Has BAA ever thought of employing a novelist? Or, failing that, hiring a team of television scriptwriters? The nation’s airports are being encouraged to take on experts in profiling terrorists. And there’s been a predictable backlash from those who think that that must mean ethnic stereotyping taking over from electronic screening, the possession of an Asian name becoming as provocative as the carrying of a metal blade. But working out what defines a potential terrorist is a much subtler process than many of the critics of profiling allow — as a truly skilled novelist, or an insightful television dramatist, can tell you.

And indeed they have been telling us. Last week two new works reached Britain from writers who have tried to map the psychology of Islamist militants. John Updike’s novel Terrorist, and the drama series Sleeper Cell, now appearing on Channel 4, are both works of fiction. But it would be a mistake to dismiss them, as some critics have done, as departures from the truth. For both works succeed in imaginatively recreating many of the factors which have tempted, and do still tempt, young men towards terrorism.

The most striking thing about both works is that their terrorist protagonists are not identikit South Asian or Middle Eastern youths. Updike’s Terrorist is the child of an Egyptian father and an Irish-American mother, brought up in New Jersey, America’s equivalent of Bedfordshire. The members of Channel 4’s Sleeper Cell include, as well as the African-American hero, a Bosnian émigré, and the all-American lily-white son of academic parents.

The decision by both Updike and the Sleeper Cell team to avoid the obvious when it comes to filling in their characters’ family history has been seen by some as cultural over-sensitivity. But in fact it’s an intellectually liberating choice, allowing both writers and readers to get beyond lazy assumptions about where terrorism comes from, and to look at the influences that turn young men towards ideological fanaticism.

One of the most casually-accepted assumptions about Islamist terrorism is that it’s a response to Western foreign policy, specifically the interventionism of Bush and Blair. But the character of Ilija, the Bosnian Muslim in Sleeper Cell, underlines a phenomenon much less widely acknowledged. One of the key radicalising elements of past Western foreign policy was actually non-intervention. The failure of the West to protect the nascent state of Bosnia, and in particular its Muslim citizens, from Serbian attack was ruthlessly exploited by Islamists. Foreign Mujahidin flocked to Bosnia, seeking to defend those whom they argued the West had betrayed, and the West’s lack of resolution in defence of the infant democracy was depicted as anti-Islamic. As Ilija himself puts it: “I loved America, man, but you never came.”

However powerful foreign policy may be as a radicalising factor, any engagement with the Islamist mindset only reinforces the impossibility of framing a foreign policy which will satisfy the jihadi agenda. Both intervention and non-intervention can be seen as culpable. And that’s because the West is hated not so much for what it does, as what it is. That’s where Updike’s recreation of his young terrorist’s interior life is so powerful.

Updike has been accused of giving his protagonist, Ahmad, far too formal a conversational register. But Ahmad’s fastidious language reflects not only his immersion in the classical purity of the Koran but also his deliberate aloofness from the habits, mores and values of the American street.

He sees, and Updike conveys, an America which is bloated and decadent, emptily consumerist and sexually lax. Ahmad’s distaste for America echoes the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood and intellectual influence on al-Qaeda, whose own book, The America I Have Seen, reflects a militantly puritan loathing for the heathen barbarism of life in the United States.

Updike is especially good at capturing Ahmad’s need, as a figure caught between cultures, to find a sense of certainty and superiority to armour himself against temptation. The allure of spiritual, and moral, certainty is also reflected in the character of Tommy in Sleeper Cell, a white boy whose own form of rebellion against his impeccably liberal, Californian counter-cultural upbringing is a conversion to jihadism. In an environment that teaches only relativism, some souls will hunger for a faith which provides an austere authority.

We know ourselves, from recent events, that Islamism knows no boundaries in its ability to win over impressionable minds. Which is why, when it comes to building up a profile of those who are drawn to wage war on the West, it’s a good idea, in every sense, to look at what our own culture is producing.

To be taken with a pinch of salt

If you, like me, have been on holiday, here's a quick catch-up on foreign affairs.

France, we are told, has restored its authority by brokering the UN resolution which brought about this ceasefire. But, curiously, the French were so confident in their resolution that they were to deploy only 200 troops out of the 15,000 they deemed necessary. Then they found another 1,800 when the Italians were about to assume leadership of the force.

Cut the boring chat

Watching the TV coverage of the Reading and Leeds festivals, I was struck by the pointlessness of the interviews between the sets. It’s not that the interviewers were weak or poorly briefed. And, for me, Edith Bowman is beyond criticism. It’s just that the acts were either nervously monosyllabic, pre-performance, or breathlessly exhausted afterwards. Wouldn’t it have been better to use the time to show videos or play archive from past festivals? After all, it’s the music we’re tuning in for. We’ve already accepted, by staying home, that we’ve lost out on the “atmosphere”. The producers of the now defunct Top of the Pops understood, like the team behind Later with Jools Holland, that the best music programmes on TV should seek to maximise the music and minimise the chat.

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