From Sanctuary to Catastrophe: A Mind Unravels in Modern Germany

There seems to be lots of ongoing thinking and concern in relation to what happened in Germany exactly in terms of the violence that was meted out against innocent Christmas shoppers at one of the many thousands of Christmas markets in Germany at this time of the year. What we know is that a man of Saudi Arabian background trained in psychiatry, originally seeking asylum in 2006 in Germany, ultimately carried out a vehicle ramming attack against ordinary German civilians because his concerns were that Germany was risking the possibility of further Islamisation due to their soft asylum policy, which was running amok and destabilising and fragmenting the imagined Germany in the mind’s eye of this perpetrator. These actions have shocked both local and international communities alike. What does it take for an individual to express seemingly feminist, or rather pro-women, ideas around supporting the needs of Saudi women who wanted to escape the patriarchal structures that were allegedly binding them into unfathomable ties to men who have absolute power of authority in what is possibly the most patriarchal society in the world? The reason for this is that Islam is the reason and the justification given for his violent actions.

There are many different issues going on. First of all, being the custodians of the two most holy sites in the Islamic world, there is a certain level of authority that Saudi Arabia possesses over Muslims across the world who look to Saudi thinking and practice as ideal models to emulate. However, it’s very clear that as we travel beyond the centre of Islam, as it were, and go to the peripheries in terms of population concentrations, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, there is far more pluralism, equality, inclusion, and acceptance of differences, all while maintaining a seemingly Islamic outlook that is not feared or used as a system of control, although authority can be challenged politically through a democratic process. This diversity in Islamic practice demonstrates the complexity of religious interpretation across different cultural contexts. Second, it is also true that patriarchy afflicts many societies across the world today for all sorts of historical reasons, and it has imbued itself into all sorts of institutional and cultural life, and dismantling systematic imbalances and injustice that this creates remains an ongoing concern for all concerned citizens of the world—it is not only a problem in Saudi Arabia. Third, in an odd twist of irony, the perpetrator’s motivations were against the country of his birth and the policies and practices of this new adopted country, which had given him first refuge and ultimately home. But in the end, his attack was against the people of his new home, acting as a proxy for the state, for being too accepting of differences, including Muslims in huge numbers as part of an asylum policy that accelerated in the light of the crisis created by the war on Iraq in 2003 and the implications it created to destabilise an entire region. It’s clear that this policy was too much too soon for Germany at a time when Germany was beginning to struggle with its model of economic, social, and political alignment after the global economic (banking) crises of 2008.

I’m still grappling with the motivations of this terrible, heinous destruction of innocent lives, and while it is possible to spend much time thinking about this from a historical, logical, political, or economic perspective, what we are looking at is an individual who had absorbed far-right ideas, which are akin to ethno-nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-Islam protectionist, exclusivist, and exceptionist perspectives found among actors such as Donald Trump and, for many observers, the shadow president Elon Musk, and also pushed at first laughably but now frighteningly successfully by people like Nigel Farage and his equivalent working-class father of the disgruntled majority masses, Tommy Robinson. One of the most important elements of the recent Drive project, which has just been completed, was that we looked at relatively ordinary citizens of Western European countries who felt pressurised, excluded, marginalised, and ultimately invisibilized by societal processes that they felt were directed at them at an individual level by states incapable of addressing their needs or wants. And so they felt the only way forward was to hold on to what they knew best, which is a sense of self created by their own visions of their imagined nations, which paradoxically have also been inculcated through dominant hegemonic discourses that leave individuals at the mercy of knowledge makers whose knowledge-making is entirely subjective. The implications of this finding extend far beyond the immediate context of this incident. We found that ordinary people going through their day-to-day challenges can feel the microaggressions of exclusionary forces, whether they are Muslim minorities or ethno-majorities, build up systematically to the extent that in some cases it can reach a boiling point after which there is a point of no return. While the study admittedly didn’t quite find exactly those individuals, we got very close to many who talked about the realities of daily humiliation, vilification, and exclusion that placed them on a mental health scale that could be defined as requiring certified treatment. This is the level of stress, anxiety, and depression that many ordinary people in our European landscapes face on a daily basis, and in a few small instances, people ultimately crack and create mayhem.

But this cannot sufficiently explain the entire picture of this Saudi-born killer because so many, effectively millions, of people go through these kinds of daily challenges and do not resort to the kinds of violence we have seen meted out against ordinary civilians at times like we did in Germany two nights ago. If this individual was primarily aiming his wrath against the German state in which he had found his refuge and ultimately his new place of residence after all of the challenges he faced in terms of his beliefs not being in accordance with the requirements of the Saudi state to the extent that a European country gave him the home that he so much wanted, then why attack the country that provided you the home that you so much wanted? What can be the motivation in terms of the outcome sought unless this individual was terribly confused and ultimately incapable of rationalising his decision-making, which is the likely outcome and which eventually takes it back to severe issues of mental health estrangement?

And if we can form this conclusion, then we cannot absolve the role of situationalism and contextualisation when it comes to mental health because nobody faces a mental health crisis in a vacuum; there are many forces that create unbearable challenges for people requiring serious assistance. The intersection of personal, social, and institutional factors creates a complex web of influences that shape individual responses to stress and trauma. As we explore the meaningful questions that will give us answers to the question as to why this individual arrived at the state he did mentally to create the destruction he did physically, we will likely face some serious challenges to our own understandings of complex realities that will be more uncomfortable than we would probably wish, but this is the route we must take in order to drive viable solutions to serious problems in societies across Western Europe today.