The Cosmopolitan and the Noumenal: A Case Study of Islamic Jihadist Night Dreams as Reported Sources of Spiritual and Political Inspiration

Abstract

The convergence of peoples and markets in ‘real-world’ cosmopolitanism is significantly challenged and indeed fractured in emerging apparent differences as to the ontological status of inner worlds. On the one hand, the Western secular, liberal, post-Christian capitalist ideology and world view ‘see’ inner worlds, usually, as reflective but not primarily constitutive or generative of outer world dynamics. The Freudian notion of the personal unconscious is emblematic of such a paradigm. The Western psychoanalytical paradigm, however is radically different from that of many societies studied by social anthropologists, notably shamanic cultures. Strongly religious cultures share a differing and variant paradigm as to the nature of the unconscious; the numinous is, or rather can be, the locus of spiritual generativity within the outer world. These abstractions find real-world political, economic and social significance today, particularly, in the ideological world view of the growing militant jihadist variant of Islam.