Security will not be enough. We must take on an ideology
We must not lose sight of the bigger picture— that Islamism targets the foundations of Western society and thought
WE HAVE become fixated on violence as a key counterextremism policy determinant, but it is not the only thing that matters.
Ideology is politically purposeful. When I was asked by then UK Prime Minister David Cameron in early 2014 to undertake what became known as the Muslim Brotherhood Review, I made it clear that I would approach the matter as a history not simply of events but of an ideology.
That was at a time when the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its affiliates elsewhere were particular objects of concern because of the Arab Spring and its discontents.
Yet this concern never produced policy coherence: governments are bad at dealing with complexity.
They have since been faced with the more urgent challenge of mutating and often violent exclusionary Salafisms, which have adopted decontextualised and dehistoricised versions of jihad, takfir and al-wala wal bara that support claims to absolute jurisprudential and — in the case of Isis — legitimately prophetic caliphal authority over Muslims everywhere.
This authority is supported by a selective, restrictive, literalist bricolage of Islam’s foundational texts, particularly the Quran and certain Hadith, but also the works of canonical scholars.
This has been matched by a change in the way such issues are studied in the policy community — a shift towards the measurable. The role of social media, complex individual paths to radicalisation and the socio-economic discontents at the roots of the attraction of such movements for ordinary people in Syria, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere have become major objects of study. Such data-driven work has helped define the policy challenges for governments.
This is valuable. But a focus on micro-level distinctions has tended to divert attention from the underlying challenge that the basic ideology of Islamism — common to all its forms — poses to the international and domestic state order. It has also given an opening to those who claim that socioeconomic oppression is the root of all radicalisation and that the ideological threat comes instead from Western and other attempts to combat it.
In parallel, policymakers have become fixated on violence as a key policy determinant. The violence is real and undoubtedly needs a robust and proportionate response, which incorporates effective legal, intelligence, policing, societal and, in some cases, military activity. But violence is not the only thing that matters. All forms of Islamism, from the Muslim Brotherhood onwards, have had a theory of physical force and have applied violence in pursuit of their aims. The important point is whether this violence is tactical — designed to be deployed at times of maximum political opportunity against defined targets — or integral to the performance of a movement, as it has seemed to be with Isis. Even when it is performative, however, violence still serves an ideological purpose.
This ideology is triumphalist, totalitarian and apocalyptic. It is founded in revelation, not reason. And however much its proponents may claim to exercise forms of reasoning in interpreting sacred texts, these texts are closed to the sort of foundational interrogation that lies at the heart of liberalism, derived inter alia from late Roman and Germanic secular law, Augustine’s two cities, mediaeval Aristotelianism, Renaissance humanism, the scientific revolution and natural rights theory.
This is the precise opposite of the Islamist conception of history as a cyclical process that leads a select few to salvation through the establishment of an exclusive community of the just.
And that seems to be a problem. Observers as different as Graeme Wood and David Thomson have drawn attention to this issue through their work on the ideational basis of what is loosely called Salafi-jihadism, and they have been roundly attacked for it. Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy have fought a fierce if highly entertaining war of words in the French press.
And it may be one of the reasons there is once again in the UK a move in central and local government, the police and the counter-terrorism community to reconsider the decisions by previous governments not to engage with organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain and Mend. Associated with this is a push by some in the British parliament to sponsor a comprehensive definition of Islamophobia, supported by such groups. This would make critical debate about such matters far more difficult.
What has happened so far is essentially a replay of the old, highly tactical debate about the utility of engaging with so-called moderate Islamists, who some still claim represent a firewall against violent Islamisms.
This debate will characteristically draw attention to the dismissive attitude of many jihadis towards the Muslim Brotherhood. But jihadis fall out with each other constantly
over points of doc-
For Isis, violence serves an ideological purpose