Ephemeral utopia: Aesthetics of the self and the community on the Syrian journey

Abstract

This article examines the flux and reflux of commitment to jihad among immigrants to Syria. Contrary to a linear and often teleological view of commitment to jihad—radical individuals joining the most radical contemporary organization—migration to Syria involved much uncertainty, including both the circumstances for leaving and the phases that punctuated the migration. By studying this form of commitment to jihad through the double prism of its founding ideals and their historical outcomes, the successive and sometimes concurrent thematizations of jihad can be examined for those who attributed an existential meaning to it. Adopting a viewpoint based on the sociology of knowledge, we aim to show that commitment to jihad is a utopian surge, in Karl Mannheim’s sense of the expression, and a realization in the here and now of moral tendencies underlying the emigrants’ social ethos.