Introduction

On December 22, 2001, a Paris-to-Miami flight made an emergency landing in Boston after a passenger tried to detonate bombs hidden in his sneakers. The terrorist, British citizen Richard Reid, was arrested. In a US court Reid, dubbed the “shoe bomber,” pleaded guilty and declared: “I know what I’ve done… At the end of the day, I know I done the actions.” Even though Reid apparently was fully aware of his actions and the reasons for his actions, the media turned their attention to Reid's family history for a possible explanation for his behavior. Reid was born in England, the son of an English mother and Jamaican father. He grew up in the London suburb of Bromley, a place that is, according to the BBC, “hardly a natural breeding ground for dissidents”. Perhaps then, the explanation for Reid's terrorist act could be found in the absence of his father during his childhood. Even though it seemed as if Reid's father was willing to take the blame, by stating that “I was not there to give him the love and affection he should have got”, he did not take any responsibility for his son's beliefs. Muslim extremists were to be held responsible for the brainwashing of his son, and more importantly: Richard Reid had been motivated by religious beliefs, not the belief of the Reid family: “They are two very different things. If he had done it through family beliefs I would have found it very hard to understand.”

The explanation Richard Reid's father gave for his son's behavior – the strict acting out of religious beliefs – fits in with common conceptions of fundamentalism and more specifically, Islamic fundamentalism. In their book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri elaborate on the recurring characteristics of (Islamic) fundamentalism. Hardt and Negri claim that fundamentalism is often reduced “to a violent and intolerant religious fanaticism that is above all ‘anti- Western’”.