A combination picture shows suspected Islamic State jihadis behind the Paris attacks. Abdelhamid Abaaoud (top right), Frenchman Bilal Hadfi (bottom centre), Samy Amimour (top left), suspect at large Salah Abdeslam (bottom left), and two unnamed suicide bombers (top centre and bottom right). Picture: AFP PHOTO

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WHAT do suicide bombers believe they are doing when they detonate the explosives strapped around their waists? It is best to look in the right places for the answer to this question.

The answer is not to be found in the Koran; enough Koranic scholars have pointed to the sacred book’s prohibitions against killing women and children.

Nor does it seem fruitful to look for the sources of jihadis’ convictions in the beliefs of their forebears. France’s Centre for the Prevention of Sectarian Drift Related to Islam estimates that 80% of French citizens who have radical Islamist beliefs come from nonreligious families and that 90% have French-born grandparents. Most are converted into radical religion by peers and undergo a "born again" experience.

One woman in a Parisian suburb described her conversion as akin to that of a transgender person who changes sexes: "I was like a Muslim trapped in a Christian body," she said.

What does the world look like to those who have been born again? The sociologist Chetan Bhatt has analysed more than a decade’s worth of jihadi language. He describes three contradictory visions welded uneasily together.

The first is the idea that Muslim lands have been invaded by imperialists whose armies must be repelled. This is the most familiar and congenial aspect of jihadi ideology; it resonates with generations of anticolonial politics. Civilian citizens of imperial powers may be killed, on this account, because they share responsibility for what their governments have done.

The second idea, in contrast, has little to do with anti-imperial grievance. The aim is not to liberate a particular territory from military occupation, but to create insurgencies wherever it is possible. Every temporal authority is ungodly and illegal and is therefore open to attack; the aim is to establish a worldwide order based on divine law.

Here, the justification for killing is far broader. Everyone on the planet who does not adhere to righteousness is an apostate and may be killed in the interests of creating a just regime on earth. This notion is less unfamiliar than may appear at first blush. It bears resemblance, for instance, to Stalin’s idea that there are categories of people who can be exterminated because history has given them thoughts and interests that progress has fated will die.

Bhatt identifies a third strand of thought that sits uncomfortably with the second. Here, the aim is not to establish a new regime on earth, but to smash all earthly authority in the name of an eternal order that transcends the divide between the living and the dead. In this conception, killing human beings is merely to destroy their corporeal existence, not their souls.

Bhatt finds, in his research, the argument that "it is honourable to kill civilians because the people one might have physically killed are not actually dead", but are drawn closer, in their deaths, to true life. "Like the human bomber, they might only experience a ‘gnat’s bite’ or pinprick as they are physically killed and move into the supratemporal world."

It is in what suicide bombers themselves can look forward to that the greatest tensions in jihadi thought are to be found.

In several of the texts Bhatt quotes, the martyr can expect on arriving in paradise "a palace, robes of the finest silk, bowls of rubies, gold and silver" as well as many sexual delights. The very values that are held in such contempt here in the temporal world — a love of money and fine possessions, an obsession with sex — are the rewards of the afterlife.

What are we to make of these stark inconsistencies?

I am reminded of myself as a 19-year-old student, sitting in a coffee shop in a Johannesburg shopping mall in the dying years of apartheid. Around the table were fellow activists. We had come from a reading group, where we had pored over Marx and Lenin. Now we were debating whether the shopping mall in which we were sitting, filled with white, apartheid-supporting shoppers, should be considered a soft target. We couldn’t agree.

It dawned on me only years later that in this moment the meaning of violent death was lost to me, the dissonance between the life I was living and the thoughts I was entertaining was quite disturbing.

• Steinberg teaches African Studies at Oxford University and is a visiting professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research