We need to discuss Islam and terrorism

Fears that Australians face an imminent deadly attack on the scale of the three recent attacks in England have prompted religious, community, and political leaders in many western countries to offer the familiar assurances that this kind of terrorism has ‘nothing’ to do with Islam. We’ve heard it often enough before.

Speaking in the House of Commons after the Westminster attack in late March, Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, said, “It is wrong to describe this as ‘Islamic terrorism’; it is ‘Islamist terrorism’, it is a perversion of a great faith.” The distinction Mrs May was making depends, however, on an assumption that Islam and Islamism are, themselves, distinct religious forms.

Statements such as these indicate an inability or an unwillingness to understand that attacks of terror committed in the name of God almost always have theological and ideological roots. And they also indicate a reluctance to accept that when religious extremists launch such attacks in the name of God, they are very serious about the claims they believe their religion makes.

Efforts in Australia to counter jihadist extremism have often focused on so-called ‘de-radicalisation’ programs which attempt to identify a ‘problem’ individual, and then intervene before that person makes the fateful transition from ‘moderate’ belief to militancy. It’s an unreliable approach. For one thing, it tends to reduce the broader social phenomenon of religious violence to a disaggregated collection of individual pathologies or crises. Find the “troubled” individual, goes the approach, and the problem will be fixed.

But as political Islam expert Clive Kessler has argued, de-radicalisation programs can actually amount to a form of avoidance because they fail to take seriously the religious component of religious violence.  Instead of regarding the issue of religious violence as merely a succession of individual ‘problems’, Kessler says we need to develop a “solidly grounded, well-informed, and knowledgeable critique of radical Islamist doctrine.”

There are a number of reasons it is difficult to do this, however. First, we are timid when it comes to criticising Islam for fear of being denounced as ‘Islamophobic’ — something of a catch-all trick that effectively turns Muslims into victims and shuts down all discussion about Islamic practice and belief.

But a second, more serious reason, is that many citizens in secular, pluralist societies such as Australia have lost the ability altogether to think critically about religion. They are comfortably of the view that there are many sources of truth — all of which can coexist more or less peacefully. Appeals to reason, tolerance, and other Enlightenment virtues, they believe, will do the work of allowing us to live together in reasonable disagreement about the sources of value. Pluralists, who are happy to live with ambiguity concerning the sources of meaning and value, make the mistake of assuming that because they don’t take religion seriously, no people take it seriously.

The problem is that religious believers — and especially those with fundamentalist or, worse, extremist views —  for the most part take religion very seriously. They reject pluralism. They say there is only one source of meaning and truth. Most believers, of course, are law-abiding. But there are some who are violent, and prepared to kill in the name of that ‘truth’. They have no sympathy for their victims whom they view as enemies of God, and they are ready to sacrifice their own lives as martyrs. Dislodging such deadly ideas from the heads of those kinds of believers is extremely difficult.

Modern secular pluralists tend to assume that if a religious individual is asked to weigh political and religious considerations against each other, the scales will tip in favour of the political. But religious believers who resort to violence are almost certainly expressing a rejection of secular norms of belief and conduct. Given the eternal nature of the believer’s relationship with God, and the high stakes that turn for them on obedience to God’s law, it is hard to believe that secular political authority would always prevail for the believer who found themselves in conflict with the state. Nor will it do simply to tell them their religious faith is hopelessly misguided. What committed believer will agree with that?

When religion has to be challenged, it needs to be done on religious rather than secular grounds. But who is best able to make that kind of challenge? Politicians may do so effectively if they speak from within their areas of expertise or from their own religious experience; but there is always a risk for them of losing wider support within the electorate.  It is generally far better if the task of challenging unreasonable religious actions or teachings be delegated to citizens themselves —  and, in particular, to those who share the same doctrinal beliefs.

Acts of religious violence, especially those committed in the name of Islam, pose a growing challenge for western countries long accustomed to the conventions of tolerance and liberty. And we know that terrorists hold the upper hand: security services simply cannot keep track of everyone who is of concern. What is to be done?

We make a serious mistake if we persist with the idea that acts of terror committed in the name of God have ‘nothing’ to do with religion. It is a mistake must be called out again and again. Multicultural Affairs Minister, Zed Seselja, did just that last week when referring to Islamic extremism in a speech in western Sydney. “Pretending that Islamist terrorists are simply mentally ill and not driven by an extreme ideology is not only dangerous,” he said, “it is insulting to all Australians, whatever their religious or cultural background.” Seselja went on to call for an honest conversation about the ideological roots of Islamist terrorism.

We need to have plenty of those honest conversations. Effectively countering the violent ideas held by death-obsessed religious extremists will depend our readiness to renew our own commitment to liberty, tolerance, and the rule of law. We also need to reassert the principles of western civilisation, instilling them in every citizen, and working hard to ensure newcomers to a country are integrated into the wider society. We also need to safeguard freedom of religion so that we may openly and honestly discuss religious ideas — and criticize them where necessary — without fear of attack or legal action under the guise of stamping out ‘Islamophobia’.

This is no quick-fix solution. It will take a long time, and it will not eliminate the threat of religious violence altogether. But it will temper the environment in which such violence breeds. Religious violence is provoking a deadly contest about our fundamental beliefs. Each one of us is now engaged in that contest — and we need to know what it is we must defend.

Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and author of the research paper Terror in the Name of God: Confronting acts of religious violence in a liberal society released this week.