Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2006, Page 6
kind receive complaints about groups that fit the definition on the basis of self-selection by
defectors and complainants. Finer distinctions are left to the connoisseurs. Professor Ian
Freckelton has noted that the term ―cult‖ has ―taken on pejorative connotations‖ and ―for at
least three decades has generally been employed judgementally, signifying little more than
that the group concerned is said to be dominated by an influential figure and is dangerous
or ideologically distasteful.‖i Adopting that popular line, we can easily regard 9/11 as
another catastrophic event involving suicide and mass murder perpetrated by a privately
funded, religious cultic terrorist group but if you want to call it a cult-like group, then that
is your choice.
In Al Qaeda we have a charismatic, self-appointed religious leader with political or
ideological ambitions who borrows from other ideologues to promote an intoxicating
worldview. We also have indoctrinated followers who eschew their personal ambitions and
family obligations to dedicate themselves, without material or tangible reward, to the
leader‘s cause. Not an army in the modern sense, and certainly not a mercenary brigade.
What more do you need to call this thing a cult? You can call it a heretical sect if you like,ii
or even a new religious movement. It makes no sense to say that a group cannot be
designated a new religious movement or a cult because it also happens to be catalogued as
a terrorist group. Perhaps we could call Al Qaeda a vanity cult or sect because it is largely
self-funded by a man who inherited an unusual amount of wealth (and who was able to
hook into and channel money from or launder money through largely inattentive religious
charities). Al Qaeda is a leech on the body of Islam that has become bloated with success,
arguably inadvertently nourished by the propaganda and some of the policies of Western
governments.
The 9/11 catastrophe (and previous cultic atrocities) requires us to take a longer-term think
about the way we regulate, and both directly and indirectly monitor religious groups—a
more sophisticated public policy response based on some understanding of the dynamics of
high-demand groups and the way in which religion is often used as a motivator for deviant
religious objectives, or sometimes just as a convenient vehicle for very venal objectives. An
integrated, structural approach to the problem has been slow in forthcoming from
governments, who treated the long list of religious cult atrocities prior to 9/11 as
intermittent, generally self-contained events that came to notice from time to time and then
lapsed as concerns of public policy.
This time, however, a sub-state cultic religious terrorist group with limited resources was
able to provoke Western leaders into a massive use of state power—using a sledge hammer
to crack a nut. This response fulfilled all the dreams the cult leader ever had in terms of
personal aggrandisement. Unfortunately, I don‘t think political leaders anywhere in the
world at the time of 9/11 had an understanding of the types of groups the International
Cultic Studies Association has been grappling with for years. Indeed, the penny is only now
starting to drop,iii so we must seize the day in terms of educating policy makers about what
we have learned about cultic behaviour and the type of integrated public-policy response
that might help us to address the problem in the longer term.
Those charged with the responsibility of giving advice to governments on security matters
do not seem to want to characterise Al Qaeda as a cult, although interestingly they have no
difficulty in seeing Aum Shinrikyo as both a cult and a terrorist group. Advisers stick to the
view that cults are essentially inward-looking groups that isolate their members physically
from society so that the cult leader can manipulate his followers for money and power over
them, which often involves sexual gratification. To the contrary, terrorist organisations are
seen as having an outward-looking political agenda that is a real threat to state sovereignty.
But if you scratch the surface of many of the groups viewed as inward-looking religious
cults, you will find attempts to promote political goals and invariably a sense of world

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2006, Page 7
mission—that either involves the conversion of everyone else or, in some cases, the
destruction of everyone else. Sometimes a retreat to another country or geographic area is
only the end process of failed (albeit amateurish or sporadic) attempts to convert society to
the aspirations of the cult leader. In any event, legislative definitions of terrorism in the
wake of 9/11 refer to political, ideological, and religious motivations as underpinning the
objectives and acts of groups designated terrorist.
By locating Al Qaeda in a broader context of a world jihadist movement, I believe we are
painting the wrong picture and providing the wrong narrative, just as we are magnifying the
significance of motley jihadist groups by declaring a ―war‖ on terror. Too many politicians
want to run with the clash of civilizations and turn it into a war of civilizations, rather than
seeking to marginalise the fringe lunatics. Far better would it have been to characterise Bin
Laden as the self-indulgent leader of a personal cult with his own idiosyncratic take on
Islam—a heretic, in fact, not the warrior hero he has become in the eyes of too many, in
large part because Western propaganda has inadvertently characterised or anointed him as
a military leader with some substance, rather than as a religious cult leader who got lucky
in his own perverse way on 9/11. Even Francis Fukuyama has now admitted that ―before
the Iraq war we were probably at war with no more than a few thousand people around the
world who would consider martyring themselves and causing nihilistic damage to the United
States,‖iv which puts the problem into a more realistic perspective. We should also consider
the assertion that ―no more than five out of the 14,000 such schools [pesantren—religious
boarding schools] in Indonesia indoctrinate their students with a harsh and confrontational
form of Islam and provide them with the religious justification for violence in pursuit of
religious goals.‖v
Home-Grown Terrorists
Professor Robert Pape observes that
Sociologists tell us that the key feature of a cult is not the content of its
belief system or the presence of persuasive leaders, but the existence of a
hard boundary separating a self-contained group from the society at large. A
hard boundary is important because it enables highly intrusive control … in
the rigid manner necessary to maintain a system of shared beliefs that is
markedly at variance with the surrounding culture.vi
He observes that the key factor in the mass suicides at Waco, Jonestown, and other settings
was that ―members of the groups lived in physical isolation from the surrounding society.‖
Pape says that these cult mass suicides are examples of Durkheim‘s category of fatalistic
suicides, whereas terrorist suicides are examples of altruistic suicide committed by
members embedded in their communities, and where the act of suicide is in pursuit of
socially acceptable political objectives. However, this analysis does not explain the dynamics
of home-grown suicide bombers living in Western societies.
I am not a psychologist, and I strongly advocate the need for a multidisciplinary approach in
this area. However, it seems to me that members of high-demand groups can function
among other members of society, although the control found in groups living within hard
physical boundaries might be difficult to replicate and maintain. While physical isolation
(which can take various forms, from camps to prisons,vii to weekend seminars) can be an
important aid to indoctrination, it is the psychological barriers that cult members carry
around with them that create an invisible wall between the chosen elite and other members
of society. Of course, the effectiveness of this wall depends on the effectiveness of the
indoctrination, so that in some cases exposure to members of the wider society, and even
inadvertent access to contesting viewpoints might result in a weakening or even a
breakdown of the psychological conditioning received. Hence the observation that terrorist