place his experience in context.

Inflation, the Second Possibility
A. Edinger's idea "The individual may take on himself, on his own ego and personal capacities, all the energy previously attached to deity. Such as person succumbs to inflation" (Edinger, 1973, p. 65).

B. Definition of inflation
"It is a state in which something small (the ego) has arrogated to itself the qualities of something larger (the Self) and hence is blown up beyond the limits of its proper size" (Edinger, 1973, p. 7). "Intellectual rigidity which attempts to equate its own private truth or opinion with universal truth is also inflation" (p. 15). In other words, inflation is the psychic condition resulting from an ego that has taken on qualities of something greater and becomes blown up beyond its normal size. To consider one's own opinion as a universal truth is also inflation.

C. Quotations
Husain's pride in Islamism and his sense of Muslim superiority lead him fanatically to defend the Islamist doctrine as if it were a faith, by debating with Muslim students, leading Islamist organizations, and converting ordinary Muslims. His fanaticism corresponds to Jung's treatment of the subject (Alschuler, 2009).
Husain avidly reads books by Islamist ideologues and becomes inflated: "Now I was not a mere Muslim, like all the others I knew; I was better, superior" (Husain, 2007, p. 36). His reading allows him to distinguish between categories of Muslims: "true" Muslims, whose ideologies are all shaped by Islam, and "partial" Muslims, who confine their religion to prayer and piety (p. 37). In 1995 he extends his fanatical beliefs even further to include non-Muslims as well as "partial" Muslims. "As an Islamist, I saw everyone along religious lines, and all non-Muslims as inferior to us" (p. 130). Back at college in Newham, Husain has classmates of different ethnicities and nationalities: non-Muslim British, Africans, Asians, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and ordinary Muslims. For him, these students were divided into two groups, Muslims and the rest. "We were Muslims, superior and different from others" (p. 142). He seeks to convince Muslims of different nationalities that religion is the only defining identity. Identification with a superior "truth", sometimes embodied in a charismatic leader, swells the vehemence of Ed's dedication to political Islam. "With parental obstacles out of the way, my zeal and commitment to Islamism were unconfined" between the ego and the archetypal psyche that enables the conscious personality to remain resilient and to develop.

C. Quotations
Husain finds spirituality through the writings of Sufi Islam. He experiences the numinosity of a Sufi holy man in Turkey. This, according to Jung, enhances a religious attitude in the psyche, something essential to individuation.
He re-establishes an ego-Self connection.
Sufi-oriented scholars helped me anchor my soul after five years of political Islamism, a shallow, angerridden, aggression-fuelled form of political belief, based on exploiting Islam's adherents but remote from Islam's teachings. (Husain, 2007, p. 190) Husain describes his encounter with Mahmud Effendi, a Turkish Sufi Muslim, outside of Istanbul in a mountain top village. "My moments with him were brief, as he had to return to rest, but I felt an overawing presence in his company. He made me feel pure, clean, and gentle … Simply to look upon him reduced Faye to tears" (Husain, 2007, p. 193). Husain concludes his search for spiritual Islam with these words: By the middle of 2001 I was committed to spiritual Islam. … As the months passed an immense spiritual energy grew within me. I was at peace with myself and the world around me; my soul was tranquil and no amount of pressure caused me stress. … I felt -I knew -I was closer to God than I had ever been, and the spiritual void I experienced while in Islamism had been filled. (Husain, 2007, p. 198)

Findings and Their Implications
In this article I have attempted to link Edinger's ideas on the religious function of the psyche to the experience of a British Islamist. Elsewhere, independently of Edinger's approach, I have applied a Jungian theory of the complexes to an analysis of Husain's autobiography (Alschuler, 2011). Both approaches yield a satisfactory fit between theory and evidence.
Let us recall the four alternative possibilities for the individual whose religious institution ceases to carry the projection of the Self. A person who loses a meaningful connection to a religious tradition at the same time loses the inner connection with the Self and experiences what Edinger calls "alienation". A person who takes on himself the qualities associated with a deity falls victim to "inflation". A substitute secular movement, responding to the spiritual needs of the person, acts as an "unconscious religion". The discovery of a new source of spirituality enables comes a chronic condition, separated from the psychic life cycle (Edinger, 1973, p. 62): in the phase of inflation there is the danger of fanaticism; when the phase of alienation becomes chronic there is the danger of meaninglessness and suicide (Edinger, 1973, p. 64).
In accordance with Edinger's ideas, Husain's progress from fanatical "reverence" for political Islam (inflation) to Islamic spirituality (reconnection of the ego-Self axis) supports his individuation to some extent, as indicated by

