“The problem with the notion of dialogue when thinking about global forms of Muslim militancy is that there appears to be no integrity, either on one side or indeed on the other”, explains historian Faisal Devji from Oxford University. “When you think about people like the brothers Tsarnaev in Boston, you have figures who are completely American and Americanized. It is impossible to think about them as somehow belonging to a closed ideological world of their own. Indeed, you can look at their violence entirely within the context of American forms of teenage or young-male violence, which includes school shootings or other forms of great damage. So how do they in fact differ from something, from a form of violence that is actually quite intimate to the United States?”. We interviewed Professor Devji during our Istanbul Seminars 2014.

Interview: Nina zu Fürstenberg

Film: Anna Fanuele