13 - New Age Spirituality and Islamic Jihad: Paulo Coelho's Manual of the Warrior of Light and Shamil Basayev's Manual of the Mujahid

Summary

So fight in the cause of God; you are answerable only to yourself. And encourage the believers.

On the face of it, New Age spirituality and post-9/11 violent Islam are irreconcilable forms of contemporary religiosity. Even as they may both announce the worldwide replacement of traditional religious authority by religious (hyper-) individualism, their doctrinal content seems to diverge too much to warrant an attempt at comparison. On the pedestrian level, as global phenomena, the contrast could indeed hardly be greater. New Age is seen as having brought comfort, self-worth and a sense of meaning to millions of ordinary people who struggle to find their identity in a world-system that increasingly marginalizes the genuine, the authentic and the sacred; whereas, it would seem, militant Islam has killed thousands and terrorizes millions in the name of a totalitarian religious ideology.

That there are affinities between New Age and Islamic jihad ideologies despite the seemingly unbridgeable differences can be shown in a concrete and very direct manner. In March 2004, the world-famous Chechen freedom fighting terrorist-cum-regional-jihad leader Shamil Basayev (1965–2006) appropriated, edited and redistributed under his own name a book written by one of the world's bestselling authors: the Brazilian New Age superstar Paulo Coelho (b. 1947).