Husain's Spiritual Awakening Does Not Equal Individuation
Many of us, including Edinger, would be pleased that Husain left fanatical Islamism and turned to Islamic spirituality. However, even the numinous spiritual experience that renewed Husain's religiosity, healed his damaged ego-Self axis, and made some of this axis conscious does not make him highly individuated. Why not? One of the essential qualities of the individuated person is the ability to reconcile conflicting tendencies in the psyche, especially those in the unconscious with those in consciousness, by making the former as conscious as possible.
Husain has come far but fails to reconcile his "fanatical Islamism" with his "spiritual Islam". As an Islamist, he deprecated the traditional and spiritual Muslims, calling them "partial" Muslims, while reserving for himself the title of "true" Muslim, one who adheres vehemently to the Islamist ideology and empathisizes with oppressed Muslims everywhere. At that time it is probable that Husain's own spirituality was repressed into the unconscious and projected onto the "partial" Muslims, indeed, making them the enemy. Later, when Husain found his Islamic spirituality, the tables turned. He became what he had formerly condemned, namely, a "partial" Muslim. He found nothing to salvage from his previous identity as a "true" Muslim, a fanatical Islamist. His total condemnation of Islamism, for its many half-truths that he discovered, suggests a repression of that Islamist identity including his enthusiastic humanitarian solidarity with oppressed Muslims in the world. Husain threw out the baby (humanitarian enthusiasm) with the bathwater (Islamist ideology). I consider Husain's individuation to be limited by his inability to reconcile his now unconscious Islamist identity with his new spiritual Islamic consciousness. Along these lines I have argued elsewhere that the development of Husain's political consciousness also fails to reach the highest stage (Alschuler, 2011). The Common Ingroup Identity Model (Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993) would arrive at a similar conclusion. The authors find that intergroup bias can be reduced by recategorization.
In place of one's identification with an in-group opposed to an out-group, one can conceive of oneself as being part of both groups, a more inclusive identity. Husain changed his identity from a "partial" to a "true" and back to a "partial" Muslim, never adopting a more inclusive identity.

Validity and Reliability of Autobiographies
In testimonial narratives, reliability refers to the correspondence between the original document and a translation of it; between an oral account to an anthropologist, for example, and the edited version (Frankfort-Nachmias & Nachmias, 2007, chapter 7). Since neither of these apply to Husain's own writing that is without editing by another person, reliability is not an issue. At issue is the validity of his autobiography. Validity concerns the correspondance between Husain's account of the facts, subjective (feelings, judgments) or objective (events, persons), and some other observer's account of the facts. Support for the validity of Husain's account comes from his frankness in revealing many unflattering descriptions of himself, something that one would not expect to find in a favorably distorted version (invalid) of the facts. In the absence of my own independent observations of Husain's personal experience, I can at most examine the critical comments in the media about his book, The Islamist. The media attention is overwhelming. After a cursory reading of many published reviews, I found a minority with negative comments. These found fault either with his historical facts, his understanding of Islamist ideology, or his interpretations of Islamic scripture. None doubted Husain's sincerity and honesty in recounting his own experiences, evidence in support of its validity.

Limitations of Single Case Studies
Single case studies are common in psychology and political science, especially in my own field of comparative politics, where the nation is usually a case. In the publications by Jungian analysts, case studies of individuals are the rule rather than the exception. In fact, one of Jung's most noted books, Symbols of Transformation (1956), is the study of a single case. Authors of case studies of individuals often seem to aim toward the generalization of their conclusions, whether or not they take into consideration the issues of reliability and validity.
Valid generalization of the results from a single case study of an individual depends on a number of preconditions, including the possibility of replicating the results in comparable cases. My single case study has Edinger's explicit conceptual and theoretical framework that may be applied to other autobiographies, rendering them comparable.
The application of Edinger's framework to comparable cases could be the task of future research. One candidate is the autobiography of Maajid Nawaz. Like Husain, he is also a British-born Muslim once a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir in London (Nawaz, 2013). In contrast to comparable case studies, a descriptive monograph without a theoretical framework makes replication problematic. Elsewhere I have followed the research strategy of comparable case studies, allowing for provisional generalization from only four cases (Alschuler, 2007).

Causality and Rival Hypotheses
Philosophers of science consider causal relationships to be unprovable. They argue that one proceeds by eliminating rival hypotheses, the principle of falsifiability, in order to retain that which resists disconfirmation (Blalock, 1972 To explain what they observe each one would have a rival hypothesis: a heliocentric and a geocentric one. I would hope to be in the enviable role of Copernicus in my explanation of Husain's experience… but who knows? Using a variety of theoretical approaches, a number of published studies of Islamism and terrorism contain rival hypotheses that could be relevant to the study of Husain's autobiography. Here are just a few. A Jungian approach applies the theory of complexes to Husain's autobiography (Alschuler, 2011). Victoroff (2005) provides an overview of psychological approaches to the study of terrorists. Moghaddam, Warren, and Love (2013) apply a "staircase to terrorism" approach that takes religion into account. In an earlier article, Moghaddam (2005) uses the "staircase" as a metaphor, rather than a testable model, to explore the gradual transformation of perceived grievances through five floors to acts of terrorism. His second floor to fourth floors resemble Husain's phases of unconscious religion and inflation-fanaticism. On floor two, perceived injustices lead one to identify an enemy, on floor three, to join a terrorist organization, and on floor four, to discriminate between "us and them". At each higher floor the perceived options become fewer until on the fifth floor, terrorist acts stand as the only option. This approach could remedy the absence of explanations by Edinger for the transition between the alternative consequences of a loss of faith.
The staircase metaphor would guide the search in Husain's autobiography for the conditions that moved Husain from floor two to four, then opened an exit door before reaching the fifth floor.

Conclusion
The religious function of the psyche, as described by Edinger (1973), goes a long way in clarifying the experience of a young British Islamist, Ed Husain. His life cycle, in some ways, ties in to the Common Ingroup Identity Model (Gaertner et al., 1993) and the staircase to terrorism approach (Moghaddam, 2005). All this suggests that Jungian psychology could be part of a multidisciplinary study of political movements.

Funding
The author has no funding to report.